Austro-Hungarian Empire

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ia, Macartney refers to an exact day: 28 January 1790 that marks ‘The turning point in the central Monarchy…’, Joseph II had been forced to revoke most of his reforms and, thereafter, the Habsburg Monarchy entered a period of decline. Macartney’s opinion is poignant, yet one does feel that to look so far back is to take the collapse of 1918 out of context.

Nevertheless, another British historian, although not of the counter factual school, A. J. P. Taylor, suggests an even earlier date. In his renowned 1948 work, The Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918, Taylor wrote: ‘In 1556, when [Charles V] abdicated and the Imperial title passed to Ferdinand, began the Habsburg struggle to survive in greatness; the Habsburg Monarchy had acquired its lasting character. External enemies had been the danger of the first half of the sixteenth century; disintegration was the danger of the second half of the century. The danger continued and perhaps snowballed from this period.

One part of this ‘snowball’, it can be argued, is the resumption of normal relations between Austria and Turkey in 1792. Sked and Professor Wandruszka suggest that with the end of three centuries of hostility and warfare, ‘…the house of Austria had fulfilled its historic mission, which had been to protect Europe from the Turks’. Without this solid entity at which to balance its strength and foreign policy on, the Monarchy had forfeited its right to survive. Samuel Williamson, in Austria-Hungary and the Origins of the First World War, supports this point by stating that the monarchy represented, for the European governments, a cushion against the Russians, Balkan states and the Ottoman Empire. ‘Only when the powers began to doubt this function and when the Habsburg leadership doubted its ability to execute the mission would the monarchy’s future become less certain’. Perhaps to some extent the resumption of normal relations with Turkey threatened...