Knowledge and Development V

Walter Sauer

Habsburg's Colonial Empire and Austrian Identity1

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Permit me to start by drawing your attention to a press statement issued by the Austrian Ministry of Culture in January 2022 which includes the following: "Although Austria is not regarded historically as a colonial power, current research has revealed the multiple involvement of the Habsburg monarchy in colonial affairs."

This sentence is remarkable as it deviates from the longstanding position maintained by government, media, and most civil society that former Austria, meaning the Habsburg Empire, was not or only marginally involved in European expansion overseas. This is a sort of a national consensus, supported by mainstream historiography and also internationally accepted. Research and political debates around colonial legacies of the past, etc., focus on Britain, France, contemporary Germany, and others, but not on Austria, Switzerland, or Scandinavia - countries with a seemingly noncolonial past.

But even if apparently obvious, this perception - which I will name the denialist discourse - leaves some questions unanswered. One of them relates to the paradox: "Austria had no colonies, but it has extensive colonial collections." This has become an unexpected challenge since President Macron's announcement to return art works in French museums acquired in colonial contexts to their countries of origin. It has generated political pressure all over Europe and in Austria as well; some - like Achille Mbembe during a recent visit to Vienna - even speak of a moral obligation. Does it mean that the Republic of Austria too has to return certain objects or even whole collections?

In order to respond sensibly to possible claims for the restitution of cultural objects or human remains, we have to understand better how these collections were assembled and whether and how there was a colonial context on which restitution claims can legitimately be based. This is the context not only for the statement of the Ministry of Culture mentioned above but also for the establishment of an international advisory group to make recommendations for a restitution policy as well as for intensified colonial provenance research in Austrian federal museums.

For all these efforts, it is paying off today that a few historians, partly from outside traditional academia, already started to reassess Austria-Hungary's colonial entanglements twenty years ago - an undertaking which was initially confronted with little interest. What did this reassessment actually entail? We were obviously not aiming at creating "alternative facts." But our intentions were

to contribute to a systematic understanding of colonialism as a system which encompassed countries playing different roles - some more militarily aggressive, some more behind-the-scenes, but hardly any country developing and acting outside the system;

to reinterpret modern Austrian history in the light of contemporary interpretations of colonialism, and on the basis of all available sources (many of which were neglected in the denialist discourse);

to deal with certain ideological interpretations of Austrian history which - as I will try to show in a moment - are linked more to identity politics than to realities. These interpretations generally aim to position Austria on a global scale in a specific way, and vis-à-vis Germany in particular.

I

Very early, the Habsburg Empire got involved in transatlantic trade - remember the close family connections between Vienna and Madrid - and it established colonial outposts in East Africa, India, and China since the early eighteenth century. This was done relatively late, as before the ruling elite had been occupied by protracted wars against the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans. Although trade relations with the Indian Ocean region were profitable, the colonies could not be sustained for long. In the nineteenth century, we see phases of bigger or lesser colonial interests, and a notable absence during the Scramble for Africa. Here lies, indeed, an important difference to West European powers.

But does that mean that the Habsburg Empire - around 1900 the second biggest state in Europe in terms of geographical extension, and the third biggest in terms of population - was disconnected from the colonial system? I don't think so. There is a popular misconception which simplifies colonialism to a system of state sovereignty over territories with clear-cut starting and independence dates. But in a wider perspective, colonialism was also a process which implied decades, even centuries, of economic, cultural, and political penetration long before these regions became colonies in a constitutional sense. Looking only at "formal empire," Gallagher and Robinson reminded us already in the 1950s, "is rather like judging the size and character of icebergs solely from the parts above the water-line" - and this is now commonly accepted in the historiography of European expansion.

If we only look at the tip of the iceberg, Habsburg Austria seems largely off the hook. It did not conduct genocide somewhere in Africa, nor was there an Austrian Savorgnan de Brazza, Cecil Rhodes, or Leopold II. On the other hand, there had been numerous, unsuccessful attempts by Austrian stakeholders to acquire colonies since the 1850s, escalating shortly before the opening of the Suez Canal and again around 1900. Furthermore, we notice an economic upswing, massive investments into the navy, participation in the multilateral intervention against the so-called Boxer Rebellion in China, and reinforcements of colonial propaganda that might perhaps have enabled Austria to reach its colonials goals. Had the course of events not been interrupted by World War I, Austria might thus be understood as a colonial power in the making, which - fortunately from today's perspective - came too late to complete this process.

Looking at the iceberg below the waterline, the picture becomes, in any case, more complex and ambiguous. Unequal trade relations were shaped to the unilateral benefit of Austria or Austria-Hungary. The monarchy participated in all multilateral state meetings on colonial affairs, including the notorious Congo Conference in Berlin, whose decisions were ratified in Vienna. Furthermore, particularly since the 1850s, numerous individuals - adventurers, missionaries, tourists, scientists, as well as emigrants - travelled through regions in Africa and Asia which were still politically independent and thus partly "unknown" to Europeans. Remember the Catholic missionaries in Southern Sudan, or people like Emil Holub, Oscar Baumann, or Samuel Teleki and Ludwig von Höhnel who were among the first or even the first Europeans in what is today Zambia, Rwanda/Burundi, or Northern Kenya. Others could be named as well. Whether on purpose or as a by-product only, they collected evidence on landscape formations, climate conditions, settlement and transport structures, the economic potential, and, not least, political, social, and cultural conditions; and most of them returned with collections of cultural objects, natural specimen, and sometimes human remains, too. They all were part of the general colonial destabilization of the Global South.

Some perceived themselves as forerunners of a specific Austrian(-Hungarian) colonialism, while others found employment in the service of other European powers and so contributed to territorial expansion: of Britain (in South Sudan and East Africa), Portugal (in Angola), Belgium (in the Congo), and, in particular, Germany (in East Africa and the Pacific). By publishing voluminous travelogues, many of them popularized the image of the heroic white explorer in far-off lands, and entrenched derogative, even racist perceptions of local situations.

The conventional discourse insisting on Austria-Hungary's nonrelevance to colonial affairs - which I call the denialist discourse - understands such activities as essentially nonpolitical and devoted to academic research. The classical evidence for that approach is to be found in a speech delivered by the then president of the Geographical Society in Vienna, Emil Tietze, at the funeral of Emil Holub, a popular "explorer" of Southern Africa, in 1902:

When travellers from other countries, other nations set out for foreign lands, it is not always, but very often for specific goals, the achievement of which directly or indirectly benefits their homeland, be it in political, colonial or commercial terms. Under normal circumstances, the Austrian traveller has no other driving force than the love for science itself and the desire to expand knowledge of other countries through his findings or his collections.

We observe two interesting points here: (1) the attribution of a special quality, if not superiority to Austrians - an ideological element to which I will return later, and (2) the separation of commercial or strategic interests on the one hand (which he terms colonial) and science on the other, which he perceives as a universal good as it advances Europe's understanding of the world. This conviction serves as a cornerstone of the denialist discourse in our country. Because Austrians devoted their efforts overseas to research, they by definition cannot be regarded as colonial.

From contemporary understandings of colonialism, it becomes, however, clear that science was extremely relevant to colonial expansion as a systemic contribution...