Austria

Besides the Hungarians and the Italians, the Slavic peoples of the monarchy also responded to the revolutionary surge, although with less violence than the other two. In June 1848 a Pan-Slav congress met in Prague to hammer out a set of principles that all Slavic peoples could endorse (see Pan-Slavism). The organizer of the conference was the great Czech historian František Palacký (most of the delegates were Czech), who not only had called for the cooperation of the Habsburg Slavs but also had endorsed the Habsburg monarchy as the most reasonable political formation to protect the peoples of central Europe. Upon being asked by the Germans to declare himself favourably disposed to their desire for national unity, he responded that he could not do so because it would weaken the Habsburg state. And in that reply he wrote his famous words: “Truly, if it were not that Austria had long existed, it would be necessary, in the interest of Europe, in the interest of humanity itself, to create it.”

Unfortunately, the Pan-Slav congress met in a highly charged atmosphere, as young inhabitants of Prague likewise had been influenced by revolutions elsewhere and had taken to the streets. In the commotion, a stray bullet killed the wife of Field Marshal Alfred, Fürst (prince) zu Windischgrätz, the commander of the forces in Prague. Enraged, Windischgrätz seized the city, dispersed the congress, and established martial law throughout the province of Bohemia.

The Germans themselves also experienced a certain degree of national fervour, but in their case it was part of a general German yearning for national unification. Responding to calls for a meeting of national unity, in May 1848 delegates from all the German states met at Frankfurt to discuss a constitution for a united Germany. Made up primarily of the commercial and professional classes, this body was indeed distinguished and was looked upon by the German princes as an important gathering. To prove its respect for tradition, the Frankfurt parliament selected the emperor’s uncle, Archduke Johann, as head of a provisional executive power and in September selected another Austrian, Anton, Ritter (knight) von Schmerling, as prime minister.

Despite this deference to Austria’s prominent men, a major question the parliament addressed was whether to include Austria in the new Germany. Those who favoured doing so argued that a new Germany could accept the German-speaking provinces of the monarchy but not the non-German lands (the Grossdeutsch, or large German, position). Those against contended that the Austrian monarchy could never divide itself along ethnic lines and so favoured the exclusion of Austria altogether (the Kleindeutsch, or small German, position). Implicit in the latter position was that the new Germany would be greatly influenced if not dominated by Prussia, by far the most important German state next to Austria. In October 1848 the delegates agreed to invite the Austrian German lands to become part of the new Germany, but only if they were disconnected from non-German territory. This so-called compromise was really a victory for the Kleindeutsch supporters, who knew that the Austrian government would reject the invitation because it would never willfully break the monarchy apart.

In the end neither position prevailed, because the Frankfurt parliament was unable to unify Germany. All the German states finally rejected its proposals, and in April 1849 it dissolved. Nonetheless, it had created the impression that, when the new Germany did emerge, it would do so under the aegis of Prussia and with the exclusion of Austria. Neoabsolutist era, 1849–60

All things considered, the revolution across the empire had not accomplished much. Absolutism seemed firmly entrenched, and the political clock seemed to have been set back to the 18th century. And yet a regime so badly shaken as Austria’s could not hope to rule unchallenged in the future. The unresolved social, constitutional, and national issues became more intense, and new changes were soon in the offing.

The period 1849–60 is called the Neoabsolutist era because it was the last effort by an Austrian emperor to provide good government by relying solely on bureaucratic effectiveness. In doing so, it was the legitimate descendant of the governments of Joseph II and Metternich. The emperor in this case was Francis Joseph, who in December 1848 had succeeded at the age of 18 to the throne in a deal engineered by Schwarzenberg" class="md-crosslink">Felix, Fürst (prince) zu Schwarzenberg, an able and iron-willed opponent of the 1848 revolutionaries and a proponent of strong central government. Francis Joseph had not been the heir, but Schwarzenberg contended that too many promises to revolutionaries had been made in the name of Ferdinand and the true heir, Francis Joseph’s father, Francis Charles, and so only his son could rule without making compromises. Francis Joseph thus became emperor and ruled for the next 68 years, dying in the midst of World War I at the age of 86.

Franz JosephFranz Joseph, 1908.Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum; photograph, J.R. Freeman & Co. Ltd.

Under Francis Joseph and Schwarzenberg, order was restored. Schwarzenberg died in 1852, and the new regime passed largely to the direction of Alexander, Freiherr (baron) von Bach, minister of the interior and a competent bureaucrat. Despite its reputation as a repressive instrument, Bach’s government was not without positive accomplishments. It established a unified customs territory for the whole monarchy (including Hungary), composed a code for trades and crafts, completed the task of serf emancipation, and introduced improvements in universities and secondary schools. In this period, economic growth continued its slow but steady pace, which had characterized the monarchy before 1848 and would continue to do so after 1860.

The regime’s policies on other matters were more typically reactionary. Freedom of the press as well as jury and public trials were abandoned, corporal punishment by police orders restored, and internal surveillance increased. The observation of the liberal reformer Adolf Fischhof that the regime rested on the support of a standing army of soldiers, a kneeling army of worshippers, and a crawling army of informants was exaggerated but not entirely unfounded. One of the more backward developments was the concordat reached with the papacy that gave the church jurisdiction in marriage questions, partial control of censorship, and oversight of elementary and secondary education. Priests entrusted with religious education in the schools had the authority to see to it that instruction in any field, be it history or physics, did not conflict with the church’s teachings.

The neoabsolutist regime came to an end because of its foreign policy. In the mid-1850s the matter that dominated the foreign offices of the European states was the Crimean War, a struggle that pitted an alliance system of Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Sardinia against Russia. Since the mid-18th century, Austrian statesmen had generally agreed that it was better to have as the monarchy’s southeastern neighbour a weak Ottoman Empire than any strong power—especially Russia. So, in this war the monarchy declared its neutrality but also insisted that Russia not advance into the Ottoman provinces of Moldavia and Walachia, which lay to the east of the Austrian Empire. This policy had two deleterious results: it alienated Russia, which had helped the monarchy put down the Hungarian revolution, and it did not befriend France, which would in 1859 support Sardinia in its war of Italian unification against the Austrians.

It was the Austro-Italian war of 1859 that humiliated Austria and ended Bach’s system. First securing support from Napoleon III of France, Sardinia provoked a woefully unprepared Austria into war and then invited France to come to the Italian kingdom’s assistance. The Austrians suffered two major defeats at Magenta and Solferino and concluded peace. The monarchy gave up Lombardy and kept Venetia, but, more important, it lost its influence in Italy. The Habsburgs had no say in the events of 1860 and 1861 that led to the proclamation of a unified Italy under the rule of the kings of Sardinia. (See also Risorgimento.) Constitutional experimentation, 1860–67

Internally, the defeats in Italy convinced Francis Joseph that neoabsolutism had failed. Clamour for economic, political, and even military rejuvenation became irresistible. In March 1860 Francis Joseph ordered that the Reichsrat, an empirewide, purely advisory council of state, be enlarged by the addition of 38 members proposed by the provincial diets and selected by the crown. Its main task was to advise the emperor on the composition of a new constitution. The body divided into two groups rather quickly. One, made up mostly of German-speaking delegates, wished to create a strong central parliament and to continue to restrict the power of the provincial governments. The other, made up of conservative federalists who were largely Hungarian, Czech, and Polish nobles, wished to weaken the central government and give considerable power to the provinces. The emperor sided with the federalists, who persuaded him to accept their position mainly with historical and not ethnic arguments, and he proclaimed by decree a constitution called the October Diploma (1860). The constitution established a central parliament of 100 members and gave it advisory authority in matters of finance, commerce, and industry. Authority in other internal matters was assigned to the provinces. Foreign policy and military issues remained the domain of the emperor.

No one was happy with the October Diploma. The German centralists opposed it for giving too much authority to the provinces, and the federalists, particularly the Hungarians, opposed it for not restoring fully the old rights and privileges of the crown lands. Faced with such opposition, Francis Joseph abandoned the Diploma and four months later issued the February Patent (1861), officially a revision of the Diploma. This document provided for a bicameral system: an empirewide house of representatives composed of delegates from the diets and a house of lords consisting partly of hereditary members and partly of men of special distinction appointed for life. Furthermore, a separate parliamentary body for the non-Hungarian lands was established.

The February Patent restored much authority to the central government and so made the centralists happier, but it only antagonized further the federalists, now led enthusiastically by the Hungarians. Resistance was so great that by 1865 the constitution was considered unworkable, and Francis Joseph began negotiations with the Hungarians to revise it. In the meantime, a form of government by bureaucracy ran the country.

These constitutional issues received a significant jolt by another failure of Habsburg foreign policy. After the disbandment of the Frankfurt National Assembly in 1849, the German Confederation founded in 1815 had resumed its work, but the question of German unification had not gone away. In 1862 this issue gained an unlikely champion in the appointment of Otto von Bismarck as prime minister of Prussia and later chancellor of the German Empire. Bismarck was a Prussian patriot and a loyal subject of his king. While definitely not a German nationalist, he was determined to extend Prussia’s power and authority into the German lands, and he knew that Prussia could expand its influence in Germany only at Austria’s expense. From 1862 to 1866 he conducted a remarkably deft foreign policy that succeeded in isolating Austria from possible allies in Europe.

By exploiting issues in the German Confederation, Bismarck was able in 1866 to force Austria into a position that could only be resolved by war. The conflict is known as the Seven Weeks’ War or the Austro-Prussian War. On July 3, 1866, the two armies clashed in this struggle’s only major Austro-Prussian battle, the Battle of Königgrätz, or Sadowa as it is known in Austrian histories. Although the battle was hard fought on both sides, the arrival of an extra Prussian force toward the end of the day decided it in favour of Prussia. Afterward, peace came quickly, because neither side wanted the war to continue. As Austria had been excluded from the future of Italy in 1859, so it was now excluded from the future of Germany. The German Confederation came to an end, and Prussia was allowed a free hand in reorganizing northern Germany as it wished (see North German Confederation). Moreover, Italy had joined Prussia against Austria and, although defeated on land and sea, received Venetia, Austria’s last possession in Italy, for its loyalty. Internally, the war meant that the government had to reach a constitutional arrangement for the remainder of its possessions. Karl A. Roider Reinhold F. Wagnleitner Austria-Hungary, 1867–1918 Ausgleich of 1867

The economic consequences of the defeat in the war of 1866 made it imperative that the constitutional reorganization of the Habsburg monarchy, under discussion since 1859, be brought to an early and successful conclusion. Personnel changes facilitated the solution of the Hungarian crisis. Friedrich Ferdinand, Freiherr (baron) von Beust (later Graf [count] von Beust), who had been prime minister of Saxony, took charge of Habsburg affairs, first as foreign minister (from October 1866) and then as chancellor (from February 1867). By abandoning the claim that Hungary be simply an Austrian province, he induced Emperor Franz Joseph to recognize the negotiations with the Hungarian politicians (Ferenc Deák and Gyula, Gróf [count] Andrássy) as a purely dynastic affair, excluding non-Hungarians from the discussion. On February 17, 1867, Franz Joseph restored the Hungarian constitution. A ministry responsible to the Hungarian Diet was formed under Andrássy, and in May 1867 the diet approved Law XII, legalizing what became known as the Ausgleich (“Compromise”). This was a compromise between the Hungarian nation and the dynasty, not between Hungary and the rest of the empire, and it is symptomatic of the Hungarian attitude that led Hungarians to refer to Franz Joseph and his successor as their king and never their emperor.

In addition to regulating the constitutional relations between the king and the Hungarian nation, Law XII accepted the unity of the Habsburg lands for purposes of conducting certain economic and foreign affairs in common. The compromise was thus the logical result of an attempt to blend traditional constitutional rights with the demands of modern administration. In December 1867 the section of the Reichsrat representing the non-Hungarian lands of the Habsburg empire (known as the engerer Reichsrat) approved the compromise. Though after 1867 the Habsburg monarchy was popularly referred to as the Dual Monarchy, the constitutional framework was actually tripartite, comprising the common agencies for economics and foreign affairs, the agencies of the kingdom of Hungary, and the agencies of the rest of the Habsburg lands—commonly but incorrectly called “Austria.” (The official title for these provinces remained “the kingdoms and lands represented in the Reichsrat” until 1915, when the term “Austria” was officially adopted for them.)

Under the Ausgleich, both parts of the Habsburg monarchy were constitutionally autonomous, each having its own government and a parliament composed of an appointed upper and an elected lower house. The “common monarchy” consisted of the emperor and his court, the minister for foreign affairs, and the minister of war. There was no common prime minister and no common cabinet. Common affairs were to be considered at the “delegations,” annual meetings of representatives from the two parliaments. For economic and financial cooperation, there was to be a customs union and a sharing of accounts, which was to be revised every 10 years. (This decennial discussion of financial quotas became one of the main sources of conflict between the Hungarian and Austrian governments.) There would be no common citizenship, but such matters as weights, measures, coinage, and postal service were to be uniform in both areas. There soon developed the so-called gemeinsamer Ministerrat, a kind of crown council in which the common ministers of foreign affairs and war and the prime ministers of both governments met under the presidency of the monarch. The common ministers were responsible to the crown only, but they reported annually to the delegations.

The Ausgleich for all practical purposes set up a personal union between the lands of the Hungarian crown and the western lands of the Habsburgs. The Hungarian success inspired similar movements for the restoration of states’ rights in Bohemia and Galicia. But the monarch, who only reluctantly had given in to Hungarian demands, was unwilling to discontinue the centralist policy in the rest of his empire. Public opinion and parliament in Austria were dominated by German bourgeois liberals who opposed the federalization of Austria. As a prize for their cooperation in compromising with the Hungarians, the German liberals were allowed to amend the 1861 constitution known as the February Patent; the Fundamental Laws, which were adopted in December 1867 and became known as the December constitution, lasted until 1918. These laws granted equality before the law and freedom of press, speech, and assembly; they also protected the interests of the various nationalities, stating that

all nationalities in the state enjoy equal rights, and each one has an inalienable right to the preservation and cultivation of its nationality and language. The equal rights of all languages in local use are guaranteed by the state in schools, administration, and public life.

