35 year career in integrated circuits. One of my proudest possessions is my first boss's copy of "Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices," which I inherited after he passed. Years later in a chance dinner discussion at a dinner party, I was describing my fondness for this possession to some friends. They listened nodding their heads. At end they said "We know Andy Grove. Want us to get that signed for you?" They happened to be related to Les Vadasz and had dinner with Andy Grove all the time when they visited. Now it has become my proudest possession squared.
Neat you used them as examples because you could apply this thick/thin bit to semiconductor history and these two guys. Maybe not as thin as WWI. But decisions Les Vadasz made, leap-frogged technology by about 10 years. Then he came up with a really clever reuse of an already developed product to explode into microprocessor market. So again maybe not WWI. But 10 years is like an infinity in high tech.
"10 years is like an infinity in high tech" is one of the alt history things that is going to be a very interesting question in maybe 1 or 2 decades. I think world history could look very different if you just delay the entire trajectory of contemporary computer science by a relatively small amount of time. If a widely used international network of personal computers doesn't exist until 2000, or 2010, which seems totally plausible to me in a world where we assume everyone had to get there "the long way around", basically everyone alive today would have a dramatically different life story I think.
It has no utility, and thus the value is solely in the mind of the beholder. It’ll always be with us, but as relevant to the modern economy’s workings as the price of gold.
And if various entities decide to curtail power usage… bye.
I’m a huge fan of the Back to the Future movies. Watching BTTF2 post-2015 (the date he travels to) is funny for what it got wrong, but I think it’s more interesting to contemplate what the “thin moments” in tech history were that could have brought us there instead of here… something related to a focus on the study of gravity and magnetism instead of semiconductors? We too could be kicking our hoverboards past a phone booth.
\ a grunt articulated as a syllabic m or n with a voiceless onset or as the syllable ˈhə or ˈhəⁿ, often ending in a glottal stop, and uttered with a range of intonations ; often read as ˈhə\
Definition of huh
—used to express surprise, disbelief, or confusion, or as an inquiry inviting affirmative reply"
I definitely agree that the outbreak of WWI was both incredibly impactful and highly contingent, but I wonder in that case where the dissipation of nationalist energies elsewhere in Europe comes from. In reality it happened because of the World Wars – I'm sympathetic to those who consider them one big war – when the sheer destructiveness of it became undeniable and Europeans looked for a better way.
If WWI doesn't happen, or is just a small retributive war against the Serbs, maybe the frequently-violent national competition between European nations seems sustainable. It's also worth noting that some nations at this time, notably the Poles, still consider themselves occupied by multiple powers – Kraków can be the centre of culture in the Hapsburg lands, but there will be a pull of Polish culture to Warsaw as well, and nationalist impulses with it.
So while I agree that the Hapsburg Empire would be very viable within Europe's shift to multiculturalism, one wonders if that would have happened – maybe 1950s Austria-Hungary would have just been a larger-scale 1990s Yugoslavia, with its brutal wars. There was a lot of violent energy in Europe in the first half of the century, and in the absence of WWI it would have to be released somehow.
On the world wars as a single event, I once heard 1914-1945 described as The Second Thirty Years War. It ended with the United Nations reshaping the concept of nation-state just as the first ended with the Peace of Westphalia.
Things were going slightly pear-shaped already in Ireland when Conservatives turned a blind eye to Unionist gun running/Curragh mutiny, but it remained contingent and the timing of the First World War a huge blow to a constitutional outcome. The War delays the Home Rule Bill, by which Northern Ireland would still have opted out 'temporarily' from the Dublin Parliament for first six years, but the two Parliaments in Ireland would have retained the aim to reunite after one or more renewed 'temporary' delays to form a united All-Ireland - maybe federal/with Home Rule for North.
This timeline has no Easter Rising - any crackdowns on radicals would be be by elected Irish governments - and no Conscription Crisis. The route would be open for a gradual, peaceful, constitutional route from integral UK > Home Rule in UK > which once given a chance would allow Ireland to eventually follow Canada/Australia-style path by moving to Dominion >Commonwealth, then onto Republic if desired.
I think you're more likely to get a fullblown civil war in 1914 with the British Government piggy in the middle between Southern Ireland and Ulster Unionists. A lot of people were somewhat relieved that WW1 gave Britain and Ireland to park the issue of Home Rule. Incidentally the Conservatives didn't turn a blind eye to gun running/mutiny - they were fully supporting it as the opposition. The Liberal Government was the one divided about what to do
You're right to correct on the characterisation of the Conservatives and gun running/mutiny - blind eye too passive for outright treason. Who makes the best argument on a possible North-South civil war? I can't see the South attempting to conquer a North enjoying UK support, or the North having much interest in invading the South.
Well you did actually have quite a lot of inter-communal violence in Ulster when war came in 1919. And this would be a Unionism that had yet to make peace with giving up three border Ulster counties let alone the rest of Ireland (Dublin was somewhat of a Unionist stronghold). A war in 1914 would've seen the British Government not on the side of Ulster which would've been in revolt. I think at the very least you might get a mass explusion of Catholics from ALL of Ulster. It would have been even messier than what ultimately happened.
I don't know enough history to comment on this without embarrassing myself, but whatever.
