Post Imperial Blues

7/28/2019 Post Imperial Blues

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A LETTER FROM

VIENNA

There is a field of academic theory calledrealism, more popular in America thanhere in Europe, which holds that states

are, for practical purposes, like billiard balls:Given certain power realities, geographical po-sitions and other material criteria, all states willbehave identically under similar circumstances

without regard to domestic political culture,distinct histories or the idiosyncrasies of lead-ers. As academic realists see it, neither emotionnor happenstance has anything to do with thechoices leaders make.

I have never known a statesman, let alonea neuroscientist, who takes the strong ex-pression of this theory seriously. When pro-fessional diplomats consider their subject

matter, they invariably combine objectiveknowledge with what, for lack of a betterterm, is a feel for the situation that they haveacquired from experience. A unique psycho-logical interplay defines any given diplo-matic engagement. It matters, for example,if a states leadership thinks that the nationalhonor of the nation has been recently violat-ed and requires redress; the emotional sub-strata of a revisionistor revanchist, to use

the classical French term of artstate is areality ignored at ones peril.

For example, no one who deals today withthe Russian leadership and its coterie of diplo-mats thinks that the countrys traumatic recenthistory makes no difference to how it acts. Atthe end of the Cold War, Russia lost not only itsartificial 20th century name but also many ter-ritories it had controlled since the time of Cath-erine the Great. Russia plunged from super-power to the uncertain status of a country witha dysfunctional economy, a murky multiethnicand ideological identity, and lots of nuclear

weapons for which no practical purpose couldbe identified. Many claimed that Russians didnot lose the Cold War, but rather that they hadliberated their country from communism. Thisis not, however, what the situation actually felt

like, either for those within the country or forthose outside it. Dealing with Russia became inshort order for Europeans and Americans alikebound up with Russias wounded pride. Dip-lomats sensed that their Russian counterparts

were particularly sensitive to slights of respect,and that a certain deference was necessary to dobusiness with them. There was a price to be paidfor not at least pretending to take the Russiansseriously; the U.S. government, in fact, has paid

that price several times in recent years.Russias collective state of mind over the pastd d l b h d Th

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NOTEs & LETTERs

domains being suddenly shorn away, leaving arump remainder of uncertain status and self-understanding. At that time Russia was alsoconvulsed by revolution, civil war and the lossof territory. In such circumstances context is

critical, and it is never the same from case tocase. Nevertheless, one cannot help but wonderif there are not some similarities amid the con-textual differences, with lessons to learn fromthem. The thought often crossed my mind

when I served as the Austrian Ambassador toRussia from 1999 to 2003, and it has returnedto visit now and again ever since. What followsis a belated attempt to interrogate the post-Hapsburg and post-Soviet cases together, to see

what insights the comparison may yield.

The differences between the Habsburg andSoviet episodes of imperial collapse andnational political reconsolidation are of coursemany and obvious. Not least among them is thefact that they are separated in time by 71 rathereventful years, during which norms, technol-ogy and more besides changed significantly.But other differences may be more germane; ofthese, five stand out.

First, although both empires lost consider-able territory, post-Hapsburg Austria endedup a small, landlocked country while the post-Soviet Russian Federation has remained thelargest country in the world and a purveyor ofenormous natural resource wealth.

Second, Austria was rendered militarily in-significant after World War I, while Russia is

still a nuclear power with a large army. Russiassize and military prowess justify to most ob-servers its retention of a permanent seat on theUN Security Council and its continued statusas a major player in global affairs. The AustrianRepublic neither had nor could dream of seek-ing such a post-imperial status.

Third, Soviet totalitarianism can in no waybe compared to Habsburg political culture. De-spite its dark sides and weaknesses, Habsburg

Vienna was not Communist Moscow. TheHabsburg dynasty aspired to the creation of no d d f h h

has not been the case among non-Russians informer Soviet territories.

