As we in Britain – and it seems more or less everywhere in the ‘free’ world – are finding our civil rights under attack by increasingly authoritarian governments, it is only natural to look for historical and literary models for current times. However, although things are bad they are clearly far from as bad as they were in George Orwell’s Airstrip One or under sundry foreign regimes, past and present. Glib references to Nazism and Stalinism do not cut it. That so many politicians and commentators have recently been prone to spouting the words ‘fascist’ and ‘Nazi’ as soon as leaving the European Union or controlling immigration is suggested has only demonstrated the paucity of their arguments and depths of their ignorance. Similarly, while the meme of ‘Keir Stalin’ can raise a chuckle one really cannot picture even the most devoted Labour apparatchik applauding until he or she faints when the great leader speaks at the party conference. We haven’t gone back to the 1930s – yet.
An analogy that can more profitably be explored is the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, its last half century from 1867-1918, the period that is commonly labelled the ‘Dual Monarchy’. During that period the empire, weakened and crumbling under the pressures of nationalism and socialism – political trends that were alternately and variously oppressed and placated – was held together by expedient rather than coherent policy. It was far better, the monarchy and its supporters thought, to put on a show and paper over the cracks than address the problems that it faced and attempt to solve them. By the 1930s the empire’s failings were a matter of hearsay. Orwell himself used an old and tired car engine as an allegory for its shambolic administration in Coming up for Air, his last novel before the war:
‘When you lift the bonnet and look at the engine it reminds you of the old Austrian Empire, all tied together with bits of string but somehow keeps plugging along.’
Any sound political and administrative structure, it is clear in retrospect, could only be built after the old system had collapsed altogether; and in noticing that we have to face the frightening reality that the changes that swept the monarchy aside certainly didn’t bring about immediate improvements. Once again, seen with hindsight and when contrasted with later governments, the Dual Monarchy can certainly be made to appear a rather benign polity, incompetent and intrinsically corrupt but nevertheless appearing to be at least well meaning. While the contrary evidence is, unhappily, mounting up, I am still inclined to believe that the same can be said about our own government and others we can observe across the aforesaid free world. Despite appearances they are at least well meaning?
Just how bad things had got by its final collapse can be demonstrated by learning what happened to the Dual Monarchy’s people in the course of the First World War. British popular history – before it was turned into a tiresome catalogue of British crimes against the rest of humanity by our ‘progressive’ educationalists – was a little livelier but nearly as myopic as the currently fashionable variant. We therefore came to think of that war as a story of the trenches of the Western Front, Zeppelin bombings, U-boats, women munitions workers and a few other standard tropes. While we might have been aware of the October Revolution in Petrograd we knew little about the titanic struggle that took place well to the east of Ypres and Verdun, a struggle that shattered society throughout Central Europe as well as Russia herself.
The unrestricted U-boat campaign which opened on 1 February 1917 frightened the British government more than any other enemy campaign in the course of the war. Four-fifths of Britain’s staple, wheat, was imported by sea and as the merchant ships were sent to the bottom the granaries emptied, food queues appeared in the cities and towns and then finally, in 1918, rationing had to be introduced. In Austria, by way of contrast, as early as December 1914 bakers were ordered to adulterate wheaten loaves with 30% of alternative starches, starches that included potato meal as well as other cereals such as barley and maize. Vienna’s first food riots broke out on 11 May 1915. After that, things got progressively worse. The 1916 harvest was unusually bad throughout Central Europe. By the winter of 1917-18 malnourishment was rampant throughout the empire. Even the army, which in general was much better provided for than the civilian population, was on desperately short rations, at least when they didn’t fail altogether because of the breakdown of the railway network – which had never been up to the standard needed in any case – and the shortage of draught horses. By the end of the war most of the horses that hadn’t been slaughtered for their meat were little better than skin and bone; in cities, dogs and men did much of the haulage instead. By early 1918:
‘Soldiers at the front received scarcely 100 gm of meat per day – one-fourth of what they had been allotted at the start of the war. In Austria civilians were down to 23 gm of meat per person per day; in Hungary they received about 10 gm more. . . . The consumption of potatoes had fallen to just 70 gm per person per day – compared with 357 in Germany and down from 493 in 1913.’[1]
A 70 gm potato is about the same size as a hen’s egg; that is a medium sized, rather than a large, hen’s egg.