If you wanted to disagree with Matt you might frame it like this. Before 1914 there were three multinational states in Europe: Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman. After 1918 there were one and a half (Russia and Yugoslavia). The Austro-Hungarians and Ottomans got broken up because they lost the war; Russia survived as a multinational state and Yugoslavia was created because Russia was a major victorious power and the Serbs were a minor one.
So I can't help thinking it's a little suspicious that the USSR and Yugoslavia eventually did disintegrate along ethnic lines, even though ethnonationalism was much less respectable in the 1990s than in 1918. That makes the whole phenomenon look overdetermined, with the outcome of WWI affecting the timing but not the final outcome.
Matt's argument, if I understand it right, is that Austria-Hungary wasn't like the Ottoman "sick man of Europe", which everyone was expecting to break apart. Because it was stable and prosperous, its continued success (if the war hadn't happened) could have discredited ethnonationalism as an organizing principle. You'd eventually have had something like the "EU mentality" emerge by a different path.
The problem I don't see addressed here is how Austria-Hungary democratizes internally. The demand for self-government has been gradually increasing everywhere in the world at least since the Enlightenment, and electoral democracy in multi-ethnic societies always--always--produces strong ethnic tensions which are very difficult to manage.
If anything those tensions are still intensifying in some parts of the world, like India, which are less developed and somewhat behind the curve. (V.S. Naipaul was very good about this: he thought the rise of Hindu nationalism was an inevitable consequence of Hindu Indians becoming more self-aware and politically minded. He got a lot of flack for not being willing to condemn the phenomenon out of hand, but the analysis seems right to me.)
Europe may be past that point by now, which is why the EU (mostly) works and even commands a lot of emotional allegiance from better-educated Europeans. But I don't see how you get to post-nationalism without first going through two world wars and seeing what nationalism can do. Matt's alternate history just seems too optimistic in that regard.
The main counterarguments are that while, yes, separatism and ethnonationalism can be emboldened by democracy, it usually requires some sort of acute crisis to actually cause fragmentation.
It's also worth pointing out that since decolonization, most countries remain multiethnic and the only major examples of multinational states actually falling apart are: (1) Pakistan and (2) the three communist federations. Pakistan's bifurcation is obviously an odd example, given its weird dual-headed structure and external intervention from India.
But the other ones are in many respects directly linked to Leninist political structures. All three of these - the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia - were structured as extremely loose confederations of theoretically sovereign "republics," with no clear demarcation of federal/state relations, and which were held together through highly centralized party dictatorships. Once the Communist Party monopolies were dismantled - especially in the midst of acute economic crises - there was very little that actually underpinned these regimes constitutionally. (It's also worth pointing out that majorities in almost all these states did not favor their unions' dissolution at the time. Even now, surprisingly large numbers of Czechs and - to a lesser extent - Slovaks regret their breakups.)
All this to say that fragmentation isn't inevitable. And because ethnonationalism wound up being dominant we tend to ignore the hugely internationalist, interconnectedness of late 19th / early 20th C political movements, most of which took for granted the looseness of political boundaries.
India is having significant religious tensions. But I don’t see there being obvious hints of major ethnic tensions between, say, Marathis and Bengalis and Tamils. There are some ethnic parties that rule various states, and a few states have split, but there doesn’t seem to be obvious pressure to break up the multiethnic nation around ethnic lines.
I'm more concerned about the spread of what seem like potentially genocidal anti-Muslim attitudes among a lot of Hindus. I don't understand Indian society well at all but what I read is very alarming.
"...even though ethnonationalism was much less respectable in the 1990s than in 1918."
Ah, the Americans (or maybe even the Anglo-Saxons?).
I think ethnonationalism is still the organizing principle in Europe. It's just that through different means (ranging from genocide to assimilation) we have much more ethnically homogeneous nations now compared to 1918.
I think Americans and Western Europeans can be unrealistic about the strength of these sentiments and the extent to which you can wish them away.
You saw this in NATO's changing attitude towards the Yugoslav wars. In the early 1990s the major powers refused as a matter of principle to let the Bosnian Serbs secede and join Serbia: a huge mistake, I think, which led to the siege of Sarajevo and a lot of other bad stuff. By the end of the decade they'd stopped trying to fight ethnonationalist sentiment, to the point that they actually used military force to help Kosovo secede from Serbia. If they'd been more accommodating of the initial ethnonationalist claims of the Serbs, a lot of bloodshed would have been prevented and Bosnia's government wouldn't be organized in its current consociational form, which doesn't look viable for the long term.
Fair enough. Maybe a better way to put it would be: the West treated Yugoslavia's integrity as negotiable but the integrity of the individual republics as non-negotiable, until they changed their minds and decided Serbia's integrity was negotiable too.
I'm not a Milosevic tankie but the Serbs were right to see a double standard and I think it affected their behavior: they decided the world would be against them no matter what they did so there was no point in trying to follow international norms (this seems to be the attitude of some Israelis nowadays, but never mind). So even from a human rights perspective this approach had bad results.
I think it's genuinely a weird situation because Kosovo and Vojvodina were basically treated like separate parts of Yugoslavia whilst still being part of Serbia. So when Yugoslavia imploded, their status was always going to need readdressing. But yes there was no doubt that the sympathies of the West were primarily with Croatia and Slovenia for religious reasons. Why the Bosinaks become such a cause célèbre is a bit more mysterious and did come latter - initially moves such as the arms embargo and Vance-Owens' peace plan placed the Bosnian Government at a disadvantage. Maybe the US (France and Britain were not keen) wanted to prove that it could fight for Muslims after the Gulf War and Somalia?
