OKEY - A Trio of Hungarian Balkanists

A Trio of Hungarian Balkanists: Béni Kállay, István Burián and Lajos Thallóczy in the Age
of High Nationalism
Author(s): Robin Okey
Source: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 80, No. 2 (Apr., 2002), pp. 234-266
Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London,
School of Slavonic and East European Studies
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4213438
Accessed: 25-11-2017 10:13 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Modern Humanities Research Association, University College London, School of

Slavonic and East European Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to The Slavonic and East European Review
This content downloaded from 137.111.162.20 on Sat, 25 Nov 2017 10:13:51 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
SEER, Vol. 8o, No. 2, April 2002
A Trio of Hungarian Balkanists:

Beni KMalay, Istv'an Burian and
Lajos Thalloczy in the Age of High
Nationalism
ROBIN OKEY
ONE of the least attractive products of East European nationalism,

open enmity apart, is the lack of interest individual nations display in
each other. The respective intelligentsias have been much more
familiar with west European cultures than with their neighbours', and
figures who concerned themselves with the latter have regularly been
viewed with suspicion, as potential sellers out of the national cause. Yet,
ironically, the activities of these same individuals can often be seen to
have been skewed by their patriotic preoccupations, and their knowl-
edge of neighbouring societies to have been put to manipulative
purposes, in the interests of hegemonic pretensions revealed, in
hindsight, to be illusory or worse. Examples can be found in the history
of German-Slav or Serb-Croat intellectual relations, as also in the work
of Russian scholars. This article deals with a Hungarian example of the
genre, which does not merit the odium of some of the instances just
mentioned, but offers a way into the intellectual mind-set of the age of
high nationalism, exposing some of the temptations and even some of
the pathos of an ultimately unsuccessful nationalism.
Hungary in the later nineteenth century fulfilled all the conditions
for an emerging nationalism. Major advances in communications,
economic growth and popular literacy transformed the backward
feudal society Istvan Szechenyi had deplored, making Budapest by
1914 a city of a million inhabitants, dwarfing Belgrade, Zagreb or
Sofia. By an easily explicable paradox, 'modernization' provided the
sinews whereby an emerging intelligentsia felt encouraged to revive
purported past greatness, matching the national self-assertiveness of
larger nations to the west. The national movement against Habsburg
absolutism and, from i867, self-government under the Austro-Hung-
arian Compromise provided the political framework for the develop-
ment of such perspectives, which could build on Hungarian traditions
as a major Balkan player before the eclipse of the medieval state on the
Robin Okey is Reader in History at the University of Warwick.
A TRIO OF HUNGARIAN BALKANISTS 235
field of Moh'acs in I526. Austria-Hungary's occupation and later

annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (i 878/I908) was a further factor,
which was central to the careers of the three scholar-officials reviewed
below. 1
Beni Kallay, Istv'an Buri'an and Lajos Thalloczy were between them
active from the final phase of European liberal nationalism in the i 86os
to what is called here the 'high nationalism' that developed in the
decades before the First World War.2 All belonged to what was then
and remains the small school of Hungarian Balkanists. That there
should be such a school is not surprising, bearing in mind that from th
start of the twelfth century until I9I8 the Croatian kingdom was
incorporated into the wider realm of the Hungarian Crown and that
medieval Hungary laid claim to Bosnia and Dalmatia and led resistance
to fifteenth-century Turkish Balkan conquest. The exiled Kossuth
himself, in his plans for a Danubian confederation, had recognized that
in an age of awakening nationalisms enlightened self-interest should
lead the Magyars to seek a relationship with similarly-sized South Slav
and Romanian neighbours.3 That the school was small was due partly
to I 50 years of intervening Turkish occupation, overlaying medieval
memories, but also to the Hungarian political class's westward-looking
perspective and absorption in relations with Vienna. Hungarians with
Balkan interests have often tended to be of South Slav origin
themselves, like the bibliographer of Serb and Croat historiography,
Ede Margalits (I849-1940), or, later, the historian of Serb Orthodoxy,
Laszlo Hadrovics (i 9' o-). Fewer, and facing an uphill struggle to
influence their indifferent countrymen, have been those Hungarians
drawn to South Slav issues by their belief in the political importance of
Balkan links for their fatherland.
The three subjects of this article belonged to this latter group: none
had South Slav antecedents, except for Serbian ancestry on Kallay's
mother's side, too remote to provide a personal motivation. Kallay and
Buri'an were members of the Hungarian middle nobility, patriots but
supporters of the Habsburg connection. They shared, if in somewhat
different ways, the mix of liberal and conservative values this stratum
had inherited from the Reform Era of I825-48, conditioned by the
I There is no satisfactory monograph on Hungarian nationalism in this period. See

G. Kem6ny (ed.), Iratok a nemzetisegi kerdes tdrtMnetMhez Magyarorszagon a dualizmus kordban
I867-I9i8, 7 vols, Budapest, I952-99; and F. Poloskei, 'Nacionalismus a dualizmus
koraban', in A magyar nacionalismus kialakuldsa e's tdrteete, Budapest, I 964, pp. I 65-86.
2 In this article 'high nationalism' is used with intent to evoke the widespread nationalist
atmosphere of pre-i 914 Europe without implying the specific ideological traits associated
with the term 'integral nationalism'. It is hoped that it has self-explanatory connotations
making it more accessible than an older distinction between the 'liberal nationalism' of the
mid-nineteenth century and the harder-nosed 'national liberalism' which succeeded it.
I E. Kovacs (ed.), Magyarorszag tdrtenete I848-I890, 2 vols, Budapest I 987, 1, pp. 709-13.
236 ROBIN OKEY
need to reform the debilitating feudal order but also to maintain the
position of the Magyar minority and its traditional elite in the state. As
successive Austro-Hungarian Joint Finance Ministers, based in Vienna
and responsible for the administration of Habsburg-occupied Bosnia-
Herzegovina, they were basically seen as outsiders by their countrymen
and doubly so, because of their perceived allegiance to 'Vienna' and
their South Slav concerns. Hence the oblivion which has overtaken
them in Hungarian historical memory. The capacious catalogue of
periodical articles in the Hungarian National Library contains only
one entry for Burian and of the two short pieces for Kallay published
since I945, one is entitled 'A Forgotten Hungarian Statesman' and the
other in the article's sub-title mistakes his Christian name.4
Thall6czy has come off better in this respect, for though of lower
rank and remaining as much scholar as bureaucrat, his role as focal
point of Hungarian social life in Vienna together with his writings
helped account for a higher subsequent profile. Unlike the other two,
he was of non-noble background, from a Germanized family. It is his
close links with the others which justifies taking the three together, for
Kallay and Burian had no significant personal ties. Thalloczy's
personality was both more open and more abrasive than that of the two
rather withdrawn noblemen. In him, as youngest of the three, can be
seen perhaps most bleakly the acceptance of competing national
egoisms that came to replace the mid-nineteenth century's more
optimistic view of inter-ethnic relations, infused as it was by a libera
nationalism. As the perennial observer, Thalloczy provides the fullest,
but also the most pessimistic, commentary on the difficulties confront-
ing Hungarian-minded Habsburg officials in the attempt to make the
Balkans a source of strength rather than of threat for their dual loyalty.
Like Kallay and Burian, while having wide-ranging Balkan interests,
Thalloczy's career path drew him to Bosnia, the securing of which,
after its occupation in I878, became a central aim of Austro-Hungarian
Balkan policy. In this triply divided land (43 per cent Orthodox, 38 per
cent Muslim and I8 per cent Catholic in I879), the Serb Orthodox
community was not only the largest but the most nationally consciou
Bosnia had been the chief object of the Serbian irredentist programme
first formulated in Ilija Garasanin's famous Plan of I844.5 Bosnia
therefore became the land about which relations with the Serbs, the
most important Balkan nation from both Habsburg and Hungarian
standpoints, turned. It will feature prominently in what follows.
4 I. Nemeskurty, 'Egy elfelejtetett magyar allamferfi. Kallay Beni', Ne~pszabadsdg, I987,

nos. I4, i6; G. Bela Nemeth, 'Realpolitikus es utopista egy szemelyben. Kallay Bertalan
[sic] elmeeti irasai', Kritika, I9, I990, 3, pp. 20-23.
3 M. Ekmeci, 'Nacionalna politika Srbije prema Bosni i Hercegovini i agrarno pitanje
I 844-75', Godis&njak istorjskog druOtva Bosne i Hercegovine, I 0, I 959, pp. I 97-2 1 9.
I
Beni (Benjamin von) Kallay (I839-1903) was the star of the three in
the eyes of contemporaries.6 Born into a relatively wealthy noble
family, the son of a county administrator who died young and a spirited
mother who gave him a forward-looking education, he mastered early
several languages, including Turkish, translated a Greek play at fifteen
and by the time of his appointment as consul-general in Belgrade at the
age of only twenty-nine had toured western Europe, published his
translation of John Stuart Mill's On Freedom, stood (unsuccessfully) for
parliament and acquired a specialist knowledge of Serbian language
and culture. After leaving his Belgrade post in I 875, he became briefly
an MP and party journal editor, published his acclaimed History of the
Serbs (i877), and re-entered the diplomatic service as Austrian plenipo-
tentiary in the East Rumelian negotiations at Plovdiv (i878-79), then
Sektionschef in the foreign ministry, before his appointment as Joint
Finance Minister with responsibility for Bosnia in I882, a post he held
till his death. If the oft-predicted passage to the Ballhausplatz did not
follow, Kallay retained for his acquaintances a mystique of brilliance
and administrative virtuosity, devoted to making backward Bosnia a
'model' land. Reading Thalloczy's I909 memorial address on him, the
former Croatian Ban and later Prime Minister, Khuen-Hedervary, had
Kallay's 'noble form' constantly before his eyes; for the Austrian liberal
Eduard Suess he was 'one of the most successful living statesman'; the
emperor to his widow recalled his 'inextinguishable merits'.7
At first view it is particularly Kallay's contradictory stances to the
Serbs and the Bosnian question which concern this discussion, for they
are pivotal to his understanding of (Austro-) Hungarian Balkan interests
as a whole. Having begun his career as consul-general in Belgrade
pressing for Serbia's acquisition of Bosnia, Kallay ended it as the
committed opponent both of Bosnian Serb nationalism and any
Bosnian links with Belgrade. The author of what was seen as a
sympathetic view of Serbian history, he became so distrusted by Serbs
as to be accused, as Bosnian-Herzegovinian administrator, of banning
his own book.8 Serbian historiography resolved the contradiction by
denying the Serbophilia of the young Kallay in the first place: the
scheme for a Serbian Bosnia and associated calls for a special
Hungarian-Serb relationship, concerted by Kallay with his patron, the
6 For Kallay's career, see L. Thall6czy's memorial lecture, 'KAllay Beni emlekezete', in
B. KAllay, A szerbfelkels tdrtenete i807-io, ed. L. Thall6czy, 2 vols, Budapest, I909, 2,
pp. 346-76 (hereafter, Szerbfelkeles).
Orszagos Sz6chenyi Konyvtar, Kezirattar (SzKK), Fond XI/540, Khuen-Hedervary
to Thall6czy, 6 May I 909; OrszAgos LeveltAr (OL), P 344, Suess to Kallay, I 2 June I 899;
Franz Joseph to Mme. KAllay, 31 May I 9 I 0.
8 V. Bogicevic, 'Da li je KAllay zabranio svoju Istor'ju Srba na podrucju Bosne', GodiAnjak
Istorijskog dru?tva Bosne i Hercegovine, 7, I955, pp. 205-08, which refutes the allegations.
238 ROBIN OKEY
Hungarian Prime Minister Gyula Andrassy, were a mere ruse cooked