The authority of parliament was also recognized. Such provisions, however, were more a promise than a reality. Although parliament, for instance, did theoretically have the power to deal with all varieties of matters, it was, in any case, not a fully representative parliament (suffrage was restricted, and it was tied to property provisions until 1907). In addition, the king was authorized to govern without parliament in the event that the assembly should prove unable to work. Austrian affairs from 1867 to 1918 were, in fact, determined more by bureaucratic measures than by political initiative; traditions dating from the reign of Joseph II, rather than capitalist interests, characterized the Austrian liberals. Domestic affairs, 1867–73

After the December constitution had been sanctioned, Franz Joseph appointed a new cabinet, which was named the “bourgeois ministry” by the press because most of its members came from the German middle class (though the prime minister belonged to the Austrian high aristocracy). In 1868 and 1869 that ministry was able to enact several liberal reforms, undoing parts of the concordat of 1855 between Austria and the papacy. Civil marriage was restored; compulsory secular education was established; and interconfessional relations were regulated, in spite of a strong protest from the Roman Catholic Church. In 1870 the Austrian government used the promulgation of the dogma of papal infallibility as pretext for the total abrogation of the concordat.

The progressive legislation of the bourgeois cabinet stood in sharp contrast to its inability to cope with the demands of the non-German nationalities. In 1868 the Czechs and the Poles issued declarations demanding a constitutional status analogous to that of the Hungarians. The government in Vienna did give the Poles in Galicia a considerable amount of self-government, which was later used to Polonize the Ruthenian minority. In 1871 a ministry for Galician affairs was set up, and the Poles remained the staunchest supporters of the Austrian government well into World War I.

The bourgeois ministry was split into a liberal-centralist and a conservative-federalist faction; its members could not reach an agreement on policies to be adopted. The liberal members of the cabinet opposed Czech demands; the conservatives were willing to consider them. Franz Joseph, indignant because of the anticlerical policy of the liberals, dismissed his prime minister, Karl, Fürst (prince) von Auersperg, in 1868 and replaced him with the conservative Eduard, Graf (count) von Taaffe, his boyhood friend. A period of indecision nevertheless persisted. The emperor wavered between the liberals, whose anticlericalism and parliamentarianism he disliked but with whom he sympathized in their centralist German-oriented policy, and the conservatives, whose political legislation he favoured but who aroused his fears by their demands for federalization. Neither Taaffe nor his successors Leopold Hasner, Ritter (knight) von Artha (1870), and Alfred, Graf Potocki (1870–71), could solve the Czech problem.

The Franco-German War of 1870–71 temporarily diverted public attention from the Czech demands. Opinion was divided strictly along lines of nationality: Austro-Germans celebrated the victories of the Prussian army, whereas the Slavs were decidedly pro-French. The Austrian government remained neutral because conflicting international interests had blocked Austro-French negotiations (which had culminated in a meeting of Franz Joseph and French emperor Napoleon III at Salzburg in 1867). The victory of Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck and the establishment of the German Empire under the leadership of the Prussian king gave finality to the results of the 1866 Austro-Prussian War. Austria was definitely excluded from the German scene, and a reorientation of dynastic interests seemed a logical consequence. Franz Joseph decided to explore the possibility of satisfying the Czechs with some measure of federalism. On February 5, 1871, he appointed as prime minister Karl Siegmund, Graf von Hohenwart, a staunch clericalist. The driving mind in Hohenwart’s cabinet was the minister of commerce, Albert Schäffle, an economist whose socialism may not have appealed to the emperor but whose federalism did.

As a first step toward conciliation with the Czechs, the cabinet dissolved parliament and the provincial diets. When the Bohemian elections improved the federalist position, Hohenwart proceeded to deal directly with the Czechs, copying in certain measure the method used to conclude the compromise with Hungary. Secret talks with the Czech leaders František Ladislav Rieger and František Palacký led Franz Joseph to issue an imperial rescript on September 12, 1871, promising the Czechs recognition of their ancient rights and showing his willingness to take the coronation oath. The Czechs answered this rescript on October 10, 1871, by submitting a constitutional program of 18 articles, called the Fundamental Articles. According to that program, Bohemian affairs should be regulated along the principles of the Hungarian compromise, raising Bohemia to a status equal to Hungary. With that, Hohenwart, who had been up against violent German opposition from the first day of his appointment, aroused Hungarian resistance too. Andrássy, fearing that the Czech program could incite minority groups in Hungary, convinced Franz Joseph that the stability of the Habsburg monarchy was endangered by the Czech program. On October 27, 1871, Hohenwart was dismissed, and Franz Joseph returned the government to the hands of the German liberals.

The new Austrian prime minister, Adolf, Fürst von Auersperg, entrusted the key ministries of his cabinet to university professors and lawyers. The “ministry of doctors,” as it was nicknamed, concentrated on legal and administrative reform and tried to strengthen German control in parliament. After the dismissal of Hohenwart, the Czechs turned to passive resistance, withdrawing from the Bohemian diet and again abstaining from attendance at the parliament in Vienna. This gave the government the chance to weaken the federalist position by introducing a bill for electoral reform. Instead of the existing modus, whereby the diets selected the deputies that were sent to parliament, the new bill set up electoral districts, each of which was to elect one deputy directly to the Reichsrat. The new system, however, preserved the old division of the electorate into curiae (socioeconomic classes), making parliament in this way a representation of German bourgeois interests.

The political victory of German capitalism took place at the very moment of a severe economic crisis. The opening of the Vienna International Exhibition of 1873 was seen as a manifestation of the material progress and economic achievements of the Habsburg monarchy. The so-called Gründerjahre, or years of expansive commercial enterprise during the late 1860s and early 1870s, however, were characterized not only by railroad and industrial expansion and the growth of the capital cities of Vienna and Budapest but also by reckless speculation. Warning signs of an imminent crisis were disregarded, and in May 1873, soon after the opening of the exhibition, the stock market collapsed.

The ensuing depression forced the government to abandon some liberal bourgeois principles. The state took over the railroads and instituted public-works projects in an attempt to alleviate popular distress. The government survived the crisis, however, and German liberal political rule continued for five more years. German liberalism would pass into eclipse not because of economic or domestic crisis but as a consequence of its opposition to foreign expansion.

A far-reaching consequence of the stock market crash of 1873 was the permeation of anti-Semitism into Austrian politics. Jews were accused of being responsible for the speculative stock market activities, even though official investigations proved that many elements of the population, including some ministers and aristocrats, had participated in the Gründungsfieber, or “speculative fever,” and the attendant scandals. International relations: the Balkan orientation

After his appointment as foreign minister on November 14, 1871, Andrássy conducted the foreign affairs of Austria-Hungary with the intention of preserving the status quo. Discarding the anti-Bismarck bias of his predecessor, Beust, he sought the friendship of the German Empire in order to strengthen his position in a possible confrontation with Russia over problems in the Balkans. The Dreikaiserbund (Three Emperors’ League) of 1873, by which Franz Joseph and the German and Russian emperors agreed to work together for peace, gave expression to that policy and made a change of the status quo in the Balkans dependent on German consent.

The continuing decline of Ottoman power encouraged the Balkan nations in their opposition to Turkish rule, and in 1875 there were revolts and upheavals. Andrássy failed to induce the Ottoman government to adopt a reform program, and by 1876 Russian intervention seemed imminent. Russia offered to join with Austria-Hungary in partitioning the Balkans between them, but Andrássy believed that Austria-Hungary was a “saturated state” unable to cope with more nationalities and lands, and for a time he resisted the offer. He was aware, however, that Russia could not be restrained altogether; thus, through Bismarck’s mediation, there were concluded two secret agreements, at Reichstadt (now Zákupy, Czech Republic) in July 1876 and at Budapest in January 1877, whereby Russia gave up its plans for a “great partition” and settled for the territory of Bessarabia and, in return, acquiesced in Austria-Hungary’s acquiring Bosnia and Herzegovina. Austria-Hungary and Russia agreed to refrain from intervention for the time being, and it was only when great-power mediation proved unable to settle the conflict between Serbia and the Ottoman Empire that Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire in April 1877, after having again secured Austro-Hungarian neutrality (see Russo-Turkish wars).

In February 1878, with the war won, the Russians did not content themselves with Bessarabia and, in the Treaty of San Stefano, violated Austria-Hungary’s Balkan interests by creating a large independent Bulgaria. Having Great Britain as an ally in his opposition to the Russian advance in southeastern Europe and Bismarck as an “honest broker,” Andrássy managed at the Congress of Berlin in July 1878 to force Russia to retreat from its excessive demands. Bulgaria was broken up again, Serbian independence was guaranteed, Russia retained Bessarabia, and Austria-Hungary was allowed to occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina. Military occupation of those two provinces turned out to be more than the expected mere formality. It took 150,000 Habsburg troops and several weeks of fighting before the lands were under Habsburg authority. Since no agreement could be reached on whether the newly acquired lands should aggrandize the Hungarian or the Austrian part of the monarchy, they were placed under the jurisdiction of the common Habsburg ministry of finance. Domestic affairs, 1879–1908 Political realignment

The German liberals had opposed the Balkan policy of Andrássy, and, out of fear that the Slav element in the monarchy would be strengthened by the addition of a new Slav population, they voted against the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina—in this way withdrawing support from the government. When Prime Minister Auersperg resigned, the era of German liberal predominance came to an end. In 1879, the same year in which the so-called Dual Alliance with the German Empire bound the Habsburg monarchy to Germany’s foreign policy, the reappointment of Taaffe as Austrian prime minister signified a reorientation in domestic affairs. From 1879 onward, the German element in the Habsburg monarchy was on the defensive, fighting stubborn and senseless rearguard actions against the Slav drive for political and national equality.

Taaffe first tried to form a cabinet above parties. It was to include even the liberal Karl, Lord von Stremayr, who had presided over a caretaker government after Auersperg’s resignation. The situation decisively changed when Taaffe persuaded the Czechs in 1879 to give up their parliamentary boycott and participate in the government. Taaffe then governed with the support of a conservative coalition, including Slavs, German aristocrats, and clericals, which gave itself the name of the Iron Ring. In April 1880, language ordinances were issued that made Czech and German equal languages in the “outer [public] services” in Bohemia and Moravia. In 1882 the University of Prague was divided, giving the Czechs a national university. In the same year, an electoral reform reduced the tax requirement for the right to vote from 10 to 5 florins, thus enfranchising the more prosperous Czech peasants and weakening the hold of the German middle class.

Despite the conservative character of the government, political life in the Habsburg monarchy underwent a decisive change during the Taaffe period. The traditional party lineup decomposed, and new alignments and parties formed that were essentially radical and aggressive. From 1890 well into the 1920s, political life in Austria was dominated by three movements that originated in the 1880s: Pan-Germanism, Christian Socialism, and Democratic Socialism.

In German Austria, especially in Vienna, moderate liberals were increasingly challenged by extremist groups—notably German nationalists. In 1882 their “Linz program” proposed the restoration of German dominance in Austrian affairs by detaching Galicia, Bukovina, and Dalmatia from the monarchy, by reducing relations with Hungary to a purely personal union under the monarch, and by establishing a customs union and other close ties with the German Empire. This Pan-Germanic program found its chief protagonist in Georg, Ritter (knight) von Schönerer, a deputy to the Reichsrat, who also introduced a note of anti-Semitism into German nationalism. Although his version of extreme chauvinism and racialism never attracted more than a small number of followers, in a modified and moderate way Pan-Germanism and anti-Semitism became the ideological support of the bureaucracy and officer corps; though these elements did not favour union with Germany, they did feel that the Habsburg monarchy had the task of bringing German culture to the “inferior” non-German nationalities.

While Schönerer and Pan-Germanism appealed to the educated classes, Karl Lueger transformed the Socialism" class="md-crosslink">Christian Socialism of Karl, Freiherr (baron) von Voegelsang, into a political organization that appealed to small shopkeepers, artisans, tradesmen, and lower bourgeois circles of Vienna and the surrounding countryside. The workers’ movement, formerly a concern of welfare and adult-education societies, also transformed itself into a political party. Although workers’ movements had been weakened in Austria by personal rivalries and government persecution, in 1889 at a conference in Hainfeld, Victor Adler managed to unite the competing Marxist groups into the Social Democratic Party (see Marxism).

Taaffe continued to seek compromises between nationalities that were becoming increasingly radical in their demands. The Slav orientation of the Taaffe cabinet did not satisfy the Czechs, for example, but rather encouraged a mood of belligerence; because the moderate Old Czechs failed to live up to radical demands, the nationalistic Young Czechs were able to gain support from the electorate. In 1890 Taaffe tried to negotiate an agreement between the Old Czechs and the German liberals, whereby Bohemia would be divided for administrative and judicial purposes along lines of nationality, but he was balked by the more chauvinistic Young Czechs and German nationalists, and his efforts led to riots in Prague in 1893.

When Emil Steinbach joined Taaffe’s cabinet as minister of finance in 1891, he encouraged Taaffe and the emperor to try electoral reform as an instrument of breaking nationalist opposition. It was hoped that, by extending the franchise, nationalistic antagonism could be allayed and the growing unrest among urban workers could be placated. On October 10, 1893, the government introduced a suffrage bill that would have given the vote to virtually every literate adult male (while preserving the traditional system of voting in curiae). Conservative groups of all nationalities joined forces against this bill, and, under pressure from the Hungarian government, Taaffe had to resign on November 11, 1893.

Though failing in political matters, the cabinet had introduced some economic reforms. Between 1888 and 1892 a system of cooperative banks for farmers was organized, the taxation system was revised, Austrian currency was stabilized by a return to the gold standard, and the florin was replaced by the crown, which remained the Austrian currency until 1924. The Taaffe government is also remembered for social-reform legislation; the laws of 1884 fixed the maximum working day at 11 hours, outlawed the employment of children under 12, required a Sunday rest day for workers, and set up compulsory insurance against accidents and sickness. Political turmoil

The franchise question continued to dominate Austrian domestic affairs and became closely welded to the nationality conflicts. The next Austrian prime minister, Alfred, Fürst (prince) zu Windischgrätz (grandson of the Windischgrätz who seized Prague in 1848), sought to win the support of parliament by forming a cabinet in which the clerical conservatives, the Poles, and the German liberals were represented. They were united, however, only in opposition to universal suffrage. Each minister defended his national cause, and the ministry was torn by ceaseless conflict. The end came in June 1895, when the government fulfilled an old promise and introduced Slovene classes into the grammar school at Cilli (now Celje, Slovenia) in Steiermark. Because the school had been exclusively German, this was regarded as a grave blow to the German cause, and the German liberals resigned, forcing Windischgrätz himself to resign.

