Austria-Hungary

Besides the end of the great war and the treaties made after.
What were the main factors that lead to the dissolution of Austria-Hungary?

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nationalism

Nationalist autism.

The 1867 Ausgleich.

>nationalism
that and republicanism

that is an event not a factor, you're looking for

The 1867 compromise was appeasing Hungarian nationalism.

Nationalistic memes

Getting the shit kicked out of them by Prussia and having to give land to the Italians, the Hungarians smelt blood in the water and a chance to assert themselves

Op here. Another question.
Would you say the leadership of Austria-Hungary helped or hurt it's longevity?
>pic related

Hard to say, Austria-Hungary was a long long way from physically collapsing. It wasnt exactly the most stable empire but it was hardly the 'sick man of Europe'.

What was life in AH like for a non-austrian/hungarian?

>I have never read a book about A-H

is sort of hinting at it. Many of the monarchy's nationalities wanted reform prior to the war, not independence - this generally entailed being raised onto the same 'level' as the Hungarians, with power to govern their own crownland. The Budapest parliament did literally everything it could to keep the Dual Monarchy politically paralyzed; it was filled with rich landholders who kept the voting franchise hilariously over-engineered to keep them in power (as opposed to giving Romanians, Slovaks, and even non-aristocratic Magyars representation), while using their parliament's constitutional power to prevent the Dual Monarchy from elevating Bohemia or Croatia into a Triple Monarchy or even turning A-H into a federation (these things would make Budapest less important and influential, after all).

Even worse, Budapest was (rightly) fearful of the Habsburg dynasty itself gaining too much political capital to the point where it could tell the Magyar parliament to fuck off, along with a fear that they might just instigate a quick civil war to manually crush Budapest's power (something Franz Ferdinand actually wanted to do). As such, they kept funding for the Monarchy's shared army cripplingly low, which was the core reason why the Monarchy entered WW1 with the second-largest European population but by far the smallest army.

...so it was the Hungarian parliament's fault for most of Austria-Hungary's political, and logistical shortcomings through out it's existence?

Franz Joseph was, contrary to popular belief, very popular through much of the second half of his reign. Fluent in nearly every language of his subjects, a relentlessly hard worker who awoke at 5:00am every day, and a diligent servant of his people in spite of seemingly endless tragedies in his personal life did much to generally cement him as a sort of steady, grandfatherly figure in an age of rapid economic, political, and technological change. His passing in 1916 was an authentic blow to the Monarchy's morale.

As for whether he was a good leader, that's a bit more complicated. While he did an excellent job as a popular figurehead that held the Monarchy's peoples together (he was notoriously mean to anti-semitism, even) his generally trend of decisions as a ruler tended to favour a quiet and comfy status quo rather than making the dramatic chances the Monarchy would need to survive. Neo-absolutism was a joke that it took losing a war to finally dispose of, and the Ausgleich (as discussed above) was a terrible idea motivated by the Kaiser's overarching quest for domestic peace at any cost.

tl;dr he was great for the present of A-H as long as he was around, but didn't make the hard decisions needed for A-H's future.

Honestly, pretty much.

Though the Czechs and Germans in Bohemia were both nationalist cunts who wanted to fuck each other over and caused all kinds of problems. Moravia was a lot quieter thanks to local compromises that might have been possible if the major Czech parties weren't full of retards who thought the Russian Tsar was going to bring them democracy by way of a pan-Slavic union.

Not all (the general inefficiency of Austrian bureaucracy is literally a thing of legend), but Budapest was responsible for two key things: Cockblocking reform of the constitutional system, and vigorously blocking funding for the K.u.K.

That depends where, as what nationality, and what you mean by 'what life was like.' A-H in 1900 had literacy rates comparable to France and Germany, which means you were 1. probably literate, and the slow rate of industrialization meant you were 2. probably a farmer.

If you're asking if life was harder for those not of the two 'peoples of state,' that's again pretty complicated, and again pretty dependent on geography and your nationality. In Cisleithania (Vienna-controlled territory) you were fluent in your own language and probably German as well due to it being a language of business and administration - that being said, your crownland's administration would be the same. In Transleithania (Budapest-controlled territory) there were actual policies of Magyarization, meaning that you were legally required to speak Hungarian if you wanted any place in the administration or even higher education.

Galicia, part of Cisleithania, was another weird kettle of fish altogether. Poles dominated the crownland diet and generally made up most of the upper class to begin with, and were really aggressive about trying to assimilate the Ukrainians living in that area.

>What were the main factors that lead to the dissolution of Austria-Hungary?

Woodrow Wilson, really.