up with the Monarchy's foreign minister, Friedrich von Beust, to
waylay Serb and Yugoslav aspirations.9 More recent studies, the edition
of Kallay's Belgrade diary by Andrija Radenic and the theses of Ian
Armour and Imre Ress, however, accept the sincerity of the 'Bosnian
scheme' and of early dualist Hungary's distinctive Serbophile course.10
The paradox is restored. Kallay's seeming change of front towards the
Serbs remains one of the most signal examples of the capricious inter-
relationship of national egos in the age of nationalism. How is it to be
explained?
The roots of apparent contradiction lie in Hungary's special
circumstances in Kallay's youth.1' He matured at a climacteric point
of European liberalism, when the legacy of I849, which had seen his
Hungarian homeland conquered and several relatives punished,
seemed about to be overcome. The youngster who was briefly tutored
by the radical peasant tribune Mih'aly Tancsics, then by a man wedded
to many of Tancsics's ideas who took him on a study tour in I 85 I -52,
emphasizing sites of significance in the recent national struggle, could
hardly become other than a keen Magyar. Later assertions of Austro-
German colleagues such as that Kallay was a 'good, patriotic,
nationally-minded Hungarian' who loved 'his Hungary' before all were
thus not mere patronizing banalities.'2 Ideas of development and civil
society, in which national entities would achieve a freer and more
mature relationship with each other were in the air; they can be seen
underpinning Daniel O'Connell's Home Rule movement in Ireland
and British policy to Mehemet Ali's Egypt, as well as the 'spring-time
of the peoples' in I848. While German liberal nationalists tended to
become more sceptical of such notions after the revolutionary debacle,
most Hungarian leaders concluded from earlier failure that they would
have to conciliate the Slavs and Romanians who had turned on them
in the anti-Habsburg revolution. The change of heart was reciprocated,
at least by Habsburg South Slavs, who under Bishop Strossmayer for
9 For example, G. Jaksic and V. Vuckovic, Spoljna politika Srbije za vlade kneza Miha
Belgrade, I963, pp. 463-64; V. Krestic, Hrvatsko-ugarska nagodba, Belgrade, I969,
pp. 376-77 (hereafter, Krestic). See also A. Lebl for the view that Kallay's A szerbek tdrte'nete
(Budapest, i877) was no less anti-Serb than the posthumously published Szerb felkelis:
A. Lebl, 'Shvatanje B. Kalaja o prvom srpskom ustanku', Zbornik Matice srpske, 7, 1955,
pp. 86-I05.
10 A. Radenic (ed.), Dnevnik Benjamina Kalaja i868-75, Belgrade, I976 (hereafter, Dnevnik
Kalaja); I. Ress, Kdllay Beni belgradi diplomaciai mu'kode'se 1868-71 kdzdtt, Budapest PhD, 1993
(hereafter, Kellay); I. D. Armour, Austro-Hungarian Policy towards Serbia i867-7I, with special
reference to Benjamin Kdllay, London PhD, I 994, which also deals thoroughly with Andrassy's
role in the Bosnian scheme (hereafter, Austro-Hungarian Policg).
For Kallay's life until his appointment to Belgrade, see Kcllay, pp. 96- I 26.
12 G. Steinbach, Erinnerungen an Benjamin von Kallay, Vienna, 1903, reprinted from
Steinbach's obituary in the Neue Freie Presse after Kallay's death on I 3 July 1903, pp. I 0, I 3.
the Croats and Svetozar Miletic for the Hungarian Serbs sided with
Magyar liberal nationalists against Viennese centralism in the early
i 86os.
It was in this atmosphere that Kallay and his young associates
became convinced of the importance of the non-Magyars in the
achievement of Hungarian national goals. His studies of Serbo-Croat
under the Pest university professor, F. Josef, a journalistic advocate o
Hungarian-South Slav rapprochement, together with the logic of South
Slav numerical and military power in the region, helped make the
Serbs the particular people with which the ambitious young man
became involved. The young Kallay shared Hungarian liberals'
common fear of Germanophone centralism and wish to ward it off
through an alliance of smaller nations. He continued to attend cultural
gatherings of the Pest Serb community even after tensions over dawning
Dualism kept more prominent Hungarian figures like Eotvos and
Andrassy away. The link between his Serbian concerns and his desire
to preserve Magyar interests is clear from his i 865 article in Hon,
commenting on the Hungarian Serb Milos Popovic's Magyar-language
work, 'The Serb position in Hungary'. Approving Popovic's acceptance
of the Hungarian state idea (but not his call for an institutional status
for Hungarian Serbs), he advocated mother tongue education and the
right to official use of Serbian in Serb-majority counties, on the
assumption that the civilizational development of Serbs thereby
achieved would enable them to participate harmoniously in the wider
Hungarian state-community.13 Kallay's advocacy of the large state
also, of course, legitimized Hungarians' own acceptance of the
Habsburg monarchy. The assumption that in a modern, advanced
environment social and ethnic relations would necessarily become
more harmonious was crucial to liberal nationalist dreams. It appears
that the young K'allay held it.
Of course, the pragmatic considerations in Kallay's Serbophilia are
transparent. Early Dualist Hungary, in which Magyars were just 40 per
cent of the population, remained potentially fragile in a zone of many
national irredenta, threatened particularly by a possible link-up of the
Serb minority of southern Hungary, Strossmayer's anti-Dualist Croats,
Military Frontier elements and Belgrade, with whom Strossmayer had
contacts aiming at a possible 'Yugoslav' entity. The Omladina move-
ment, with its propaganda of pan-Serbian rapprochement was at its height
and Prince Mihailo Obrenovic of Serbia (i 86o-68) had become
involved in schemes with Greeks, Bulgarians and Montenegrins with a
13 KWllay, pp. I 03-o6.
240 ROBIN OKEY
view to a Balkan rising and war with Turkey. 14 In these circumstances,

sponsoring Serbia's peaceful acquisition of Bosnia (through agreement
with the Turks), Kallay's 'grand design' when appointed to Belgrade in
i868, appeared to meet all goals of a Hungarian Balkan policy. It
would isolate Hungarian Serb radicals, divide Serbs and Croats-
since the latter too claimed Bosnia and draw autonomous Serbia
into a Hungarian sphere of interest. But that the scheme had not just a
tactical, but also an ideological and even an emotional appeal for
K'allay receives abundant confirmation from his Belgrade diary. There
he continually discusses his hopes for a deal with Serbia over Bosnia
and makes plain he was disguising his Hungarocentric motives from
Beust; the interest of a Slav-glutted Hungary did not lie in the Bosnian
annexation plans of the Vienna 'military party'.'5 The diary's very tone
suggests genuine enthusiasm; witness the response to Serbian regency
member Milivoj Blaznavac's talk of a future league of Slavs, Magyars,
Greeks and Romanians under free institutions in I 868 'my favourite
ideas of old! [... .] A great Danubian confederation on democratic
foundations uniting different but roughly equally numerous nations,
each of which has cause to fear that external powers will repress its
nationality and individuality'.'6 There is evidence, too, that Kallay's
attitude to Serbia had more than a merely regional/tactical underpin-
ning, but was part of a wider strategy towards non-Russian Slavs. In an
article in the Pest Reform of August I 87 i he tried to assuage Hungarian
fears of the semi-federalist approach of the Cisleithanian Hohenwart-
Schaffle government to Czech aspirations, arguing that they were
voiced, like Hungary's, within a territorial-political framework (Bohe-
mia) rather than an ethnic one. Panslavism, in this view, was an unreal
bogey because of the intense particularism of the Slav peoples, and the
real problem, Panrussianism, could be best solved by encouraging
other Slav peoples' autonomous development. 'I
Linked with Kallay's patriotic and ideological assumptions was a
final set of factors which help explain perhaps the most puzzling aspect
of his early Serbophilia. The puzzle is the sheer implausibility, in
hindsight, of the Bosnian scheme. How could Kallay have seriously
hoped to broker Serbia a strategy which conflicted with Vienna's long-
standing support for Turkish integrity, which Beust had specifically
ruled out in his instructions?'8 The heady elan of the age, a sense of the
14 For Hungarian-South Slav relations in the i 86os, see H. Haselsteiner, Die Serben Ungarns
und der osterreichisch-ungarische Ausgleich, Vienna, C976; N. Petrovic (ed.), Svetozar Mi1etic
Narodna stranka. Grada i860-i885, 2 vols, Sremski Karlovci, I 968-69; Krestic.
15 For example, DnevnikKalaja, pp. 72, 73, 8o (8, io and 23 August i868).
16 Ibid., p. 44 (entry for 26 June i868).
17 Reform article reproduced in ibid., pp. 756-68.
18 ldllay, pp. 263, 265.
A TRIO OF HUNGARIAN BALKANISTS 24I
avenues opened up for Hungary by Dualism and the ambition of