Embittered by the conduct of the German liberals, Franz Joseph on October 2 entrusted the task of solving Austria’s problems to a Polish aristocrat, Kasimir Felix, Graf (count) von Badeni, known as a “strong man” for the high-handed way in which he had acted as governor of Galicia. Little noticed at the time, the appointment of Badeni as Austrian prime minister symbolized the breakdown of German control over the Habsburg monarchy. For the first time in Habsburg history, Germans controlled none of the key positions of government. Not only the prime minister but also the finance minister (Leo, Ritter [knight] von Biliński) and the foreign minister (Agenor, Graf Gołuchowski, who had succeeded Gusztáv Siegmund, Graf Kálnoky von Köröspatak, in May 1895) came from the Polish part of the empire.

Badeni managed to induce parliament to accept a compromise franchise bill that introduced qualified universal male suffrage but preserved the system of class voting (a fifth curia was even added). The shortcomings of the new system enraged the parties representing the masses of the population. By 1897, however, elections held on the basis of the new suffrage had strengthened the radical elements in the Reichsrat; the Young Czechs, for instance, had completely overwhelmed the conservative Old Czechs.

In the 1870s and ’80s, decisive economic changes with far-reaching social consequences had occurred in the Habsburg lands. Though remaining primarily agrarian, they had undergone an industrialization that had resulted in an unprecedented growth of urban centres. Vienna, which had about 430,000 inhabitants in 1851, had become a metropolis of 1,800,000 by the turn of the 20th century, and that phenomenon was paralleled in other areas, especially in Bohemia, which had become the industrial centre of the western part of the Habsburg lands. Those socioeconomic developments naturally began to affect politics. From 1890 on, the advance of the Social Democrats and the Christian Socialists caused considerable tension in Vienna. In October 1894 the Social Democrats held their first impressive orderly mass demonstration in the capital, and the communal elections of 1895 made the Christian Socialists the strongest party in Vienna, ending the long liberal rule. When the emperor refused to confirm Karl Lueger, the popular leader of the Christian Socialists, as mayor of Vienna, there were demonstrations and protests. Not until Lueger was elected mayor for the fifth time did Franz Joseph agree to confirm him, in April 1897.

Counting on support from the Slav and conservative parties in parliament, Badeni dared to take up the Bohemian-language question again. In April 1897 he issued a famous language ordinance that introduced Czech as a language equal to German even in the “inner service”—i.e., for communications within government departments. This decision meant that civil servants in Bohemia and Moravia would have to be able to speak and write Czech as well as German. Since many Germans refused to learn Czech, the ordinance put them at a definite disadvantage in Bohemia’s administration. The publication of the ordinance provoked violent German reactions: university professors signed resolutions of protest, mass meetings incited the public, and German deputies in the Reichsrat began to obstruct all legislative activities. The protest reached its climax in November 1897, when parliamentary sessions turned into bedlam, and popular protests against Badeni led to street demonstrations. The mass protest was not restricted to Vienna. It was even worse in some German towns in Bohemia; in Graz, clashes between soldiers and the masses ended in the death of one demonstrator.

To pacify the public, Franz Joseph gave in; on November 28, 1897, he dismissed Badeni and asked Paul, Freiherr (baron) Gautsch von Frankenthurn, a former minister of education, to form a government out of the German parties of parliament. Gautsch’s attempts to appease the Germans ran into obstruction from the Czechs. The scene of violence shifted from Vienna to Prague and from the Reichsrat to the Bohemian diet. In March 1898 Gautsch was replaced by the former governor of Bohemia, Franz Anton, Fürst zu Thun und Hohenstein, who failed within a year. Of his successors neither Manfred, Graf Clary und Aldringen, who formally revoked the Badeni language ordinance, nor Heinrich Wittek, who headed a short-lived cabinet of a few weeks, managed to solve the nationality problem.

On January 18, 1900, Franz Joseph asked Ernest von Koerber, a former minister of the interior, to form a new cabinet. Koerber was the only commoner to be appointed prime minister by Franz Joseph. As a leading bureaucrat, he formed his ministry from the ranks of other bureaucrats, concentrating in subsequent years on the administration of public affairs and economic programs rather than trying to deal with political problems. First by imperial decree and then, after some political bargaining, by consent of parliament, Koerber carried through a program of economic expansion, social legislation, and administrative reform; among his reforms was the liberation of the press from government and police control. By devious politicking, he managed to keep government activities free from national strife, but he could not prevent national emotions from becoming more and more extremist. The national conflict came to be fought over educational matters, and in the final years of Koerber’s government the desire for national universities aroused the sentiments of Italians, Slovenes, and Ruthenians—turning the traditional Czech-German conflict into a multinational one. In December 1904 Koerber’s various maneuverings faltered, and he was driven from office by a combination of parties.

The political climate in Austria was further complicated by the worsening of relations between the emperor and the Hungarian government. Hungarian separatists had agitated for the separation of the Habsburg army, and when Franz Joseph used an address to the troops at Chłopy (now in Poland) in 1903 for an unequivocal reaffirmation of the common and unified character of his army, a controversy developed that had repercussions in the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy. The plan to use universal suffrage—for which popular demand had strongly increased since the Russian Revolution of 1905—to break the opposition in Hungary actually furthered the cause of political democracy in Austria. Electoral reform

Gautsch, who had been reappointed as prime minister, oversaw a bill that would instate universal franchise in Austria. This first bill, introduced to parliament in February 1906, ran into the opposition of the middle-class and conservative parties that still controlled parliament. Nevertheless, imperial interest and popular pressure—the Social Democrats had organized mass rallies to support the bill—combined to overcome parliamentary opposition. After Gautsch resigned in March 1906 and his successor, Conrad, Fürst (prince) von Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, failed to master the situation, Max Wladimir, Freiherr (baron) von Beck (Austrian prime minister from June 1906), managed to carry the bill through parliament. In January 1907 Franz Joseph sanctioned the law, which gave the vote to every male over age 23 and abolished the curiae.

The returns of the election of 1907 made the Germans inescapably a minority in parliament, with 233 members, though they certainly remained the strongest national group. (The Czechs could count on 107 seats, the Poles 82, the Ruthenians 33, the Slovenes 24, the Italians 19, the Serbs and Croats 13, and the Romanians 5.) Universal suffrage also brought the expected decline of the chauvinistic parties. The Young Czechs and the Pan-Germans were reduced to small factions without parliamentary influence, while the Christian Socialists and the Social Democrats returned as the two strongest parties out of more than 30 represented in parliament; the socialist delegation in the Austrian parliament was, in fact, larger than in any other country. The Austrian constitution, however, did not force the emperor to form his government according to the composition of the parliament. Neither the Social Democrats nor the Christian Socialists acquired any significant influence on the shaping of Austrian government affairs.

Beck remained in office and satisfied the Christian Socialists with some concessions but for the most part based his policy on the support of the conservative parties. In 1905 the diet of Moravia had succeeded in finding a compromise between German and Czech national demands, and it was hoped that a similar compromise could be achieved for Bohemia. But, within a short time, national conflicts got the upper hand again, and parliamentary debate and public opinion were once more excited by national strife. In 1908, however, international complications diverted attention from domestic affairs. Foreign policy, 1878–1908

The occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878 had reasserted Habsburg interests in Balkan affairs. Facing the possibility of conflict with Russia in this area, Austria-Hungary had looked for an ally, with the result that in 1879 Austria-Hungary and the German Empire had joined in the Dual Alliance, by which the two sovereigns promised each other support in the case of Russian aggression. The signing of the Dual Alliance was Andrássy’s last act as foreign minister, but the alliance survived as the main element in the international position of the Habsburg monarchy until the last day of the empire. Under Andrássy’s successors, Habsburg foreign policy continued its conservative course.

In 1881 an alliance with Serbia, which after the Congress of Berlin (1878) had turned to Austria-Hungary for protection, made this Balkan state a satellite of the Habsburg monarchy. The Three Emperors’ League (comprising Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary) of the same year brought Russian recognition of Habsburg predominance in the western part of the Balkan Peninsula. The signatories of this alliance promised to consult one another on any changes in the status quo in the Ottoman Empire, and, while Russia was given assurances that its position regarding Bulgaria and the Straits (the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosporus) would be recognized, Austria-Hungary received from Russia the promise that there would be no objection to a possible annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the future.

The Three Emperors’ League was an important element in the structure of alliances that German chancellor Bismarck set up to stabilize Europe. Having decided to rely on Austria-Hungary as the fundamental partner in international affairs, Bismarck had to try to neutralize all the areas in which the Habsburg monarchy might be drawn into a conflict. It was essential to avoid being involved in a controversy at an inopportune moment and in a region of little interest to Germany. Bismarck therefore attempted to lessen the possibility of a conflict between Austria-Hungary and Russia by making them partners in the Three Emperors’ League. And when, in 1882, Italy approached Germany to find a partner in its anti-French policy, Bismarck used the opportunity to neutralize another European trouble spot. He told the Italian foreign minister that the road to Berlin led through Vienna, with the result that the Triple Alliance (comprising Italy, Germany, and Austria-Hungary) was signed in May 1882. It was primarily a defensive treaty against a French attack on Italy or Germany. It further stated that, in the event of any signatory coming to war with another power, the partners of the alliance would remain neutral. The treaty did not settle the problems still existing between the Habsburg monarchy and the Italian kingdom, but for Bismarck it sufficed that they were neutralized.

In 1883 Bismarck acted again to reduce the danger of war in “Europe’s backyard” by arranging a defensive agreement between Austria-Hungary and Romania. The Triple Alliance and the Romanian Alliance not only strengthened the international status quo but also gave security to the internal order of the Habsburg monarchy by weakening the irredentist movements in Transylvania and the Italian parts of Austria-Hungary. (See also Irredentist.)

The deterioration of German-French relations in the following years convinced Bismarck of the indispensability of the Triple Alliance, and he made every effort to force Vienna to renew the alliance in 1887. By threatening to withdraw protection against Russian aggression, Bismarck forced the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister Kálnoky to consent to his demands, but there can be no doubt that Austria-Hungary was impeded in its national interests by having to adapt its foreign policy to the German and Italian demand for the isolation of France. Although Kálnoky succeeded during the negotiations in avoiding any new obligation in western Europe, he was less successful in defending more-immediate Austrian interests. He managed to evade the Italian request for the support of an active Italian colonial policy, but he was unable to keep Italy out of involvement in Balkan affairs. It might be that, in view of his own conservative and defensive policy, he saw an advantage in having Italy as a third partner in the maintenance of the status quo against possible Russian expansion. At any rate, it was on Kálnoky’s initiative that the original Italian demand for a declaration in favour of the status quo along the Ottoman coasts and the Adriatic and Aegean seas was extended to the interior of the Balkan Peninsula. On top of this, Kálnoky granted the Italians the right to ask for compensation in case of any change in the territorial status quo without defining this term. In a certain way, all the differences and clashes between Austrian and Italian Balkan policy in the first decade of the 20th century can be traced to the introduction of this clause (later formulated in Article VII of the treaty) at the renewal of 1887.

In the same year, Bismarck built around the Triple Alliance a system of alliances and agreements that amounted to complete isolation of France and obliged the major European powers to guarantee the status quo along the borders of the Ottoman Empire. The First and Second Mediterranean Agreements of 1887 joined Great Britain to the powers (Austria-Hungary and Italy) interested in blocking Russia from the Straits and enabled Kálnoky to abandon direct agreements with Russia. The Three Emperors’ League of 1881 was allowed to expire, and Austria-Hungary was thus left without any formal understanding with Russia. Gołuchowski, who followed Kálnoky as foreign minister in 1895, decided that direct relations with Russia should be renewed. In April 1897 Franz Joseph and Gołuchowski visited St. Petersburg. The agreements signed as a result of that initiative aimed to exclude Italy from Balkan affairs and sought to entrust preservation of the Balkan order to the bilateral cooperation of the two eastern monarchies rather than to a multilateral alliance system. Thus, the final years of the 19th century were marked by a change from static continental policy to a more dynamic world policy, and the ensuing mobility in international relations reduced the value of the Triple Alliance.

The Austro-Russian agreements of 1897 came to bear in 1903, when a major revolt occurred in Macedonia. After a meeting between Tsar Nicholas II and Franz Joseph in October 1903, their foreign ministers drafted a reform program for the Ottoman Empire. A mutual neutrality agreement was added in 1904, leaving Austria-Hungary a free hand in the event of a conflict with Italy and enabling Russia to turn and face Japan (see Russo-Japanese War).

Explicitly excluded from the agreement with Russia were Balkan conflicts. When King Alexander of Serbia was assassinated in a military revolt in 1903 and the Obrenović dynasty was replaced by the Karadjordjević, Serbian relations with the Habsburg monarchy deteriorated. The Serbs adopted an expansionist policy of unifying all South Slavs in the Serbian kingdom, and, in order to block a Serbian advance, the Habsburg monarchy applied economic pressure. In 1906 all livestock imports from Serbia into Austria-Hungary were prohibited. This conflict, the so-called Pig War, did not crush Serbia but rather pushed it into the Russian camp.

When, in 1906, Gołuchowski was replaced as foreign minister by the former ambassador to St. Petersburg, Alois, Graf (count) Lexa von Aehrenthal, a turning point in Austrian foreign policy was signaled. Aehrenthal made a belated effort to free Austria-Hungary from its submission to German interests and to engage in a dynamic Balkan policy. A first step was his proposal for the construction of a railroad through the Sandžak of Novi Pazar, a strip of land that separated Serbia from Montenegro. The combined Russian and Serbian opposition forced Aehrenthal to abandon the project temporarily and made it clear that any advance in the Balkans would probably result in war with Serbia and perhaps with Russia as well.