The US fought in favor of Muslims in the Gulf War though. I have a Saudi friend who deeply cared about Bosniaks because of shared religion. Looking into Syria in the 2010s as well, my understanding is that the US will really fight in favor of Muslims that are supported by Saudi Arabia, just as they did in the Gulf War.
I also think that a Serb perspective is that they were punished because they are predominantly Orthodox Slavs just like Russia. So, no inconsistency there about whether the sovereignty of individual regions is sacred or not. Just fight against Serbs/Russians all the time.
I'm not convinced by Saudi lobbying, because Britain tends to be equally suspectible to that than the Americans, and we were very much opposed to intervention in Bosnia. But I take your point
I agree, but I also want to emphasize that it's not all humanitarian reasons. To the best of my knowledge, the US recognizes the Golan Heights as part of Israel and Crimea as part of Ukraine, which doesn't seem very consistent to me. Same thing about sanctions towards Russia for occupying Crimea versus sanctions against Turkey for occupying northern Cyprus.
Opposite. Led by Germany they rushed to recognise the independence of Croatia and Slovenia, rather than see if something could be salvaged of Yugoslavia. Bosnia was always going to become a killing field after that, because there wasn't a clearly delineated "Serbian" area, the Serbs wanted to grab as much territory as possible, and Croatia weren't minded to let Bosniaks rule Bosinan Croats in what would be left.
Yes, but Ireland decided to leave and Scotland may eventually do the same. I think Scottish independence is a stupid idea and Irish independence was probably a mistake as well (RIP my mentions) but it just goes to show that even in very successful societies, these attitudes can gradually strengthen until it's no longer feasible to resist them.
Also the history of Ireland shows how even in the 20th Centuries, religion played such a huge role in determining alligences. Catholic Ireland and Presbyterian Ulster both had a history of rebellion against the Anglican Ascendancy. But by the 20th Century, fear of being ruled by Catholics meant Presbyterian Ulster had become the strongest champions of the link with Britain.
Well all societies are multiethnic to some degree. But I think the idea that specific ethnic groups or regions have a right to self-government didn't have much currency in the UK until Victorian times, when the demand for Irish home rule began. And it didn't reach its current form until Tony Blair's government brought in the devolved assemblies in the 1990s.
It looks to me as if the movement for Irish home rule is pretty closely linked to the expansion of the franchise throughout the UK. That goes back to my earlier question: how do you expect people in Austria-Hungary to start demanding voting rights without also starting to demand ethnic autonomy? It would be nice if the two things didn't have to go together but it seems they almost always do.
But parliamentary devolution isn't the only form of devolution. Scotland got to have their own (non-Anglican) established Church, its own legal system, educational system, sports teams, and government minister.
I agree with this, which also echoes Michael M's complaint. I think there needed to be learning on both sides. From bottom up, the ethno-nationalist needed to learn they would pay a horrendous cost if they insisted on carving up nation states. And the elites needed to learn that they had to embrace democratic legitimacy and accept what are now modern concepts of international norms in order to sustain political order domestically and internationally.
In other words, it's a nice story but I don't think this historical example is on as strong of grounds as claiming to be 'thin' compared to the story of Bolshevik success in Russia. I think the more realistic take is that history could have played out quite differently in the specifics, but the survival of the Austria-Hungarian empire still seems like a longshot compared to the more relatively homogeneous French, German, Spanish, English and even Italian states.
When I lived in Singapore in the late 1990s it was very noticeable that you could identify the ethnicity of middle-aged people by their accents, whereas young people all spoke the same way.
Singapore also had an intense autocratic program to try and integrate society across ethnic lines. I don't know how reproducible that is outside of the confines of "small island, charismatic leader, government provision of housing and lots of other things".
Speaks poorly to the sustainability of the US federal project, especially when the rich areas are the ones that haven’t completely lost the plot on policy. (Just partly).
I laughed out loud at the part where it was suggested that prominent Jewish representation in the high offices of the Empire would have resulted in a philosemitic culture. Yes, that's how it's always worked!
I’m skeptical that conflict between Germany and France/Russia could’ve been permanently avoided. If I’m right about that, then I don’t think there’s a way to keep Austria-Hungary out of it.
The 2014 movie, Sarajevo (Das Attentat, in the original) is a fun take on the assassination of the archduke, suggesting Princip was a dupe of German and Austrian intelligence services looking to stage a pretext for a war they were dead set on having.
I think German fear of the Bear is probably a more potent problem.
They knew that Russia, barring an external push, was eventually going to eclipse their own war-fighting potential, even in concert with A-H, and even if they had kept the British out of it.
Some of what I’ve read suggests the German leadership basically breathed a sigh of relief when it became clear that Russia would consider the whole incident a casus belli.
Great piece. I very much enjoy this kind of post as a subscriber, and would like to continue seeing it alongside your usual political commentary – maybe this is what Slow Boring readers consider off-beat.
Two additional thoughts:
First, I think the strongest case against Austro-Hungarian federalism is that the imperial structure induced divide-and-rule politics, and I’m not sure how this would play out in a more federal system or the transition to one. For instance, you mention that the state would not be warm towards Ukrainian nationalism – this would be a demotion for Ukrainian nationalists, who enjoyed patronage from the Hapsburgs as a counterweight to Polish influence in Galicia.
