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rfmcdonaldI'd mentioned back in January that I was planning a series of posts on unlikely reunifications, on pairs of countries separated by relatively minor historical circumstances which were nonetheless unlikely to ever overcome the separation. I don't know why I'm doing this since I'm not a political scientist or another sort of specialist and I don't think my writings on the subject are particularly revelatory. I suppose that my interest in alternate history, in paths not taken despite their plausibility, is responsible. Regardless, here's installment #1.
* * *
In the heady days of die Wende, I remember reading in Time the tumult which erupted in Austria when a West German author proclaimed that the German nation was divided between two ideologies (capitalistic democracy and an orthodox communism) and three states (West Germany, East Germany, and Austria). If it had been made a generation ago, this statement would have been immensely destabilizing, suggesting as it did that the Federal Republic of Germany’s territorial ambitions might not be satified with reclaiming Brandenburg and Saxony, Thuringia and Mecklenburg,would have awoken. The hint that Austria was just as "illegitimate" as East Germany suggested the possibility that German territorial appetites would not stop with East Germany, that Salzberg, Tyrol, and Burgenland might also be claimed. After that, who knows? Bohemia and Moravia? Silesia and East Prussia? Even Poznan and Slovenia?
It’s important to note that this West German author’s suggestion never got off the ground, either in West Germany or in Austria. 14 years after reunification, Austrian independence is as unchallenged as it ever has been. This is interesting from the comparative perspective, for Austria and East Germany were both states built on territory that was ethnically German after the Second World War, in order to deny their territories, populations, and industries to a rump Germany (West Germany) still suspected as politically unreliable and potentially strategically destabilizing. The Austrian nation-building project worked; the East German nation-building project only managed to create a strong regionalism. Why did the Austrian project succeed where the East German failed?
Evan Burr Nukey, in his book Hitler's Austria: Popular Sentiment in the Nazi Era, 1938-1945, is one of many people who has noticed strong parallels between Austria and the neighbouring German state of Bavaria:
Bavarian regionalism is a well-known fact. What might not be as broadly known, though, is that on multiple occasions in the 19th and 20th centuries this regionalism might well have become a nationalism. Indeed, it’s plausible to create a history where Bavaria does not merge with the Second Reich. Let’s say that, in the 1860s, King Ludwig II was somewhat saner, willing to forego the construction of fairy-tale castles and adopting a more assertive foreign policy against the upstart Prussians. It isn’t inevitable that Bavaria would have joined united Germany. Arguably, it was only the Franco-Prussian War which brought Bavaria, along with the other south German states (the Grand Duchy of Baden, the Kingdom of Württemburg), into the federal German empire founded at Versailles. Supported by a Bavarian monarchy in favour of separation, and casting out for an alliance with Austria-Hungary, Bavaria remains a sovereign and independent state.
It wouldn’t escape German influence, of course. Surrounded to the north and west by Germany, to the east and south by Austria-Hungary, home at the end of the 19th century to only some five million, the Kingdom of Bavaria would inevitably be drawn into the economic and diplomatic orbits of Berlin and Vienna. It would ally with the Central Powers in the First World War, though it’s anyone’s guess whether or not Bavarian troops would be concentrated on the Italian, Russian, or French fronts, and how this would effect the German and Austro-Hungarian war efforts. Assuming the Central Powers were defeated in a way not too dissimilar from what we know of from our history, the Bavarian monarchy will fall like all of the other monarchies of central Europe. Perhaps we’ll even have a Communist revolution. This Bavaria, though, will have had almost two generations of statehood separate from Germany to look back upon, and an international system quite hostile to suggestions of Germano-Bavarian unification.
How likely is it that this Bavaria, with its development separate from Germany, will turn to Germany? It’s certainly quite possible that many Bavarians will want to do this; after all, German nationalism was popular in Austria. Still, this Bavaria has new options available to it making a complete submersion in Germandom unlikely at best.
