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The Austro-Hungarian Compromise, 1867–1918: A Half Century of Diagnosis; Fifty Years of Post-Mortem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Leslie C. Tihany
Leslie C. Tihany
Affiliation:
Department of State
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Extract

The fall of the Dual Monarchy in October 1918, after a half-century existence, gave rise to a Schuldfrage which prolonged by another fifty years the polemics begun in 1867 about the constitutional foundations of the reformed Habsburg state. Both before and after 1918 the pivotal problem of the controversy had to do with the political wisdom and implementation of the Ausgleich or Compromise of 1867. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct the dispute over the Compromise in its successive historical settings through four generations of critics and, with benefit of their insight, to attempt a reassessment of the 1867–1918 edifice from a centennial vantage point.

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Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , June 1969 , pp. 114 - 138
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1969

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References

1. The negotiators of 1867 used the German word Ausgleich, which the Hungarians subsequently translated for their home use as kiegyezés. Both the German and Hungarian words carry the general meaning of a reciprocally accommodating agreement. The word Compromise, which entered Western historical writing at the turn of the century as a synonym of Ausgleich, sharpened the general denotation of the latter by adding the nuance that the reciprocally accommodating agreement involved significant concessions by both sides.

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82. Echoes of the Hungarian conservative school, freed of its conformist compulsions, are still heard in the present Hungarian emigration—the third in the history of the Ausgleich controversy. Miskolczy, Julius, Ungarn in der Habsburger Monarchie (Vienna and Munich, 1959), exonerates Hungary from the charge of having caused the collapse of the Monarchy, in which, he writes, Austria and Hungary “fell together, victims of their own mistakes and of an uncomprehending world” (p. 195). Miskolczy is critical of these mistakes and weaknesses, among which he gives priority to the short-term, decennially renewable span of the Austro–Hungarian commercial–customs agreements, which restricted and frustrated long-range economic planning and sound commercial policy (p. 138). His post-mortem of the Compromise is that it brought into existence a powerful state favorable to the high cultural development and material welfare of the Danubian peoples (p. 199).Google ScholarSólyom-Fekete, William, “The Hungarian Constitutional Compact of 1867,” The Quarterly Journal of The Library of Congress, XXIV, No. 4 (10. 1967), 287–308, provides an excellent juridical prehistory of the Compromise, which, he states, “was only possible because the Hungarian nation and its leaders took a firm stand on the continuity of law and remained persistent on this principle, as they had done for over nine centuries” (p. 307).Google ScholarBarany, George, “Hungary: The Uncompromising Compromise,” Austrian History Yearbook, III, Pt. I (1967), 234–59, comes to the conclusion that “the Compromise offered real advantages to both Austria and Hungary” and that it “permitted the Poles to have home rule in Galicia” (p. 252).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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94. The author's efforts to be permitted access, for the purposes of this article, to the yet unpublished reports of the Bratislava congress, have proved of no avail. The forthcoming publication of these reports will throw additional light on the most recent phase in the historiography of the Ausgleich.

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