The dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a political, military, social and demographic process which occurred in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 and 1919. This was a major polyglot and multi-ethnic state which ruled a region covering modern-day Austria, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and parts of countries like Poland, Ukraine and Romania. There had been structural problems within the Austro-Hungarian Empire throughout the nineteenth century which boiled over in 1918 as the First World War effort collapsed for Austria-Hungary and social unrest began in cities like Vienna, Budapest and Prague. These evolved into full-blown revolutions and as the war came to an end the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed and new smaller nations emerged out of it such as Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, while Serbia acquired much of Austria-Hungary’s territory which it used to form the new state of Yugoslavia. The dissolution resulted in much migration around the Balkans and Central Europe as groups like the Hungarians migrated out of Romania to within the borders of the new Hungarian state.[1]
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Dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire chronology of events
The Austro-Hungarian Empire was a state which grew steadily over a period of centuries to become one of the most powerful nations in the world. It began as the private aristocratic fiefdom of the House of Habsburg in Austria way back in the High Middle Ages. Then, through many advantageous marriage alliances and rather fortuitous dynastic developments in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Habsburgs inherited major new lands, most notably the Kingdoms of Hungary, Bohemia and Croatia in 1526 following the death of King Louis II in battle against the Ottoman Empire that year. Then between 1772 and 1795 as a result of the Partitions of Poland, the Austrian state acquired most of southern Poland and parts of western Ukraine. In acknowledgement of the vast size of the state that had developed under the rule of the Habsburgs, a new Empire of Austria was declared as being in existence in 1804.[2]
As powerful and large as the Empire of Austria was, it was also a troubled state. Most of the major European powers of the nineteenth century had ethnic minorities living within their borders. The English had to deal with an unruly Irish subject people in Ireland. Prussia and later the German Empire had a Polish minority, while Russia also ruled many subject people in Finland, the Baltic States, Poland and Ukraine. However, none of these had to deal with the ethnic, lingual, cultural and religious diversity that prevailed in the Empire of Austria. According to the 1851 census, just 21% of the population was ethnically German, the ethnicity of the House of Habsburg and the ruling elite. Instead 40% of the population was Slavic groups like the Croats, Czechs, Slovenes and Slovaks. Hungarians made up over 13% of the population, while Jewish people, Romanians, Italians and other groups made up the remainder. There were over a dozen languages spoken here as well. Finally, while Roman Catholicism was the official religion of the Austrian elite, Lutheranism and other types of Protestantism prevailed in Hungary and Bohemia, and Orthodox Christianity was a major religion the further south into the Balkans one headed.[3]
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Signs of the ethnic, religious and national discontent this diversity created were seen in 1848 when the Hungarian Revolution broke out and saw an independent government established there before a major military crackdown the following year. In 1867, in order to allay the cost of maintaining military rule in Hungary, the Austrian government agreed to make the Hungarians dual partners in managing the state, with the Empire of Austria becoming the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a kind of dual monarchy. This was a compromise, but also an admission of the structural issues which prevailed within the Habsburg state.[4]
Eventually these issues would boil over as a result of the First World War and cause the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The war itself was sparked by the rise of Serb and Slavic nationalism in the Balkans, with the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by a Serb nationalist in the streets of Sarajevo on the 28th of June 1914 leading to a diplomatic crisis which eventually led to a pan-European war. In this the Kingdoms of Serbia and Romania would join the Entente of Britain, France and Russia, and they were consequently pitted against Austria-Hungary as a member of the Central Powers.[5]
The course of the war is well-known. It lasted just over four years from late July 1914 to early November 1918. What is often more overlooked is that Austria-Hungary’s war effort had collapsed weeks before the war ended. Leftist and nationalist movements, buoyed by the seeming success of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917, and spurred on by the collapsing military and economic situation following US entry into the war on the side of Britain and France the previous year, led to revolts breaking out across Austria-Hungary in October 1918. The Hungarian parliament voted in favor of ending the union with Austria and a short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic would be established there in 1919. Eventually in early November Emperor Karl I abdicated as the wider European war ended, bringing the Austro-Hungarian Empire to an end. For a time revolutionaries in Vienna favored union with Germany to form a Greater Germany, but the victorious powers in the war prohibited this. Thus, new independent republics would emerge out of the dissolution in Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Extensive territories in the Balkans were lost to Serbia and Romania through the treaties of Trianon and Saint-Germain,[6] with Serbia subsequently being formed into the larger Slavic state of Yugoslavia. A Polish state was also re-established at the end of the war out of lands taken from Germany and Austria-Hungary. Hence Austria was reduced to a country roughly one-eighth of the size that the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been prior to the war.[7]
Extent of migration associated with the dissolution
The dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire did lead to some considerable migration at the very end of the 1910s and into the 1920s. Most of this was caused by ethnic groups who now suddenly found themselves as ethnic minorities within another state moving to within the borders of their own nation state. A prominent example occurred in the case of Hungary and Romania. Under the terms of the Treaty of Trianon of 1920, the new Hungarian state was forced to cede extensive territory in Transylvania to Romania, one of the main victors in the war.[8] In response some 154,000 ethnic Hungarians relocated in 1920 from Transylvania to within Hungary’s new borders. This migration continued on a much smaller scale in the years that followed, though there is still a sizeable Hungarian minority in western Romania to this very day. Similar migratory patterns occurred across the borders of the newly established states following the dissolution, although the Romanian and Hungarian exchange was the most substantial.[9]
Demographic impact of the dissolution
The demographic impact of the dissolution was to create more ethnically homogenous states in Central Europe and the Balkans as the ethnic, lingual and religious soup that the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been became a series of more ethnically coherent states. Nevertheless, problems still remained. The new Yugoslavia was dominated by the Serbs and over seven decades later would violently break up as groups like the Croats, Slovenes and Bosniaks would attempt to acquire independence through the Yugoslav Wars, while Czechoslovakia would split more peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia after the Cold War.[10]
See also
Explore more about the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
- Austria, Births and Baptisms, 1651-1940 records collection on MyHeritage
- Austria-Hungary, Roman Catholic Indexes, 1612-1966 records collection on MyHeritage
- Hungary, Civil Registration, 1895-1980 records collection on MyHeritage
- Austria Newspapers records collection on MyHeritage
- A primer on Austro-Hungarian geography at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/1992/066/article-A001-en.xml
- ↑ https://www.habsburger.net/en/events/foundation-empire-austria-1804
- ↑ https://blogs.bl.uk/european/2017/07/peoples-and-languages-of-the-austrian-empire-in-19th-century-ethnographic-maps.html
- ↑ https://ww1.habsburger.net/en/chapters/dual-monarchy-two-states-single-empire
- ↑ https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/how-the-world-went-to-war-in-1914
- ↑ https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/saint-germain_treaty_of
- ↑ https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/1992/066/article-A001-en.xml
- ↑ https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52903721
- ↑ Iren Godri, ‘A Special Case of International Migration: Ethnic Hungarians Migrating from Transylvania to Hungary’, in Yearbook of Population Research, Vol. 40 (2004), pp. 45–72.
- ↑ https://www.britannica.com/topic/Velvet-Divorce