The First World War lasted for more than four years, becoming the first worldwide battle in human history to choose sides and take sides, and the final result was a river of blood and devastation. The Allies, led by the German-Austrian clique, were defeated and had to accept the wanton slaughter of the Allies dominated by Britain, France, and the United States. Among them, Germany's destructiveness and harsh treatment are recognized, but the collapse of the dying Austro-Hungarian Empire, which seems inevitable, is actually a failure of great power politics, creating a source of turmoil for Europe in the future.
Compared with Germany, which was only half a century after the completion of unification, the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is very long, and the Habsburg Dynasty wore the Crown of the Holy Roman Empire to dominate Germany for a thousand years, becoming one of the important powers in Europe. In this process, the eastern and western European powers France and Russia competed for supremacy, the same As the German nation of Prussia rose, and the maritime power Britain was contained, competing for central and southern Europe as the main battlefield to compete for resources. And this area is home to a large number of small ethnic states and ethnic tribes such as Germany, Slavic, and Muslims, whose strength is very weak, and their surnames are Zhang San today and Li Si tomorrow, becoming victims of great power competition. If Austria had not picked up the old mountains and rivers under the aura of the Holy Roman Empire, united the Little Brothers of Germany in the north, suppressed the eastward expansion of France, resisted the westward advance of Tsarist Russia, interrupted the Ottoman invasion of Central Europe, and brought a group of minorities under its rule, then the course of European history would not have been what was seen later. Thus, the existence of the Austrian Empire was seen as "a necessity for Europe". Especially after the overthrow of Napoleon I, Austria became a "stabilizer" for the European powers to balance each other.
Fundamentally, Austria ruled over a large number of minorities in Central and Southern Europe, and the Proportion of German power represented by the Habsburgs was very small, so the natural centrifugal force within the empire was relatively large, and consolidating vested interests became the primary need of rule, and could not expand everywhere like France, Russia, Prussia and other countries with dominant national power. In particular, the Napoleonic Wars inspired European nationalism, Austria lost the Crown of the Holy Roman Empire, and it became increasingly difficult to maintain its original rule, neither willing nor able to dominate German unification, and had to sit back and watch Prussia come to the fore. After the defeat of the Austro-Prussian War, Austria completely withdrew from German affairs, and in order to retain the remaining imperial territory, it had to form a coalition with Hungary to form the Austro-Hungarian Dual Empire. By this time, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was in the twilight of a thousand years, with the appearance of a great power, and could only rely on the support of Germany to integrate internally, barely maintaining a huge shelf. It was also for these reasons that austria-Hungary tightened its grip on the southern Slavic region of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which instead provoked the anger of the Serbs who dreamed of the reunification of Yugoslavia, which led to the murder in Sarajevo and became the trigger of the First World War.
In this great war, the weak nature of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was exposed, its weaker economy was on the verge of bankruptcy, the army speaking more than a dozen national languages was alienated from Germany, and the individual combat was often beaten to the nose and swollen, and later had to put the army under the leadership of the Germans, in fact the Austro-Hungarian Empire had become a vassal of Germany. It was precisely because Britain and France saw the current situation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and believed that it had lost its role as a European "stabilizer" and that its continued existence would only benefit the expansion of German power, so it decided to slaughter the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the war. The emerging power of the United States was during the reign of President Wilson, with a strong idealism, throwing out the post-war "fourteen-point peace program", which explicitly supported national self-determination, which in turn laid a legal foundation for the independent consciousness of the minorities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
So the rest of the matter is logical. Military defeat led to the end of Habsburg rule, with Germans, Hungarians, and Slavs within the empire demanding independence, and the entire state collapsing. After the war, the Allies dominated the Paris Peace Conference, signed the Treaty of Saint-Germain, established new Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and other countries on the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and some territories were assigned to Italy, Poland, Romania and other countries, and stipulated that Austria could not merge with Germany. After the operation of the Theosophical Theosophical Theory, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a Central European power with an area of 670,000 square kilometers and a population of 52.8 million, was destroyed, and its core force, Austria, was reduced to a small single ethnic country with an area of more than 80,000 square kilometers and a population of 6.5 million, and its international status plummeted.
Looking back at history, if the Byzantine Empire and the Austrian Empire had not guarded the gateway to Europe for thousands of years and blocked the invasion of external forces, I am afraid that Central and Western Europe would have long become a paradise for barbarians in Eastern Europe and West Asia, and it would have been possible for the Ottoman Empire to fight all the way to the English Channel. Later facts proved that a group of small countries that had stood up on the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had intricate historical grievances and contradictions with each other, and were unable to contain the aggressive expansion of Germany and the Soviet Union at all, but they themselves needed the protection of great powers such as Britain and France, which increased the burdens and obligations of Britain and France. As a result, a new fuse of war was created, and the great powers were deeply involved and forced to unveil the curtain of a new world war.
After World War II, this negative effect persisted, such as the national vendetta after the collapse of Yugoslavia and the scramble between NATO and Russia for the remnants of Europe. From this point of view, the existence of an international military organization dominated by a major country such as NATO is necessary and crucial to the peace and stability of Europe. Otherwise, as has happened in recent years, Russia has repeatedly invaded Ukraine, with the weakness of Ukraine, if there is no NATO to check, what will be the consequences, can Emperor Pu the great press press the impulse to withdraw hundreds of thousands of troops from the border of East Ukraine?
Author WeChat public account: Shen Tingxue's historical anthology
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