The Habsburgs
The Habsburg Monarchy, 1815-1918. By A. J. P. Taylor. (Mac- millan. 15s.) ,
THIS is constitutional history, the study of the distribution of power in the imperial system. It is from the outset intended to be a narrow and confined study in which all the great, dynamic forces in the history of the period are observed, and sometimes judged, only in their effects upon the structure of the sovereignty. No objection can properly be raised to this method on the ground of its specialisation. Criticism must restrict itself to judging, first, whether the author rightly and fully estimates the effects within his field of the forces which he does not directly study, and, secondly, whether within his self-chosen limits he correctly describes and interprets the constitutional movements themselves.
It will be allowed that Mr. Taylor deals very adequately with the impact of the different nationalities upon the Habsburg state. All the salient elements in that intricace struggle—the conflict of the "historic peoples," Magyars, Germans, Poles and Italians, with one another, the steady upward pressure throughout the century of the submerged nationalities, and the conflict of the Crown with all, each element is given its place in the author's narrative. This is indeed the main achievement of the book, and in the author's view its chief lesson. That lesson is that in ,the lands once ruled by the Habsburgs as long as history counts for anything . . . lord and servant, master and slave, the privileged historic nationalities and the submerged nationalities, who have won their own way to freedom, can never work together. Magyar and Pole, German and Italian can co-operate ; but German and Czech, Italian and Serb, Magyar and Roumanian, Pole and Little Russian cannot.
This is a vigorous conclusion. But it is too narrowly based. It does not take sufficient account, it may be suggested, of the economic and diplomatic forces of the period (excluded by Mr. Taylor from his direct inquiry) and their effects upon the Habsburg Monarchy. On the diplomatic side, it may be said that one main reason why the Dual Monarchy stood so long (and from 1867 on Mr. Taylor speaks constantly of its mori- bundity) is that its integrity was held by other German statesmen to be indispensable to Prussian Great Power status. When in 1908 Billow underlined the bankruptcy of German foreign policy in his declaration of its total dependence upon Austria-Hungary he was expressing a principle which, admittedly in a more qualified form, had been a main part of Bismarckian diplomacy. On the economic side, it may be doubted whether Mr. Taylor takes sufficient account of the extent to which the financial and monetary developments of the century, as well as the gradual demarcation, with increasing industrialism, of natural areas of economy, pressed, in the Danubian basin as elsewhere in Europe, for institutions which cut across and ' transcended national boundaries. That these forces failed finally to produce a federal Austrian State is, perhaps, an indication of their weakness in this period. That they supported for so long a State so flagrantly at issue with the political aspirations of its subject peoples as the Habsburg Monarchy is an indication of their strength. In the analysis of the constitutional history of the Monarchy Mr. Taylor shows an elaborate and impressive dexterity. lie has done a permanent service here in disentangling the confused devices which, from the Bach system to the end of the dual regime, were the characteristic expression of Habsburg incom- petence. His recurrent judgement of the Habsburgs, and especi- ally of Francis Joseph, is that they failed utterly to learn the lesson of their century, that the peoples must be admitted to a participation in government or the State would perish At the same time, Mr. Taylor as regularly _reminds us, this insight was never possible.
In 1905 Francis Joseph had been given the chance to undo the mistakes of 1867;. inevitably he failed to take that chance, because in 1906 as in 1867 a policy of co-operation with the subject peoples was not a historic possibility for him.
A good part of Mr. Taylor's judgements of persons are of this kind : the latter are first condemned and then exonerated. The arrogant Magyar, the unpleasant Pole, the sham, pedantic German, the upstart Czech, all were futile all were irresponsible. The Prime Ministers of the Habsburg Empire are passed before us like faces in a Rogues' Gallery. But they were bad because they had to be; their vice was "historic legacy." Rounded historian's judgements. Yet they succeed less in conveying impartiality than in expressing the author's deeply contemporary reaction to the optimistic liberalism of the mid-nineteenth century. It should be added that Mr. Taylor fmdi his main relief, in a century of despair, in the contemplation of the noble Deak and
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