During German unification, two competing visions of the future of German-speaking Europe existing. The first, the Kleindeutschland perspective, favoured the creation of a united Germany including only German-populated lands, and under the leadership of the northern Protestant kingdom of Prussia. The second, the Grossdeutschland program, looked to the existence of a large German diaspora in central and eastern Europe, stretching as far as the Saxon communities of Transylvania and the Hanseatic cities of Estonia and and Latvia. The Grossdeutschland vision favoured, at least, the inclusion of Cisleithenian Austria--roughly put, the modern Austrian Republic, the Czech lands, and Slovenia--within Germany, possibly placed under the leadership of the venerable Hapsburgs of Austria, probably at odds with its neighbours as one Frenchman writing at the time of the Franco-Prussian War and the annexation of Alsace-Moselle warned:
The Kleindeutschland vision of Germany won out, and Bismarck decided to expel Austria from Germany in the Seven Weeks War, annexing some Austrian allies in northern Germany and forcing other Austrian allies to join the Prussian-dominated North German Confederation. This confederation would eventually be expanded into the German Empire, leaving Austria’s millions of Teutophones--an overwhelming majority in modern-day Austria, but one-third of the population of Bohemia-Moravia, half of the population of mid-19th century Budapest, and scattered in small urban and rural enclaves across the south and east of the empire--outside.
Necessarily, the fates of Austria’s Teutophones diverged from that of Germany’s. Within the territory of modern-day Austria, the western and central provinces. Vienna developed separately from these territories, becoming the centre of the entire empire of Austria-Hungary. Vienna was the capital of a Great Power; Vienna attracted immigrants from across the empire, for instance becoming one of the largest Czech cities in the world; Vienna became a major industrial centre.
And then, in 1918, the imperial structure fell apart completely.
The other successor states of Austria-Hungary could lay claim to autonomous nationalisms of their own. Hungary was the best example of this, given its limited independence from 1867 on, but the Czechoslovak and Yugoslav peoples also had relatively clear identities, at least against outsiders. The Republic of Austria, though, was simply the collection of Teutophone territories left once the rest of the empire had been parcelled out. Millions of Teutophones--most notably in Czechoslovakia--found themselves outside of the frontiers of the Republic of Austria, living in non-German (Slavic, Magyar, even Latin) nation-states. It didn’t help that the leading nationalities in the new successor states--for instance, the Czechs--were frequently objects of Teutophone disdain and fear in Austria-Hungary.
The somewhat larger number of Teutophones living inside reduced Austrian frontiers found that they lived in an imperial core bereft of its peripheries. Before the First World War, Vienna’s two millions inhabited the prominent capital of a middling prosperous state of more than fifty million people, with its basic needs (for food, for migrants, for industrial raw materials) supported by its dependent provinces. Once those dependent provinces became independent states, determined to develop their own national industrial economies autonomously of the former imperial centre, the Austrian economy went into a decided slump.
More, the territories remaining under the control of the national government in Vienna were threatened--Italy’s annexation of the overwhelmingly Teutophone South Tyrol was fiercely contested, while the Yugoslav attempt in 1920 to annex south Carinthia with its large Slovene population was only barely overturned. A small republic of less than seven million people, Austria was left terribly vulnerable.
Given the lack of a distinct Austrian identity, given the economic failure of the First Republic, and given the vulnerability of border territories to ambitious successor states, it isn’t surprising that a dominant trend in Austrian political life was to seek unification with Germany. For much of its two decades of existence, the country was governed by people who sought unification but were prevented by outside pressure, particularly French and Italian. For most of the rest of the time, Austria was governed by conservative Catholics who failed to successfully articulate an Austrian alternative to Greater Germany. Austria’s eventual anschluss was widely welcomed, resented only by minorities--by Jews, by socialists and communists, by democrats, by Viennese.
As elsewhere in other central European capitals, the conquest of Austria’s capital by Soviet troops radically altered traditional political patterns. In Czechoslovakia and Hungary, for instance, the captures of Prague and Budapest guaranteed the inevitable ascension of Communists to power. In Germany, the capture of Berlin symbolized the complete breakdown of previous political and social patterns. In Austria, the capture of Vienna culminated the end of eight years of Austrian unification into Germany, beginning on a positive note but quickly becoming a nightmare between shortages of consumer goods, growing lists of war casualties, destructive Allied bombings, and finally an irresistible Soviet invasion. Austrians had tried Greater Germany, and it most manifestly didn’t work.
The last chance for Austria’s absorption lay in the possibility of a breakdown in Western-Soviet relations. If Western-Soviet relations broke down completely, the possibility of a partition of Austria on the German model perhaps existed. With Vienna divided into Communist and Western sections, the separation of the Western segment of Vienna from the rest of Western-controlled Austria by Soviet-controlled countryside, and the fragmentation of the Austrian territories occupied by the United States, Britain, and France into various parochial local identities, an annexation of a rump Austria into the emerging Federal Republic of Germany might have been a plausible outcome. After all, Austrians had proclaimed themselves to be German, hadn’t they?