Fourth, the collapse of the Habsburg Empiresent sparks of leftist revolution through muchof central Europe, followed in most places by a

sharp right-wing reaction. The collapse of theSoviet Union led to far less ideological extrem-ism and consequent political polarization in ei-ther eastern Europe or in the former territories ofthe Soviet Union. In contrast to the short-livedBela Kun communist government in Budapest,for example, in the post-Soviet space old com-munist parties were often able to quickly recastthemselves as socialist or even social democraticones. In many cases autocratic leaders of former

Soviet republics remained autocratic leaders ofnewly independent states. Whereas political en-ergies exploded in and around Vienna in 191819, they imploded into a muffled heap in andaround Moscow after December 1991.

Fifth, while post-World War I Austria neverseriously entertained revisionist aspirations to re-gain part or all of its lost empire, post-Soviet Rus-sia may well do so. Certainly, since the summer2008 Russia-Georgia War, it is no longer possi-ble to take for granted Russias acceptance of thepost-Cold War territorial status quo. VladimirPutin declared the collapse of the Soviet Unionthe biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20thcentury, implying that if it were possible to re-verse that catastrophe he would do so. No Aus-trian leader has ever made a similar remark aboutthe dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy.

Notwithstanding these important differenc-

es, five similarities are worth exploring. At thelow points in the Austrian and Russian experi-ences, both post-imperial national leadershipsfaced the shock of lost empire; the issue of legal/political continuity; an ideological watershed;a search for a post-imperial political identity;and tension between the sirens of multi-eth-nicity and a more parochial nationalism. Morebroadly, both collapses bore implications for the

wider balance of world power, generating issues

not only for the former imperial metropoles butfor the rest of the world as well. Let us look ath l


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ThE POsT-IMPERIAL BLuEs

established Republic of Austria in a way that jus-tified French Prime Minister Clmenceaus de-scription: Le reste cest lAutriche. Compared

with the territory of the former Dual Monar-chy, only a small fraction of the lands previouslyunder Habsburg rule remained within the bor-ders of Austria. Some non-German-speaking

Habsburg territories were added to the newlyrecreated Poland and the newly created King-dom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (sub-sequently Yugoslavia). Austria also lost sizableareas with a predominantly German-speakingpopulation: South Tyrol and the CarinthianCanal Valley were assigned to Italy; the south-ern part of Styria went to the new Kingdomof the Southern Slavs; a large strip of German-speaking territories in the northern part of the

country was given to the new state of Czecho-slovakia, and independent Hungary came

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bringing to a close the illusory stability of theHabsburg monarchy.

In Vienna, Emperor Charles had to abdi-cate as the monarchy gave way to a hastily con-structed first Austrian Republic. The abdicationconstituted the concentrated symbolic shock ofabrupt change: A 261,000 square-mile Euro-

pean state stretching from Lake Constance inthe west to the confines of the Russian Empirein the east was reduced to a territory of hardlymore than 52,000 square miles; a multiethnicpopulation of more than fifty million was re-duced to about seven million German speakers.Vienna, the former capital of a great Europeanpower and one of the largest European cities atthe time, suddenly became the confused hydro-cephalus of a small country.

The disappearance of Austria-Hungary dis-rupted the close cultural ties and ethno-politi-

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A large crowd gathers before the Parliament of Budapest on November 17, 1918, to celebrateHungarys proclamation of independence from Austria.

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NOTEs & LETTERs

Indeed, the dislocations caused by four years ofwar and the sudden economic fragmentationof the realm had made basic living conditionsin the first Austrian Republic precarious. Theshock of lost empire and even the threat of civil

war paled next to the pressing concerns of dailysurvival in a country facing a serious hungercrisis. Complete exhaustion after the militarydefeat of World War I and the prevailing cata-strophic living conditions generated a climateof political apathy and general depression.Thus, despite the political chaos that followedthe collapse of the monarchy, the populationremained remarkably calm, politically sleep-

walking from one elusive meal to the next. Not

knowing how to think about politics in a sud-den void of familiarity, people simply stoppedthinking about it altogether.

Things were so bad that much of the newpolitical leadership and large segments of thepopulation doubted that Austria could surviveas an independent state. Most took the viewthat Austria should unify with Germany, anobjective that was, however, explicitly ruled outby the Allies in the Treaty of Saint-Germain.Hellmut Andics expertly captured the generalmood when he called his popular 1962 bookon the history of Austria in the interwar periodDer Staat, der keiner wollte (The State No-body Wanted).

