From 1867 until 1918 the second-largest state in Europe was, in fact, two states joined
in a loose and quite contentious union.
At its height, the Austro-Hungarian Empire ruled over 50 million people, half of whom
were not Austrians or Hungarians,
so then how did that very divided country govern its subjects?
Just how did Austria-Hungary actually work?
Well, both halves of the Empire recognized one man—the Emperor of Austria and King
of Hungary—as their head of state, and for almost all of Austria-Hungary’s existence
that man was the Kaiser und König Franz Joseph,
who led the Imperial and Royal house of Habsburg-Lorraine.
Fealty to Franz Joseph’s dynasty was what tied Austria and Hungary together.
Other than their shared monarch though, the two had almost no joint institutions.
Mostly, the Hungarians, or Magyars, were responsible
for that state of affairs.
The Dual Monarchy was founded on a compromise between them and Austria, but before 1867
Hungary had just been another Habsburg territory…
though not always a happy one.
While a Habsburg had been King of Hungary since the 16th century, the Hungarian diet
had always maintained a degree of power, much more so than in other Habsburg lands.
The nobility, who largely controlled the diet, jealously guarded that privilege.
They never fully accepted the authority of the Austrian Empire, and Hungary did get to
keep plenty of autonomy, but in 1848, they decided to make a stand.
The so-called March or April Laws put an end to absolutism in Hungary, but the then-new
emperor, Franz Joseph, wasn’t a fan and he (arguably illegally) revoked the laws.
That sparked the Hungarian revolution which came very close to establishing a totally
independent, liberal Hungary, if not for the 200,000 or so Russians who showed up to save
the young Emperor’s crown.
For nearly the next two decades a reduced Hungary was governed by Franz Josef under
harsh martial law, with the Hungarians continuing to agitate for change all the while.
But it took an external force, Austria’s loss to Prussia and Italy in the Seven-Weeks war,
to force Franz Joseph to see the need for adjustment.
His empire had to reform to survive, and the Magyars, second only to Austrian Germans in
population, had to be appeased if he was to maintain control.
What did the Magyars want?
Well, for many, it was full independence from Austria, but they also wanted to keep control
of the non-Magyar groups in Hungary.
Most of the people of the whole Austrian Empire, in fact, were neither ethnically Austrian nor
Hungarian, and each ethnicity had its own goals of autonomy or independence.
Then there were still fierce debates even among the ethnic Austrians and Magyars: should
Austrian Germans rally around the Habsburgs for example, or abandon them and seek to join
the unification of Germany proper?
And should the Magyars head a fully sovereign state, and attempt to rule over their minorities
alone, or retain Hungarian links with Austria and the house of Habsburg?
Most would’ve preferred the former, but what they would get was the Ausgleich,
or the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867.
Agreed to primarily by Franz Joseph and the Hungarians Ferenc Deák and Gyula Andrássy,
then passed by both Hungary’s Parliament
and Austria’s Imperial Council, the Austro-Hungarian
Compromise made Hungary the legal equal of Austria.
It largely restored the laws that Franz Joseph had arbitrarily repealed in 1848: giving Hungary
sovereignty over all of its domestic affairs, returning Croatia-Slavonia and Transylvania,
and ensuring that the Hungarian Parliament would be elected democratically
—a full 5% of the population could vote.
Under the now Emperor-King, Austria-Hungary maintained a united foreign policy,
a joint army, and worked out how to pay for those things together,
but other than that, all aspects of government were dealt with separately;
there were even tariffs on trade between the two sides.
The only other exception to separation really was Bosnia
which Austria and Hungary governed together after its occupation in 1878.
So, the Austrian half of Austria-Hungary, or officially the Kingdoms and Lands represented
in the Imperial Council, was ran much like how the Austrian Empire before it was.
The council, or the Reichsrat, had two houses: one the House of Lords, that represented the
hereditary aristocracy, the Catholic Church,
and anyone who the Emperor wanted to appoint for life,
and another, the House of Deputies.
At first, that house was made up of representatives
from the diets of each of the 17 kingdoms,
duchies, counties, and other states over which Franz Joseph ruled outside of Hungary.