Western-Soviet relations in Austria didn’t suffer a breakdown comparable to that in Germany, of course, and so there was no partition. Just as importantly, Austria’s new political elite, returning from exile and reemerging from obscurity, took care to distance their new nation from Germany. Where once Austria was seen as a willing collaborator of Germany, willingly incorporated into the Third Reich, now Austria was portrayed as Germany’s first victim, as heir to a distinct Germanic culture with specific political orientations and a somewhat folklorized relationship with the Hapsburg past and wider central Europe. This suited the desires of the Austrians to manage to survive the post-war era; it also satisfied the desires of the Western powers to remove Austria from the table of Cold War issues, the desires of West Germans to avoid accusations of adventurism and imperialism beyond (or within) Germany’s traditional frontiers, and the desires of Soviets to gain a neutral intermediary in central Europe for trade and diplomacy.
And so, here we are.
Modern-day Germany and modern-day Austria are once again united, sharing a customs union, a single currency, and elected officials in the same parliament. The European Union, though, is a much broader project than the Austro-German customs union vetoed by France in 1932. Austria was once a politically unstable and struggling state, vulnerable to its neighbours; it is now one of the richest countries in Europe, surpassing Germany in income per capita, with a relatively stable political system despite its recent disturbance by the xenophobic populism of Haider and his ilk, and a frontier secured within the greater European Union. Austria’s main political issues have little to do with its relationship with Germany, and much more to do with its former partners in Austria-Hungary. Austria's now on its own.
In the heady days of die Wende, I remember reading in Time the tumult which erupted in Austria when a West German author proclaimed that the German nation was divided between two ideologies (capitalistic democracy and an orthodox communism) and three states (West Germany, East Germany, and Austria). If it had been made a generation ago, this statement would have been immensely destabilizing, suggesting as it did that the Federal Republic of Germany’s territorial ambitions might not be satified with reclaiming Brandenburg and Saxony, Thuringia and Mecklenburg,would have awoken. The hint that Austria was just as "illegitimate" as East Germany suggested the possibility that German territorial appetites would not stop with East Germany, that Salzberg, Tyrol, and Burgenland might also be claimed. After that, who knows? Bohemia and Moravia? Silesia and East Prussia? Even Poznan and Slovenia?
It’s important to note that this West German author’s suggestion never got off the ground, either in West Germany or in Austria. 14 years after reunification, Austrian independence is as unchallenged as it ever has been. This is interesting from the comparative perspective, for Austria and East Germany were both states built on territory that was ethnically German after the Second World War, in order to deny their territories, populations, and industries to a rump Germany (West Germany) still suspected as politically unreliable and potentially strategically destabilizing. The Austrian nation-building project worked; the East German nation-building project only managed to create a strong regionalism. Why did the Austrian project succeed where the East German failed?
Evan Burr Nukey, in his book Hitler's Austria: Popular Sentiment in the Nazi Era, 1938-1945, is one of many people who has noticed strong parallels between Austria and the neighbouring German state of Bavaria:
Throughout most of the interwar period Austria bore a striking resemblance to Bavaria, a land with which it shared both a common border and a similar culture and heritage. Geographically smaller and more diverse, the Alpine republic (in 1934) contained 6,760,233 inhabitants, while its neighbour (in 1933) had 7,681,584. [. . .B]oth were predominantly Roman Catholic (90.5 and 62.7 percent respectively), and both were largely agrarian in nature. While it is true that Vienna with its population of 1.9 million gave Austria a distinctive character and cosmopolitan reputation, most of the country, including entire provinces, was rural or heavily forested. [. . .] Including Vienna, [. . .] only a third of the Austrian people (35.9 percent) lived in cities of more than 20,000 inhabitants, a proportion roughly comparable with that of Bavaria (30.5 percent) (18).
Bavarian regionalism is a well-known fact. What might not be as broadly known, though, is that on multiple occasions in the 19th and 20th centuries this regionalism might well have become a nationalism. Indeed, it’s plausible to create a history where Bavaria does not merge with the Second Reich. Let’s say that, in the 1860s, King Ludwig II was somewhat saner, willing to forego the construction of fairy-tale castles and adopting a more assertive foreign policy against the upstart Prussians. It isn’t inevitable that Bavaria would have joined united Germany. Arguably, it was only the Franco-Prussian War which brought Bavaria, along with the other south German states (the Grand Duchy of Baden, the Kingdom of Württemburg), into the federal German empire founded at Versailles. Supported by a Bavarian monarchy in favour of separation, and casting out for an alliance with Austria-Hungary, Bavaria remains a sovereign and independent state.
