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Guardians of the Empire 
Nationalism and the Habsburg Army  

   
 

Benjamin James Manuatu 
Victoria University of Wellington 
 
 
Abstract 
Released by the conquests of Napoleon and stoked by the fires of the 1848 Revolutions, the 
age of nationalism took Europe by storm in the nineteenth century and lasted well into the 
twentieth century. For those states that enjoyed a more homogenous population, such as 
the emerging German Empire, nationalism would prove to be a useful tool in mobilizing 
their citizens and increasing their capabilities for warfare. For the Austrian Empire, which 
represented more a polyethnic and multilingual conglomerate than a unified state, 
nationalism would present itself as an existential threat from which the polity could not 
recover. This article analyzes the Habsburg army and the role it played in maintaining the 
Austrian Monarchy in the face of nationalist aggression from the 1848 Revolutions to its 
ultimate end at the climax of the First World War. The army served not only as a physical 
shield for the Empire but also as a symbol for the unity of all ethnic groups under the 
command of the Habsburg emperor and held the potential to be a tool of integration and 
unity for the multiple ethnic groups. Using military and nationalism theories, this article 
examines the challenges the army was forced to contend with in order to maintain the 
monarchy and how the language issue plagued combat effectiveness and also served as a 
hotbed of grievances for the multiple ethnic groups of the Empire. 
 
 
Article 
 

In the difficult times which face the Monarchy, one must ask, who and what 
supports the Throne and the Dynasty? To this question there is only one answer—
the army. The Army does not serve only to defend the fatherland against foreign 
foes; its chief role is the defense and maintenance of the throne and the struggle 
against the enemies within. 
 

— Edmund Glaise von Horstenau1 
 
The military institution of the Habsburg Monarchy during the nineteenth century served as 
a mirror that reflected the volatile state of the Austrian Empire in its twilight century as the 
wave of nationalism threatened to tear it apart. Throughout the nineteenth century and 
into the early twentieth century, the Habsburg state had dramatically changed its 

 
1 Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, Franz Josephs Weggefahrte (Vienna: Amalthea-Verlag, 1930), 474, cited in 
Lohr Eugene Miller, “Politics, the Nationality Problem, and the Habsburg Army, 1848-1914 (Volumes I and 
II)” (PhD diss., Louisiana State University, 1992), 328. 



 

 

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boundaries, system of governance, name, and place on the world stage. In 1848, the 
Austrian Empire’s military apparatus was simply referred to as the kaiserlich-königlich 
Armee, Imperial-Royal Army.2 Next to the dynasty itself, the Habsburg army is often seen as 
the key bulwark of the state, the common army being the chief guarantor of physical safety 
and unity of the Habsburg state.3 As an institution, the army was one of the most important 
tools in the Habsburg administration for promoting loyalty to the emperor as well as being 
used as the model for Emperor Franz Joseph’s idealized multination yet ordered and 
obedient empire. 4 As reflected in the opening quote by Austrian military officer Edmund 
Glaise von Horstenau, the army played a pivotal role in maintaining the state during the 
nineteenth century, guarding against not only external threats but also internal ones, 
namely the forces of nationalism.5  
 
Topics and terms discussed in this article—including nation, nationalism, nationality, 
ethnicity, empire, and monarchy—often have multiple, and sometimes contradictory, 
definitions and could themselves be the subject of a lengthy essay. For the purposes of this 
article, I use the term Monarchy to represent the ruling Habsburg government as an entity 
and not limited to the sitting emperor or empress. Similarly, the Empire, used alone, refers 
to the lands directly administrated by the Habsburg Monarchy. My working definitions of 
the terms nation, nationalism, and nationality build upon the works of several prominent 
nationalism theorists. For instance, Rupert Emerson described the nation as “that of a body 
of people who feel that they are a nation.”6 Ernest Gellner defined nationalism, simply, as a 
shared culture.7 Ernest Renan acknowledged that a nation could not be defined as simply 
an ethnographic or linguistic group but is rather based on two things: first, it must have a 
sense of common history and, second, that people concerned must have a will to live 
together.8 Using these comments we can identify the term nation, and by extension 
nationality, as that of a group of people who share common characteristics, culture, and 
who wish to live together. The term nationalism refers to the political and sociological 
movement to achieve the purported goals of the nation and, ultimately, to unify the nation 
with the state. A nationalist is an individual who is in pursuit of those goals. Ethnicity, 

 
2 Lohr Eugene Miller, “Politics, the Nationality Problem, and the Habsburg Army, 1848-1914 (Volumes I and 
II)” (PhD diss., Louisiana State University, 1992), 1. 
3 Laurence Cole and Daniel L. Unowsky, “Introduction: Imperial Loyalty and Popular Allegiances in the Late 
Habsburg Monarchy,” in The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegiances, and State Patriotism in 
the Late Habsburg Monarchy, eds. Laurence Cole and Daniel L. Unowsky (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 
5. 
4 John E. Fahey, “Bulwark of Empire: Imperial and Local Government in Prezmyśl, Galacia (1867-1939)” (PhD 
diss., Purdue University, May 2017), 62. 
5 Edmund Glaise von Horstenau was a member of the Austro-Hungarian Army’s General Staff and the head of 
the press department of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces during the First World War. He became 
a Nazi politician and the last Vice-Chancellor of Austria before the Anschluss in 1938. During the Second 
World War, he served a general in the Wehrmacht. 
6 Rupert Emerson, Empire to Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 102. 
7 Ernest Gellner, Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 4. 
8 Eugene Kamenka, “Political Nationalism—The Evolution of the Idea,” in Nationalism: The nature and 
evolution of an idea, ed. Eugene Kamenka (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1973), 12. 



 

 

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although often confused as a synonym for nationality, is a group of people with a shared 
cultural identity and often a shared spoken language.9  
 
Unlike most of the European states during the nineteenth century, the Austrian Empire was 
unique in that it was an imperial organization and not a country. As noted historian A.J.P. 
Taylor observes: “to be Austrian was to be free of national feelings—not to possess a 
nationality.”10 The political entity of the Monarchy was simply the unitary state composed 
of the lands that owed allegiance to the Habsburg family.11 Distinctively, the Austrian state 
was absent of a single ethnic identity, which on the one hand served to the benefit of their 
subjects, since it could claim to exist above national or ethnic allegiance, but on the other 
hand simultaneously failed to evoke strong feelings of unity. Many citizens, especially 
following the Ausgleich (Compromise) of 1867, often first identified themselves as part of 
their “nation” and only secondarily as members of the Monarchy.12 It was this motely 
entity, the Austrian state, which the army was charged with defending. With the 
establishment of a standing army by imperial decree, the role of the Habsburg Monarchy 
was militarized in formal terms, placing the ruling monarch as the supreme commander.13 
In an empire of multiple nationalities, five major religions, and no common political 
institutions, the army and the imperial bureaucracy served as the only visible bond 
between the Monarchy and its subjects, remaining the sole apparatus to which they could 
all offer the emperor loyalty in unity.14 The military arm of the Habsburgs would undergo a 
multitude of changes throughout its existence. However its link to the Monarchy and its 
role as the foremost representation of loyalty and unity in the Empire never wavered. 
 
