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In Honor of Franz Josephby
Carlo Lottieri and Carlo
Stagnaro
While the European ruling classes are trying to unify the continent by adopting a radical socialist approach, a few people have been getting together in recent days in the north-eastern Italian village of Giassico. They come from Slovenia, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Italy, and all the other countries which were once part of the Habsburg Empire.
The politically correct media, not to mention history books, say that the Empire was the anachronistic relict of past ages. It represented all that democratic, socialist and egalitarian culture condemns: an institution whose roots were in the Roman Catholic tradition, and very aware of the cultural and religious complexity of Central Europe; the idea that we can live within institutions with no national identity; the view that the Emperor got his authority directly from God and for this reason his power was limited by well-defined moral rules; and finally, an order descending from the Middle Ages. With World War I, the Jacobin spirit triumphed over Western society. President Wilson’s "project of a new American century" (as his modern heirs would define it) needed to normalize the Austrian exception. As Ralph Raico notes, "Wilson was a ‘progressive,’ a leader in the movement that advocated using the full power of government to create ‘real democracy’ at home. But Wilson’s horizons were much broader than the United States. Preaching the gospel of ‘making the world safe for democracy,’ he aimed to extend the progressive creed to the ends of the earth. More than Franklin Roosevelt himself, Woodrow Wilson is the patron saint of the ‘exporting democracy’ clique in America today." Democratic propaganda put the three Central Empires (Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Turkey) in the same category of non-democratic regimes. However, Vienna was not the capital of a centralized, militaristic, and despotic system. Emperor Franz Joseph viewed himself as first among public servants. He well knew that the entire world was radically changing; there was no place for his ancient imperial institutions. Notwithstanding, he conceived his own life as a service to "my peoples" (as he always called all the people of the Empire) because the very existence of the Empire was in their interest. For centuries, Empire was a guarantee for many small nations which could have not survived otherwise – or at least would have found it much harder. It is not by chance that Jews lived much better in that Catholic Empire than in the neighbouring nation-states, whether Protestant or Orthodox. And when the old order disappeared and Vienna became only the capital of a small state in the Alps, that space was quickly occupied by the Nazi army and, after World War II, by Soviet imperialism. (Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn told the story of an arrogant Teddy Roosevelt calling on Franz Joseph and asking what possible point there could be to a monarch in the modern 20th century. "To protect my peoples from their governments," replied the Emperor.)
The old Habsburg Empire was 676,616 square kilometres in size and had 52 million inhabitants, including 12 million Austrians, 10 million Hungarians, 5 million Poles, more than 5 million Serbs and Croatians, 4 million Ruthenians, less than 9 million Czechs and Slovaks, and 1 million Tridentate, Venetians and Friuli’s. There were 34 million Roman Catholics, 4.5 million Orthodox, as many Protestants, 2.5 million Jews, and 700,000 Muslims. The peaceful coexistence of such different realities was granted by the structure of the Empire. This complexity prevented any single identity from emerging as a leader able to impose uniformity on the others. During Franz Joseph’s reign (1848–1916), Vienna was not only the capital of a wealthy Empire, but also the cultural capital of the whole world. The major philosophers, scientists, and artists of the time had their roots within the Empire: Brahms and Kafka, Doderer and Klimt, Brentano and Mahler, Husserl and Kokoschka, Freud and Popper, Wittgenstein and Kelsen, and so forth. And, of course, the Austrian school of economics owes its name to the fact that Carl Menger had the opportunity to work and develop a new economic theory in Vienna. By noting that, we don’t mean that Franz Joseph was some sort of patron; indeed, most intellectuals lived without his support (though he did hire Menger as tutor to his son, the Crown Prince). The point is that culture finds the ideal conditions to emerge in a context of liberty and wealth; and especially in a society which understands the central importance of exchange and debate. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany could not tolerate internal dissent, and thus knew less intellectual vivacity. In fact, most worthy intellectuals were dissidents who "needed" to be purged....
Remembering the Empire, as those in Giassico are doing, is a way of expressing nostalgia for the traditional, tolerant Europe which was literally destroyed by nationalism and socialism. The Empire certainly had democratic bodies; however, its odd and old-fashioned equilibrium of powers and traditions prevented the dramatic rise of "national" exploitation and the consequent decline of liberty that other nations experienced at least 50 years before Austria. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe would say, the democratic devil tempted Austria and could conquer it by the harsh apple of war. Franz Werfel once said that "nation-states are demoniac units by their own essence." For this reason, the Austrian novelist celebrated the wisdom of the Austrian Empire, pointing out the impossibility (in Vienna, Prague or Budapest) of creating a mystic and romantic idea of the nation-state.
One could infer that today’s neo-conservative project; that is, building an American Empire, follows the example of Austria-Hungary, and therefore libertarians should support it. Unfortunately not. George W. Bush will not be a new Franz Joseph. Basically, the Habsburg Empire was a multi-national, largely pre-state Empire, while what the former Trotskyites who are running the federal government aim at creating is one global, stars-and-stripes state. They want to create a super-state at a global level, while the old Empire was the survival of a completely different way of organizing social relationships. If we compare it to US imperialism, the European Union is actually part of the same paradigm. In Paris, Berlin or Rome we don’t have ruling classes determined to conquer the world – probably because they do not have a strong enough army – but it’s evident that they would like the United Nations to become a legislative body with democratic elections and an absolute power – some sort of command and control headquarters. In contrast, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire was implicitly "federalist"; within it the instances of local communities were taken into great account. While both the EU and the forthcoming American Empire are modelled on the basis of the modern nation-state, the old Empire had its roots in medieval polycentrism and pluralism, and was the heritage of Catholic universalism, which was peculiar to Europe before the idea of "sovereignty" deeply harmed all those good things.
August 18, 2003
Copyright © 2003 LewRockwell.com
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Such
meetings have been organized by the 
As
Joseph Roth points out in his masterpiece, 
The
merit of Franz Joseph, then, was that he understood the importance
of and was able to manage such a pluralistic organization. While
in other parts of Europe the idea was growing that the state must
coincide with the nation (i.e., it should have one language, one
religion, one culture), the Empire was a miraculous example of spontaneous
pluralism (which is the contrary of multi-culturalism imposed by
force). Since it couldn’t define itself in terms of language, race,
religion, etc., it was able to maintain a regime of liberty until
its fall in World War I. 
In
fact, the Empire was only a large space where small, different communities
could live together with their natural rights protected. Significantly
enough, Franz Joseph was always opposed to the anti-semitic movement
of Karl Lueger, the Christian-Socials: "any anti-semitic movement
should be halted at its birth." He repeatedly vetoed Lueger’s
election as Mayor of Vienna, showing how the "absolute"
power of the Emperor was less absolute, and far less dangerous than
the power of democratic bodies. The fall of Austria-Hungary left
the road free for all the nationalisms, including Mussolini’s and
Hitler’s.
These
are very good reasons to praise the memory of the Emperor Franz
Joseph of Habsburg.
Carlo
Stagnaro [
