Around a decade ago the Atlantic was running a series on "Big Questions" where they asked a bunch of thoughtful types broad questions like "what day most changed the course of history?", and gave them a paragraph to stump for their answer. Some obvious-ish answers (eg Ken Burns named June 14, 1914 being the day Archduke Franz Ferdinand was killed), and others some somewhat silly (W. Kamau Bell named May 16, 1983, being the day Michael Jackson first performed the moonwalk on TV).
But some of the answers had me asking the question about thick vs thin moments in history (without realising someone had coined that term).
Paul Kennedy, professor of history, Yale University argued for "The day Thomas Newcomen invented his steam engine. America would be like a giant Angola without it." And my thought in response was: a world in which Thomas Newcomen didn't invent the steam engine, isn't world in which there is no steam engine, it's a world in which someone else invents a steam engine a few years later and not much changes. A thick day, perhaps.
The interesting to me argument for what this piece suggests is the "thinnest" date in recorded history was that given by Timothy Snyder, professor of history, Yale University:
"On December 11, 1241, the Mongol warrior Batu Khan was poised to take Vienna and destroy the Holy Roman Empire. No European force could have kept his armies from reaching the Atlantic. But the death of Ögedei Khan, the second Great Khan of the Mongol empire, forced Batu Khan to return to Mongolia to discuss the succession. Had Ögedei Khan died a few years later, European history as we know it would not have happened."
If only you were willing to write "The case for the Tsarist Russian Empire," you could join the Republicans and Fox News crowd and get that sweet, sweet Putin payola.
I tend to agree with some of the other commenters - WW1 had bigger consequences than the empires it destroyed, and probably there's a big European war at some later point that takes its place as driving home just how destructive modern warfare is. (And probably totalitarianism still happens somewhere, though not necessarily the same countries as historically.)
Of course, A-H might have wound up on the *winning* side of such a war. If reformers were successful, it might've worked out better for Central Europe. But it wouldn't necessarily have been better for the world as a whole.
This was a fascinating piece for me - my late (and beloved) college history professor in the 1970s, Dr. Laszlo Deme, fled Hungary in 1956, walking with a limp his entire life because an injury in the uprising. While your discussion is astute on many points, it wasn't original to me. Much of my "Modern European History" minor in 1973-77 consisted of learning a lot about the Hapsburg Empire, and I had to take an entire class on the subject. Dr. Deme's main thesis (which I had to internalize to pass his classes) was very similar to yours, although a little different because it was posited while the Soviets still controlled Eastern Europe. He alternate history was not quite as elaborate, taking WW I as a given, and arguing that the Empire should not have been broken up, and that it could have succeeded as a federation, and resisted Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. I had to think that he is smiling down seeing that someone has echoed his arguments.
I can buy that WWI itself was a little fluky, but I don't see any path to anything that looks like modern Europe without it. Here's my (very very amateur) counter-factual.
Imagine you import a member of the German general staff or a British Admiral out of 1899 and show them 1950. Don't tell them about the world wars, just show them what's going on, and they're going to be completely confounded.
From their perspective up is down, down is up. The United Kingdom isn't the dominant super power/empire, and apparently the...Americans are in charge??! To fend off their foes the Russian communists, who apparently have half of Germany as a client state. The other half of Germany has really leaned into this pacifist thing and depends on the isolationist United States for its security guarantees. European ideas about superiority, empire, culture, all that stuff is gone, and more than anything, nobody really wants to fight anymore.
If you don't tell our 19th century friends about the world wars, what else can they put in that blank spot that explains such complete international transformation.
In that context, the idea that if we skip WWI somehow we dodge all the nasty stuff and Europe just eases into its current configuration...I don't buy it. Without WWI people still think that fighting with other international empires is a splendid idea. They think it's a good idea until they try it.
The whole scenario reminds me of Minsky's idea that volatile markets breed stability (by causing the participants to become more risk averse) and stable markets breed volatility (by cuasing the participants to take on more risk unknowingly). The Europeans go from being risk takers (in international relations) to risk averse by taking on too much risk and having civilization burn down on them.
FWIW, the impetus for homogeneous linguistic communities to want to break away never really stopped. Czeckoslovakia split not long ago. The Basques still want to. Etc. My experience in Europe / with a European wife & friends is that ordinary people have little affection for the European project.
Africa is a continent full of Austro-Hungarian empires that are trying to convince themselves that they are nations. So are India (like “Europe in one country”) and Indonesia.