All of which were historic Habsburg territories.
The local diets were composed of delegates
from four classes or curia: landowners, financiers,
the cities, and rural areas.
Eventually, the curia would be abolished and replaced with universal male suffrage in 1907.
All the while though the Emperor maintained sweeping executive powers:
Franz Joseph had sole authority to appoint or dismiss Austria’s
minister-president and cabinet,
and through them, most notably the Count von Taaffe,
he managed to put together coalitions that kept his diverse empire in one piece.
In Hungary, or the Lands of the Crown of St. Stephen on the other hand Franz Joseph had
less, but certainly not no power.
Hungarian politics was dominated by the Liberal Party, a somewhat broad coalition including
both traditional aristocrats and newly ennobled gentry and capitalists.
Though its support for the compromise alienated ethnic Magyar voters.
Hungary’s Parliament, also split into Houses
of lords and deputies, though with less influential
lords and slightly more democratic elections, contained members from Hungary proper,
and envoys from the partially self-governing parliament of Croatia-Slavonia.
The system generally overrepresented Magyars, but still Magyar nationalists,
led from exile by Lajos Kossuth who had
spearheaded the 1848 revolution,
saw Liberal Hungarians like Deák and his successors Kálmán and István Tisza
who supported the Ausgleich
as traitors to their country.
Kossuth and Deák in particular present stark contrasts between Magyars who sought total
Hungarian sovereignty, and those who saw a Habsburg monarch as key to keeping down the
non-Magyar subjects of Hungary.
Something that they were very interested in.
Through a process called “Magyarisation,” from the compromise until the end of the empire
Hungary’s government set out to squash regional identities and maintain a Magyar monopoly
on power, despite their making up at most only half of the Kingdom’s population.
Apparently culturally backwards Slavs,
the Slovaks
in particular, were most often made targets.
Austria too had a plethora of minorities,
particularly the Czechs and the Poles, but there, they were used by Franz Joseph and
von Taaffe to bolster Habsburg absolutism in the face of Austro-German liberalism.
(Ethnic minorities in Austria gained more power in the Reichsrat with the democratisation
of the House of Delegates).
Von Taaffe’s government, the Iron Ring, bought their support for Habsburg rule by
granting languages other than German some regional authority;
they also catered to Roman Catholic and rural Austrians.
Franz Joseph himself was obviously Austro-German but he was very much not a nationalist,
or really any sort of idealogue.
His interest was in the preservation of his
dynasty, and in fact to promote too much German-ness
would have only pushed his subjects away from him, and towards the German Empire, which
plenty of them wanted to join already.
Much of the liberal, Austro-German intelligentsia though wanted to enact
similar policies to Hungary's in their half of the empire.
They sought to bring about a purely ethnically German nation-state, either by allocating
to Hungary most non-German areas and then having the rest unite with Germany,
or by enforcing German culture on Austria’s Slavs.
Proponents of such thought also had a habit of being quite anti-Semitic,
in addition to being anti-Slavic,
and obviously the ramifications
of Austrian anti-Semitism would persist well into the 20th century.
In Austria, it was almost official state policy to actively play the nationalities off of
one another in the name of ensuring the security of the Habsburg dynasty.
It did the opposite.
Franz Joseph died after a nearly 70-year reign in 1916, and at the height of WW1, his successor
Karl I and IV, was left with virtually no support at all.
The war gave his Czechs, Poles, Slovenes and Italians, the opportunity to break totally
free from any Austrian rule.
By then, Austrian Germans, after having been frustrated by them for so long, were also
sick of the antiquated house of Habsburg,
and eager to ditch them in favour of republicanism,
and ideally union with Germany proper.
Magyarisation too had precisely the opposite effect that the policy was intended to achieve,
only entrenching the resolve of threatened identities, and encouraging them to reject
both the Habsburgs, as well as any sort of Hungarian state.
To learn more about them and the Treaty of Trianon, which carved up Hungary, you can
check out the video on that topic to the left, and as always, I’ve been James and I’ll
see you there.