ABSTRACT
The Monarchy’s obsession with the Balkans – and with Russian influence there, not excluding imperial territory – was cemented by Gyula Andrassy’s apparent triumph at Berlin, when he secured the agreement of the great powers to the Monarchy’s occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Inside the Monarchy, practically nobody wanted the territories since they threatened to upset the delicate balance erected by dualism. Domestic developments, meanwhile, were pointing in the same direction: by the spring of 1918, most of the population were war-weary and starving; the Monarchy was convulsed in strikes; the Czechs, Poles and south Slavs inside the Empire were calling for its dissolution. In Istvan Deak’s words: ‘this was the final irony: the last fighting forces of the Habsburg monarchy were to a great extent Slavs, Romanians and Italians, all theoretically the allies of the Entente armies.’ Among some historians there has been a tendency to adopt an ‘either or’ attitude to explain the Monarchy’s supposed decline.
