The Habsburg Monarchy has long been seen as
an outdated empire doomed to fail. To the Central European societies it
sheltered before 1914, it may have had a cosy charm, but as a dynastic
empire among nation-states, critics and historians deemed Austria an
anachronism. Nineteenth-century liberals judged the Habsburgs for ruling
a prison of peoples and siding with fellow despots. William Gladstone,
the British prime minister who epitomized liberal moralism, called
Austria “the unflinching foe of freedom in every country of Europe.”
Never and nowhere, he insisted, could it be said that “here Austria did
good.” Those charges defined narrative even before the Habsburg Empire
collapsed amidst the catastrophe of World War I.
Historical perspective and a wealth of detailed scholarship, along
with intervening events over a brutal twentieth century, force a
reassessment. The Habsburg Monarchy was more effective and popular than
critics allowed. If doomed by internal contradictions, what made it last
so long? How could a backward, repressive order have fostered the
flourishing and diverse culture of Mitteleuropa? Why did it inspire such
loyalty until the very end? Empire provided a unifying force as
eighteenth-century Habsburgs sought to consolidate their disparate
territories into a coherent state. Those top-down efforts created
loyalties and institutions—including a conception of citizenship and
state power limited by law—that made space for bottom-up responses
within an emergent civil society. The world those interactions created
requires a new approach to be understood on its own terms.
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Confessing God
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