320. “The Belt” #1
“
Monaco's neutrality is one of our main attributes ..”
Albert II, Prince of Monaco
“
There are no conditions to which a man may not become accustomed, particularly if he sees that they are accepted by those about him.”
Leo Tolstoy,
Anna Karenina
“
Of course as a small country you're not necessarily in the strongest negotiating position unless you're negotiating with other small countries.”
Helen Clark
“
Vienna is a city that was built around coffee shops.”
Bertold Brecht
Of course, this was not an official definition but in practical terms there was something like a “belt” of the lesser powers stretching from (almost) the Baltic coast and all the way to the Meditteranean: Kingdom of Poland, Austrian Empire, Kingdom of Hungary and Ottoman Empire. Voluntarily, or just because the alternative would be dangerous, they were generally friendly to the Russian and German empires, which meant to the French Empire as well, to a degree in which it was relevant.
Poland.
Ruled by the Poniatovski dynasty the country was at peace for the decades mostly because none of its neighbors seriously wanted any piece of what remained of it. At some point Wilhelm II was contemplated a modest annexation to improve communication with the East Prussia but was persuaded by Russia and Sweden that it does not make sense to destroy status quo
unless Poland does something provocative like establishing some ill-advised tariffs, creating problems with crossing its territory or some other stupidity. Wilhelm listened to the …er… “voices of reason” coming from abroad and from within Germany and agreed.
The reason for status quo support was quite pragmatic: to a great degree the textile, mining, metallurgic and banking industries of the kingdom was controlling by the Russian and German companies and banks and annexation could cause the bad feelings and perhaps even the excesses, which would have a negative impact on the smoothly running business while economic value of the territories in question was quite small.
In general, the kingdom was completely at the mercy of its stronger neighbors who, unfortunately for the kingdom, were allied to each other thus depriving the polish government of a space for the political maneuver. So the kingdom had to adopt the tariffs approved by the big neighbors and adopt the economic policies which benefitted them. Taking into an account that the country was predominantly agricultural and relatively poor, its value as an importer of the manufactured goods was limited but it remained a good investment area because, due to a permanent employment problem, the labor force was cheap and scared enough not to make noises, which made investments into the Polish industries industry profitable.
Then, it was a second (after Russia) biggest importer of the agricultural products into Germany and Sweden and second (after Hungary) into Austria. Which, of course, was not problem free because in the agricultural area Germany was in a complicated situation: on one hand, the domestic agricultural production was no adequate for feeding the population while OTOH agricultural sector was dominated by the major Prussian landowners who did not want a cheap grain imports because they’d hurt them both economically and politically. Russian Empire had a short-term “tariff war” with Germany over this issue which was settled by the mutual adjustments of the tariffs on a wide variety of items. This was much more difficult for Poland due to an absence of any serious leverage. Somewhat better situation was in the kerosine exports from Galicia to Austria:
this Poland, being a regional monopolist, could negotiate on the equal terms. As a result, the government was getting a considerable revenue that allowed financing of various projects. Lwow region was prospering (as in the oil companies, speculators and those in the “service and entertainment industry”) but this did not change overall situation too much.
The country remained predominantly agrarian: more than 75% of its population lived in the villages. 20% of agricultural land belonged to 1,964 latifundias with an area of over 1,000 hectares each (an average of 1,629 hectares), and 25% to 16,952 landlord farms with an area of 100 to 1,000 hectares (an average of 236 hectares). Together, these two groups, which accounted for only 0.58% of the total number of farms, had 45% of agricultural land. At the other end of a spectrum were 3,129 farms (96.72% of the total) with less than 20 hectares (an average of 2.3 hectares), which in total amounted to only 45.4% of agricultural land. That is, if we add to this numerous masses of landless peasants - a huge land shortage prevailed.
In the practical terms, while the big estates were a source of export, the “village” was “
just a modest addition to a city market” [1]. In other words, the wealth had been almost exclusively accumulating at the top level and hardly even trickling down: it was a common practice in the peasants’ households to
split the matches to save money.
On a regular basis country was suffering from the financial, industrial and agricultural crisises so its level of the industrial production was not growing and agriculture had its share of the near-catastrophic or catastrophic situations like the bad harvests (starvation of the poorest peasants) or good harvests (falling grain prices meant loss of the income by the landowners and cutting of the employment). The structure of employment in industry continued to be dominated by the textile industry, metalworking, mining, and food industries. However, there were also some newly-created industries: armaments production and locomotive construction. Another successfully developing area was railroad construction: by the late 1890s more than 1,000 km of the railroads had been constructed allowing the kingdom to get some income from the transit of goods between Germany and Russia.