The danger of such a conflict arose within a short time. In July 1908, after a revolution in the Ottoman Empire, the Young Turk movement announced the reform of the Ottoman constitution. Afraid that this constitutional change could undermine the Habsburg position in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which nominally were still under Ottoman suzerainty, Aehrenthal decided to use the opportunity to fortify the Austro-Hungarian position in the Balkan Peninsula. In September 1908 he met with the Russian foreign minister, Aleksandr, Count Izvolsky, and secured, so he thought, Russian approval of the proposed annexation in return for Austria’s support in having the Straits opened to Russian warships. On October 6, 1908, the annexation was announced, immediately bringing a violent reaction from Serbia. When Izvolsky found that his plans for the Straits were opposed by Great Britain and France, he retracted his tentative support of Austria and supported the Serbian position. The situation became serious, and for a while war seemed imminent. Franz, Freiherr (baron; later Graf [count]) Conrad von Hötzendorf, the chief of the general staff of the Habsburg monarchy, who had long advocated preventive war, pushed for an aggressive move, but Aehrenthal had apparently never planned more than going to the brink of war. In March 1909 a German ultimatum forced the Russians to withdraw their support from Serbia, and, since the Turkish government had agreed to the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in return for a monetary compensation, Serbia also had to come to terms with the Habsburg monarchy. The Bosnian crisis was settled, but the Serbs felt their national pride deeply wounded and continued to stir unrest in the South Slav provinces of the Habsburg monarchy. Last years of peace Conflicts of nationality

The annexation crisis had repercussions among the other Slav nationalities in the monarchy. For several years Czechs had been attracted by the Pan-Slav movement, and in July 1908 a Pan-Slav congress was held in Prague (see Pan-Slavism). During the diplomatic crisis of the following winter, the Czechs unabashedly took the side of the Serbs, and, on the day of the 60th anniversary of Franz Joseph’s accession to the throne, martial law had to be declared in Prague. National strife broke out all over the monarchy, and parliamentary activities were all but blocked by filibustering and the riotous activities of the deputies. Austrian Prime Minister Beck had resigned in November 1908; his successor, Richard, Freiherr (baron) von Bienerth, after having accomplished little with a cabinet of civil servants, tried to appease the nationalities by including Landsmannminister (national representatives) in his cabinet (February 1909).

Obstruction in parliament continued. The Germans, in control of the government and the central administration, continued to assign to the monarchy the role of an outpost of German culture; the Slavs increasingly wanted to make Austria the home of Slav national aspirations. The Czech agrarian leader František Udržal stated in parliament: “We wish to save the Austrian parliament from utter ruin, but we wish to save it for the Slavs of Austria, who form two-thirds of the population.” A population census taken in 1910 more or less confirmed the Slav claim: out of the 28,324,940 inhabitants of the western half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, nearly 36 percent regarded themselves as Germans, whereas more than 60 percent regarded themselves as Slavs—nearly 18 percent as Poles, about 13 percent as Ruthenians, about 23 percent as Czechs or Slovaks, nearly 5 percent as Slovenes, and almost 3 percent as Serbs or Croats. (Less than 3 percent identified themselves as Italians.) Slav predominance was weakened by the attitude of the Poles, who remained loyal to the central government, allowing the national conflict to assume the character of a primarily Czech-German quarrel.

Even the Social Democratic Party could not overcome nationalist antagonism. In 1899, at the party congress at Brünn (now Brno, Czech Republic), the Social Democrats had presented a national reform program based on democratic federalism, which would have granted the right of national decisions to territorial units formed on a basis of nationality. Karl Renner and Otto Bauer, who later became leaders of German-Austrian socialism, drafted various programs for the solution of the nationality problem in books published between 1900 and 1910. But these efforts could not prevent the socialists from splitting along national lines too, and in 1910 the Czech socialists declared themselves independent of the Social Democratic Party. Party rivalries

Such national differences weakened the socialist position in the elections of 1911. More than 50 parties had competed in the campaign, and, since the German nationalist parties had allied in the Deutscher Nationalverband (German National League), they managed to return to parliament as the strongest single party, gaining 104 seats out of 516. The Christian Socialists, weakened by personal rivalry, suffered heavy losses, winning only 76 seats. The Social Democrats received 44 seats and the Czech Social Democrats 24. The Czech parties were badly divided, with those representing the Czech middle class gaining 64 seats. Prime Minister Bienerth found himself unable to form a workable ministry, and he was replaced by Gautsch, reappointed for the third and final time, who tried to reconcile the Germans and the Czechs.

For a while negotiations seemed quite successful, but extremist incidents deadlocked the talks, and the Gautsch cabinet was replaced by a new ministry headed by Karl, Graf (count) von Stürgkh, in November 1911. Unable to deal with the nationality problem in a parliamentarian fashion, Stürgkh repeatedly suspended the Reichsrat. It was characteristic of the general political climate in Europe that Stürgkh had to concentrate his legislative program on the improvement of Austrian armament, for international crises overshadowed the nationality conflict. Conflict with Serbia

Since the Bosnian crisis of 1908–09, Austrian diplomats had been convinced that war with Serbia was bound to come. Aehrenthal died in February 1912, at a moment when an Italian-Turkish conflict over Tripoli (now in Libya) had provoked anti-Turkish sentiment in the Balkan states (see Italo-Turkish War). Leopold, Graf (count) von Berchtold, who directed Austro-Hungarian foreign policy from 1912 on, did not have the qualities required in such a critical period. Aehrenthal had been able to silence the warmongering activities of Conrad, the Habsburg chief of staff who continued to advocate preventive war against Italy and Serbia, but Berchtold yielded to the aggressive policies of the military and the younger members of his ministry. During the Balkan Wars (1912–13), fought by the Balkan states over the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary twice tried to force Serbia to withdraw from positions gained by threatening it with an ultimatum. In February and October 1913, military action against Serbia was contemplated, but in both instances neither Italy nor Germany was willing to guarantee support. Austria-Hungary ultimately had to acquiesce in Serbia’s territorial gains. But by supporting Bulgaria’s claims against Serbia, Austria-Hungary also had alienated Romania, which had shown resentment against the Habsburg monarchy because of the treatment of non-Hungarian nationalities in Hungary. Romania thus joined Italy and Serbia in support of irredentist movements inside the Habsburg monarchy. By 1914, leading government circles in Vienna were convinced that offensive action against the foreign protagonists of irredentist claims was essential to the integrity of the empire.

In June 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir of Franz Joseph, participated in army maneuvers in the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, disregarding warnings that his visit would arouse considerable hostility. When Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated by the Bosnian Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip at Sarajevo (Bosnia-Herzegovina) on June 28, 1914, the Austro-Hungarian foreign office decided to use the opportunity for a final reckoning with the Serbian danger. The support of Germany was sought and received, and the Austro-Hungarian foreign office drafted an ultimatum putting the responsibility for the assassination on the Serbian government and demanding full satisfaction. The attitude of the foreign office was shared by Conrad and the Austrian prime minister, Stürgkh, but it was opposed by the Hungarian prime minister, István, Count Tisza, who wanted an assurance that a military move against Serbia would not result in territorial acquisitions and thus increase the Serb element in the monarchy. His demand satisfied, Tisza joined the advocates of war.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife SophieAustrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, riding in an open carriage at Sarajevo shortly before their assassination, June 28, 1914.World History Archive/ARPL/age fotostock

In ministerial meetings on July 15 and 19, a deliberately provocative ultimatum was drafted in words that supposedly excluded the possibility of acceptance by Serbia. The ultimatum was handed to the Serbian government on July 23. The Serbian answer, handed in on time on July 25, was declared insufficient, though Serbia had agreed to all Austro-Hungarian demands except for two that, in effect, entailed constitutional changes in the Serbian government. These demands were that certain unnamed Serbian officials be dismissed at the whim of Austria-Hungary and that Austro-Hungarian officials participate, on Serbian soil, in the suppression of organizations hostile to Austria-Hungary and in the judicial proceedings against their members. In its reply, the Serbian government pointed out that such demands were unprecedented in relations between sovereign states, but it nevertheless agreed to submit the matter to the international Permanent Court of Arbitration or to the arbitration of the Great Powers (comprising France, Germany, Great Britain, and Russia, in addition to Austria). On receiving this reply, the Austro-Hungarian ambassador left Belgrade (Serbia), severing diplomatic relations between the two countries.

Foreign Minister Berchtold and his government were clearly determined to make war on Serbia, regardless of the fact that such action might result in war between the Great Powers. While the European governments frantically tried to offer compromise solutions, Austria decided on a fait accompli. On July 28, 1914, Berchtold asked Franz Joseph to sign the declaration of war, informing him that

it cannot be excluded that the [Triple] Entente powers [Russia, France, and Great Britain] might make another move to bring about a peaceful settlement of the conflict unless a declaration of war establishes a fait accompli [eine klare Situation geschaffen].

In the meantime, the German government had taken control of the situation. Placing German strategic and national plans over Austro-Hungarian interests, Germany changed the Balkan conflict into a continental war by declaring war against Russia and France. (See World War I.) World War I

The German declaration of war subordinated the Austro-Serbian conflict to the German aim of settling its own rivalries with France and Russia. According to the terms of the military agreement between Germany and Austria-Hungary, the Austro-Hungarian army had to abandon plans to conquer Serbia and instead protect the German invasion of France against Russian intervention. The setbacks that the Austrian army suffered in 1914 and 1915 can be attributed to a large extent to the fact that Austria-Hungary became a military satellite of Germany from the first day of the war, though it cannot be denied that the Austrian high command proved to be quite incompetent. The Austro-Hungarian chief of staff, Conrad, had clamoured for preventive war since 1906, but, when he received his chance in July 1914, it turned out that the Austrian army had no plans for an expeditious offensive. Similarly, after Italy entered the war on the side of the Allied Powers in May 1915, Conrad was unprepared. The fact that only after the Germans had taken command could the Russian front be stabilized did little to enhance the prestige of the Austrian government.

Austria-Hungary, 1914Map showing the extent of Austria-Hungary, 1914.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

In July 1914 parliament was out of session, and the Austrian prime minister, Stürgkh, refused to convene it. That and the military censorship established immediately after the outbreak of the war concealed the discontent of the non-German population. While German public opinion in Austria had welcomed the war enthusiastically and some Polish leaders supported the war out of anti-Russian feeling, the Czech population openly showed its animosity. The Czech leader Tomáš Masaryk, who had been one of the most prominent spokesmen of the Czech cause, emigrated to western Europe in protest. Karel Kramář, who had supported the Pan-Slav idea, was tried for high treason and found guilty on the basis of shaky evidence. German nationalism was riding high, but in fact the German Austrians had little influence left. In military matters they were practically reduced to executing Germany’s orders; in economic affairs the Hungarians, who controlled the food supply, had the decisive influence. The Hungarian prime minister, Tisza, who had opposed the war in July 1914, became the strongman of the empire. On his advice Foreign Minister Berchtold was dismissed in January 1915, and the foreign office was again entrusted to a Hungarian, István, Count Burián. But Burián failed to keep Italy and Romania out of the war. German attempts to pacify the two states by concessions were unsuccessful because Franz Joseph was unwilling to cede any territory in response to the irredentist demands of the two nations. How little the outward calm in the Habsburg lands corresponded to the sentiment of the population became apparent when Stürgkh was assassinated in October 1916 by Friedrich Adler, the pacifist son of Victor Adler, the leader of Austrian socialism. Franz Joseph made Koerber prime minister once again, but Koerber had no chance to develop a program of his own.

On November 21, 1916, Franz Joseph died, leaving the throne and the shaky empire to his 29-year-old grandnephew, Charles (I), who had had little preparation for his task until he became heir apparent on the death of Franz Ferdinand. Full of the best intentions, Charles set out to save the monarchy by searching for peace in foreign affairs and by recognizing the rights of the empire’s non-German and non-Hungarian nationalities. Charles relied heavily on the advice of politicians who had had the confidence of Franz Ferdinand. He dismissed Koerber in December 1916 and made Heinrich, Graf (count) von Clam-Martinic, a Czech aristocrat, prime minister. At the foreign office he replaced Burián with Ottokar, Count Czernin.

CharlesCharles.George Grantham Bain Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. LC-DIG-ggbain-16767)

When parliament was reconvened in May 1917, it became manifest how far internal disintegration of the Habsburg monarchy had progressed. Parliament again became the stage of unrelenting national conflicts. Finding so little support from the Czech side, Charles turned back to the German element, and in June 1917 he made Ernst von Seidler, once his tutor in administrative and international law, prime minister. Although he tried to appease the Czechs, the stubborn insistence of the Germans not to yield any of their prerogatives made reform of the empire impossible.

At the same time, various moves to get Austria-Hungary out of the war ended in failure. After a U.S. offer of general mediation had miscarried in December 1916, Charles tried through secret channels to deal directly with the Triple Entente powers. In the spring of 1917 an exchange of peace feelers took place through the mediation of his brother-in-law, Sixtus, Fürst (prince) von Bourbon-Parma, but Italy’s unwillingness to abandon some of the concessions granted to it in the 1915 Treaty of London (by which Italy joined the Allies) made these talks abortive. Similarly, negotiations with Allied representatives carried on in Switzerland brought no results.

Since the Austro-Hungarian government was unable to extricate itself from the Dual Alliance, which tied Austria-Hungary to Germany, France and England ceased to have regard for the integrity of the Habsburg monarchy. Furthermore, the revolutionary events in Russia in 1917 and the entry of the United States into the war introduced a new, ideological element into Allied policy toward the German-led coalition known as the Central Powers. The German-directed governments represented an authoritarian system of government, and national agitation in the Habsburg lands assumed the character of a democratic liberation movement, winning the sympathies of western European and American public opinion. From early 1918 the Allied governments began to officially promote the activities of the émigrés from Austria, foremost among them the Czech leader Masaryk, and in April 1918 the Congress of Oppressed Nationalities was organized in Rome.

