Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
Ferdinand: The Last Emperor
"...temptation. The fact was that the newly installed Andrassy government was a temporary solution, and one in which it was widely understood that power was held not by the aging count or Janos Hadik but rather by "irreconcilables" such as Khuen-Hedervary or, really, Tisza, the central figure of the White faction whose exclusion from formal power was becoming increasingly difficult if Ferdinand wanted a Hungarian government of anything other than civil servants not responsible to the House of Representatives - which, quite frankly, he did not, and thus the Andrassy Cabinet would have to do. Nonetheless, the Milan Magyars and L'affaire Bethlen had left the Emperor badly damaged, and in the aftermath he made a gamble that in the end left him even weaker than before - the brief "Charm Offensive," as it came to be known, towards Berlin.
Ferdinand's contempt for the Magyar people, politically and racially, was well-known, but he was also not the Slavophile whom many historians have come to portray him as; he liked Czech culture thanks to his extensive time in Prague but was ambivalent at best about the Poles and most certainly did not care for Croats or Serbs beyond his opportunistic sense that they were useful in his struggle with Magyarism. Ferdinand was not a believer in Pan-Germanism, viewing Prussia as an alien culture who shared only a common language with Austrians, but he nonetheless saw "Alpinism," an ideology beginning to form out of the remnants of Karl Lueger's worldview, as potentially complementary to Prussianism. And why not? Strategically, Berlin and Vienna had no overlapping disputes - the Germans were increasingly looking to Asia and were interested in the Balkans only to satisfy the demands of their Italian allies. Ferdinand considered Austria's exclusion from the German Empire a settled matter, as did his counterpart Kaiser Heinrich, who held the Habsburg name in high esteem (though Pan-Germanists disagreed fundamentally with this position); there was a sense emergent at the Schonbrunn, encouraged by many of the Prague Circle, that Austria's alliance with France was borne out of the immediate frustrations of the late 1860s and the Unification Wars, and had been signed by the Alte Herr Franz Josef and the Petit-Aigle Napoleon IV forty years ago and thus no longer reflected the strategic needs of Austria-Hungary as the 1920s beckoned. Ferdinand was the new era of the Habsburgs, and a rethinking of not just constitutional governance but strategic alignments was just as much a modernizing tact.
Ferdinand's thinking was governed by two general ideas. The first was that it seemed apparent to him, as well as Austrian war planners, that in a general war Germany would defend in the west and attack to the east, aiming to seize western Galicia quickly to cut Carpathian mountain passes while pressing towards Ostrau and Linz as quickly as possible to seize Austria's industrial heartlands. The reinforced Bohemian mountain passes would be tied down with artillery to prevent a counterattack, and Italy could put immediate pressure on Trento and the Istrian Plateau beyond the Isonzo River to attempt to capture crucial Trieste. These war plans had always favored the Dual Monarchy thanks to the defensibility of their frontiers with both of the "Central Powers," but now Ferdinand was concerned about the extent to which he could rely on Hungarian soldiers in such a conflict, or whether there would be a revolt from some or even many brigades and divisions of the Honved that would tie down the Common Army. The weakness of the Dual Monarchy had never been more apparent, either, and rising Italian influence in Belgrade opened the question if Serbia - no longer ruled by the Austrophilic Obrenovic family - would make a play for parts of the Banat simultaneously, and that left another uncomfortable question about Romanian intentions. Austria was, perhaps, more surrounded than she had ever been before.
The second thought that occurred to Ferdinand was that he was not entirely sure if he could depend on France. Napoleon V was very much not his father, a polite and pious but deeply strange young man pressed firmly under his nonagenarian grandmother's thumb who was easily influenced by vapid courtiers, conservative priests, and his smattering of "cousins" from Belgium who shuttled between Brussels and Paris as if they ruled both. France was typically on the cutting edge technologically with their military kit, especially in terms of air power where they were regarded as second to none, and had just showed their ruthlessness off in Vietnam, but with their massive colonial empire had other goals not aligned with those of Austria, first and foremost in North Africa, where undermining rather than supporting the Ottomans was increasingly in vogue in Paris. Ferdinand did not know if Paris would in fact be there should war at some point arise, what with his distinct inability to trust anybody there.