It wouldn’t escape German influence, of course. Surrounded to the north and west by Germany, to the east and south by Austria-Hungary, home at the end of the 19th century to only some five million, the Kingdom of Bavaria would inevitably be drawn into the economic and diplomatic orbits of Berlin and Vienna. It would ally with the Central Powers in the First World War, though it’s anyone’s guess whether or not Bavarian troops would be concentrated on the Italian, Russian, or French fronts, and how this would effect the German and Austro-Hungarian war efforts. Assuming the Central Powers were defeated in a way not too dissimilar from what we know of from our history, the Bavarian monarchy will fall like all of the other monarchies of central Europe. Perhaps we’ll even have a Communist revolution. This Bavaria, though, will have had almost two generations of statehood separate from Germany to look back upon, and an international system quite hostile to suggestions of Germano-Bavarian unification.
How likely is it that this Bavaria, with its development separate from Germany, will turn to Germany? It’s certainly quite possible that many Bavarians will want to do this; after all, German nationalism was popular in Austria. Still, this Bavaria has new options available to it making a complete submersion in Germandom unlikely at best.
During German unification, two competing visions of the future of German-speaking Europe existing. The first, the Kleindeutschland perspective, favoured the creation of a united Germany including only German-populated lands, and under the leadership of the northern Protestant kingdom of Prussia. The second, the Grossdeutschland program, looked to the existence of a large German diaspora in central and eastern Europe, stretching as far as the Saxon communities of Transylvania and the Hanseatic cities of Estonia and and Latvia. The Grossdeutschland vision favoured, at least, the inclusion of Cisleithenian Austria--roughly put, the modern Austrian Republic, the Czech lands, and Slovenia--within Germany, possibly placed under the leadership of the venerable Hapsburgs of Austria, probably at odds with its neighbours as one Frenchman writing at the time of the Franco-Prussian War and the annexation of Alsace-Moselle warned:
Songez où nous arriverions si le principe de nationalité était entendu comme l'entend la Prusse, et si elle réussissait à en faire la règle de la politique européenne. Elle aurait désormais le droit de s'emparer de la Hollande. Elle dépouillerait ensuite l'Autriche sur cette seule affirmation que l'Autriche serait une étrangère à l'égard de ses provinces allemandes. Puis elle réclamerait à la Suisse tous les cantons qui parlent allemand. Enfin s'adressant à la Russie, elle revendiquerait la province de Livonie et la ville de Riga, qui sont habitées par la race allemande ; c'est vous qui le dites page 16 de votre brochure. Nous n'en finirions pas. L'Europe serait périodiquement embrasée par les " revendications " de la Prusse.
The Kleindeutschland vision of Germany won out, and Bismarck decided to expel Austria from Germany in the Seven Weeks War, annexing some Austrian allies in northern Germany and forcing other Austrian allies to join the Prussian-dominated North German Confederation. This confederation would eventually be expanded into the German Empire, leaving Austria’s millions of Teutophones--an overwhelming majority in modern-day Austria, but one-third of the population of Bohemia-Moravia, half of the population of mid-19th century Budapest, and scattered in small urban and rural enclaves across the south and east of the empire--outside.
Necessarily, the fates of Austria’s Teutophones diverged from that of Germany’s. Within the territory of modern-day Austria, the western and central provinces. Vienna developed separately from these territories, becoming the centre of the entire empire of Austria-Hungary. Vienna was the capital of a Great Power; Vienna attracted immigrants from across the empire, for instance becoming one of the largest Czech cities in the world; Vienna became a major industrial centre.
And then, in 1918, the imperial structure fell apart completely.
The other successor states of Austria-Hungary could lay claim to autonomous nationalisms of their own. Hungary was the best example of this, given its limited independence from 1867 on, but the Czechoslovak and Yugoslav peoples also had relatively clear identities, at least against outsiders. The Republic of Austria, though, was simply the collection of Teutophone territories left once the rest of the empire had been parcelled out. Millions of Teutophones--most notably in Czechoslovakia--found themselves outside of the frontiers of the Republic of Austria, living in non-German (Slavic, Magyar, even Latin) nation-states. It didn’t help that the leading nationalities in the new successor states--for instance, the Czechs--were frequently objects of Teutophone disdain and fear in Austria-Hungary.
