How a frontier march became an empire and then a small republic

Where the name came from

Charlemagne, king of the Franks, conquered the area in 788, encouraged colonisation and introduced Christianity, and as part of Eastern Francia the core territories of modern Austria were bequeathed to the house of Babenberg. The region was known as the marchia Orientalis, the eastern march, which describes exactly what it was: a frontier district of a larger realm, held against what lay further east.

The native name records the same thing. Österreich derives from the Old High German Ostarrîchi, meaning eastern realm, and the word first appears in a document of 996. A country that has spent its whole existence being a frontier or a corridor is named for having been one.

The march became a duchy in 1156 and an archduchy in 1453, which is the sequence by which a border district acquired the standing of a state. Each promotion was a matter of imperial law rather than of conquest, and the pattern of gaining position through legal instruments and dynastic arrangement rather than through war became the characteristic Habsburg method.

How a dynasty acquired half of Europe

Austria was dominated by the House of Habsburg and the House of Habsburg-Lorraine from 1273 to 1918, which is six and a half centuries of continuous rule by one family over the same territory. Very little in European history matches that.

The method was marriage, inheritance and election rather than primarily conquest. The Habsburgs accumulated crowns across central Europe, Spain and the Low Countries by dynastic arrangement, and they held the elective title of Holy Roman Emperor almost continuously for centuries, which gave a family of moderate territorial holdings the standing of the leading power in Europe.

The eastern expansion came from war and it came from the Ottomans. Vienna was besieged and successfully defended in 1683 under the command of John III Sobieski, king of Poland, and the Great Turkish War that followed put most of Hungary under Austrian control during the long reign of Leopold I. That transformed the monarchy from a German principality with claims into a multinational empire with a Danubian core.

What resulted was a state defined by a family rather than by a nation, governing Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Slovenes, Croats, Italians, Romanians and others under a single crown. That arrangement worked for as long as dynastic loyalty outweighed national loyalty, and the nineteenth century ended that condition.

Why an empire replaced an empire

In 1806 Emperor Francis II dissolved the Holy Roman Empire, and Austria became the Austrian Empire. The change was a response to Napoleon: a title that had existed for a thousand years was abolished by its own holder, who had already taken a new one that did not depend on election by German princes.

Austria was then part of the German Confederation until the middle of the century, and the question of who would lead the German lands, Austria or Prussia, was settled against Austria by war. Exclusion from Germany forced the monarchy to look east and south, towards the territories it already held, and to solve the internal problem those territories posed.

The solution was the compromise of 1867, which reorganised the state as a dual monarchy of Austria and Hungary, with two governments, two parliaments and a shared monarch, army and foreign policy. It satisfied the Hungarians and satisfied nobody else, because every other nationality inside the empire could now see that a national settlement was available and had not been offered to them.

That unresolved question is the direct line to the war. After the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, Emperor Franz Joseph declared war on Serbia, and the conflict escalated into the First World War within weeks.

Why the nineteenth century broke it

The problem the monarchy could not solve was the one the whole nineteenth century was about. A state organised around a dynasty governs subjects; a state organised around a nation governs a people, and the second idea spread across Europe faster than the first could adapt to it.

Inside the empire that produced a set of movements pulling in incompatible directions. Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Croats, Slovenes, Italians and Romanians each developed national programmes, and satisfying any one of them meant refusing another. The Habsburg answer was to concede where pressure was greatest and to hold elsewhere, which produced the settlement of 1867 and left everyone else waiting.

Among the German speakers the movement ran the other way. Many Austrian Germans across the social spectrum promoted pan-Germanism, and figures such as Georg Ritter von Schönerer campaigned to reinforce an ethnic German identity and to attach Austria to Germany. A dynastic empire therefore faced a nationalism among its own core population that wanted to dissolve it into a larger German state.

By 1914 the monarchy was managing a set of national questions it had no mechanism for answering, and it went to war partly to demonstrate that it could still act. The war destroyed it, and what emerged was a set of national states in the territory it had governed, plus a German-speaking remnant that spent the next twenty years arguing about whether it should exist at all.

