Austria-Hungary and Britain in 1917

Austria-Hungary in 1917: Trialism and the Struggle for Reform

Austrian forces may not have performed spectacularly in the first two and a half years of the war, but they did far better than anyone expected. The Russian Army assaulting Lviv was beaten back. With German assistance, Congress Poland was conquered and Austro-Hungarian troops garrisoned in Lublin and Warsaw. Further east, innumerable peasant towns in Western Ukraine and Belarus were occupied. In the south, Italian attempts to seize the Isonzo were frustrated time and again by the elite troops of the Austro-Hungarian army. The Serbian threat appeared to have been vanquished once and for all. (1)

The Dual Monarchy, widely believed to be a fragile and tottering house of cards, had shown itself to be more than adequate in the field. Living standards were certainly hard hit by the war, but German loans and Russian plunder helped to prop up the economy. When Franz Joseph died on December 15, 1916, tens of thousands of Viennese citizens attended his funeral and participated in the vast burial procession. (2)

Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, immediately succeeded to the throne as Ferdinand II following the death of his older brother. In his politics and outlook, he represented a mixture of old and new. Like the recently deceased Franz Joseph, Ferdinand was an autocratic archconservative at heart who believed in the paternalistic role of the crown. He had little tolerance for socialism, mass politics, or democracy. (3)

He was also a committed trialist with a sincere commitment to the slavic people of the Empire. Ferdinand had a particularly robust base of support among the Poles in Galicia and the Croats in Hungary. Yet it is clear that his desire to federalize the Empire arose as much from his concerns with the threat that Hungarian nationalism posed to the traditional dominance of the Austrian aristocracy as it did from goodwill toward the Slavs. The schemes for federalization he endorsed involved a greater centralization of power in Vienna, made possible by a partition of Hungary between Croatia, Slovakia, Transylvania, and several German enclaves. (4)

Hungarian political elites reacted to Ferdinand’s ascension with unease. To assuage their concerns, he met with the Hungarian Prime Minister Istvan Tisza on December 17th, who attempted to persuade him to have an early coronation. As part of the coronation, Ferdinand would be required to take a pledge committing him to maintaining the integrity of Hungarian territories, forestalling any attempt to reform the Empire. After consulting with some of his advisors, Ferdinand determined to delay the coronation for at least five months. (5)

Ferdinand appointed a cabinet of Austrian-Germans, Croats, and Poles from the Belvedere circle, a pre-war group of trialists and federalists. The reform plans drafted were less drastic than those considered before; in particular, Bohemia and Galicia would not, for the time being, cease to be Austrian crownlands, though both would be granted increased autonomy. It was feared that directly sundering either of the Austrian territories would lead to a revolt of the Austrian elite, a group whose support Ferdinand required to push his reforms on an unwilling Hungary.

Franz Ferdinand, the last Emperor of Austria-Hungary ​

The Czechs would not be happy about trialist plans being implemented which ignored their own aspirations to make Bohemia a co-equal Kingdom. This is part of why Ferdinand avoided calling parliament into session, a body in which he may have found some support for his reform efforts but which would likely be used by the Bohemian parties to voice their discontent with the government. Neither did he immediately issue any decrees indicating his plans for Hungary, which involved the transfer of its southern, croatian-majority lands to a south Slavic, majority-croatian kingdom. (6)

It was felt that some propaganda victory was needed before commencing the trialist plan, a boost to the regime’s legitimacy that would allow it to weather Hungarian recalcitrance. Thus with the full cooperation of the Germans, a military offensive was planned in Italy later that year in May to coincide with a counteroffensive in Bulgaria. Ferdinand believed that a decisive victory here would give him the political capital necessary to begin reforming the Empire without outright Hungarian revolt.

A week before the counter-offensive was to begin, the government was shaken by protests and strikes in Vienna. There were calls for an end to the war, the phasing out of the de facto wartime military dictatorship, and for the Reichsrat (the lower house of the Austrian parliament) to be called back into session. The protest was mostly contained to Vienna and of a mostly working-class character; after two days, the protests fizzled out. Despite this, they put a scare into Ferdinand and prompted him to enter into a more direct dialogue with political elites in Bohemia and Galicia. (7)

He could not offer them much. Germany would not agree to a Polish state under Austrian suzerainty, and the ambitions of the Bohemians were at odds with Austro-German nationalists. The Czechs in particular were wary of engaging in negotiations at this point, as they felt that they were best off stalling for time until an allied victory, which seemed fairly plausible following the successive blows dealt to the Central Powers in the winter of 1917. Ferdinand did provide an assurance to the Czechs that there would be no partition of German-speaking areas of Bohemia without their full consent, a gesture which was crucial in building trust between the two parties.

