Concept

Austria-Hungary

Overview

Austria-Hungary, also referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire and officially as the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, was a multi-national constitutional dual empire in Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. A military and diplomatic alliance, it consisted of two sovereign states with a single monarch who was titled both the Emperor of Austria and the Apostolic King of Hungary. Austria-Hungary constituted the last phase in the constitutional evolution of the Habsburg monarchy: it was formed with the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 in the aftermath of the Austro-Prussian War, following wars of independence by Hungary (primarily Rákóczi's War of Independence of 1703–1711 and the Hungarian Revolution of 1848–1849) in opposition to Habsburg rule. It was dissolved shortly after Hungary terminated the union with Austria in 1918 at the end of World War I.

Austria-Hungary was one of Europe's major powers, and was the second-largest country in Europe in area (after Russia) and the third-most populous (after Russia and the German Empire), while being among the 10 most populous countries worldwide. The Empire built up the fourth-largest machine-building industry in the world. With the exception of the territory of the Bosnian Condominium, the Empire of Austria and the Kingdom of Hungary were separate sovereign countries in international law.

At its core was the dual monarchy, which was a real union between Cisleithania, the northern and western parts of the former Austrian Empire, and Transleithania, which corresponded to the medieval territories of the Kingdom of Hungary. Following the 1867 reforms, the Austrian and Hungarian states were co-equal in power. The two countries conducted unified diplomatic and defence policies. For these purposes, "common" ministries of foreign affairs and defence were maintained under the monarch's direct authority, as was a third finance ministry responsible only for financing the two "common" portfolios. A third component of the union was the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia, an autonomous region under the Hungarian crown, which negotiated the Croatian–Hungarian Settlement in 1868. After 1878, Bosnia and Herzegovina came under Austro-Hungarian joint military and civilian rule until it was fully annexed in 1908, provoking the Bosnian crisis.

Austria-Hungary was one of the Central Powers in World War I, which began with an Austro-Hungarian war declaration on the Kingdom of Serbia on 28 July 1914. It was already effectively dissolved by the time the military authorities signed the armistice of Villa Giusti on 3 November 1918. The Kingdom of Hungary and the First Austrian Republic were treated as its successors de jure, whereas the independence of the First Czechoslovak Republic, the Second Polish Republic, and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, respectively, and most of the territorial demands of the Kingdom of Romania and the Kingdom of Italy were also recognized by the victorious powers in 1920.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Austria-Hungary is discussed.

Since Austria-Hungary is surrounded on all sides by states composed of the same races as are within its own borders, its foreign policy is necessarily intimately connected with its internal policy. To keep seven million Serbs and South Slavs within the frame of its own military state, Austria-Hungary is compelled to extinguish the hearthfire that kindles their political leanings--the independent kingdom of Servia…
Leon Trotsky, The Bolsheviki and World Peace
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is
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From hence arose the several orders, with or without a monarch (which are called states), in every European country; the strong traces of which, where monarchy predominated, were never wholly extinguished or merged in despotism. In the few places where monarchy was cast off, the spirit of European monarchy was still left. Those countries still continued countries of states; that is, of classes, orders, and…
Edmund Burke, Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke
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The first pamphlet we lay before the public is called _The Northern Crisis_. It was printed in London in 1716, and relates to the intended Dano-Anglo-Russian _invasion of Skana_ (Schonen). During the year 1715 a northern alliance for the partition, not of Sweden proper, but of what we may call the Swedish Empire, had been concluded between Russia, Denmark, Poland, Prussia, and Hanover. That partition forms the first…
Karl Marx, Secret Diplomatic History of The Eighteenth Century
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MARCH 15th, 1852. Bohemia and Croatia (another disjected member of the Slavonic family, acted upon by the Hungarian, as Bohemia by the German) were the homes of what is called on the European continent "Panslavism." Neither Bohemia nor Croatia was strong enough to exist as a nation by herself. Their respective nationalities, gradually undermined by the action of historical causes that inevitably absorbs into a more…
Friedrich Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution
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The empire of Russia is the largest in the whole globe, extending from west to east upwards of two thousand common leagues of France,[1] and about eight hundred in its greatest breadth from north to south. It borders upon Poland and the Frozen Sea, and joins to Sweden and China. Its length from the island of Dago, in the westernmost part of Livonia, to its most eastern limits, takes in near one hundred and seventy…
Voltaire, The History of Peter the Great, Emperor of Russia
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