Um, no. Austria declared war on Serbia on a totally BS premise that it was somehow responsible for Ferdinand’s assassination - though they knew that this wasn’t true - betting on the fact that Russia wouldn’t get involved. It’s true that they were egged on by Germany, but the Austrian leaders were all gung ho for war anyway.
The only person in Austria-Hungary’s leadership who didn’t support going to war against Serbia was… Hungary’s Prime Minister Tisza. I think we can reasonably conclude that if it had been up to the Hungarians then Austria-Hungary wouldn’t have declared war on Serbia, which started WWI.
Ironically, I would argue that no other country suffered the long-term effects of WWI more than Hungary. I happen to live in Hungary and I can tell you that everyone, and I mean everyone, is still, even today, acutely aware of the effects of WWI and how it fundamentally changed the country forever. In fact, grievances from this war still resonate to the extent that our current ruling government is able to exploit them for its own political benefit.
But to claim that Austria is more of a victim than an instigator of the war is crazy revisionist talk in my mind.
That’s the thing: Clinton’s campaign literally rode on the promise of “business as usual”, proudly. She and Obama promised that her administration would continue what Obama had been working on against an intransigent Congress, finish the work, and fix what Congress had broken. She put a lot of her chips onto Obama’s popularity and didn’t try very hard. And you know what? In that sense I agree with her: I wanted to see what she was promising, which was essentially a third Obama term with a woman at the helm and a more cooperative Congress. She vastly underestimated how much a lot of people distrust dynasties and how uncharismatic she came off next to Obama.
Not to mention distaste for Wall St cronyism and douchebag warhawkishness.
She was never going to be #nextprez, with a list of strikes (real and imagined) against her as long as your arm. She lost to Trump, for crying out loud. GG, establishment Democrats.
First off, do you blame the voters? It’s a democracy, they’re adults, hell yes you blame them.
Secondly, I see Sanders saying that the voters had reasons for voting trump other than a response to dog-whistle racism, and the Democratic Party needs to change the way it does things (although the reason he quotes is a bad one - deficiencies in the ACA are entirely the result of compromises made to get with Blue Dog democrats to get it through Congress and the Senate. Blue Dogs who mostly got wiped out in 2010). Still, it is probably true. The weird thing is all the commentaters who think that he said, or should have said, “the primary was fixed” No, it wasn’t, no he didn’t, no he shouldn’t. Sanders’ didn’t do himself any favours when he let this narrative gain traction among his supporters, and it undoubtedly hurt Clinton in the general election. Nice work Bernie.
Outside of Vienna, Austria was / is among the most nationalist, close-minded, xenophobic countries in Europe. It’s a quasi feudal (correction, real) society where titles play an important role-although with a very high living standard and good education system, which mitigates for some of the fascist tendencies.
As to your description of the end of the Habsburg Empire it’s uninformed revisionism at best. You are confusing Austria with the European, cosmopolitan metropolis of Vienna, which although today happens to be situated in Austria historically had more in common with other European cities such as Prag or Budapest than with the surrounding hostile mountains.
The point is not that there was no Austria as a country, the point is there was no Austrian populace aside from a few Bishop seats such as Salzburg (which were understandably not hot beds of progressivism) you are talking about a population surviving in mountains without road infrastructure–among the most harsh living environments in Europe.
Have you ever spoken to an Austrian Bergbauer? Someone whose grandmother told them what it was like pre WW2 making it day to day?
As to more recent history. Unlike other sections of the Habsburg Empire Austria emerged from WW2 as a beneficiary–and that was purely for geopolitical reasons. The West invested heavily and Austria is still among those countries greatly benefiting from the EU.
As it stands Austria and Germany are prime examples of the success of open-minded, progressive post WW2 Allied (US) policies, i.e. Marshall Plan. If Western civilisation as we know it doesn’t disappear through the plughole in the coming decade, we can attribute that to the Marshall Plan.
I would venture to guess–and it is only an educated guess, that the Green Presidential candidate won in erzkonservative Austria in the main, because of Trump! And because the FPÖ were such sore losers that they insisted on a new election even though the Green candidate had won first time around, completely legitimately.