The May offensives changed matters. The spectacular victories in Asiago and Caparetto and the reconquest of eastern Bulgaria suddenly placed the Entente on the back-foot. With fears now rising that both Russia and Italy might make a separate peace, the Czechs showed a renewed willingness to negotiate. In return for accepting autonomous German enclaves in the southern Sudetenland, parts of western slovakia would be transferred to Bohemia, which would gain autonomy but remain an Austrian crownland. Hungary would be compensated by gaining Romanian territory and receiving explicit assurances of its future territorial integrity; Transylvania and Eastern Slovakia would be recognized as integral parts of Hungary. (8)

Of course, this was all decided without the active participation of the Hungarians. When the reorganization of the Empire was imposed unilaterally upon Hungary by a series of decrees, protests broke out in major Hungarian cities and Istan Tisza threatened to resign. Ferdinand accepted the resignation, but it never came. Tisza, feeling cornered after Czech, Galician, and Croatian parties announced support for the reform, instead entered into negotiations with Ferdinand to lessen the blow to Hungary. He successfully won a series of Vojvodina and increased funding for Hungary’s military. On June 14th, the Kingdom of Croatia, incorporating Dalmatia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Istria, and half of Slavonia, was officially declared. (9)

Though the Croats would prove to be some of the most loyal subjects of Ferdinand, creating the new Kingdom was hardly a panacea for the Empire’s problems. With food prices rising and Austria still governed by a de facto military dictatorship, domestic unrest continued to percolate through the remainder of the year. Throughout July, new protests in Vienna centered around the government’s refusal to issue a pardon for the popular social democrat Friedrich Adler, sentenced to death after being convicted for assassinating the Austrian Minister-President Karl von Sturgkh. Eventually, Ferdinand commuted his sentence to life-imprisonment. (10)

The emperor also faced increasing pressure from the nationalist right as Austrian and Hungarian revanchists denounced the loss of territory. Radical “Free Hungary” societies formed which advocated for Hungary to seek a separate peace and declare independence. In August, Austrian nationalists killed several Croatian politicians in Slovenia, and paramilitaries associated with the free hungary movement burned the offices of prominent Croatian-language newspapers in Hungarian Slavonia. The same month, renewed protests broke out in Austria demanding the Reichsrat to be called back into session. This time, Ferdinand allowed their grievances to be aired, but still refused to end de facto military rule.

Britain in 1917: The Coalition Collapses

The spectacular British victories of the winter of 1917 concealed an underlying weakness: the armies of all three of Britain’s principal allies in the war were nearing exhaustion. Prince Lvov insisted that the Russian Army was in no state to launch any offensives; he would sooner make peace than throw Russian youth once more into German and Austrian machine guns. For France, the battle of Verdun had not utterly destroyed the French Army, but it had inflicted casualties so devastating upon it that it would be incapable of offensive action for at least eight months. And the Austrian asiago offensive in 1916 and the costly Italo-British counteroffensive which followed had forced the Italians onto the defensive for the foreseaable future. (11)

The plans for the winter of 1917 initially involved concurrent offensives from Russia and France sometime in February. Without their participation, the British hardly had the means of pressing home the attack. When they reached their Kulminationspunkt, no German ally was knocked out of the war. The Ottoman Empire was temporarily reduced to a national redoubt in Ankara and most of Bulgarian territory was occupied for a time, but both nations would regain a good deal of their lost territory.

Britain confronted a series of crises in 1917. Firstly, there was the manpower crisis. Having rapidly expanded its army, Britain was facing critical shortages of workers in many key industrial sectors. The entrance of women into the workforce could only partially make up for the loss of skilled workers. With munitions production starting to dip, Britain became increasingly dependent on American weapons and ammunition imports. (12)

This compounded Britain’s financial and diplomatic crises. British conservatives desired a hard break from America, but this would require either reducing the army’s annual procurement of munitions and weapons or finding some means of boosting domestic munitions production. Some of the Liberals in the cabinet advocated for a strategic retrenchment, but with the support of Lloyd George, Bonar Law pressed ahead with the ambitious winter offensives; then, with the support of Churchill, who held increasing influence in Whitehall following the Dardanelles offensive, he secured the support necessary to exit the Alexandria accords and begin a complete blockade of Germany.

