Colonial lessons to learn from Habsburg: Bosnia-Herzegovina,1878

Abstract

In 1878, as a consequence of an international Balkan summit in Berlin, Austria–Hungary was given permission to occupy the troubled Ottoman provinces Bosnia and Hercegovina. A gory invasion campaign ensued, followed by four decades of civil administration. Finally, the territories were annexated by the Habsburg Monarchy in 1908 as an appendix of sorts, which almost caused the premature outbreak of a great war in Europe. This article will sketch the background for this last – and lethal – expansion of the empire and pursue the research questions of (a) whether this constitutes a case of colonialism within Europe and (b) what its repercussions were, critically challenging the alleged ‘civilising mission’ that would legitimise the whole undertaking.

Keywords

Habsburg Monarchy Bosnia-Hercegovina colonialism imperialism postcolonial studies

Introduction

Western colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has two faces: on the one hand, it stands for military conquest and foreign rule, for economic exploitation, inequality, and patronising identity politics for the sake of ‘civilisation’, based on more or less racist discourses that conjure a ‘lazy native’ who needs to be tamed. On the other hand, colonialism triggers modernisation as it introduces infrastructure, new goods, unknown lifestyles, and particularly educational and legal systems, which paradoxically are the first steps towards a civil society that enables the colonised to overthrow the foreign rule finally.¹ Both faces were shown to Bosnia-Herzegovina by Austria–Hungary, 1878–1918. In the following, I will try to answer the question of to what extent the colonialism paradigm applies to this particular case and which conclusion can be drawn from it, synthesising the research work of other scholars and my own.²

Historical background, events, and rationales

Why Austria-Hungary intended to occupy Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878, and which agenda its ‘Balkan peace mission’ actually concealed: these are questions not easily answered even 145 years later. However, one would do well to accept the ‘Age of Empire’ (Eric Hobsbawm) as a significant backdrop, as for instance Arnold Suppan and Evelyn Kolm do.³ In the canonised historiography of our present, the sequence of events does not deviate substantially from the narrative advocated by the well-known Balkan historian Barbara Jelavich and other scholars who have contributed standard works on this subject matter.⁴

In 1875, a revolt broke out in the European territories of the Ottoman Empire, pitting dissatisfied Herzegovinian farmers against their Muslim landlords. This produced a large number of casualties and refugees, for Serbia and Montenegro soon supported the uprising against Turkish rule, which by 1876 had also spread to Bulgaria. While Ottoman troops remained victorious in the ensuing battles, the war was nevertheless accompanied by a political crisis in the power centre of Istanbul, which led to changes in leadership even in form of a coup d’état.⁵

Faced with both the instability of the Ottoman Empire and ambitious Russian plans, Austria–Hungary clearly no longer saw itself in the position of sticking to the double maxim of its traditional Balkan policy, in place since Kaunitz and Metternich: ‘to keep Russian presence and influence to a minimum and to maintain the status quo with the Ottoman administration’.⁶ Furthermore, there is some indication that a new expansionist reorientation of Austria–Hungary’s Orientpolitik was not only the ambition of Austrian court and military circles, but also of one of its major players, Count Gyula Andrássy, Joint Minister of the Exterior.⁷

Thus, in 1877, during the Russo–Turkish War, which followed on the heels of the clashes of 1875–76, the Habsburg Monarchy diplomatically declared its readiness to adopt a benevolent neutrality toward the Tsarist Empire. The Russians countered this move by offering up Bosnia-Herzegovina to the Austrians as an inducement.⁸ However, on 3 March 1878, this arrangement went by the boards with the Treaty of San Stefano. The resulting territorial reorganisation of the Balkans (e.g. the emergence of a large new Bulgarian state), however, still did not satisfy the great European powers. In response, the Congress of Berlin was convened on 13 June of the same year to discuss the drawing of borders anew. One important outcome of this conference was the ceding of the administration of Ottoman Bosnia and Herzegovina at the request of the British representative, Lord Salisbury. Thus, Article XXV of the Treaty of Berlin formulated that

[t]he [two] Provinces shall be occupied and administered by Austria-Hungary. […] To this end the Governments of Austria-Hungary and Turkey reserve to themselves to come to an understanding on the details.⁹

The conjectures about Vienna’s particular motivations for this last – and fatal – territorial expansion of the Habsburg monarchy before the First World War are complex and fall into three categories of historical argument:

Regarding ‘strategic grounds’, the assumption here is that Austria–Hungary needed to safeguard its territory against Russian Pan-Slavism and suspected Serbian expansion plans through the military and infrastructural occupation of the Dalmatian hinterland.¹⁰ This motivation, however, is weakened by a fact foreseeable even at the time, namely that the acquisition of a Southern Slav population numbering over a million in the process would also potentially exacerbate the ethnic tensions already existing in the Habsburg Monarchy.¹¹

Regarding ‘economic grounds’, Bosnia-Herzegovina harboured large deposits of coal and various ores, a mining potential that was only exploited in Tito’s Yugoslavia. The vast natural resources lead some historians like Bérenger to impute certain economic interests to Austria–Hungary.¹² Given the available historical evidence, however, it is difficult to assess to what extent such potential gains – along with the prospect of a new market for Austrian goods – actually played a motivational role in the occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina.¹³ On the other hand, the ‘natural treasures’ of the territory are explicitly mentioned in the concluding remarks to the official military report on the occupation campaign in 1878.¹⁴

Regarding ‘territorial expansion’, this line of argument maintains that, after the founding of the German Empire in 1871, the only remaining opportunity for imperial(ist) growth still open to Austria–Hungary lay in the South, that is, in the fallback regions of the declining Ottoman Empire in the Balkans.¹⁵ Other European powers did the same to the ‘Sick Man of Europe’, which is commonly seen under the label of colonialism by most historians: for instance, the usurpation of Tunis by France in 1881 and of Egypt by Great Britain in 1882.¹⁶

However, massive administrative, if not also financial, disadvantages were arrayed against the geopolitical advantages of occupying Bosnia-Herzegovina. Robert Kann writes:

In financial sense the acquisition was considered not only no gain but a definite loss […]. Occupation was considered the lesser of two evils. It would mean bad business economically but it might offer some relief against the threat of Balkan nationalism and Russian-inspired Panslavism.¹⁷

Apart from increasing both the empire’s expenditures and its Southern Slavic population (out of the latter, plans for both Croatian hegemony and Trialism would arise alongside with Serbian nationalism),¹⁸ it should not be underestimated that with the occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, for the first time in history, a significant Muslim community became part of Austro–Hungarian society and culture.¹⁹ This new population group was by no means a matter of a few historical converts, since it also contained the regional elites: landowners, Ottoman functionaries, clergymen and quite a few merchants.²⁰ Through this setup, the later increasingly ethnicised religious differences in Bosnia-Herzegovina were interwoven with social hierarchy, especially since the majority of free peasants and dependent tenant farmers (kmetovi) were of the Christian faith, that is, Orthodox or Roman Catholic.²¹ Thus, all Austro–Hungarian administrative measures that would lead to an interference with the existing (and frankly problematic) late-feudal system²² of cultural, religious, and social difference were delicate politically, particularly since they would hit mostly those elites on whose benevolence the Austro-Hungarian rule rested – even if reforms were implemented with well-meaning intent vis-à-vis a majority of the population.

In addition, Austria–Hungary’s occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the summer of 1878 was far from being a military ‘Spaziergang mit einer Musikkapelle’ – that little outstep with a brass band – the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister Andrássy had envisaged for the imperial army, but rather a gory ‘conquest’ which was fiercely fought by local militias and the remnants of Ottoman troops in the region.²³ Thus, by the end of the campaign in November 1878, the Austro-Hungarian occupying forces were about as strong in number as the American contingent deployed in the second Iraq War of 2003, that is, roughly a quarter of a million.²⁴

In this military context, the colonialist undertones of the whole operation become perceptible for the first time, when, for example, a Czech veteran later describes the heads of Austrian soldiers skewered by the ‘Insurgentenc’ (the official term for the local resistance already used in 1878). Here, old Balkan clichés²⁵ of barbaric ‘bandits’ and ‘cutthroats’ re-emerge – instrumentalized, it appears, for almost an outcry for a new and ‘civilized’ administration:

We stood in full battle dress against the ignoble cannibal enemy and it is no exaggeration to say that the Zulus, Bagurus, Niam-Niams, Bechuans, Hottentots and similar South African bands behaved more chivalrously towards European travellers than the Bosnian Turks did towards us. I always recollect with dismay the peoples of the Balkans, where the foot of the civilised European has not trod for decades, how the Turks, ‘native lords’, probably rule down there! ²⁶