An alliance with Germany, on the other hand, held all kinds of benefits. It immediately eliminated Austria's largest enemy along its longest borders, allowing Austria to concentrate her energies on the Italian frontier; it brought two German-speaking monarchies back in alignment with each other, along with continental Europe's largest and second-largest populations (excluding Russia, of course), its largest and third-largest economies, and would control a wide swath of the continent from the Danube to the North Sea. Italian and French rivalry in Africa and claims of irredenta over Corsica and Nice would preclude an alignment between the Houses of Savoy and Bonaparte, even before one considered France's opposition to Italian occupation of the Leonine City and the Church's fierce opposition to the government in Rome; this would, in all likelihood, leave Italy forced to either stand alone or begrudgingly accept an alliance with Vienna. With this new "Triple Alliance" formed temporarily, France would be isolated politically and militarily, essentially ending any threat of war in Europe for decades. The Iron Triangle had served its purpose - now it was time for a new alignment by a new generation.
Ferdinand's visit to Berlin to secretly discuss these matters in October 1917 could not have gone worse, even if at first glance it was a cordial visit. Heinrich had earned a reputation in his younger years as aloof from European politics, rarely reading newspapers and waving through the desires of his various ministers, in particular the powerful Chancellor Furstenburg who had now been in power for thirteen years. The Heinrich of 1917, however, could sense the unease beginning to creep across the continent and as he approached his sixtieth birthday had developed not an encyclopedic understanding of current affairs like many of his peers and predecessors had, but was nonetheless savvier than met the eye. Heinrich admired the House of Habsburg - its traditions, its longevity, its prestige - and had been excited by the accession of Ferdinand as a fresh new influence, but an outright alliance was out of the question. For one, Heinrich had little confidence in the Hungarian Crisis being solved anytime soon; having taken at least one Magyar woman as a mistress in his reign, he was unusually well-read on the grievances of the Hungarian street and understood Ferdinand's lack of interest in actually addressing said grievances. Further, the ongoing constitutional crisis suggested that Ferdinand's feelers were not ones coming from a place of strength but rather desperation - Furstenburg, in particular, surmised privately to the Kaiser that what Ferdinand perhaps really wanted was for Berlin to "solve" his problem for him. While Furstenburg was intrigued by the idea of an "unequal" alliance with Vienna that would see them as the clearly junior partner in a relationship, Heinrich demurred, not wanting to make any commitments until the matters in the Dual Monarchy were fully solved.
It was also further the case that Heinrich was nervous about Russia's reaction to a realignment on her borders; a huge part of Russia's "turn from Europe" since 1878 had been that Germany and Austria were at each other's throats, and thus the Bear did not have to worry about a potential threat on her immediate western frontiers. When combined with her cordial relations with Romania (underwritten in part by German reassurances in treaty form), Russia's European borders had never been more secure, which had allowed for her ambitions in Central Asia and the Orient to be successful and restore her imperial prestige. A German-Austrian alliance would immediately change all that, and while Heinrich was confident that Russia would not see it as a preemptive move towards a war of choice in the east - he had, after all, done well to keep the most ardent of Prussian chauvinists obsessed with Drang nach Osten ideas out of his immediate inner circle for more clear-eyed realists such as Furstenburg - he nonetheless was concerned enough about Romanov nervousness to want to avoid arousing a potential enemy he did not need to have. Longstanding dynastic enmity between the Romanovs and the Bonapartes was not sufficient as a guarantor that France and Russia would never align, and the risk of a Russo-French alliance sandwiching Germany was far too high, especially as Russia began more rapidly modernizing and industrializing in the late 1910s.
And so Ferdinand charmed his German hosts, regaling them with hunting stories, and in particular bonded with Heinrich over their shared love of yachting and navies, but it was to no avail. Heinrich politely but bluntly declined a "formalizing a change" in "German strategic thinking," which was a coded diplomatic way of stating that Germany was disinterested in alignment, though he left the door open to "revisions in the European order as circumstances evolve." Ferdinand was embarrassed and angry, having spent weeks away from Vienna as the stalemate in Hungary persisted for nothing. Indeed, the "Charm Offensive" gave him worse than nothing, for French spies caught wind of the meetings there, and soon Austrian officialdom was angrily accosted by their French counterparts, who demanded answers, and Ferdinand was forced to dispatch Tisza, brought to Vienna as his personal foreign minister and envoy to keep him out of Budapest, to Paris to smooth the ruffled feathers of the Raymond Poincare government.
This trial balloon with Germany wound up being more damaging than Ferdinand could have realized - France was now deeply suspicious of its ally and strategic thinking in Paris shifted quickly towards a more provocative manner, for two reasons. One, it was now assumed that Ferdinand was willing to walk away from France, and French politicians took this to mean they had to be more nakedly favorable towards Austria in public to keep Vienna "on-side;" and two, it meant that there may be a limited period of time in which the Franco-Austrian alliance under which two or three generations of staff officers had planned France's strategic operational plans had come up was able to actually fight a war, and that if France was to have a war with Germany, it needed to have it soon while that window was still open before Ferdinand got any new ideas..."