Winston Churchill, the Irascible Naval Secretary and the Hero of the Hour
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To increase its munitions production, the British government created a new guest-laborer program to draw in manpower from the colonies. In 1917 alone, 600,000 Indian workers arrived to work in Britain’s munitions factories. While this offered a temporary fix to the issue of man-power, it did not resolve the long-simmering political tensions in the cabinet. The Liberals around Lloyd George felt that they had to stand on principle if they were to have any hope of defeating the independent liberals in the next parliamentary elections.

Nowhere were political battle lines drawn more sharply than on the Irish issue. During the formation of the coalition government, Lloyd George’s liberals and Bonar Law agreed to a truce on the matter, but in reality the government’s policy favored the Unionists (many of the cabinet liberals were themselves Unionists). In late 1915, the decision of the government to arrest and detain James Connolly, Patrick Pearse, and Tom Clarke led to a series of strikes in early 1916 that were brutally suppressed by the local British garrison. The three men were all involved in the Irish Republican movement, and the government charged them with planning a revolt. In retrospect, most historians agree that there was not sufficient evidence to convict them in a neutral court of law, and that the prosecutions were themselves politically motivated. (13)

The arrest of three of the most prominent leaders of the Republican movement did have the effect of delaying the formation of organized Irish resistance to the war. Despite frequent strikes and protest in 1916, no coordinated insurrection against the British occurred; while the government steadily increased the size of the Dublin garrison, it did not take any emergency measures throughout 1916 to avert a future Irish uprising.

This was a grave mistake. Neither the Irish Republican Brotherhood nor the Irish Citizen Army were decapitated by the loss of their leadership. In the Citizen Army, the syndicalist James Larkin became the de facto leader of the group with the support of Jack White and Constance Markievicz. His organizing skill and widespread discontent over declining labor conditions led to a boom in its membership. The secretive Republican Brotherhood, a conspiratorial group of republicans of a more bourgeois and literary variety, also managed to recover in short order from the loss of Pearse and Clarke. Though they were technically led by the tubercular language scholar Eoin MacNeill, the real force behind the group was the diplomat Roger Casement, who worked in the British foreign office and used the connections he made there to arrange for German weapons shipments to the Republican resistance.. (14)

On May 14th, three American merchant ships left from Rotterdam for Dublin. As neutral American ships heading for British waters, two of them slipped through the British blockade without being inspected. The manifest of the ships claimed that they were bringing a variety of dry goods to Ireland from the Netherlands and Sweden, as the same set of ships did just a few months ago before making their return journey to America. In reality, there were large stashes of German small arms and medical supplies stocked on the bottom decks. (15)

Roger Casement knew that May 14th was a day when the blockade would be strained. With the German counteroffensive in Bulgaria, the British navy was split between enforcing the blockade and supplying their troops in the Balkans. He knew, too, that returning American ships would occasion little suspicion. The inspection of the only ship stopped was cursory and failed to uncover the weapons. Later that day, all three of the vessels landed in Dublin, where friendly dockworkers directed the cargo to the Irish Citizens Milia and Irish Republican Brotherhood. On the morning of the 15th, the cabinet became aware of the suspicious weapons shipment, but at this point there was little chance to halt events.

In Dublin, 3,500 armed volunteers began seizing key locations in the city. Dublin City Hall and Dublin Castle, the centre of British rule in Ireland, both fell within the first hours of the rebellion. Three hours later, Trinity College, the South Dublin Union, and most of the police stations were in the hands of the rebels. The next day, both of Dublin’s key ports were seized, preventing the British from shipping reinforcements to the area. Early attempts of British soldiers to assault the well-dug Irish trenches outside the city were rebuffed. As the last British soldiers in Dublin surrendered on the 16th, James Larkin and Roger Casement declared the formation of an independent Irish Republic. (16)

In Rural Ireland, the rebellion had considerably less success. Though crack-militia groups formed in several towns, they were not nearly as well-supplied or well-organized as the Dublin forces. While they managed to successfully seize several villages, Cork and Limerick remained in British hands fo the duration of the rising, and rural guerilla activity was markedly more mild than the organizers of the coup hoped. (17)

On the 18th, the first of several British reserve divisions landed in Ulster. The rebels had not made any real effort to extend their power base beyond Dublin, but had established forward, entrenched positions north of the city. A series of pitched battles over the following days forced the militias to retreat into Dublin proper.

