Austro-Hungarian civil war

BlondieBC

Banned
1900-1913, total emigration from hungary: about 1,5 million. I have no idea the ratio of nationalities in this number.
Still, the number is great... yes, the common people voted with his feet.

Galacia was the highest proportion of population loss, mostly since it was poor and the less favored minorities. In Hungary proper, there were lots of little measures to encourage non-Hungarian immigration and to encourage Hungarians to stay. And it was slowly working. While crude, the Magyarization programs were having success, and given another century or two, you could have a clearly dominant Hungarian super majority in Hungary. Much like France slowly became more French and less Basque/Brenton/etc, Hungary was doing he same process.

Another good examples of less favored minorities leaving is Cedars Rapids Iowa is the second largest Czech city in the world.
 
Both Galizia and Bohemia were parts of the Empire of Austria (Cislethania), not the Kingdom of Hungary.

700 000 of 1 500 000 that left the Kingdom of Hungary were Hungarian-speaking ethnic Hungarians.

In the 1910 census, 10 050 557 people in the Kingdom of Hungary listed Hungarian as their primary language, of a total population of 20 886 487, or 48,1%.

46,7% of the emigration was Hungarian-speaking.

The difference is so small that it is obvious that the regular Hungarian tought his future as bleak in the Kingdom of Hungary as did Croats, Slovaks, Serbs and Romanians.
 
Galacia was the highest proportion of population loss, mostly since it was poor and the less favored minorities. In Hungary proper, there were lots of little measures to encourage non-Hungarian immigration and to encourage Hungarians to stay. And it was slowly working. While crude, the Magyarization programs were having success, and given another century or two, you could have a clearly dominant Hungarian super majority in Hungary. Much like France slowly became more French and less Basque/Brenton/etc, Hungary was doing he same process.

Another good examples of less favored minorities leaving is Cedars Rapids Iowa is the second largest Czech city in the world.

Galicia was not part of the Kingdom of Hungary, the habsburgs favored polonization there (okay, its not entirely true, because the dinasty did not liked any kind of natinalism, it was mostly a religion thing, favoring chatolicism. Something along the lines wih the ruthenes with the greek catholic church...)

If there would be a clear Magyarization program, from 67, by 1914 the clear majority of the Kingdom of Hungary (minus Croatia) would have been considered himself as hungarian. There were no such program, strings of individual efforts, sometimes even from ill-interpreted and misguided goodwill (the worst of its kind).
But i still think, that even that did not mattered - the ruling upper class was the biggest problem, along with the immense amount of poverty.
 
Why will the war start, and what do the cesessionists hope to achieve?
"Yay, we broke free from improving economy and moderate Hapsburg yoke - now we can be landlocked state in the middle of German-controlled Mitteleuropa and that will certainly work out like a charm!"

Aside from a socialist revolution of some type, I just don't see this even remotely plausible scenario.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Galicia was not part of the Kingdom of Hungary, the habsburgs favored polonization there (okay, its not entirely true, because the dinasty did not liked any kind of natinalism, it was mostly a religion thing, favoring chatolicism. Something along the lines wih the ruthenes with the greek catholic church...)

If there would be a clear Magyarization program, from 67, by 1914 the clear majority of the Kingdom of Hungary (minus Croatia) would have been considered himself as hungarian. There were no such program, strings of individual efforts, sometimes even from ill-interpreted and misguided goodwill (the worst of its kind).
But i still think, that even that did not mattered - the ruling upper class was the biggest problem, along with the immense amount of poverty.

Ok, you want the Kingdom of Hungary only. There was a clear Magyarization over the time period you want (1867-1914), but it was weak. We see some clear recruitment of non-Hungarians to Hungarians. A bit of a stereotype but illustrating, a rural extended family of Romanians moves to an urban area around 1970. Two generations later, 2 of your 8 grandchildren view themselves as Hungarians, or at least use Hungarians as their first language. The Hungarians also did it through the visa to leave process. There were a lot more small barriers to leaving the country.

