The Great War was begun as part of a scheme to revitalize the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

It ended with the dissolution of the dual monarchy, and its replacement with separate Austrian and Hungarian states, both of them republics, thus ending a 900-year-old dynasty.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century.

The 20th century. Episode 178, 1919, Austria-Hungary, Part 3.

This is the third episode in our 1919 World Tour series, and like the first two,

we're in Austria-Hungary. And you can bet I'm

hoping this series won't require me to do three episodes each on every single nation in the world.

But, you know, Austria-Hungary is a special case. It isn't every day an empire breaks up on you.

To review, we've already covered the formations of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, as well as the

transfer of sovereignty over Transylvania from Hungary to Romania.

The new nation of Poland and the older nation of Italy, each took control of some formerly

Habsburg territory, but I'm saving

those two countries for future episodes. We'll be talking about Poland in the next episode, more

about that later. What remains of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy for today's episode is Austria

and Hungary themselves.

Hungary, you'll recall, declared the dual monarchy dissolved and went its own way,

following the Aster Revolution on October 31, 1918.

I'll come back to Hungary in a few minutes, but for now, let's focus on Austria.

What is Austria, anyway?

This is actually a complicated question.

The simplest answer is that Austria is what's left of the Sysylathanian half of the former empire after the secession of the Czech and South Slav and Italian-speaking

regions. Or to put it even more simply, it's the German-speaking region of the Austrian half

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