The view that the institutions of the military are effective instruments for ethnic 
integration was a prevalent notion in modernization theory during the 1960s and 1970s.15 
The army as an institution was often seen not as a separate body of the society but as an 
extension it. Thus an army reflects the social structure, the technological capabilities, and 
vigor of the state.16 Political scholar Lucian W. Pye observes that the military provides 
some form of training in citizenship, as “recruits with traditional backgrounds must learn 
about a new world in which they are identified with a larger political self.”17 Sven Simonsen 
identifies several traits of facilitating integration and homogeneity, which includes a strict 
adherence to hierarchy, emphasis on rationality, opportunities for social mobility, and 

 
9 Adrian Hastings, Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 1997), 3. 
10 A. J. P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809-1918: A History of the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary, 
(Bristol: Western Printing Services LTD., 1952), 22. 
11 Kelly McFall, “Ethnicity as a Problem for Grand Strategy: Conrad von Hoetzendorf, Nationalism, and the 
Habsburg Imperial Army at War, 1914-1916” (PhD diss., The Ohio State University, 1998), 28-29. 
12 McFall, “Ethnicity as a Problem for Grand Strategy,” 30. 
13 Laurence Cole, Military Culture and Popular Patriotism in Late Imperial Austria (Oxford: Oxford University 
Press, 2014), 23. 
14 John Keegan, World Armies, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1983), 30. 
15 Sven Gunnar Simonsen, “Building ‘National’ Armies—Building Nations?: Determinations of Success for 
Postintervention Integration Efforts,” Armed Forces & Society 33, no. 4, (July 2007): 573. 
16 Correlli Barnett, The Desert Generals (London: Pan Books edn., 1962), 105. 
17 Lucian W. Pye, “Armies in the Process of Political Modernization,” in The Role of the Miltiary in 
Underdeveloped Countries, ed. John J. Johnson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 69-68. 



 

 

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services centered on achieving national aims.18 An officer of the Habsburg forces in 1911 
attested to the perceived primary function of the military’s training regime: 
 

Every year in October we conscript men who have, as often as not, undergone a 
preliminary training in nationalist, anti-Austrian atmospheres and have been 
educated as irredentists or anti-militarists, or who, being illiterate, know less than 
nothing of the world; and out of such material we have to fashion intelligent 
responsible individuals and enthusiastic patriotic citizens.19 

 
As reflected in this quote, the primary function of the Habsburg army’s training regime was 
to change potential dissident nationalists who adhered to the needs of their respective 
nations into citizens who were “patriotic” to their shared monarch. 
 
The military can be viewed as one of the—if not the—important factors of integration and 
homogeneity in a state. For the polyethnic Habsburg Monarchy, the military had the 
potential to achieve this aim. As historian N. F. Dreisziger notes, the “polyethnic” army 
could have utilized its ethnic factor in the armed forces to appease certain ethnic groups 
and promote ethnic integration and unity.20 Unfortunately, as we will come to observe, the 
Austrian military was ill-suited to address a task of such gargantuan size.  
 
The great force of nationalism that was released in the wake of the devastating Napoleonic 
Wars swept the European stage and enveloped it almost entirely by the mid-nineteenth 
century.21 The Austrian Monarchy was no exception and became home to a multitude of 
emerging national movements during this period.22 The national question in Austria 
exploded onto the scene in a violent fashion during the Revolutions of 1848, which 
presented the various nationalist groups in the Monarchy the task of condensing their 
national claims into a political program for the first time.23 The situation for the ethnic 
Germans of Austria, however, was unique among the contesting nationalities of the 
Monarchy as they enjoyed a seat of privilege and hegemony. Thanks to the efforts of Joseph 
I, building upon the foundations laid by his mother Maria Theresa, German was the official 
language of the Austrian administration, Universalsprache meines Reiches, giving the 
German subjects a distinct social advantage.24  Furthermore, the royal family thought of 

 
18 Simonsen, “Building “National” Armies—Building Nations?,” 573. 
19 Brosch von Aarenau, “Am Vorabend der sweijahrigen Dienstzeit,” Danzers Arneezetuna, 12 January 1911. 
20 N. F. Dreisziger, “Polyethnicity and Armed Forces: An Introduction,” in Ethnic Armies: Polyethnic Armed 
Forces from the Time of the Habsburgs to the Age of the Superpowers, ed. N. F. Dreisziger (Ontario: Wilfried 
Laurier University Press, 1990), 3. 
21 E.H. Buschbeck, Austria (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), 92. 
22 John Deak, Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the 
First World War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 4. 
23 Otto Bauer, The Questions of Nationalities and Social Democracy, trans. Joseph O’Donnell (Minneapolis: 
University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 219. 
24 John W. Mason, The Dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire 1867-1918 (Hong Kong: Longman Group 
Limited, 1985), 10. R. J. W. Evans, “Language and State Building: The Case of the Habsburg Monarchy,” 
Austrian History Yearbook 35 (2004): 7. 



 

 

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themselves as German, and Metternich regarded the monarchy as a German state.25 Even 
the language required for one to enter the Diet of Hungary was German.26 Thus, while the 
Austrian Empire was a cauldron of various ethnic groups and languages, its government 
was consistently German in character. As such, Austrian German nationalism held different 
goals compared to other nationalist groups of the Habsburg lands. Rather than a call for 
national liberation, German nationalism was a reaction against the growing nations in the 
Empire’s multiethnic layout that threatened their privileged position. As historian Hans 
Kohn wrote, “nationalism centers the supreme loyalty of the overwhelming majority of the 
people upon the nation-state, either existing or desired.”27 The dilemma presented to the 
Austrian Germans was that, although the royal family was considered German and the 
official language of the Empire was conducted in German, the ethnic Austrian Germans did 
not make up the majority of the Habsburg Empire, despite being the largest ethnic group.28 
The ethnic divide was further exacerbated as the Habsburg hereditary lands acquired new 
territories and subjects; the proportion of privileged German Austrians to non-Germans 
dwindled, creating minority elites.29  
 
In many cases, the age of nationalism provided an effective tool for the rulers of Europe to 
ignite a new fervor of loyalty and increase the military power of their respective states;30 
the same could not be said for Austria. As a polity of different nations, many of whom 
identified themselves more with their own lands and their monarch than the whole state, 
nationalism was antithetical to their very existence. 31 As political theorist John Plamenatz 
explains, “nationalism is a reaction of peoples who feel culturally at a disadvantage.”32 For 
many ethnic groups in the Empire, nationalism presented a useful tool to voice their 
grievances and, for some, to seek their own “liberation” from a foreign master.  
 
Language, Literacy, and Technology  
Ernest Gellner argues that nationalism emerged from the combination of state and culture. 
His much quoted phrase—"every man is a clerk”—referred to the spread of education in 
local languages and economic development during the industrial age, which in turn allowed 
mass participation in these new nations.33 As Gellner observes, “A modern industrial state 

 
25 Alan Sked, “The Nationality Problem in the Habsburg Monarchy and the Revolutions of 1848: A 
Reassessment,” in The 1848 Revolutions and European Political Thought, eds. Douglas Moggach and Gareth 
Stedman Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 336. 
26 C. A. Macartney, The House of Austria: The Later Phase 1790-1918 (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh 
Press, 1978), 14. 
27 Hans Kohn, “Nationalism,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 11, ed. David L. Sills (New 
York: Macmillan Free Press, 1968), 63. 
28 Robert A. Kann, The Multinational Empire: Nationalism and National Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy 
1848-1918: Volume II (New York: Octagon Books Inc., 1964), 305. 
29 John Knickerbocker, “Österreich und Anschluss: Ponderous Dilemma of Austrian Identity (1848-1948)” 
(MA Thesis, University of Albany, 2014), i. 
30 Burak Kadercan, “Military Competition and the Emergence of Nationalism: Putting Logic of Political 
Survival into Historical Context,” International Studies 14 (2012): 402. 
31 Miroslav Sedivy, “The Austrian Empire, German Nationalism, and the Rhine Crisis of 1840,” Austrian 
Yearbook 47 (2016): 32- 33. 
32 John Plamenatz, “Two Types of Nationalism,” in Nationalism: The Nature and Evolution of an Idea, ed. 
Eugene Kamenka (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1973), 27. 
33 Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld Nicolson, 1964), 159. 