Kallay and Andrassy combine to offer clues. It seems the charismatic
Andrassy, whose charm helped make Empress Elizabeth a life-long
Magyarophile, hoped to overcome Beust's resistance through his
influence with Franz Joseph, and Turkey's by convincing her that the
Monarchy could only offer her defence against Russia if relieved,
through the Serbian deal, of the burden of guarding the Balkan front.'9
Kallay noted in i868 the Ballhausplatz personnel director's view that
henceforth no one would be able to get on in the Orient without
knowing Hungarian.20 It was no doubt under the influence of Andrassy,
who exchanged the Hungarian premiership for the Ballhausplatz in
I87I, that Kallay began to formulate the doctrine which Thalloczy
later called Kallayism: Hungarian control of the foreign ministry,
Hungarian economic and cultural help for Balkan states in their self-
assertion, and through Hungary's great power stance in the East her
ability to play the leading role among the Monarchy's peoples.2'
Underpinning these expansive goals, finally, as Kallay's Belgrade
diary shows, was the personal ambition of someone confident of high
abilities. This was, after all, the man who confided to himself at the end
of an affair: 'I do not know how to love, I can, therefore, only marry a
woman who can help me in my ambitious plans. I have no other goal,
no other thought, nor can have, than to satisfy my ambitions [... .] But
I do not abandon the hope that one day I shall rule over a people.'22
Kallay's career was propelled by interrelated intellectual and personal
drives. Many years later, in praising the Pester Lloyd editor Max Falk for
his 'practical idealism' and espousal of the 'great ideas moving the
world' in the interests of progress -which won even opportunists'
respect because of the human soul's deep-seated need for idealism-
he surely betrayed his own politico-philosophical convictions.23 The
well-shielded inner 'idealism', to cite Thalloczy's memorial lecture,24
was combined with an urge to fulfilment in action which in practice
often expressed itself in bold, cold, not to say cynical calculation. The
combination was an uneasy one. Thus in his own memorial lecture on
Andrassy in I89I Kallay claimed that Andrassy's innermost thought
was to equate Hungary's interests with the fight for the sacred interests
of mankind, and promptly followed it with the statement that 'the only
19 Austro-Hungarian Polic), pp. 48-49 (Beust); Dnevnik Kalaja, p. 3 I 6 (29 July I 870: Turkey).
Kallay was told in Vienna that Andrassy's influence exceeded Beust's (Dnevnik Kalaja, p. 68:
4 August i868).
20 Dnevnik Kalaja, p. 8 i (25 August i 868).
21 M. Tomory, 7hallczy Lajos es a Ba1kankerdes, Budapest PhD, I978, p. I07 (hereafte
Tomory).
22 Dnevnik Kalaja, p. I 75 (entry for 29 April I 869).
23 SzKK, Fond IV/442, Kallay to Falk, 20 December I 892.
24 Thall6czy, 'Kallay' in SzerbfelkelMs, p. 372.
242 ROBIN OKEY
object of his ideal was the welfare of our nation'.25 The age of
nationalism is full of such inconsequentialities.
In the event, Andrassy's interest in the Bosnian project was more
intermittent than his subordinate's, coming out particularly when the
prospect of war with Russia made it desirable to have Serbia on side.26
Only when the Hungarian judiciary failed to deliver the conviction of
the dynastic rival, Petar Karadordevic, for Prince Mihailo's murder,
which Kallay had promised, and the Regency turned decisively towards
Russia in autumn I 87 I, did the Bosnian option, however, finally
disappear from the diplomatic scene, and with it Kallay's Serbophile
course. Wider events steadily undermined its rationale. Ideas of
Hungaro-Serb cooperation in common defence against an overween-
ing Vienna lost force for both sides as it gradually became clear that
defeat by Prussia in i 866 and the solidifying Dualist Compromise had
definitively destroyed Habsburg power to lead Germandom in south-
east Europe.27 With Andrassy's subsequent departure to the Ballhaus-
platz, Hungary was now committed to the role of junior partner in a
German-led central Europe, while Serb nationalists looked to Russia,
all Hungarians' bugbear. In what remained of Kallay's Belgrade
sojourn he opposed Serbia's claims even to border rectifications in
Bosnia, withdrew support for the passage of an international Balkan
railway through Serbia and urged an Austro-Hungarian boycott of
Serbian livestock exports.28
That for a period, however, a Hungaro-Serbian rapprochement had
been central to his thinking seems undeniable. Himself a Serb, Radenic
counters instances of Andrassy or K'allay negating Serbian aspirations
even at this time by drawing a distinction between momentary
eruptions of prejudice, or even half-suppressed arrierepensees relating to
the future, and the basic policy of rational Hungarian self-interest in
the late I 86os, which indicated a genuine understanding with Serbia at
that time along the general lines suggested above.29 This is plausible.
But the limitations of the liberal element seen by Hungarian historians
in Andriassy's and Kallay's initial Serbophile course should be clear.
Like most Hungarian noble liberalism it amounted essentially to a
distrust of Habsburg and Russian absolutism, and did not take the
25 Graf Julius Andrassy, Gedenkrede gehalten in der feierlichen Jahressitzung der ungarische
Akademie der Wissenschaften, Budapest, I 89 I, pp. 3-4. The shrewd Thall6czy objected on his
copy of the Hungarian original that Andrassy's liberalism was not European; he was 'an
enlightened Magyar magnate': SzKK, Fol. Hung I 733.
26 Dnevnik Kalaja, p. xvii. For Kallay reassuring Andrassy that self-interest would stop
Serbia from double-crossing the Monarchy, see ibid., p. I O I (I 5 October, i 868).
27 Kdllay,p. 241.
28 For example, Dnevnik Kalaja, pp. 445-46, 450.
29 Ibid., p. i8. For Radenic on Kallay's letter to Andrassy of 3I May i868, which said
Bosnia one day would be Austro-Hungarian, see ibid., p. 66i.
solidarity of small nations beyond the point of Hungarian self-interest.

Letting Serbia have Bosnia was intended to preoccupy her with her
new acquisition and inflame Serb-Croat relations; Kallay openly
threatened Serbian leaders with a Hungarian switch to support a
Croatian Bosnia.30 Radenic's desire to counter conventional Serb
accusations makes him a little indulgent towards Kallay's patent
manipulativeness, his high-handed unscrupulousness (witness the
unabashed engagement in a plot to murder the Hungarian Serb leader
Svetozar Miletic) and the positive relish with which he recognized that
both he and Blaznavac sought to use Hungaro-Serb friendship to
hegemonize the other.3' Additionally, Kallay's hope that Strossmayer's
National Party in Croatia could be bribed into cooperation with
Budapest is bizarre.32
In general, Kallay's early Belgrade years and the Bosnian strategy he
then espoused reveal dubious traits that were to remain central to his
career. They showed the tendency of the intellectual in politics to
rigidity in pursuit of what he held to be a logically conceived position,
and the delight, not unrelated perhaps, in the complications and secret
subterfuges of the 'Great Game'. The basic convictions of the younger
Kallay -a liberal-related belief in the irresistibility of what might now
be called 'modernization'; determination that the Hungarian state
should survive as a modern 'civil society' incorporating 'particularist'
Slavs; and a sense of the importance of Hungarian-South Slav relations
to this end were those, too, of the later Bosnian 'King'. What
changed was optimism about the chances of cooperative relations
between Hungarians and their neighbours.
Seven years passed before Kallay returned permanently to the
Balkan stage. The temperamental loner, he entered Hungarian party
politics in the mid-i87os not through the ruling Liberal Party, but
Baron Szennyei's conservative grouping, in whose paper Kelet JWpe
(People of the East) and his parliamentary speeches he abjured the
Hungarian public's support for theocratic, unmodern Turkey in the
Balkan crisis of I875-78. His History of the Serbs (i877) heaped praise on
the progressive Joseph II, hardly a Hungarian icon. The book still
sketched appreciatively the role of folk poetry in the maintenance of
30 Ibid., p. ioi (I5 October i868: Serb preoccupations); p. i i6 (i9 November i868:
encouraging Serb-Croat discord); p. 83 (I September i 868: threat to the Serbian politician
Jovan Ristic). That Kallay also thought constitutionalism would make Serbia less able to
pursue vigorous nationalism abroad (ibid., pp. 664, 675: letter to Andrassy, 22 June i868;
despatch to Beust, i o August i868) shows him less perspicuous than Ristic in this regard:
ibid., p. 92.
3' Ibid., p. 665 (Miletic); pp. 44-45 (Blaznavac). Ian Armour is sterner on Kallay's
dubious political morality, for example on the Karadordevid trial (see Austro-Hungarian
Policy, ch. 4).
32 Dnevnik Kalaja, p. 422 (28 November I87 I).
244 ROBIN OKEY
Serb national consciousness but also suggested that it was not so much
Serb patriotism as the Ottoman empire's lack of assimilative power
which had ensured Serb survival.33 This evaluation was not new. As
consul-general he had reported:
The Serbs are indeed an energetic people, endowed by nature with much
healthy understanding, but they stand at a very low level of civilization
[.. .] The people themselves feel the need for tutelage and authority, and
gladly obey the government when this is in the position to win itself general
obedience.34
That tutelage by the Monarchy would have greater assimilative

power was implicit here. But the underlying Hungarian motif in this
position came out with continued force in the lecture Kallay gave the
Hungarian Academy of Sciences in I883 on 'Hungary on the Borders
of East and West' shortly after taking office as Joint Finance Minister.
To the unbridled individualism of the East, which prevented any social
forms but despotism and the unlimited domination of one nation over
another, he opposed the Recltsstaat tradition of the Roman West, in
which common citizenship enabled the growth of stable multi-ethnic
polities. Hungary, which had failed to assimilate its inhabitants
linguistically (an oriental trait) but had succeeded in creating a political
nation (a western trait) was called to mediate between the two
traditions.35
The main lines of Kallay's Bosnian administration clearly relate to
these notions. Foremost was its accommodation to western norms of
civil society, mediated by the Monarchy, whose model administration
in Bosnia was to buttress its hegemonic role in the wider Balkans. This
required the province's isolation from the fissiparious tendencies of
South Slav nationalism, especially of the essentially oriental Serbs
though Kallay was still considered a Serbophile in Budapest circles.36
The cornerstone of this policy externally was the Austro-Serbian secret
treaty of i88i, whose architect Kallay was, which obliged Serbia to
renounce ambitions to Bosnia and consult the Monarchy on foreign
political questions.37 Internally, the links of Bosnian Orthodox and
Muslim religious leaders with the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the
3 B. Kallay, Geschichte der Serben, tr. by J. H. Schwicker, Budapest, i878, pp. 267-68,
476-78.
34 Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv (HHStA), Politisches Archiv XXXVIII/ i83: Kallay to
Beust, 26July I869.
35 B. von Kallay, 'Ungarn an den Grenzen des Orients und des Occidents', Ungarische
Revue, 2, I883, pp. 428-89.
36 Tomory, p. 94. Thall6czy ironized that this was because he knew Serbian and Russian.
Kallay did appoint a Hungarian Serb landowner, Baron Fedor Nikolic, as Civil Adlatus in
Sarajevo (I882-86). But as a member of the Hungarian establishment and anyway
something of a cypher, Nikolic symbolized the limits of Kallay's view of Serbophilia.
3' F. Hauptmann, 'Osterreich-Ungarns Werben um Serbien I879-I88I', Mitteilungen des
Osterreichischen Staatsarchivs, 5, 1952, pp. 5-149.
Sheikh-ul-Islam respectively in Constantinople were zealously weak-