- Ferdinand: The Last Emperor
Ferdinand's contempt for the Magyar people, politically and racially, was well-known, but he was also not the Slavophile whom many historians have come to portray him as; he liked Czech culture thanks to his extensive time in Prague but was ambivalent at best about the Poles and most certainly did not care for Croats or Serbs beyond his opportunistic sense that they were useful in his struggle with Magyarism. Ferdinand was not a believer in Pan-Germanism, viewing Prussia as an alien culture who shared only a common language with Austrians, but he nonetheless saw "Alpinism," an ideology beginning to form out of the remnants of Karl Lueger's worldview, as potentially complementary to Prussianism. And why not? Strategically, Berlin and Vienna had no overlapping disputes - the Germans were increasingly looking to Asia and were interested in the Balkans only to satisfy the demands of their Italian allies. Ferdinand considered Austria's exclusion from the German Empire a settled matter, as did his counterpart Kaiser Heinrich, who held the Habsburg name in high esteem (though Pan-Germanists disagreed fundamentally with this position); there was a sense emergent at the Schonbrunn, encouraged by many of the Prague Circle, that Austria's alliance with France was borne out of the immediate frustrations of the late 1860s and the Unification Wars, and had been signed by the Alte Herr Franz Josef and the Petit-Aigle Napoleon IV forty years ago and thus no longer reflected the strategic needs of Austria-Hungary as the 1920s beckoned. Ferdinand was the new era of the Habsburgs, and a rethinking of not just constitutional governance but strategic alignments was just as much a modernizing tact.
Ferdinand's thinking was governed by two general ideas. The first was that it seemed apparent to him, as well as Austrian war planners, that in a general war Germany would defend in the west and attack to the east, aiming to seize western Galicia quickly to cut Carpathian mountain passes while pressing towards Ostrau and Linz as quickly as possible to seize Austria's industrial heartlands. The reinforced Bohemian mountain passes would be tied down with artillery to prevent a counterattack, and Italy could put immediate pressure on Trento and the Istrian Plateau beyond the Isonzo River to attempt to capture crucial Trieste. These war plans had always favored the Dual Monarchy thanks to the defensibility of their frontiers with both of the "Central Powers," but now Ferdinand was concerned about the extent to which he could rely on Hungarian soldiers in such a conflict, or whether there would be a revolt from some or even many brigades and divisions of the Honved that would tie down the Common Army. The weakness of the Dual Monarchy had never been more apparent, either, and rising Italian influence in Belgrade opened the question if Serbia - no longer ruled by the Austrophilic Obrenovic family - would make a play for parts of the Banat simultaneously, and that left another uncomfortable question about Romanian intentions. Austria was, perhaps, more surrounded than she had ever been before.
The second thought that occurred to Ferdinand was that he was not entirely sure if he could depend on France. Napoleon V was very much not his father, a polite and pious but deeply strange young man pressed firmly under his nonagenarian grandmother's thumb who was easily influenced by vapid courtiers, conservative priests, and his smattering of "cousins" from Belgium who shuttled between Brussels and Paris as if they ruled both. France was typically on the cutting edge technologically with their military kit, especially in terms of air power where they were regarded as second to none, and had just showed their ruthlessness off in Vietnam, but with their massive colonial empire had other goals not aligned with those of Austria, first and foremost in North Africa, where undermining rather than supporting the Ottomans was increasingly in vogue in Paris. Ferdinand did not know if Paris would in fact be there should war at some point arise, what with his distinct inability to trust anybody there.
An alliance with Germany, on the other hand, held all kinds of benefits. It immediately eliminated Austria's largest enemy along its longest borders, allowing Austria to concentrate her energies on the Italian frontier; it brought two German-speaking monarchies back in alignment with each other, along with continental Europe's largest and second-largest populations (excluding Russia, of course), its largest and third-largest economies, and would control a wide swath of the continent from the Danube to the North Sea. Italian and French rivalry in Africa and claims of irredenta over Corsica and Nice would preclude an alignment between the Houses of Savoy and Bonaparte, even before one considered France's opposition to Italian occupation of the Leonine City and the Church's fierce opposition to the government in Rome; this would, in all likelihood, leave Italy forced to either stand alone or begrudgingly accept an alliance with Vienna. With this new "Triple Alliance" formed temporarily, France would be isolated politically and militarily, essentially ending any threat of war in Europe for decades. The Iron Triangle had served its purpose - now it was time for a new alignment by a new generation.