Africans might be pleased with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, because it was the one important European country (not counting Russia) that didn’t try to colonize Africa ;-)
I have to say, though, as a Polish-born American citizen, my first reaction to "wouldn't it be great if the Austro-Hungarian Empire had survived?" as a visceral "No!"
My great-grandma was born in a village near Lviv before WWI. My ancestors didn't want to be part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, not even a nice, friendly, federal, wealthy one with brilliant Jewish-Hungarian physicists and stuff. They wanted their own free independent homeland, and a reunion of the three parts - Russian, Prussian, and Austro-Hungarian - that had been taken from Poland at the end of the 18th century.
On purely utilitarian grounds, would a continuation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire be a net benefit? Probably. Certainly WWI was horrific, and then, 20 years after Poland got our independence, we were invaded by the Nazis from the west and the Soviets from the east, and f***d over for the next 4+ decades. It's nice to think of how all that could have been avoided.
Maybe the best-case scenario is this: there's no WWI, the Austro-Hungarian Empire continues for a while, but the Poles and other ethnic groups continue to agitate for independence, and eventually whoever's in charge decides it's too much trouble to keep the whole thing together, and we have a peaceful dissolution a la the Czech Republic and Slovakia? (The Russian government would have never let the Russian-occupied part of Poland go. So we'd have a smaller Poland, possibly with the capital in Krakow. In this fantasy version of history, does Russia still have a tsar - presumably one who's a figurehead, like other modern European monarchs?)
I feel a lot of cognitive dissonance when writing this. I'm an American citizen now, by choice, and the American vs. Polish versions of what a nation-state should be - based on shared ideals vs. shared ethnicity/ancestry - are clashing in my mind. From the American perspective, sure, let's have a kinder, gentler Austro-Hungarian Empire. From the Polish perspective, hell no! To the barricades!
I see Matt is excited for the upcoming release of Victoria 3.
Another interesting counterfactual along these lines is what if the Ottoman Empire had sat out the Great War. There's no particular reason to think the empire was about to collapse of its own accord, absent the shock of the war, and if they hadn't then they'd have retained control of like 2/3s of the oil on Earth. It's pretty easy to imagine a world in which Istanbul is the glittering capitol of an unfathomably wealthy multi-ethnic petro-empire.
There are a lot of "thin" moments in history (if I followed Matt's explanation about Nozick's terms correctly) involving oil that would be interesting to explore. The one I think most often about recently is the issue of oil being discovered in Libya almost immediately after it was granted full independence. It seems like there are two different points in time where that could have happened and had significant historical impact. The first would be the Italians discovering oil in the 1920s or early '30s. That would certainly have changed some of the calculations about the importance of Italy as a potential ally in the lead up to WW2 and, if Italy had still joined the Axis as it did historically, would have made the Mediterranean and North Africa even more significant theaters in the war. The second would be the British discovering oil in the late '40s, which seems like it probably would have resulted in Libya's independence being more carefully managed, possibly precluding Qaddafi from successfully carrying out his coup in the '60s, which in turn would have a lot of implications for the stability of the Sahel region (since Qaddafi financed many rebel groups in the region) and the assassination of Anwar Sadat (since Qaddafi's involvement there is widely suspected).
Also, on the subject of Mid-Eastern alternate histories, you might want to check out this quirky short story/article that was published in Reason magazine about 20 years ago -- "The Tale of Many Jerusalems": https://reason.com/2002/11/01/the-tale-of-many-jerusalems-2/
I like the idea of playing out various plausible scenarios for past events that did not occur. In this case, I worry that while you did a wonderful job of laying out why your plausible scenario would have been succcessful, you did not pay any significant attention to why it might have run into some severe problems such as decentralization or ethnic coalitions that competed with each other and might have fought wars within the country. A fun piece nonetheless that reminds us that the world we now have is not the only one we could have had. Two decades or so ago, I played around with why the Ottoman Empire would produiced a far more prosperous and stable Middle East than what actuially developed. It was an interesting exercise as your's is as well.
Could it have worked though? I think the Hapsburgs and their elite supporters were head of a ship of state bound to fail in one way or another, largely due to their own incompetence. Bismarck warned of "seek[ing] protection from a possible storm by tying our trim and seaworthy frigate to the worm-eaten and old-fashioned Austrian man-of-war" and once said there was nothing in the Eastern Question "that was worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier."
Wasn't Bismarck was essentially correct about the Austrian empire in this respect?