 

 

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can only function with a mobile, literate, culturally standardized, interchangeable 
population.”34 Literacy, the ability to read and write and therefore communicate effectively, 
facilitated the process of homogenization. Eric Hobsbawm also postulates the growth of 
educational institutions, such as schools and universities, mirrors the progress of 
nationalism.35 With regards to education in Austria, the Habsburg Empire was among the 
first European states to tackle the literacy question, with Empress Maria Theresa’s policies 
of encouraging German education during her reign.36 In 1869 the Habsburg government 
made further steps in combating literacy by placing schools under state jurisdiction and 
mandating eight years of primary school.37 Consequentially, the literacy rates climbed from 
51 percent in 1870 to 78 percent in 1890.38 As more subjects became educated, the issue of 
language in a multilingual state became more significant.  
 
The general growth in literacy and industry created powerful new impulses and yearnings 
for linguistic unification.39 Language, as Peter Burke notes, became an instrument for the 
proverbial “cult of nation.”40 Using the foundations laid by his mother Maria Theresa, 
Joseph centralized the Monarchy’s bureaucracy, staffed by the most educated subjects and, 
in terms of nationality, primarily by those who spoke German.41 The German language 
consequently became the vehicle for social mobility, in essence promoting the 
Germanization of Gellner’s aphorism, “every man is a clerk.”42 The German language’s 
privileged status simultaneously encouraged resistance of the non-German nationalities 
and caused other Habsburg ethnicities to chaff further under the stewardship of the 
German-speaking government. The German language became the de facto language of 
privilege, making German-speaking Austrians essentially the leaders in the Habsburg 
Monarchy. 
 
Gellner notes that the industrial age created mass mobility and the uprooting of rural 
people, which resulted in a new cultural “freak,” the replaceable modular man.43 With the 
capacity to perform a variety of tasks and duties by obeying the same set of rules and 
sharing a common idiom with his peers, the modular man can be seen as the end product of 

 
34 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell Publisher Limited, 1983), 46. 
35 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolutions: 1789-1848 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962), 166. 
36 Anthony Bushell, Polemical Austria: The Rhetorics of National Identity from Empire to the Second Republic 
(Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 69. 
37 Branko Sustar, “The historical development of the formation of the elite in the south of the Habsburg 
Empire. Slovens and the schooling of the intellectual class in the late 1800s and early 1900s,” History of 
Education & Children’s Literature X, no. 1 (2015): 508. 
38 Harvey J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture (Indianapolis: 
Indiana University Press, 1991), 296. 
39 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: 
Verso, 2006), 77-78.  
40 Peter Burke, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 
2004), 160. 
41 Edward Crankshaw, The Fall of the House of Habsburg (London: Jarrold & Sons Ltd., 1963), 10. 
42 Andrea Komlosy, “Imperial Cohesion, Nation-Building, and Regional Integration in the Habsburg 
Monarchy,” in Nationalizing Empires, eds. Stefan Berger and Alexei Miller (New York: Central European 
University Press, 2015), 420. 
43 Ernest Gellner, “The Importance of Being Modular,” in Civil Society: Theory, History, and Comparison, ed. 
John A. Hall (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 42-43. 



 

 

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Gellner’s industrialization process, facilitating cultural homogeneity.44 This perspective of 
industrialization could explain the centralized German character of the Austrian 
administration and bureaucracy, as the bureaucrats, often by origin and always by 
employment, were urban dwellers, and the urban centers of the Austrian Empire were all 
German in character and substance.45 According to K. G. Hugelmann’s Das 
Nationalitatenrecht des alten Österreich (The Nationality Law of Old German), in January 
1914, 76 percent of all officials of the Empire’s central bureaucracy identified as 
Germans.46 Although the imperial government made attempts within the confines of a non-
national state to recognize certain national and linguistic equalities, such as trials being 
held in ten different languages, the expansion of the bureaucracy meant that more German 
was heard.47 The Germanization of Austrian bureaucracy and the consequent elevation of 
the German people in the Habsburg Monarchy could be seen as the unintended byproduct 
of centralization. 
 
Gellner’s theory of nationalism is concerned with industrialization, but several scholars 
have noted that Gellner does not adequately address the importance of the military in this 
process. One vocal critic, Daniele Conversi, argues that Gellner failed to relate the 
homogenization “separatism dynamics” with the rise of the mass army independent of 
industrialism.48 Barry Posen contends that any economic argument for the function of 
literacy and a shared culture, the arbiters of nationalism, can equally be made into a 
military one.49 Gellner draws attention to the importance of technology in the economy, but 
the conduct and nature of warfare also depended critically upon technology. Armies 
evolved with the changes of technology, communications, and transportation. For instance, 
the invention of the railroad in particular ushered in the age of mass warfare.50 Alongside 
the evolution of military technology, the utility of a soldier who could read and write 
became more valuable in ensuring victory.51 States now had a military incentive to 
promote mass literacy, and the subsequent spread of literacy, in turn, increased the state’s 
capabilities to train larger armies. Brendan O’Leary argues that education and cultural 
standardization of European conscripts preceded that of the general citizenry and that the 
military elites used protonationalism for military goals exclusive of industrial society.52 In 
the case of Austria, Steven Beller directly links Maria Theresa’s modernized bureaucracy to 
dramatic increases of state revenue, providing the resources to support the expanding 

 
44 Daniele Conversi, “Homogenisation, nationalism and war: should we still read Ernest Gellner?*,” Nations 
and Nationalism 13, no. 3, (2007): 381. 
45 Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809-1918, 24. 
46 Quoted in Robert A. Kann, The Multinational Empire: Nationalism and National Reform in the Habsburg 
Monarchy 1848-1918: Volume II (New York: Octagon Books, Inc., 1964), 313. 
47 Miller, “Politics, the Nationality Problem, and the Habsburg Army, 1848-1914 (Volumes I and II),” 71. 
48 Conversi, “Homogenisation, nationalism and war: should we still read Ernest Gellner?*,” 373-374. 
49 Barry R. Posen, “Nationalism, the Mass Army, and Military Power,” in Perspectives on Nationalism and War, 
eds. John L. Comaroff and Paul C. Stern (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers SA, 1995), 139. 
50 Massimiliano Gaetano Onorato, Kenneth Scheve, and David Stasavage, “Technology and the Era of the Mass 
Army,” The Journal of Economic History 74, no. 2 (June 2014): 450. 
51 Onorato, Scheve, and Stasavage, “Technology and the Era of the Mass Army,”167. 
52 Brendan O’Leary, “Ernest Gellner’s diagnoses of nationalism: a critical overview, or, what is living and what 
is dead in Ernest Gellner’s philosophy of nationalism,” in State of the Nation, ed. John A. Hall (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 66. 



