The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (39 page)

The Hungarians, after all, had their own nationalities problem, one which they had managed to ignore successfully up to this point. Hungarians, or Magyars, as they liked to be called, were only a bare majority within Hungary’s borders but the restricted franchise gave them almost all the seats in parliament. By 1900 national movements – Serb, Rumanian, Croat – were igniting around Hungary, fuelled by this lack of power as well as resentment at government promotion of Hungarian in schools and offices. They were also mirrored by growing nationalist movements elsewhere, both inside Austria-Hungary and around its borders. In 1895 a Congress of Nationalities met in Budapest to demand that Hungary become a multinational state. The Hungarians reacted with alarm and anger. Even the relatively liberal Tisza simply could not accept that there were other nations with legitimate national aspirations within Hungary. In his view Rumanians, except for extremists, were like the peasants on his estate and knew that they needed to work with Hungarians: ‘I know that they are gentle, peaceful, respectful of gentlemen, and grateful for every good word.’
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Throughout the Dual Monarchy, the rising tide of nationalism
brought with it endless and insoluble fights about schools, jobs, even street signs. The question on the census asking people to put down their mother tongues became a vital marker of national strength and national groups took out advertisements urging the ‘right’ answers. Nationalist movements often overlapped with economic and class issues: Rumanian and Ruthenian peasants, for example, challenged their Hungarian and Polish landlords. Yet such was the force of nationalism that classes which in other countries formed socialist or liberal or conservative parties here split apart on national lines.

Because Austria-Hungary’s population had been so mixed by centuries of history almost every locality had its own nationalist struggles: in Slovenia, Italians against Slovenes, in Galicia, Poles against Ruthenians, and Germans, it seemed, against everyone, whether Italians in the Tyrol or Czechs in Bohemia. In 1895 the Austrian government fell because German speakers objected to parallel Slovene classes in a secondary school; two years later conflict between Czechs and Germans over the use of Czech in government business in Bohemia and Moravia led to violence in the streets and the fall of another Prime Minister; and in 1904 there were violent demonstrations by Germans when an Italian law faculty was established in Innsbruck. New railway stations remained nameless because no one could agree on which language to use. Perhaps it was no accident that it was a Viennese, Sigmund Freud, who was to come up with the notion of the narcissism of small differences. As he wrote in
Civilization and Its Discontents
, ‘it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other …’
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‘An air of unreality pervaded everything,’ said Henry Wickham Steed, a British journalist assigned to Vienna. ‘Public attention was fixed on trifles – a squabble at the Opera between a Czech and a German singer, a row in Parliament over the appointment of some obscure official in Bohemia, the attractions of the latest comic opera or the sale of tickets for a charity ball.’
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The younger generation either became bored and cynical about politics or joined new political movements which promised to clean up the mess, by violent means if necessary. Austria-Hungary was being weakened and its international position damaged by the ‘defective solution of the nationality question’, the future Foreign Minister of Austria-Hungary, Alois von Aehrenthal,
wrote to his cousin in 1899. ‘The hereditary defect of the Austrian – pessimism – is already seizing the youth and threatens to stifle every idealistic impulse.’
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National differences led not only to a breakdown of civility in the streets but to increasing stalemate inside the Dual Monarchy’s parliaments. Political parties, divided as they mostly were on linguistic and ethnic lines, were mainly interested in promoting the interests of their own group and in blocking the others. Deputies blew trumpets, rang cowbells, banged gongs, beat on drums and hurled inkpots and books around to silence their opponents. The filibusters became a normal tactic; in one of the most famous a German deputy spoke for twelve straight hours during the struggle to prevent Czech being given equal status with German in Bohemia and Moravia. ‘In our country’, a conservative aristocrat wrote to a friend, ‘an optimist must commit suicide.’
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The government somehow muddled through, increasingly by using its emergency powers. When war came in August 1914, the Austrian parliament had been suspended for several months and was not to meet again until the spring of 1917.

Nationalism also undermined the bureaucracy as appointments became a way for parties to reward their followers. As result the size and costs of the bureaucracy went up enormously. Between 1890 and 1911 there was a 200 per cent increase in the numbers of bureaucrats, most of them new appointments. In Austria alone there were 3 million civil servants for a total population of some 28 million. Even the simplest decisions were wound about with red tape or, in reality, coloured twine, black and yellow for imperial matters, red, white, and green for Hungary, or, when it was annexed, brown and yellow for Bosnia. A single tax payment in Vienna went through the hands of twenty-seven different officials. In the Adriatic province of Dalmatia, a commission set up to report on ways to improve the bureaucracy discovered that the collection of direct taxes cost twice as much as it raised. The commission painted a dispiriting picture of inefficiency and waste throughout the country: while civil servants were expected, for example, to work five to six hours a day, few did even that. In the Foreign Office, a new recruit said he rarely received more than three or four files a day to deal with and no one minded if he came in late and left early. In 1903 the British embassy had to wait for ten months to get an answer about the duty on
Canadian whisky. ‘The dilatoriness of this country, if continued in progressive ratio, will soon rival that of Turkey,’ a British diplomat complained to London.
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Not surprisingly, the public tended to describe the bureaucracy as a broken-down old nag but the consequences were far from a joke. The contempt for what the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus called
Bürokretinismus
served further to undermine public confidence in their government. And the costs of the bureaucracy meant, among other things, that there was less money for the armed forces which in any case remained caught up in the endless political struggles. Until 1912, the Hungarian parliament had refused to agree to increased funding or the number of men being conscripted annually unless it got concessions on such matters as the language issue in return. It took a crisis in the Balkans on the Dual Monarchy’s doorstep to bring about a modest improvement. Even so, by 1914 Austria-Hungary was spending less on its army than was Britain (which had by far the smallest army of all the powers in Europe). The Dual Monarchy’s total defence budget was well under half of that of Russia, its most formidable enemy.
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Austria-Hungary was by no means the corpse on the Danube, as some in its ally Germany had taken to calling it, but it clearly was sick. Various cures were considered and rejected or found to be unworkable. During the crisis with Hungary over the language issue and the army, the Dual Monarchy’s military drew up plans to use force in Hungary but the emperor refused to contemplate it.
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Hopes of making the bureaucracy truly national and above politics foundered in the face of inertia and entrenched nationalisms. Universal suffrage as a way of linking the masses closer to the crown was tried in Austria but it only produced more voters for the new populist national parties. Or there was Trialism, a new sort of compromise with the South Slavs, a term increasingly being used for the Serb, Slovene and Croat inhabitants of the southern part of the Dual Monarchy as well as those in the Balkans. A South Slav bloc would counterbalance Austria and Hungary and satisfy South Slav nationalist demands. It was rejected out of hand by the Hungarians. For many the last hope was the heir to the throne, Franz Ferdinand, who was relatively young and energetic and undoubtedly full of ideas, largely authoritarian and reactionary ones. Perhaps he could roll back change and make the Dual Monarchy a proper
autocracy again with a strong central government. He certainly looked and acted the part of a decisive ruler.