The wave of strikes and mutinies that swept through the empire early in 1918 frightened some in the empire’s leadership, but as in all corrupt, failing, polities a surprisingly large number of the elite were remarkably complacent. All that was needed, they imagined, was stricter repression. General Landwehr von Pragenau, whose Joint Food Committee was – nominally – tasked with evening out food supplies across the empire was more realistic. On 30 April 1918 he seized 2,455 railway wagons laden with Ukrainian grain which were en route to Germany on a convoy of Danube barges. That enraged General Ludendorff, basking in the phoney glory of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Ludendorff was not far from becoming Germany’s military dictator and on the cusp of megalomania. His reaction to Landwehr’s act of piracy was to propose that Germany should declare war on her ally and fight her as well as the Entente powers. An eerie foreshadowing of Hitler in the Chancellery Führerbunker?
Despite a new wave of mutinies breaking out in May the young emperor, Charles I, ordered a major offensive in June 1918. Just how deluded he was is illustrated by the fact that part of his reasoning was that his soldiers might capture some of the large stockpiles of food known to be held behind the Italian front line, and so eat properly for the first time in months. The Second Battle of the Piave River lasted just a week. Both side’s losses were high but the Italian’s were affordable and neither territory, nor food, was gained by either. It was the last Austro-Hungarian offensive of the war. At the Battle of Vittorio Veneto at the end of October the Italians captured nearly half a million men. Firing ceased on the Italian front on 4 November, a week before the Western Front.
Charles I granted self-determination to his people in November but didn’t abdicate. Nevertheless, his reign was effectively over and he fled to Switzerland the following March, guarded for the journey by an escort of British soldiers.
Even before 4 November every vestige of Habsburg authority had collapsed. The rump of what was soon to be established as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia had seceded from the empire on 29 October, while the Battle of Vittorio Veneto was being fought. Even before that, on 18 October, Tomáš Masaryk proclaimed the independence of Czechoslovakia, albeit in Paris rather than Prague. However, reality on the ground wasn’t far behind. Some Czech and Slovak soldiers, ex POWs, were fighting alongside the Italians rather than the Austrians and Hungarians. The first ever RAF bombing raid on Berlin was scheduled for 9 November 1918 but bad weather prevented it from being attempted. It was accepted that the two aeroplanes that had been prepared for the mission wouldn’t be able to return to their base in Norfolk, instead their destination was to be a landing ground in Bohemia, the western, Czech, part of Czechoslovakia. Ironically, while the immediate cause of the war was the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Charles I’s uncle and heir to the Habsburg throne, probably the most important underlying cause for it breaking out at all was the Austro-Hungarian power elite’s hope that it would shore up their fragile and anachronistic empire. War was their last throw. In 1917-19 that royal family went, together with the Romanovs and Hohenzollerns, into history’s capacious dustbin.
Happily, we are not now at war and while we have recently suffered a spate of riots they were cultural-ethnic rather than food related. Again happily, they were nothing like as serious as those that broke out in Vienna in 1914-18. We are surely a very long way from the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Nevertheless, the times are difficult and there are certainly some troubling parallels between the condition of the United Kingdom today and that of the Dual Monarchy in the decades before 1914. A microcosm of that government’s failures is well illustrated by the reference, above, to General Landwehr’s Joint Food Committee, that it was ‘– nominally – tasked with evening out food supplies’: nominally being the key word. It didn’t have any executive authority but was rather instituted to persuade the parts of the empire to ‘share and share alike’. Government and administration was a mish-mash of discordant authorities. The emperor sat on two distinct thrones, as his Austrian crown gave him no authority over Hungary. Some regions were under the local control of more or less popular assemblies; others weren’t.