Some readings I have seen indicate that the outreach efforts towards Jews in Hungary had gotten many of them of to view themselves as Hungarians first for nationality, who was also in the Jewish community. Avoid the horrors of WW1, and these people probably largely support the Hungarian status quo in civil war, at least as much as non-noble Hungarian.


Now it has been a year since I looked at the numbers and this is from memory. If highly important, you can look up the details, but it generally went like this one.

In 1867, the Hungarians were 46% percent of the population. They were more urban so had lower birth rate, so if nothing else changes we would expect to see about 42% Hungarian. But we see 50-52%. So it was success from some perspective. The Hungarians were well on their way to achieving a durable majority, if given a few more generations. They were gaining up to 10% growth rate on base. Now from another perspective, they were failing. It was taking generations to reach a clear supermajority. It made the minorities mad, which in many ways would give the Germans Austrians a way to suppress the Hungarian nobility. (Not clear to me the average Hungarian actually cared that much about extra autonomy to some Romanian village in the mountains.) And it was so slow, there is a big risk over another few generations, the Hungarians would need to lose some land or give up some autonomy to some minorities. A good example of the down side is that Croatian troops were tasked to taking the Hungarian capital in the civil war orders issue then recalled IOTL. The anger of the Croatians at Hungary made them more reliable troops in a civil war than Austrian Germans.


And this is where I think they were generally heading. Look at some of the proposals floating around. The final solution is probably within the bounds of what was proposed by various bodies.


- Triple Crown: Remove large number of Serbs.
- United States of Austria - Remove most minorities.
- Remove Germans in what is now Central Romania from Hungary to Austria, along with few other enclaves.


Or put another way. A defacto smaller area under Hungarian Magyrization. You get a area with clear super majority of Hungarians (over 2/3) with few to no large areas less than 50% Hungarians. The key on unity becomes not so much demographics since Germans will never be 50% of all of A-H, but can the Austrians make it appear better to be "Hapsburgish" and for Hungary to live in the A-H system than Hungary be a client state of the Tsar. I lean towards A-H surviving, but having some very awkward compromise absent WW1 or another Great War.



Note: The census and estimates are biased and have a human thumb on them, you can see the underlying pattern. Also, don't get too worked up on individual numbers. The underlying trends are what was happening. When you dive into details of estimates in Austria and Hungary and Poland, we see everyone of the day had an agenda.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Why will the war start, and what do the cesessionists hope to achieve?
"Yay, we broke free from improving economy and moderate Hapsburg yoke - now we can be landlocked state in the middle of German-controlled Mitteleuropa and that will certainly work out like a charm!"

Aside from a socialist revolution of some type, I just don't see this even remotely plausible scenario.

It wasn't the Hungarians, it was the 3.9% who could vote, or under 2% of the empire. So it is a tough position to hold for the "two-percenters". When I did my TL, this is one of the two reasons I concluded the Empire could be save. The other was Germany wanted one ally, not two. So the Austrians have two ways to win. Make sure the new power structure gives enough to the Hungarian nobility that the new system looks clearly better than civil war. The second is to give power to the non-nobles. Either pure way works. In my TL, I chose a compromise between the two because it was an uglier solution, and history often goes this way.

In many ways, the civil war threat served much the same purpose as the Fillibuster did for the old South that wanted to protect slavery. And for both groups in power (Southern Planters and Hungarian Nobles), they both went a little too far for their own best interests. The Hungarians had starved the artillery budget among other military budgets, but the eventually relented, 3 years too late. If the modernization started 3 years earlier, and WW1 starts out on time, the Russian army is murdered by light artillery in the open, and then if they are not stopped here, they bust themselves on the greatly improved set defenses. For the Hungarians, so close but so far away.

The Hungarians were using too low a military budget and the associated risk of fighting the Russians to try to gain a better renegotiation settlement with the Austrians.
 
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