The very act of trying to create new sources of legitimacy separate from allegiance to the monarch is itself destabilising – reform is risky and the route to a “good ending” seems to me rather narrow, especially after the disastrous creation of an oversized Hungarian quasi-state with its own military in 1867.
Second, I’m not sure that a local government approach to ethnic federalism would work. This was the cornerstone of Soviet (Stalin’s!) nationality policy in the 1920s, and the resulting pyramid of ethnic units (with autonomous republics, oblasts, raions etc all with titular ethnicites) fuelled rather than dampened national sentiment. It’s the kind of thing that smart people can reason themselves into thinking is a viable framework, but the on-the-ground creation of those structures creates new and alarming incentives for individuals and communities.
If you are interested in looking at these questions through the lens of pre-War Soviet nationality policy and local government reform, I would highly recommend Terry Martin’s the Affirmative Action Empire. It’s also extremely useful for understanding Ukrainian-Russian relations in the formation of the Soviet state, and helps explain why Putin is saying a bunch of mad stuff about that period to justify the next phase of his war in Ukraine. https://www.amazon.com/Affirmative-Action-Empire-Nationalism-1923-1939-ebook/dp/B01N291P0U
In Gregor Von Rezzori's Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, which is about the post-Hapsburg world in the interwar years, Stiassny, the dispossessed aristocrat, notes that people in the empire were more ethnically mixed than they liked to admit, especially the German Austrians, and that (quoting from memory) "we could have admitted that we were Americans, but we lacked the political ability".
I think the czar had it coming but the revolution would have taken a less violent turn if not for the war. Mike Duncan’s podcast is pretty great at describing how random and contingent Lenin’s success was.
But without the provisional government not wanting to accept German surrender terms I don't think you'd see the October Revolution and subsequent civil war.
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 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!
It’s worth considering how much of the apparent liberalism of the Austria-Hungarian Empire c. 1914 was dependent on its emperor.
Franz-Joseph reigned for 68 years, including the entire period of the Dual Monarchy. In the constitutions of Austria and Hungary, the emperor was granted substantial powers, including the sole authority over the army, and the right to veto any bills. Nevertheless, the empire developed an ostensibly liberal-ish political culture.
But any system that depends on one man as a bedrock is inherently unstable, and all the more so if it’s a hereditary monarchy. The Russian Empire had a parliament; the German Empire had a parliament; but they were both governed by erratic would-be despots, and the parliaments were sidelined.
If a future Austro-Hungarian Emperor had decided to crack down on his representative government, would Austro-Hungarian political culture be able to push back?
After World War I every former A.H. state (except, I believe, Czechoslovakia) quickly devolved into autocracy, not to say racialism and fascism. Of course, the interwar period was hard for everyone but it doesn’t say much for the people’s commitment to pluralistic liberal democracy.
The nation-state was among other things an innovation in organizing society to make war, coupled with industrialization and inter-locking alliances costly large scale wars would have occurred regardless of the particular details of WWI.
Industrial scale warfare is easier to achieve than the politics that selects leaders who realize in an industrial world there is no longer an economic logic to war because you cannot capture human capital or profit from a factory supply chain destroyed by war in the way that you could extract wealth from a land based economy. With the means to make war outstripping the judgement not to, a traditional war could not end all wars and further industrialization would lead to more deadly wars regardless of the particulars of the start of WWI.
The major constraint on war in the post WW-II period is nuclear weapons which make the extreme cost of war very clear to both leaders and nationalists alike. Nuclear weapons would have been developed anyways and they are the real reason for the post WW-II peace in Europe.
I think the idea that absent the assassination of the Archduke WWI wouldn’t have happened is incorrect. I highly recommend “Europe’s Last Summer” by David Fromkin, which convincingly argues that Germany’s cadre of military leaders was seeking a pretext for war and that peace would still have been achievable after the assassination if Germany had actually been interested in peace
Austria-Hungary could have survived and wasn’t doomed like the European colonial empires because it was fundamentally a good deal for the people within it.
For India, there was really no benefit to being a part of the British Empire. The British didn’t provide an extra level of protection, and British economic policy tried to extract as much as they could from India. Railroads for example were built to make it easier to get raw materials to port so they could be shipped back to Britain.
For an empire like Austria-Hungary, the main benefit was protection. As we saw, the alternative to being a part of Austria-Hungary was dominated by either Germany, Russia or, to a lesser extent, Italy.
When did Slow Boring just become such a click bait factory?
I would also like to say in addition to my other comment that I very much enjoyed this and hope you do more weird content like it
35 year career in integrated circuits. One of my proudest possessions is my first boss's copy of "Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices," which I inherited after he passed. Years later in a chance dinner discussion at a dinner party, I was describing my fondness for this possession to some friends. They listened nodding their heads. At end they said "We know Andy Grove. Want us to get that signed for you?" They happened to be related to Les Vadasz and had dinner with Andy Grove all the time when they visited. Now it has become my proudest possession squared.
Neat you used them as examples because you could apply this thick/thin bit to semiconductor history and these two guys. Maybe not as thin as WWI. But decisions Les Vadasz made, leap-frogged technology by about 10 years. Then he came up with a really clever reuse of an already developed product to explode into microprocessor market. So again maybe not WWI. But 10 years is like an infinity in high tech.
