Last word
Saying alas
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
The last week has seen the sixtieth anniversaryof the Armistice which ended the Great War; and of several other events besides. In Poland crowds spontaneously celebrated national Independence Day for the first time since the last war: previously, the only days commemorated had been the October Revolution and the 'Liberation' by the Red Army. One anniversary has not been marked or remarked. Sixty years ago the ti.absburg empire classed into history — a but an evocative one. The last monarch, Charles, renounced his role in pvernrnent as Emperor of Austria on 11 lilovember, as King of Hungary on 13 "ember and then left Vienna forever. The fall of the Habsburgs and the end of !heir empire is for me a poignant event. This Is a common enough sentiment. In the 1920s H.A.L. Fisher wrote of the regret at the demise of Austria-Hungary which was felt among those who blamed nationalism for most of what was wrong with the mod 11 world. To an extent the sentiment is ,lndeed sentimental, a delusion. It is unhiswrical, as well as futile, to fret about what rnght have been. That is not to say, though, that we may not express regret at what did "PPen. W.H. Auden, in later life, changed or upped lines from his earlier poems. 4, of these emendations are certainly for the better. But I'm puzzled as to why Auden took so violently against the lines History to the defeated can say Alas 8ut cannot help or pardon. h,is was brutally cynical, the older Auden wald. On the contrary, it is the simple truth. e cannot help the Habsburgs and their doomed attempt to preserve a supra,"ational empire in the age of nationalism, OW we can surely say alas. Call ray own reaction sentimental, but Z:ntimentality works two ways. One of my ',..4vourite books is Mr A. J. P. Taylor's The rih elbsburg Monarchy. I read and re-read it, °wever, with exasperation and puzzleMentMy exasperation is with his central rnemiss that the monarchy's failure was aevitable. This is as unhistorical an attitude to8 Pining for what might have been. 'His inevitability' is a double-headed
the historian can toss it to make a Vaint either way. What has happened has r.sPPened but, as Mr Taylor has himself
°re recently observed, nothing in life is Inevitable except death. My puzzlement was with his undisguised c iL/nternpt for his subject. This does not in 1elf vitiate the book's quality. As Mr Tay(to quote him yet again) has said elseere: 'Dislike and contempt may be u4,,,ligerous if they dominate the historian's 'Id. Yet the example of Gibbon is there to show that they may be no barrier to a work of genius.' Quite so; but my puzzlement remained. And then, a couple of years ago in the New Statesman, Mr Taylor explained himself. He had been inspired when chronicling the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire, he said, by the belief that it had been replaced by something better. Even coming from a master of paradox and perversity that is an astonishing statement. There is an old Jewish proverb which states baldly: What comes after is worse. Those of us who are temperamentally inclined to believe the saying could scarcely ask for better proof than the history of Austria_ and Austria-Hungary. Maybe the claims and presumptions of the Habsburgs were untenable — but they were not contemptible. In the nineteenth century Austria claimed to be the Paramount Power in Italy and in Germany. That claim was shattered in 1859 and 1866; the outcome was an Italian national state and a German national state — one a joke, the other a nightmare. We cannot change what has happened but, as I say, we can regret it (there is not a battle in history — not even Hastings — whose result I regret as much as Koniggratz). We may smile at those Habsburg pretensions but, in view of ,what happened in the following century, should we sneer at them?
By 1914 Masaryk, who had formerly worked to make Austria a democratic federation of free peoples, had decided that the Habsburg empire had become no more than an instrument for German domination of the Slays. Perhaps he was right. He certainly played a major part in encompassing the end of the empire and in the founding of the Succession States, designed to be free and democratic. Alas for Masaryk's hopes. His own country, Czechoslovakia, knew two decades of threatened freedom, as did republican Austria. For the rest, the
last
sixty years has been a story of disaster. The 'peasant democracies' which succeeded Austria-Hungary became police states in the interwar years, and since the defeat of Hitler they have passed into the newer empire of Soviet Russia.
Today, of all the lands that composed Austria-Hungary in 1914, only republican Austria (with the territories ceded to Italy) enjoys rule as democratic and constitutional as sixty-five years ago. Not Mr Taylor, not at his most perverse, would maintain that the elements of justice and freedom flourish more vigorously now than they did under Francis Joseph in Prague and Budapest. Nor, I would add, in Zagreb. Tito may be the last Habsburg — a good Taylorian conceit — and one may admire his amazingly resilient struggle against Stalin and Stalin's successors. His regime is certainly less oppressive than any other in Eastern Europe. But to claim that Yugoslavia has free institutions —or likely to in the immediate future — is absurd.
Maybe one day Eastern Europe will be what Masaryk dreamed of, a community of
independent nation states living in amity. We must hope so. At the moment it seems that the only alternative to Austro-German domination is Russian domination; that the only 'freedom' available to the Slav peoples is freedom to live under the shadow of the greatest Slav nation, much as Metternich might have predicted. When we look back at all the sad attempts to make the Habsburg monarchy work in its last decades, at the bemused proponents of the 'Austrian idea', we might remember that for all his faults Francis Joseph was not Hitler or Stalin: what came after was worse.
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