 

 

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standing army.53 In response to Gellner’s theory, Nicos Mouzelis observes that, “it is 
military rather than economic technologies that primarily explain the spectacular 
development of state bureaucracies and their unprecedented penetration of the societal 
periphery.”54  
 
Both the army and the bureaucracy of the state pursued the goal of homogenization in 
order to control both the “clerk” and the “conscript.” In regards to the army of Austria, 
there were attempts to educate the common rank and file and establish basic literacy; 
according to Austrian officer Fenner von Fenneberg, “there [were] scarcely two out of 
every hundred [men] who could not read or write and answer questions correctly 
concerning service regulations.”55 As the bellicist, war-centered, approach to state building 
claims, wars are a great stimulus to centralizing state power and building institutional 
capacity.56 State-led cultural homogenization, as argued by Conversi, ushered in by 
technological advances, consisted of a “single, distilled purified culture…It did not 
materialise as a spontaneous and inevitable outgrowth of modernity.”57  
 
Military, Cohesion, and Nationalism 
Nationalism can increase the intensity of the state’s warfare capabilities as well its utility 
for mass mobilization. As Posen notes, in the age of the large-scale armies, states acted 
purposefully to produce nationalism.58 In a homogeneous state, nationalism can be used 
effectively to facilitate military cohesion on the primary and secondary level. On the 
primary level, nationalism can be used to develop an ingrained kinship between fellow 
soldiers. On the secondary level, nationalism can facilitate trust and kinship in groups 
bigger than oneself with goals and aspirations of the larger group used as the goals and 
aspirations of the individual. Carlton Hayes suggests that “[m]ilitarism exists primarily for 
the sake of national honor, national rights, and national interests.”59 However, Posen’s and 
Hayes’s observations cannot be applied to the Habsburg Monarchy; on the contrary, 
nationalism was entirely detrimental to the existence of the state and to maintaining a 
cohesive army. Instead, Emperor Franz Joseph opted to present the army as the highest 
form of state unity.60 Though states such as the emerging Prussian-led Germany would find 
nationalism a powerful motive to increase their military effectiveness, the Habsburg 
military needed to be an institution that united the state absent of national identity. To 
embrace nationalism highlighted the differences of the multiple ethnic groups and gave 

 
53 Steven Beller, Francis Joseph: Profiles in Power (London: Longman, 1996), 20. 
54 Nicos Mouzelis, “Ernest Gellner’s Theory of Nationalism: Some Definitional and Methodological Issues,” in 
State of the Nation, ed. John A. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 159. 
55 Fenner von Fenneberg, Oesterreich und seine Armee (Leipzig: Keil, 1847), 142-143, in Alan Sked, The 
Survival of the Habsburg Empire: Redetzky, the Imperial Army, and the Class War, 1848 (London: Longman, 
1979), 37. 
56 Cameron Thies, “War, Rivalry and State Building in Latin America,” American Journal of Political Science 49, 
no. 3 (2005): 451.  
57 Conversi, “Homogoneisation, nationalism and war: should we still read Ernest Gellner?*,” 382. 
58 Posen, “Nationalism, the Mass Army, and Military Power,” 136, 139. 
59 Carlton J. H. Hayes, Essays on Nationalism (New York: Russell & Russell, 1966), 159. 
60 Alfred J. Reiber, “Nationalizing Imperial Armies: A Comparative and Transnational Study of Three Empires,” 
in Nationalizing Empires, eds. Stefan Berger and Alexei Miller (New York: Central European University Press, 
2015), 611. 



 

 

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legitimacy to minority grievances. As Field Marshall Conrad von Hotzendorf wrote in 1908, 
“There may be no ruling nation in the army,” for “[o]nly in an army in which each of the 
nationalities can come to accept that they are viewed as completely equal will a unified 
spirt and attachment to the greater whole [be able to] endure.”61 
 
Commanding the loyalty of a multiethnic army, whilst simultaneously maintaining military 
cohesion and the quality of the units, was a problem endemic of polyethnic states. Imperial 
policy required an army loyal only to the ruling dynasty; nationalist sentiment was treated 
with suspicion if not outright as sedition.62 The Habsburg army had to contend with 
nationalist issues that threatened military cohesion more so than any other professional 
mass army that enjoyed a homogenous state, with the possible exceptions of the 
concurrent Ottoman and British Empires. The solution to any polyethnic force was to make 
the army supranational. The language issue in itself presented a nightmare for the Austrian 
military high command, not only in maintaining the loyalty of multiple ethnic units but, 
more practically, in the day-to-day operations and military cohesion. Cohesion stands at 
the universal core of all armed groups and to the creation of force.63 Success on the 
battlefield is found in clear communication and bonding within military groups in order to 
execute orders and tasks vital to victory. Effective cohesion between officers and their 
soldiers generates the trust necessary for teamwork, which in turn leads to a greater group 
cohesion and identification with the army, producing the professional serviceman.64 The 
vast majority of officers serving in the Habsburg military—78 percent of professional 
officers and 60.2 percent of reserve officers—were ethnically German.65 The largely 
German-speaking officer corps was not representative of the units they commanded, which 
were drawn from the vast ethnically diverse reaches of the Empire.66 Officially, the 
Habsburg army gave recognition to about ten or eleven languages in their rank and file.67 
The average Austrian regiment was a proverbial melting pot of different ethnicities, 
facilitated by a system introduced in 1849, which instituted soldiers of varying ethnic 
groups in each regiment, lasting up until the Ausgleich in 1867.68 This was done with the 
explicit intention of combatting nationalist influences as the administration distributed 
troops outside of their ethnic area, and regiments were transferred routinely.69 The 

 
61 Conrad von Hotzendorf, Aus Meiner Dienstzeit, 1.503, 560, (Memorandum dated 19 February 1908), in Kelly 
McFall, “Ethnicity as a Problem for Grand Strategy: Conrrad von Hoetzendorf, Nationalism, and the Habsburg 
Imperial Army at War, 1914-1916” (PhD diss., The Ohio State University, 1998), 62-63.  
62 Rok Stergar, “National Indifference in the Heyday of Nationalist Mobilization? Ljubljana Military Veterans 
and the Language of Command,” Austrian History Yearbook 43 (2012): 52. 
63 Ilmari Kaihko, “Broadening the Perspective on Military Cohesions,” Armed Forces & Society 44, no. 4 (2018): 
572-573. 
64 Guy L. Siebold, “The Essence of Military Group Cohesion,” Armed Forces & Society 33, no. 2 (January 2007): 
287-288. 
65 Militar-stat. Jahrbuch, for 1910, 145, in Norman Stone, “Army and Society in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1900-
1914,” Past & Present 33 (April 1966): 99. 
66 Alexander Watson, “‘Managing an ‘Army of Peoples’: Identity, Command and Performance in the Habsburg 
Officer Corps, 1914-1918,” Contemporary European History 25, no. 2 (2016): 234. 
67 Istvan Deak, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848-1918 
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 99. 
68 Joseph Redlich, Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1929), 197; 
Miller, “Politics, the Nationality Problem, and the Habsburg Army, 1848-1914,” 82. 
69 Gunther Rothenberg, The Army of Francis Joseph (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1968), 19. 



