The Afterlife of Austria-Hungary: The Image of the Habsburg Monarchy in Interwar Europe

Chapter Two: Austria-Hungary in Essayism and Political Theory

AusTriA-hungAry in essAyism And PoliTiCAl Theory 67 of history as such, the mechanism that governs it and its aims, for in the interwar period it was still popularly believed that history has an aim, and that one can penetrate its mechanisms. For an academic historian it was natural to declare, as A. F. Pribram did in his Austrian Foreign Policy, that he would “avoid any higher standpoint” than “the purely historical one,” and conclude his narrative stating that “regrets, however, are of no avail. History has pronounced its verdict. Austria-Hungary is no more.”1 To be sure, a mistrustful, and certainly a postmodern reader would challenge this declaration, observing that no “purely historical” standpoints exist, and that the historian included a lot of ideology, emotions, and Austrian patriotism in his narrative. Still, I am going to credit interwar scholarship with some straightforward confidence and differentiate their writings from those whose main interest was not the history of the monarchy but the present and the future of ideas it represented. Academic historians have to emphasize this difference, even though it may sometimes seem that they do so naïvely or perfidiously, in order to remain within the framework of their domain and to protect it against those who do not respect its rules. As the first chapter of this book indicates, they scarcely avoided “higher standpoints”; their writings are full of ideology and sentiments that have little to do with scholarly standards, but a lot with their political and national sympathies . And yet academic accuracy, source-based data, and the necessity to acknowledge various opinions and interpretations (including those that did not please them), seriously limited their inclinations to express their sentiments. In other words, academic standards worked imperfectly , but they had their undeniable impact on historians’ narratives. In this chapter I am going to deal with another kind of historical writing, which acknowledges “higher standpoints” overtly and freely. The past is a rich, dark soil that can feed various kinds of writers, including these who do not really cultivate it but exploit it for their “higher” purposes. Authors discussed in this chapter did not really care about Austria-Hungary as a monarchy with its peculiarities and paradoxes, institutions and monarchs, and its history that ended in the fall of 1918. What mattered for them were the timeless ideas that for a moment anchored in the Habsburg monarchy. In other words, they did not care whether democracy, socialism, or nationalism had 68 AusTriA-hungAry in essAyism And PoliTiCAl Theory strengthened or weakened the monarchy but whether the monarchy had hastened or slowed down their “march through history.” More precisely, there were three main problems discussed by interwar authors inspired by the fate of the Habsburg monarchy. First was the shaping of an Austrian identity, one that could rival the ethnic nationalisms that were popularly believed to have been the deadliest enemies of the monarchy. One should remember that before 1918 nothing like that actually existed in Austria. There were two reasons for that. First, all Austrians who cared about such things as the still relatively fresh national identification considered themselves members of the German nation—except those, of course, who considered themselves members of some other nationalities, and whom we may nevertheless retrospectively call Austrians because they were good Habsburg patriots . This refers to many Slavs, Hungarians, or Romanians who settled in Vienna or who made careers in the state administration or the imperial and royal army; to the supranational aristocracy; and, perhaps most importantly, to the numerous Austrian Jews, who might have had the same Austrian identity regardless of whether they lived in Vienna or in eastern Galicia. These people, dispersed throughout all corners of the realm and combining their ethnocultural self-identification with Austrian patriotism, were the true pillars of the monarchy. Needless to say, before the Great War, when the monarchy had still been powerful, stable, and prosperous, it seemed that their number was huge and that they built up the social elite of Austria proper and all its crownlands. When the monarchy fell, however, and was replaced by new successor states, their number also fell drastically, and most of them quickly forgot their old loyalty. Second, Austria did not need any national identity . The monarchy had enough problems taming the all-too-vigorous nationalisms it eventually had to face, which undermined its dynasticpatriarchal order, so it never made any serious or coherent attempts...