"To Ken, May you learn more from this book than I still remember - Actually, that should be easy! Andy (smiley face) 3/10/08"
"10 years is like an infinity in high tech" is one of the alt history things that is going to be a very interesting question in maybe 1 or 2 decades. I think world history could look very different if you just delay the entire trajectory of contemporary computer science by a relatively small amount of time. If a widely used international network of personal computers doesn't exist until 2000, or 2010, which seems totally plausible to me in a world where we assume everyone had to get there "the long way around", basically everyone alive today would have a dramatically different life story I think.
It has no utility, and thus the value is solely in the mind of the beholder. It’ll always be with us, but as relevant to the modern economy’s workings as the price of gold.
And if various entities decide to curtail power usage… bye.
I’m a huge fan of the Back to the Future movies. Watching BTTF2 post-2015 (the date he travels to) is funny for what it got wrong, but I think it’s more interesting to contemplate what the “thin moments” in tech history were that could have brought us there instead of here… something related to a focus on the study of gravity and magnetism instead of semiconductors? We too could be kicking our hoverboards past a phone booth.
My overwhelming reaction to this post was: "huh".
Then I read this comment, to which my immediate reaction was... "huh".
I like people who say "Huh" a lot (as long as it matches my view of what saying "Huh" means.)
Websters:
"huh interjection
\ a grunt articulated as a syllabic m or n with a voiceless onset or as the syllable ˈhə or ˈhəⁿ, often ending in a glottal stop, and uttered with a range of intonations ; often read as ˈhə\
Definition of huh
—used to express surprise, disbelief, or confusion, or as an inquiry inviting affirmative reply"
Umm.. Maybe not quite as liking the "huh"er as I thought... But as an attempt to recover, I give you a hesitant, vaguely affirmative reply.
I definitely agree that the outbreak of WWI was both incredibly impactful and highly contingent, but I wonder in that case where the dissipation of nationalist energies elsewhere in Europe comes from. In reality it happened because of the World Wars – I'm sympathetic to those who consider them one big war – when the sheer destructiveness of it became undeniable and Europeans looked for a better way.
If WWI doesn't happen, or is just a small retributive war against the Serbs, maybe the frequently-violent national competition between European nations seems sustainable. It's also worth noting that some nations at this time, notably the Poles, still consider themselves occupied by multiple powers – Kraków can be the centre of culture in the Hapsburg lands, but there will be a pull of Polish culture to Warsaw as well, and nationalist impulses with it.
So while I agree that the Hapsburg Empire would be very viable within Europe's shift to multiculturalism, one wonders if that would have happened – maybe 1950s Austria-Hungary would have just been a larger-scale 1990s Yugoslavia, with its brutal wars. There was a lot of violent energy in Europe in the first half of the century, and in the absence of WWI it would have to be released somehow.
On the world wars as a single event, I once heard 1914-1945 described as The Second Thirty Years War. It ended with the United Nations reshaping the concept of nation-state just as the first ended with the Peace of Westphalia.
That seemed to have worked less well in Ireland.
Things were going slightly pear-shaped already in Ireland when Conservatives turned a blind eye to Unionist gun running/Curragh mutiny, but it remained contingent and the timing of the First World War a huge blow to a constitutional outcome. The War delays the Home Rule Bill, by which Northern Ireland would still have opted out 'temporarily' from the Dublin Parliament for first six years, but the two Parliaments in Ireland would have retained the aim to reunite after one or more renewed 'temporary' delays to form a united All-Ireland - maybe federal/with Home Rule for North.
This timeline has no Easter Rising - any crackdowns on radicals would be be by elected Irish governments - and no Conscription Crisis. The route would be open for a gradual, peaceful, constitutional route from integral UK > Home Rule in UK > which once given a chance would allow Ireland to eventually follow Canada/Australia-style path by moving to Dominion >Commonwealth, then onto Republic if desired.
I think you're more likely to get a fullblown civil war in 1914 with the British Government piggy in the middle between Southern Ireland and Ulster Unionists. A lot of people were somewhat relieved that WW1 gave Britain and Ireland to park the issue of Home Rule. Incidentally the Conservatives didn't turn a blind eye to gun running/mutiny - they were fully supporting it as the opposition. The Liberal Government was the one divided about what to do
You're right to correct on the characterisation of the Conservatives and gun running/mutiny - blind eye too passive for outright treason. Who makes the best argument on a possible North-South civil war? I can't see the South attempting to conquer a North enjoying UK support, or the North having much interest in invading the South.
Well you did actually have quite a lot of inter-communal violence in Ulster when war came in 1919. And this would be a Unionism that had yet to make peace with giving up three border Ulster counties let alone the rest of Ireland (Dublin was somewhat of a Unionist stronghold). A war in 1914 would've seen the British Government not on the side of Ulster which would've been in revolt. I think at the very least you might get a mass explusion of Catholics from ALL of Ulster. It would have been even messier than what ultimately happened.
I don't know enough history to comment on this without embarrassing myself, but whatever.
If you wanted to disagree with Matt you might frame it like this. Before 1914 there were three multinational states in Europe: Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman. After 1918 there were one and a half (Russia and Yugoslavia). The Austro-Hungarians and Ottomans got broken up because they lost the war; Russia survived as a multinational state and Yugoslavia was created because Russia was a major victorious power and the Serbs were a minor one.