The somewhat larger number of Teutophones living inside reduced Austrian frontiers found that they lived in an imperial core bereft of its peripheries. Before the First World War, Vienna’s two millions inhabited the prominent capital of a middling prosperous state of more than fifty million people, with its basic needs (for food, for migrants, for industrial raw materials) supported by its dependent provinces. Once those dependent provinces became independent states, determined to develop their own national industrial economies autonomously of the former imperial centre, the Austrian economy went into a decided slump.
More, the territories remaining under the control of the national government in Vienna were threatened--Italy’s annexation of the overwhelmingly Teutophone South Tyrol was fiercely contested, while the Yugoslav attempt in 1920 to annex south Carinthia with its large Slovene population was only barely overturned. A small republic of less than seven million people, Austria was left terribly vulnerable.
Given the lack of a distinct Austrian identity, given the economic failure of the First Republic, and given the vulnerability of border territories to ambitious successor states, it isn’t surprising that a dominant trend in Austrian political life was to seek unification with Germany. For much of its two decades of existence, the country was governed by people who sought unification but were prevented by outside pressure, particularly French and Italian. For most of the rest of the time, Austria was governed by conservative Catholics who failed to successfully articulate an Austrian alternative to Greater Germany. Austria’s eventual anschluss was widely welcomed, resented only by minorities--by Jews, by socialists and communists, by democrats, by Viennese.
As elsewhere in other central European capitals, the conquest of Austria’s capital by Soviet troops radically altered traditional political patterns. In Czechoslovakia and Hungary, for instance, the captures of Prague and Budapest guaranteed the inevitable ascension of Communists to power. In Germany, the capture of Berlin symbolized the complete breakdown of previous political and social patterns. In Austria, the capture of Vienna culminated the end of eight years of Austrian unification into Germany, beginning on a positive note but quickly becoming a nightmare between shortages of consumer goods, growing lists of war casualties, destructive Allied bombings, and finally an irresistible Soviet invasion. Austrians had tried Greater Germany, and it most manifestly didn’t work.
The last chance for Austria’s absorption lay in the possibility of a breakdown in Western-Soviet relations. If Western-Soviet relations broke down completely, the possibility of a partition of Austria on the German model perhaps existed. With Vienna divided into Communist and Western sections, the separation of the Western segment of Vienna from the rest of Western-controlled Austria by Soviet-controlled countryside, and the fragmentation of the Austrian territories occupied by the United States, Britain, and France into various parochial local identities, an annexation of a rump Austria into the emerging Federal Republic of Germany might have been a plausible outcome. After all, Austrians had proclaimed themselves to be German, hadn’t they?
Western-Soviet relations in Austria didn’t suffer a breakdown comparable to that in Germany, of course, and so there was no partition. Just as importantly, Austria’s new political elite, returning from exile and reemerging from obscurity, took care to distance their new nation from Germany. Where once Austria was seen as a willing collaborator of Germany, willingly incorporated into the Third Reich, now Austria was portrayed as Germany’s first victim, as heir to a distinct Germanic culture with specific political orientations and a somewhat folklorized relationship with the Hapsburg past and wider central Europe. This suited the desires of the Austrians to manage to survive the post-war era; it also satisfied the desires of the Western powers to remove Austria from the table of Cold War issues, the desires of West Germans to avoid accusations of adventurism and imperialism beyond (or within) Germany’s traditional frontiers, and the desires of Soviets to gain a neutral intermediary in central Europe for trade and diplomacy.
And so, here we are.
Modern-day Germany and modern-day Austria are once again united, sharing a customs union, a single currency, and elected officials in the same parliament. The European Union, though, is a much broader project than the Austro-German customs union vetoed by France in 1932. Austria was once a politically unstable and struggling state, vulnerable to its neighbours; it is now one of the richest countries in Europe, surpassing Germany in income per capita, with a relatively stable political system despite its recent disturbance by the xenophobic populism of Haider and his ilk, and a frontier secured within the greater European Union. Austria’s main political issues have little to do with its relationship with Germany, and much more to do with its former partners in Austria-Hungary. Austria's now on its own.