There is little to be gained from recapitulat-ing the situation in Moscow and the rest of theformer Soviet Union after December 1991. It isrecent enough to be familiar to many of us. But

it is worth reminding ourselves that there wasfear of a hunger crisis in the winter immediatelyfollowing the collapse. It is worth noting, too,that just as the threat of political violence inVienna receded in the face of exhaustion, apa-thy and worry about more basic concerns suchas personal security from crime and findingdinner also meant that there was little politi-cal violence in Moscow or in any of the soon-to-be-former Soviet space. Even though the

situation seemed to approach civil war when, inAugust 1991, Communist hardliners attempted

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the Baltic States, where Russia unsuccessfullytried to use military force to prevent secession,did many people get killed. The lesson seems tobe that the sudden loss of empire has a way oftaking the wind out of politics in general.

Legal/political continuity: The victorious Al-lied Powers considered the First Republic of

Austria to be the legal successor to the HabsburgMonarchy. They thereby proceeded from the as-sumption that Austria had the same legal identi-ty as the former Austro-Hungarian Empire andtherefore bore responsibility for the war. In thenegotiations for the Treaty of Saint-Germain,the government in Vienna was simply too weakto challenge the legal fiction of continuity im-

posed by the Paris Peace Conference. However,Austrian leaders soon took a diametrically op-posite position, claiming that the new Republicof Austria was legally distinct from the formerMonarchy. This led to extended arguments overa series of financial and diplomatic issues.

In addition to disagreement about the is-sue of continuity, the Allies and Austria weredivided over the fundamental question of Aus-trian independence. As noted, under the shockof defeat and disintegration an overwhelmingmajority of Austrians, together with the coun-trys most influential politicians, favored Aus-trias accession to Germany. But, as also noted,the Allies forbade that option. The name Aus-trians originally chose for the new state wasDeutschsterreich (German Austria). The

Allies insisted on the deletion of the quali-fier Deutsch. None of this was fair or legally

proper, but it was what it was.The issue of state succession also became an

issue when the Soviet Union disappeared fromthe political landscape: To what extent was theRussian Federation entitled under internationallaw to assume the rights and obligations of theformer Soviet Union? This question clearly boreon Moscows relationship with the newly inde-pendent states that emerged on the territory ofthe former Soviet Union and with the rest of

the world. The matter turned out not to be par-ticularly contentious because of a pre-eminent

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and elsewhere outside the Russian Federationsterritory; Russia wanted control of Soviet nukesto save as much of its superpower status as pos-sible and so was eager to take responsibility forSoviet nukes. The new Russian leadership clear-

ly had no interest in an independent Ukrainianstate having a nuclear weapons arsenal.

The official Russian position was based onthe claim that the Russian Federation was le-gally identical with the former Soviet Union andthat, therefore, Russia simply continued the legaldestiny of the Soviet Union as a subject of inter-national law. Once accepted, this thesis had theremarkable consequencethat the Russian Federa-

tion was not considereda new state and did notneed to apply for interna-tional recognition. In theUnited Nations, for ex-ample, Russia took overthe permanent seat in theSecurity Council previ-ously held by the SovietUnion without any ob-jection being raised bythe other permanentmembers of that body.

This, of course,marks a difference fromthe extended legal quar-rels about the status of

Austria as a successor ofthe Austro-Hungarian

Monarchy in 1918, butit is not clear even today that there should havebeen a difference. I was directly involved in thediscussions on Russian state succession. Shortlyafter the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the

Austrian Foreign Ministry challenged the Rus-sian Federations official position that it was alegal continuation of the Soviet Union. Austriaargued that, on the contrary, the Russian Fed-eration had to be considered a new subject of

international law. Austria called into questionthe validity of the international treaties con-l d d b h f l d

adviser to the Austrian Foreign Ministry atthat time, I faced an uphill battle trying to ex-plain the Austrian view to my Russian ForeignMinistry counterpart. The atmosphere turnedrather tense as he offered a lengthy lecture of

Russian history beginning with the first writtendocuments of the Nestor chronicle, dating backto the 13th century. Russia, he explained, has al-

ways been and always would be Russia whetherit was called the Soviet Union or the RussianFederation or Brigadoon, for that matter.

