Why do you go into a war where you can gain nothing but can lose everything?

>Austrians did fairly well actually

They needed German assistance even against the Serbs.

Yes Germany was "shackled to a corpse" after their impetuous behavior isolated them diplomatically from every other Great Power. Austria- Hungary was truly an anachronistic old dinosaur waiting to disintegrate in the wake of the nationalist Era and was held together only through the iron will and persistence of Franz Josef who was highly conservative, but a pragmatist. Conrad von Hotzendorf on the other hand was a retard who was convinced that invasion of Serbia was necessary to maintain their great power status and regain some lost glory. In the years leading up to the Great War he recommended invasion if Serbia some ridiculous amount if times (somewhere in the hundreds if I'm not mistaken). He was a hothead desperately holding on to a bygone era.

Pretty useless comparison, the Ottomans were on the defense at Gallipolli, something Austria-Hungary was also capable of in Italy. On their Eastern border, the Ottomans suffered devastating defeats against Russia akin to the Austro-Hungarian defeats in Galicia.

On a side note, the Ottomans did receive some German support in Gallipolli in the form of command support

The falcons in Austria-Hungary had a rather pessimistic outlook about the future integrity of their state, they thought that showing weakness and compliancy this time would encourage their internal and external adversaries and lead AH further on the path of gradual decline. Going to war on the other hand would eliminate the threat of Serbia as a South Slavic Piedmont and raise the prestige of the monarchy as a dynamic force.

>Austria- Hungary was truly an anachronistic old dinosaur waiting to disintegrate in the wake of the nationalist Era

>He was a hothead desperately holding on to a bygone era.

Why is that? For me it seems that they had the resources, intelligentsia, manpower etc. Why did they stuck in the past?

gorlice-tarnow offensive had german support and command, but was undertaken by a large majority of habsburg troops

because you aren't thinking from their perspective. the question wasn't "why should we pick a fight with serbia, france, britain and russia" but rather "should we let these cocky little shits from serbia get away with murdering our archduke."

from there, you get into the altogether nebulous study of how WW1 started, but bear in mind that no one in the summer of 1914 expected things to get as out of hand as they did, nor did anyone expect the war to go as long as it did. also,

>Axis victory

The core solution to Austria's problems was federalizing and basically elevating all the other nationalities of the dual monarchy to the same level as Hungary. This couldn't happen, however, because Hungary was run by old-timey aristocrats that were hellbent on retaining power, and the dualist structure of A-H meant they could veto any attempt to reform the monarchy (they also relentlessly blocked universal suffrage in Hungary to the same end).

It was obvious for everyone that attacking the Serbs will lead to a large scale conflict.

They were too fearful of giving any of their ethnic minorities too much power in government. A hereditary monarchy run by a nobility that is itself an ethnic minority could never withstand the nationalist agitation of the time without giving up a great deal of their own power and core principles which Austrians were unwilling to do.

fpbp
you have to understand how fucking atrocious the assassination of the heir was to the Empire to get it.
Austria-Hungary didn't really want a war with the Entente. They just really wanted to punish someone (Serbs) for the death of the heir.

I guess the closest modern example is America destroying Saddam and Iraq after 9/11. A more or less fabricated connection between a state and a terrorist organization which has done you a grievous wound. You can't really destroy the ideology behind the terrorist movement, so you go off on the nation-state standing next to it just so you have someone to hit. Pretty much sums up what happened to Iraq, but imagine if instead of utterly destroying the Iraqis, China and Russia intervened on Iraq's side and it started WW3.

Why is Hungary so historically conservative?

>you have to understand how fucking atrocious the assassination of the heir was to the Empire to get it.

The Franz Joseph didn't even really like Ferdinand. Franz Ferdinand had insisted on marrying a woman that Joseph highly disapproved of, and aside from that, Ferdinand was open to many liberalizing ideas that were revolting to Franz Joseph's absolutist sensibilities. If anything Franz was happy about the assassination.

Because it was an underdeveloped agrarian country with low population and thus no urbanization.

>Grandson and heir to the Empire gets assassinated with his wife
>some faggot on a Siamese quarter collection forum years later claims you were actually happy about it.

Franz Joseph wasn't even in charge at this point.
His advisers were the ones running the show at this point, due to his old age.
Someone else issued the ultimatum to Serbia and kickstarted WW1.
Someone who was probably very upset at the death of the Heir.

>The core solution to Austria's problems was federalizing and basically elevating all the other nationalities of the dual monarchy to the same level as Hungary.

You mean like the glorious and never disintegrated case of Yugoslavia?

yes, only with a "core" ethnicity that could never develop serbian delusions of grandeur and no gommunism to drag the economy into the shitter

he asked 26 times for the goverment to declare war on serbia

not necessarily. Had they invaded immediately, with whatever units they had on hand, it would be almost impossible for the entente to respond, given that they start the war when sympathy for austria would be at its peak. This is like when dubya invades Iraq two years after 9/11. Sometimes history gives you a blank check, but the effect is temporary (gulf of tonkin was 2 day window), a country in a highly competitive continent has less time to respond before traditional enemies conjure up arguments to politically nullify any sudden advantage.

>Why Franz Joseph and the Austrian high command thought it's a good idea to go to war
To conquer foreign lands and advance their agenda.

The only nations to enter WW1 with honorable intentions were Britan and US.

Not really, Conrad von Hötzendorf assured Franz-Joseph every day that it would not, until he believed it, being the senile old man he was

>Why do you go into a war where you can gain nothing but can lose everything?
I dunno,ask Paraguay.

t. william edward farrington