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If Franz Ferdinand Had Lived - NYTimes.com
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The Opinion Page
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OP­D CONTRIUTOR
If Franz Ferdinand Had Lived
 SIMON WINDR
JUN 27, 2014
FOR over 25 years, Archduke Franz Ferdinand paced up and down in his
palaces and castles waiting impatiently for the death of the ever more ancient
emperor, his hated uncle Franz Joseph I. As we all know, his wait was in vain.
Of this summer’s great anniversary commemorations of World War I, the
most important will be those marking the assassination on June 28, 1914 of
Franz Ferdinand, the “original sin” from which all the terrible subsequent
events followed. The heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne has come to
symbolize everything backward and myopic about pre-1914 Europe. With his
ostrich-feather hat, medaled bulk and waxed mustache, he was a sitting duck
for a young radical with a cheap semiautomatic. In his apparent archaism, no
leader could contrast more with the horrific modernity of his eventual postwar
inheritor: the young Adolf Hitler, a gaunt Everyman with a toothbrush
mustache and a raincoat.
In the public perception of history, Franz Ferdinand is thought to have
had a mere walk-on role. But that is a measure of how low the Hapsburg
empire had fallen. In an early-20th-century world of exuberant American and
Russian expansion, of Britain and France as global colonial powers and of the
newly united nations of Germany and Italy, the Hapsburg empire seemed ever
more marginal. And yet the challenges and opportunities of the empire —
encompassing a huge region, widely varied terrain, all of Europe’s religions
and a dizzying variety of languages — are still relevant today. Franz Ferdinand
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was heir to an entity which now forms all or part of 12 modern states.
Somehow, despite linguistic and religious disputes that could result in riots
and legislative gridlock, it worked.
Following a deal in 1867, the empire had been split into two giant pieces,
one ruled by German speakers in Vienna, the other by Magyar speakers in
Budapest. Both groups formed large minorities in their own halves and had to
ride wave after wave of nationalist agitation. The German speakers were
distracted by the mesmerizing existence of Otto von Bismarck’s Germany on
their doorstep; and it was in Vienna that both modern anti-Semitism and the
logical Jewish response, Theodor Herzl’s Zionism, were created. The Magyar
speakers were isolated by their language, and rule over their half was spent in
a frantic but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to “Magyarize” the other
nationalities — a battle that was played out bitterly across schools, churches
and armies.
How to rationalize this Tower of Babel was Franz Ferdinand’s great
preoccupation. The Hapsburgs had many cards to play and there was no sense
in 1914 that their empire was reaching its end. Indeed, it was not until 1918
that the Allies decided the empire would be broken up. It was only the war’s
years of grinding attrition that so radicalized all the combatants that any
weapon — even the unleashing of chaotic minor nationalisms — seemed worth
using.
There were many possibilities before 1914. One ingenious proposal was
for a United States of Austria, which would have carved the empire into a
series of federal language-based states, including small urban enclaves to
protect (but also isolate) German speakers. This could have been achieved only
by the destruction of Magyar imperialism, but Franz Ferdinand at different
points seems to have seen this as worth risking. The archduke also toyed with
universal suffrage, knowing that the threat alone might keep the Magyar and
German minorities in line.
We will never know if such schemes might have worked. But these are
ghosts that have haunted Europe ever since — possibilities whose
disappearance unleashed evils inconceivable in the stuffy, hypocritical, but
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relatively decent and orderly world of the Hapsburg empire.
Its destruction in 1918 proved a universal disaster. The Hapsburg rulers
might have been shortsighted, cynical and incompetent, but they ruled over a
paradise compared to the horrors that followed. The successor states were
desperately weak, and almost all contained fractions of those minorities that
had caused the Hapsburgs such problems.
Most became vicious dictatorships; and even the least offensive,
Czechoslovakia, contained a partly alienated German minority that would play
a central role in the outbreak of the next world war. The fates of the countries
of the former empire, as they fell into the hands first of Hitler and then of
Stalin, represented nightmarish “solutions” to the challenge of multinational
rule, solutions based on genocide, class war and mass expulsions of kinds
unimaginable in 1914.
There were many reasons Franz Ferdinand was the perfect target for the
Serbian-sponsored terrorists of 1914. They knew that his plans for reform
within the empire were a profound threat to them. And in symbolic terms, he
was ideal.
But what they could not have known was that Franz Ferdinand was
probably the most senior antiwar figure in Central Europe, a man acutely
aware of Hapsburg weakness, scathing about the delusions of his generals and
a close friend of the German monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm. The recklessness and
stupidity of the Hapsburg response to the assassination — the ultimatum of
humiliating demands served on Serbia, a response so crucial to the outbreak of
the World War I — would not have occurred in the face of some other
provocative outrage that had left Franz Ferdinand alive.
For those who had been living in the shelter of the Hapsburg empire, the
shooting initiated a catastrophe that ended only with the conclusion of the
Cold War. The shadow of this vanished empire continues to hang over Europe,
and the assassination’s centenary must, for many millions of Europeans, be
viewed as a truly solemn event.
Simon Winder is the author, most recently, of “Danubia: A Personal History of
Habsburg Europe.”
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A version of this op­ed appears in print on June 28, 2014, on page A21 of the New York edition with
the headline: If Franz Ferdinand Had Lived.
© 2015 The New York Times Company
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