Nationalism prior to the war is overrated. With the exception of a few Hungarians and Czechs, most nationalities in the Empire were loyal to the Habsburgs. Though the army had different views, and when the war began and they began mass executions of Croats, Slovenians and Ukrainians as potential traitors, while establishing a incompetent military dictatorship, the social fabric of the Empire imploded.

Still it could have survived. Emperor Charles told the army to fuck off once crowned and could have turn things around, if it wasn't for Woodrow Wilson deciding that this whole Habsburg ruling in Central Europe business was not progressive enough.

Czechs and Serbs, I think you mean. Croats and Slovenes were generally regarded as among the more loyal nationalities, Croats in particular. Meanwhile the head of the largest Czech political party had to be imprisoned after calling on Czech conscripts to go over to the Tsar and help the Supreme Autocrat of all the Russias bring them liberty.

Moravia found a sort of comfy compromise between Czechs and Germans because they were roughly equal halves of the population there.

Czechs in general were a lot more unruly in Bohemia because they made up the ethnic majority, and, uh. Well, I'm not as sure about the whole thing about the Tzar, but there were a lot of cunts among their political parties with some weird delusions. That they went on to create Czechoslovakia, a country with a German population that dwarfed the Slovak one and figured this wouldn't end up a problem at all, kind of showcases that.

Pic related is one of Veeky Forums's recommended books, and for good reason - it gives a lot of insight into how Austria made it to WW1 in the first place, and how while there was a lot of fuss over nationalism, the Dual Monarchy wasn't quite the 'jail of nations' it's been derided as.

This book is good, but it severely downplays nationalism.

I'd guess historians are trying to rehabilitate the image of multiethnic empires of the past in order to make the European Union more palatable. Peter Wilson's book about the Holy Roman Empire comes to mind as another one of this trend.

The decisive factor for the dissolution of A-H was the Entente blockade. What undermined the legitimacy of the Dual Monarchy more than anything was its inability to feed its own people - while Germany could partially compensate with brutally autocratic micromanagement of the economy fuelled by German autism, Austria could not, and so its subject peoples began searching for any way to escape this war and get access to food again - independence being the most straightforward.

'Turning things around' would have required a civil war by 1918, though. Right at the end, Boroevic straight-up asked Karl if he wanted him to march the army back to Vienna to restore order, bring Budapest to heel, and pull a Kemal Ataturk and tell the Allies and their peace terms to fuck off.

Karl, a gentle soul to the end, said he didn't want to force himself on an empire that didn't want him anymore.

Op here again. This is an extremely hypothetical question.
What would have been required for A-H to not become the logistical, and mismanaged mess it became during the great war?

Fire Conrad. Preferably out of a cannon.

Isn't it an irony that Jewish Marxists, like the ones that came up with the idea of "national personal autonomy", did more to try to preserve the Empire, than the Hungarian and Polish aristocracies.

Pic somewhat related. Joseph Roth was a Jewish socialist who felt some sort of nostalgia for A-H.

>downplays nationalism

literally the 1800s onward is strictly describing nationalist autism contests

>I'd guess historians are trying to rehabilitate the image of multiethnic empires of the past in order to make the European Union more palatable.

Or maybe you're being a cynic and there's just a re-examination of something literally everyone has spent the past century shitting on without questioning how it existed for 300~ years? The overall thesis of the book is that nationalism and personal loyalties are more complicated than most people think.

I'd wait for people trying to rehabilitate the image of Tzarist Russia and how it governed its own various nationalities before jumping to that conclusion.

Well that would take a number of oh nevermind someone nailed it.

Ironically towards the end of the war it actually did a pretty good job of organizing its war economy and its army; the trouble was that up until then the decentralized nature of Austria's government really didn't lend itself to the unity of command and tight organization needed for a wartime footing.

A-H ended the war starving but with a pretty well-organized internal structure. The trouble was that by the time it achieved that organization, it was too late.

I don't know a whole lot about Conrad besides he was pretty incompetent.
Was there a reason for this?
Did he have poor upbringing, lackluster military training, personal grudges?

Cadorna was just a brutal idiot. Conrad on the other hand was one of those people who are too clever for their own good. He was also lazy and prone to panic, as well as exceedingly neurotic and touchy about his pride.

Jews, full stop, adored A-H. In 1915, the US government did a survey of newspapers to get a feel for which side the people supported, and the demographics of newspapers created surprising and unsurprising results - Germany was generally only reported favourably by German-immigrant newspapers, and Jewish newspapers did the same with Austria-Hungary.

Franz Joseph himself was very kind to the empire's Jewish population, best embodied by his year-long trolling of Viennese mayor Karl Lueger.