After three months of fighting, some thousands of dead, and many tens of thousands of refugees, the Austro–Hungarian mission civilatrice was to be accomplished next. In 1882, a civil administration was put in place by the occupiers, and finally, in 1908, Bosnia and Herzegovina were annexated by the Habsburg Monarchy, which almost caused World War One to break out prematurely. Ironically, its opening shots would still be fired right here, in Sarajevo, on 28 June 1914, and its finale in 1918 also meant the end of Habsburg rule over Bosnia-Herzegovina which became part of the first Yugoslav state, that is, the State of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs (SHS). The question still remains, in many respects, how those 40 years should be assessed: in terms of the ‘civilizing mission’ they were supposed to be, or within the paradigm of European colonial imperialism around 1900?

Habsburg rule through a (post-)colonial lens

In recent decades, various scholars have discussed the applicability of colonial and post-colonial approaches to Habsburg Central Europe, as a third way as it were, avoiding the fallacies of Habsburg nostalgia (Viribus unitis) and the nationalist discourse of self-victimisation (Völkerkerker).²⁷ As stated before, Bosnia and Herzegovina, among all parts of the Empire, might be the only territory which fully qualifies for a case study of k.u.k.²⁸ colonialism in a non-figurative sense of the term. However, this position was ardently contested by Robert Kann in 1976 already:

The thesis put before us, namely that the administration of Bosnia-Herzegovina represented trends of colonialism, is highly problematical. We must first ask whether the concept of colonialism, commonly understood as the rule of European powers over native colored people on other continents, can be transferred to a master-subject relation within Europe, pointing to a system of colonial administration and exploitation of whites by whites. ²⁹

It was thus in the capacity of an apologist that Kann joined the debate of ‘internal’ European colonisation, which had started in the years after the publication of Michael Hechter’s book on the ‘Celtic Fringe’ of Great Britain in 1975.³⁰ For Kann, however, colonialism constitutes ‘the unholy trinity of imperialism, capitalist exploitation, and oppression on racial grounds, all of them imposed by force’; on this basis, he rejects the application of the concept to Bosnia-Herzegovina, albeit with arguments that are barely convincing.³¹

In a more recent formulation by key postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak based on the protean nature of colonialism, the term seems plausible again for the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina:

‘Colonizer’ and ‘colonized’ can be fairly elastic if you define scrupulously. When an alien nation-state establishes itself as a ruler, impressing its own laws and system of education, and re-arranging the mode of production for its own economic benefit, one can use these terms […].³²

Unfortunately, due to space constraints, other important definitions of colonialism in historiography and the social sciences cannot be discussed in depth here, such as Jürgen Osterhammel’s research.³³ However, the propagandistic undertones of how the term colonialism was used in communist Yugoslavia for the country’s past seems to have left a bad taste in many scholars’ mouths.³⁴

On the other hand, Austro–Hungarian sources from the period itself love to repeat the mantra of Habsburg mythology, that is, the selfless ‘cultural’ and/or ‘peace mission’ that must inevitably follow the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the bloody chaos of war.³⁵ A statement made by the Austro–Hungarian Joint Finance Minister Benjamin (Béni) von Kállay, who from 1882 to 1903 was responsible for the civil administration of the ‘Okkupationsgebiete’, is one of many symptomatic examples. In an interview with the Daily Chronicle in London he commented: ‘Austria is a great Occidental Empire […] charged with the mission of carrying civilization to Oriental peoples’; in this respect, ‘rational bureaucracy’ would be ‘the key to Bosnia’s future […] to retain the ancient traditions of the land vilified and purified by modern ideas’.³⁶

But exactly this talk of Austria-Hungary’s ‘civilizing mission’ has led not only Yugoslav but quite a few Western historians³⁷ to extend the critical paradigm of colonialism to the Habsburg monarchy. Such is the case with A.J.P Taylor who some 70 years ago wrote the following polemical verdict on Bosnia-Herzegovina:

The two provinces were the “white man’s burden” [!] of Austria-Hungary. While other European Powers sought colonies in Africa for the purpose, the Habsburg Monarchy exported to Bosnia and Hercegovina its surplus intellectual production – administrators, road builders, archeologists, ethnographers, and even remittance-men. The two provinces received all benefits of Imperial rule: ponderous public buildings; model barracks for the army of occupation; banks, hotels, and cafés; a good water supply for the centres of administration and for the country resorts where the administrators and army officers recovered from the burden of Empire. The real achievement of Austria-Hungary was not on show: when the Empire fell in 1918, 88 per cent of the population was still illiterate.³⁸

The same story sounds very different from the vantage point of a contemporary German observer, the Berlin journalist Heinrich Renner, in 1896; still, he also uses the term colonialism, albeit not as a critical tool, but affirmatively:

These regions [...] remained completely unknown to the wide public; the Bosnian Sleeping Beauty still slept her age-old magical slumber and was only reawakened when the Imperial troops crossed the border and ushered in the new era. The thicket that had sprawled around Sleeping Beauty’s castle was then cleared and after less than two decades of restless and arduous work Bosnia is now known and respected by the world. What has been achieved in this land is practically unparalleled in the colonial history of all peoples and epochs [...].³⁹

In Renner’s fairy tale rhetoric, the success story of the Austro–Hungarian mission civilatrice is told. Bosnia becomes a kind of oriental Sleeping Beauty – or rather Snow White? – that is cursed/poisoned by the Ottoman Empire and later woken up by the kiss of Europe, or particularly, the Habsburg prince.

Many more examples could be given of how the term colonialism was used for Bosnia-Herzegovina in contemporary sources, surprisingly never by Austrian authors, but frequently by Germans, for instance by Ferdinand Schmid, the former head of the official Statistics Department in Sarajevo, who later, as a university professor in Leipzig, would write an academic monograph on Bosnia. Here, he also discusses the applicability of the colony concept:

The concept of ‘colonies’ has been widely debated in German and Western literature on the topic; often, it only meant overseas territories which were ruled by the motherland economically and legally. In this sense, Austria-Hungary does not have colonies and it has never done colonial politics, at least not recently. However, if you define the notion of ‘colonies’ in a broader sense, then there can be no doubt that Bosnia and Herzegovina were obtained as colonial territories by Austria-Hungary and that they have remained so until today. ⁴⁰

Factors of Habsburg colonial rule in Bosnia

If the case is to be made for an Austro–Hungarian colonialism of sorts beyond the contemporary use of terms and tropes,⁴¹ the following points should be taken into consideration:

1. The legal status of the territory. Throughout the forty Austro–Hungarian years, Bosnia-Herzegovina never became a ‘crownland’, that is, an imperial province, but remained a sort of appendix to the empire, a Reichsland (comparable to the status of Alsace-Lorraine in imperial Germany), which in essence belonged to none of the two constitutive halves of the empire, neither Austria nor Hungary, but to both.⁴² Due to its special status, the territory was the only one under Habsburg rule which had no legal representation in either of the parliaments in Vienna and Budapest.⁴³ A regional assembly, the so-called Sabor/Landtag (Diet), was introduced in 1910 only, but it soon became dysfunctional and was put out of business through emergency laws in the First World War soon after.⁴⁴

2. Similar to British reign in India, the Austro–Hungarian occupiers established their rule over a majority of the population through the participation and gradual ‘reformation’ of existing elites in Bosnia–Herzegovina, particularly the Muslim landowners.⁴⁵ (This prevented e.g. a major land reform from happening, which added to the frustrations among the mostly Christian tenant farmers who initially, hoping for change, had been partly welcoming of the Austro–Hungarian takeover of the territory).⁴⁶

3. An ever-growing,⁴⁷ patronising civil administration was put in place shortly after the occupation, which rested to a large extent in the hands of foreigners, even in its lower ranks. It discriminated against local applicants, particularly Bosnian Muslims and Serbs.⁴⁸ The eager administrators would try to govern almost every aspect of civic life, for instance, whether or not the name of a local amateur choir was appropriate. However, their achievements are also diminished by corruption allegations in foreign diplomatic reports, which paint a picture very different to the alleged ‘civilizing mission’.⁴⁹

4. In the two decades during which Joint Finance Minister Kalláy headed the occupied territories, he tried to impose an artificial overall Bosnian identity’ to combat the political movements of the three major population groups, the Muslims, Orthodox, and Catholics – a modern tool of government also known from colonial contexts outside of Europe. This paternalistic identity politics, however, rather worked into the hands of the nationalists and further deepened and ethnicised the religious divisions between the three groups.⁵⁰