Hungary was, at least at the outbreak in 1914, the empire’s breadbasket. Her agricultural sector was less efficient than Austria’s or Bohemia’s as her land was worked by self-sufficient peasants rather than market orientated farmers. Even so, the country was a major net exporter of foodstuffs, whereas Austria and Bohemia were drawing in food to fill the larders of their expanding cities. Although hardly to be compared with Germany’s Ruhr triangle, Bohemia could be termed the empire’s industrial powerhouse. So the view from Prague and Brno was that the Czech people were in the empire’s economic vanguard, but were nevertheless in the thrall of a quasi-feudal foreign power. By 1914 the only Czechs who were not nationalists of some kind were placemen, lickspittles and toadies.
March forward The Good Soldier Švejk. Švejk is, of course, as anybody who is familiar with Jaroslav Hašek’s celebrated novel will know, anything but a ‘good’ soldier. He is an indolent fellow who is always looking out for opportunities to snaffle rations and alcohol, to defy the spirit of his orders – frequently by obeying them to the letter – and thus frustrate the army’s destructive purposes. He is by no means wholly selfish, as by his words and actions he encourages and helps others to cheat the system. He is also relentlessly cheerful, most obviously when told to do something especially pointless. Like every good cartoon character he can survive repeated pummellings and bounce back, more or less unscathed. When we first meet him – immediately after the assassination at Sarajevo – we learn that he is making a dishonest living as a dog poacher and faker, having previously served in the army before being dismissed for congenital idiocy.
Obviously anything but an idiot, Švejk is a Czech everyman, downtrodden and oppressed by ‘them’, but surviving unbowed. In the book’s first chapter he is arrested by an undercover policeman for spreading rumours about the assassination. Thrown in a cell at the police headquarters with a number of other ‘politicals’, he tells them that there’s no need to be despondent, the authorities have hauled them in for a good reason:
‘If the times are so dangerous that archdukes get shot, no one should be surprised if he’s carried off to police headquarters. They’re doing all this to make a splash, so that Ferdinand can have some publicity before his funeral.’
While in Britain today you can be arrested for spreading rumours about crimes there is no reason to think that the power elite are in greater physical danger than anybody else, probably less given police priorities. On the other hand our Prime Minister is in danger of ridicule whenever he appears in public. That must be galling, accustomed as he has become to the fawning of journalists. It is only natural that he feels the need to seek the shelter of corporate hospitality at football matches, rather than be made to face the common people’s ire.
The differences are matters of style, not substance. Instead of courtiers dressed in traditional costumes our present rulers only appear before carefully selected journalists armed with media passes, instead of picking up gossip in pubs police spies monitor social media posts. Initially, it may seem good that unlike Bohemia in the early twentieth century no part of the United Kingdom is actually occupied and governed by a foreign power but given the way we are governed – especially in England – it is all too easy to lose sight of that. Our almost universal experience is that state agencies simply do not work. Bureaucracy is sclerotic, appointments are delayed or cancelled with minimal notice, department X can’t get a simple piece of information from office Y. Underlying that the kingdom is far from being united in any true, and healthy, sense. Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales are administered by different executives to England, which despite being much the most populous home country is the only one not to have its own assembly. While there is, at present, no agitation for that to change there is no good reason to dismiss the possibility of it coming about. In 2016 the English were asked their opinion on membership of the European Union. Their verdict so alarmed the UK’s governing elite that they spent the succeeding years doing all they could to avoid putting it into effect, not uncommonly hiding behind the fiction that they didn’t know what ‘leave’ meant, as if they weren’t native English speakers. That elite are generally much happier abroad amongst their fellow leaders than here at home. In 2016 they had a real fright, and it is clear that they will do all they can to avoid entrusting the English with any decision about their own government in the future. Yet if, by way of example, the kingdom’s next government depends on Scottish separatists or political Islamists for its parliamentary majority, it is likely that the English, already dissatisfied, will get very disgruntled indeed.