Around a decade ago the Atlantic was running a series on "Big Questions" where they asked a bunch of thoughtful types broad questions like "what day most changed the course of history?", and gave them a paragraph to stump for their answer. Some obvious-ish answers (eg Ken Burns named June 14, 1914 being the day Archduke Franz Ferdinand was killed), and others some somewhat silly (W. Kamau Bell named May 16, 1983, being the day Michael Jackson first performed the moonwalk on TV).
But some of the answers had me asking the question about thick vs thin moments in history (without realising someone had coined that term).
Paul Kennedy, professor of history, Yale University argued for "The day Thomas Newcomen invented his steam engine. America would be like a giant Angola without it." And my thought in response was: a world in which Thomas Newcomen didn't invent the steam engine, isn't world in which there is no steam engine, it's a world in which someone else invents a steam engine a few years later and not much changes. A thick day, perhaps.
The interesting to me argument for what this piece suggests is the "thinnest" date in recorded history was that given by Timothy Snyder, professor of history, Yale University:
"On December 11, 1241, the Mongol warrior Batu Khan was poised to take Vienna and destroy the Holy Roman Empire. No European force could have kept his armies from reaching the Atlantic. But the death of Ögedei Khan, the second Great Khan of the Mongol empire, forced Batu Khan to return to Mongolia to discuss the succession. Had Ögedei Khan died a few years later, European history as we know it would not have happened."
If you haven't read Tooze's The Deluge, you really should
I thought, oh this is going to be a complete waste of time and wound up loving it. Bravo!
This is one of my favorite posts of yours.
If only you were willing to write "The case for the Tsarist Russian Empire," you could join the Republicans and Fox News crowd and get that sweet, sweet Putin payola.
I tend to agree with some of the other commenters - WW1 had bigger consequences than the empires it destroyed, and probably there's a big European war at some later point that takes its place as driving home just how destructive modern warfare is. (And probably totalitarianism still happens somewhere, though not necessarily the same countries as historically.)
Of course, A-H might have wound up on the *winning* side of such a war. If reformers were successful, it might've worked out better for Central Europe. But it wouldn't necessarily have been better for the world as a whole.
This was a fascinating piece for me - my late (and beloved) college history professor in the 1970s, Dr. Laszlo Deme, fled Hungary in 1956, walking with a limp his entire life because an injury in the uprising. While your discussion is astute on many points, it wasn't original to me. Much of my "Modern European History" minor in 1973-77 consisted of learning a lot about the Hapsburg Empire, and I had to take an entire class on the subject. Dr. Deme's main thesis (which I had to internalize to pass his classes) was very similar to yours, although a little different because it was posited while the Soviets still controlled Eastern Europe. He alternate history was not quite as elaborate, taking WW I as a given, and arguing that the Empire should not have been broken up, and that it could have succeeded as a federation, and resisted Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. I had to think that he is smiling down seeing that someone has echoed his arguments.
I can buy that WWI itself was a little fluky, but I don't see any path to anything that looks like modern Europe without it. Here's my (very very amateur) counter-factual.
Imagine you import a member of the German general staff or a British Admiral out of 1899 and show them 1950. Don't tell them about the world wars, just show them what's going on, and they're going to be completely confounded.
From their perspective up is down, down is up. The United Kingdom isn't the dominant super power/empire, and apparently the...Americans are in charge??! To fend off their foes the Russian communists, who apparently have half of Germany as a client state. The other half of Germany has really leaned into this pacifist thing and depends on the isolationist United States for its security guarantees. European ideas about superiority, empire, culture, all that stuff is gone, and more than anything, nobody really wants to fight anymore.
If you don't tell our 19th century friends about the world wars, what else can they put in that blank spot that explains such complete international transformation.
In that context, the idea that if we skip WWI somehow we dodge all the nasty stuff and Europe just eases into its current configuration...I don't buy it. Without WWI people still think that fighting with other international empires is a splendid idea. They think it's a good idea until they try it.
The whole scenario reminds me of Minsky's idea that volatile markets breed stability (by causing the participants to become more risk averse) and stable markets breed volatility (by cuasing the participants to take on more risk unknowingly). The Europeans go from being risk takers (in international relations) to risk averse by taking on too much risk and having civilization burn down on them.
FWIW, the impetus for homogeneous linguistic communities to want to break away never really stopped. Czeckoslovakia split not long ago. The Basques still want to. Etc. My experience in Europe / with a European wife & friends is that ordinary people have little affection for the European project.
Africa is a continent full of Austro-Hungarian empires that are trying to convince themselves that they are nations. So are India (like “Europe in one country”) and Indonesia.
Africans might be pleased with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, because it was the one important European country (not counting Russia) that didn’t try to colonize Africa ;-)
Fascinating alternative history, thank you MattY!
