The Grand Strategy of the Habsburg Empire

Abstract

The Empire of Habsburg Austria faced more enemies than any other European great power. Flanked on four sides by rivals, it possessed few of the advantages that explain successful empires. Yet somehow Austria endured, outlasting Ottoman sieges, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon. This book tells the story of how this cash-strapped, polyglot empire survived for centuries in Europe’s most dangerous neighborhood without succumbing to the pressures of multisided warfare. It shows how the Habsburgs played the long game in geopolitics, corralling friend and foe alike into voluntarily managing the empire’s lengthy frontiers and extending a benign hegemony across the turbulent lands of middle Europe. The book offers lessons on how to navigate a messy geopolitical map, stand firm without the advantage of military predominance, and prevail against multiple rivals.

Assessing the Imprint of the Long‐gone Hapsburg Empire's Border on the Romanian Students' Migration Intentions

“…A millennial invasion route, the lands of the Danube represented a civilizational and military frontier, a collision point of the Christian (Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant) and Muslim worlds converging at Europe's turbulent south‐eastern corner (Mitchell, ). Interesting enough, Transylvania was under the Ottoman Empire until 1687, then under the Hapsburgs until 1918, while Moldova and Wallachia were dependent on the Ottoman Empire until the 19th century.…”

“…In 1774, the Hapsburg Empire annexed a part of Bukovina, a small but strategic territory that provided a land bridge between Galicia and Transylvania and also a headland from which to monitor future Russian moves on Moldova. More, on almost every frontier, the Hapsburg local communities directly abutted ethnic kin across the border; and this also happened for the Romanians living in nearby Wallachia and Moldova, making the Hapsburg Empire a frontier state in the truest sense which stood between separate civilizational spaces (Mitchell, ).…”

“…Mitchell () emphasized that the need to incorporate Transylvania in the Hapsburg Empire was to build a powerful structure in which this region supported a certain degree of economic complementarity together with other regions, such as Bohemia and Hungary (e.g. metals from Bohemia, grain from Hungary, and timber from Transylvania).…”