5. The mission civilatrice was used as a discursive tool to justify structures of administration that were less democratic than in the motherland, and the status of Bosnians and Herzegovinians as second-rate k.u.k. citizens. In order to legitimise this civilizing mission of the Empire – with its central fiction of the alien in need of culture – Bosnians were (re)presented and formatted as the Other through popular Orientalist discourses in the hegemonic culture, instead of seeing them simply as an extension to the already existing Southern Slavic populace of the Empire.⁵¹ Thus, othering became an important pretext for the necessary ‘education’ of the Other, a project which not surprisingly ‘failed’:

Thallóczy’s report on Bosnian education in 1904 brings out the now familiar pattern of student politicization in backward territories, in classic colonialist terms. According to Thallóczy, from about 1897 growing numbers of Bosnian youth began to acquire western culture, without absorbing its inner spirit. ⁵²

6. Economic aspects.⁵³ The self-imposed official restriction through Austro–Hungarian legislation that Bosnia-Herzegovina was on the one hand controlled by an almost almighty bureaucracy, but on the other hand had to finance itself from its provincial incomes, prevented to a large extent the development and exploitation of the territories through private capital – until the late days of Habsburg rule when especially Hungarian banks increasingly moved in. Habsburg nostalgics would try to use this point as a counter-argument against the colonialism hypothesis – along with the fact that ‘the Austrians’ built hundreds of kilometres of roads and railway tracks, school buildings etc. However, this phenomenon of creating modern infrastructure is characteristic of most Western colonial regimes overseas as well.

7. Military exploitation. Similar to the Gurkha units within the British army, the k.u.k. military very soon, in 1881, started drafting the male population of Bosnia-Herzegovina into special infantry regiments that were never fully incorporated in the Austro–Hungarian army (but run by its officers).⁵⁴ Thus, the alien Other from the periphery, whose barbarism was to be tamed by the mission civilatrice, was also put on hold as a ‘natural’ military resource, as it were, to be unleashed whenever the centre wanted it to be. The ‘Bosniaken’ were thus designed as elite units of sorts which terrified their enemies with their cruelty and combat efficiency, particularly on the Italian front during World War One.

8. Similar to overseas colonies, the provincial government and other organizations (such as churches) encouraged farmers from other regions of the monarchy, but also from other German and Italian countries, to immigrate and establish model villages in Bosnia-Herzegovina. This settler initiative met with great resistance from indigenous political activists and later also in the newly established provincial parliament (Sabor).⁵⁹

Conclusion

If one tries to put all these data together to see the greater picture, a comparative perspective might prove helpful. Then, there would be a whole range of phenomena available to illustrate what colonialism can be(come). On top of the blacklist, there should be, for instance, the Congo colony as described by Adam Hochschild, particularly when the territory was the private property of the Belgian king and run as a hybrid of capitalist corporation and lethal labour camp, which cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of native Africans.⁵⁵ In comparison, Austria–Hungary’s intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina was fairly soft(-spoken?) and perhaps – in parts – even well-intended.

However, the arguments listed in the sketch above show that the k.u.k. intermezzo from 1878 to 1918 can be considered as a kind of Austrian proxy-colonialism:⁵⁶ a substitute for the ‘Scramble for Africa’ (and Asia) the Habsburg monarchy had been too late for. The only reason why others hesitate to call Bosnia-Herzegovina a colony is that it was not separated from its ‘motherland’ by a large body of saltwater,⁵⁷ but lies at the peripheries of Europe in the long nineteenth century. Here one can argue that it is the rather imaginary concept of what Europe is – thus Eurocentrism – which paradoxically prevents us from recognising colonialism on its own soil.

This is very counter-productive since exactly that colonial Habsburg imperialism has had a long aftermath that lasted at least until the Yugoslav Succession Wars of the 1990s. More generally speaking, it can be easily stated that violent territorial expansion coming with identity management and inequality from outside invaders, who impose their cultural formats and narratives by force (even if it is mainly soft power!), tends to backfire in history. The means used to control and assimilate an occupied population are eventually turned against the occupier. Thus, it does not come as a surprise that the opening shots of the First World War were fired in Sarajevo.⁵⁸

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Clemens Ruthner

Colonial lessons to learn from Habsburg: Bosnia-Herzegovina,1878–1918