IF A European Union bureaucrat could travel to fin de siècle Vienna, he would be surprised by how closely the Hapsburg Empire resembled today's European Union.
Like the EU, Austria-Hungary was an experiment in supra-national engineering, comprising 51 million inhabitants, 11 nationalities and 14 languages.
Presiding over this microcosm of Europe was a double-throned emperor-king and twin parliaments rep
resenting the largely independent Austrian and Hungarian halves of the realm.
The Hapsburg Empire acted as a stabilising force for its peoples and for Europe. To its scattered ethnic groups, it performed the twin roles of referee and bouncer, pacifying indigenous rivalries and protecting pint-sized nations from predatory states. It also filled a geopolitical vacuum at the heart of the continent, placing a check on Germany and Russia.
So long as it performed these functions, Austria was viewed as a "European necessity" – a balancer of nationalities and of nations for which there was no conceivable substitute. But, by the early 1900s, the empire faced two problems that cast doubt on its ability to fulfil these missions.
First, it proved incapable of reconciling and representing its constituents' interests. The heart of the problem was the 1867 Compromise, which divided the empire into Austrian and Hungarian halves.
By excluding the Slavs – who accounted for half the empire's population – the compromise was seen as a vehicle for German/Magyar domination. All attempts at modifying the arrangement stopped short of what was needed: a political settlement between Germans and Slavs like that between Germans and Magyars.
Second, due in part to internal nationalist crises, the empire found it increasingly difficult to chart a unified, independent course in international affairs. Confronted after 1906 with a more assertive Russia, Austria-Hungary resorted to increasing reliance on Germany, thereby relinquishing the empire's status as a geopolitical stabiliser.
These problems inflicted irreparable damage to Austria-Hungary's image as a "necessity" – both for its subjects, who came to see national self-determination as a superior alternative to supra-nationalism, and for outside powers, which dismembered the empire in 1918. So ended the first European union.
Like Austria-Hungary, the EU's raison d'être consists in its ability to transcend the indigenous balance of power among its members, and the service this renders to the international system. On both counts, the EU confronted challenges in 2007 much like those confronting Austria-Hungary in 1907.
Many of the EU's newest members continue to grapple with questions of geopolitical trust. This is revealed in the tensions that have existed between Poland, which fears domination by the EU's steering group, and Germany, which is reluctant to shoulder the financial burden for a union in which it is under-represented.
If allowed to fester, this feud could metastasise, leaving the EU in a state of crisis like that which plagued Austria-Hungary.
The full article contains 482 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
