ABSTRACT
At first sight it might indeed seem that the interests of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire in their declining years were identical; and that there was an element of historical necessity in their common struggle in the war that ended with their almost simultaneous disappearance.1 After all, even in the late eighteenth century the Austrians had begun to doubt the wisdom of cooperating with Russia in wars against an Ottoman Empire that had ceased to be an expansionist power. In the nineteenth century they came to believe that, in the south-east at any rate, the chief threat to the Habsburg Monarchy came from that same Balkan nationalism that was undermining the Ottoman Empire; and that the Ottoman Empire, for all its faults, was the best possible neighbour for the Monarchy. Certainly, any power combination that replaced it would be worse, whether it be a collection of irredentist states looking to Russia for support, and with designs on territories of the Monarchy, or direct Russian control over the area. ‘A Slav conformation of the Balkan peninsula under… Russian protection would cut our vital arteries’—thus an AustroHungarian Foreign Office memorandum of 1884;2 and in 1903 the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister warned Wilhelm II that the moment Russia were to establish herself in Constantinople ‘Austria becomes ungovernable’.3 The destinies of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires seemed inextricably bound together.