Ferdinand's visit to Berlin to secretly discuss these matters in October 1917 could not have gone worse, even if at first glance it was a cordial visit. Heinrich had earned a reputation in his younger years as aloof from European politics, rarely reading newspapers and waving through the desires of his various ministers, in particular the powerful Chancellor Furstenburg who had now been in power for thirteen years. The Heinrich of 1917, however, could sense the unease beginning to creep across the continent and as he approached his sixtieth birthday had developed not an encyclopedic understanding of current affairs like many of his peers and predecessors had, but was nonetheless savvier than met the eye. Heinrich admired the House of Habsburg - its traditions, its longevity, its prestige - and had been excited by the accession of Ferdinand as a fresh new influence, but an outright alliance was out of the question. For one, Heinrich had little confidence in the Hungarian Crisis being solved anytime soon; having taken at least one Magyar woman as a mistress in his reign, he was unusually well-read on the grievances of the Hungarian street and understood Ferdinand's lack of interest in actually addressing said grievances. Further, the ongoing constitutional crisis suggested that Ferdinand's feelers were not ones coming from a place of strength but rather desperation - Furstenburg, in particular, surmised privately to the Kaiser that what Ferdinand perhaps really wanted was for Berlin to "solve" his problem for him. While Furstenburg was intrigued by the idea of an "unequal" alliance with Vienna that would see them as the clearly junior partner in a relationship, Heinrich demurred, not wanting to make any commitments until the matters in the Dual Monarchy were fully solved.
It was also further the case that Heinrich was nervous about Russia's reaction to a realignment on her borders; a huge part of Russia's "turn from Europe" since 1878 had been that Germany and Austria were at each other's throats, and thus the Bear did not have to worry about a potential threat on her immediate western frontiers. When combined with her cordial relations with Romania (underwritten in part by German reassurances in treaty form), Russia's European borders had never been more secure, which had allowed for her ambitions in Central Asia and the Orient to be successful and restore her imperial prestige. A German-Austrian alliance would immediately change all that, and while Heinrich was confident that Russia would not see it as a preemptive move towards a war of choice in the east - he had, after all, done well to keep the most ardent of Prussian chauvinists obsessed with Drang nach Osten ideas out of his immediate inner circle for more clear-eyed realists such as Furstenburg - he nonetheless was concerned enough about Romanov nervousness to want to avoid arousing a potential enemy he did not need to have. Longstanding dynastic enmity between the Romanovs and the Bonapartes was not sufficient as a guarantor that France and Russia would never align, and the risk of a Russo-French alliance sandwiching Germany was far too high, especially as Russia began more rapidly modernizing and industrializing in the late 1910s.
And so Ferdinand charmed his German hosts, regaling them with hunting stories, and in particular bonded with Heinrich over their shared love of yachting and navies, but it was to no avail. Heinrich politely but bluntly declined a "formalizing a change" in "German strategic thinking," which was a coded diplomatic way of stating that Germany was disinterested in alignment, though he left the door open to "revisions in the European order as circumstances evolve." Ferdinand was embarrassed and angry, having spent weeks away from Vienna as the stalemate in Hungary persisted for nothing. Indeed, the "Charm Offensive" gave him worse than nothing, for French spies caught wind of the meetings there, and soon Austrian officialdom was angrily accosted by their French counterparts, who demanded answers, and Ferdinand was forced to dispatch Tisza, brought to Vienna as his personal foreign minister and envoy to keep him out of Budapest, to Paris to smooth the ruffled feathers of the Raymond Poincare government.
This trial balloon with Germany wound up being more damaging than Ferdinand could have realized - France was now deeply suspicious of its ally and strategic thinking in Paris shifted quickly towards a more provocative manner, for two reasons. One, it was now assumed that Ferdinand was willing to walk away from France, and French politicians took this to mean they had to be more nakedly favorable towards Austria in public to keep Vienna "on-side;" and two, it meant that there may be a limited period of time in which the Franco-Austrian alliance under which two or three generations of staff officers had planned France's strategic operational plans had come up was able to actually fight a war, and that if France was to have a war with Germany, it needed to have it soon while that window was still open before Ferdinand got any new ideas..."
- Ferdinand: The Last Emperor
So, including wartime deaths, the Confederacy proper will have lost something like ~35-40% of its prewar black population by 1920. Calling that a gigantic demographic shift would be an understatement, I think.
Heinrich's concerns (hilariously) are a good encapsulation of why the OTL Triple Alliance didn't make much practical sense by the time the 1910s rolled around, if it ever did at all.
Since it was alluded to in the update, I'm guessing Serbia and Romania are both going to jump in to the war at some point - I can't wait to see just how much of a shitshow the situation in Transleithania devolves into by the end.