Jews were also allowed to serve as officers in the Austrian Landwehr, which was not only unique in much of Europe, but provided a means for Jews to assimilate into Austrian society via a 'respectable' occupation.

Of course, the Jews had another, simpler motive for their loyalties. If the Empire dissolved into different nation-states for different peoples, where would the Jews go?

I feel bad for them imagine being a veterans of the first world war then being rounded up by nazis during the second

Most generals blundered into 1914 with a profound naivety of what modern warfare was going to consist of. Conrad was especially guilty of this, compounded by what said along with some profoundly stupid personal beliefs on strategy.

Conrad was anything but lazy. He was fucking obsessed with his job.

One thing I thought after reading this book is that "German culture" in the XIXth century wasn't a matter of ethnicity, but of assimilation into a high culture. As Jews assimilated into non-Jewish culture, German culture was the natural path and most of they really saw themselves as Germans.

The transformation of "Germanity" from something you could assimilate into towards something you were born with as an ethnic feature happened in the late XIXth century and early 20th and it was one of the most tragic results of all the national awakenings that happened in Europe at the time.

>tfw no more liberal German Mitteleuropa

Okay, then what about the other military leaders of Austria-Hungary?
Did they also have such large blunders as Conrad. Did they do any notable deeds before, during, or after the Great War?

The commanders of the Austrian armies in Galicia in 1914-1915 were answering to Conrad as head of the General Staff and deputy head of Armeeoberkommando. The nominal Commander-in-Chief Archduke Friedrich just went along with him. Viktor Dankl won a battle against the Russians in Poland at Krasnik, and Mauritz von Auffenberg won a battle at Komorow before Conrad's strategic direction led him into the disaster at the Battle of Rawa-Ruska. Rudolf Brudermann just failed hard defending against the Russians in East Galicia but Conrad leading Second Army as a notional "flexible reserve" meant it was left hanging for most of the first month of the war and so the Austro-Hungarians were massively outnumbered anyway.

Conrad did have a hand in planning the highly successful Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive but after that the strategic direction of the war was largely under German control. His "Strafeexpedtion" in 1916 against the Italians out of Tyrol was also an unexpected success but it meant the KuK Armee had its eye off the ball in the east. The success of the Brusilov Offensive was largely down to complacency by the Austro-Hungarian command in their defensive tactics and Brusilov's own genius at basically inventing the stormtrooper tactics and hurricane barrages the Germans would later adopt.

Arz von Straussenberg did a fine job holding off the Romanian offensive into Transylvania despite being massively outnumbered before the Germans arrived.

The most successful general was Svetozar von Boroevic, a self-described "Orthodox Croat" who took over command of the Isonzo Front at the start of the war with Italy. He pretty much cockblocked the Italians for ten battles, starting with the odds-and-ends of everything the Russian front wasn't devouring. He judged the local Slovenes and Croats would fight hard for their own land and that's exactly what happened.

The Serbian fiasco actually happened under Conrad's rival Oskar Potiorek so he's not to blame there.

Were there any notable military leaders from Austria-Hungary who went on to do other notable things after the Great War and the dissolution of Austria-Hungary?

Bohm-Ermolli, the commander of Second Army for pretty much the entire war, went on to be an honorary Field Marshal in WWII, becoming the only Field Marshal in both the KuK Armee and the Wehrmacht.

And of course Miklos Horthy, the last commander-in-chief of the Austro-Hungarian Navy, went on to become "Regent" of Hungary until 1944.

Aside from that uh well I guess Pilsudski was technically a military leader from Austria-Hungary...

>tfw A-H is my countryfu
It just looks so perfect

OP yet again. (I ran out of Austro-Hungarian related pics)

Something that I don't know about is the other contemporary nation's reactions to Austria-Hungary coming to an end.
Where there some who praised it as an end to imperialism in the east? Or where there some who though it was some kind of end of a great era?
I just wanted to know, because there is a ton of things written about nations discussing Germany being gutted, but not other nations of the central powers.

The idea of people writing fondly of Austria-Hungary is a fairly modern one. History is said to be written by the winners, but more than that, history is written by people with agendas.

All of the Monarchy's successor states needed good founding myths, and so all of them portrayed the fall of the Habsburg Empire as a squarely good thing, and good riddance to it. The new nations played up how they'd either been totally trying to break free of Vienna the whole time or had selflessly tried to make the Empire work only to get dragged down by squabbling and self-centered fellow nationalities. This became more common as the new Central Europe progressed into its fairly awful 1920s and 1930s.

Western academia was also perfectly eager to roast the memory of Austria-Hungary, and shoo away any notion that conjuring a bunch of nation-states into existence from its corpse may have been hasty or, even worse, yet another terrible mistake made at the Paris Peace Conference.