ened, with regular greasing of palms in the former case.38 Isolation was
also required from Austria and Hungary themselves, which by an I 88o
law had a right to consultation on all significant Bosnian issues. True to
the paradoxical spirit of the age of imperialism, the self-consciously
lonely upholders of patriotic civilizing missions and Kallay had
admirers in British-administered Egypt and French Algeria did not
want the captious opinions of their home peoples getting in the way of
their proconsular duties. In the context of the quarrelsome politics of
Dualism, this made some sense and Kiallay long succeeded in making
the I 88o law in many fields virtually a dead-letter. Thus a proposal by
the Hungarian minister of culture in I893 to remind K'allay of
Hungary's role the issue was the appointment of Bosnian Orthodox
bishops was annotated by the prime minister 'neither necessary, nor
opportune'.39 Despite this (provisional) acquiescence, such a state of
affairs hardly helped Kallay's rapport with his home people and its
media at large. However, he used the power at his disposal to suppress
previously endemic brigandage and launch an economic moderniza-
tion process, which, with the help of prestige projects (the Sarajevo
archaeological congress in I 893; a literary review J\lada with pan-
Balkan pretensions; the Ilidze hotel complex), helped win him by the
I 8gos a European reputation as a master-statesman.40
As in Belgrade, Kallay had a strategic vision. Known to historians as
the concept of Bosnian nationhood, it played Christian nationalists off
against the Muslim aristocracy, purportedly sprung from the nobility
of medieval Bosnia, who had converted to retain their land.41 As
Thalloczy later represented Kallay's views:
He believed firmly in the historical separate identity of Bosnia, which until
the fifteenth century had formed quite a distinctive entity in the Western
Balkans [...] If then, he used to conclude, the wakening of the historical
spirit and the old Bosnian self-consciousness were possible [. . .] and if in
the not too distant future a conservative Bosnian national character could
develop and differentiate itself from that of Croat and Serb, then the basis
38 P. Vrankic, Religion und Politik in Bosnien und der Herzegowina (1878-i9i8), Paderborn,
1998, chs. 3, 5.
39 OL, Miniszterelnokseg (Prime Ministerial Papers), 240/ I893: Wekerle's comment on
Csaky's letter of 17 January I 893.
40 For a detailed study of Killay's regime, T. Kraljacic, Kalajev re&zm u Bosni i882-I 03,
Sarajevo, I987. See also E. Redzk, 'Kallays bosnische Politik. Kallays Politik uber die
"bosnische" Nation', Osterreichische Osthefte, 5, I965, pp. 367-79.
41 The idea of the lineal descent of the Bosnian Muslim aristocracy from leaders of the
medieval 'Bosnian Church', the mysterious 'Bogumils', has undergone substantial revision.
See S. M. Dzaja, Konfessionalitdt undNAationalitdt Bosniens und der Herzegowina. Voremanzipatorische
Phase I463-i804, Munich, I984, ch. 2.
246 ROBIN OKEY
of all the fanciful dreams, whether Pan-Croat or Pan-Serb, would be

removed.42
Hindsight should give Kallay credit for recognizing that Bosnia

could not be governed by the precepts of Serb and Croat nationalism.
In his own day was there not, however, as in the 'Bosnian scheme',
something too speculative in positing an over-arching Bosnian ethnicity
on medieval survivals? In the face of ineluctably growing nationalism,
Kallay's negation of Serb and Croat entities in Bosnia was a dogmatic
espousal of an ultimately untenable position. The most excoriated
aspect of the Bosnianizing policy, the enforcement of the term 'Bosnian'
for the local language, could be seen as a pragmatic solution to a real
problem of nomenclature in a pre-'Serbo-Croat' age, but Kallay gave
it a historical dimension heavily dependent on a view of the Muslim
begs as the real bearers of Bosnian consciousness. However, gestures
like the publication of Muslim folk-songs and the Muslim-edited weekly
Bosnjak, together with the representational precedence of Muslims as
mayors, were weakened by the undermining of other Muslim groups,
like artisans, by Austrian competition. Nor did the semi-feudal land
system Kallay retained altogether operate as the begs wanted.43 The
fact was that he doubted Islam's capacity to flourish in a modern
society,44 and influenced by his historicizing bent may initially have
believed in Bosnian Muslims' return to Christianity.45 It was not a
'Bosnian national' consciousness that Kallay wished to inculcate in a
modern sense, so much as a regional identity which could feed into
allegiance to the empire. Bosnianism was to be a building block for
psychological adaptation to a broader civil society. This vision of a
wider mnodernization, as Kallay understood it, not any concept of
Bosnian identity, was his primary organizing principle. It was the old
theme of the i865 article on the accommodation of Hungarian Serbs,
repeated in his I 883 lecture on East and West.46
In keeping with his view of Bosnia's 'oriental' society, Kallay, on
classic colonial lines, came down strongest on those elements seeking to
escape the traditionalism for which he type-cast them. This brought
42 Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Zajednicko ministarstvo finansija (ABiH, ZMF), Prasidial

(PR) BH I282/1904, Thall6czy's report, n.d.
43 F. Hauptmann, Die dsterreichisch-ungarische Herrschaft in Bosnien und der Herzegowina
I878-I9I8. Wirtschaftspolitik und Wirtschaftsentwicklung, Graz, I983, pp. I-2, 1I3-14,
1 26-33.
44 Die Lage der Mohammedaner in Bosnien, von einem Ungarn, second edition, Vienna, I900.
Conventionally assumed to have been Kallay, the Hungarian was probably Thall6czy, in
whose handwriting a draft of this work exists in SzKK, Fol Hung. 635. Here, though,
Thall6czy acted as Kallay's alter ego.
45 ABiH, ZMF, PR BH 1945/ I 882, Kallay to Franz Joseph, 7 October I 882.
46 Specialists will recognize that this is a speculative argument, which is difficult to
document by direct quotation. It draws its plausibility from the entire context of KAllay's
life and belief system, as analysed in this article.
him into direct conflict with the merchant-dominated Bosnian Serb

church and school communes in the towns and their claims to an
administrative autonomy, which in his words 'can but come on
principle into permanent conflict with a uniform and purposeful state
power'.47 His somewhat high-handed attempts to weaken them
involved intrusive surveillance (censorship of patriotic concerts, dissolu-
tion of committee meetings or entire communal organizations), petty
harassment of 'malcontents', including petitioners to the Emperor, and
divide and rule tactics through use of spies, bribery and would-be
covert cajoling into existence of 'a moderate and conservative Oriental
Orthodox element'.48 Both strategy and tactics mixed expediency with
a certain cynicism. The most modern-minded forces in Bosnian Serb
society, the communes, were to be subordinated to the Austrian-
dominated confessional hierarchy; the poverty of the clergy was not to
be met by introduction of a regular salary (congrua) but by ad hoc
payments determined by loyalty; the perceived challenge of the Serb
confessional schools to the administration's intercommunal schools was
in practice countered by heightened harassment of the former rather
than increased expenditure on the latter.49 All this eventually conjured
up a movement for church and school autonomy from I896 which
appealed to Franz Joseph, the Ecumenical Patriarch, the Sultan, who
was Bosnia's nominal sovereign, and the Austrian and Hungarian
Delegations. When a similar Muslim movement emerged in I 899
Kallay explained it away as the reaction of unreformable Islam to
modern culture -a tactical error, for it undermined his regime's claim
to be a successful modernizing force.50
The Serb and Muslim autonomy movements gave a fillip to
previously isolated critics of Kallay's autocratic regime in the Austrian
and Hungarian Delegations, the latter consistently stressing neglect of
Hungarian economic interests and language. By I900-02 he was the
object of sustained campaigns led by members of the Kossuthite
Hungarian Independence Party and the Neues Budapester Abendblatt,
well as by the Pan-German papers Ostdeutsche Rundschau and Deutsches
47 ABiH, ZMF, PR BH 26/ I 89I, Killay to Kutschera, n.d.

48 ABiH, ZMF, Kabinettbriefe (KB) 69/I897, Kallay to Kutschera, 6 May I897.
49 R. F. C. Okey, Cultural and Political Problems of the Austro-Hungarian Administration of Bosnia-
Herzegovina, i878-I903, Oxford DPhil, 1972, pp. 253-55, 260-69, 282-83.
50 See B. Madzar, Pokret Srba Bosne i Herzegovine za vjersko-prosvjetnu autonomiju, Sarajevo,
I982; N. Sehic, Autonomni pokret Muslimana za vryjeme austrougarske uprave u Bosni i Hercegovini,
Sarajevo, I980. For English-language treatments, see R. F. C. Okey, 'Education and
Modernisation in a Multi-Ethnic Society: Bosnia I850-I9I8', in J. Tomiak (ed.), Schooling,
Educational Policy and Ethnic Identity, vol. I of Comparative Studies on Governments and Non-
Dominant Ethnic Groups in Europe, i850-I940, Dartmouth, 199I, pp. 319-42, and 'State,
Church and Nation in the Serbo-Croat Speaking Lands of the Habsburg Monarchy,
I850-I940', in D. A. Kerr (ed.), Religion, State and Ethnic Groups, vol. 2 in the above
Comparative Studies, Dartmouth, I 992, pp. 62-67.
248 ROBIN OKEY
Volksblatt, aided by the Hungarian Serb press bureau of the lawyer Emil
Gavrila. Not for the first time the fix-it skills of Thalloczy had to be
enlisted in a rival 'hearts-and-minds' campaign with the Austro-
Hungarian and German press. It is clear that Thall6czy and his master
were not sure even of the loyalty of the Hungarian prime minister Szell,
no doubt irritated at having to defend an unpopular regime before the
Hungarian public.51 After Kallay's death the next year, tributes to his
regime were no longer unalloyed.
The gloomier aspects of Kallay's last decade are recorded in
Thalloczy's voluminous diary. Insisting on his chief's warm-hearted
Magyarism and life given to the politics of Magyardom's expansion, he
notes Kallay's frequent musings on his lack of popularity with his
fellow-countrymen.52 This he could not win, partly because his years in
Vienna put him beyond the pale for the narrow nationalism of the age,
partly because he made no effort to cultivate the club-orientated world
of Hungarian politics, appearing at best once a year in Szechenyi's
National Casino.53 Thalloczy writes of a certain sourness as Kallay
realized that he would not fulfil his ambition to become foreign minister
and as difficulties in Bosnia mounted.54 Moreover, Kallay seems to
have thought that his fellow-countrymen had missed their chance. If
Kalman Tisza, prime minister from I 875 to I 890, had taken control of
the 'nationalities' it would have been a matter of 'the State of Hungary,
alias Austria-Hungary' he said privately in i892; as it was, there had
been fifteen years of decline of the nation's real strength.55 Kallay was
saved from the humiliation of dismissal he feared56 by his careful
maintenance of his position with the emperor, for whom he was a
valued confidant on Hungarian politics, and with influential Austrian
circles. The latter connection had negative effects on his standing in
Hungary and Bosnia. He once told his deputy in Sarajevo that
compared to criticism from the clerical Das Vaterland all the fury of
Bosnian Muslims over Catholic proselytization was 'quite infinitesi-
mally small'.57 This helps explain the movement against him of
Muslims he apparently favoured.
It is hard not to conclude, however, that Kallay had a hand in his
difficulties. Besides his personal reserve, he based his life's work on
abstract preconceptions and far-fetched strategems: the Bosnian
51 Voluminous records of the anti-Kallay press campaign are contained in OL.