But the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy cannot be ascribed to the Allied policy of supporting the independence claims of the Habsburg nationalities, which was only a belated adjustment to the changed conditions within Austria-Hungary. From the summer of 1917, the activities of the nationalist movements within the empire made the situation increasingly untenable. Two days before U.S. Pres. Woodrow Wilson proclaimed his Fourteen Points—one of which demanded the reorganization of the Habsburg monarchy in accordance with the principles of national autonomy—the Czechs demanded outright independence (January 6, 1918). Within a month Polish and South Slav deputies, together with the Czechs, presented to the Reichsrat a program demanding the establishment of independent constituent assemblies for nationally homogeneous areas. End of the Habsburg empire

As World War I raged and the national independence movement reached its final stage, another destabilizing development manifested itself. From 1915 on, the supply situation had worsened increasingly, and by January 1918 there were dangerous shortages, especially of food. Prompted by the difficult food situation and inspired by the Bolshevik victory in Russia (see Russian Revolution of 1917), a strike movement developed in the Habsburg lands. Demands for more bread and a demand for peace were combined with nationalist claims resulting in open opposition to the government. The strikes among the civilian population were followed by mutinies in the army and navy. In January and February 1918 the army and the government succeeded in suppressing the social unrest and antiwar demonstrations. But, from the same date, the national opposition movement gathered momentum.

The hopes that the government soon placed on peace settlements with the eastern states were not fulfilled. The treaties of Brest-Litovsk with Ukraine (signed in February 1918) and with Soviet Russia (March 3, 1918) as well as the Treaty of Bucharest, which established peace with Romania (May 7, 1918), did not alleviate the supply situation and irritated the Poles because of certain provisions of the Ukrainian settlement.

In April 1918 Czernin was replaced as foreign minister by Burián. This change resulted from the conflict between Czernin and Charles over the desirability and possibility of Austria’s concluding a separate peace with the Allies. When Charles’s secret overtures to the Allies in 1917 were revealed by French premier Georges Clemenceau, the Germans were outraged, and Czernin was dismissed on their orders. Burián returned to the foreign office on April 16 and immediately reported to the German high command at Spa (Belgium), where he and Charles had to assure the German emperor, William II, of their unchanging loyalty. While this act of submission satisfied the German Austrians, it further incensed the Slav opposition.

In May 1918 a Slav national celebration in Prague demonstrated the strength of the independence movements. But Charles and the German elements in the central government were still not aware of the extent of the disintegration. In July 1918 Prime Minister Seidler resigned, and his successor, Max Hussarek, Freiherr (baron) von Heinlein, began a belated effort to reorganize the Habsburg monarchy. Hussarek’s efforts to federalize the empire in the moment of imminent military defeat unintentionally turned out to provide the basis for the formal liquidation of the Habsburg monarchy. On October 16, 1918, Charles issued a manifesto announcing the transformation of Austria into a federal union of four components: German, Czech, South Slav, and Ukrainian. The Poles were to be free to join a Polish state, and the port of Trieste was to be given a special status. The lands of the Hungarian crown were to be excepted from this program.

Within a few days, national councils were established in all the provinces of the empire, and for all practical purposes they acted as national governments. The Poles proclaimed the union of all Poles in a unified state and declared their independence at Warsaw on October 7, 1918; the South Slavs advocated union with Serbia; and on October 28, the Czechs proclaimed the establishment of an independent republic. The dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy was thus consummated by the end of October 1918—that is, before the war actually ended.

It was impossible for the country to survive another winter of hostilities, and on September 14, 1918, Burián published an appeal to all belligerents to discuss the possibilities of ending the war. When this move was opposed by the Germans as well as by the Allies, Burián tried for a separate peace settlement for Austria-Hungary. On October 14, 1918, he sent a note to President Wilson asking for an armistice on the basis of the Fourteen Points. On October 18 the U.S. secretary of state, Robert Lansing, replied that, in view of the political development of the preceding months and, especially, in view of the fact that the new country of Czechoslovakia had been recognized as being at war with the Central Powers, the U.S. government was unable to deal on the basis of the Fourteen Points anymore. On October 27 Gyula, Gróf (Count) Andrássy (the son of the former foreign minister Andrássy), who had replaced Burián three days before as foreign minister, sent a new note to Wilson; in asking for an armistice, he declared full adherence to the statements set forth in the U.S. note of October 18, thus explicitly recognizing the existence of an independent Czechoslovak state. From this moment, it remained only to liquidate the war.

On October 22 Heinrich Lammasch, a renowned authority in the field of international law and a respected pacifist, formed a new cabinet. He hoped to save the Habsburg monarchy by drawing up a federative structure. Instead, however, he found himself charged with the task of supervising the dissolution of the empire and bringing about an orderly transfer of power. The government could not influence events outside Vienna any longer, and from October 30 it was even challenged in the central agencies by the German-Austrian state council.

Hostilities were ended by an armistice signed on November 3, 1918. The Austro-Hungarian high command, which had blundered into the war unprepared in 1914, did little better at its conclusion. Owing to inaccuracies in the wording of the documents, more than 300,000 Austro-Hungarian soldiers were taken prisoner by the Italian army.

For some days, the government hoped that, in spite of the secession of the Slav areas, the Habsburg dynasty could survive in the remaining lands. But even the German Austrians had lost faith in the Habsburgs, and, with revolutionary agitation on the rise and republican passion widespread, Charles adhered to the advice of Lammasch and decided to waive his rights to exercise political authority. On November 11, 1918, he issued a proclamation acknowledging “in advance the decision to be taken by German Austria” and stating that he relinquished all part in the administration of the state. The declaration of November 11 marks the formal dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy. First Republic and the Anschluss Early postwar years

On October 21, 1918, the 210 German members of the Reichsrat of Austria formed themselves into the National Assembly for German-Austria, and on October 30 they proclaimed this an independent state under the direction of the State Council (Staatsrat), composed of the leaders of the three main parties (Social Democrats, Christian Socialists, and German Nationalists) and other elected members. Revolutionary disturbances in Vienna and, more important, the news of the declaration of a republic in Germany forced the State Council on the republican path (see The Weimar Republic, 1918–33). On November 12, the day after Charles’s abdication, the National Assembly resolved unanimously that “German-Austria is a democratic republic” and also that “German-Austria is a component part of the German republic.” Under the title of chancellor, the socialist Renner became head of a coalition government, with Bauer, the acknowledged spokesman of the left wing of the Social Democrats, as foreign secretary. On November 22 the territory of the republic was further defined: the National Assembly claimed for the new state all the Habsburg lands in which a majority of the population was German. It also claimed the German areas of Bohemia and Moravia.

From the first day, the republic was faced with the disastrous heritage of the war. Four years of war effort and the breakup of the Habsburg empire had brought economic exhaustion and chaos. The resulting social distress and poverty inspired revolutionary activities, making bolshevism appear the greatest danger to the new republic, especially after a Soviet republic was established in Hungary at the end of March 1919. The Austrian Social Democrats were determined to resist bolshevism with their own forces without making an alliance (as the German Social Democrats did) with the old order. The Volkswehr (People’s Guard) was organized and was twice effective (April 17 and June 15) against communist attempts at a putsch. Bauer and fellow socialist leader Friedrich Adler staked their popularity on defeating the communist agitation in the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, which had been set up on the Soviet model. By mid-1919, political and social order was restored on parliamentary lines, and the Communist Party relapsed into insignificance.

More dangerous was the tendency of the Länder (states) to break away from Vienna or to claim almost complete independence. Though the principal motive of this was reluctance to send food supplies to Vienna, it also represented a genuine social, political, and ideological conflict: the administration of the industrialized capital was socialist controlled, while the states, being predominantly agrarian, remained conservative and faithful to the Roman Catholic tradition. This difference was aggravated by the fact that the Habsburg monarchy had been the only bond between the German Austrian lands; with the abdication of the emperor, no symbol of loyalty common to all states remained. Vorarlberg voted for union with Switzerland in May 1919, and Tirol also attempted to secede.

In February 1919, elections for a constitutional assembly were held. The Social Democrats were returned as the largest single party, with 69 seats. The Christian Socialists won 63 and the German Nationalists 26. When this assembly met (March 4), it had to make wide concessions to federalism in order to appease the states. In exchange, Vienna was elevated to the rank of a state, and the mayor was made the equivalent of a state governor. This proviso subsequently enabled socialist-controlled Vienna to pursue an autonomous policy, even though the Bundesregierung (“federal government”) was controlled by the conservative parties from 1920 to 1934.

The constituent assembly also settled the constitution of the federal republic (October 1, 1920). The State Council was abolished, and a bicameral legislative assembly, the Bundesversammlung, was established. The Bundesrat (upper house) was to exercise only a suspensive veto and was to be elected roughly in proportion to the population in each state. This represented a defeat for the federal elements in the states, which had wanted the Bundesrat to exercise an absolute veto and to be composed of equal numbers of members from each state. The Nationalrat (lower house) was to be elected by universal suffrage on a basis of proportional representation. The Bundesversammlung in full session elected the president of the republic for a four-year term, but the federal government, with the chancellor at its head, was elected in the Nationalrat on a motion submitted by its principal committee; this committee was itself representative of the proportions of the parties in the house.

The foreign policy of Bauer and the representatives of the major political parties had insisted firmly on Anschluss (“union”) with Germany, and, as late as 1921, unauthorized plebiscites held in the western provinces returned overwhelming majorities in favour of the union. But Article 88 of the Treaty of Saint-Germain (1919), signed by Austria and the Allied Powers, forbade Anschluss without the consent of the League of Nations and stipulated that the republic should cease to call itself Deutschösterreich (German-Austria); it became the Republik Österreich (Republic of Austria). The Austrian claim for the German-speaking areas of Bohemia and Moravia was denied by the Saint-Germain peace conference, and Austria also had to recognize the frontiers of Czechoslovakia along slightly rectified historical administrative lines. On Austria’s southern frontier, the newly created Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes threatened armed invasion until it was decided that the border question should be settled by a plebiscite, which, on October 10, 1920, returned a majority of 59 percent in favour of Austria. The German-speaking districts of western Hungary were to be ceded to Austria outright, but Austria, in the face of Hungarian resistance, was obliged to hold a plebiscite. The area of Sopron was finally restored to Hungary.

After the elections of February 1919, Renner had formed another coalition government; however, following a government crisis in the summer of 1920, a caretaker cabinet under the Christian Socialist Michael Mayr was formed. This was the government that prepared the draft of the constitution and introduced it into parliament. After its approval, new elections were held on October 17, 1920. The Christian Socialists were returned as the strongest party, gaining 82 seats, while the Social Democrats were reduced to 66 and the German Nationalists to 20. Mayr formed a cabinet composed of Christian Socialists; the Social Democrats went into opposition and never returned to the government during the First Republic.

This political division hardened, and no decisive change took place during the following years. The system of proportional representation combined with the ideological background of Austrian parties made oscillations of political allegiance unlikely. Of the two mass parties, the Social Democrats had an unshakable majority in Vienna (in which about a third of the republic’s population lived), while the Christian Socialists had an equally secure majority among the Roman Catholic peasants and the conservative classes, the latter consisting largely of army officers, landowners, and big businesses. The urban middle classes, hostile to both workers and peasants, became German Nationalists. But German nationalism was not limited to the middle classes. Many workers and peasants felt themselves to be Germans and responded to the national appeal. Economic reconstruction and political strife

The main task of the nonsocialist governments in power from the autumn of 1920 was to restore financial and economic stability. Between 1919 and 1921 Austria’s urban population lived largely on relief from the United States and Great Britain, and, although production improved, distress was heightened by inflation that threatened financial collapse in 1922. In October 1922 the chancellor, Ignaz Seipel, secured a large loan through the League of Nations, enabling Austrian finances to be stabilized. In return, Austria had to undertake to remain independent for at least 20 years. The controller general appointed by the League of Nations reported in December 1925 that the Austrian budget had been balanced satisfactorily, and in March 1926 international financial supervision was withdrawn.

Seipel’s success in October 1922 gave Austria some years of stability and made economic reconstruction and relative prosperity possible. In socialist-controlled Vienna, an ambitious program of working-class housing, health schemes, and adult education was carried out under the leadership of Karl Seitz, Hugo Breitner, and Julius Tandler. “Red Vienna” thus acquired a unique reputation in Europe.

In 1920 all three major parties spoke in democratic terms. Despite democratic rhetoric, however, preparations for civil war had never been abandoned. The Christian Socialists, led by Seipel, a believer in strong government, were convinced that they had to protect the existing social order against a Marxist revolution. In the provinces, reactionary forces known as the Heimwehr (Home Defense Force)—originally formed for defense against Slavs invading from the south or against marauding soldiers returning from service in World War I—gradually acquired fascist tendencies (see fascism). The Social Democrats, who felt that their social-reform program was endangered, had their own armed force, the Schutzbund (Defense League), descended from the People’s Guard of 1918.

The Schutzbund and the reactionary forces regularly demonstrated against each other. In 1927, in the course of a clash between members of the Schutzbund and reactionary forces at Schattendorf, an old man and a child were accidentally shot by reactionaries. When the latter were acquitted by a Vienna jury on July 14, the Social Democrats called for a mass demonstration, which got out of hand and ended in the burning down of the ministry of justice. In fighting between the police and the demonstrators, almost 100 people were killed and many more were wounded. The Social Democrats then launched a general strike, but it was called off after four days. Seipel had violently asserted the government’s authority, and the balance between socialist and nonsocialist forces in Austria was never secure after this decisive date.

The Christian Socialists, pressed increasingly by the Heimwehr, began to take the offensive against the Social Democrats. Wilhelm Miklas, a leading Christian Socialist, was elected president in 1928, successor to the nonparty Michael Hainisch, who had been in office since December 1920. There were repeated attempts to revise the constitution, principally with the object of strengthening the power of the executive. After protracted negotiations, a compromise was reached late in 1929. On December 7, 1929, a series of constitutional amendments gave increased powers to the president. Of particular importance were the rights to appoint ministers and issue emergency decrees. But Vienna maintained its autonomy, and the democratic principle was preserved against the far-reaching authoritarian demands of the Heimwehr. In the elections of November 1930, the Social Democrats were returned as the largest single party, with 72 seats. The Christian Socialists held 66, the German Nationalists 19, and the Heimwehr, elements of which had temporarily coalesced into a fascist party on the Italian model, 8.

