Definition of Austro-Hungarian Empire

In its intricate human geography, composed of several towns united by the force, we found the weakness which led to his disappearance.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire was the political entity heir to the Austrian Empire, resulting from a political compromise between the two main population entities of the former Austrian Empire, and the will of the Habsburg monarchy to maintain its domains.

The key to the transformation of the Austrian Empire into the Austro-Hungarian, with the transfer of rights to the Hungarians that this entailed, was the defeat of the Austrian troops against the Prussians at the Battle of Sadowa, which ended the brief Austro-Prussian war for hegemony in the unification process German.

With Prussia leading this, Austria turned to maintaining her dominions. The subjugated peoples (Bohemians, Croats, Italians, Romanians, Poles, among others besides the Hungarians) had seen in the Austrian defeat at the hands of the Prussians a weakness for Austria, and the empire having already suffered several revolts, especially by the Hungarians, both the political authorities and the monarchy began to design a plan from

reform.

Said reform took shape in the so-called “Compromise” of 1867, from which the dual monarchy was born with broad autonomy for Hungary, with its own parliament included.

In this way, Austria focused on her direct domains, leaving aside the politics of the German states, in which she had interfered in the hope of being able to lead their future union. Now that Prussia had taken this role by force, the renewed Empire already as a dual monarchy, preferred maintain a strategic alliance with Germany, which allowed it to "play" in the Balkans and contain Russia.

The "Triple Alliance" formed by both empires and Italy in 1879 was a good example of this policy of good coexistence with its immediate neighbors and to allow it to intervene in Balkan affairs.

It would be precisely the Austro-Hungarian interference in the Balkans that would light the fuse of the First World War.

And, with it, the end in 1918 of the Empire. But let's not anticipate events yet.

During its existence, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a heterogeneous set of cultures, languages ​​and, even, "races" (a term that I ask to adopt with caution, but which at the time was seen by many as such).

Thus, Slavic peoples like the Czechs and Slovaks, or many of the Balkan subjects of the Empire, tended to see Austrians and Hungarians as “racial enemies”, and in the case of the Balkans, to Serbia and, ultimately, to Russia, as guarantors of their future existence in a species Slavic "sphere of co-prosperity", if you will allow me to use the term that Japan would use in the 1930s and 1940s to justify its war of conquest in Asia.

The internal tensions of the Empire would be exploited by its enemies during World War I, aligning soldiers of the oppressed ethnic minorities within it.

All the artifice that constituted the Austro-Hungarian Empire would implode in 1918 with the defeat of the Central Empires in the First World War.

The various nationalities obtained their independence, such as Czechoslovakia (a state in which Czechs and Slovaks coexisted), Ukraine (in the short-lived Republic People of Western Ukraine), Yugoslavia (or, more accurately, what would later constitute Yugoslavia), Romania, and the return of Italian and Polish ethnic minorities to their respective countries, in the case of Poland also recently creation.

With the death of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, its romantic idealization was born as an attempt at coexistence between different peoples. Let's not be fooled: it was a group of peoples, some subject and others more privileged, united only by the interest of a monarchy and a dominant elite, either Austrian or, later and with the achievement of autonomy, also Hungarian, as well as the collaborating elites with power between the peoples subjugated.

Photos: Fotolia - Yossarian6 / Juulijs

Themes in Austro-Hungarian Empire