So I can't help thinking it's a little suspicious that the USSR and Yugoslavia eventually did disintegrate along ethnic lines, even though ethnonationalism was much less respectable in the 1990s than in 1918. That makes the whole phenomenon look overdetermined, with the outcome of WWI affecting the timing but not the final outcome.
Matt's argument, if I understand it right, is that Austria-Hungary wasn't like the Ottoman "sick man of Europe", which everyone was expecting to break apart. Because it was stable and prosperous, its continued success (if the war hadn't happened) could have discredited ethnonationalism as an organizing principle. You'd eventually have had something like the "EU mentality" emerge by a different path.
The problem I don't see addressed here is how Austria-Hungary democratizes internally. The demand for self-government has been gradually increasing everywhere in the world at least since the Enlightenment, and electoral democracy in multi-ethnic societies always--always--produces strong ethnic tensions which are very difficult to manage.
If anything those tensions are still intensifying in some parts of the world, like India, which are less developed and somewhat behind the curve. (V.S. Naipaul was very good about this: he thought the rise of Hindu nationalism was an inevitable consequence of Hindu Indians becoming more self-aware and politically minded. He got a lot of flack for not being willing to condemn the phenomenon out of hand, but the analysis seems right to me.)
Europe may be past that point by now, which is why the EU (mostly) works and even commands a lot of emotional allegiance from better-educated Europeans. But I don't see how you get to post-nationalism without first going through two world wars and seeing what nationalism can do. Matt's alternate history just seems too optimistic in that regard.
The main counterarguments are that while, yes, separatism and ethnonationalism can be emboldened by democracy, it usually requires some sort of acute crisis to actually cause fragmentation.
It's also worth pointing out that since decolonization, most countries remain multiethnic and the only major examples of multinational states actually falling apart are: (1) Pakistan and (2) the three communist federations. Pakistan's bifurcation is obviously an odd example, given its weird dual-headed structure and external intervention from India.
But the other ones are in many respects directly linked to Leninist political structures. All three of these - the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia - were structured as extremely loose confederations of theoretically sovereign "republics," with no clear demarcation of federal/state relations, and which were held together through highly centralized party dictatorships. Once the Communist Party monopolies were dismantled - especially in the midst of acute economic crises - there was very little that actually underpinned these regimes constitutionally. (It's also worth pointing out that majorities in almost all these states did not favor their unions' dissolution at the time. Even now, surprisingly large numbers of Czechs and - to a lesser extent - Slovaks regret their breakups.)
All this to say that fragmentation isn't inevitable. And because ethnonationalism wound up being dominant we tend to ignore the hugely internationalist, interconnectedness of late 19th / early 20th C political movements, most of which took for granted the looseness of political boundaries.
India is having significant religious tensions. But I don’t see there being obvious hints of major ethnic tensions between, say, Marathis and Bengalis and Tamils. There are some ethnic parties that rule various states, and a few states have split, but there doesn’t seem to be obvious pressure to break up the multiethnic nation around ethnic lines.
I'm more concerned about the spread of what seem like potentially genocidal anti-Muslim attitudes among a lot of Hindus. I don't understand Indian society well at all but what I read is very alarming.
Say more?
hindu thugs attack people for killing cows and interreligious marriage
Ironically the example of that in the Subcontinent would be Pakistan with East Pakistan/Bangladesh basically being the Muslim part of Bengal.
"...even though ethnonationalism was much less respectable in the 1990s than in 1918."
Ah, the Americans (or maybe even the Anglo-Saxons?).
I think ethnonationalism is still the organizing principle in Europe. It's just that through different means (ranging from genocide to assimilation) we have much more ethnically homogeneous nations now compared to 1918.
I think Americans and Western Europeans can be unrealistic about the strength of these sentiments and the extent to which you can wish them away.
You saw this in NATO's changing attitude towards the Yugoslav wars. In the early 1990s the major powers refused as a matter of principle to let the Bosnian Serbs secede and join Serbia: a huge mistake, I think, which led to the siege of Sarajevo and a lot of other bad stuff. By the end of the decade they'd stopped trying to fight ethnonationalist sentiment, to the point that they actually used military force to help Kosovo secede from Serbia. If they'd been more accommodating of the initial ethnonationalist claims of the Serbs, a lot of bloodshed would have been prevented and Bosnia's government wouldn't be organized in its current consociational form, which doesn't look viable for the long term.
Fair enough. Maybe a better way to put it would be: the West treated Yugoslavia's integrity as negotiable but the integrity of the individual republics as non-negotiable, until they changed their minds and decided Serbia's integrity was negotiable too.
I'm not a Milosevic tankie but the Serbs were right to see a double standard and I think it affected their behavior: they decided the world would be against them no matter what they did so there was no point in trying to follow international norms (this seems to be the attitude of some Israelis nowadays, but never mind). So even from a human rights perspective this approach had bad results.
(edit: mis-threaded)
I think it's genuinely a weird situation because Kosovo and Vojvodina were basically treated like separate parts of Yugoslavia whilst still being part of Serbia. So when Yugoslavia imploded, their status was always going to need readdressing. But yes there was no doubt that the sympathies of the West were primarily with Croatia and Slovenia for religious reasons. Why the Bosinaks become such a cause célèbre is a bit more mysterious and did come latter - initially moves such as the arms embargo and Vance-Owens' peace plan placed the Bosnian Government at a disadvantage. Maybe the US (France and Britain were not keen) wanted to prove that it could fight for Muslims after the Gulf War and Somalia?