 

 

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linguistic maze, of which the army had to consistently navigate, is an often cited reason for 
poor performance on the battlefield.70 At first the language issue was treated by military 
leaders as exclusively a matter of efficiency rather than a political problem; however this 
would later evolve to become a hotbed for nationalist grievances.71  
 
Here, the military apparatus deals with the first and major issue of having a polylinguistic 
army and that is the challenge of maintain effective communication. To protect the primary 
group cohesion and to combat the multilingual issues that threatened to break down 
communication and compromise the chain of command, the Habsburg military utilized a 
complicated language system, designating three linguistic levels. The Kommandosprahce 
(the language of command) was the basic vocabulary between troop units; Dienstsprache 
(the language of service) was the basic intercourse for the officers; and the 
Regimentssprache was the language spoken by the soldiers of the regiment.72 If at least 20 
percent of a regiment’s soldiers spoke a native non-German languages, then officers were 
obligated to speak it.73 This left the members of the army, especially those of higher rank, 
with the herculean challenge of mastering all three registers in order to deliver effective 
communication. In order to standardize communication and military cohesion and to 
promote the fusion of the multiple nationalities, German was to be used as the language of 
service and the language of command, with the exception of the Honvéd (Hungarian army), 
which used Hungarian as their language of service.74 For all other regiments in Habsburg 
forces, only around eighty major commands were given in German, such as “halt,” “at ease,” 
“left,” “right,” and “fire,” with the rest given in the Regimentssprache.75 Standardizing 
German as the universal language also had the added benefits of having effective 
correspondence with the civilian state bureaucracy. German, as the single administrative 
and command language, was perceived as a symbol of unity by the emperor and the army 
high command.76 As a commentator in 1862 described, the German language was “a 
powerful means of uniting the various elements,” insisting that they “are not a German 
army alone but the great Austrian Army.”77 
 
By 1914, only 142 regiments were considered to be monolingual, 162 regiments had two 
languages spoken by their rank and file, 24 were trilingual, and even a handful were 

 
70 John Anthony Dredger, “Offensive Spending: Tactics and Procurement in the Habsburg Military, 1866-
1918” (PhD diss., Kansas State University, 2013), xi. 
71 Scheer, “Habsburg Languages at War,” 64. 
72 Irina Marin, “K.u.K Generals of Romanian Nationality and Their Views on the Language Question,” Language 
Diversity in the Late Habsburg Empire, eds. Markian Prokopvych, Carl Bethke, and Tamara Scheer, vol. 9 of 
Central and Eastern Europe (Boston: Brill, 2020), 119. 
73 Reiber, “Nationalizing Imperial Armies,” 611. 
74William Harrison Ainsworth, “The Austrian Army,” The New Monthly Magazine 14, no. 414 (Jan 1853 – Dec. 
1881): 128. Richard Bassett, For God and Kaiser: The Imperial Austrian Army, 1616-1918 (London: Yale 
University Press, 2015), 367. 
75 Deak, Beyond Nationalism, 99. 
76 Rok Stergar, “The Evolutions of Linguistic Policies and Practices of the Austro-Hungarian Armed Forces in 
the Era of Ethnic: Nationalisms: The Case of Ljubljana-Laibach,” Language Diversity in the Late Habsburg 
Empire, eds. Markian Prokopvych, Carl Bethke, and Tamara Scheer, vol. 9 of Central and Eastern Europe 
(Boston: Brill, 2020), 60. 
77 D. N., “Über die Truppensprache unserer Armee,” Neue Militärische Zeitschrift 3, no. 2 (1862): 366-368. 



 

 

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complex quadrilingual regiments.78 As a consequence, more than 90 percent of the officers 
were obligated to communicate in one other language than German.79 Regarding the 
language of service and the regimental language, an officer would shout his first order in 
German and then repeat it in one, two, or three other languages.80 The army mandated its 
officer cadets to become bilingual in order to maintain unit cohesion.81 Military handbooks 
published the “minority” languages, such as Czech, Croatian, Polish, and Slovak, were 
delivered so that officers were able to more effectively communicate with their troops.82 
For the Qualifikations-Listen (qualifications list), officers had to demonstrate familiarity 
with the regimental language, or languages, adequate for the needs of service before a 
commission, before a committee which met within three years after an officer’s entry into 
his unit.83 If the officer failed, he would be given a second chance a couple years later, upon 
which if he failed again, his promotion would be set back. Typically, after their second 
failed attempt, officers would either try to obtain a transfer to another regiment that spoke 
their language or resign from their commission.84 Despite the numerous obstacles to 
communication that confronted the Habsburg army, the willingness of the participants and 
the devotion of military schools to the study of languages yielded moderate results.85 The 
table   below, which displays the percentages of officers’ familiarity with another language 
besides German, shows that Czech, Hungarian, Polish, and Serbo-Croatian remained the 
dominant minority languages. 
 

1870 1904 
Language 
Italian 
Czech 
Hungarian 
Polish 
Serbo-Croatian 
Romanian 
Ruthene 
Slovene 
Slovak 

Percentage 
32.76 
30.18 
19.77 
17.62 
17.36* 
8.95 
5.14 
5.11 
-* 

Language 
Italian  
Czech 
Hungarian 
Polish 
Serbo-Croatian 
Romanian  
Ruthene 
Slovene 
Slovak  

Percentage 
8.5 
47.0 
33.6 
19.3 
15.3 
8.8 
7.8 
7.3 
6.9 

 
78 Michael Wolf, The Habsburg Monarchy’s Many-Languaged Soul: Translating and Interpreting, 1848-1918, 
trans. Kate Sturge (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2015), 60. 
79 Deak, Beyond Nationalism, 99. 
80 Wolf, The Habsburg Monarchy’s Many-Languaged Soul, 60. 
81 Istvan Deak, “The Ethnic Question in the Multinational Habsburg Army, 1848-1918,” in Ethnic Armies: 
Polyethnic Armed Forces from the Time of the Habsburgs to the Age of the Superpowers, ed. N. F. Dreisziger 
(Ontario: Wilfried Laurier University Press, 1990), 24. 
82 Livia Kardum and Bruno Korea Gajski, “Languages as Political Issue: The Case of Language of command in 
the Austro-Hungarian Army,” Jezikoslovlje, 13, no. 2 (2012): 359. 
83 Deak, Beyond Nationalism, 99. 
84 Scott Warren Lackey, “General Friedrich Beck and the rise of the Austro-Hungarian general staff: Civil-
military relations and the making of a modern military state” (PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel 
Hill, 1991), 155. 
85 Lackey, “General Friedrich Beck and the rise of the Austro-Hungarian general staff,”102. 



 

 

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Table 1: Percentage of Officers Familiar with Languages besides German86 
*In 1870, Serbian and Croatian were still listed separately, on the other hand, Slovak was 
not yet a recognized national language. 
 
Despite these measures, some of the officers’ inability to grasp the languages of the soldiers 
who served under them threatened the ability to gain their confidence, an issue which 
reflected the Empire’s educational policies.87 Though bilingualism was encouraged and 
promoted among the various national languages, with the exception of military schools, 
these policies were not implemented among the civilian Austro-Germans and Hungarians 
whose secondary educational institutions stuck to an almost unilingual practice.88 The lack 
of bilingualism among the Austro-Germans weakened their political influence in the empire 
and proved disastrous for the military apparatus. Military cohesion could not be 
accomplished without clear and precise communication, which in a battlefield situation 
was vital in achieving war aims. 
 
