The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire 1815-1918 Paperback – 19 Jul 2001

If the book has a theme, it is that the Dynasty and the Empire were not in irreversible decline and the fall, brought about by defeat in WWI, was not inevitable. Why the title then? Well, towards the end of the book, in a couple of chapters added to the second edition, Sked admits that the title was chosen by his publishers and not by him.
My main reason for contributing this review is that I don't think it is clear from other reviews here that Sked's book is not a narrative or comprehensive history of the Habsburg Empire from the Congress of Vienna until its fall. It is rather a series of essays which reflect on other historians' treatment of some of the major themes in Habsburg historiography. These are interesting, challenging, occasionally repetitive, but are not, and do not pretend to be, a substitute for a general history of the period (such as C.A. Macartney's great work).

First let me say that academically the book is both readable and factual in its content. But I found the book troubling for two reasons. First, Professor Sked writes like an English Lecture. He poses questions which he answers with his own opinions, many times taking other authors opinions to task. Those that he doesn't agree with he speaks of as liberal or extreme or having "missed the point". Secondly as this is a Second Edition,
it should have been brought up to date with information that has been developed over the last twelve years.
As an example of his inability to rewrite his own words (which he takes as sacrosanct) there is an aside that refers to the USSR and the eastern european satellites. He makes a referral to what would happen in eastern europe if the USSR were to go multi-party, hinting at chaos on the terms of Yugoslavia. Where has he been for the last ten years? No chaos, some nations in NATO and others being accepted into the EU.
Lastly, he shows a pronounced weakness in his understanding of military matters. In his discussion of the failure of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution, he dismisses the treatment of other nationalities in the Hungarian Crown Lands as being self-defeating but not disasterous. He especially discounts the Croats. Napoleon, not a bad general, described the Croat Cavalry
as the best in Europe, both for their bravery and ability to endure hardship. He used them as his scouts for his intelligence services and gave them credit for helping to secure many of his victories. They would not have won the was for the Hungarians, but they could have been a thorn in the side of both the Austrians and Russians. Instead the helped to defeat the Hungarians at every major battle.
Reading this book is informational, but you must be prepared to spend a lot of time searching around Professor Sked's opinions and biases to get to the facts.

This text is truly invaluable for students of the Habsburg Monarchy. It's major strength has to be that it is analytical in style, providing explanations for the decline in fortunes of the Habsburg Monarchy. It is also innovative in that it provides a new perspective on the last century of Habsburg rule. Sked's book is an extremely readable text, which is accessible for all. An added bonus is that it provides a background to the historiography surrounding the Austrian Empire. Even if you do not agree with Sked's conclusions, it will certainly give you something new to think about, and is a useful antidote to the more traditional interpretaions of the Habsburg decline. I cannot recommend this book strongly enough!

What I am about to type concerning this book will be rather political, so I should make it clear at the outset that the author himself has no political axe to grind. He is simply examining and refuting some common misconceptions about the last century of the Habsburg Empire and the causes of it's fall. If that is what you are looking for, you could not do better than to read this book. This is *the best* book on the subject in English, bar none. If that is your interest, **buy it**, without reservation. Alan Sked's political opinions appear no where in it's pages, which are full of hard facts and strong historical thinking. It is in every way a model piece of historical scholarship.
The reason I see this as a very political text is that the history of the fall of the Habsburgs has been put to ideological use for a long time now. The Habsburg Empire was dismembered by that crusading moralist professor, Woodrow Wilson, in the name of "Democracy", "Progress", and other "enlightened" ideals for which he was willing to kill and send others to die.
It has been argued that the fall of the Habsburgs was a kind of bellwether, proving the inevitable progress of modernity and modern politics over the face of the whole Earth as a reactionary dionsaur of an empire finally died under the weight of it's own anachronism and decrepitude. The author of this book disproves that thesis totally. He demonstrates definitively that the Habsburg Empire was not weak or inept, and that in fact it faced it's worse crisis in 1848, and, having survived that, was viable as a political unit right up until the end of it's life. There was no mass longing for democracy, no mass discontent with the ancient Monarchy of the House of Habsburg, no demand for "national sovereignty" or "self-determination" on the part of the many nationalities of the Empire. They were fiercely loyal to the Monarchy right up until the end of it's existence. The Habsburgs fell, not because of the "turning of the tides of history" against them, but because they picked the wrong side in WWI. Period.
The fact that this is so undermines most of the cherished myths of the modern West. It proves that history has no inevitable current ending up with us, since it shows that the way history turned out was in fact the result of the individual choices of men, rather than the effect of some kind of powerful underlying trend that men could not have shaped. It proves that democratic gov't's are not the only ones capable of being seen as legitimate in the eyes of their people and that a nation of highly cultured and relatively wealthy people (the Austrians) could happily and freely choose to live under a radically different form of gov't, namely a hereditary monarchy. It proves that a powerful multi-ethinc state can be built, if ethnicity is carefully divorced from political power and protected (the Empire of the Habsburgs was virutally a microcosm of Europe in it's vast ethnic diversity). It proves that religion can be effectively joined to gov't - the Habsburg Empire was a confessional Catholic state until the end.
In short, it proves that the supposedly axiomatic modern truths about how politics just has to be are really just so many lies. There was, once upon a time, a strong, viable, multi-ethnic, confessional, hereditarily monarchical empire, that was a living force in world politics right up until the First World War, and that only ceased to be so after it was deliberately destoryed by the victors of that war, who sought to impose their ideology at all costs on the conquered, even if it meant destroying an ancient state and everything that was based on it. We know the results of this well: the wellspring of nationalisms this created has turned the Balkans into a killing field, and it left no strong power in the Germanic world that might have checked the Nazis after Germany itself was raped by the vitorious Allies; thus, the dismemberment of the Habsburg Empire cleared the way for Hitler and every horror to follow him in Central Europe. This was the price foreigners were made to pay so that professor Wilson could "Make the world safe for democracy". No amount of foreign blood is too much, apparently, for the ideals of a progressive intellectual.

I bought the second edition under the misleading impression that the contents will be updated, even though the conclusions may still stand. Instead, I have a book that's 95% same as before, plus some random afterthoughts on the main thesis that the Habsburg Monarchy self imploded because of losing the war, and not from the rampant nationalities conflict in an age of nationalism. If you want to read Sked's work on the Monarchy, just buy some second hand first edition.

And if you want a refreshing look at European history, look no further than Paul Schroeder's majestic The Transformation of European Politics.