These political events were overshadowed by the great world economic crisis (see Great Depression). Though the Social Democratic Party’s leaders believed that the crisis should be met by the orthodox means of deflation and spending cuts, they were resolved not to be compromised by supporting these measures and refused to enter a coalition government. On the other hand, in October 1931 they acquiesced in suspending the election of the president by direct popular vote, as had been provided by the constitution of 1929, and agreed to the reelection of President Miklas by parliament. The government, meanwhile, led by Chancellors Johann Schober (1929–30) and Otto Ender (1930–31), was driven to desperate devices to stave off collapse. Schober, leader of the middle-class German Nationalists, launched a project for a customs union with Germany in March 1931; this provoked violent opposition from France and the alliance of the Little Entente (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania) and was subsequently condemned by a majority of the Permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague. The bankruptcy in May 1931 of the Creditanstalt, the country’s most influential banking house, brought Austria close to financial and economic disaster. This, together with the rise of the National Socialists in Germany, resulted in considerable support being given to the Austrian Nazi Party (see National Socialism; Nazi Party). Provincial elections in 1932 showed that the Nazis were draining off votes from the conservative parties. The Nationalists began to demand a general election, and this demand was taken up by the Social Democrats, who saw a chance of winning a majority in parliament. Authoritarianism: Dollfuss and Schuschnigg

After the election, when Engelbert Dollfuss came to form a Christian Socialist government on May 20, 1932, he could count on a majority of only one vote. Chancellor Dollfuss belonged to a new generation that had been educated in the conservative conviction that the Western form of parliamentary government had been forced upon the central Europeans as a result of military defeat and socialist revolution and that the political and social order could be restored only by the establishment of some kind of strong authority. The leaders of the Christian Socialist Party found themselves under attack from two ideological enemies, the Marxists and the Nazis, who apparently threatened the very basis of the conservative order. In reaction, Dollfuss determined to replace parliamentary government with an authoritarian system. The opportunity to do this came in March 1933, when, during a debate on a minor bill, an argument arose over alleged irregularities in the voting procedure. The president of the Nationalrat resigned, the two vice presidents followed his example, and Dollfuss declared that parliament had proved unworkable. It never met again in full, and Dollfuss governed thereafter by emergency decree.

Engelbert Dollfuss, 1934.UPI/Bettmann Archive

By this time (spring of 1933), Adolf Hitler was in power in Germany, and Nazi propaganda for the incorporation of Austria was greatly increased. Dollfuss turned to fascist Italy and authoritarian Hungary for help, as he was convinced that British and French aid would be ineffective. This shift in foreign policy also can be attributed to the fact that Dollfuss had to rely ever more strongly on the help of the pro-fascist Heimwehr to stay in power.

The Social Democrats were subjected to increasing provocation and on February 12, 1934, took to arms. Civil war followed. After four days of fighting, Dollfuss and the Heimwehr were victorious. The Social Democratic Party was declared illegal and driven underground. In the course of the same year, all political parties were abolished except the Fatherland Front (Vaterländische Front), which Dollfuss had founded in 1933 to unite all conservative groups. In April 1934 the rump of the parliament was brought together and accepted an authoritarian constitution. The executive was given complete control over the legislative branch of government; the elected assemblies disappeared and were replaced by advisory bodies, appointed in a complicated and futile fashion. The human rights guaranteed under the democratic constitution also were swept away. “Republic” was removed from the official name of the country, which became merely the Federal State of Austria.

On July 25, 1934, a group of Nazis seized the chancellery and attempted to proclaim a government. Dollfuss, whom they had taken prisoner, was murdered. The plan, however, miscarried: the Nazis in the chancellery were compelled to surrender, and their leaders were executed; a Nazi rising in Steiermark was suppressed; and Hitler, faced with the mobilization of an Italian army on the Brenner Pass, repudiated his Austrian followers. Franz von Papen was sent as German ambassador to reduce Austria by other means.

Kurt von Schuschnigg, who became chancellor on the death of Dollfuss, was a man of gentler personality and of less-violent political passions. His administration of the authoritarian constitution was in the easygoing Austrian fashion, less oppressive than in Italy and Germany. Schuschnigg had a mild preference for restoring the Habsburgs, but he shrank from the international complications this would involve. The regime drifted on without popular favour, weakened by the personal rivalries and ambitions of its leaders and sustained only by a guarantee from Italy. The temporary accord of Great Britain, France, and Italy in the Stresa Front (April 1935) seemed to promise new security, but the Italo-Ethiopian War soon destroyed the unity of the Western powers, and Austria’s isolation was complete when Hitler and Italian leader Benito Mussolini allied themselves in 1936.

Kurt von Schuschnigg.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Schuschnigg had to negotiate a compromise with Germany, which was signed on July 11, 1936; Germany promised to respect Austrian sovereignty, and in return Austria acknowledged itself “a German state.” The agreement left Austria open to Nazi infiltration. In January 1938 the Austrian police discovered a new Nazi conspiracy. Schuschnigg hoped to defeat this by a meeting with Hitler, but at Berchtesgaden, Germany, where Hitler received him on February 12, 1938, Schuschnigg was faced with threats of military intervention in support of the Austrian Nazis. He had to agree to give them a general amnesty and to include some leading Nazis in his cabinet; the Ministry of the Interior had to be entrusted to Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the spokesman of Austrian Nazis. The open agitation of the Nazis threatened to destroy the government’s authority, and confidential contacts in the European capitals brought Schuschnigg to realize that he could not count on the support of the western European powers. He therefore resolved to challenge Hitler alone. On March 9 he announced that a plebiscite would be held on March 13 to decide in favour of Austrian independence. Anschluss and World War II

Though the Austrian crisis had taken him unaware, Hitler acted with energy and speed. Mussolini’s neutrality was assured, there was a ministerial crisis in France, and the British government had made it known for some time that it would not oppose the union of Austria with Germany. On March 11, 1938, two peremptory demands were made for the postponement of the plebiscite and for the resignation of Schuschnigg. Schuschnigg gave way, and German troops, accompanied by Hitler himself, entered Austria on March 12. A Nazi government in Austria, headed by Seyss-Inquart, was established; it collaborated with Hitler in proclaiming the Anschluss on March 13.

Hitler, AdolfAdolf Hitler reviewing German troops in Vienna, 1938. AP Images

France and Great Britain protested against the methods used by Hitler but accepted the fait accompli. The United States followed the British and French policy of appeasement, and the Soviet Union demanded only that the West should stop further German aggression and that the Anschluss should be handled by the League of Nations. The government of Mexico was the only one that did not accept the Anschluss, and it lodged an ultimately futile protest with the secretary-general of the League of Nations. A questionable plebiscite on April 10, held throughout greater Germany, recorded a vote of more than 99 percent in favour of Hitler.

Austria was completely absorbed into Germany. Any official memory of Austrian existence was destroyed and suppressed. Austria was renamed Ostmark (Eastern March); Upper and Lower Austria became Upper and Lower Danube. Immediately after the invasion, the Nazis arrested many leaders of the anti-Nazi Austrian political parties and a great number of political opponents, particularly communists and socialists. Many Austrians, especially those of Jewish origin, were forced into exile.

The Viennese events during Kristallnacht—a short but devastating period of pogroms against Jewish people and property throughout Germany on November 9–10, 1938—proved that anti-Semitism was more virulent and violent in Austria than in most other German areas. A significant percentage of the Jews killed were in Vienna, where dozens of synagogues and hundreds of Jewish shops and apartments were destroyed and plundered. The degradation of the Austrian Jewish community—including the widespread threats against Jews’ lives, the destruction or “Aryanization” (forcible confiscation) of Jewish property, and the exiling of Austrian, mostly Viennese, Jews—became known as the Viennese model (Wiener Modell), on which the Nazis based their later expulsion of Jews from all of Germany and German-occupied countries.

anti-Semitic grafittoNazi storm troopers guarding a Jewish-owned business in Vienna shortly after the Anschluss. The graffito on the store window reads, “You Jewish pig, may your hands rot off!”© Marschalek/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

By the time World War II began in 1939, more than 100,000 Jews—roughly half of all Austrian Jews—had left Austria. When the fighting ceased, more than 65,000 Austrian Jews had perished, many of them in extermination camps. Jews were not the only victims of Nazi persecution. Thousands of Roma (Gypsies) also were deported or murdered, and tens of thousands of Austrians with mental or physical disabilities were killed, most of them at Hartheim Castle, a so-called euthanasia centre near Linz.

Austrians were overrepresented not only in the system of terror against Jews but also on the battlefields. During the course of the war, hundreds of thousands of Austrians fought as German soldiers; a substantial number of Austrians served in the SS, the elite military corps of the Nazi Party. By the end of the war, approximately 250,000 Austrians had been killed or were missing in action. An even greater number of Austrians were held as prisoners of war, many of them for years in camps in the Soviet Union. In addition, more than 20,000 Austrians were killed in U.S. and British bombing raids.

As increasing numbers of Austrian men were enlisted in the German army, the resultant lack of workers, together with the tremendous buildup of the armament industries, brought compulsory labour on a massive scale to Austria. Foreign workers from many European countries were forced to work in industry as well as agriculture during the war, as were many thousands of concentration-camp inmates, most of them from the Mauthausen concentration camp, near Linz, or one of its satellite camps. (About half of the approximately 200,000 prisoners in these camps—many of them Russian soldiers—died.)

While the great majority of Austrians were not Nazis, popular support for Germany’s wartime policies remained strong until the later phases of the war. The Austrian resistance was small, though it was by no means negligible. Left-wing resistance groups (mostly communists, with a smaller number of socialists) dominated, but conservative resisters (mainly Christian Socialists and monarchists) were active as well. During the war, tens of thousands of Austrians were arrested for political reasons; many of them died in concentration camps or prisons, and about 2,700 were executed. Additionally, a number of Austrians fought as Allied soldiers against the German army.

The resistance movement was hampered by the political antagonism that had weakened the First Republic of Austria between the two World Wars. This political divide was so deep and bitter that it blocked cooperation between Austrian émigrés and between the various resistance groups that had formed inside the country. Nevertheless, the possibility of reestablishing an independent Austria after the war was far from dead.

After the outbreak of the war, the Allied governments began to reconsider their attitude toward the Anschluss. In December 1941 Soviet premier Stalin" class="md-crosslink">Joseph Stalin informed the British that the U.S.S.R. would regard the restoration of an independent Austrian republic as an essential part of the postwar order in central Europe. In October 1943, at a meeting in Moscow of the foreign ministers of Great Britain, the U.S.S.R., and the United States, a declaration was published that declared the Anschluss null and void and pledged the Allies to restore Austrian independence; it also reminded the Austrians that they had to make an effort to rid themselves of the German yoke. Though the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, continued to make proposals for setting up a central European federation comprising the former Habsburg lands and even southern Germany, the European Advisory Commission in London assumed that Austria would return to sovereignty within the borders of 1937.

When Soviet troops liberated Vienna on April 13, 1945, representatives from the resistance movement and the former political parties were allowed to organize and to set up a free provisional government. Though Austria was once again an independent republic, the future looked more than bleak. Much of the infrastructure of Austrian cities had been damaged or destroyed, and the country emerged from the war as one of the poorest in Europe. Second Republic Allied occupation

On April 27, 1945, former chancellor Karl Renner set up a provisional government composed of Social Democrats, Christian Socialists, and Communists and proclaimed the reestablishment of Austria as a democratic republic. The Western powers, afraid that the Renner government might be an instrument of communist expansion, withheld full recognition until the autumn of 1945. Because of similar suspicions, agreement on the division of Austrian zones of Allied occupation was delayed until July 1945. Shortly before the Potsdam Conference (which stipulated that Austria would not have to pay reparations but assigned the German foreign assets of eastern Austria to the U.S.S.R.), control machinery was set up for the administration of Austria, giving supreme political and administrative powers to the military commanders of the four occupying armies (U.S., British, French, and Soviet). In September 1945 a conference of representatives of all states extended the authority of the Renner government to all parts of Austria.

A general election held in November 1945, in which former Nazis were excluded from voting, returned 85 members of the Austrian People’s Party (corresponding to the Christian Socialists of the prewar period), 76 Socialists (corresponding to the Social Democrats and Revolutionary Socialists), and 4 Communists. Renner was elected president of the republic; Leopold Figl, leader of the Austrian People’s Party, became chancellor of a coalition cabinet. As the coalition government was formed in proportion to the parties’ strength in parliament, the Austrian People’s Party and the Socialists were the sole partners. This principle of proportional representation, originally introduced in 1919, was to be an important factor in Austrian political life after 1945.

The government decided not to draft a new constitution but to return to the constitution of 1920, as amended by the laws of 1929. In June 1946 the control agreement of July 1945 regulating the machinery of Allied political supervision was modified by restricting Allied interference essentially to constitutional matters. Denazification laws passed in 1946 and 1947 eliminated Nazi influence from the public life of Austria.

From 1945 to 1952 Austria had to struggle for survival. After liberation from Nazi rule, the country faced complete economic chaos. Aid provided by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and, from 1948, support given by the United States under the Marshall Plan made survival possible. Heavy industry and banking were nationalized in 1946, and, by a series of wage-price agreements, the government tried to control inflation. Interference by military commanders in political and economic affairs in the Soviet zone of occupation caused a considerable migration of capital and industry from Vienna and Niederösterreich to the formerly purely agricultural western states. This brought about a far-reaching transformation of the economic and social structure.

In 1949 former Nazis were allowed to participate in the general election. The Union of Independents (later renamed the Freedom Party), corresponding to the former German Nationalist group, won 16 seats in parliament. In subsequent elections (1953, 1956, 1959, 1962), the relationship of this party with the two main parties (the Austrian People’s Party and the Socialists) remained stable. After Renner died (December 31, 1950), Theodor Körner, the Socialist mayor of Vienna, was elected president by direct popular vote. He was succeeded in 1957 by the leader of the Socialist Party, Adolf Schärf, who was followed in 1965 by Franz Jonas, former mayor of Vienna, and in 1974 by Rudolf Kirchschläger, former minister of foreign affairs.