This is sort of how you balance out the massive losses to the white cohort, especially in that 16-40 range. In all, the CSA got absolutely gutted demographically, and I’m not even sure I’m going to bother with a Census attempt for them in 1920.
Heinrich was always the Hohenzollern brother who was smarter, even if he himself was regarded as a bit of a simpleton - he just wasn’t a massive narcissist like Willy. Here his strategy is essentially just “don’t rock the boat” and he’s not wrong that Austria doesn’t add much to Germany (other than more people/better army than Italy) that is worth trading Russian benevolent neutrality for
🤦♂️🤦♂️
Didn't the French just see what happened in North America when the CSA used that exact same line of thinking to declare war on the USA? How'd that work out for the men and women of Dixie?
To quote Deep Throat from "All The President's Men:" "The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand."
It was incidentally also this thought process that contributed to WW1 OTL, too!
As Near to Heaven by Sea: A History of Newfoundland
"...the United Trading Company's stores thus proved an excellent focal point for organizing fishermen and sealing crews, where literature could be distributed easily. The Fishermen's Protective Union's ties to the Orange Order had by 1917 further eroded, with [William] Coaker going so far as to boast that the FPU had as many as three thousand Catholic members in organized northern council districts, and ahead of the elections they had organized their first ever local in St. John's. There was a new energy in the outports, and despite a late surge in ferociously anti-Catholic campaign pamphlets in Protestant districts by the panicking Liberals, the results were decisive - the FPU had won fourteen seats, a gain of six, and were for the first time the largest party in the Newfoundland Assembly.
The FPU's victory in the 1917 elections thus marked a major realignment not only of Newfoundland's politics, but marked the most stark triumph of a left-wing party anywhere in the Commonwealth. The ruling People's Party lost ten seats to draw at eleven with Richard Squires' Liberals; [Edward] Morris, deeply tied in to the Catholic hierarchy and supportive of Coaker's social democratic ideas, immediately promised confidence despite it being his Cabinet that had just been defeated. The arrangements of 1909 and 1913 were inversed, and the press for populist reform saw itself cemented, with the piecemeal reforms passed under Morris now supercharged.
The FPU was in some fashions the first-ever syndicalist government elected anywhere in the world, though Coaker would have been loathe to name it as such, regarding instead his brainchild as a "people's trade cooperative." It was simultaneously an advocacy group for fishermen, Newfoundland's first truly nonsectarian party that ended the interminable feuds between "Prots and Popeists" (at least on the surface) that had bedeviled the organizing of the outports, a trade union, a political party, and an independent commercial organization that bypassed the fish exporters of St. John's through the UTC. It was, in essence, "One Big Union." Coaker had unleashed something new and innovative in Newfoundland, and farm cooperatives across rural Canada and the United States would not take long to notice what they had achieved..." [1]
- As Near to Heaven by Sea: A History of Newfoundland [2]
[1] IOTL, the FPU got sucked into the conscription debacle in Newfoundland (as with so many other parties around the Commonwealth in WW1) and eventually got absorbed into the corrupt, conservative Liberals as Newfoundland's prewar political parties all imploded and shifted their loyalties around. Here, they stay on the path they begin on in 1909/13, supporting Morris' center-left, Catholic-interest People's Party and then surpassing them as a nonsectarian alliance. I should note that they were only vaguely socialistic, but there are some syndie vibes to their platform.
[2] I want to give full credit, this is cribbed from the actual the name of a history book about Newfoundland, found here
The FPU's victory in the 1917 elections thus marked a major realignment not only of Newfoundland's politics, but marked the most stark triumph of a left-wing party anywhere in the Commonwealth. The ruling People's Party lost ten seats to draw at eleven with Richard Squires' Liberals; [Edward] Morris, deeply tied in to the Catholic hierarchy and supportive of Coaker's social democratic ideas, immediately promised confidence despite it being his Cabinet that had just been defeated. The arrangements of 1909 and 1913 were inversed, and the press for populist reform saw itself cemented, with the piecemeal reforms passed under Morris now supercharged.
The FPU was in some fashions the first-ever syndicalist government elected anywhere in the world, though Coaker would have been loathe to name it as such, regarding instead his brainchild as a "people's trade cooperative." It was simultaneously an advocacy group for fishermen, Newfoundland's first truly nonsectarian party that ended the interminable feuds between "Prots and Popeists" (at least on the surface) that had bedeviled the organizing of the outports, a trade union, a political party, and an independent commercial organization that bypassed the fish exporters of St. John's through the UTC. It was, in essence, "One Big Union." Coaker had unleashed something new and innovative in Newfoundland, and farm cooperatives across rural Canada and the United States would not take long to notice what they had achieved..." [1]
- As Near to Heaven by Sea: A History of Newfoundland [2]
[1] IOTL, the FPU got sucked into the conscription debacle in Newfoundland (as with so many other parties around the Commonwealth in WW1) and eventually got absorbed into the corrupt, conservative Liberals as Newfoundland's prewar political parties all imploded and shifted their loyalties around. Here, they stay on the path they begin on in 1909/13, supporting Morris' center-left, Catholic-interest People's Party and then surpassing them as a nonsectarian alliance. I should note that they were only vaguely socialistic, but there are some syndie vibes to their platform.