Although the Monarchy and the military were the pillars that kept the Austrian Empire 
aloft, the 1848 Revolutions made them inseparable to the unity of the polity. On the verge 
of being overwhelmed by nationalist fervor, the Austrian military rescued the Empire from 
the brink of dissolution, leading one captain—and future Lieutenant Field Marshal—Hugo 
von Weckbecker to comment, “now we really say our bayonets are the firmest support of 
the throne, with our life blood we have cemented the monarchy,” a notion that the young 
Emperor Franz Joseph never forgot.89 In April of 1849, Franz Joseph publicly announced 
his intention to personally oversee the military affairs of the Monarchy, elevating the 
institution to greater heights.90 Since the tumultuous uprisings through the 1867 Ausgleich 
and up until his death in 1916, Franz Joseph chose to elevate the military and the army in 
order to represent unity of the Empire to the exclusion of nationalist sentiments. The 
Emperor constantly displayed the visage of a martial leader, bringing military advisors into 
his inner circle, insisting on military inspired ceremonies, and adhering to a militaristic 
discipline in his public life.91 In this regard, the Emperor went as far as evaluating his inner 
entourage on the basis of their “soldierliness” qualities.92 Rarely was he seen out of military 
uniform, even after the turn of the century; according to Miklos Horthy, who had served as 
his aide-de-camp, the Emperor still prided himself in, “a General’s uniform.”93 The success 
to Franz Joseph’s efforts to elevate the prestige of the army was made evident by the 

 
86 Militar-Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Jahr 1870, Part 1 (Vienna, 1872), 222. Militar-Statistisches Jahrbuch für 
das Jahr 1904 (Vienna, 1905), 145. 
87 Scheer, “Habsburg Languages at War,” 72. 
88 Peiter H. van der Plank, “Effects of Habsburg educational policies measured by census statistics,” 
Jezikoslovlje 13, no. 2 (2012): 373. 
89 Quoted in Anatol Mura, Franz Joseph I of Austria and His Empire (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1968), 66. 
Gunther E. Rothenberg, “Toward a National Hungarian Army: The Military Compromise of 1868 and Its 
Consequences,” Slavic Review 31, no. 4 (December 1972): 806. 
90 Lackey, “General Friedrich Beck and the rise of the Austro-Hungarian general staff,” 31. 
91 Daniel Unowsky, “Stating Habsburg Patriotism: Dynastic Loyalty and the 1898 Imperial Jubilee,” in 
Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe, eds. Pieter M. Judson and Marsha L. Rosenblit (Oxford: 
Berghahn Books, 2009), 147. 
92 Anatol Mura, Franz Joseph I of Austria and His Empire (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1968), 64. 
93 Admiral Miklos Horthy, Regent of Hungary, Memoirs (Westport: Greenwood Press Publishers, 1979), 44. 



 

 

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observers at the time. The Austrian writer Otto Friedlander described the social status and 
prestige of the Austrian military in 1900 as such: “the military is the first estate in the state. 
It takes precedence at all parades and festivities. The youngest lieutenant goes ahead of the 
highest civil servant.”94 Austrian society absorbed the military culture and integrated it 
within its daily life. It is a testament to how much importance was placed upon the Austro-
Hungarian military by the Habsburg government that the German ambassador in 1913 
made the following critical observation: “I believe it [the army] to be thoroughly healthy—
at the moment it is the only healthy element in the monarchy.”95 
 
The Emperor’s love of the military, shown through his public visage and the parades, was 
an expression of the Monarchy’s reliance on the army for its continual existence. Franz 
Joseph owed his reign to the army, saving it from the brink of collapse in 1848 and 
continuing to safeguard him and his throne to his dying day. After the Revolutions, while 
other armies were primarily charged with the defense of a state against external threats, 
the primary role of the army of Austria was to maintain the delicate internal security of the 
empire. The Austrian army had to serve the dual purpose of integrating the various 
nationalities and ethnicities, unifying them under one proverbial banner, and remain 
militarily efficient. To achieve this aim, Franz Joseph made every attempt to ensure that the 
army’s loyalty was to no nation, no state, no single ethnicity, but to the Emperor. According 
to the final terms of the Ausgleich, “Matters pertaining to the command, command-system, 
and internal organization of the Common Army form exclusive rights of His Majesty.”96 
This, in short, cemented the importance that the army should remain above nationalism, a 
notion that both competing halves of the Empire recognized as essential to their mutual 
safety.97 The Monarchy existed above any national, ethnic, or familial allegiances, so too 
must the army. This sentiment can be seen repeated in Franz Joseph’s army order issued on 
September 16, 1903 following the divisive debates over the Army Bill of 1902:  
 

my Army, whose stout bonds of union are threatened by one-sided aspirations 
proceeding from misapprehension of the exalted mission the army has to fulfil for 
the weal of both states of the monarchy. Joint and unitary as it shall my army 
remain, the strong power to defend the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy against every 
foe. True to its oath, my whole Defensive Force will continue to tread the path of 
earnest fulfilment of duty, permeated by that spirt of union and harmony which 
respects every national characteristic and solve all antagonisms by utilizing the 
special qualities of each race for the welfare of the great whole.98  

 

 
94 O. Friedlander, Letzter Glanz der Marchenstadt. Wien um 1900 (1948; repr. Vienna: Moden, 2002), 77. 
95 Die Grosse Politik der Europasichen Kabinette 187101914, xxxvm nr. 13370. 
96 Austrian Law 21 December 1867, Art V, cited in Lohr Eugene Miller, “Politics, the nationality Problem, and 
the Habsburg Army, 1848-1914 (Volumes I and II)” (PhD diss., Louisiana State University, 1992), 115. 
97 Norman Stone, “Army and Society in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1900-1914,” Past & Present 33 (April 1966): 
97. 
98 Quoted in Henry Wickham Steed, The Habsburg Monarchy (London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1919), 
66-67.  



 

 

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Franz Joseph had always regarded the armed forces as his personal possession.99 This can 
be found distinctly in his speeches, constantly referring to the army not as the Austro-
Hungarian army or the Imperial Royal Soldiers, but as “my Army” or “my soldiers,” as seen 
in his order. This opinion was shared by other leading figures in the Austrian Empire. Franz 
Joseph’s nephew and heir, Franz Ferdinand, saw an army that is trustworthy and loyal only 
to the Emperor and blind to nationality as a basic necessity of the Empire.100 Archduke 
Albrecht, the chief military advisor to Franz Joseph, shared similar views, proclaiming after 
the Ausgleich: “one oath alone is binding to us all.”101 The common army must remain the 
bastion of imperial loyalty, its officer corps, and rank and file remaining staunch in the 
Emperor’s favor. 
 
World War and Dissolution 
 

In no other country is unity, uniformity, and dynastic soldierly spirit as all 
important…because only the dynasty and the army can hold this monarchy together. 

