That there is as yet no good history of the Serbs in Austria-Hungary is not surprising. Such a work would have to treat not one but several separate Serbian communities. A number of Serbs had lived on imperial lands from the time they colonized the Balkans, but most of them settled in Austria-Hungary after the Ottoman invasion of the Balkan Peninsula in the fourteenth century.2 Some Serbian communities in Austria-Hungary were more oppressed than others and had less opportunity for social advancement. Certain of them were blessed with rich lands that yielded abundant crops, while others were settled on starved lands from which they could barely earn a living. A few made their homes astride important trade routes and near major centers of civilization and others in relatively isolated communities. A small minority became successful merchants and artisans and some of them amassed fair-sized fortunes. There were among the Serbs well-to-do landowners (including the Serbian Church) and a handful of Serbs who had titles. Eventually a number of Serbs became distinguished as high ranking officers in the emperor's army and as scholars and professional men.3 But most Serbs in Austria-Hungary were peasants and remained so.

Of the various causes of the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, nationalism was certainly one of the most important. In an age of integral nationalism like the latter part of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth century it proved extremely difficult for a multinational empire like the Austro-Hungarian monarchy to survive. Not only did the Habsburgs face the question of how to retain the loyalty of a dozen different nationalities within the framework of a single empire, but they also had to reconcile ever increasing differences between the Slavs and the Germans and Magyars and between the Germans and the Magyars themselves. In the end, the Habsburg government failed to meet the challenge.

In view of the many paradoxes that have studded the history of the Habsburg monarchy, it is fitting at the outset to observe that as the nineteenth century opened Austrian foreign policy proceeded with complete obliviousness to the nationality problem and for this very reason was the principal contributor to the nationality problem of the future. It was a time of unprecedented territorial change, indeed of the founding of the Austrian empire itself, and the net result of the changes was an increment to the ethnic diversity of the Habsburg lands. The acquisition of western Galicia in the third partition of Poland added several million Poles. By the Treaty of Campo Formio in 1797 Walloon and Flemish subjects in the Netherlands had been exchanged for the Italian, Croatian, and Serbian population of Venice, Istria, and Dalmatia, and the prospect was held out for adding more Germans in Upper Bavaria and Salzburg. The Treaty of Lunéville in 1801 did not change the territorial holdings of the Austrian Habsburgs; it did, however, affect them indirectly by providing for the transfer of the members of collateral branches of the family who ruled in Modena and Tuscany to unspecified territories in Germany. Two years later, in 1803, the Imperial Recess of the Holy Roman Empire named these territories: Salzburg, for Ferdinand; and the Breisgau and Ortenau, on the Upper Rhine, for the Duke of Modena. Both awards represented Austrian losses, Breisgau and Ortenau having been Austrian lands to begin with, Salzburg having been previously promised.

It would be much easier to state what the relationship between the concepts of the “dynasty” and the “imperial idea” does not mean than to explain what it is supposed to mean. Before we can make any serious efforts to do so, we must, first of all, come to a clear understanding of the exact meaning of some of the terms involved. In English-speaking areas the word “empire” is generally understood to mean “an extended territory, usually comprised of a group of nations, states or peoples under the control or domination of a single sovereign power.” Frequently the determining factors are the assumption of a master-subject relationship between “a dominating conquering people and the conquered people,” either by way of a confederacy, in which “one strong member dominates its confederates,” or by even more direct subordination. Furthermore, the notion of an empire is generally associated with an area of considerable size and frequently “with the supreme or absolute power especially of an emperor.1

The theories on foreign policy and international relations which have emerged in the last decade stress the interaction between foreign policy and internal social structure. Contemporary analysis of this interaction has benefited from refined social science methods and concepts developed since the end of the Second World War, but awareness of the connection between foreign policy and internal policy is not new. For instance, as long ago as the eve of the First World War Rudolf Goldscheid wrote that “nothing is more Utopian than the belief that substantial alterations in internal policy can be realized without simultaneous corresponding changes in foreign [policy] and vice versa.” The interaction between Austro-Hungarian foreign policy and the nationality problem in the monarchy from 1867 until 1914 is a striking example of Goldscheid's general thesis.

