The Ausgleich (Austro-Hungarian Compromise)
Austria and Hungary reorganised themselves into a dual monarchy in 1867, and the arrangement lasted fifty-one years. The compromise was made from weakness. Austria had lost the war with Piedmont and France in 1859 and the war with Prussia in 1866, had been excluded from Germany, and could not govern Hungary — where passive resistance had made the province ungovernable since 1849 and where taxes went uncollected. Franz Joseph, who had crushed the Hungarians with Russian help eighteen years earlier, negotiated with the men who had led them. The settlement created two states with one monarch. Hungary got its own parliament, government, courts and internal administration, and Franz Joseph was crowned King of Hungary in a separate ceremony; Austria kept the rest. Three ministries were common — foreign affairs, war, and the finance for those two — and the quota each half paid was renegotiated every ten years, which produced a political crisis every decade. Hungary also obtained a customs union and a share of the empire's diplomacy, and used it: Hungarian ministers had a veto in practice on foreign policy, which is one reason the empire's Balkan options were narrow in 1914. The internal cost was carried by everyone else. Hungary pursued Magyarisation of its schools and administration over a population that was half non-Hungarian; the Czechs, who were more numerous and more industrialised than the Hungarians, were refused an equivalent arrangement and never accepted it. The empire dissolved along exactly those lines in October 1918. The name in German is Ausgleich, meaning a settling of accounts, and in Hungarian kiegyezés, a reconciliation, which is a fair indication of how each side understood it. The empire's official designation afterwards used the letter k and k, imperial and royal, for anything the two halves shared.
- Year: 1867 CE
- Category: Political
