6 - 1897–1914: Modernisation

Summary

The Monarchy in its final decade and a half of peace presents a conundrum to historians. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, and the World War that followed, loom over everything that happened in the years preceding it. We know what no one knew in 1897, or even the summer of 1914, that the Monarchy was about to disappear from the map only a few years later, leaving chaos, and eventually genocide, in its wake. It is quite understandable why, for the longest time, the Monarchy's history was written from that perspective, to explain why it failed and disappeared. There was also more than enough recognition at the time that the Monarchy was in a severe, existential crisis, due to the failure of its main political institutions. The Reichsrat was in seemingly perpetual crisis, there were major financial and organisational problems with the various levels of the domestic administration, and also a seemingly unending controversy over the dualist agreement. The tendency in the traditional historiography to write off the Monarchy as doomed, and to look for reasons for that in its anachronistic nature or its inability as a supra-national dynastic state to handle modern nationalism, appears at first sight quite reasonable.

And yet, we also see now how the Monarchy's populace was in many respects flourishing, that its economy was keeping pace, or even catching up, with Western Europe, that its administration was relatively efficient and not corrupt, especially compared to the situation to its south and east; as an economy and society the Monarchy was modernising quite effectively. We also now see that, culturally and intellectually, the Monarchy was set to be the ‘birthplace of the modern world’ in a whole range of arts and disciplines. Moreover, even if contemporaries saw the Monarchy as in a state of crisis, very few thought that it would collapse, or were even looking forward to such an event, despite what nationalist hotheads might say to grab attention. They also could not imagine what we now know of the horrors that marked Central European history in the mid-twentieth century, which makes the prewar era seem so relatively benign, in retrospect, almost innocent.