Displacing Empire: Refugee Welfare, National Activism and State Legitimacy in Austria-Hungary in the First World War

Abstract

Up to 2 million civilians in the Austro-Hungarian Empire were internally displaced between 1914 and 1918, the equivalent number of displaced civilians in France for the same period and almost a third of the total displaced in Russia before 1917.¹ This chapter shows how the displacement of Austria-Hungary’s wartime refugees from the eastern and southern peripheries of the empire contributed both to the empire’s collapse and to the legitimacy of post-imperial successor states in East Central Europe. It argues that by creating social and economic categories — nationality, religion and class — the multinational state unwittingly nationalized its own citizens and gave legitimacy to nationalists who sought to claim non-national people for their political projects of liberation from imperial rule. Not only the state and its agencies, but also the various groups and politicians who sought to represent the refugees as co-nationals, each claimed the displaced. International actors after the war also made claims on the displaced as part of their larger humanitarian mission in the region. Therefore, the discourses about and responses to wartime displacement — what Peter Gatrell has called ‘refugeedom’ in the case of Tsarist Russia — were the very process by which the empire itself was displaced and replaced by nationalizing successor states.²