The Austrian-Russian legal dispute couldbe swept under the carpet only when Austria

joined the EuropeanUnion in 1995. As a

member country, Aus-tria was bound to acceptthe official position ofthe European Union,

which had recognizedthe legal opinion ofRussia on this matter.On the other hand,since EU accession ne-gated de facto Austriasneutral status, the onelegal hand washed theother, so to speak.

Ideological watersheds:In the course of its disin-tegration, many peopleheld the Habsburg dy-nasty responsible for thewar and the catastrophe

of defeat. In Budapest,as already noted, the turmoil brought forth aCommunist Party regime. In Vienna, Commu-nist Party activists tried to follow the Hungarianexample but failed. The majority of the Vienneseworking class did not support a Communisttakeover, but what it did support took some timeto work out.

In the first general elections held afterthe war in February 1919, the Socialist Party

emerged as the dominant force in a coalitiongovernment with the Christian Social Party.Th l l l d d d

Franz Joseph I of Austria

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titles of the old Austrian aristocracy. EmperorCharles and his family were driven into exile,all property belonging to the crown was con-fiscated, and the Habsburgs return to Austria

was prohibited by law. The old monarchical

order thus quickly gave way to the egalitarianconcepts of a democratic Republic, at least onthe surface.

Obviously, the transition from a centuries-old dynastic regime to a democratic system wasanything but frictionless. Once the shock ofcollapse had worn off and food reappeared onshelves, the political climate of postwar Viennaheated up. In most respects it remained extreme-ly warm until the Anschluss put an end to Aus-

trian independence in 1938. Few advocated therestoration of the monarchy. (Even so, Charlestried and failed to gain control of the crown ofHungary.) But political life in the first AustrianRepublic remained unsteady, as its democracytried to function amidst acute tension betweenthe extreme Left and the extreme Right, withalmost no practiced democrats on hand to bro-ken compromise.

Something not so different happened in Rus-sia. The dissolution of the Soviet Empire wasaccompanied by the evaporation of communistideology as the theoretical infrastructure of theSoviet dictatorship. The complete collapse ofSoviet communism as a political regime wascompounded by the total failure of commu-nist ideology. The fact that, in the course of thefailed putsch in Moscow in August 1991, theCommunist Party was totally discredited to the

point of being dissolved speaks volumes aboutthe drama of a system that had held a monop-oly on power for two generations. As the rightsand privileges of the Habsburg aristocracy wereabolished, so were those of the Soviet nomencla-turaagain, at least on the surface.

Russian politics formally embraced de-mocracy, but as was the case in post-Habsburg

Austria, there were few genuine democratsavailable to operate it. There were, however,

lots of people with vested interests in theold social and economic order who were notb b d h l h

development of neither real mass-based po-litical parties nor the rule of law. The stateremained the locus of wealth and power, andpolitical organization flowed downward inthe form of patronage. In the Putin era, the

hold of the state over society and the economytightened, giving rise to a managed or imita-tion Russian democracy, at best.1

To a considerable extent, too, post-Habsburgand post-Soviet politics adopted the political-ideo-logical form (but not necessarily the content) of thevictors of the wars that had brought them down.After World War I, all the great autocratic empireswere gone, and so those picking up the pieces inVienna, Berlin, Istanbul and Moscow pledged

themselves to egalitarianism, which seemed tobe the rhythm to which modern politics movedin London, Paris and Washington. After Decem-ber 1991, the Washington Consensus dominatedthinking about political economy far and wide,even to some extent, in Beijing and Hanoi. But re-flected and reflexive orthodoxies of this sort do noteasily take root and thrive. A society cannot simplypick up a political economy like one buys a suit offthe rack. As was the case in Austria from 1919 to1938, what has characterized Russia since 1992 isan ideological miasma. Beneath the faade of de-mocracy is a lowest-common-denominator politicsof self-interest and short-term maneuver. The exis-tence of democracy as a formal structure actuallyhelps political actors avoid naming the neo-feudalsystem in which they are really engaged, and italso serves to fool inexpert and hopeful onlookers,at least for a time.