(Thall6czy Papers), fascicle. I.
52 Tom6ry, pp. 90-9i.
53 Ibid., p. 95.
54 Ibid., p. 99
55 SzKK, Quart. Hung., 2459/ I. Thall6czy's diary for June I 892.
56 For one of many Thall6czy references to KAllay's fearfulness, SzKK, Fol. Hung. I 67 7 /
1, I 7 March I 903.
5' ABiH, ZMF, Kabinettbriefe 86/ I 903, KAllay to Kutschera, 2 May 1903.
scheme, western and orientalist ideal types, the reactivation of a

historical Bosnian consciousness borne by Muslims he disparaged.
True, the Leitmotiv underlying his career, the identification of progress
with the multi-ethnic state, was one widely held when he adopted it. It
can be seen in Lord Acton's famous critique of nationalism (1 862), for
example.58 But that the Magyars could play the role vis-a-vis non-
Magyars that Acton saw the English as playing towards assorted Celts
was problematic in east-central Europe's climate of emulative national-
ism. During the i 86os, showing an inkling of this, he sought an
ostensible partnership that would have left the at that time still most
advanced portion of Serbdom, the Hungarian Serbs, under Magyar
rule. His shift thereafter (part of a wider one) towards reliance on the
dynasty and the Dualist system brought many of the intractable
nationality problems Kossuth (and he himself) had once feared,59
besides weakening his own position vis-a-vis his countrymen. The
fragile Hungaro-Serb rapprochement shattered (on both sides, of
course) with an alarming ease only too typical of ethnic detentes in the
age of high nationalism. In the poisoning of relations a part was played
by his penchant for unscrupulous opportunism, contrary to his writings'
stress on the rule of law, and, when the Bosnianizing strategy failed, by
a leaning towards Croatdom such as he had held in prospect at the start
of his career.60 All this helped feed an already existing Serb and Muslim
paranoia, so that the cultural autonomy movements he provoked
became the seed-bed for later political nationalism in occupied Bosnia.
One senses a certain anti-climax in the last years of this gifted and
ambitious man. His career showed the too easy conflation of idealism
and pragmatism and of national interests with universal ones which
shadowed the 'liberalism' of his youth and of ethnic relations in the
nationalist age as a whole. If Kallay 'greatly loved the Bosnian people',
as Thalloczy asserted,6' it was a love without respect.
II
Kallay was succeeded as Joint Finance Minister by another Hungarian,
Istvan Burian de Rajeczi (I85I-1922). Burian was likewise a member
of the Hungarian middle nobility, son of a minor man of letters from
58 J. E. E. Dalberg-Acton, The Histogy of Freedom and other Essays, London, i 907,

pp. 270-300.
59 F. Poloskei, 'Nacionalismus a dualizmus koraban', in A magyar nacionalismu
es tdrtenete, Budapest, I 964, p. I 82 (Kossuth).
60 Thall6czy noted these tendencies as the two things he least appreciated in
SzKK, Fol. Hung. i 677/ I, Thall6czy's diary, i6 February 1903. For Kallay's own avowal
of a Croatophile course, see his letter of 3 September I 902 to Kutschera in F. Hauptmann
(ed.), Borba Muslimana Bosne i Hercegovine za vjersku i vakufsko-mearifsku autonomiu, Sarajevo,
1967, pp. 342-44.
61 Thall6czy, 'Kallay Beni', p. 367.
250 ROBIN OKEY
what is now western Slovakia. With a diplomatic background and

intellectual interests, he too was seen as somewhat aloof by his peers.
Though he was a Protestant and Kallay a Catholic, neither were
personally friendly to ultramontanism, though Kallay was more careful
in keeping on the right side of the court clerical party than Burian was
to prove.62 If both men were reserved, however, it was not in the same
way. Kallay's intellectual style favoured bold generalizations and
helped feed a certain charisma quite lacking in the prosaic ratiocinations
of the somewhat pedantic Burian, whose arrival in high office, unlike
Kallay's, did not seem to contemporaries predestined by the gods.
Yet Burian was in his own way an ambitious man, with a strong
commitment to his chosen diplomatic career and East European
specialization. On his first major posting, to Moscow he like Kallay
in Belgrade studied the culture as well as the politics of his hosts,
acquainting himself with the Slavophile enemy, notably Aksakov.63 But
while contributing three articles on aspects of Russian mentalities to
the leading Hungarian review Budapesti Szemle, he gave up plans to
publish a book because he would no longer be able to exploit his
insights on Russian weaknesses to practical effect for his career.64
Thalloczy had long chosen the role of contemplative observer com-
pared to himself, he wrote to the former (an acquaintance since student
days) in I895; there was perhaps a self-questioning note here, since he
had already divulged that nine years in Sofia his first post as head of
mission -was more than a normal man could stand.65 From Stuttgart,
his next placement, he confided that Athens or Constantinople rather
than a Sektionschef 's post in Vienna would bring him joy; would he ever
make ambassador at Constantinople, he duly asked from Athens in
i899?66 In fact, the next call was to the Joint Finance Ministry,
which his diary recorded that he felt the beat of the wings of fate.67
Burian had a patriotic Hungarian's perspective. Thalloczy's book on
the medieval king Bela III was very instructive, he told his friend, in
showing how far 'we' were confronted with the same eastern problems
as seven centuries earlier.68 The diary of his ministerial years, a
minimalist affair compared to Kallay's and Thalloczy's, first spluttered
into some kind of life with comments on the Hungarian constitutional
62 Burian's dislike of clericalism may be seen in his sarcastic comments on the I9I2
Vienna Eucharistic Congress, SzKK, Fond XI/i66, Burian to Thall6czy, 21 September
I912. For KAllay's caution, see note 57.
63 See his letters to Thall6czy in SzKK, Fond XI/i66, io November i882; 27 October
I884; 7 March i886.
64 Ibid., 22January i 885.
65 Ibid., 24January I896; 26 May I895.
66 Ibid., 21 January I 897 (Stuttgart); i 6 January I 899 (Athens).
67 Hadtortenelmi Leveltar, Burian's diary for 1903-o6, I 8 July 1903.
68 SzKK, Fond XI/ i 66, Burian to Thall6czy, I 8 July I 900 (Athens).
crisis of 1905 -o6. He followed events at

wrote to Thalloczy in I899. But he went on to say that eastern events
interested him more insofar as he was once again among them.69
Burian's Balkan policies did not have such direct Hungarian roots as
in Kallay's case. Born half a generation later, he did not inherit the
Danubian/Balkan agenda of the i86os. The liberal elements in his
conservatism correspondingly lacked the idealistic, almost romantic
streak seen in the young Kallay. Burian believed in socio-historical laws
based on painstaking factual enquiry in the positivist spirit of late
nineteenth-century Hungarian historiography. 'The development of
peoples follows the law of growth of organic forms', he wrote, if at
different rates.70 This shaped his approach to the crisis of 1905-06. Its
underlying cause, he opined, was the failure to understand the
development of Hungarian national consciousness towards the demand
for full constitutionalism,7" though Burian equally criticized the
nationalist opposition for not seeing the need to compromise with the
Crown. 'Pre-determined historical developments', he wrote, exploited
men's abilities and their defects.72 Burian put more faith in conciliation
and less in coercion than Kallay, once commenting that people's
sympathies could not be commanded.73 Indeed, his articles on Russia
seem more persuasive than those of his more famous predecessor. In
limiting his generalizations to the matter in hand he drew conclusions
more plausible than Kallay's sweeping talk of East and West, Greece
and Rome. Nihilism was a symptom of a discredited Tsarist bureaucra-
cy's problems; Russians liked to take foreign ideas to extremes and
were not attracted by moderate constitutionalism; they felt both large
and insignificant as a people, hence were both pessimistic and
aggressive; all believed that Russia was different, even if differing in
their prescriptions; they had more chance of assimilating their Turanian
subjects than their fellow Slavs, who looked down on them. Thus
Panslavism was not a real force.74 In these observations there was muc
sober intelligence.
What did this mean for Burian as a Bosnian administrator? He
turned quite sharply from Kallay's course, a departure his later
69 Ibid., i 6 January I 899 (Athens).

70 J. Rajeczi (i.e. Burian), 'OroszorszAgb6l Oroszorszagr6l', Budapesti Szemle, 42
pp. 57-75 (62).
71 Hadtortenelmi Leveltar, Burian's diary for I903-06, 5 April and io October 1905, I4
March I906.
72 Ibid., 3 March I906.
73 Reformatus Leveltar, BuriAn Papers, XI/44, BuriAn to Bosnian Landeschef Windsor,
8 May I 908.
7 Burian's Budapesti Szemle articles, under the name Rajeczi, were, 'A gonosz szellemek.
Egy orosz nihilista regenyr6l'; 'Oroszorszag vallasos viszonyai'; and 'Oroszorszagb6l
OroszorszAgr6l', in 37, I884, pp. 347-65; 39, I884, pp. 32I-42; and 42, i885, pp. 57-75
respectively.
252 ROBIN OKEY
presentations to Franz Joseph (May I907) and his fellow ministers

(December 1907) linked explicitly to its failure. 75 The system of
espionage was scaled down substantially, Buri'an gave up Kallay's habit
of private correspondence with the civil head of the Landesregierung
in Sarajevo, the names Serb and Croat were officially adopted by the
authorities and Serbs and Muslims were granted statutes of cultural
autonomy in I905 and I909 respectively. Burian pressed ahead with
schemes of municipal and communal self-government and in I907
introduced a press law removing preliminary censorship, all with a
view to ending a political wardship felt to have outlived its time. He,
not foreign minister Aehrenthal, first broached Bosnia's annexation.
Some of this, in theory, Kallay would have done in due course, but in
practice his relations with his Bosnian opponents would have made it
harder for him. Moreover, whereas Kallay turned from Bosnianism to
the Croats, Burian sought to prepare for the constitutional era that
followed annexation by working with the Serbs, the relative majority of
the population and the most nationally conscious. The arguments he
adduced struck the characteristic note of those basically conservative
late Habsburg reformers (Max Bruck is another example) who hoped
that bringing wider elements into the pale of the constitution, in
Gladstone's phrase, would normalize a fraught political process. 'The
step by step introduction of an extensive autonomy' was essential now
that Bosnia was no longer isolated from political debate; Serbia's
'disorganized' circumstances and Serbdom's 'clan-like' organization
offered the chance of winning Bosnian Serbs away from 'political
dreams'; they had not shown revolutionary tendencies, but resented
their previous side-lining.76 Once the Bosnian Diet or Sabor was in
place (I91o), Burian argued that the post-annexation settlement had
represented the maximum possible at the time; but for its full goal
the occupied provinces' psychological integration into the Monarchy
more now needed to be done to meet Bosnians' inevitable awareness of
their lack of equality with other inhabitants of the Monarchy. Popular
aspirations could be divided into those which were realizable and those
which were not. The issue was the anomalous nature of the new
constitutional framework, whereby Bosnia-Herzegovina stood outside
the Dualist system, with its own citizenship, open to the charge of being
second class. The well-nigh insoluble problem, given Dualist tensions,
75 Reformatus Lev&ltar, BuriAn Papers, IX/42, Denkschrift uiber Bosnien und die
Herzegowina, May I907; XI/44, Aufzeichnung uber eine Besprechung des gemeinsamen
Ministeriums vom I XII I 907, bei Aehrenthal, uber die gegenwartige Situation in Bosnien
und der Herzegowina.
76 Ibid., Denkschrift uber Bosnien; Aufzeichnung uber eine Besprechung.
was which state of the Monarchy Bosnia should join. Predictably,

