Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [158]
Hungarian nationalism was not the only nationalism buffeting the empire in the decades before 1914. In the north, the Poles and the Czechs were stirring and in the south Italians were agitating to join the newly unified Italy. Serbs, Slovenes and Croats talked of greater autonomy, perhaps even a South Slav state of their own. If Hungarians had autonomy, why shouldn’t others? Franz Joseph, driven by the great but simple object of handing on what he had inherited to his successors, step-by-step gave way on nationalist demands to preserve the façade of imperial unity. In both his parliaments, the one in Vienna and the one in Budapest, the deputies increasingly organized themselves along national lines.
By the 1890s, the old emperor faced yet another challenge, from the new Austrian Social Democratic Party. Inspired by Karl Marx and drawing on the growing industrial working class as well as middle-class liberals in the great cities, it demanded universal revolution inside a reformed empire. Dr. Karl Renner, the affable and clever son of a Moravian peasant, who was the leading Socialist thinker on the national issue and a prominent Socialist deputy from 1907, downplayed the destructive threat of nationalism. He proposed an ingenious solution: each individual would be assigned to a nationality and each nationality would have an empire-wide body which would look after matters dear to nationalists such as culture and education. He was behind the times—or perhaps too far ahead of them. Nationalists in Austria-Hungary, as elsewhere, increasingly wanted their own states. Even his own party, the Social Democrats, for all its talk of working-class solidarity, was affected by nationalist rivalries.
In the last years of the peace, Austria-Hungary went from one political and constitutional crisis to the next. The Great War simply gave the final blow. “We were bound to die,” said Count Ottokar Czernin, one of the empire’s last foreign ministers. “We were at liberty to choose the manner of our death, and we chose the most terrible.” The civilian and military bureaucracies, never efficient at the best of times, fell apart under the strain of war, and national rivalries turned to hatred: Germans for Hungarians and Slavs for both. From 1915 onward, desertions from the army grew sharply as Czechs, for example, asked themselves why they were fighting for German or Hungarian officers against fellow Slavs especially as the war was going badly for Austria-Hungary. In the second half of 1916, the Russians won a great victory in Galicia and the Rumanians entered the war on the Allied side, temporarily seizing Transylvania. German troops salvaged the situation but the result was to leave Austria-Hungary very much the junior partner in the alliance. When the Austrian government urged Germany to consider a negotiated peace, it was met with a contemptuous lack of interest.2
In November 1916, the old emperor, a faded symbol of better days, finally died. It was increasingly clear that the peoples of the empire were tired of the war and, more dangerous, tired of the old order. The news from Russia in February 1917 brought warning of where such moods could lead. “If the Monarchs of the Central Powers are not able to conclude peace in the next few months,” warned Czernin, “the people will do so over their heads.”3 The new emperor, Karl, a gentle and sickly young man, sent out peace feelers to the Allies, which he was careful to keep secret from Germany. These went nowhere largely because the Italians, who had much to gain from the complete defeat of Austria-Hungary, were adamantly opposed to a separate peace.
By 1918, the empire was near its end. Strikes brought the cities to standstill, parts of the navy mutinied in the Adriatic and the army hemorrhaged soldiers.