[2] I want to give full credit, this is cribbed from the actual the name of a history book about Newfoundland, found here
...see I had zero idea about any of this and this is absolutely a consequence of No WWI (or at least no war that the UK gets involved in) and it's yet another reason I love this timeline.
Thank you! It’s one of my favorite parts of researching it, to be honest
The problem I think stems from the fact that the alliances that were initially formed to keep peace in Europe have become too inflexible. At some level policymakers have become too complacent/comfortable with simply relying on an the alliances they do have. These commitments have been reinforced by longstanding relationships and as well as plans and deployments. But what nobody has realized at least until now is that these understandings are meant to be flexible. Austria should not be bound to France in the same way that Germany should not be bound to Italy. Austria needs to be free to reach understandings with Germany and Russia on its own terms.
The problem I think is that it has been caught squarely in the middle of the Franco-German rivalry and it is too strategically vulnerable to forfeit the safety of the French alliance. I don't recall whether it was AJP Taylor or Bridges but one of them said about Austria but they pointed to Austria being a great power because the other great powers permitted it to be. In this case Austria is a great power because France enables it to remain and stay a great power; Austria cannot throw its weight around and frankly has not been able to do so since at least the 17th and 18th Centuries. Indeed you could claim Austrian overtures to Germany are a means of reclaiming that great power status that has been so diminished.
At the same time Austria maintains some degree of leverage over France and the allusion to "blatant favoritism" may allude to something later on akin to the "blank check". I don't think French policymakers entirely appreciate how weak the Dual Monarchy actually is. If anything they overestimate Austrian strength - especially in light of the crisis in Hungary but Poincare is driven more by fear of French isolation which is in turn driven by French belligerence and may thus act more provocatively toward Germany in future. They see their peers going out of their way either to avoid or snub France (i.e. the Anglo-German agreements in Africa) and they worry that somehow they will lose their only other guarantee of stability. I don't think that the Franco-Austrian alliance extends to Central Europe but one could see the French changing the conditions for activating the alliance and thus widening the scope of any local conflict into an general war. A good parallel would be the "Balkan Inception Scenario" that Clark mentioned in Sleepwalkers.
The problem I think is that it has been caught squarely in the middle of the Franco-German rivalry and it is too strategically vulnerable to forfeit the safety of the French alliance. I don't recall whether it was AJP Taylor or Bridges but one of them said about Austria but they pointed to Austria being a great power because the other great powers permitted it to be. In this case Austria is a great power because France enables it to remain and stay a great power; Austria cannot throw its weight around and frankly has not been able to do so since at least the 17th and 18th Centuries. Indeed you could claim Austrian overtures to Germany are a means of reclaiming that great power status that has been so diminished.
At the same time Austria maintains some degree of leverage over France and the allusion to "blatant favoritism" may allude to something later on akin to the "blank check". I don't think French policymakers entirely appreciate how weak the Dual Monarchy actually is. If anything they overestimate Austrian strength - especially in light of the crisis in Hungary but Poincare is driven more by fear of French isolation which is in turn driven by French belligerence and may thus act more provocatively toward Germany in future. They see their peers going out of their way either to avoid or snub France (i.e. the Anglo-German agreements in Africa) and they worry that somehow they will lose their only other guarantee of stability. I don't think that the Franco-Austrian alliance extends to Central Europe but one could see the French changing the conditions for activating the alliance and thus widening the scope of any local conflict into an general war. A good parallel would be the "Balkan Inception Scenario" that Clark mentioned in Sleepwalkers.
Last edited:
Please return to italics as was done in Vol.I. It’s easier to read for me
For Thine is the Glory: Brazil and Integralism
"...labor strikes that essentially shut down most of Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro for days at a time, responded to against by the veterans' brigades which made a game of knocking out teeth and eyeballs when they "shattered" the heads of their hated leftists on the streets. If the radical left and radical right had one thing in common, however, it was a mutual contempt for the political establishment of the Congress of Brazil and the military, and this hatred came due in the polls of November 1917.