There was a steady flow of emigration, mostly to the US and Mexico (President Diaz was somewhat obsessed with the RR construction), that kept unemployment on “acceptable” level between 400,000 and 1,000,000 unemployed in the urban areas [2] while in the rural areas the numbers were higher.
On a positive side, an absence to the sea access had been saving big amounts of money on
not building a navy. As a result, the kingdom could even afford a descent sized army with the reasonably modern weapons and cute headgear. Nobody could tell for sure against whom it is supposed to fight but there were no doubts that a self-respecting country must have an army so here you go.
Warsaw flourished. Under Mayor
Sokrates Starynkiewicz (1875–92) it got its first water and sewer system as well as the expansion and modernisation of trams, street lighting, and gas infrastructure. Between 1850 and 1882, the population grew by 134% to 383,000 as many peasants migrated from surrounding rural Masovian towns and villages to the city for employment opportunities: a number of metallurgical, textile and glassware factories and been built there so by 1897 population grew to 626,000. Life was good. For those who had money. Which was a big problem because a majority dud not. 43% of the population lived in one-room dwellings (36.5% urban and 51.5% rural), with 2.3 people per room in cities and 4.8 people in the village. 36% of the population lived in two-room dwellings (2.3 people per room in cities, 2.7 people in the village). Only 21% of the population lived in three-room and more apartments, on average per room in cities - 1.3 people, in the village - 1.6 people.
Austrian Empire.
International position of the Austrian Empire was somewhat peculiar: it was treated with a much higher respect than its economic or military power should warrant because, however you put it, the Hapsburg empire was the oldest European empire and the Hapsburgs were by far the oldest imperial dynasty [3] and the younger dynasties, for their own benefit, had to maintain respect to the title. Actually, it was even convenient on various international diplomatic occasions by excluding potential protocol arguments about priority between representatives of three other empires: annoying trifles like that could source the “beautiful friendship”. And, of course, it was also preventing Brits from making silly claims (their imperial title was the youngest).
In general, Austrian Empire maintained good relations with
almost all European states due to its absence of the expansionist ideas and well-developed economy having numerous things to over and extensive demands for the imports.
After surviving humiliation of the defeats and loss of Hungary, FJI and his government embarked upon much less ambitious but more meaningful political course helped by the fact that as a result the Empire was now heavily dominated by a historically heavily industrialized Austria-Czechia region which was producing all types of engines, weapons and chemical products.
Škoda Works became one of the world’s renown manufacturers producing heavy guns for the
navy,
mountain guns or
mortars, locomotives, machine tools and all types of the industrial equipment.
Shipbuilding developed in Trieste - the Austrian fleet was not backward and poorly developed, and among its ships it was possible to find extremely technically interesting specimens that combined cheapness with good characteristics like 3 coastal defense battleships of “Monarch” class built in 1893-97:
- Displacement 5547 tons, length is 99.2 m, width 17 m, draft 6.4 m.
- Power of steam engines 8500 hp, speed 17.5 knots.
- Armor (Harvey steel): belt 270-220 mm, casemates 80 mm, towers 250 mm, deck 40 mm.
- Armament: four 240 mm, six 150 mm guns, ten 47 mm Skoda guns and four 47 mm Gochkis guns, 2 torpedo tubes.
The navy was steadily growing but prior to the Great Naval Rush it was kept within the reasonable limits without really big ships. Soon it was going to change.
In the Austrian army the major decisions in 1867-1895 were made by
Archduke Albrecht, Duke of Teschen, who was the cousin of the Emperor Franz Joseph and his leading advisor in military affairs and “
fighting a fierce rearguard action against all forms of innovation.” The budget military spendings per capita were less than in the major European countries and its conscription rate of 0.29% was low if compared to 0.47% in
Germany, 0.35% in Russia and 0.75% in
France. While being prevailing German in its ethnic make-up, the army remained multi-ethnic.To aid communication between the multitude of ethnicities, the army developed a simple language called “
Army Slavic”, based primarily on Czech. The army finally changed its white uniforms to more practical dark blue and it had quite good weapons, including its own version of the machine gun. However, based upon the budgetary considerations, there was a rather questionable decision of retaining the bronze cannons. In a time of peace it was under 300,000.
