7 - 1914–1918: Self-Destruction

Summary

The Monarchy went to war in 1914 because the emperor and his advisors feared that not going to war would result in a loss of status and prestige, not only abroad but also at home, especially among irredentist South Slavs, and risked the disintegration and collapse of the Monarchy. The result of going to war was the disintegration and collapse of the Monarchy. Going to war, and then mismanaging it, produced the outcome it was meant to prevent. All those circles that had not been adequately squared, whether Germany, Hungary, Bosnia or Bohemia, to name just the most prominent, coalesced to produce a situation where there were just no circles left to square, where the Monarchy had run out of ad hoc solutions to deep-lying problems, and could no longer escape to fight another time. It was torn apart by its inability to choose between being a supra-national, multinational, polyglot, quasi-federated refuge for the small nations of Central Europe, and being a subordinate part of the great power complex of the greater German Empire. It had always benefited from being able to play both sides of this dichotomy at the same time – that is what made it a ‘European necessity’ – but the war, with all its distorted modernism, forced the Monarchy to make a choice between either supranational pluralism, or German (Hungarian) imperialism. It was a false choice, brought on by the war Austria-Hungary started; even so, the false choice was made and not made: the Monarchy threw in its lot with nationalist modernity in the form of the German Empire, ceased to be a ‘European necessity’, and by the time it once more reversed itself by seeking accommodation with nationalist modernity in the form of a federalisation, it was too late. The result was self-destruction.

The Decision for War

What caused the First World War or, more accurately, who caused the First World War has been for decades one of the most significant and controversial debates in Modern European History. After the war, the Western Allied version of events held that Germany bore the main ‘war guilt’.