The US fought in favor of Muslims in the Gulf War though. I have a Saudi friend who deeply cared about Bosniaks because of shared religion. Looking into Syria in the 2010s as well, my understanding is that the US will really fight in favor of Muslims that are supported by Saudi Arabia, just as they did in the Gulf War.
I also think that a Serb perspective is that they were punished because they are predominantly Orthodox Slavs just like Russia. So, no inconsistency there about whether the sovereignty of individual regions is sacred or not. Just fight against Serbs/Russians all the time.
I'm not convinced by Saudi lobbying, because Britain tends to be equally suspectible to that than the Americans, and we were very much opposed to intervention in Bosnia. But I take your point
I agree, but I also want to emphasize that it's not all humanitarian reasons. To the best of my knowledge, the US recognizes the Golan Heights as part of Israel and Crimea as part of Ukraine, which doesn't seem very consistent to me. Same thing about sanctions towards Russia for occupying Crimea versus sanctions against Turkey for occupying northern Cyprus.
Opposite. Led by Germany they rushed to recognise the independence of Croatia and Slovenia, rather than see if something could be salvaged of Yugoslavia. Bosnia was always going to become a killing field after that, because there wasn't a clearly delineated "Serbian" area, the Serbs wanted to grab as much territory as possible, and Croatia weren't minded to let Bosniaks rule Bosinan Croats in what would be left.
(my reply "Fair enough..." should have gone here)
The UK is a multinational nation
Yes, but Ireland decided to leave and Scotland may eventually do the same. I think Scottish independence is a stupid idea and Irish independence was probably a mistake as well (RIP my mentions) but it just goes to show that even in very successful societies, these attitudes can gradually strengthen until it's no longer feasible to resist them.
Sure. But I was correcting the point that only Austria-Hungary, Ottomans and Russia were multi-national states.
Also the history of Ireland shows how even in the 20th Centuries, religion played such a huge role in determining alligences. Catholic Ireland and Presbyterian Ulster both had a history of rebellion against the Anglican Ascendancy. But by the 20th Century, fear of being ruled by Catholics meant Presbyterian Ulster had become the strongest champions of the link with Britain.
Well all societies are multiethnic to some degree. But I think the idea that specific ethnic groups or regions have a right to self-government didn't have much currency in the UK until Victorian times, when the demand for Irish home rule began. And it didn't reach its current form until Tony Blair's government brought in the devolved assemblies in the 1990s.
It looks to me as if the movement for Irish home rule is pretty closely linked to the expansion of the franchise throughout the UK. That goes back to my earlier question: how do you expect people in Austria-Hungary to start demanding voting rights without also starting to demand ethnic autonomy? It would be nice if the two things didn't have to go together but it seems they almost always do.
But parliamentary devolution isn't the only form of devolution. Scotland got to have their own (non-Anglican) established Church, its own legal system, educational system, sports teams, and government minister.
I agree with this, which also echoes Michael M's complaint. I think there needed to be learning on both sides. From bottom up, the ethno-nationalist needed to learn they would pay a horrendous cost if they insisted on carving up nation states. And the elites needed to learn that they had to embrace democratic legitimacy and accept what are now modern concepts of international norms in order to sustain political order domestically and internationally.
In other words, it's a nice story but I don't think this historical example is on as strong of grounds as claiming to be 'thin' compared to the story of Bolshevik success in Russia. I think the more realistic take is that history could have played out quite differently in the specifics, but the survival of the Austria-Hungarian empire still seems like a longshot compared to the more relatively homogeneous French, German, Spanish, English and even Italian states.
When I lived in Singapore in the late 1990s it was very noticeable that you could identify the ethnicity of middle-aged people by their accents, whereas young people all spoke the same way.
Singapore also had an intense autocratic program to try and integrate society across ethnic lines. I don't know how reproducible that is outside of the confines of "small island, charismatic leader, government provision of housing and lots of other things".
Speaks poorly to the sustainability of the US federal project, especially when the rich areas are the ones that haven’t completely lost the plot on policy. (Just partly).
I laughed out loud at the part where it was suggested that prominent Jewish representation in the high offices of the Empire would have resulted in a philosemitic culture. Yes, that's how it's always worked!
Otherwise, though, great article!
First rule of Judaism: nothing is ever good for the Jews.
Second rule of Judaism: anything good for the Jews must be reframed in the form of a kvetch.
I’m skeptical that conflict between Germany and France/Russia could’ve been permanently avoided. If I’m right about that, then I don’t think there’s a way to keep Austria-Hungary out of it.
The 2014 movie, Sarajevo (Das Attentat, in the original) is a fun take on the assassination of the archduke, suggesting Princip was a dupe of German and Austrian intelligence services looking to stage a pretext for a war they were dead set on having.
I think German fear of the Bear is probably a more potent problem.
They knew that Russia, barring an external push, was eventually going to eclipse their own war-fighting potential, even in concert with A-H, and even if they had kept the British out of it.
Some of what I’ve read suggests the German leadership basically breathed a sigh of relief when it became clear that Russia would consider the whole incident a casus belli.