Franz Ferdinand was a tall, handsome man with large expressive eyes and a loud and domineering voice. If his moustache was not quite a match for Wilhelm’s it nevertheless twirled smartly into sharp points. His private life, after the usual youthful indiscretions, was impeccable. He had married for love and was a devoted husband and father. He had an eye for beautiful things and did much to save Austria-Hungary’s architectural heritage. He was intellectually curious and, unlike his uncle the emperor, read the newspapers thoroughly. He was also greedy, demanding, and intolerant. He was known for beating dealers down to get the paintings and furniture he wanted. He was unforgiving with subordinates for even the smallest of mistakes. Among others, he hated Jews, Freemasons and anyone who criticised or challenged the Catholic Church to which he was passionately devoted. He also loathed Hungarians (‘traitors’) and Serbs (‘pigs’). They should, he said frequently, be crushed. There was something excessive about both his pleasures and hatreds. When he hunted he preferred to have the game, great quantities of it, driven towards him as he shot until his guns turned red hot. It was said that he once suddenly demanded that a herd of deer be rounded up and shot all 200 of them as well as one of the beaters by mistake.
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It had not been expected that he would be the heir to the throne but the execution of his uncle Maximilian in Mexico, the suicide of his cousin Rudolf, and his own father’s death from typhoid which he got from drinking the water of the River Jordan in the Holy Land, left him in 1896 at the age of thirty-three as the next acceptable male heir. (Franz Joseph’s youngest brother Ludwig Victor was still alive but surrounded by far too much scandal.) Franz Ferdinand himself had been seriously ill with tuberculosis shortly before father’s death; he was dismayed to see people paying court to his younger brother. He had recovered after a sea voyage and was to remain in good health until 1914.

The emperor did not much care for his new heir and their relations took a marked turn for the worse in 1900 when Franz Ferdinand insisted on marrying Countess Sophie Chotek. She was pretty, with a good reputation, and came from an old aristocratic family in Bohemia, but she was not of the right rank for a Habsburg. Although the
emperor eventually gave way he imposed conditions: Sophie would not get the rank or privileges of a Habsburg duchess and their children would not be eligible for the throne. This slight, which her husband resented bitterly, and the indifference which his uncle displayed towards his heir’s views added to Franz Ferdinand’s highly developed sense of insecurity. ‘The archduke has the feeling’, said one of his loyal aides, ‘he is undervalued [and] from this feeling there results an understandable jealousy of high functionaries, who in the army or public life enjoy great prestige.’
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Perhaps as a result, his temper, always ferocious, became close to uncontrollable. There were rumours of him shooting his revolver wildly, attendants who were really male nurses, and a story, reported by the British ambassador in Vienna, that the emperor was thinking of passing him over for the succession because of doubts about his sanity.
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Whether this was true or not, and there were always many rumours about the Habsburgs, Franz Joseph gradually began to give Franz Ferdinand greater responsibilities. He provided him with a lovely baroque palace, the Belvedere, and allowed him to set up his own military office and in 1913 made him Inspector General of the Armed Forces, which gave him considerable latitude to deal with the military, although Franz Joseph himself remained the commander-in-chief. The Belvedere became almost a second court as Franz Ferdinand built his own network with politicians, bureaucrats, officers, and journalists. Here he developed his ideas for saving the Dual Monarchy: by centralising power and the armed forces, getting rid of the Compromise with Hungary, and creating a new federated state to include Hungarians, Germans, Czechs, Poles, and South Slavs. He had no particular fondness for parliamentary institutions and would have governed without them if he had had the opportunity. Count Ottokar Czernin, who was to become Foreign Minister during the war, doubted whether he could have succeeded: ‘The structure of the Monarchy which he was so anxious to strengthen and support was already so rotten that it could not have stood any great innovations, and if not the war, then probably the Revolution, would have shattered it.’
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In foreign policy Franz Ferdinand’s preference was for maintaining the German alliance and getting a closer understanding with Russia, the other great conservative monarchy. He would have happily ended
the alliance with Italy, which he hated for any number of reasons from its treatment of the Pope to its absorption of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies which had been ruled by his grandfather.
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Although he was said to be a warmonger, he was in fact more cautious than he frequently sounded because he knew that Austria-Hungary was too weak and divided to risk an aggressive foreign policy. As he said presciently to the Foreign Minister in 1913 during the last Balkan crisis before the Great War: