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John Stuart Mill declared in his Representative Government that it was "in general a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of government should coincide in the main with those of nationalities." This early statement of the principle of the self-determination of nations was not generally accepted in the age of empire, - or in any earlier age, for that matter; it was expected, by contrast, that small nations would be absorbed into larger imperial structures. And the most striking defiance of the principle was to be found in the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Austria-Hungary, ruled by the Emperor Franz Joseph, was the most multinational of multinational empires. This fact alone softened its previous hostile relationship to the Orthodox Christians within its borders (although there were important exceptions, as we shall see). As Simon Winder writes, the Habsburgs “came to stand – against their will – as champions of tolerance in a nineteenth-century Europe driven made by ethnic nationalism.”27 For the balance between the 17 official nationalities in the empire was so fine that the Habsburg dynasty was forced to concede a very considerable degree of freedom to each of them. But all the nations of the empire were still discontented - and not least the Austrians themselves.
The Germans had solved the question of their national unification only by violently excluding the Austrian Germans from their state. The situation of these Austrian Germans was now weaker than ever, for on the one hand, they could not stake out an independent state for themselves on the grounds of race since the State of Germany already existed, but on the other hand the other nations of the empire were demanding independence for themselves. As the Viennese dramatist Franz Grillparzer said to the Germans: "You believe that you have given birth to an empire, but you have only destroyed a people!"
Michael Biddis writes: "Bismarck himself had been reluctant to encourage Magyar or Slav nationalism by any additional encroachment on Habsburg sovereignty. 'Whatever,' he asked, 'can fill the place in Europe that has hitherto been filled by the Austrian state from Tyrol to Bukovina? Any rearrangement in this area could only be of a permanently revolutionary nature.' Yet Bismarck's refusal to risk international destabilization by further expansion of Germany within Europe was increasingly challenged. In essence, the critics were willing to applaud his version of unification, but not as a finalization of territorial fulfillment; rather as a milestone on a longer path to greater destinies. Those to whom the nation-state meant some form of Grossdeutschland could only be unsatisfied by the 'little Germany' or 'great Prussia' of 1870-1."28
The biggest problem for the Austrians was the Hungarians. Together with them, they could control the other nations; without them, the whole structure could collapse. And so they decided on the famous Compromise of 1867. Dominic Lieven describes what it involved: "Francis Joseph divided his empire in two for most purposes. He handed over to the Magyar elite almost complete control over the internal affairs of the Kingdom of Hungary, more than half of whose population was not ethnic Hungarians. In return the emperor secured the - albeit equivocal - support of the Magyar elite for his empire, a considerable Hungarian contribution to sustain the imperial armed forces, and recognition that foreign and defence policy would remain the almost exclusive concern of the monarch and those officials to whom he chose to turn for advice. The 1867 Compromise was the decisive event in late Habsburg history. It determined much of the empire's domestic policy and some of its foreign policy down to the Monarchy's demise in 1918. Cold and, in the long run, dubious calculations of power drove the emperor to adopt the Compromise. As he wrote to his daughter, 'I do not conceal from myself that the Slav peoples of the monarchy may look on the new policies with distrust, but the government will never be able to satisfy every national group. This is why we much rely on those which are the strongest - that is, the Germans and the Hungarians.' Relying on 'the strongest' would bring domestic political stability, at least in the short run. Above all, it would allow the emperor the time and resources to renew his challenge to the Prussians, which would make it possible to reverse Austria's humiliating defeat at Königgrätz in 1866 and to ensure that the independent South German States did not fall under Prussian rule. Only with Prussia's defeat of France in 1870-71 and her absorption of the remaining German states did Austria's hopes of revenge disappear."29
As Simon Winder writes, “the two halves of the Empire carried on in parallel, held together by Franz Joseph’s startling longevity. Both halves boomed, being immeasurably richer by the beginning of the twentieth century. Austria had been neutered and infantilized by its defeat by Prussia – when the new united Germany emerged in 1871 it became Franz Joseph’s central aim in life never to be alienated from Berlin again. It became axiomatic that Imperial security could only be guaranteed by holding Bismarck in a clingy embrace. Hungary was even further neutered and infantilized politically by being in Vienna’s shadow and using the security guarantee provided by their association to underfinance its own armed forces. This Berlin-Vienna-Budapest axis now settled in, and of course with no sense at all of what a bitter future generation would owe to it…”30
Meanwhile, nationalism flourished within the multi-national empire, buoyed up by folklore, linguistic studies and music… It could flourish because of the Empire’s necessarily tolerant attitude to it. But, as the emperor had feared, the Czechs, Italians and Ruthenians in the Austrian monarchy, and the Slovaks, Slovenes and Romanians in the Hungarian, still felt oppressed. "In practice, the three 'master races' - the Germans, the Magyars, and the Galician Poles - were encouraged to lord it over the others. The administrative structures were so tailored that the German minority in Bohemia could hold down the Czechs, the Magyars in Hungary could hold down the Slovaks, Romanians, and Croats, and the Poles in Galicia could hold down the Ruthenians (Ukrainians). So pressures mounted as each of the excluded nationalities fell prey to the charms of nationalism."31
The most important pressure was that of the Czechs on the Germans. The Czechs were enjoying a national revival, but the Germans were doing badly in both halves of the empire. In Hungary, they were few (1.95 million in 1880) and oppressed. Lieven writes that "the German community in Hungary, abandoned to its fate by the imperial government, was one of the major victims of Magyarization, even if in some cases its assimilation of Hungarian language and culture was voluntary. By 1900-14 even the absolute number of Germans in Hungary was in decline owing to assimilation and emigration. Meanwhile, in the non-Hungarian half of the Monarchy (usually referred to by the shorthand name Cisleithenia) the Germans were also under pressure. They were still much the richest group in the region. On the eve of the First World War they comprised 35.8 per cent of Cisleithenia's population and paid 63 per cent of its direct taxes. But they were losing, or had lost, control over many towns and even whole crownlands which they had traditionally dominated. Prague was a good case in point. Traditionally a German town in language, appearance and culture, it was increasingly swamped by Czech immigrants in the second half of the nineteenth century. By 1910 there was not a single German left on the city council. Not surprisingly, the German community's politics, especially in mixed nationality crownlands, was often an unlovely combination of traditional cultural arrogance with hysteria about the threat to its identity and status offered by Slav numbers, migration and increasing self-confidence.
