Vintage

The EU's Viennese mirror

"Lessons to be learned from the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

If an EU bureaucrat travelled to turn-of-the-century Vienna, he would be surprised at how closely the empire it governed resembled today’s Europe. Like the EU, Austria-Hungary was a vast experiment in supranational engineering – a patchwork of kingdoms and nationalities knitted together in search of a common geopolitical destiny.

At its height, the empire was home to 51 million inhabitants from 14 language groups, 11 nationalities and five religions. Of these subjects, roughly half were Slav, a quarter German and a quarter Magyar, with a sprinkling of Italians and Romanians. Presiding over this microcosm of Europe was a pseudo-democratic monarchy, the governmental functions of which were split – in the form of a double-throned Emperor-King and twin Parliaments – between the largely independent Austrian and Hungarian halves of the realm.

Despite the Byzantine manner in which it functioned, the empire acted as a stabilising force for its peoples and the rest of Europe. To the scattered ethnic groups inhabiting the Habsburg lands, it performed the twin roles of referee and bouncer, pacifying the region’s indigenous rivalries and protecting its pint-sized nations from nearby predatory states. This in turn filled a geopolitical vacuum at the heart of the continent and placed a check on the expansionist appetites of Germany and Russia.

As long as it performed these functions, Austria was viewed as a “European necessity” – a balancer of nationalities and of nations for which there was no conceivable substitute.

.... In sum, the EU is positioned at the turn of the twenty-first century much like Austria-Hungary was at the turn of the twentieth. For both, the moment of deepest constitutional soul-searching arrived just when the project needed unity to cope with external challenges. For the empire, this confluence of domestic crisis and international flux proved to be too much. Three lessons from this earlier experience – two internal and one external – may be especially instructive for the leaders of the EU.

1 Two-speed unions don’t work. Perhaps the clearest lesson from Habsburg history is that a multinational union cannot exclude a significant constituency group from the ranks of constitutional stakeholders. As long as the Slavs saw themselves as second-class citizens, the empire remained stuck in introspective turmoil and unable to create a unified state. The best it could hope for was what the Viennese called fortwursteln – muddling through from crisis to crisis under the pretence of progress.

The EU may have entered a similar stage of its existence. A Franco-German power duo cannot indefinitely manage the affairs of a union of 27, any more than a German-Magyar duo could do so in a union of 11. Much as Austria-Hungary had to either make room for the Slavs, the EU must make room for the new members of Central Europe. Now, as then, the trick is to expand the original covenant without sacrificing the ability to effectively steer the union. Though Habsburg history does not furnish a model for how to accomplish this, it does show that a “multi-speed” union is not an option for squaring the circle. Such an arrangement creates entrenched privileges among the union’s haves and grudges among its have-nots that are more difficult to remove than the original crisis was to solve.

2 To survive, a multinational empire must be capable of replicating its founding settlement. The architects of the Austro-Hungarian union understood an important truth that Jean Monnet would re-discover: At the heart of effective supranational governance is a grand bargain between the project’s two largest nations. Both the 1867 and 1952 settlements occurred between a stronger industrial power and a weaker agricultural one, both involved states that were former adversaries, and both centred on an agreement to share sovereignty over a vital function of state. Now, as then, the challenge is continuing the momentum of this founding pact and replicating its success between other nationalities in the empire. Just as Austria needed a second “1867 moment” to occur between Germans and Slavs, the EU needs a second “1952 moment” to occur between its largest western and eastern members, Germany and Poland. Such a settlement will require three things that were missing in Austria-Hungary. First, it will require Germany, as the dominant power, to take the lead in devising and delivering an offer to deepen ties – something the Austrian Germans failed to do. Second, it will require Poland to relinquish the short-term domestic advantages its leaders derive from the politics of obstruction and accept the inevitability of German leadership in the union in exchange for inclusion in the steering group. Finally, it will require both powers to share sovereignty over a sensitive national resource. For Austria and Hungary this was the army; for France and Germany it was coal and steel; for Germany and Poland it may be natural gas. Until this deeper political rapprochement occurs, the have/have-not cycle of crisis will dominate German-Polish relations like it did Austrian-Slav relations.

3 Avoid over-dependence on external powers. Much as Austria-Hungary formed an alliance with Germany to fill a strategic need it was incapable of filling for itself (military defence), EU members have sought, through their rising intake of Russian gas, to meet a strategic need – energy security – that Europe on its own lacks. But as Habsburg history shows, in an asymmetrical relationship of this kind, short-term security can come at a long-term price. For the EU, the danger of over-reliance on Russia for a strategically vital commodity is twofold. First, it widens the divergence of interests between members like Germany, which share a privileged partnership and many common interests with Russia, and those like Poland that consider Moscow a paramount diplomatic and even military threat. Much as Austria’s alignment with Germany drove the Slavs to seek patronage from Russia at the expense of imperial unity, perceived alignments between Berlin and Moscow drive the new members to seek patronage from Washington at the expense of EU unity.

Second, over-dependence on Russia creates incentives for Moscow to keep the EU dependent and thus divided. As Austria discovered in the early 1900s, geopolitical dependency is a slippery slope: once it starts, the dominant power will always have stronger incentives to use the dependent ally as an extension of its own interests than to see it regain freedom of manoeuvre. While Europe is unlikely to gain independence from Russia as an energy source, it should seek a source of leverage with which to maintain the relationship on some semblance of equal terms – something Austria failed to achieve with Germany.

As with all historical analogies, the parallels between Habsburg Austria and the EU eventually break down. Unlike its predecessor, Europe today does not have to cope with the twin centrifugal forces of irredentist nationalism and great power war. Nevertheless, to the extent that a policy-relevant antitype can be found for today’s EU, none is more apt than Austria-Hungary. Nor is the picture it paints entirely a bleak one: for all its inherent weaknesses, a multinational union can survive a lot, provided it is seen as politically and geopolitically irreplaceable. All told, the Habsburg Monarchy endured four crisis-ridden centuries. Not bad for an entity with two capitals and 14 languages. The danger was never so much sudden disintegration as terminal complacency. Of Austria-Hungary’s various self-inflicted wounds, the one that proved fatal was its contentment with political routine just when it needed wholesale reform and strategic retrenchment.

In the wake of enlargement, the EU has reached a similar constitutional and geopolitical crossroads. The danger is not that it will disappear from the map as Austria-Hungary did. Rather, it is that the union will hobble along – with its compromise-cum-constitution and unbreakable addiction to Russian gas – in a state of perpetual existential limbo. To avoid this fate, EU leaders must find what Austria did not: a lasting political settlement between the union’s haves and have-nots – one that is based, not just on the right distribution of votes in the European Council, but on fundamental rapprochement in German-Polish relations. And this must be achieved while keeping an energy-rich and geopolitically reanimated Russia at arm’s length. Only when it has surmounted these challenges will the EU represent a “necessity” today as it was for Europeans during the Cold War. It avoid the fate of an earlier integration project that ceased to convince its citizens of its own indispensability. In the end, those who fought to bring about the empire’s demise would live to mourn its passing; as subsequent events would show, the old empire was still more of a necessity than they realised. So too would we mourn the premature passing of an empire whose most important work still lies ahead."

Wess Mitchell is Director of Research for the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) based in Washington, a non-profit, non-partisan public policy research institute dedicated to the study of Central Europe.