Burian's preference was for Hungary.77
Much of Burian's discourse amounted to classic arguments in favour
of 'taking risks for peace', in the modern phrase. They have not
convinced Hungarian historians, who view him as over-sanguine in his
attitude to the Serbs, with the Sarajevo assassination and the Great
Serbian apotheosis of i 9I8 as hindsight.78 However, Burian's critics at
the time were chiefly Great Austrian and Catholic circles, who looked
to the Croats as allies against a Russian-Serb Panslav threat and wished
to crush the Serbo-Croat coalition in power in Croatia since i 906.
Burian's policy, however, was largely in line with the more relaxed
attitude of the Hungarian government to Serbdom in these years.
While most Croatian Serbs continued to support the coalition, the
leading group among Serbs of Hungary proper, the Radicals, left it and
cooperated with Budapest, with Belgrade's backing. Suspicions of
Croats and the hope to winkle out concessions lay behind this
realignment, but no doubt also the fact that Hungarian Serbs were a
relatively prosperous and small, demographically stagnant community,
no longer the perceived threat of the I 86os. Burian reassured a worried
Aehrenthal that he need have no fear of Hungarian prime minister
Wekerle's conciliatory noises to the Serbs, which would lead to nothing
concrete.79 On another issue, that of the privileges he conceded the
Hungarian Commercial Bank to finance the emancipation of Bosnian
peasants from semi-servile status, he was publicly accused by the
Austrian Prime Minister of evading his duty of consultation under the
I 88o act on Bosnia's government. Though his action has been
explained in terms of his administration's limited resources rather
Hungarian nationalism, the bad-tempered episode showed how sensi-
tive Bosnian policy was under Dualist circumstances.80
Burian's advocacy of a more pragmatic policy towards the Serbs was
echoed more strongly still by the Sarajevo Landesregierung. Bosnians
needed to be given some sense of influence on their own destiny, with a
view to Bosnia's 'moral conquest' and to ease possible deals with
77 Ibid., XI/44, Emlekirat-tervezet a boszniai-hercegovinai allamjogi kerdes megoldAs

illet6leg, June i 9 i i.
78 The above statement is based on discussions with Hungarian historians. BuriAn
fallen so far from his countrymen's purview as hardly to be mentioned in the literatur
except for dismissive comments on a later phase of his career by Di6szegi and Vermes (
below, references 89 and go). This tendency began early; BuriAn does not appear in
index of the standard interwar multi-volume Magyar Tdrtenet of B. H6man and Gy. Szekff
second edition, Budapest, 1936.
79 ReformAtus Leveltar, BuriAn Papers, X/43, BuriAn to Aehrenthal, 24 April I 907.
80 Ibid., X/43, Aehrenthal to BuriAn, 6 May 1909; 111/3, Burian's diary for i909,
enclosing Neue Freie Presse article of I 8 May I 909, 'BuriAn und Bienerth'; for the exculpation
of BuriAn, see Hauptmann, Osterreichisch-ungarische Herrschaft, pp. I 98-99.
254 ROBIN OKEY
moderate Serbs, wrote Civil Adlatus Benko.8' Government should not

attempt to influence the Sabor elections, argued the head of the Political
Department, Baron Pittner. The Serb candidates represented the
flower of the 'Serb intelligentsia', who, whatever their inner convictions,
showed 'formal loyalty'; not a Serb in the land could be found to stand
against their official party programme.82 Under Kallay both Pittner
and Benko, though not liberals per se any more than Buri'an, had argued
for more flexible policies to the Serbs.83 The aim, as a Burian diary
entry implies, was to exploit Serb willingness to work the system.84 It
was not one to which the old Emperor was open. Several alarmed
messages to Buri'an from Franz Joseph's Cabinet Office in the summer
of I9IO made plain that the constitutional settlement, which Benko
thought too confining, must be maintained and the authority of the
negligent Landesregierung asserted 'most decisively' against Serb
agrarian agitation.85
Whether or not Buri'an succeeded at this time in dissociating himself
from his subordinates in the Emperor's mind, when he left office
eighteen months later a crestfallen sovereign (if Burian's own version is
to be believed) reiterated his confidence in his minister.86 The issue
came with Aehrenthal's death in February I9I2. His successor as
foreign minister being Count Berchtold, formally a Hungarian subject,
Burian had to resign on the principle that there should not be two
Hungarian common ministers at the same time. The NVeue Freie Presse
presented the matter in terms of the disapproval of Burlian's perfor-
mance by influential circles (code for Great Austrians and clericals),
while praising the 'confident purposefulness' of a key actor behind the
stage, whose abrupt manner could be mistaken for intransigence. The
ex-minister's diary, which shows how he had, with purported reluc-
tance, been preparing to bow to 'fate's mysterious course' i.e. pass on
to the Ballhausplatz, records the bitterness of 'a man old in experience'
at being removed on a pretext in the middle of his labours.87 Thalloczy,
while he at times saw Buri'an as too fond of compromise, saluted him as
the most honest of Hungarian politicians, a special breed.88
81 Ibid., VIII/20, Baron Benko to Burian, 24 July I9I0.

82 Ibid., VIII/ i 8, Pittner to Burian, 29 April I 9 I 0.
83 ABiH, ZMF, BH PR 6I9/I895, Kutschera to KAllay, I9 May I895 (for Benko); ibid.,
1759/ I 90 I, Mostar Kreis Commissioner Pittner to Landesregierung, 24 December i 901 .
84 ReformAtus leveltAr, BuriAn Papers. III/3, BuriAn's diary, 7 September I9I0. BuriAn
noted far-sighted Serbs' fears that their goal was unattainable.
85 Ibid., VIII/ig, His Majesty's Cabinet Secretary to BuriAn, i August i9I0 for the
quotation.
86 Ibid., XXI/8i, Burian's diary, i6 February 1912.
87 Ibid, BuriAn's diary, I4 (fate), I 7 (middle of labours), i9 Febru
the Aeue Freie Presse for i 9 February. One suspects BuriAn liked the c
88 SzKK, Fol. Hung. i677/VIII, Thall6czy's diary, 22 February I
Burian found loss of office painful and was

minister at court. During the First World W
minister and once again, Joint Finance Mini
not lost favour. Istvan Dioszegi in a brilliant treatment of his laconic
diary for this wartime period has ridiculed him as a theory-bound
dogmatist who followed each misconceived strategic blunder by a new
one, with just enough nous to realize that the occasionally-mooted
elevation to the Hungarian premiership of a reserved Vienna-based
bureaucrat was a non-starter.89 Gabor Vermes has likewise presented
his post-I9I2 career as that of an unimaginative loner, less flexible even
than his friend Istv'an Tisza, though the picture does not quite square
with what he himself notes of Buri'an's moderation in July I 9 I 4 and his
support for franchise reform in war-time Hungary.90 Such inter-
pretations admirably suit this article's overall theme of Hungarian
Balkanists' failure. The very consistency of evolution of Buri'an's
Bosnian policy does indeed open him to the charge of being another
intellectual in politics who nailed his colours to what proved a flimsy
mast. That Buri'an should come off so much the worse in his
countrymen's eyes compared to his predecessor seems, though, a little
harsh. If a British liberal instinct applauds the non-confrontational
approach Buri'an favoured towards the central Serb issue, more
concretely, his wager on Bosnian Serb moderation aimed, no less than
Kallay's hard line, to neutralize nationalism, and the means chosen, as
has been seen, were championed by Bosnian 'old hands'.
Nor were they wholly without effect. Much of the bitterness of
'Young Bosnia' was due to the apparent willingness of Serb notables to
work the constitutional system, even if the Serb leader Vojislav Sola's
effusive farewell compliments about Burian's fairness to the Serbs seem
almost too good to be true; his letter culminated in the plea that the
minister would do him the final honour of crediting its sincerity!91 That
Sola was incriminated for treason in the world war does not necessarily
prove Burian a dupe before it. All bets were off in a world conflagration
in which Bosnian Serbs were rudely exposed to the Great Austrian,
pro-Croat policy Burian opposed. Short of war, the risks of his strategy
were rather that wealthy merchants and landowners like Sola were
themselves under pressure from more radical bourgeois professionals
around the nationalist newspaper Narod, not to speak of the pro-peasant
radical editor, satirist and Diet member, Petar Kocic.92 There is no
89 I. Di6szegi, A ballplatzi palota utols6 gazd'aja', Kortars, I0, I966, pp. 270-82.
90 G. Vermes, Istvan Tisza. The Liberal and Conservative Statecraft of a Magyar Nationalist, New
York, I985, pp. 2 I9, 299, 308, 31 I, 400.
91 Reformatus Leveltar, Burian Papers, IX/42, Sola to Burian, n.d.
92 V. Maslesa's Marxist Mlada Bosna, Sarajevo, I 946, is still the most convenient summary
of these pre-war tensions.
256 ROBIN OKEY
evidence that Burian believed in a Bosnian Serb loyalty without arriere

pense'es. In fact, in his ruminative way he later showed awareness that
non-Magyars' discontent threatened Hungary both when they were
socio-economically weak and when their condition improved.93 Kal-
lay's comments always suggested that the modernization of Bosnia
would weaken opposition to the Monarchy. If Burian is judged to have
been equally unsuccessful as Kallay with the Serbs, with a different
policy, the explanation must include the difficulty of the problem and
the growing complexity of the Habsburg and international background
as much as the wrong-headedness of the approach. By 1912, the
constraints on a Hungarian conducting Balkan policy had become
formidable.
III
As the most perceptive observer of Kallay and life-long acquaintance

of Burian, the Joint Finance Ministry Sektionschef and Balkan historian
Lajos Thalloczy (I856-I9I6) affords the best commentary on these
constraints. Just as Kallay claimed that he had lost the better part of
himself with Andrassy's death,94 so Thalloczy was to say his life's crown
had gone with Kallay: 'till now I served the living Kallay; henceforth I
shall serve the dead one.'95 Much of his diary was devoted to recording
and analysing the thoughts of his chief, who had spotted his talent as a
young Budapest archivist and brought him to Vienna. Its great value
and that of Thalloczy's work as a whole lies in the fact that he was no
blind acolyte but provided an at times astringent assessment of the
Kallay legacy, highlighting for the historian the shifting challenges
facing patriotic Hungarian Balkanists into the twentieth century.
Kallay initially looked to Thalloczy to provide a definitive history of
Bosnia. In this he was to be disappointed, in part because of the
positivist spirit in which Thalloczy worked, which made historical
synthesis appear a task for later generations. In the work of detail which
Thalloczy saw himself and his contemporaries engaged upon, the role
he set himself was to establish the sources illuminating Hungary's
relations with her Balkan neighbours.96 His main editorial series,
significantly entitled Documents on Hungary's Adjoining Territories (Magyar-
orszag mellektartomanyainak okleve'tra, vols I-4, I903-I5), covered such
topics as late medieval Croatian and Bosnian frontier fortresses,
medieval Hungaro-Serb relations and the Croat-Hungarian traditions
of Slavonian noble families. He was also a leading historian of medieval
93 Reformatus Leveltar, Burian Papers, XI/44, 'Adalek a magyar nemzetisegi kerdeshez',