In hindsight, it had been a massive mistake for Emperor Luis I to delay elections for so long after the conclusion of the Treaty of Asuncion. Brazil had been at peace, externally at least, since February of 1916, and that had given opposition groups nearly two years to organize and destabilize while the Pessoa government, in the parlance of the times, "fiddled," in reference to Nero's apocryphal musicmaking as his city burned to the ground. The resumption of trade with Britain and Europe (and to a lesser extent the United States) had not been enough to rescue Brazil's gutted economy, which was still struggling from Pessoa's strict austerity policies, the loss of tens of thousands of young men and, more than anything, the mental shock of its inconclusive end to the war. While Argentina and Chile in the postwar years were no picnics either, especially the latter as it struggled to exit a long, bloody civil war, they had outlets for their frustrations in political change and reform, whereas Brazil stagnated in place and let resentments build to a boil across the country.
The old Liberal-Conservative paradigm had been subverted by Fonseca's prewar machinations and the conflict with Argentina had utterly broken it; the Liberal Party collapsed and the Conservatives splintered into several factions aligned with various state-based oligarchs, many of whom supported a secular republican positivism rather than the monarchy and Church. In addition to conservative republicanism there were radical parties, socialist parties, syndicalist parties, abolitionist parties, and nationalist parties - as many as thirty-one parties, some with as few as one representative, entered the Congress of Brazil after the polls, and it was apparent there was no unified government that could emerge out of the mess. Pessoa dutifully tendered his resignation the next day, but gave Luis no sense of who he should call upon next.
The elections brought with them violence at polling places and riots in some cities and towns as accusations swirled of locally successful parties stuffing ballot boxes or intimidating their opponents; over a thousand people are estimated to have been killed in electoral bloodshed in the last three weeks of November, including among them Epitacio Pessoa, as the former Prime Minister was shot to death while enjoying a coffee by an unemployed Black veteran who blamed him for the end of the war and resented his racial views. It seemed apparent to all that Brazil was careening towards an internal conflagration based on region, ideology, and mutual distrust, and violence was increasingly an acceptable method of solving communal issues.
There was no liberal majority to appoint that could survive a vote of confidence from socialists who hated them as popular sellouts, and there was no conservative majority to appoint that could accommodate the internal feuds that had riven the Brazilian right. Luis at first pondered a technocratic government under his cousin Dom Augusto Leopoldo, one of the few major military figures to exit the war with relatively clean hands. He was, however, almost immediately dissuaded from this course of action by his wife, who pointed out that in a time of intense crisis in which the monarchy's prestige was beginning to fray, the appointment of a member of the Imperial family, one who was already enormously powerful, would be a provocative choice. Luis slept on the matter and when he awoke agreed with her logic, and thus called somebody else to the Sao Cristavao - Manuel do Nascimento Vargas. [1]
Vargas was nominated for Prime Minister of Brazil on November 26, the day after his 73rd birthday. He was a veteran of the Paraguayan War who had risen from corporal to colonel on his own merits and had married wealthy after the war, becoming a powerful Riogradense rancher; at the conclusion of his military career, where he had been neither friend nor rival to Fonseca, he had been made the municipal superintendent of the town of Sao Borja on the Argentina border, a position he would hold for four years, before being elected a Deputy in the Congress and serving an unremarkable career as a well-liked and respected backbencher. But it was more than simply that he was a relative unknown figure outside of Rio Grande do Sul that made him an unconventional choice - in the 1880s, he had led a republican club in his home province and was known as an ardent abolitionist, and while he had sworn an oath to the monarchy both as superintendent and as a deputy, it was an open question whether his positivist thinking that demanded the monarchy be overthrown had ever gone away.
It was often said that Vargas, who was woken up after his birthday celebrations groggy and confused, was as surprised by his nomination as the rest of Brazil, which responded with a collective "Who?" upon the proclamation that he had agreed to form a government of technocrats, scientists, academics, and retired - at his insistence - military officers, ideally ones who had not served in the recent war. It was a curious Cabinet, with conservative jurists such as Clovis Bevilaqua invited to serve as Minister of Justice and draft Brazil a new civil code while also containing longstanding establishmentarian figures such as Ruy Barbosa contrasted with genuine radicals such as Manuel Bomfim. How exactly this mix of men of profoundly different views, ideas and backgrounds would coexist would come to define Vargas and, indeed, the time period associated with his government…”
- For Thine is the Glory: Brazil and Integralism
[1] Yes, as in that Vargas' dad.