On the 23rd, the battle of Dublin began. William Jennings Bryan called on Britain to respect the democratic aspirations of the Irish people. The coalition Liberals balked; they warned that the destruction of the city would make martyrs of the revolutionaries and end any prospects of Home Rule. They proposed meeting with the rebels to ascertain if they would stand down in return for amnesty of low-level participants and a guarantee of home rule. This proposal was unlikely to succeed, but the conservative refusal to “bargain with the enemy” contributed to the fractiousness in the ruling coalition. On the 28th, the Manchester Guardian published an article describing the opposition of coalition liberals to the government’s Irish policy; it is likely the specific quotes were leaked by liberal backbenchers sympathetic to Lloyd George.

By June 5th, the last rebel strongholds in Dublin had fallen, and the Irish Republic quashed in its infancy. In all, around 1,800 soldiers and 10,000 civilians were killed or wounded in the fighting. One suspect, however, was missing: Roger Casement, one of the two leaders of the rebellion, had improbably escaped out of Ulster stowed away at the bottom of an ocean liner. He arrived in New York on June 10th to cheering crowds. William Jennings Bryan refused Britain’s extradition request, successfully enraging both pro-entente opinion and the British public. (18)

Meanwhile, the British government was in a state of deep crisis. The coalition liberals felt with good reason that they were being iced out of the actual process of governance. Elections slated to occur in 1915 had been delayed because of the war, but now it was felt that wartime elections were needed to “clarify” the opinion of the nation. The coalition liberals hoped to unseat many of Haldane’s backbenchers, and the conservatives believed that liberal division and patriotic sentiment would propel them to victory. To ensure that the pro-war majority would remain intact, the acrimonious governing partners agreed not to run candidates against each other. In response, the independent liberals and increasingly antiwar British Labor Party did the same, forming the “Progressive-Democratic Alliance” to contest the elections.

Patriotic sentiment was still present in Britain, but it was challenged by the battle-field losses in May, declining standards of living, and growing discontent in both the middle-class and labor movement. It was believed that a clear parliamentary victory for the pro-war coalition would both quiet pacifist protest and make clear what the real correlation of forces ought to be in the cabinet.

The conservatives received several electoral windfalls before the scheduled December vote. Firstly, the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare led to a “rally around the flag” effect. A series of limited French offensives in the north successfully pushed the Germans back in Flanders, while the October Revolution in Russia polarized middle-class opinion against the left. In Germany, Ludendorff’s dissolution of the Reichstag reinforced the government’s claim that the war was a fight against German autocracy. Finally, the defection of the widely beloved Churchill to the conservatives provided them with a charismatic surrogate adept at rallying patriotic opinion. The leaders of the party may have detested the arrogant and volatile Churchill, but they soon found him to be an invaluable asset.

The election campaign was marred throughout by a lack of clarity from many of the parties. Labor refused to take a clear and consistent antiwar line, while the independent liberals moderated their position before the election to try to broaden their base, advocating for the beginnings of negotiation rather than an immediate exit from the war. Lloyd George faced increasing pressure from the liberal press to denounce the policies of his Conservative partners, which he felt reluctant to do publicly while still in coalition with the Tories. Instead, he ended up making equivocal statements which pleased nobody.

