Between Hammer and Anvil

This chapter traces the breakdown of the Metternichian system, from the time of the revolution of 1848 and Crimean War to the debilitating defeats by Italy in 1859 and Prussia in 1866. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the Habsburg Monarchy suffered defeats in a series of short, sharp wars that would bring an end to the Metternich system and pave the way for Austria’s demise as a Great Power. These changes occurred not primarily because of economic decay or the empire’s internal complexity but instead because Austria lost the tools that it had used in the past to manage the sequencing and duration of its wars. This was the result of both structural changes beyond its leaders’ control and avoidable errors and a deviation from the principles that had formerly shaped its past statecraft. Specifically, Austria’s leaders abandoned the flexible statecraft that had allowed them to control conflict sequencing and avoid isolation; rivals adopted new technologies that denied the monarchy’s armies the ability to use attrition and terrain to prolong conflict and outlast stronger militaries; and nationalism trumped treaty rights as a source of territorial legitimacy, allowing hostile polities to form in the areas that had previously served as the monarchy’s buffer zones. Deprived of its traditional strategic toolbox, Austria was forced by its strongest rival to accept cohabitation with its strongest ethnic minority and for the first time had to absorb the full costs of managing a 360-degree defensive position.

Harvest of Briars

This chapter examines the competition with the Ottoman Empire and Russia, from the reconquest of Hungary to Joseph II’s final Turkish war. On its southern and eastern frontiers, the Habsburg Monarchy contended with two large land empires: a decaying Ottoman Empire, and a rising Russia determined to extend its influence on the Black Sea littorals and Balkan Peninsula. In balancing these forces, Austria faced two interrelated dangers: the possibility of Russia filling Ottoman power vacuums that Austria itself could not fill, and the potential for crises here, if improperly managed, to fetter Austria’s options for handling graver threats in the west. In dealing with these challenges, Austria deployed a range of tools over the course of the eighteenth century. In the first phase (1690s–1730s), it deployed mobile field armies to alleviate Turkish pressure on the Habsburg heartland before the arrival of significant Russian influence. In the second phase (1740s–70s), Austria used appeasement and militarized borders to ensure quiet in the south while focusing on the life-or-death struggles with Frederick the Great. In the third phase (1770s–90s), it used alliances of restraint to check and keep pace with Russian expansion, and recruit its help in comanaging problems to the north. Together, these techniques provided for a slow but largely effective recessional, in which the House of Austria used cost-effective methods to manage Turkish decline and avoid collisions that would have complicated its more important western struggles.

“Si Vis Pacem”

This chapter explores the outworkings of geography and administrative complexity on Habsburg conceptions of military force and political power more broadly. The Habsburg Monarchy’s physical and political geography shaped how its leaders thought about war. Austria’s position at the heart of Europe dictated that it would be a continental power and thus need large land armies to achieve security. But encirclement by powerful rivals meant that Austria could not defend all of its frontiers simultaneously using military force alone. Internal complexities placed further limitations on the size and capabilities of Habsburg armies, curtailing their utility as offensive instruments. Together, these constraints influenced Habsburg strategic behavior by encouraging the development of defensive conceptions of force that sought to avoid risk when possible, highlighting gaps that would need to be filled to augment the monarchy’s weak military capabilities, and prompting the systematic development of strategy as a tool for coping with Austria’s difficult environment, with a particular emphasis on managing the time parameters of competition and avoiding the full impact of the virtually limitless threats facing the monarchy.

The Habsburg Puzzle

This introductory chapter provides a background of the Austrian Habsburgs. Amassed over several centuries by marriage, war, diplomacy, and luck, the eastern realm of the Austrian Habsburgs was an omnium gatherum of tribes and languages—German, Magyar, Slav, Jew, and Romanian—bound together by geographic happenstance, legal entailment, and the person of the emperor who ruled them. The lands inhabited by this multiethnic menagerie were a place of war; in every direction, the Austrian Habsburgs faced enemies. Indeed, the outside environment placed Austria in a position of continual danger while the political and economic structure of the empire narrowed the range of viable tools for responding effectively to external threats and putting it on a secure long-term footing. Yet somehow, despite the seemingly insurmountable threats arrayed against it, the Habsburg Monarchy had survived. It outlasted Ottoman sieges, Bourbon quests for continental hegemony, repeated efforts at dismemberment by Frederick the Great, and no fewer than four failed attempts to defeat Napoleon Bonaparte. Each time, it weathered the threat at hand and more often than not emerged on the winning side. Thus, by virtually any standard measure, the Habsburg Empire must be judged a geopolitical success.

Epilogue

This epilogue argues that many of the problems that the Habsburgs faced are present today. Geopolitics remains as a persistent and reintensifying force in which Great Powers seek to survive in competition with other large, purposeful actors. In this contest, geography remains both a key determinant of success and its ultimate prize. Advances in technology have only partially mitigated the effects of geography; even in the era of nuclear weapons, the search for security comes down to a battle for space in which finite resources must be arrayed in time to deal with virtually infinite challenges. As in the Habsburg period, the threats arrayed against today’s West are multidirectional in nature and vary widely in form, ranging from revisionist Great Powers with large conventional armies to economically backward but numerous and religiously motivated enemies employing asymmetrical weapons and tactics. The chapter then considers a few broad principles of Habsburg strategic statecraft which stand out as potentially relevant in any era.