Post-imperial identity: There is, of course,a connection between ideology and identity.If one knows the higher purposes of politics,the source of its ideological aspirations helpsto identify the constituencies for whose ben-efit those purposes are sought. If the former is

wanting, the latter can become problematic.So it was for post-Habsburg Austrians. One

could fill entire libraries with the literature on theproblematiqueof Austrian identity. During the

monarchy all the various nationalities, the Cath-olic Church, the army, the public bureaucracy

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reign as head of state from 1848 to 1916 ran solong that some of his subjects reportedly didntknow who was older, the Emperor or God. Thesubjects of the Empire had good reasons to believethat they belonged to a great European power

whose achievements in science, education, publicadministration and many other areas compared

well with that of the most advanced countries ofthe civilized world. The Emperors authoritarian-ism wore lightly; citizens enjoyed a considerabledegree of personal freedom. Cultural life thrivedandfin de sicleVienna developed as a major cen-ter of the arts and sciences. This Central Euro-pean civilization provided people with a sense ofidentity characterized by common features and a

certain way of life. Its politics remained for themost part politely behind the curtains.

The Habsburg formula for identity was ina sense pre-modern, stressing faith, personalityand country, in that order, and subordinatingalmost entirely the awareness of the role playedby the state. When the state collapsed, however,people suddenly noticed its absence. Once thepolitical structure that had bound together Vi-enna, Budapest and Prague disappeared it beganto dawn that balances many decades and evencenturies in the making were now gone. It wasas if the music had suddenly stopped and peo-ple awakened to the fact that they had waltzedthemselves to places they did not recognize.

With the political, economic and culturallinks between the three capitals disrupted andthe unifying symbol of the monarchy gone, thenow-unbalanced forces of nationalism gath-

ered strength. Within the Austrian bordersdrawn by the Allies, the population consistedpredominantly of German speakers, so into thevacuum of ideology poured the notion of Ger-man identity. The quandary of the day was

whether a genuine Austrian nation existed atall, or whether the German-speaking Austriansinstead formed part of a larger German nation.

One answer to this question was given bythe then-Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, who

proclaimed that Austria was the second Ger-man state. With the thuggish Nazis rising in

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convince the Austrians that they were better offin their own state, and to be able to say small isbeautiful with some conviction.

Oddly enough, however, having accom-plished that feat within a generation after

World War II, Austrians were soon confound-ed once again by the question of political andnational identity thanks to Austrias accessionto the European Union in 1995. Given theirhistory, Austrians were quick to ask themselveshow much was left of their national identity asnational prerogatives kept creeping away fromEU-member states to Brussels. With a reuni-fied Germany clearly the largest state in theEuropean Union, and, with the economic cri-

sis of recent years, clearly in command of theausterity regime designed to save the eurozone,some Austrians have begun to murmur about asecond Anschluss achieved through the inter-mediate stage of EU membership.

The issue of Russian identity is hardly lesscomplex. Like the Habsburg Empire, the Rus-sian Empire in both its pre-Soviet and Sovietforms was multicultural. The Habsburg Ger-man-speaking elite may have taken a somewhat

jaundiced view of Austro-Hungarian multi-culturalism, but that multiculturalism wasgenuine. So was the pre-Soviet Russian version,though Russian royalty indulged it much lessthan did the Habsburg monarchs. The Sovietinternationalist theme-park version, however,

was an artifice of Russian domination simplymore hypocritical than the earlier sort, this not-

withstanding the rise into the elite of some who

were not ethnic Russians.When the official truththe Pravdaof the

Communist Partyrevealed itself to be any-thing but the truth in late 1991, there was noth-ing readily available to replace it. Although noone believed anymore in the Homo Sovieticusofthe official state ideology, the end of the SovietUnion made plain that hardly anyone believedin anything. Russians nationalism had alwaysbeen a mystical admixture of Orthodox religion

and a sense of peoplehood neither entirely Eu-ropean nor entirely Asiatic, but both national-

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Just as it was natural for Russians to look tothe West for ideological mooring, they lookedthat way for a sense of identity as well. The

Western model of the free market economybecame fashionable in Moscow, and so Rus-

sian identity became Homo Chicagoensis. Thiswas, after all, the time of the Chicago boys,Jeffrey Sachs and company, who came to Mos-cow with economic advice that turned out tofit about as well with Russian economic condi-tions as democracy f it with post-Habsburg andpost-Soviet political conditions.