The development of nineteenth century Europe was marked by the evolution of the principle of nationalism, the democratization of political and social life, an economic boom, the progress of technology, and a spirit of realism and materialism in both science and culture. The diffusion of new national, social, and political ideas inevitably seriously disturbed the established order. Whereas in countries with a relatively homogeneous population from the point of view of nationality the resulting conflicts assumed the form of internal social and political crises, in multinational states such as the Habsburg and Ottoman empires national movements became disintegrating forces. Under the pressure of self-conscious nationalities, the old nationally heterogeneous monarchies entered their final period of crisis and gave way before those national forces which represented the dominant movements and ideas of a new era. The old integrating forces—the socially dominant feudal nobility and the army and bureaucracy, which were the most cohesive political elements and which were permeated with absolutism and legitimism—were destroyed by new and disintegrative nationalist and democratic movements that championed ideas of national, social, and political freedom. All the great national liberation movements of nineteenth century Europe from the time of the unification of the Italian and German nations and the liberation of the peoples of the Balkans until the collapse of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires took place at the expense of these two empires. The national crisis caused by the disintegrative aspirations of the various peoples within its boundaries made it difficult for the Habsburg monarchy to adjust to the new currents of democracy and social reform. As a result, the nationality question became more and more closely linked with the growing internal social and economic crisis. At the beginning of the twentieth century these three forces merged into a violent centrifugal force.

The fundamental fact in the nationality issue in Croatia in the nineteenth century is that by 1914 the majority of the most influential political leaders of the Croats assumed that the indefinite survival of an independent united Croatia, based on the national principle alone, was a political and international impossibility. Once having accepted this premise, which was based on careful consideration of the conditions of their historical past and their position in Europe, the Croatian leaders were compelled to seek a solution to their political future which was in conflict with the major trend of the nineteenth century, namely, the political unification of ethnically homogeneous people into a sovereign state. Although there was a strong nationalist movement in Croatia, which aimed at the creation of an independent state, it could not deal with the realities of the Croatian position. Practical considerations thus left the Croatians with two alternatives: they could either remain within the framework of the Habsburg empire, in union with Vienna or Budapest or both; or they could join with the Serbs and Slovenes in a federal South Slav state. The story of nineteenth-century nationalism in Croatia centers on the vacillation between these two possibilities. The aim at all times was to find the combination which would best protect the Croatian national individuality, since Croatia alone did not have the necessary prerequisites for a completely independent national existence.2

Observers of the Central European scene after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in 1918 were often disappointed by the vigorous national assertiveness of the Succession States, which seemed to expedite Hitler's aggressions and the Russian penetration of 1944–45. Retrospective assessments of the monarchy's historic role often cited economic unity, the centralized constitutions of both Austria and Hungary, the traditions of the bureaucracy, and the existence of strongly entrenched, pro-imperial classes as centripetal forces in a political complex which from Rudolf I's time often had yielded to particularism and administrative division.

In a rather agitated correspondence between Emperor Francis Joseph and Pope Pius IX in 1874, Pius IX highly praised the members of the Austrian episcopate, who, in his opinion, had, through their noble leadership, performed excellent work in helping the monarch to accomplish his goals. He asked, moreover, whether anyone could cite a single deed of a Catholic priest that could be used as a pretext for abrogating the concordat which the Austrian government had made with the Church in 1855 and denounced in July, 1870.

During the early part of the nineteenth century the Croatians were one of the most loyal of all the peoples in the Habsburg monarchy, and during the revolutionary movement of 1848–1849 they were one of the main pillars of strength of the dynasty. Yet, before the end of World War I the South Slav question in general and the Croatian question in particular had become one of the most dangerous problems of the whole Austro-Hungarian monarchy. To discuss how such a radical metamorphosis in Croatian national sentiment occurred within the course of less than seventy years is the aim of this paper.

Historians are generally agreed that until the very end of the Habsburg monarchy the army constituted one of the main pillars of the multinational empire.2 Even so, the view that the armed might was always a reliable instrument of the established order and that it was largely unaffected by the nationality problem cannot be accepted. On the contrary, throughout the period from 1815 to 1914 the nationality problem was constantly present in the army. On occasion, as in 1848–49, it actually divided the army against itself; at other times it corroded the loyalty of some contingents, and it often influenced political, administrative, strategic, and even tactical decisions. After 1867 the status of the Hungarian forces within the Dual Monarchy became one of the most crucial, and at the same time one of the most vexing, problems of the empire.

