Dissolution of Austria-Hungary
The dissolution of Austria-Hungary unfolded in the final weeks of the war with extraordinary speed. In October 1918, as the military fronts collapsed, the empire's component nationalities simply ceased to act as Austrian or Hungarian subjects. On 28 October Czechoslovakia declared independence in Prague; on 29 October the State of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs proclaimed itself in Zagreb; on 31 October Hungary severed its link to Austria and formed its own government under Mihaly Karolyi. German-Austria declared a republic on 12 November 1918, the day after Emperor Charles I renounced participation in government — unable or unwilling to abdicate, he dissolved himself from the state. The succession states that emerged — Czechoslovakia, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia), the Austrian and Hungarian republics, and the territories transferred to Romania (Transylvania), Poland (Galicia), and Italy (South Tyrol, Trieste) — divided the empire's 51 million people among seven successor states and the enlarged Romania. The 1919-20 peace settlements at Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Trianon confirmed the territorial partition, with Hungary suffering the most extreme reduction — from a kingdom of 21 million to a rump state of 7 million. The dissolution ended 400 years of Habsburg rule and redrew the map of Central Europe, but the succession states inherited many of the same minority nationality contradictions that had made the empire ungovernable, without the imperial structure that had previously contained them.
- Year: 1918 CE
- Category: Political