2I December I9I4.
94 Tomory, p. 92.
95 L. HorAnszky, Magyarok Becsben, Budapest, I 94 I, p. 25 (hereafter, Horanszky).
96 F. Eckhart, 7Thall6czy Lajos tdrt6netir6, Budapest, 1938, pp. 6, 9 (hereafter, Eckhart).
Albania. Thalloczy claimed to be able to speak a new language

proficiently within three months. Only high intellectual gifts and
what was believed to be the Emperor's favour97 could have sustained
the career of the son of a lowly official of German origin named
Strommer, who made no disguise of his homosexuality: the 'eccentric-
ity' of his biographers.
Thalloczy shared the Hungarian patriotism and Dualist allegiance
of the subjects of the present study. Still a very young man, he had sent
specimens of his historical work to the exiled Kossuth, who encouraged
him to see history as an important national task.98 Burian believed his
friend's deep-seated 'Magyar soul' would preserve him from the
powerful influences to which he would be subject on moving to
Vienna.99 For though Thalloczy's links with Kossuth showed the
emotional power of Hungarian national identity with which the Dualist
system had to contend, generationally he belonged to those who
believed Hungarianism could thrive in the Dualist framework. Vienna
was territory to be infiltrated in the Hungarian cause. The magic slogan
was parity in the running of the Monarchy, the external obverse,
perhaps, of the notion of 'rounding out' the Compromise by which the
maverick politician Apponyi from the late I 88os helped set the domestic
agenda in Hungary. Under its banner a clutch of talented Hungarian
historians found their way to Vienna, to the Institute for Austrian
Historical Research or the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, culminating in
Arp'ad Karolyi's appointment as director of the latter, to Franz
Ferdinand's distaste, in I 903. In his position as director of the
Hofkammer archives, which came underJoint Finance Ministry jurisdic-
tion, Thalloczy could go some way to meeting Hungarian demands for
the repatriation of Hungary-related material by keeping the relevant
documents separately sorted in his office for compatriots' unofficial
use -as well as successfully resisting Franz Ferdinand's demand that
the entire archive should be incorporated in the Haus-, Hof- und
Staatsarchiv. He played a leading role, too, in the return to Hungary
from Turkey of the remains of Ferenc Rtakoczi II, the anti-Habsburg
leader of the kuruc wars. '00 A positively lyrical letter to Buri'an of I 915
on the final settlement of the decades-old saga of what should be the
Monarchy's common coat of arms showed the passion which could
underly these seeming minutiae. '01
97 F. Glatz, TdrtMnetir6 es politika. Szekfu, Stiener, 7him is Miskolczy nemzetr6l es allam

Budapest, I980, p. 132.
98 Tomory, pp. 28-30-
99 SzKK, Fond XI/ i 66, Burian to Thall6czy, 9 January, i 886.
10 For this historiographical theme, see Glatz, Tdrtinetir6 ispolitika, pp. 125-34.
101 Reformatus Leveltar, Burian Papers VIII/38, Thall6czy to Burian, I 2 October I 9 I 5.
258 ROBIN OKEY
But perhaps Thalloczy's most signal contribution to Hungarianism

in his exile years was the role his house in the Traungasse played as a
centre of Hungarian Viennese life. Visiting writers, journalists, soldiers
and politicians all enjoyed his hospitality, as well as permanent Vienna
residents, some of whom lodged there, paying their board on a tariff of
his devising. Hence the number of Thall6czy's admirers who helped
run the Thalloczy Society after his death, drawn to a personality
frequently described as abrasive, cynical and fond of coarse jest, but
apparently attractive to many who did not share his 'eccentricity'. 102 In
some of the Society's publications Thalloczy's historical work acquired
almost prophetic power as the record of a Hungarian Balkan empire
which had been and would be again. Did he not speak, in his work on
the Bosnian fortress of Jajce published in I 9 I 5, of the 'faith of many'
that a Magyar empire would resume its place in the Balkans, and of the
'inextinguishable moral capital' of the medieval experience at a time
when the same peoples were again in contestation?'03 Thalloczy was
for the Society the Hungarian who understood the Balkans, acknowl-
edged its peoples' valour, and out of his sympathy for them saw to it
that medical treatment was dispensed free in the wartime occupation
of Serbia,104 he was 'our man in the Balkans' in the sense in which the
nationalist age required 'experts' for the fields nationalists sought to
hegemonize. The fact that for all his patriotic labours Thalloczy still
suffered the unpopularity his countrymen reserved for Vienna-based
expatriates no doubt spiced the homage of a coterie.
In fact, the image of Thalloczy as prophetic imperialist rather
overemphasized quotations from his wartime publications. Closer to
the mark overall are evaluations which stressed his doubts about the
late nineteenth-century imperialist school or the glib nationalism of the
I896 Hungarian millennial celebrations.105 But even shorn of the semi-
fascist rhetoric with which they were later invoked, Thalloczy's Balkan
studies indeed show the patriotic self-absorption of the age. A
Hungarian geopolitical vision dominates. Bosnia appears as a triangle
between the Adriatic and the Danube, its more densely populated
northern lands opening out to the Danube-Tisza plain of the Hungarian
'mother territory'. 106 Croatian and Serb noble lineages are of interest
chiefly for their loyalty to their Hungarian or later Habsburg sovereigns,
a theme which appears to have influenced Thalloczy's Dualism through
102 Horanszky offers the fullest account of Thall6czy's social role in Vienna.
103 Eckhart, p. 8.
104 Suhay, Thall6czy Lajos mint a megszallt Szerbia orszagos polgari bisztosa, Budapest, I94I,
P. 9
105 Eckhart, pp. 5-7, combines the two approaches.
106 L. Thall6czy, Bosznia mint tdrtenelmi szintdr, reprinted from Fdldrajzi Kdzlembqyek, 30,
Budapest, I 902, p. 20.
the much-respected figure of Franz Joseph.'07 Thalloczy's Albanian

concerns were bound up with the question of Albanian viability as a
barrier to Serbian designs, part of the 'arch-Catholic living dam' along
the Adriatic against the assaults of Orthodoxy in the words of his
Croatian protege, Milan Sufflay. 108 Hardly surprising as this is, it sits ill
with the repeated appeals to scholarly objectivity. The historiography
of the high nationalist age was characterized above all by the
conjunction of ingrained bias and positivist method. Objectivity
became a grim readiness to recognize obstacles to national goals, not
an attempt at emotional distance from them. The claim to refrain from
all politics did not exclude the refutation of others' nationalistic errors,
like the Romanian thesis of continuous Romanian settlement in
Transylvania.109 Genuine sympathy for other peoples was rare. Thal-
loczy's view of the Bosnians turns out to be of a people unable to
achieve unity, not unlike Kallay on Orientals, though given a
geographic as much as a psychic basis. As for his goodwill to Serbs, in
his diary and correspondence he frequently called them 'riacok', or
'Rascians', a term that can have disparaging force. His judgement of
fellow academics was coloured by national-political considerations:
thumbs up for the Croatian philologist Vatroslav Jagic because the
Russians distrusted him and he was sound on the union of Croatia with
Hungary; thumbs down for Serb academics whom his circle dis-
trusted.110 This, of course, was only to apply the measure that Serb
academics themselves wielded.
What distinguished Thalloczy from simplistic nationalists was his
appraisal of realities: the hostility of the nationalities, which in the
Serbs' and Romanians' case had states to turn to which were far more
of a factor than in I 848,1 1 the 'serious' problem of Hungarian peasant
socialism before which the authorities displayed 'frightening' inade-
quacy,12 in general the 'outmoded' nature of Hungarian politics."13
Thalloczy took to heart the comments of outsiders like the German
107 For example, L. Thalloczy and S. Barabas (eds), Codex diplomaticus comitum de Blag
Budapest, I 897, p. ii; ibid., A Frangepan csalad okleveltara, 2 vols, Budapest, I 9 I O- 1 9 I 3
p. xlvi.
108 M. Sufflay, 'Die Kirchenzustande im vorturkischen Albanien', in L. von Thall6c
(ed.), Illyrisch-albanische Forschungen, 2 vols, MIunich, Leipzig, I 9 I 6, I, p. I 89.
109 Ibid., L. von Thall6czy, 'Vorwort', p. v (abstention from politics), and ibid., 'Die
Theorie der wlachischen oder rumanischen Frage', p. 39.
110 SzKK, Quart. Hung. 2459/I, Thall6czy's diary, 30 December I889 (Jagk); Fol.
Hung. I682/2, Kosta Hormann to Thall6czy, n.d. [May I9I6]. Thall6czy sent on
Hormann's disparaging comments on the historian Radonk, the geographer Cvijic and the
literary critic Skerik as politicizing scholars to the Czech BalkanistJirecek, but it should be
said without comment. Hormann was the leading figure responsible for cultural matters in
the Sarajevo Landesregierung and a regular correspondent of Thall6czy's.
SzKK, Quart. Hung. 2459/ I, Thall6czy's diary, June I 892.
112 Ibid.,June I89I.
113 Tomory, p. I O9, a comment from I 9 I O.
260 ROBIN OKEY
consul-general in Budapest, Mons, and the king of Saxony, who

