Consulates General. Honorary Consulates. Cultural Fora. Academic Centers. Open Austria - Silicon Valley. Advantage Austria. Meet the Consul. Facts and Figures. Austrian Innovation. A Taste of Austria. The Political System. Austrian EU Presidency Foreign Policy. Human Rights. Study in Austria. Vienna - Centre for International Dialogue. To these men and their allies in the aristocracy and parts of the bureaucracy the Foreign Ministry , undisciplined political squabbles in parliament encouraged social conflict and weakened popular loyalty to the state and dynasty.
They could not see that Austria-Hungary was perhaps stronger precisely because of the ongoing liberalization of politics it had experienced since the s.
Nothing illustrates this effort better than the secret emergency legislation the military high command managed to have passed during various war scares from to Anxieties around the Balkan Wars made it easier for the high command to persuade governments to pass legislation ensuring that in case of war, the military would replace civilian rule with its own administration.
This administration could in turn impose military justice and military discipline on both the general population and the civilian bureaucracies in Austria. It could suspend the power of elected institutions and the functioning of the normal judiciary, and this is exactly what happened in the summer of In Austria, at least, the civilian government did not put up a fight. Not all of these measures applied to Hungary. There, the government jealously guarded its national prerogatives. Throughout the war both the Hungarian and Croatian parliaments remained open, while censorship was not as strict as in Austria.
Austria-Hungary began mobilizing for a single-front war on 28 July. Presuming that Russia would take much longer to mobilize its forces than Austria-Hungary, he sought to strike a decisive blow against Serbia before moving his forces to Galicia to meet the Russians.
By the end of July however, when it was obvious that Russia was mobilizing, a nervous Conrad shifted some units north to Galicia. Any numerical advantage over the Russians that the Austro-Hungarian forces might have gained through early mobilization was quickly lost. These were hardly the only mistakes of the first weeks of mobilization and combat. The hesitations and incompetent reversals meant that Austro-Hungarian forces arrived in Galicia too late, in far too small numbers, and at disadvantageous sites that required exhausting marches on foot for them to take up their positions.
Defeat was swift and massive. By 26 August the Austro-Hungarian forces in Galicia were in full retreat. On 11 September Conrad ordered a general retreat to the east of Cracow.
This first month of war in Galicia brought , military deaths, over , wounded, and , captured. A cholera epidemic, brutal massacres of usually Ukrainian civilians wrongly suspected of sedition, and the desperate flight of thousands of civilians westward made the situation even more chaotic. The Austro-Hungarian campaign against Serbia was equally unsuccessful although with fewer immediate consequences.
The Austro-Hungarians conducted their invasion in forbidding terrain with far fewer troops than planned for. As historian Alexander Watson argues, the challenges faced by the troops had in fact been anticipated in Habsburg war exercises a few months earlier, yet no changes had been made to the strategy.
The military did not advance very far into Serbia, but it wreaked cruel havoc on those civilians it encountered. Fearing the actions of legendary Komitadjie guerillas, and aware that not all Serb troops were in uniform, the Habsburg troops massacred thousands of civilians and burned villages preemptively.
Skillful Serb defenses soon countered the invasion, and by 25 August the Austro-Hungarians had fully retreated from Serbia. Later in an invasion that briefly held the city of Belgrade ended quickly with Austro-Hungarian forces in retreat for the winter.
At the end of Austria-Hungary faced a dire military situation. The early strategic decisions taken by the AOK contradicted military logic and exemplified a kind of wishful thinking—utterly unrelated to facts—in which Conrad and many of his colleagues repeatedly indulged in their planning.
In , with considerable German assistance, Austria-Hungary won back most of Galicia and prevented a Russian advance in Bukovina. Also in , Austria-Hungary managed to conquer and occupy Serbia , as two new allies had joined the Balkan front on the side of the Central Powers: Bulgaria 14 October and the Ottoman Empire 12 November In April , however, Italy also abandoned its erstwhile ally to join the war on the side of the Entente, thanks to promises of massive territorial aggrandizement at the expense of Austria-Hungary in the secret Treaty of London.
This raised the number of fronts on which the badly over-stretched Austro-Hungarian military fought to three. The Germans dispatched reinforcements to aid the faltering Habsburg forces, but were too late to stop an attack led by Conrad on Italy in Trentino , in June, which failed. In August, however, the Central Powers managed at least to halt an offensive against the Russians led by Aleksei Brusilov , to retake Galicia. On the Balkan front in , Austro-Hungarian forces preemptively occupied Albania.
In , however, Austria-Hungary won back most of the territory that had been lost to the Russians in Galicia and Bukovina. Its troops occupied large parts of Russian Poland, which Austria-Hungary administered from the city of Lublin. Austro-Hungarian and German forces broke through the Italian lines, advancing far into Italian territory. Some 10, Italians were killed and another 30, wounded, while some , men were taken prisoner. The victory created little cause for celebration, however, given deteriorating conditions on the home front.
At the same time, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia brought the war on the Eastern Front essentially to a standstill before the end of From to Austria-Hungary also experienced revolutionary economic and social transformations on the home front. This presumption swiftly proved impossible when the war showed no sign of ending by December As military casualties mounted, both food and munitions supplies dwindled, and as refugees from the east clogged the highways, the military found itself forced to call for greater levels of civilian participation in and sacrifice for the war effort.
