The history of the Habsburg Empire longs for syntheses. The puzzle of languages, political movements, and religions; the juxtaposition of backwardness and modernity, of innovation and tradition, offers one a fascinating mosaic of pieces with which academics and intellectuals can play. That the empire fell so utterly and completely in 1918, shattering all those pieces of the mosaic, makes coming up with synthetic accounts that reassemble and impart coherence all the more challenging and stimulating. Moreover, the long-underway project of Habsburg studies to revise and reassess the empire, shedding the assumptions that have underwritten histories of inevitable decline and fall, has given the impetus for new synthetic accounts that offer scholars and students a fair appraisal of the empire's last two hundred years.
Enter this book under review. Marco Bellabarba's Das Habsburgerreich, itself a revised translation of L'impero asburgico, which appeared in 2014, offers a sweeping and often engaging account of the Habsburg Empire in its last one hundred and fifty years, from the accension of Joseph II to the position of Holy Roman Emperor to the collapse of the empire in World War I.
Bellabarba's narrative begins with a familiar story, the death of Joseph II and the rolling back of his ambitious reforms that would have administratively ended Hungarian distinctiveness. This moment is also when C. A. Macartney began his own magisterial synthetic account of the empire. But while Macartney cast the death of Joseph II as the beginning of decline, Bellabarba tells a similar story with a raised eyebrow. He wants us to be skeptical of this narrative, even as he tells it.
The question that frames the opening pages of the book concerns which direction the Habsburg Empire should face: toward the Holy Roman Empire or, inwardly, toward its own territories. The Prussian challenge to Habsburg hegemony in Germany spurs a turning inward, toward reorganization and economic and fiscal integration of its own territories. With this narrative framework in place, Bellabarba covers the series of reforms under Maria Theresa and her chief administrators, Count Friedrich Wilhlem von Haugwitz and Prince Wenzel Anton Kaunitz. By the time the narrative fully turns to Joseph II, we see the internal tensions take shape that guide the narrative to the end: the impetus to reform, resistance to centralization among regional elites, and the Habsburgs’ attempts to manage these tensions—all the while maintaining its status as a great power in Europe.
Subsequent sections cover the period of the Napoleonic Wars, the Polish Partitions, and the reconfiguration of Habsburg territories after 1815. Again, the focus of the book remains the juggling and juxtaposition of these territories and the Habsburgs’ place in the European configuration. Nonetheless, the Vienna Congress is left out of the story. In the middle third of the book, the author covers the growth of the imperial civil service and the resistance to change and central authority they spawned in the provinces.
The revolutions of 1848 are covered ably, as is the period of neoabsolutism that follows. Key here are the new national arguments that become part of the language of politics in 1848 and the ways in which the Habsburg policy makers seek to counter and challenge this language. Financial pressures lead to painful but sweeping solutions: reform, restructuring, and rebalancing. A fourth chapter covers the constitutional reconfigurations in Austria and Hungary after 1860, which brought not only representative governments at the local, regional, and provincial levels—with concomitant control of the purse—but also new challenges and bones of contention for political activists. The Dualist Settlement of 1867 and the political dominance of the liberals in Austria and Hungary (and the differences between them) are covered before the final long chapter on the age of dualism and World War I.
As such, this is a political history. It gives great attention to monarchs and their advisors as well as social change and transformation. Cultural and intellectual history is largely absent. Vienna's place as an important cultural center for the German- and, indeed, Slavic-speaking world is given no mention. Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Mahler, or Schoenberg are not here. Nor are Schnitzler, Freud, Ady, Jokai, or anyone else, save a few opening quotes from Robert Musil. What we have therefore is a political and social story, one that follows the patterns of older histories that deemed the Habsburg Empire incapable of reform in the face of the major social transformations of the nineteenth century. Those elements are here, again with a degree of skepticism.
The book excels when it goes into the regional politics of the empire. Particularly well-integrated are social and economic issues and policy responses by government officials and local elites. Moreover, the author's treatment and range of provincial differences within the empire are both insightful and impressive. Interesting comparisons are made between how the Habsburg policy makers approached ruling Galicia, where they satisfied the aspirations of the nobles, and the rich province of Lombardy-Venetia, where they did not. Even so, the book's reliance on research published before 2014 starts to show its intellectual age—an indication of how fast the field has been moving in the past twenty years. Notably, the sweeping assessment of the provincial administration in the province of Galicia could have benefited from incorporating the findings of Iryna Vushko's Politics of Retreat, published in 2015, which counters many of Bellabarba's assumptions on the Habsburg administration.
While the book is well-produced, with color maps and a translation that captures the sweep and simplicity of the original Italian, the book's German text lets us down in places. Oftentimes, the translator has used generic German words when the translation calls for a historically specific Austro-German word; for instance, a secondary-school exit certification is translated as Abitur instead of Matura—the word used in the Habsburg Empire and in several of its successor states. The feudal institution of compulsory labor is likewise rendered as Frondienst in some chapters and Robot in others. Non-German and non-Italian names and nouns here are frequently misspelled (Föispán instead of Főispán, Appony instead of Apponyi, Obrenoviĉ instead of Obrenović) or missing diacritics (Tarnow instead of Tarnów), creating more confusion for the reader.
In the end, the book demonstrates how difficult a synthetic account of the monarchy is. Not everything here is convincing, nor is it up to date. And while the author's treatment is skeptical of the old narratives of the empire, he still follows in their footsteps. But the account is readable, sympathetic, insightful, and balanced. And this, given everything we know and all that we still do not about the old empire, is a valuable contribution.
