Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs 34. (1981)
BRIDGE, Francis Roy: Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire in the Twentieth Century
270 Francis Roy Bridge tierung, welche die türkische Politik in der Zukunft einschlagen wird, heute noch nicht mit Bestimmtheit vorausgesehen werden kann, und es sogar nicht ausgeschlossen ist, daß sich die Türkei nach Friedensschluß von uns ab- und unseren jetzigen Gegnern zuwenden wird’191). — a devastating comment on the state of the alliance in the closing months of the war. But his observations were not acted upon, merely filed away in the archives of the Ballhausplatz. They had been overtaken by events. The Habsburg and Ottoman empires were already in their death-throes. Their simultaneous collapse at the end of 1918 might seem to suggest that their destinies had been inextricably linked. Certainly, the expulsion of the Turks from Europe in 1913 had removed a factor of stability and greatly intensified the threat posed by Balkan nationalism to the continuance of the Habsburg empire and of the European states system in its existing form. The World War created a new system in which neither empire found a place. And the reluctance of policy-makers in Vienna throughout this period to take any action that might weaken the Ottoman empire might also suggest an awareness of a broad community of interests between the two conservative empires. On the other hand, a wide gulf always existed between the appreciation of a broad community of interests and its expression in terms of practical politics. In the first place, Austria-Hungary was a member of an international states system composed of five or six powers: the ‘concert of Europe’; and although Turkey had officially been admitted to it in 1856, she had never really been treated as an equal by any of the powers. As the Austrians were wont to point out, Turkey was “not a state in the European sense of the word”. Certainly, the behaviour of a succession of regimes at Constantinople, and the interference in and criticism of their domestic affairs by the Great Powers, helped to perpetuate the isolation of the Ottoman empire from all the Great Powers in these years. And Austria-Hungary, in particular, as both a member of a concert of Christian powers and as a neighbour of the Balkan states, could never formulate its Turkish policy simply in terms of relations with Constantinople. These were never of overriding importance to the Ballhausplatz. More than this, Austria-Hungary, as an old and declining power inordinately sensitive about its prestige, was perhaps even more determined than others to assert her rights as a Christian great power in the Ottoman empire, ruthlessly enforcing both her own Kultusprotektorat and the whole capitulatory system. The former was largely symbolic, but still immensely damaging to Ottoman pride, the latter certainly restrictive of the economic development of the empire. Herein lies a measure of Austro-Hungarian responsibility for 191) PA I 522: Burián to Trauttmansdorff, September 1918, draft, with minute: ‘entfällt’.