What the collapse left behind

The empire's defeat and collapse led to the proclamation of the Republic of German-Austria in 1918 and to the First Austrian Republic. What the new state inherited was a capital built to administer fifty million people and a territory containing about six million, most of the industrial capacity of the old empire cut off behind new borders, and no agreed idea of what the country was for.

The interwar republic was hampered from the start by the economic burden of the war and the reparations required by the victorious allies. It did produce pioneering reforms in the 1920s, particularly in Vienna, whose municipal housing and welfare programmes served as models for social policy elsewhere in Europe.

Politically it failed. The republic polarised between two armed political camps, collapsed into civil conflict and authoritarian rule in the 1930s, and lost the capacity to defend itself. Pan-German sentiment had been present since the nineteenth century, promoted by figures such as Georg Ritter von Schönerer, arguing that Austrian Germans belonged in a single German state.

The end came in 1938. Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg acknowledged Austria as a German state while wanting it to remain independent, and announced a referendum on 9 March 1938 to be held on 13 March on precisely that question. The vote never took place; Germany annexed the country first, and Austria ceased to exist as a state for seven years.

What the monarchy built and what it cost

The Habsburg state was an administrative achievement before it was anything else. Governing a dozen nationalities across central Europe without a common language required a civil service, a legal code, a postal system, a railway network and an army recruited from everywhere, and the bureaucratic tradition that produced still shapes how Austria is administered.

The building programme was the visible half. Vienna was rebuilt in the nineteenth century with a ring boulevard replacing the fortifications, and the museums, opera house, parliament, university and government buildings placed along it were designed as a statement about what the monarchy was. Comparable programmes ran in Budapest, Prague, Kraków, Trieste and Zagreb, all of which were Habsburg cities.

The cost was carried unevenly. The capital absorbed the revenue and the display, the peripheries supplied the soldiers and the taxes, and the imbalance was one of the grievances the national movements organised around. A monarchy that spent on its centre was easy to describe as a foreign power by anyone living far from it.

What Austria kept after 1918 was the centre without the periphery. The institutions, the buildings and the administrative habits designed for an empire remained inside a small republic, which is a large part of why modern Austria has more of everything institutional than a country of nine million would build for itself.

What the occupation decided

Austria fought the Second World War as part of Germany, and Austrians participated in the war and in the crimes committed during it in numbers proportionate to the population. The republic was restored in 1945 and the country was then occupied by the four allied powers and divided into zones, with Vienna itself divided in the same way.

The occupation lasted a decade, longer than in western Germany, because Austria sat at the point where the western and Soviet spheres met and neither of them would leave while the other remained in place. The negotiations that ended it took years and were shaped throughout by the Cold War.

Full independence returned on 15 May 1955 with the Austrian State Treaty, concluded with the allies of the Second World War. All occupation troops had left by 26 October, and on that day Austria declared permanent neutrality by act of parliament, which was the condition on which the Soviet Union had agreed to withdraw.

The account Austria then told about itself was that it had been the first victim of Nazi aggression. That description served a purpose in 1945 and it was substantially incomplete, and revising it in public did not begin in earnest until the 1980s. The revision is recent enough that how the period is taught and commemorated is still argued about.

What the second republic built

The Second Republic was built on cooperation between the two political camps that had fought each other in the 1930s, and that decision shaped everything after it. Coalition government, the social partnership between organised employers and organised labour, and a large state-owned industrial sector were the instruments, and they produced four decades of stability and rising prosperity.

Neutrality gave the country a role it could not otherwise have had. A neutral state on the line between the blocs became a venue for negotiation and a seat for international organisations, which is why Vienna hosts a set of institutions out of proportion to the size of the country.

The end of the Cold War changed the position again. The border that had made Austria a frontier for forty years opened, the central European markets the monarchy had once governed became accessible, and Austrian firms and banks moved into them from a starting position no western competitor had.

Austria joined the European Union on 1 January 1995 and the Schengen area in 1997, and the meaning of neutrality narrowed accordingly to non-membership of a military alliance. A country that spent a millennium as a frontier of something larger is now an interior member of a union, which is the least frontier-like position it has occupied in its history, and the reason the country's self-description has taken several decades to catch up with its circumstances. Austria: politics works through the institutions that resulted and Austria: overview what the republic looks like now.