Other Russians eventually turned to theOrthodox Church for inspiration and positivevalues. The Yeltsin and Putin Administrations

supported the Orthodox revival and used it intheir quest to erect a post-communist Russianidentity. For the sake of continuity, if not alsofor other purposes, the common folk were alsotold that the Russian Federation remained a

world power on a par with the United States,China and other global actors. Most wanted tobelieve this, and so they did. This belief in turnprovided a bridge to the widespread nostalgiafor the previous times. That nostalgia in turn

abets to this day a complacency about the returnof elements of the old Soviet mentality so vividlydisplayed in the later Putin era.

Where does this leave the Russians in termsof political identity? Confused. Hardly anyonedesires a return to the Communist era, but fewhave embraced parochial nationalism, as shownby the surprising weakness of post-Soviet anti-Semitism. The early enthusiasm for aping West-ern materialism could never work for the many,

or for long, even if the economy had been able tosupport it. The murky waters of the post-Sovietidentity are thus still dark and difficult to seethrough. There are very few communists, fewfascists, few genuine liberal democrats, and fewpartisans of any identifiable political identity. In-stead, there are successful sycophants of the state,and there is everyone else. After the fall of the


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Habsburg monarchy, the Austrian people hadasked themselves: Are we German or are we

Austrian in character? After the fall of the So-viet Union, the Russian-speakers within theRussian Federation have yet to ask themselves

a similar question. Perhaps Russian speakers inthe Ukraine will end up posing it for them.

Multiethnicity and nationalism: Just as ide-ology and political identity are related, so areidentity and the question of ethnicity and na-tionalism. The death of the Habsburg DoubleEagle put an end to a multiethnic empire that

was in many respects a forerunner of the ideasof the European Union. The idea that the dif-ferent nationalities making up the Empire were

bound together in a single political and eco-nomic space resembles somewhat the conceptof the European integration.

Habsburg rulers obviously failed to establish aregime that created a fair balance among all majornationalities. In 1867, a legal arrangement createda confederation between the Austrian part of theMonarchy and the Hungarians. That seemed towork tolerably well for a time, but the Habsburgsfailed to devise similar compromises with theother ethnic groups of the crown, especially theCzechs and Moravians. This may have contrib-uted to the ultimate disintegration of the Empirein the throes of the World War. Yet despite theweaknesses of the constitutional arrangementpost-1867, Habsburg rulers never attempted toGermanize the empire as French rulers in anearlier time tried to francify all the denizens ofterritorial France. For Austrians, then, the year

1918 marked a total paradigm shift, away frombeingprimus inter paresin a multiethnic state tobeing defined, in the absence of any other obviousalternative, by language.

Yet this was odd, as speaking German did notmake Austrians ethnically Austrian. The very ideaof an Austrian ethnicity has never made muchsense, and it certainly didnt in 1919. One reasonis that ethnicity is a relative concept. If there arehardly any other people within the boundaries of

a country who are ethnically different from themajority, then that majority cannot be an ethnic-

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multiethnic state, but they cant readily consti-tute an Austrian ethnic supermajority either. Allthey can be is ethnically German, if one takes thelinguistic trait as definitive. Yet Austrians havelearned the hard way that they dont want to be

that either.Unlike post-Hapsburg Austria, the Russian

Federation is still multiethnic. But just as wasthe case with the Soviet Union before it, Rus-sian ethnic consciousness and the old impulsetoward Russification remain strong. Russianleaders overtly turned to the values of Russiannationalism (designated as patriotism) duringtimes of war and crisis. Based on the majorityof ethnic Russians living in the territory of the

Russian Federation, the post-Soviet governmenthas pursued ade facto policy of Russians first.This policy has increasingly alienated the non-Russian components of the Russian Federation,especially the Muslims in the North Caucasus.

In the end, we are left with a strange situa-tion: The Austrians dont have a coherent for-mula to deal with the multiethnic/nationalismdilemma, but it works for them; the Russiansdo have a coherent and traditionally validatedformula, but it is failing.

