It has been well said that the Habsburg Monarchy represented a ‘chance for Central Europe’, but it was an opportunity that, in the end, was not taken. The various ways in which the Habsburg monarchs and the political leadership attempted to manage their patrimony worked to preserve Habsburg power for over a century after 1815, but they ultimately proved inadequate – partly because the Monarchy was still viewed by them as a patrimony.

It was still a major event when an ancient dynastic empire, which had often been a dominant presence in Central Europe, disappeared, almost overnight, in November 1918. Why the Monarchy failed in the way it did has remained since then a topic for historians to debate and agonise over. Not only the reasons for its disappearance, but also the nature of its legacy, both positive and negative, and further of its ‘meaning’ for Central Europe, and for Europe more generally, remain live, and often hotly disputed topics. The Monarchy has now been defunct for a century, but the book has not been closed on its nature, its meaning or its demise. Here are some tentative conclusions to further the ongoing discussion.

How an Ancient Empire Disappears

In the Manifesto of 29 July 1914, Franz Joseph claimed that he had ‘examined and weighed everything’ and came to the conclusion that he must declare war on Serbia. That was not a wise conclusion. If we ‘examine and weigh everything’ that happened in the Monarchy's last century, as I have attempted to present in abridged form in this book, we can, perhaps, see that some of the explanations given for why the Monarchy eventually disappeared in 1918 are more cogent than others. Older versions of the Monarchy's flaws are not quite as convincing as they used to be.

The once popular idea that the Monarchy remained throughout the period an essentially autocratic state, which never really adjusted to the modern era of representative government, has been shown to have been at best only partly true, and ignored the fact that even in the era of Metternich there was in fact political life, of sorts, in much of the Austrian Empire.