The influence of the Socialists in the coalition government, which had been relatively strong under Figl’s chancellorship, was reduced when the Austrian People’s Party replaced Figl with Julius Raab in the spring of 1953 and had Reinhard Kamitz appointed minister of finance. The subsequent economic reconstruction and the advance to a prosperity unknown to Austrians since the years before World War I is generally identified with the so-called Raab-Kamitz course, which was based on a modified free-market economy. The nationalized steel industry, electric power plants, and oil fields, together with the privately owned lumber and textile industries and the tourist traffic, were the major economic assets. The Austrian economy came to be dominated to a disproportionate extent by a trend toward the service sector because of the importance of tourism, which transformed the economic and social character of the rural Alpine areas. In addition, a heavy burden had been removed from the economy in 1953, when the Soviet government declared that it would pay its own occupation costs (as the United States had done since 1947). Thereupon, the British and the French followed suit.

The Berlin conference of the foreign ministers of France, Great Britain, the U.S.S.R., and the United States in January 1954 raised Austrian hopes for the conclusion of a peace treaty. For the first time, Austria was admitted as an equal conference partner, but the failure of the foreign ministers to agree on the future of Germany again prejudiced Austria’s chances. The Soviet government was not prepared to forgo the strategic advantages of maintaining forces in Austria as long as it perceived Germany to be a threat. In February 1955, however, the Soviet government suddenly extended an invitation to the Austrian government for bilateral negotiations. An Austrian delegation visited Moscow in April 1955, and an agreement was reached by which the Soviet government declared itself ready to restore full Austrian sovereignty and to evacuate its occupation troops in return for an Austrian promise to declare the country permanently neutral. Restoration of sovereignty

The State Treaty—signed in Vienna on May 15, 1955, by representatives of the four occupying powers and Austria—formally reestablished the Austrian republic in its pre-1938 frontiers as a “sovereign, independent, and democratic state.” It prohibited Anschluss between Austria and Germany as well as the restoration of the Habsburgs. It also guaranteed the rights of the Slovene and Croatian minorities in Kärnten, Steiermark, and Burgenland. Great Britain, the United States, and France relinquished to Austria all property, rights, and interests held or claimed by them as former German assets or war booty. The U.S.S.R., however, obtained tangible payment for the restoration of Austrian freedom. This included $150 million for the confiscated former German enterprises, which Austria bought back from the Administration of Soviet Property in Austria; $2 million for the confiscated German assets of the First Danube Steamshipping Company; and 10 million metric tons of crude oil as the price of Austrian oil fields and refineries that had been Soviet war booty.

The treaty came into force on July 27, 1955, and by October 25 all occupation forces were withdrawn. On October 26 a constitutional law of perpetual Austrian neutrality was promulgated. The Austrian government had never left any doubts that the pledge to neutrality could be interpreted only as a military one and never as an ideological one. Throughout the Soviet occupation, the Austrians had proved their anticommunist attitude, and the spontaneous reaction of the Austrian people during the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 demonstrated their sympathy with Western democratic ideas (see Hungary: The Revolution of 1956). Austria preserved political stability; changes in the personal and ideological structure of the government and political parties were effected without major political crisis.

Austria became a member of the United Nations in 1955 and of the Council of Europe in 1956. Major problems in foreign relations were the conflict with Italy over Südtirol (southern Tirol; now part of the Italian Alto Adige" class="md-crosslink">Trentino–Alto Adige region) and the problem of association with the European Economic Community (EEC; later succeeded by the European Union). During the Paris Peace Conference of 1946, an agreement had been signed guaranteeing the rights of the German-speaking population of Südtirol, a region that Italy had obtained after World War I. The Austrian government, claiming that the Italians had not lived up to their obligations, initiated bilateral talks. In the early 1960s, acts of terrorism committed by German-speaking chauvinists interfered with the progress of the negotiations, but in 1969 agreement was finally reached on implementing the guarantees provided in the agreement of 1946. In 1958 Austria joined the European Free Trade Association, but a special arrangement with the EEC, accompanied by prudent dealings with the communist neighbours, maintained Austria’s status as a neutral nation. In that capacity, Austria provided for large numbers of refugees from eastern Europe; it also functioned as a transit link for Jewish émigrés from the U.S.S.R.

From 1962, disagreement over economic problems generated friction between the coalition parties. The annual budget led to grave disunity in the coalition, and in the autumn of 1965 the government resigned and called new elections. The elections, held on March 6, 1966, brought a setback for the Socialist Party, and the Austrian People’s Party was returned to parliament with an absolute majority. Negotiations for a new coalition government failed. The Socialists, led by a former foreign minister, Bruno Kreisky, went into opposition, and Josef Klaus formed the first one-party cabinet of the Second Republic. Contrary to widespread misgivings, the political stability of the country was not disturbed, and parliament was given new vigour and influence.

In ensuing provincial elections, the Socialist Party demonstrated recovery from the setback of 1966, and in the national elections of 1970 the Socialists managed to win a plurality of votes, becoming the strongest party in parliament, with 81 seats, though falling short of a majority. After negotiations for a new coalition cabinet failed, in May 1970 Kreisky was appointed chancellor, and he formed the country’s first all-Socialist cabinet. Sensing increased support for the Socialists, he called for new elections in October 1971, which gave his party a clear majority of 93 seats. In the subsequent elections of 1975 and 1979, Austrian voters demonstrated their approval of Kreisky’s policy of moderate social reform and economic stability by returning the Socialist Party to parliament in increasing strength: the elections of May 1979 gave the Socialists 95 seats, while the Austrian People’s Party, continually weakened by regional animosities and leadership squabbles, received 77 seats and the Freedom Party 11.

The stability of Austrian politics in the 1970s was paralleled by an equally stable economy: besides having an elaborate system of social security and health insurance, Austrians enjoyed an unbroken prosperity with one of the lowest rates of unemployment in Europe. The Kreisky governments carried through a host of reform programs, among which the reorganization of the legal code under the minister of justice Christian Broda had truly historic dimensions. Fritz Fellner Reinhold F. Wagnleitner

In 1978 Kreisky suffered his first defeat when a majority voted against the opening of a nuclear power plant. The late 1970s also witnessed the first of a series of scandals, many of them related to the technocratic wing of the Socialist Party. This wing centred around Kreisky’s minister of finance and political heir-apparent, Hannes Androsch. In particular, the dubious link between Androsch’s tax-consulting firm and the contractors building Vienna’s new general hospital began a series of setbacks for the Socialist Party; these were aggravated by the troubles of the nationalized industries.

The scandals that plagued Austria in the 1980s overshadowed the considerable reforms enacted by the Kreisky government. Voters grew increasingly dissatisfied with a stagnant sociopolitical system in which all important decisions were made behind closed doors by the interest groups represented in the “Social Partnership” (i.e., the chambers of industry, trade, and agriculture and the labour unions). A growing environmental awareness intensified voter frustration.

After the Socialist Party lost its absolute majority in 1983, Kreisky resigned, and the Socialists, under Chancellor Fred Sinowatz, entered into a coalition with the Freedom Party. The coalition stumbled from one scandal to another until it was finally brought down by the election of Kurt Waldheim, who was alleged to have been a Nazi war criminal, as president in 1986. Although an international historians’ commission found no evidence that Waldheim had personally committed war crimes, it proved his indirect complicity. With Waldheim’s insistence that he had only done his duty, the domestic political intrigue, the not-altogether-hidden anti-Semitism of some of his supporters, and the U.S. government’s decision to place Waldheim on its watch list of undesirable aliens, the incident undermined Austria’s domestic consensus more than any other event since 1945.

After the Waldheim debacle, Sinowatz resigned as chancellor, and the Socialist Party under Franz Vranitzky called for new elections, which resulted in a grand coalition of the Socialist and Austrian People’s parties. This government introduced partially successful budgetary and tax reforms and a privatization scheme for the nationalized industries. These reforms promoted the economic growth and social stability of the late 1980s. However, more scandals (notably the Noricum affair, involving the illegal sale of arms to Iran by a state-owned company), division within the Austrian People’s Party, and the public’s continued dissatisfaction with backroom deals weakened support for the coalition, while the environmentalist Greens (in parliament since 1986) and the Freedom Party enjoyed growing appeal.

In the 1990 elections the Socialists avoided disaster only through a combination of Vranitzky’s popularity and the weakness of the Austrian People’s Party. The reshaped coalition of the Socialist Party (renamed the Social Democratic Party in 1991) and the Austrian People’s Party faced new problems that were largely due to the dramatically changed international situation: Austria’s application for membership in the EEC (which, renamed the European Community, was embedded in the European Union [EU] in 1993) renewed heated debates over domestic repercussions and over membership’s compatibility with neutrality. The latter issue was raised again in connection with the breakdown of the Warsaw Pact and the turmoil in Yugoslavia. In 1990 the Austrian government unilaterally revoked some of the provisions of the 1955 State Treaty governing Austria’s neutrality. During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, in a controversial decision the government permitted air-transit rights to Allied planes and the transportation of U.S. salvage tanks through Austrian territory.

With the end of the Cold War and the opening of Austria’s eastern borders, the country was faced with an explosive increase of refugees (particularly from the Balkans) and immigrants (especially from Turkey). Many Austrians blamed the now-suffering Austrian economy on the influx of newcomers. In the early 1990s, heavy industry struggled, national debt rose, and unemployment reached a 40-year high. Popular discontent was reflected at the polls, as the right-wing Freedom Party and smaller opposition parties made gains against the ruling coalition. Reinhold F. Wagnleitner Austria in the European Union

In a historic referendum in June 1994, Austrian voters indicated their desire to join the EU, and in January 1995 Austria became a member. The following year, Austrians commemorated 1,000 years of common history. The festivities highlighted Austria’s stature in Europe historically, while the country’s increased regional cooperation underscored its current role in newly restructured Europe.

The Austrian economy, however, was not yet ready to meet EU criteria for financial stability. Further austerity measures were launched as Austria prepared to adopt the single European currency, the euro. In 1999 the majority of EU members began to replace their national currency with the euro, and by 2002 Austria, with its economy once again among the strongest in Europe, retired the schilling.

Meanwhile, the ongoing concern about immigration paralleled fears of foreign (particularly German) ownership of Austrian businesses, especially as Austria began privatizing more state-owned operations. Reflective of these fears was the ascendancy of Freedom Party leader Jörg Haider, whose extreme brand of conservatism regularly drew international censure but whose party narrowly eclipsed the Austrian People’s Party in the parliamentary elections of 1999. By 2000 the People’s Party had deserted the weakened Social Democratic Party to form a right-of-centre coalition government with the Freedom Party. The participation of the Freedom Party in the government brought condemnation from both the Austrian left and the international community, and the EU imposed sanctions on Austria. This move backfired within the country, where the governing parties mobilized patriotic support by portraying Austria as the victim of an international conspiracy. By the end of 2000 the EU had withdrawn its sanctions.

Jörg Haider, 2008.© Muellek/Shutterstock.com

The government was buoyed by a surging economy, but the Freedom Party, inexperienced in matters of state and beset by internal turmoil, stumbled in the 2002 elections. Its losses were primarily the gains of the Austrian People’s Party, which became the largest party for the first time in 36 years. But rather than renewing its traditional partnership with the Social Democrats, it again formed a coalition with the Freedom Party in 2003.

The Freedom Party splintered in 2005 as Haider and other leaders left to form a new party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria. The split followed a period of especially acrimonious fighting between moderate members and hard-liners over the party’s direction. The Alliance for the Future of Austria replaced the Freedom Party as the junior partner in the coalition government.

In 2006 the Social Democrats won an unexpected victory in the parliamentary elections, narrowly defeating the Austrian People’s Party. In January 2007 those two parties formed a coalition government, with Alfred Gusenbauer of the Social Democrats as chancellor. However, the unpopularity of Gusenbauer, who was perceived as an ineffective leader, as well as disputes over social policy, soon weakened the coalition. It collapsed in July 2008 following the withdrawal of the People’s Party. Parliamentary elections held that September—the first in which 16- and 17-year-olds were allowed to vote—resulted in a narrow win for the Social Democrats over the People’s Party. However, the Freedom Party and the Alliance for the Future of Austria enjoyed a resurgence: combined votes for the two right-wing parties exceeded those for the People’s Party. Nevertheless, the Social Democrats and the People’s Party agreed to form a new coalition government, excluding the far right, in November 2008. Werner Faymann of the Social Democrats was selected as chancellor.

The most pressing concern for the “grand coalition” was the precarious state of the European economy. Beginning in 2009, the euro-zone debt crisis acted as a persistent drag on Austria’s economic health, as consumer confidence sagged and exports declined. The Austrian financial sector was heavily exposed to the southern European economies that were at the centre of the debt crisis, and the government adopted a policy of robust intervention to shore up the country’s ailing banks. Faced with these challenges, the coalition exhibited a degree of cooperation unseen in previous years, as it implemented a series of austerity measures designed to bring Austria’s deficit into compliance with the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact. These policies, which included a public-sector wage freeze and a package of tax increases, did little to endear either of the ruling parties to voters, and each saw a steady erosion of support in state and local elections.

While the economy showed signs of stabilizing in 2011, corruption scandals and a leadership vacancy in the People’s Party fueled support for the Freedom Party. Although it remained outside the government, the Freedom Party’s Euroskeptic and anti-immigrant rhetoric influenced discussions at the national level, and the party ranked even or ahead of the ruling parties in opinion polls. Controversial statements made by Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache drew criticism from the mainstream parties. Those denouncements intensified in August 2012, after Strache posted a cartoon to the social media site Facebook that was widely characterized as anti-Semitic. Support for the Freedom Party was diluted when Austrian-born Canadian billionaire Frank Stronach announced in September 2012 that he was forming a new political party. Called Team Stronach, the party promoted an antiestablishment, pro-business agenda that favoured lower corporate taxes and disengagement from the weaker euro-zone economies. The Freedom Party suffered a series of reverses in regional elections in 2013, and it was unable to capitalize on a collapse in support for the Social Democrats in Salzburg. A financial scandal there triggered early elections, and the Greens, running on an anti-corruption platform, boosted their national standing with an impressive finish in the last regional contest before the scheduled September 2013 general election.