Why bother at all with anything beyond a token army and naval force? The answer is obvious: Italy. Only getting a bloody nose could cure what looked as a national aggressive itch in the posteriors and even these periods of a prevailing reason tended to be the short ones. As soon as the bleeding stopped, there will be new calls for “restoration of the Roman Empire” or at least “return of all Italian lands” which, by the reasons not quite clear, included not only Trieste but also Tyrol and the coastal part of Croatia. Probably, if Italy was given a free hand on getting its colonial desires, it would keep it busy for years (providing that the weapons do not have weapons more modern than the swords and spears) but so far its colonial ideas were going contrary to the interests of the Big Guys and, in the case which is better not to be mentioned, the natives who happened to have magazine rifles and machine guns. Even permission to occupy Southern part of Somalia did not satisfy its colonial itch and neither of the Colonial Powers could understand why: all reports by their …er… researchers had been confirming that the region has very nice sandy beaches and even more of a good quality sand and rock inland; it was an act of a pure unselfishness from all of them, especially France which already had been nearby, to make such a sacrifice but the Italians grabbed it and did not even say “grazie” (or whatever it would be in the Italian ).
So, u fortunately, Austria had to watch military and naval developments and to waste money on keeping abreast with them to protect itself from … the Italians.
Besides growing navy, Austria had a big merchant fleet based on Trieste.
Manufacturers based in Austria were looking for
sales markets for their products, and
trading companies were set up that opened up these markets and in return imported goods and raw materials required domestically. So by the late 1990s Austria had the tenth largest
merchant navy inEurope with around 2000 steamships - 200 of them in international ocean shipping - with a total tonnage of around 740,000
GRT.
Inland navigation was also part of the merchant navy, with the
Danube Steamship Company as the most prominent representative. One sixth of the im- and export of Austria was handeled by the merchant navy. For the empire´s industry a far better solution than having to be dependent of Northgerman ports, or worst Italian ports.
There was even passenger ship line AUSTRO-AMERICANA. NYT reported: “
The AUSTRO-AMERICANA liner KAISER FRANZ JOSEPH I came into port yesterday with a large number of passengers, much cargo, and a story of a whale of great proportions which tried to butt the bottom out of the big liner, and died in the attempt. The KAISER FRANZ JOSEPH I was shaken to such an extent that the skipper, all of his junior officers, half of the crew, and scores of the passengers rushed on deck in apprehension. Not until the dead body of the giant mammal was seen floating away to windward did the skipper and his men know what had been under them.”
The reasons allowing the industrial growth were the following:
1) Availability of large reserves of coal, iron, as well as other resources. (By the end of the XIX century, the Czechia and Moravia accounted for 90% of coal production and 82% of brown coal production, more than 90% of steel smelting in the Empire );
2) Convenient location of transport routes and railways;
3) Close proximity to Germany, which was the main consumer of resources and goods of heavy industry, as well as a source of investment and innovation;
4) Availability of highly qualified specialists in this region: Austria was spending about 4-5% of the budget on training engineers and technical designers.
The growth rate was impeded by a shortage of the available natural resources, which had to be imported, and the industry could not survive without the foreign investments: most of the military industry had been controlled by the German investors. OTOH, the oil industry in the Polish Galicia was heavily dependent upon the Austrian capital and machinery. With the old animosity put aside, Hungary was a big source of the raw materials and agricultural products.
After financial crisises of the 1860s and 1870s, situation stabilized and in 1892 country switched to the gold standard. The basis for the stability of the economy was the gold reserve of Austria-Hungary, the volume of which ranked sixth in the world, second only to France, Germany, England, the United States and Russia.
However, the country remained heavily agrarian (more than 50% of the population) , especially in the eastern part, with landownership dominated by the big estates, which were employing the local peasants.
90% of the railroads were state-owned and the Austrian railroad engineers actively participated in the international projects like Eastern Railroad going to Constantinople.
Vienna developed what had previously been the
bastions and
glacis into the
Ringstraße, a new
boulevard surrounding the historical town and a major prestige project. Another major innovation was related to the Danube: its many branches were removed, and a straight course was created away from the city centre. The branch near the central city was made narrower and has been known under the somewhat misleading name
Donaukanal (Danube Canal). By the late 1890s Vienna’s population reached 2,000,000.
It became a center of high culture and of
modernism and a word capital of music. And of course there were famous coffee houses. In general, the Viennese, who mostly lived in tiny, crowded flats, regarded the elegant coffee houses as their "extended living rooms" or second homes where they could meet friends and other people. And eat the pastries…… [4]
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[1] Deputy Prime Minister E. Kvyatkovsky in 1935
[2] OTL high data for 1932-33 and low for 1936 - 38. Most of the numbers are from various periods of the 2nd Republic.
[3] Well, of course, as the “imperial” dynasty House of Osman may disagree but if one counts from the conquest of Constantinople, the Hapsburgs were still beating them by 13 years: 1440 vs. 1453. Anyway, the Ottomans did not count.
[4] They are unbelievable…
) would hardly have anything in common