“Where our commonality is necessary…”: Rethinking the End of the Habsburg Monarchy

Abstract

As the hundredth anniversary of November 1918 approaches, this article suggests some ways in which historians might rethink dominant narratives about the character of the Habsburg monarchy in its final years, the reasons for its collapse, and its complex legacies to the postwar world. Currently, most accounts that narrate the fall of the empire are still shaped to some extent by outcomes whose character was defined at the time by the nationalist architects of the states that replaced the monarchy. Even accounting for a sensible revisionism of their versions of events over the past century, their general reasoning, their ideological claims, and their worldviews frame the predominant explanations for why the monarchy fell when it did. Concomitantly, they continue to influence our understanding of the character of the regimes that replaced the monarchy after its fall.