Some of us Europeans like to think that we are a bit more sophisticated than the loud boisterous Americans and especially now, when the US has elected a bad tempered Toddler in Chief, we would like to feel superior and a van der Bellen makes us feel better about ourselves.
Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities is the best book on Nationalism, it has a very good chapter on the Habsburg Empire.
He sites the early Habsburg Empire as an example of a successful pre-nationalist governing structure, which explicitly didn’t require the individual peoples to assimilate. Minorities in the Habsburg Empire continued to retain their language, traditions, cultures. And this was explicit government policy. Even today, all the countries which were previously part of the Habsburg Empire, have significant minorities, which have still retained their language and tradition and that is a 100 yr later, with two WW and Sowjet occupation.
The far more relevant question is, why were the structures of the Habsburg Empire incapable to mitigate / accommodate the rising nationalism post French Revolution. It is generally considered that Nationalism as a cultural phenomenon was the fall of the Habsburgs, as there never was an Austrian nation pre WW2–it is little surprise that they had no role to play.
The statement is obviously ironic! It says we “would like to feel” it is an ironic comment on the central European psyche. Saying that, I very much hope that in the German election that sense of “superiority” will be mobilised as well as every possible / legal tactic to ensure that the far-right in Germany (where I can actually vote) is put in their place, preferably under 5%.
will most likely not happen. the only chance I see for a really low AfD election result is a rather extreme move to the right by CDU/CSU.
it seems possible that the inner conflicts renders an AfD faction effectively defunct and will hinder a reelection in 2021, but the election in 2017 will result in a right-wing faction in the Bundestag
It’s true, the phrase “Wall Street crony” was used a lot by her opponents, which turned a lot of people off (who are now watching actual Goldman Sachs execs becoming Cabinet members – that worked out well!).
I think that calling her a ‘douchebag warhawk’ for being Secretary of State is, well, douchey. I’m trying to look at the election objectively. There’s a million reasons Trump resonated more with a certain kind of voter than she did, all of which are being listed in a million thinkpieces. Reducing it all to “she’s a douchebag” isn’t helpful to anyone.
Very true. She also underestimated the degree to which Dems under age 40 recognised that the Dems’ lite version of neoliberalism was no more sustainable in the long-term (i.e. the future stretching out before them) than the GOP’s full-throated variety. It was obvious that she moved to the left only because of pressure from Sanders, grudgingly and in a way that didn’t convince anyone she was sincere about following through. Her campaign’s dependence on Goldman and other donors from the financial services sector was too well known for many Dem voters to convince themselves otherwise.
They had other legitimate concerns about her policy approach in other areas. Given the climate change crisis the U.S. needs to step up its games on fulfilling its goals, which meant doing better than Obama. They also knew she would (unfairly) be expected to prove herself tougher than Obama on national defense, so it seemed likely she would have put large numbers of American troops on the ground in Iraq against Daesh.
In the end, though, you nail it: she just didn’t try very hard during the primaries or the general election. She felt entitled to victory, and had both the DNC and then a clownish and dangerous GOP opponent enabling the delusion that it would fall into her lap. The resulting arrogance was evident to and turned off a lot of Dem voters.
Clinton, her campaign and the DNC establishment dropped the ball and too many Dem voters in swing states thought that was reason enough to stay home. Now we’ll be stuck with a President who’ll be a disaster in both the short and long term: “business as usual” not ca. 2012 or 1992 but ca. 1984.
Exactly, and her other big gamble was to assume (which, frankly, I would too, if I was managing her campaign) that when your opponent is saying horribly racist things, admitting to molesting women, being sued for fraud and rape, and being lauded by the KKK, that all you need to do is point to them and say “look how awful this is!”, and people would agree and go along with her. Instead, it turns out that spending most of your time showcasing your awful opponent just gives them free publicity and makes you look bad instead, in this case. Weird times.
Or to vote for Trump. I’m still sorting through the post-election entrails, but I keep coming back to the Dems’ ceding of rural voters to the Repubs. To quote our Dear Leader: Sad!