In hindsight, it had been a massive mistake for Emperor Luis I to delay elections for so long after the conclusion of the Treaty of Asuncion. Brazil had been at peace, externally at least, since February of 1916, and that had given opposition groups nearly two years to organize and destabilize while the Pessoa government, in the parlance of the times, "fiddled," in reference to Nero's apocryphal musicmaking as his city burned to the ground. The resumption of trade with Britain and Europe (and to a lesser extent the United States) had not been enough to rescue Brazil's gutted economy, which was still struggling from Pessoa's strict austerity policies, the loss of tens of thousands of young men and, more than anything, the mental shock of its inconclusive end to the war. While Argentina and Chile in the postwar years were no picnics either, especially the latter as it struggled to exit a long, bloody civil war, they had outlets for their frustrations in political change and reform, whereas Brazil stagnated in place and let resentments build to a boil across the country.
The old Liberal-Conservative paradigm had been subverted by Fonseca's prewar machinations and the conflict with Argentina had utterly broken it; the Liberal Party collapsed and the Conservatives splintered into several factions aligned with various state-based oligarchs, many of whom supported a secular republican positivism rather than the monarchy and Church. In addition to conservative republicanism there were radical parties, socialist parties, syndicalist parties, abolitionist parties, and nationalist parties - as many as thirty-one parties, some with as few as one representative, entered the Congress of Brazil after the polls, and it was apparent there was no unified government that could emerge out of the mess. Pessoa dutifully tendered his resignation the next day, but gave Luis no sense of who he should call upon next.
The elections brought with them violence at polling places and riots in some cities and towns as accusations swirled of locally successful parties stuffing ballot boxes or intimidating their opponents; over a thousand people are estimated to have been killed in electoral bloodshed in the last three weeks of November, including among them Epitacio Pessoa, as the former Prime Minister was shot to death while enjoying a coffee by an unemployed Black veteran who blamed him for the end of the war and resented his racial views. It seemed apparent to all that Brazil was careening towards an internal conflagration based on region, ideology, and mutual distrust, and violence was increasingly an acceptable method of solving communal issues.
There was no liberal majority to appoint that could survive a vote of confidence from socialists who hated them as popular sellouts, and there was no conservative majority to appoint that could accommodate the internal feuds that had riven the Brazilian right. Luis at first pondered a technocratic government under his cousin Dom Augusto Leopoldo, one of the few major military figures to exit the war with relatively clean hands. He was, however, almost immediately dissuaded from this course of action by his wife, who pointed out that in a time of intense crisis in which the monarchy's prestige was beginning to fray, the appointment of a member of the Imperial family, one who was already enormously powerful, would be a provocative choice. Luis slept on the matter and when he awoke agreed with her logic, and thus called somebody else to the Sao Cristavao - Manuel do Nascimento Vargas. [1]
Vargas was nominated for Prime Minister of Brazil on November 26, the day after his 73rd birthday. He was a veteran of the Paraguayan War who had risen from corporal to colonel on his own merits and had married wealthy after the war, becoming a powerful Riogradense rancher; at the conclusion of his military career, where he had been neither friend nor rival to Fonseca, he had been made the municipal superintendent of the town of Sao Borja on the Argentina border, a position he would hold for four years, before being elected a Deputy in the Congress and serving an unremarkable career as a well-liked and respected backbencher. But it was more than simply that he was a relative unknown figure outside of Rio Grande do Sul that made him an unconventional choice - in the 1880s, he had led a republican club in his home province and was known as an ardent abolitionist, and while he had sworn an oath to the monarchy both as superintendent and as a deputy, it was an open question whether his positivist thinking that demanded the monarchy be overthrown had ever gone away.
It was often said that Vargas, who was woken up after his birthday celebrations groggy and confused, was as surprised by his nomination as the rest of Brazil, which responded with a collective "Who?" upon the proclamation that he had agreed to form a government of technocrats, scientists, academics, and retired - at his insistence - military officers, ideally ones who had not served in the recent war. It was a curious Cabinet, with conservative jurists such as Clovis Bevilaqua invited to serve as Minister of Justice and draft Brazil a new civil code while also containing longstanding establishmentarian figures such as Ruy Barbosa contrasted with genuine radicals such as Manuel Bomfim. How exactly this mix of men of profoundly different views, ideas and backgrounds would coexist would come to define Vargas and, indeed, the time period associated with his government…”
- For Thine is the Glory: Brazil and Integralism
[1] Yes, as in that Vargas' dad.
Agreed. Fascist movements don’t typically win power in their own right. The idea that they seize power is a myth. Conservative politicians typically think they can co-opt fascist movements. In practice however these movements tend to hijack the government if they are given power. That was what happened with Mussolini and Hitler respectively. That doesn’t mean that the AIB won’t receive a considerable amount of support. But fascist movements need legitimacy and there will typically be right wing voters that opt for parties of the Conservative and Liberal center.