—Archduke Albrecht102 
 
It was clear throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the language 
issue was not the only threat to military cohesion and, therefore by extension, the 
Habsburg Monarchy. The nationalist problem was an ever-constant headache that plagued 
Emperor Franz Joseph and the army command, from the very start of his reign to his dying 
days. The Emperor took great effort to mitigate any fracturing element that emerged, but 
even some of the measures he took to unify his multiethnic subjects ultimately doomed 
him. As John Breuilly postulates, nationalism is a form of politics that arises out of strained 
relationships with the modern state.103 In the case of the Austrian Empire, the state was 
German in character and German in communication. As a demographic, the ethnic 
Germans, much like their position in the monarchy, was perceived by others to enjoy a 
position of privilege. In the army, Germans only consisted of around 25 percent of the rank 
and file but made up the majority (70 percent) of the officer corps, and they enjoyed the 
advantage of having their language as the Dientsprache, the Kommandosprache, and the 
universalsprache meines Rieches.104 All other ethnic groups were underrepresented in the 
military hierarchy, especially the minor ethnic groups, like the Slovaks, Ruthenes, and 
Romanians, who collectively consisted of 18.2 percent of the common army but made up 
only 1.1 percent of the officer corps.105 Of all the ethnic groups under the Habsburg 
dynasty, it was only the Germans who had always identified with the entire state and thus 

 
99 Valdis Baidins, “Franz Joseph, Kaisertreue and Loyalty in the Late Habsburg Empire” (PhD diss., University 
of Washington, 1999), 63. 
100 Leopold von Chlumecky, Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand Wirken und Wollen (Berlin: Verlag für Kulturpolitik, 
1929), 359. 
101 Stone, “Army and Society in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1900-1914,” 97. 
102 Rothenberg, “Toward a National Hungarian Army,” 806. 
103 John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 366. 
104 Militar-Statistiches Jahrbuch fur das Jahr 1911 (Vienna, 1912), 146-147, 196-197. 
105 Jason Lyall, Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War (Boston: Princeton 
University Press, 2020), 264-265. 



 

 

176 
 

were the only ones who never called for “national liberation.”106 The same could not be 
said for the other prevalent national movements, and the resulting friction led to an overall 
ethnic mistrust and the suspect of loyalties. 
 
The effectiveness of the Habsburg army historically had been often regarded by military 
experts as below the standard of their contemporaries.107 Some commentators at the time 
found praise-worthy elements of the Austrian army. For instance, George Brinton 
McClellan, a United States officer who was attached to the Austrian army as a military 
observer in the 1850s, commented that the Austrian system of executing written tactics 
and adapting them to the battle-ground situation, which required effective and quick 
communication, was worthy of study and “to, some extent, of imitation.”108 While some 
commended the Austro-Hungarian army command for the “military miracle” of having an 
efficient organization in contention with the maze of multiple languages, the language 
problem proved to be a multilayered pragmatic disaster for battlefield conditions and army 
operations via nationalist grievances, especially in the lead up and duration of the First 
World War.109 As Posen has confidently asserted, the army “was nearly the least successful 
army of the first World War” in stark comparison to the more homogenous armies found 
on either side of the conflict.110  
 
During the later stages of Franz Joseph’s reign, nationalist grievances had swelled to the 
point that the Armeoberkommando (Army High Command, AOK) did not even trust a great 
portion of their own army. In 1906, General Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf had warned of 
“corrosive nationalist elements” threatening the cohesion of the Austro-Hungarian military 
in certain potential theaters of war.111 As one British journalist noted at the time, this was 
due to the fact that “[t]here is not one potential enemy of Austria today, whether it be 
Russia, or Italy, or the Allied Balkan states, that would command the sympathy and active 
support of some section of this enormous polyglot host.”112 This distrust eventually bled 
into the officer corps creating a hotbed of contention, leading to the breakdown of the 
army’s policy of national indifference. The German language, as the official language of 
command and service, was seen as the language of authority and, by extension, the 
language of the Monarchy. Officers equated German with Austrian patriotism, and as 
nationalist tensions became more transparent, the officer corps began to see the use of 
other languages as an indisputable sign of disloyalty, such as equating Slovene with 
Russophilia and favoring German-speaking soldiers over other ethnic groups.113 Frank 
Prosek, a Czech soldier of the Imperial and Royal Army, wrote, “As a Czech, I am subject to 

 
106 Fritz Fellner, “Introduction: The Genesis of the Austrian Republic,” in Modern Austria, ed. Kurt Steiner 
(Palo Alto: The Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship Inc., 1981), 1-2. 
107 “The Efficient Army of Austria,” The Washington Post, Sep 3, 1915, 6. 
108 Maj. Gen. George Brinton McClellan, The Armies of Europe: Comprising Descriptions in Detail of the Military 
Systems of England, France, Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Sardinia (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1861), 64. 
109 Henry Wickham Steed, The Habsburg Monarchy (London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1919), 65. 
110 Posen, “Nationalism, the Mass Army, and Military Power,” 139. 
111 Lyall, Divided Armies, 290. 
112 O.T.C., “The Austrian Army,” The Westminster Review, Jan. 1852-Jan. 1914, no. 2 (February 1, 1913), 124. 
113 Stergar, “The Evolution of Linguistic Policies and Practices of the Austro-Hungarian Armed Forces in the 
Era of Ethnic Nationalisms,” 69. 



 

 

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discrimination and ill treatment. Promotions only go to Austrians. What chance did I have 
in this army; my race damns me in the eyes of my superiors.”114 The most significant blow 
to the army’s ideology was the formation of the National Guards, Honvéd and Landwehr, 
following the 1867 Ausgleich, which ironically was viewed as a solution to placate national 
grievances.115 The fall out of the Ausgleich, as perceived by some officers, would lead to 
other nationalities seeking connections with foreign Slavic powers, sowing more seeds of 
distrust and disunity.116 
 
In the years before 1914, those loyal to the Monarchy came increasingly to feel that the 
political instability could be cured only through foreign policy rather than internal 
reform.117 The nationality problem had become too complex, with every attempt to 
mitigate the issue resulting in the creation of more tears in the delicate fabric which held 
the army together. While other European statesmen believed that civil war in Austria-
Hungary would inevitably set off a greater conflict in the continent, officials in Vienna 
believed that a great conflict in Europe was their only alternative to civil war, preventing 
the “internal fighting which would inevitably result in the disintegration of the polyglot 
Monarchy.”118 A simple solution to a complex problem. However, the subversive and 
continuous undercurrent of mistrust damaged the army in more ways than one. The 
systematic suspicion of ethnic minorities crippled Habsburg training. Wary over the 
reliability of their own soldiers, the AOK curtailed prewar training drastically.119 Naturally, 
an army that had no trust in half its own soldiers had little interest in training them to use 
initiative or utilize independence.120  
 
Certain ethnic groups—notably the Czechs, Ruthenians, Serbs, Romanians, and Poles— 
were singled out and restrictions were placed on their military service and training.121 The 
watered-down training that did take place was more focused on instilling obedience and 
creating loyal citizen and less on actual combat training. “Don’t bother teaching them to 
fight,” instructed one Habsburg general, “they learn that in battle; teach them to obey.”122 
The resulting defective training produced unskilled soldiers and vastly depreciated the 
army’s ability to wage effective warfare. The dilemma faced by the AOK was a paradoxical 
one: to solve the problem of internal threat, an external threat is necessary; however, the 
army could not hope to succeed without resolving their internal situation, and preparing 

 
114 Cited in Kevin McNamara, Dreams of a Small Great Nation: The Mutinous Army that Threatened a 
Revolution, Destroyed an Empire, founded a Republic, and Remade the Map of Europe (New York: Public Affairs, 
2016), 52. 
115 Deak, “The Ethnic Question in the Multinational Habsburg Army, 1848-1918,” 45-46. 
116 John Anthony Dredger, “Offensive Spending: Tactics and Procurement in the Habsburg Military, 1866-
1918” (PhD diss., Kansas State University, 2013), 68. 
117 Norman Stone, “Hungary and the Crisis of July 1914,” Journal of Contemporary History 1, no.3 (July 1966): 
153. 
118 Stone, “Hungary and the Crisis of July 1914,” 153. Lyall, Divided Armies, 289-290. 
119 Lyall, Divided Armies, 292. 
120 Norman Stone, The Eastern Front: 1914-1917 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), 308. 
121 Lyall, Divided Armies, 299. 
122 Geoffrey Wawaro, A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg 
Empire (New York: Penguin, 2014), 354. 