I have to say, though, as a Polish-born American citizen, my first reaction to "wouldn't it be great if the Austro-Hungarian Empire had survived?" as a visceral "No!"
My great-grandma was born in a village near Lviv before WWI. My ancestors didn't want to be part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, not even a nice, friendly, federal, wealthy one with brilliant Jewish-Hungarian physicists and stuff. They wanted their own free independent homeland, and a reunion of the three parts - Russian, Prussian, and Austro-Hungarian - that had been taken from Poland at the end of the 18th century.
On purely utilitarian grounds, would a continuation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire be a net benefit? Probably. Certainly WWI was horrific, and then, 20 years after Poland got our independence, we were invaded by the Nazis from the west and the Soviets from the east, and f***d over for the next 4+ decades. It's nice to think of how all that could have been avoided.
Maybe the best-case scenario is this: there's no WWI, the Austro-Hungarian Empire continues for a while, but the Poles and other ethnic groups continue to agitate for independence, and eventually whoever's in charge decides it's too much trouble to keep the whole thing together, and we have a peaceful dissolution a la the Czech Republic and Slovakia? (The Russian government would have never let the Russian-occupied part of Poland go. So we'd have a smaller Poland, possibly with the capital in Krakow. In this fantasy version of history, does Russia still have a tsar - presumably one who's a figurehead, like other modern European monarchs?)
I feel a lot of cognitive dissonance when writing this. I'm an American citizen now, by choice, and the American vs. Polish versions of what a nation-state should be - based on shared ideals vs. shared ethnicity/ancestry - are clashing in my mind. From the American perspective, sure, let's have a kinder, gentler Austro-Hungarian Empire. From the Polish perspective, hell no! To the barricades!
I see Matt is excited for the upcoming release of Victoria 3.
Another interesting counterfactual along these lines is what if the Ottoman Empire had sat out the Great War. There's no particular reason to think the empire was about to collapse of its own accord, absent the shock of the war, and if they hadn't then they'd have retained control of like 2/3s of the oil on Earth. It's pretty easy to imagine a world in which Istanbul is the glittering capitol of an unfathomably wealthy multi-ethnic petro-empire.
There are a lot of "thin" moments in history (if I followed Matt's explanation about Nozick's terms correctly) involving oil that would be interesting to explore. The one I think most often about recently is the issue of oil being discovered in Libya almost immediately after it was granted full independence. It seems like there are two different points in time where that could have happened and had significant historical impact. The first would be the Italians discovering oil in the 1920s or early '30s. That would certainly have changed some of the calculations about the importance of Italy as a potential ally in the lead up to WW2 and, if Italy had still joined the Axis as it did historically, would have made the Mediterranean and North Africa even more significant theaters in the war. The second would be the British discovering oil in the late '40s, which seems like it probably would have resulted in Libya's independence being more carefully managed, possibly precluding Qaddafi from successfully carrying out his coup in the '60s, which in turn would have a lot of implications for the stability of the Sahel region (since Qaddafi financed many rebel groups in the region) and the assassination of Anwar Sadat (since Qaddafi's involvement there is widely suspected).
Also, on the subject of Mid-Eastern alternate histories, you might want to check out this quirky short story/article that was published in Reason magazine about 20 years ago -- "The Tale of Many Jerusalems": https://reason.com/2002/11/01/the-tale-of-many-jerusalems-2/
I love this content
Next Slate Pitch -- the Holy Roman Empire was underrated, and had quite a lot to recommend it.
I'm pretty sure there were a lot of French writers from the mid-1800s to mid-1900s putting out content to that effect.
I like the idea of playing out various plausible scenarios for past events that did not occur. In this case, I worry that while you did a wonderful job of laying out why your plausible scenario would have been succcessful, you did not pay any significant attention to why it might have run into some severe problems such as decentralization or ethnic coalitions that competed with each other and might have fought wars within the country. A fun piece nonetheless that reminds us that the world we now have is not the only one we could have had. Two decades or so ago, I played around with why the Ottoman Empire would produiced a far more prosperous and stable Middle East than what actuially developed. It was an interesting exercise as your's is as well.
Could it have worked though? I think the Hapsburgs and their elite supporters were head of a ship of state bound to fail in one way or another, largely due to their own incompetence. Bismarck warned of "seek[ing] protection from a possible storm by tying our trim and seaworthy frigate to the worm-eaten and old-fashioned Austrian man-of-war" and once said there was nothing in the Eastern Question "that was worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier."
Wasn't Bismarck was essentially correct about the Austrian empire in this respect?