The Habsburg Legacy

This chapter discusses the Habsburg grand strategy. The Habsburg Empire had an especially pressing need to engage in the pursuit of grand strategy because of its vulnerable location and the unavailability of effective offensive military instruments with which to subdue the threats around its frontiers. Weakness is provocative, and apathy is rarely rewarded in even the most forgiving of strategic environments. For an impecunious power in the vortex of east-central European geopolitics, these traits, if permitted to coexist for long, would lead to the extinction of the state. This was the signal lesson from the wars of the eighteenth century, which had culminated in a succession struggle that saw a militarily weak Austria dangerously bereft of allies invaded from three directions and almost destroyed. These experiences spurred Habsburg leaders to conceptualize and formalize the matching of means to large ends in anticipation of future threats. The result was a conservative grand strategy that used alliances, buffer states, and a defensive army to manage multifront dynamics, avoid strains beyond Austria’s ability to bear, and preserve an independent European center under Habsburg leadership.

Barricades of Time

This chapter examines Austria at its post-Napoleonic peak, assessing congress diplomacy and the pecuniary, forts-based system that undergirded it. The Habsburg Monarchy emerged from the Napoleonic Wars in a position of unprecedented strength. In the postwar settlement at the Congress of Vienna, Austria regained lost territories to form an expanded empire whose possessions and dependencies stretched from Venice to Cracow. To protect these enlarged holdings, Habsburg leaders extrapolated on past frontier strategies to build a European-wide security system based on two broad components: a reorganized and fortified network of buffer territories integrating neighboring lands into Austrian defense; and elaborate diplomatic structures that mediated conflict and co-opted rivals into the joint management of Habsburg buffers. The resulting “Vienna system” mitigated the time pressure of managing multiple frontiers while converting long-standing enemies into participants in the maintenance of Austrian power. This, in turn, obviated the need for large standing military commitments on the scale that would have been demanded to manage Austria’s sprawling position through force alone. The apogee of Habsburg strategic statecraft, this system of security endowed Austria with many of the attributes of hegemony at an affordable cost to itself, while creating conditions of European stability that lasted for half a century.

Teufelfranzosen

This chapter traces the contest with France, from the wars of Louis XIV to the bitter life-or-death struggle with the revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte. More advanced than the Ottomans and bigger than Prussia, France was capable of fielding large modern armies and elaborate alliances to threaten the Erblände from multiple sides. In conflicts with France, Austria was not able to count on the military-technological advantage that it enjoyed against the Turks, or the greater size and resources that gave it an edge against Prussia. Instead, Austria learned over time to contain French power through the defensive use of space, building extensive buffer zones to offset France’s advantages in offensive capabilities. Habsburg strategy on the western frontier evolved through three phases. In wars with the Bourbon kings, successive Habsburg monarchs cultivated the smaller states of the German Reich and northern Italy as clients, committed to sharing the burden of defense through local armies and tutelary fortresses in wartime. Against Napoleon, these buffers collapsed, forcing Austria to use strategies of delay and accommodation similar to those employed against Frederick II to wear down and outlast a stronger military opponent. And in the peace that followed, Austria restored and expanded its traditional western security system, using confederated buffers and frontier fortresses to deter renewed French revisionism.

“The Monster”

This chapter details the struggle with Prussia, from Frederick the Great’s first invasion of Silesia to the stalemate of the War of the Bavarian Succession (1778–79). Though a member of the German Reich and titular supplicant to the Habsburg Holy Roman emperor, Prussia possessed predatory ambitions and a military machine with which to realize them. Under Frederick II (the Great), Prussia launched a series of wars against the Habsburg lands that would span four decades and bring the Habsburg Monarchy to the brink of collapse. Though physically larger than Prussia, Austria was rarely able to defeat Frederick’s armies in the field. Instead, it used strategies of attrition, centered on terrain and time management, to draw out the contests and mobilize advantages in population, resources, and allies. First, in the period of greatest crisis (1740–48), Austria used tactics of delay to separate, wear down, and repel the numerically superior armies of Frederick and his allies. Second, from 1748 to 1763, Austria engineered allied coalitions and reorganized its field army to offset Prussian advantages and force Frederick onto the strategic defensive. Third, from 1764 to 1779, it built fortifications to deter Prussia and finally seal off the northern frontier. Together, these techniques enabled Austria to survive repeated invasions, contain the threat from Prussia, and reincorporate it into the Habsburg-led German system.

Damnosa Hereditas

This chapter looks at the constitutional makeup of the Habsburg state and the limitations it placed on the mobilization of resources. In contrast to its physical geography, the political geography of the Danubian Basin greatly complicated the task of Habsburg empire building. Accumulated in a pell-mell fashion over several centuries, the territorial holdings of the Austrian Habsburgs formed a composite state made up of multiple, historically separate polities, each with its own separate constitutional arrangement with the ruling dynasty. Its human population consisted of more than a dozen ethnic groups, none of which was strong enough to dominate the others. This internal makeup impeded the monarchy’s evolution as a modern state in two ways: by hindering the development of a centralized, efficient state administration and implanting sources of domestic conflict into the social fabric of the state. Both factors shaped Austria’s behavior as a strategic actor, placing it at a disadvantage in competition with more centralized and unified Great Power rivals. Ultimately, these characteristics prevented the monarchy from mobilizing its full power potential, effectively removed territorial expansion as an option for increasing state security, and presented internal vulnerabilities for enemies to exploit in wartime.