Great piece. I very much enjoy this kind of post as a subscriber, and would like to continue seeing it alongside your usual political commentary – maybe this is what Slow Boring readers consider off-beat.
Two additional thoughts:
First, I think the strongest case against Austro-Hungarian federalism is that the imperial structure induced divide-and-rule politics, and I’m not sure how this would play out in a more federal system or the transition to one. For instance, you mention that the state would not be warm towards Ukrainian nationalism – this would be a demotion for Ukrainian nationalists, who enjoyed patronage from the Hapsburgs as a counterweight to Polish influence in Galicia.
The very act of trying to create new sources of legitimacy separate from allegiance to the monarch is itself destabilising – reform is risky and the route to a “good ending” seems to me rather narrow, especially after the disastrous creation of an oversized Hungarian quasi-state with its own military in 1867.
Second, I’m not sure that a local government approach to ethnic federalism would work. This was the cornerstone of Soviet (Stalin’s!) nationality policy in the 1920s, and the resulting pyramid of ethnic units (with autonomous republics, oblasts, raions etc all with titular ethnicites) fuelled rather than dampened national sentiment. It’s the kind of thing that smart people can reason themselves into thinking is a viable framework, but the on-the-ground creation of those structures creates new and alarming incentives for individuals and communities.
If you are interested in looking at these questions through the lens of pre-War Soviet nationality policy and local government reform, I would highly recommend Terry Martin’s the Affirmative Action Empire. It’s also extremely useful for understanding Ukrainian-Russian relations in the formation of the Soviet state, and helps explain why Putin is saying a bunch of mad stuff about that period to justify the next phase of his war in Ukraine. https://www.amazon.com/Affirmative-Action-Empire-Nationalism-1923-1939-ebook/dp/B01N291P0U
In Gregor Von Rezzori's Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, which is about the post-Hapsburg world in the interwar years, Stiassny, the dispossessed aristocrat, notes that people in the empire were more ethnically mixed than they liked to admit, especially the German Austrians, and that (quoting from memory) "we could have admitted that we were Americans, but we lacked the political ability".
This alternate history doesn’t ever really see the fall of Tsarist Russia, which seems strange.
Figuring out what happens to Russia and the Ottomans in this history seems important.
I think the czar had it coming but the revolution would have taken a less violent turn if not for the war. Mike Duncan’s podcast is pretty great at describing how random and contingent Lenin’s success was.
But without the provisional government not wanting to accept German surrender terms I don't think you'd see the October Revolution and subsequent civil war.
Yes, I think that there's a good chance of something like the February Revolution anyways. It's the October Revolution that I'd hope could be avoided.
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 suspect that the Habsburgs were always doomed to take it on the chin.
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!
It’s worth considering how much of the apparent liberalism of the Austria-Hungarian Empire c. 1914 was dependent on its emperor.
Franz-Joseph reigned for 68 years, including the entire period of the Dual Monarchy. In the constitutions of Austria and Hungary, the emperor was granted substantial powers, including the sole authority over the army, and the right to veto any bills. Nevertheless, the empire developed an ostensibly liberal-ish political culture.
But any system that depends on one man as a bedrock is inherently unstable, and all the more so if it’s a hereditary monarchy. The Russian Empire had a parliament; the German Empire had a parliament; but they were both governed by erratic would-be despots, and the parliaments were sidelined.
If a future Austro-Hungarian Emperor had decided to crack down on his representative government, would Austro-Hungarian political culture be able to push back?
After World War I every former A.H. state (except, I believe, Czechoslovakia) quickly devolved into autocracy, not to say racialism and fascism. Of course, the interwar period was hard for everyone but it doesn’t say much for the people’s commitment to pluralistic liberal democracy.
A few alternative "thick" ideas:
The nation-state was among other things an innovation in organizing society to make war, coupled with industrialization and inter-locking alliances costly large scale wars would have occurred regardless of the particular details of WWI.
Industrial scale warfare is easier to achieve than the politics that selects leaders who realize in an industrial world there is no longer an economic logic to war because you cannot capture human capital or profit from a factory supply chain destroyed by war in the way that you could extract wealth from a land based economy. With the means to make war outstripping the judgement not to, a traditional war could not end all wars and further industrialization would lead to more deadly wars regardless of the particulars of the start of WWI.
The major constraint on war in the post WW-II period is nuclear weapons which make the extreme cost of war very clear to both leaders and nationalists alike. Nuclear weapons would have been developed anyways and they are the real reason for the post WW-II peace in Europe.
I think the idea that absent the assassination of the Archduke WWI wouldn’t have happened is incorrect. I highly recommend “Europe’s Last Summer” by David Fromkin, which convincingly argues that Germany’s cadre of military leaders was seeking a pretext for war and that peace would still have been achievable after the assassination if Germany had actually been interested in peace
Austria-Hungary could have survived and wasn’t doomed like the European colonial empires because it was fundamentally a good deal for the people within it.
For India, there was really no benefit to being a part of the British Empire. The British didn’t provide an extra level of protection, and British economic policy tried to extract as much as they could from India. Railroads for example were built to make it easier to get raw materials to port so they could be shipped back to Britain.
For an empire like Austria-Hungary, the main benefit was protection. As we saw, the alternative to being a part of Austria-Hungary was dominated by either Germany, Russia or, to a lesser extent, Italy.