Of course, even in its time, critics of Austria-Hungary's existence were never few. The Habsburg Monarchy was not a nation-state, and was thus aberrant to intellectuals on the right and left.

I seriously don't understand why they felt so threatened by Serbia that they thought they needed to completely destroy the country. I started listening to "A World Undone" today and it seems like Conrad was super-paranoid about Serbia for some reason.

>The idea of people writing fondly of Austria-Hungary is a fairly modern one.
I'm certain that's true for almost every successor state except actual austria and maybe hungary. Pre-War Austria is often seen as an almost mythological place where everyone enjoyed peace and prosperity. Especially after WW2, the Vienna of pre-1914 was often celebrated in contemporary media. Unlike Germany, where everything related to Prussian Militarism had the sour aftertaste of defeat, the Habsburg Era is remembered very much fondly by Austrians, not as a time of dominance and power, but as a golden time where the people built beautiful monuments and made great works in every field.

It's more or less drifting out of public consciousness now, but the Austrian Film industry was basically founded on Nostalgic Sissi and Franz Joseph movies.
youtube.com/watch?v=TAGgsjs4Yvk

Do you have the names of said films?
I would like to view them to see how they interpreted their old empire.

A question about AH. Why didn't it pursue an overseas empire, save for Tianjin in China it never really left Europe but seemed fully capable. Any reason why?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_Elisabeth_of_Austria#Film

there's a huge number of them and I know only a fraction by name, but the Sissi trilogy is a good way to start.

They wanted Balkan land not African land

it never was a seafaring nation like Britain, Spain or Protugal, though America was conquered under Habsburg Rule.

Croatia had fishing communities but no major overseas harbors or even shipbuilding industry like England had. Even it's later Naval Power was only meant for Coastal Defence and power projection inside the Adriatic. Until Italy became an issue noone thought of needing a proper navy at all.

So what was the A-H navy like?
How big was it, did they have any major successes, or failures?
And what happened to it after the war?

>If the Empire dissolved into different nation-states for different peoples, where would the Jews go?
>Stage left: Enter the Zionists...

Small, but effective

Trashing the Italians during the Austro-Prussian War, also did effective raids and ground support during WW1

Sold off to other belligerents, none of the successors could afford them

what said. It was universally well led for the rare occassions it actually saw action, and with heart. The future Dictator of Hungary, Miklos Horthy kept his rank of Admiral long after the dissolution of AH and the Navy, even though Hungary became landlocked.

And at the end of WW1 it fell apart quickly like most anything else. Most Ships were grounded for weeks or months when the war ended due to mutiny like circumstances in the multi ethnical navy.

> What would have been required for A-H to not become the logistical, and mismanaged mess it became during the great war?

Become a Federal Republic and enfranchise the other nationalities.

Not even joking.

It's fucked and nothing can save the habsburgs' relic state. Francis' II's decision to refocus on the crown lands instead of the HRE after Napoleon raped him was what truly killed the habsburgs. Austria was too weak to take on russian, conquer all the balkans and reestablish itself under the new auspices of a superpower along the eastern mediterranean and too strong to 'submit' as a German state under the king of prussia after getting destroyed in 1866. Thus, it surrendered to its own stagnation. And if history tells us one thing, a stagnating empire is not an empire that lasts the course of time.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_of_Greater_Austria
USGA is what they needed, what the archduke had to offer if not for those pesky serbs

What books would you all recommend for learning more about the history of Austria Hungary? It feels like some monarchic early attempt at a regional European Union but i know there's more to it than that

Well since we talked a bit about the navy and army.
Did Austria-Hungary have a decent air force for the Great War?
Did they have their own aircraft or were they just using the German ones?

>Did they have their own aircraft or were they just using the German ones?
Fokker is a Dutch company

It's not specifically about A-H but "The World Undone" starts out with a pretty substantial briefing on A-H just so that the reader can understand what the fuck is going on. In the introduction, the author says that he believes that most books on the Great War make the mistake of assuming that their reader knows all the basic geography and history of Europe, and for his book he wanted to specifically write for a 21st century audience which probably doesn't know much about the politics of the early 20th century. I'm not too deep in it yet, but it seems very good so far.

AH had one of, if not the first Air Force in the entire world, founded in 1892 and originally operating balloons. By 1909 and 1910 it had been fully transformed into an actual airforce using aeroplanes exclusively, and the first military airbase in Europe at Wiener Neustadt.
Austria had a decent aircraft industry for the time and a couple pioneer aircraft designers, but also built some very successful models like the German Albatross in license.

refer to
For a fun but disgustingly Habsburgaboo read, try For God and Kaiser. For a good analysis of Austria in the war, read Ring of Steel.