An important fact to keep in mind in studying the Slovenian nationality problem in the nineteenth-century Habsburg monarchy is the lack of coincidence between ethnic and administrative boundaries. Instead of living together in a single province, the Slovenes formed a significant percentage of the population of each of more than a half dozen different administrative subdivisions of the Austrian empire. Approximately half of them lived in provinces with a non-Slovenian majority. According to the official survey made by Carl Joseph von Czoernig, which was based on the 1846 census for the Austrian lands and that of 1850 for the kingdom of Hungary, there were 428,000 Slovenes and Serbo-Croatians (92 percent of the total population) in Carniola. There were 363,000 Slovenes (36 percent of all the inhabitants) in Styria; 96,000 (30 percent), in Carinthia;1 128,000 (67 percent), in Gorica (Görz); 25,000 (31.5 percent), in Trieste; and 32,000 (14 percent), in Istria. In addition, 45,000 Slovenes lived in the border areas that were added to the Transleithanian half of the dual monarchy after 1867 and 27,000 in the province of Venetia, which belonged to the Habsburg empire until 1866.

After the Habsburg empire rose to the position of a great power and successfully defended itself against the expansionist drives of Ottoman imperialism, both the population and the territory of the southeastern part of the monarchy began to increase. As a consequence of this expansion, an increasing number of Orthodox peoples were incorporated into the multinational empire on various legal bases. The Orthodox population of the empire certainly did not constitute anything resembling an undivided unit, whether in regard to the language which the people spoke or the length of time they lived in the area or belonged to the Habsburg monarchy. A real community of interests existed only insofar as folklore, tradition, and their common legal struggle for religious freedom were concerned. This was especially true of the Serbs and the Rumanians. During the course of their struggle to attain religious freedom a hierarchical social structure, dominated by the Serbian higher clergy, came into being which remained in existence for a long period of time.

In 1848–49 Austria could have introduced reforms which conceivably might have insured her continued existence for many generations and possibly might have finally made a true state out of the Habsburg domains. … [In] the course of the two [subsequent] generations until 1918 there never appeared an equally promising opportunity for the empire to carry out reform without risking its disintegration. This is not to say that Austria should not have taken this risk, which was smaller at the time of the compromise in 1867 than it was in 1905 and smaller in 1905 at the height of the Hungarian crisis than it was in 1917, when Engels' ominous prediction finally came true that with the victory of the Russian Revolution Austria would disintegrate.

By the turn of the twentieth century the disintegrative role of the nationalities in the Habsburg empire had gained a momentum that would probably have been impossible to arrest. But whether, in the larger scheme, it was the nationalities or military debility and other factors that sealed the fate of the empire is an issue which will doubtless continue to produce dissent.

The breakup of the Habsburg monarchy was perhaps the most exceptional change made in the political geography of the European world of our times. It would be too much to say that the shot fired at Sarajevo destroyed the Austro-Hungarian empire. But it is hardly an exaggeration to suggest that the young assassin was a living embodiment of the principle of nationalism in the South Slavic lands and that the shot which he fired was a deliberate blow at the political-geographic structure of the Habsburg monarchy. Those competent to discuss the question are almost unanimous in their verdict: the dissolution of the empire was brought on by a combination of external forces and an internal disintegration. The internal disintegration actually impelled the state to expose itself to the external forces. The works of scholars from many countries and disciplines2 who have carefullyanalyzed the structure and function of the Habsburg empire have been scrutinized with the view of studying the regions which formed this empire, their different characteristics and associations, and their connections with each other and to the state in order to ascertain to what extent the area of the empire constituted a state in the modern sense and to note any weaknesses in its morphology and physiology that helped to account for its collapse. The contribution of political geography to this critical evaluation of nationalism as a disintegrating force of the Habsburg empire lies in an analysis of the major problems of the internal situation of that empire.

The topic assigned for this section offers us an alternative: integration or disintegration. There is a certain lack of reality about such an alternative. One will retrace in vain the whole story of the confrontation of Czech and Habsburg in pursuit of a genuine Czech impulse to support Habsburg aims. There were periods of peace between the two protagonists, though perhaps tolerance would be a better term, but they were few and insubstantial. They were seldom used for anything but preparation for the next inevitable engagement. I take it that this tradition of enmity is almost axiomatic for Central European history. Little, then, will be said about the Czechs as a force leading toward the integration of Habsburg power. This leaves us a broad field of historical assessment and delineation: the story of the Czech odyssey from their first contact with the Habsburgs in the late thirteenth century until 1918, when they again became a sovereign people in their own land.