"Not at all surprisingly, many Austrian Germans were enthusiastic about the new German Reich. In 1871, noting this fact, Count Andrassy warned Francis Joseph that it would be fatal to pursue internal policies in Cisleithenia which further antagonized the Austrian Germans. If this were done, 'the Austro-Germans would then turn to the forces of German democracy, which would tear the national banner out of the hands of Prince Bismarck and carry it forward until the whole German race was united.' Andrassy's comments were not those of a neutral observer. The Magyar elite, of which he was a leading representative, saw German domination of Cisleithenia as essential to keeping the Monarchy's Slavs in their place. In particular, plans for 'trialism', in other words for giving the Crown of St. Wenceslas (i.e. Bohemia and Moravia) the same sort of autonomy as the Crown of St. Stephen, were anathema to the Hungarians since they would dilute their influence in Vienna (one out of three territories rather than one out of two) and would set very dangerous precedents for the Hungarian Kingdom's Slav minority. Nevertheless, in the end Andrassy's prediction, a logical one in a nationalist and increasingly democratic era, was to come true in Hitlerian form."32
Dynasticism, writes W.H. Spellman, "was the only variable linking a host of peoples who shared no racial, linguistic, social or historical cohesion. Austria-Hungary was an empire consisting entirely of minorities, a holdover from the medieval imperial idea of allegiance to crown and dynasty, not to abstract nation. The only bond between the far-flung and varied provinces of the empire was the monarch himself, whose 68-year reign overlapped the decades when nationalism was becoming the strongest factor in the political life of Europe. Thus it should not surprise us that the principal powers enjoyed by the emperor, control over foreign affairs and the military, were constantly employed in the service of obstructing the realization of the nationalist agenda. In the view of one observer, 'foreign policy was the justification of the monarchy; almost every important change within the Habsburg lands for a century or more had been the result of a need to meet a new crisis in foreign affairs.'
"And during the last 40 years of the monarchy's existence, questions of national rivalry within Habsburg-controlled lands constituted the key challenge to the ruler and his ministers. The ageing emperor felt a deep personal responsibility for the well-being and territorial integrity of his multi-ethnic inheritance. Unfortunately, concessions made to one group invariably spurred demands from another. What held the monarchical model intact into the twentieth century was, more than anything else, the sense of continuity represented by Europe's oldest dynastic house. Thus the celebration of the emperor's eightieth birthday in 1910 was every bit as significant for the empire as Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee had been for the British in 1897. The Habsburgs were associated in the minds of their subjects with the tradition of transnational Roman authority, the bold defence of Europe against the incursions of the Turk, and an almost exceptional sense of antiparochialism. The emperor was the heir of Charles V, apostolic king of Hungary and successor of St. Stephen. Tradition still counted for something in this polyglot empire.
"There were representative assemblies in both Austria and Hungary, and by the 1880s Austrians enjoyed freedom of religion, equality before the law and the protection of civil rights. In 1907 the parliament was elected on the basis of universal manhood suffrage, and a multi-party system was put in place. But government ministers were servants of the crown and not responsible to parliamentary control. Supported by an expanding civil service, army and Church, Francis Joseph was not a man predisposed to initiate change conducive to either a nationalist or constitutionalist agenda. The emperor did encourage state investment in certain infrastructure sectors like the railroad, and economic growth was led by industrial centres like Vienna and Prague. But raised in the intellectual climate of Metternich's Europe, and chastened as a young emperor by the memory of the 1848 liberal revolutions, the monarch placed the survival of the transnational dynasty above all other personal or political considerations. On the eve of the First World War few of the king-emperor's subjects would have proposed the dissolution of the monarchy."33
However, transnationalism was an increasingly difficult ideal to maintain as “ethnomania” spread from West to East and began to infect the smaller nations of the Austro-Hungarian empire. For, as a Habsburg diplomatic circular of the year 1853 had correctly noted: “The claim to set up new states according to the limits of nationality is the most dangerous of schemes. To put forward such a pretension is to break with history; and to carry it into execution in any part of Europe is to shake to its foundations the firmly organized order of states, and to threaten the Continent with subversion and chaos…”
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