1917 British Parliamentary Election ​

Party	Party Leader	Vote	%	Seats Before	Seats Won	Change
Conservative	Bonar Law	1,703,812	43	271	368	+97
Liberal	David Lloyd George	551,975	14	150	74	-76
Labour	William Adamson	394,255	10	42	51	+9
Independent Liberal	Richard Haldane	906,786	23	122	94	-28
Sinn Fein	Eamon de Valera	173,472	4.4	New Party	70	+70
Irish Parliamentary	John Redmond	105,506	2.6	74	10	-64

The results provided a stinging rebuke to the policies of the pro-war coalition liberals. The unpopularity of his government among the party’s voting base was made quite clear on election day, as the independent liberals received more than twice the vote of the coalition government. Middle-class liberal discontent had led to a wave of defection. Yet the Independent Liberals did not have a banner night. The surge of pro-war sentiment in the country meant that most competitive ridings were lost to the conservatives, who picked up a whopping 123 seats and gained an absolute majority in parliament. Labor fared somewhat better, and looked increasingly as if they might displace the liberals as the main opposition to the Tories. (19)

The rise of Sinn Fein caused alarm across the British political spectrum. The militant republican group had ties with many of the participants in the May rising, and the collapse of the moderate Irish parliamentary party was a sign that the Irish would no longer be content with home rule after the brutal British crackdown in May. As the spectre of more Irish unrest loomed, the Tories were tasked with forming a government of their own.

Footnotes
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1​This paragraph is meant to indicate that the Austro-Hungarian Army has thus far performed far better than it did IOTL. This is mostly because Serbia was already pretty much defeated at the start of the war, which meant the initial Russian offensive into Galicia inflicted substantially less damage on the Dual Monarchy’s army.

2​Living standards in Austria-Hungary moderately better-off than IOTL. Germany is somewhat more generous with its loans, which means that there’s a bit less inflation. More importantly, because Galicia is never lost and the British blockade is only partial for the first two anda half years of the war, there’s much more food to go around.

3​Of course, Franz Ferdinand was dead IOTL, so instead his nephew Karl, known as Charles I, became Emperor.

4​All in line with his thinking IOTL!

5​IOTL,Tisza convinced Karl to go ahead with an early coronation. Ferdinand is a significantly more wily political operator, so he sees through this ploy here.

6​Karl, who was significantly more reformist, did call parliament into session in 1917, which actually ended up causing a number of problems for him. Of course, not calling parliament into session will also cause problems for Franz Ferdinand. Such is the parlous state of Austria-Hungary…

7​Similar protests occurred IOTL, but they were actually somewhat larger. Better living standards, less defeats in the field, and a somewhat more competent administration all mean that they’re not quite as pronounced.

8​Without American entry into the war, the Czechs have much less of an incentive to stall in the hopes of achieving self-determination and complete independence.

9​IOTL, attempts to implement a form of trialism were frustrated by Hungarian intransigence. Here, because Austria-Hungary is in a significantly stronger position than IOTL and is led by a figure with a much more keen sense of the politics of the Empire, a form of trialism succeeds. Note that this is still far from the ambitious attempts to federalize the empire that were talked about before the war. And as we’ll see, it will have consequences that are far from salutary.

10​IOTL, the sentence was commuted from death to 18 months imprisonment. Ferdinand is significantly more hostile to social democrats and socialists, so the commutation only comes here after significant pressure is placed on the government.

11​All of the entente armies besides the British and Romanian are in a much worse state than IOTL.

12​Britain also faced manpower problems IOTL, but they were not nearly as severe because the army expansion happened more slowly.

13​IOTL, Connolly, Pearse, and Clarke were the main leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising. Here, because of butterflies and the dominance of the unionist conservatives, they are arrested before they get a chance to execute their plot.

14​IOTL, these were also the two groups most instrumental to the Easter Rising IOTL.

15​In the Easter Rising, a germans weapons shipment was also sent, but here it is significantly larger because Casement has more time to prepare and the British blockade is less airtight.

16​The May Rising is significantly larger and better armed than the easter rising IOTL (and thus more successful). This is mostly because there is much more discontent with the war by this point, which means there are more volunteers enlisted in the various republican militias.

17​This is a point of continuity with OTL’s easter rising.

18​Casualty numbers were significantly smaller IOTL’s Easter Rising (around 2,000 civilian dead or wounded), primarily because British troops were able to directly use the city’s port to reinforce their positions in Dublin, which meant the city itself never had to be placed under siege. Consequently, there is also much more destruction of infrastructure and private residences in the city ITTL.

19​IOTL, there was no parliamentary election of 1917, though there was one in 1918. Compared to that election, ITTL the pro-war coalition liberals do significantly worse and independent liberals much better. The conservatives actually also do slightly better in this timeline’s election as a consequence of the country polarizing: they receive around 2% more of the vote and 15 more seats, though in both elections they win an absolute majority in parliament.