That election saw the “grand coalition” returned to power, with Faymann as chancellor, albeit with a slightly reduced majority. The Freedom Party posted a strong third-place finish, ahead of the Greens, Team Stronach, and the neoliberal New Austria (NEOS). Low unemployment and a stable economy had fueled support for the governing parties, but a worsening migrant crisis, the military conflict in Ukraine, and a series of terrorist attacks on European soil caused that foundation to erode throughout 2014–15. In January 2016 Austria suspended its participation in the Schengen Agreement, reintroducing border controls in an effort to stem the tide of refugees (principally fleeing turmoil in Syria, elsewhere in the Middle East, and in Africa).

Many dismissed that effort as too little, too late, as evidenced by the Freedom Party’s landslide victory in the first round of presidential balloting in April 2016. Although the office of president was largely ceremonial, the rejection of the two ruling parties—both of which had failed to advance to the runoff election—signaled a major shift in the mood of the Austrian electorate. Stating that he had lost the support of his party, Faymann announced his resignation in May 2016. The second round of the presidential election, held on May 22, was narrowly won by Green candidate Alexander Van der Bellen. The closeness of the outcome led the Freedom Party to challenge the results, and Austria’s Constitutional Court ruled that irregularities had occurred in a majority of polling districts. The election was annulled and rescheduled for October 2016, but faulty glue on postal ballots forced the postponement of the election until December. On December 4, 2016, Van der Bellen won a clear victory, capturing 54 percent of the vote and offering a glimmer of hope to Europe’s centre-left at a time of growing support for far right and Euroskeptic parties.

In May 2017 a deadlock over policy within the “grand coalition” led Social Democrat Chancellor Christian Kern to call for early elections. Support for the Freedom Party remained high, but the People’s Party, under telegenic new leader Sebastian Kurz, tacked hard right in the months prior to the election and embraced much of the Freedom Party’s anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric. Kurz, who had served as foreign minister in the “grand coalition” government, revived the flagging fortunes of the mainstream conservative party, and he carried it to victory in the general election held on October 15, 2017. The Social Democrats were second, and the Freedom Party finished a strong third. Party infighting led to the spectacular collapse of the Greens, who, for the first time in nearly four decades, failed to clear the 4 percent threshold necessary for parliamentary representation. After months of talks, the People’s Party and Freedom Party agreed to form a coalition, and in December 2017 Kurz, at age 31, became Europe’s youngest head of government. Before swearing in the new chancellor, Van der Bellen took the extraordinary step of securing a pledge to maintain Austria’s pro-EU stance and to acknowledge the country’s responsibility for the scourge of Nazism. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Citation Information

Article Title: Austria

Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica

Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.

Date Published: 05 August 2019

URL: https://www.britannica.com/place/Austria

Access Date: August 10, 2019

Additional Reading Geography

Eugene K. Keefe et al., Area Handbook for Austria (1976), though old, is still valuable for its survey of physical features and its description of national traditions and culture. Austria, Facts and Figures (1990), published by the Federal Press Service, is an informative compendium of illustrations and statistics. Among the more comprehensive guidebooks are Ian Robertson, Austria, 2nd ed. (1987); and Franz N. Mehling (ed.), Austria (1985; originally published in German, 1977), from the Phaidon Cultural Guide series. Harald Gardos and Manfred Wagner, Some Aspects of Cultural Policies in Austria (1981), is a brief UNESCO study.

Political developments are discussed in William T. Bluhm, Building an Austrian Nation: The Political Integration of a Western State (1973). John Fitzmaurice, Austrian Politics and Society Today: In Defence of Austria (1990), is a study of economic, social, and political characteristics against the traditional perception of Austrian neutrality. More-detailed analysis of the political forces in Austrian society is found in Max E. Riedlsperger, The Lingering Shadow of Nazism: The Austrian Independent Party Movement Since 1945 (1978); Melanie A. Sully, Political Parties and Elections in Austria (1981); and Anton Pelinka and Fritz Plasser (eds.), The Austrian Party System (1989). History

Konrad Spindler, The Man in the Ice (1994, reissued 2001; originally published in German, 1993), recounts the discovery of the well-preserved body of a Stone Age hunter in the Ötztal Alps. Comprehensive chronological coverage is provided in Richard Rickett, A Brief Survey of Austrian History, 9th ed. (1988); and Lonnie Johnson, Introducing Austria (1987). Erich Zöllner, Geschichte Österreichs: von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, 8th ed. (1990), is a massive history of Austria from ancient times to the end of the 1980s. Paula Sutter Fichtner, The Habsburg Empire: From Dynasticism to Multinationalism (1997), provides a comprehensive survey of the long history of the Habsburgs. Barbara Jelavich, Modern Austria: Empire and Republic, 1815–1986 (1987), covers Austrian history from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the end of the 20th century.

Austrian History Yearbook, published by the University of Minnesota, is devoted to recent research. The series Contemporary Austrian Studies, ed. by Günter Bischof and Anton Pelinka, often with a guest editor, concentrates on recent Austrian history. Paula Sutter Fichtner, Historical Dictionary of Austria (1999), provides easily accessible, reliable information.

Studies of particular historical periods include A.W. Leeper, A History of Medieval Austria (1941, reprinted 1978), focusing on the Middle Ages up to the middle of the 13th century; Adam Wandruszka, The House of Habsburg: Six Hundred Years of a European Dynasty (1964, reprinted 1975; originally published in German, 1956), focusing on the late Middle Ages; Robert A. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–1918 (1974); and R.J.W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550–1700: An Interpretation (1979, reprinted 1984), concentrating on the ascent of the house of Habsburg, and Rudolf II and His World: A Study in Intellectual History, 1576–1612 (1973, reissued with corrections, 1984). Thomas M. Barker, Double Eagle and Crescent: Vienna’s Second Turkish Siege and Its Historical Setting (1967); and Ivan Parvev, Habsburgs and Ottomans Between Vienna and Belgrade (1683–1739) (1995), explore the difficult relations between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires from the second siege of Vienna to the beginning of Maria Theresa’s reign. A thorough overall interpretation of the period from the Thirty Years’ War to the Congress of Vienna is given in Charles W. Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618–1815, 2nd ed. (2000).

The 18th century is examined in James Van Horn Melton, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria (1988), discussing the educational system against the background of general social history; and Ernst Wangermann, The Austrian Achievement, 1700–1800 (1973), on cultural and intellectual life. Works on the monarchy include C.A. Macartney, Maria Theresa and the House of Austria (1969); Derek Beales, Joseph II: In the Shadow of Maria Theresa, 1741–1780 (1987), focusing on Joseph’s formative years; and Paul P. Bernard, Joseph II (1968), a brief survey. The Habsburgs’ stormy relationship with the Hungarians in the age of reform is dealt with in Éva H. Balázs, Hungary and the Habsburgs, 1765–1800: An Experiment in Enlightened Absolutism (1997; originally published in Hungarian, 1987). Austria’s great struggles against the French Revolution and Napoleon are covered in Karl A. Roider, Jr., Baron Thugut and Austria’s Response to the French Revolution (1987); and Gunther E. Rothenberg, Napoleon’s Great Adversaries: The Archduke Charles and the Austrian Army, 1792–1814 (1982). Economic development is examined in David F. Good, The Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire, 1750–1914 (1984); and John Komlos, The Habsburg Monarchy as a Customs Union: Economic Development in Austria-Hungary in the Nineteenth Century (1983). Culture is surveyed in Robert A. Kann, A Study in Austrian Intellectual History: From Late Baroque to Romanticism (1960, reprinted 1973).

Analyses of 19th-century politics and diplomacy include Harold Nicolson, The Congress of Vienna: A Study in Allied Unity 1812–1822 (1946, reissued 1989); Arthur G. Haas, Metternich, Reorganization, and Nationality, 1813–1818: A Story of Foresight and Frustration in the Rebuilding of the Austrian Empire (1963); and Enno E. Kraehe, Metternich’s German Policy, 2 vol. (1963–1983). István Deák, The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848–1849 (1979), is an excellent work on the national problems. The 19th century is further covered in Heinrich Friedjung, The Struggle for Supremacy in Germany, 1859–1866 (1935, reprinted 1966; originally published in German, 10th ed., 2 vol., 1916–17); C.A. Macartney, The Habsburg Empire, 1790–1918 (1968); Arthur J. May, The Hapsburg Monarchy, 1867–1914 (1951, reissued 1968); Henry W. Steed, The Hapsburg Monarchy, 4th ed. (1919, reissued 1969); Robert A. Kann, The Multinational Empire: Nationalism and National Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1848–1918, 2 vol. (1950, reissued 1977); and A.J.P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809–1918: A History of the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary, new ed. (1948, reprinted 1976); William McCagg, A History of Habsburg Jews, 1670–1918 (1989); Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980); and William M. Johnston, The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848–1938 (1972).

John W. Boyer, Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna: Christian Socialism in Power, 1897–1918 (1995); and Brigitte Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship, trans. from German (1999), provide a bridge between the 19th and 20th centuries. F.L. Carsten, Fascist Movements in Austria: From Schönerer to Hitler (1977); and Charles A. Gulick, Austria from Habsburg to Hitler, 2 vol. (1948, reprinted 1980), do the same through analyses of social and political developments. Gunther E. Rothenberg, The Army of Francis Joseph (1976, reissued 1998); and Alan Sked, The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815–1918, 2nd ed. (2001), explain structural reasons for the breakdown of the monarchy. Karl R. Stadler, Austria (1971); and Elisabeth Barker, Austria, 1918–1972 (1973), cover 20th-century history in general. David F. Good, Margarete Grandner, and Mary Jo Maynes (eds.), Austrian Women in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives (1996), gives a good overview of women’s history.

Surveys of the First Republic include Arthur J. May, The Passing of the Hapsburg Monarchy, 1914–1918, 2 vol. (1966); Mary MacDonald, The Republic of Austria, 1918–1934: A Study in the Failure of Democratic Government (1946); F.L. Carsten, The First Austrian Republic, 1918–1938: A Study Based on British and Austrian Documents (1986); and Anson Rabinbach, The Crisis of Austrian Socialism: From Red Vienna to Civil War, 1927–1934 (1983). Jill Lewis, Fascism and the Working Class in Austria, 1918–1934: The Failure of Labour in the First Republic (1991), offers fresh insight into the problematic wavering between the theory and the practice of Austro-Marxism. Michael P. Steinberg, The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival: Austria as Theater and Ideology, 1890–1938 (1990, reissued 2000), reviews the rejuvenation of the Austrian spirit after World War I.

Martin Kitchen, The Coming of Austrian Fascism (1980); and Bruce F. Pauley, Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis: A History of Austrian National Socialism (1981), review early German national socialism in Austria. The development of anti-Semitism is chronicled in Ivar Oxaal, Michael Pollak, and Gerhard Botz (eds.), Jews, Antisemitism, and Culture in Vienna (1987), a history of Austrian Jews, from assimilation to forced emigration and extermination; and Bruce F. Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (1992).

Emmerich Talos, Ernst Hanisch, and Wolfgang Neugebauer (eds.), NS-Herrschaft in Österreich, 1938–1945 (1988), is a comprehensive scholarly volume dealing with the implications of national socialist rule for Austrian society. Evan Burr Bukey, Hitler’s Austria: Popular Sentiment in the Nazi Era, 1938–1945 (2000), analyzes secret-service reports on Austrian public opinion during World War II. David Wingeate Pike, Spaniards in the Holocaust: Mauthausen, the Horror on the Danube (2000), offers new insight on the fate of Spanish Republicans and other resistance members in the main Austrian concentration camp.

Robert H. Keyserlingk, Austria in World War II: An Anglo-American Dilemma (1988); William B. Bader, Austria Between East and West, 1945–1955 (1966); and Alice Hills, Britain and the Occupation of Austria, 1943–45 (2000), study the various strategic plans, international problems, and political decisions surrounding the reestablishment of Austria during and after World War II. Reinhold Wagnleitner (ed.), Understanding Austria: The Political Reports and Analyses of Martin F. Herz, Political Officer of the U.S. Legation in Vienna, 1945–1948 (1984), gives a detailed account of the first three years of occupation by one of the most insightful American postwar diplomats. Günter Bischof, Austria in the First Cold War, 1945–55: The Leverage of the Weak (1999), examines the diplomatic, military, political, legal, and economic questions confronting Austria and the Allies between 1945 and 1955. Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria After the Second World War (1994; originally published in German, 1991), analyzes the impact of the U.S. reorientation policies toward Austria in the context of the Cold War and the development of a culture of consumption. David F. Good and Ruth Wodak (eds.), From World War to Waldheim: Culture and Politics in Austria and the United States (1999), gives a good overview of the leverage of a small state in the shadow of a superpower. F. Parkinson (ed.), Conquering the Past: Austrian Nazism Yesterday and Today (1989); Richard Bassett, Waldheim and Austria (1989); and Richard Mitten, The Politics of Antisemitic Prejudice: The Waldheim Phenomenon in Austria (1992), are critical studies of the inability of some Austrians to conquer their past.

Kurt Steiner (ed.), Modern Austria (1981); and Kurt Richard Luther and Peter Pulzer (eds.), Austria, 1945–95: Fifty Years of the Second Republic (1998), examine political, social, economic, and cultural developments under the Second Republic. Melanie A. Sully, A Contemporary History of Austria (1990), is a short review of politics in the 1980s. Melanie A. Sully, Continuity and Change in Austrian Socialism: The Eternal Quest for the Third Way (1982); and Jim Sweeney and Josef Weidenholzer (eds.), Austria: A Study in Modern Achievement (1988), are also useful.

Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka, and Ferdinand Karlhofer (eds.), The Vranitzky Era in Austria (1999), discusses the problems of the first 10 years of the second grand coalition. Anton Pelinka, Austria: Out of the Shadow of the Past (1998); and Hella Pick, Guilty Victim: Austria from the Holocaust to Haider (2000), discuss the profound political changes in late 20th-century Austria. Reinhold F. Wagnleitner