P icking up where the Habsburg and So-viet Empires left off obviously hasnt beeneasy either for Austrians or for Russians. Inboth situations the forces of disintegrationprevailed when the basic aspirations and in-terests of the constituent parts of the twoentities could no longer be either suppressed

or balanced in a unitary political framework.But what have these imperial collapses meantfor everyone else?

Let us begin an answer by noting that fromthe time of Peter the Great until the unificationof Germany, both Russia and Austria were twoof the five pillars of the classic European bal-ance of power, along with Britain, France andthe Ottoman Empire. The unification of Ger-many and the rise of America began to upset

this balance before the onset of World War I,but the basic purpose of the balance, codified

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When the Habsburg Empire ended up onthe losing side of World War I, its dissolutionwas not inevitable. But the overweening ideal-ism of Woodrow Wilson combined with theoutsized ambitions of France (and to a lesser

degree Britain) joined to ensure it. The vari-ous smaller nations and ethnic groups thathad been part of Austro-Hungary, now aloneand unprotected, soon became the pawns ofa chess game between a revisionist Germanyand a revolutionary Russia. In a phrase, Ra-pallo devoured Locarno. The Petite Entente,devised by the French at Versailles, never couldnever substitute for the structural role in theEuropean balance that the Habsburg Empire

had played, so that its rapid dismembermentwas clearly one of several causes of World WarII, and the Holocaust with it.2 Thus, while theend of the Habsburg Empire was bloodless atthe time, the fuller consequences of its dissolu-tion were anything but.

The collapse of the Soviet Empire was alsorelatively bloodless. But it, too, undid a balance,albeit a bipolar one that spanned not just Eu-rope but the globe. The question is, will therebe a bloody delayed response to the Soviet col-lapse as there was to the Habsburg one sevendecades before it?

Clearly, all that Peter the Great achievedand the Soviets extended and reinforced isgone. The Baltic States are once again inde-pendent, and most of central and eastern Eu-rope now forms part of the European Unionand NATO. These nations have at last found

the kind of protection they had within the foldof the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the differ-ence being that they are now formally equalpartners within multilateral alliance systemsand not mere subjects of imperial rule. Theinstitutions of the Atlantic Alliance, in other

words, are the functional equivalent for thesepurposes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Ina sense, what was lost in 1919 because of whathappened to Austria was found again in 1991

because of what happened to Russia.Multiethnic empires have gotten a bad

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Union show. What history seems to suggest isthat multiethnic empires can survive for a con-siderable length of time under one of two con-ditions: either domestic order is maintainedfrom above by a strong military and police

force, or the imperial order is not challenged inthe first place because it is seen to be either le-gitimate within prescribed limits or superior tothe available alternatives. The latter conditionis, after all, how the European Union enduresdespite its many frailties.

The Austro-Hungarian monarchy probablycould not have survived long past 1919 becauseit increasingly lacked the consent of the differ-ent nations governed from Vienna. It was being

challenged by the empires minorities, whetherethnic, ideological or religious, and its militaryand police forces were not up to the task of sup-pressing multiple and simultaneous rebellions.But had it not been for the World War, and hadits dissolution not been mandated as an imme-diate one, the monarchy might have lasted sev-eral more decades and its eventual devolutionmight not have contributed to another world

war. That, however, we cannot know.Such speculation is nevertheless not en-

tirely idle, because the aftermath of the Sovietcollapse has not yet played itself out. We have

witnessed what the full collapse of a multi-ethnic entity can look like: We saw it in theseveral phases of the Yugoslav bloodbath,

which itself may not be completely finished.The future of Russia is not finished or fore-ordained either. Russia may try to reacquire

its historic sphere of influence; if so, the warwith Georgia is only the f irst phase of a longcampaign. Or the Russian Federation itself,multiethnic and without any ideological glueto hold it together, may disintegrate, slowly orrapidly, from the North Caucasus all the wayto the Pacific Ocean, greatly affecting the fu-ture of Central Asia, India, China, Japan andKorea. Knowing what we do now about theeventual consequences of the Habsburg fall,

that is perhaps something to think about.

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Post Imperial Blues