The long-term price for this mobilization soon became apparent. Those who suffered on the home front treated their sacrifice as equivalent to that made by men in battle. In return, women and men on the home front demanded adequate food supplies as their right, and political and social welfare reforms after the war to recognize the key roles they had played. Nationalist activists too — those who were not at the front — linked their charitable wartime efforts to demands for political recognition and territorial autonomy after the war.
In the Austrian government even endowed a new Ministry for Social Welfare whose administrators sought the expertise and experience of regional nationalist welfare organizations to target and distribute benefits.
As historian Tara Zahra has argued, this development only increased the popularity of nationalist organizations among people desperate for assistance in the final year of the war. The military dictatorship may have exercised brutal control over society in the early war years, but it could not avoid raising legitimate expectations for a radically reformed post-war world.
These developments were especially clear in policies around food and labor. Food shortages in Austria-Hungary developed almost immediately after the start of the war. Peasants and draft animals were conscripted for the war effort at the start of the harvest season. Hungary, which had annually exported over 2 million tons of grain to Austria, now had to feed the military over 3 million enlisted men and draft animals.
By Hungary could barely spare , tons for Austria. Finally, an allied blockade of the Central Powers made it impossible to import foodstuffs or fuels from other global sources.
Early in the Austrian government decreed that 50 percent of the flour used for bread had to be replaced by ersatz products — at first barley, corn, or potato, and later far less palatable options like sawdust. Not only was it increasingly difficult to obtain foodstuffs, but what foodstuffs could be obtained saw a big drop in their nutritional value.
In February the government created a War Grain Control Agency to oversee the distribution of flour and bread. Local and regional governments created cartels charged with collecting foodstuffs and monitoring their distribution.
Soon local municipal governments introduced ration cards for a range of products from bread to milk, sugar, fats, and meats. However, the main problem was shortage: local markets received far too few foodstuffs to fill the needs of those who presented ration cards. This in turn led to the urban practice of lining up at market shops and stalls often overnight, in order to obtain rationed food.
Since many working-class women were drafted to work long hours in munitions factories, it was often children who lined up all night to hold places for their mothers. The governments tried to influence demand for food by controlling its consumption. Businesses and later families had to observe a number of meatless days per week. A law, for example, banned restaurants from providing sugar on tables or sweetening drinks. Municipal governments created public dining halls and kitchens to provide people with access to cheap meals.
Rumors attributed shortages to hoarders, black marketeers, Jewish conspirators, and especially to selfish peasants who allegedly profited from the misery of urban folk. Violence in markets and protest marches to town halls put enormous pressure on municipal authorities, who themselves had no real ability to alleviate the situation.
Thanks to harsh wartime censorship , a rampant culture of rumor replaced traditional sources of news both in urban neighborhoods and rural villages. As historian Maureen Healy argued for wartime Vienna, when faced with an economy of rationed information, ordinary people reacted to censorship and propaganda by spreading rumors or denouncing neighbors in an effort to maintain what they believed were standards of fairness and legality.
The desperate need for particular products, from uniforms and boots to munitions and ammunition led to a haphazard expansion of certain businesses and factories, [16] as well as an extension of working hours and harsh labor discipline inside their walls. Scarce material resources were allocated to war industries, further limiting available consumer goods.
Male workers with valuable skills were released from frontline military service, but they worked under harsh military discipline in the factories. Legislation from gave the War Ministry the right to take over whole factories, and to place their workers under military law. Women in these factories worked long shifts and faced recurring threats from horrific industrial accidents, given lax safety standards and ongoing pressures to raise production rates.
Austrian and Hungarian municipalities also hired women to replace men in public sectors, for example as conductors on city tramway lines. Even the military hired women to release men at desk jobs for service at the front. More importantly, children increasingly suffered from malnutrition, disease, and early death. Across the monarchy local Social Democratic leaders and party functionaries increasingly lost control over the industrial actions taken both by unionized and non-unionized workers.
In its search for scapegoats to explain defeat or hunger, the military treated civilians it considered to be suspicious with harsh brutality, implying explicitly that some ethnic or national groups were more valuable, loyal, and favored than others who were responsible for military failures.
Seeking out signs of treason, the military encouraged civilian administrators, local police, and provincial gendarmes now under military command to punish suspicious civilian behavior in non-war zones.
Different nationalist groups often accused their local nationalist opponents of fomenting treachery on the home front. Neighbors could turn swiftly against each other, reporting strange rumors about each other to local authorities. In Hungary, even before the start of military mobilization, popular initiatives attacked the alleged treachery of Serb gymnastics societies or Sokols.
When war was declared, police in Southern Hungary immediately arrested several Sokol members. Anti-Serb riots fueled by local anti-Serb political parties broke out in linguistically and religiously mixed regions of Croatia and Bosnia. There was no record that a second appointee in ever served. There was no permanent U. Venice first passed into Austrian control as the result of the Treaty of Campo Formio of October 17, , and became part of the Kingdom of Italy in In the case of Trieste, no dispatches from the earliest appointee have survived.
There were consuls serving there between and , but there was no permanent U. Trieste was part of the Austrian Empire until its breakup in Consulate was established in Vienna on October 10, It became a Consulate General on June 17, Consulates in other parts of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire i.
Hungary and the former Czechoslovakia will be mentioned under the countries in which they are presently located. Henry A. Muhlenberg was appointed as the first U. Minister to Austria on February 8,
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