“Birds of Prey in Disarray: The Habsburg Empire from a Hungarian Perspective”

Lecture by Juhasz Balazs

On Tuesday, 18 November at 6:00 p.m., at the headquarters of the Manlio Cecovini International Society for Historical, Social and Ethical Studies (Via Miramare 23 – Trieste), a lecture entitled “Birds of Prey in Disarray: The Habsburg Empire from a Hungarian Perspective” will be given by Juhasz Balazs of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.

The event, which is free to attend, takes its cue from the motto of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, “Indivisibiliter ac Inseparabiliter” — which might loosely be translated as “fighting and coexisting.” The Habsburg Empire was a conglomerate of fiefdoms that the centralising power managed to fuse together only up to a certain point, while the lands of the Hungarian Crown remained for centuries a separate entity, jealously guarding their own autonomy.

Nevertheless, the Hungarian state and society in turn depended on the resources and protection provided by the other half of the Empire. Their coexistence was marked by constant disputes, uprisings, and conflicting viewpoints. The terms historically used to describe Hungarians who collaborated with the Habsburgs (labanc) and those who held opposing views (kuruc) are so familiar in Hungary that they are still used today in everyday life and in politics. The labanc are now seen as those who look westward, while their opponents look eastward.

But how forced was this cohabitation, especially after the political compromise of 1867, when the Hungarian part of the Empire was elevated to an equal footing with the Austrian one? What did people think of the Compromise and of the Austrian side of the Empire?

Professor Balazs’s lecture will offer an original interpretation of the delicate balance between autonomy and dependence, collaboration and conflict, which characterised centuries of coexistence between Vienna and Budapest.