 

 

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for a foreign war was useless.123 So concerned was the AOK with resolving the monarchy’s 
internal problem, that it even retained detailed plans to invade Hungary in an effort to 
reunify the Dual Monarchy, as late as 1914.124 As the Minister-President of Austria, Kasimir 
Badeni, commented: “A country of nationalities cannot wage war without danger to 
itself.”125  
 
Concerns over the reliability of national minorities were intimately bound in the tactics of 
the AOK during the First World War, coupled with the varying qualities of training and the 
apparent misgivings of certain groups. The AOK believed that at least one quarter of its 
army that went to war in 1914 were politically unwilling to “do their duty to the 
emperor.”126 The Dual Monarchy’s army was a haphazard institution yielding mixed 
battlefield results. Due to the crippled training program, many Habsburg soldiers could 
barely fire their weapons, let alone follow instructions to execute complex maneuvers.127 
As the war went on, second-rate training also led to an epidemic of indiscipline, especially 
among the groups that were the targets of official suspicion. In general, only the German, 
Hungarian, and Bosnian regiments could be reliably committed to combat on all fronts, and 
the effectiveness of the other nationalities varied greatly.128 Mass desertion was common 
among the Ruthenian-, Serb-, and Czech-dominated regiments, beginning as early as August 
1914.129 The Austro-Hungarian army suffered particular high rates of desertion during the 
war, forcing the AOK to create a number of ad hoc measures including summary executions 
for even encouraging desertion.130 So strained had interethnic relations gotten that during 
the First World War, regiments where officers did not speak the regimental language(s) 
became fertile grounds for indiscipline and mutinous behavior. Even an officer 
mispronouncing a soldier’s name was enough to generate grievances.131 By the end of the 
war, nearly 125,000 soldiers—consisting of Czechs, Poles, Serbs, Ruthenians, and 
Romanians—defected and took up arms against the Habsburgs.132 The First World War 
proved to be not only a physically devastating conflict but an existential battle for the 
Habsburg army. In a strictly practical sense, the language issue was a proverbial 
administrative nightmare and pragmatically awkward in battle, but it was not the undoing 
of the army. Interestingly, almost no officer after the war pointed to the language issues as 
being responsible for the Empire losing the war or even any particular operations on the 

 
123 Gunther E. Rothenberg, “The Habsburg Army in the First World: 1914-1918,” in The Habsburg Empire in 
World War I: Essays on Intellectual, Military, Political and Economic Aspects of the Habsburg War Effort, eds. 
Robert A. Kann, Bela K. Kirlay, and Paula S. Fichtner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 75. 
124 Cathal Nolan, The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost (Oxford: Oxford 
University Press, 2017), 333. 
125 Lyall, Divided Armies, 253. 
126 Mark Cornwall, The Undermining of Austria-Hungary: The Battle for Hearts and Minds (London: Macmillan 
Press, 2000), 31. 
127 Lyall, Divided Armies, 292. 
128 Rothenberg, “The Habsburg Army in the First World War,” 75. 
129 Lyall, Divided Armies, 300. 
130 Hieke Nibergarll-Lackner, Status and Treatment of Deserters in International Armed Conflicts (Boston: Brill, 
2016), 24-25. 
131 Lyall, Divided Armies, 301. 
132 Lyall, Divided Armies, 302. 



 

 

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front.133 Ideologically however, it was an entirely different matter. The grievances of the 
polyethnic empire and the ambitions of the nationalist movements proved too great a task 
for the army to handle, leading to a crippled military going into one of the most devastating 
conflicts in history. The results of which were not surprising. 
 
Though showing, at best, mixed results in actual combat, the Habsburg army was an 
important symbol of diverse unity and was essential to the creation of dynastic loyalty. 
With nationalism an ever-present danger to that unity, the monarch alone held the 
potential to unite the army as a symbol of unity. In the case of Franz Joseph, that 
relationship was symbiotic. Although the army could not prevent the ultimate demise of 
the Monarchy, the collapse would have come a lot sooner if not for the intervention of the 
loyal Habsburg forces during the 1848 Revolutions. Franz Joseph had the army to credit for 
the longevity of his reign and recognized its significance in keeping him on the throne, as 
well as its role in maintaining the strained bonds of the interethnic groups. After the 
Revolutions, Franz Joseph, issued the maxim Virbus Unitis, “With United Forces,” as the 
official motto of a renovated Austrian army and as his personal mantra, bringing to 
attention the army’s policy of ethnic unity.134 The Emperor furthermore took painstaking 
measures to connect himself to the official army visage as much as possible, considering 
himself “first soldier of the Empire.”135 He and the army, much like the throne and the 
army, would be inseparable entities. If the Emperor counted himself part of the armed 
forces, referring to the army as “his army,” what did the army think of Franz Joseph? It 
would appear the relationship was mutual, as the newspaper, the Pester Lloyd, stated, 
“Franz Joseph is not only the leader of the Army in Law, but also in fact. He is popular with 
the Army because he is always in uniform, and many regard him as the oldest soldier.”136 
The phrases dynastische loyalität (dynastic loyalty) and Schwarz-Gelb Patriotismus (black-
and-yellow patriotism, referring to the royal colors of the old Imperial flag) were also 
widely used in expressing feelings of the armed forces.137 The phrases are indicative of the 
strong ties between the military and the dynasty without referring to any state patriotism, 
only stressing the loyalty to the dynasty and its symbols. As the nineteenth century 
progressed, however, the lexicographic revolution created a fierce conviction in Europe 
that languages were the personal property of specific groups, and a particular language 
was the nucleus to which a nationalist movement formed their group and communities 
around.138 The dominance of German in the Habsburg Monarchy, especially in the army, 
alienated certain groups, and particular questions over the simple means of 
communication became hotly contested ideological battle grounds. Despite all the 
measures to which Franz Joseph and the Austrian military command took to combat 
nationalist tendencies, the language issue remained unresolved. 

 
133 Scheer, “Habsburg Languages at War,” 75. 
134 Ainsworth, “The Austrian Army,” 138. 
135 Laurence Cole, “Military Veterans and Popular Patriotism in Imperial Austria, 1870-1914,” in The Limits of 
Loyalty: Imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegiances, and State Patriotism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy, eds. 
Laurence Cole and Daniel L. Unowsky (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 37. 
136 Pester Lloyd, 31 May 1908, 3. 
137 Baidins, “Franz Joseph, Kaisertreue and Loyalty in the Late Habsburg Empire,” 71. 
138 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 84. 