Because Serbians are hyper-nationalistic retards with a boner for revanchism on lands that they never held but view as "Serbian" even though the people there are either different kinds of South Slavs (Croats, Bulgarians), Half-Slavic (Macedonians, Slovenians), or not Slavs at all (Albanians, Greeks).

Why didn't Germany and Austria-Hungary just unite into a single super-country called Germany-Austria-Hungary?

I know that it's bait, but that's because the Hohenzollerns would never submit to the Habsburgs (again) and vice-versa.

Also, Austria(-Hungary) forming Großgermany while retaining Transleithania and Illyria would have almost certainly lead to war with Britain, France, Russia, and basically all of continental Europe.

It's wasn't really bait, more of a dumb joke, but thanks for the informative reply anyway.

It's hard to tell bait from actual humor at this point.

And you're welcome.

The real question is why didn't all of the Central Powers unite into Germany-Austria-Hungary-Turkey-Levant-Iraq-Bulgaria?

because turkey smells

>because turkey smells
>GOOD

Can someone draw this on a map?

Sorry it's so shitty.

More importantly, can someone mock up a flag?

...please inform me what the flag looks like.

Uhh, maybe, I'm not great with graphical shit, I hope someone better at it sees this.

The little dots of white was bugging me so I cleaned it up a bit.

FUCK. I missed a bit in east Prussia

Would the Great War have ended sooner or later had the enemy been this monstrosity and not just the Central Powers?

considering they ended the war as a string of German satellites being controlled and financed from Berlin, it likely would've ended around the same time.

>Implying the capital wouldn't have been Vienna
Also here's the monstrosity of a flag.

part of it is the habsburg elites intense distrust of their own subjects, particularly the slavs. they just assumed that the croats/slovenes and inhabitants of bosnia would want to unite with the serbs because they were all south slavs. the reality was they were fairly far apart, and the croats and slovenes were two of the more loyal subject peoples the habsburgs had. they only opted for yugoslavia when the empire fell apart and they saw their choices as serbian or italian domination, and went with serbian. being that the empire's fall was caused by the austrians being hell-bent on destroying serbia, they ironically meme'd yugoslavia into existence.

It's like I'm staring into some kind of alien landscape.

It gets worse user.
>What would the monarch be called?

I'm scared.
I'm very scared now.

What's there to be scared of? You have nothing to fear from the Kaiser-Kaiser-King-Sultan-Tsar-King-King.

If you're loyal.

...how the fuck would the government work?

Like Austria-Hungary but with a shitload more constituents. The German federal monarchies, the Ottoman constituent states, Bulgaria.

They rotate through power year by year. It's actually a great system. You have to work for a year straight but then you get 6 years off after that.

It was hopelessly multicultural and the union was unsustainable
And there was the sl*v unity autism

Hey now, it's the current year, multiculturalism is strength, not a weakness. (yes, this is bait)

Multiculturalism was actually a strength back then for the Austrians.

It's just a shame that one of those cultures was Hungarian.

in WW1 it became more of a weakness due to difficult communications and dissidence.
In everything but lefty dreamland multiculturalism becomes a burden and doesn't withstand any sort of internal or external pressure.
It's basicall a waterboiler made of paper and wishful thinking.

russian interest in balkans
french interest in an isolated germany

Austria is hilarious.

Everyone in Europe was memeing about how Ottomans were the "weak man of Europe." But then during WW1 they actually kicked some ass against a superior foe.

On the other hand, the Austrians had to constantly be bailed out by Germans.

Turks have been pretty good at war historically. AH was pretty cocky which makes it more funny that they almost got beaten by Serbia.

>beaten
it was pushed back out of Serbia after a
failed offensive, but at no point in the war was Serbia in any position to "beat" AH. Also people seem to conveniently forget that most of the forces were occupied in Russia.

How about we call him, Holy Roman Emperor for shorts?

Also, why didn't Austria-Hungary turn into Germany-Hungary? I know the Germans wanted the Austrian to drop the other half of the crown, but what about a different dual monarchy?

I'll just leave this here

habsburgs vs hohenzollerns as previous user said

Why they couldn't just marry up? I know interests are a thing, but some concecions must be made, or the no concessions side won and this is why they all imploded?

The Turks at Gallipolli where under German command which had reorganised their defenses. But it's generally easier to "kick ass" in a situation where your opponent is attacking your fortified positions from the sea. The Ottomans got their ass kicked by Russia and were in need of help from the Central Powers in the Middle East.