While Keir Starmer and his Cabinet of entitled cronies are deservedly harvesting their bounteous crop of public contempt, they are far from being innovators. Over recent decades British – and certainly other European – politicians have become decreasingly conscious of what governing a nation comprises. International solutions for international problems – themselves frequently no more than sound bites – are more alluring for them than domestic trivia. Why should they trouble about whether potholes are repaired or osteopathy services work in Middle England when war is raging across the Pontic Steppe and a whole planet’s ecology needs to be saved? For the British the ‘high’ point of that trend was March 2020, when Boris Johnson announced that he was shutting down as much of day to day life as he could get away with, to check the spread of an airborne virus. In the likelihood of that working it was akin to King Canute’s fabled pantomime on the shores of the North Sea, but whereas Canute was demonstrating his pious humility before God Johnson was strutting on the world stage. For him, it was a – fleeting – triumph. For small businesses, for children’s and students’ education, for public health, for the economy and society as a whole it was close to a catastrophe. Was it done, like the Dual Monarchy’s reckless march towards total war, by an uneasy power elite who feared that the peasants had thoughts of revolt? Nothing like a bit of strong, decisive, government to bring them to heel?
No doubt that is taking the analogy too far. However, the enthusiasm with which the parliamentary opposition, the state broadcaster, the dead tree press, the health services and the police gathered into a Gadarene chorus exhorting the people to throw themselves unthinkingly into lockdown surely tells us that something is rotten? Were there no establishment voices championing caution and liberty, and even that old-time concept: common sense? Lockdowns were a far greater, far more damaging, blunder than Trussonomics. Yet to date there have been no apologies, no mea culpa, no punishment for the guilty. Indeed, many of those most guilty – including the previous and current Prime Ministers – have been promoted. Until that appalling episode is examined and exposed, and the truth told, no thinking person can place his or her faith in government, whether the kingdom is united or fragmented.
As a downtrodden Czech, conscripted into a foreign army, Švejk’s response to its demands on him was a healthy one. Does it have any lessons for the people of Britain today? The obvious difficulty is that unlike the British of today he was dealing with people. People, who even if they were only reading from sheets of fatuous instructions, were forced to face the consequences of their own actions.
In the present age the governed don’t enjoy the luxury of meeting with even the most humble of government agents. Hit a problem with HMRC, the DSS, the NHS, the DVLA or whatever, and the chances of the miserable punter actually being able to discuss it with somebody who can and will sort it out is little better than winning the lottery. There is a reason for that. The agencies that direct our lives can only be approached and lobbied online, or just possibly on the telephone. There is little chance of getting through to somebody who can take any kind of decision, still less of somebody who is able to override protocol and correct a blatant folly or injustice. Nobody takes responsibility for anything. That is deliberate. Government, like many public facing businesses such as energy retailers, doesn’t allow its staff to take decisions, lest they have to be disciplined for getting things wrong. As long as the people who suffer in consequence are only the customers – in the case of government’s victims the hoi polloi who are trapped and have nowhere else to go – the system can continue to function. At the top salaries go up, bonuses are paid and pensions protected, regardless of a department’s performance on the ground. It is easier to run a computer program that reports record production than actually count how many tractors are driven off the production line. That might prove embarrassing. Horizon was an object lesson in how modern British government works.
There are certainly too many parallels between Britain today and the Dual Monarchy’s last fifty years for our comfort but Švejk’s method of resistance is not open to us. The mills of British state power grind too small. Yet he teaches us one important lesson. Whether our leaders are graciously accepting the disinterested homage of wealthy patrons to beautify the Downing Street flat as a Second Empire boudoir, or their own faces with spectacles that ‘exude effortless sophistication and contemporary flair’, we can at least join him in laughing at them. Whatever else, don’t let the buggers get you down!
[1] Holger H Herwig. The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914-1918, p 361.
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Neil Datson is the author of The British Air Power Delusion 1906-1941, the first history to explain and detail why and how the establishment of the Royal Air Force in 1918 weakened, rather than strengthened, British defence.