prophesied an unviable existence for a dwarf Hungary if the Monarchy
broke up, and Germans and Russians, Serbs and Romanians took their
fill." 4 Hungary was weakening and faced ruin without a Moses, he
wrote in connection with imperialist visions in I902; the political class
could provide neither leadership nor consensus and prime minister
Szell was no Moses. He did not doubt there was life in Hungary, he
commented in I9IO, but it needed a leader to release it."15 The idea
that what benefited Austria harmed Hungary and vice-versa had
become an article of faith, Thalloczy wrote in I912, whereas the two
countries needed to concert their Balkan strategy; a mediating role vis-
a-vis their neighbours was the means towards that positive goal Magyar
society lacked, in a world where the life of nations was continual
movement, either advance or regression." 6 These remarks, spanning
decades, testify to sustained apprehension about Magyar
preponderance.
Thalloczy did not hold high political office. Though he had a role as
trouble-shooter with the press and undertook a number of missions in
the Balkans, his main interest is as a penetrating reflector on events,
rather than for his own more limited work in shaping Bosnian cultural
policy. In this last role, however, his testimony shows the difficulties
which the administration of Bosnia posed to pro-Dualist Hungarian
patriots and the narrowing of options for those who could not subscribe
either to a Muslim, Croat or Serb orientation, as at different times
Kallay and Buri'an did.
It was here that Thalloczy differed most from his venerated first
master. Kallay's hope of bolstering a Bosnian identity derived from
medieval statehood, he later wrote, was misplaced: the continuities
with a medieval past had been irrevocably destroyed by the Ottoman
occupation."7 As to the Muslim begs whom Kallay initially wanted to
embody that continuity, 'The Position of the Muslims in Bosnia' argued
for the incompatibility of Islam and modern culture." 8 In his
comprehensive report on Bosnian education of I904 Thalloczy noted
that the few begs' sons in Bosnian Gymnasien rarely prospered. 1 19
Yet whereas Kallay, reviewing his earlier ideas, became less intoler-
ant of Croat nationalism as a counter-weight to Serb, Thalloczy did
114 SzKK, Thall6czy's diary, June I 892.

115 Tomory, pp. I 09- I O.
116 Reformatus Leveltar, Burian Papers, X/43: Thall6czy's printed memorandum, 'A
Balkan-felszigeten beAllott vAltozasokkal szemben MagyarorszAg reszer6l kovetend6 elj'aras
kulturalis es gazdasagi teren. Emlekirat', dated I 9 I 2.
117 ABiH, ZMF, PR BH I 282/ I 904, Thall6czy's report on Bosnian education, n.d., based
on an inspection carried out in autumn I 904.
118 See note 44.
19 See note I I7.
A TRIO OF HUNGARIAN BALKANISTS 26I
not. Horrified by an overlooked statement in a Croatian textbook

revised for Bosnian schools, to the effect that throughout the Middle
Ages Croatia had preserved her 'independence', he contemplated
recalling the entire print run, before concluding that this defence of
Hungarian state right could cause even more problems. 120 What would
one say if a Bosnian Serb confessional school hung up the portrait of St
Sava, he noted in the I 904 report of a Travnik school run by Catholic
nuns, where the Croatian arms were displayed alongside the Virgin
Mary? 'The so-called Croatian culture' in the same report appeared as
a lure to educated Bosnian youth, and fear of the collaboration of
'Great Croat' and 'Great Austrian elements' was a constant motif of
Thalloczy's diary from around I908 on. He had always kept a sharp
eye on Archbishop Joseph Stadler of Sarajevo, who became a bearer
of this tendency. 121
Yet the chief threat remained the Serbs. The I904 report claimed
that they had exploited the inadequate supervision of their confessional
schools under Kallay to institutionalize in them the nationalist cult of
St Sava. Showing Bosnia on Serb school maps as outside Habsburg
boundaries, under Austrian administration only, might be correct in
international law but it hardly conduced to state purposes.122 Thalloc-
zy's fears of Serbian nationalism were not allayed by the successful
annexation of Bosnia in I908. For him a Serbian foreign ministry
statement of December that year, that whatever happened the Bosnian
question would remain an open one for Serbia, was no more than the
truth.'23 Diary comments during the crisis on the inevitability of war
with Serbia and the unlikelihood of Serbia's renouncing her historically
conditioned goals reflect the mind-set of the nationalist age.'24 In the
event, not having defeated her by force of arms, the Monarchy, he
concluded, would have to count on Serbia as an enemy in the future. 125
The difficulties of the Monarchy's Bosnian project come well out of
Thalloczy's oft-mentioned school inspection report of I904, tracing
inter alia the development of nationalist agitation among students and
staff and the 'cardinal defects' of Kallay's educational strategy.
Educated Bosnians could not be isolated from Serb and Croat
nationalism: Muslims were not up to their imputed leading role and
more developed Serb and Croat entities, speaking an identical
language, were adjacent. Croatia, too, provided the bulk of early
120 ABiH, ZMF, BH 14158/I892 , Thall6czy's comments, n.d.; BH 12914/I9

Finance Ministry Telegrams to Landesregierung, I 6 and 27 November i 901 .
121 See the folder in Thall6czy's papers in OL, I 67 a.
122 ABiH, ZMF, PR BH I282/I904, Thall6czy's report on Bosnian education, n
123 M. T6mory, 'Bosznia-Hercegovina annektalasanak t6rteneteb6l', Szazadok,
p. 906 (entry for 4 December I 908). Hereafter, 'Bosznia-Hercegovina'.
124 Ibid., pp. 917-2 I (entries for I4-15, 29 and 3I March I909).
125 Ibid., p. 920 (29 March I909).
262 ROBIN OKEY
teachers and university education for the first generation of Bosnian

middle school graduates, including impressionable Muslims. Once
westernization got under way, a native intelligentsia could begin to
emerge, albeit half-educated and from a primitive background, which
inevitably came to see the foreign administrators as a hindrance to their
ambitions. From about I 900, these young people fell into line with the
opposition movements, under the influence of a nationally divided
teaching body eager to corall them into their respective camps. This
was a powerful and shrewd analysis, in which the least documented
judgment was Thalloczy's claim that signs were at hand of a 'sobering'
of the mood in the secondary schools.'26 In fact, nationalist influences
continued to grow.
The report also shows up some of the ambiguities of the nationalist
age. Measured and enlightened in tone, as befitted a century of
unprecedented European cultural progress, its practical recommenda-
tions were hardly liberal: restrictions on secondary school entry,
including school fees, tighter state supervision of confessional schools;
more technical emphasis because of the humanities' idealizing propen-
sity; spending cuts; perhaps celibacy for women teachers.'27 Plainly,
Thall6czy had not abandoned Kallay's belief that one could mould the
process of westernization, but the drastic proposal to cut back on
secondary school numbers reflected an awareness of its difficulties,
which comes out more directly in his diary. And we wonder why
Bosnian youth does not learn more, he ironized after a Sarajevo
conference with Bosnian educational officials in I907, where the
secondary school inspector had opposed confiscating newspapers pupils
brought to school as an interference in their personal liberty. Inspector
Nemanjic would be fine somewhere in southern Germany, he com-
mented sourly,'28 just as he believed, in the negotiations taking place
with the Muslim opposition, that the fist was more appropriate than
the pen.'29 But then the administration was in no position to hand-pick
its servants; it had to scrape together personnel from whoever in the
far-flung Monarchy would volunteer for service in the Bosnian wilds:
Croats, Czechs, Slovenes, Poles, Ukrainians but non-Slavs too, came
with a rag-bag of cultural and national presuppositions and the
inevitable foreign tag, as far as natives were concerned, however well
Slav teachers learnt the local language. Two-thirds of secondary school
teachers were still incomers when Thalloczy wrote his report.
Crowning the baroque complexity of what was in effect a multi-
national Bosnian administration operating at two levels, in Sarajevo
126 ABiH, ZMF, PR BHI 282/I 904, Thall6czy's report, n.d.

127 Ibid.
128 SzKK, 2549/ 7, Thall6czy's diary, i 9 September 1907.

129 'Bosznia-Hercegovina', p. 8go (entry for 12 July I907).
and Vienna, was, for a Magyar, the Austro-Hungarian relationship.

Thalloczy was involved in drafting the proclamation with which Franz
Joseph greeted the annexation of Bosnia. On the brink of an
international crisis, the Monarchy's leaders spent a good deal of time
wrangling over whether the proclamation should refer to the Crown of
Saint Stephen's historical claims to Bosnia or include phrasing which
violated Hungarian understanding of the Pragmatic Sanction of
I7I3.130 Problems like this gave Thalloczy pause over plans of the
military party to invade Serbia; what would one do with Serbia if one
could not even agree on Bosnia?'3' At times, the Great Austrian party
and the military appear to be almost the greatest enemy of 'us' in
Thall6czy's diary, which traced its pressure on Burian in I9II to accept
its pet project of a greater role for the Landesschef in Sarajevo, General
Potiorek, before manoeuvring him from office.'32 One is reminded of
Kallay's fulminations against the military party when consul-general at
Belgrade.
These cross-currents may help explain the sharp-eyed Sektionschef's
inability to prevent an escalation of the national problem in the field
closest to him, education, in the pre-1914 years. But the tone of hi
diary on the Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination in I9I4 still
surprises. The desperate Bosnian circumstances 'more or less known to
us', the 'dismal picture' of the 'spirit ... .] so corrupted' in the schools,
the later comment that neither Vienna or Sarajevo were aware of all
aspects of this 'so sad' state of affairs:'33 all this is recorded with a
customary dispassion most easily explicable by a further entry.
Discussing speculation as to how far Bosnian Serbs had been alienated
by the regime's extraordinary measures in the Balkan crisis of I913,
Thalloczy concluded that the whole thing went back further; the
current envenomed ethnic tensions would have come anyway. Had he
not remarked earlier to foreign minister Berchtold, who claimed not to
have found much about Great Serbianism in his files, that the
movement lay rather in the very soul of Serb teachers and priests?134
It is harder to think of a better example of the bleak bottom line of
the nationalist age. Thalloczy paid some attention in his diary to the
anti-Serb riots in Bosnia which followed the assassination and which
tend to weaken claims for a consolidating civil society there under
Austrian rule. His own dry accounts of the wretched plight of two Serb
Sektionschefs, the Joint Finance Ministry official Cerovic, trembling all
130 Ibid., for example, p. 893 (entry for I 3 September I 908).

131 Ibid., p. 9I I, (entry for 30January i909).
132 Ibid., entries for I 5 January and 3, I 7 February of I 909.
133 F. Hauptmann and A. Prosch eds, Dr Ludwig Thall6czy - Tagebiicher 23 VI I9I4 - 3' XII
I9I4, Graz, I 98 I, entries for 29 June, 3 July and 22 July 1914.
134 Ibid., 7 September and I 3 July I 9 I 4.
264 ROBIN OKEY
over, and the Sarajevo Provincial Government figure Zurunic, tacitly

boycotted by all, provide a bleak commentary on two generations of
hopes of smoothly integrating the most dynamic Balkan nation of the
time into a framework safe for Habsburgs and Hungarians.135 Kdallay's
wheel had come full circle.
IV
The above portraits have been intended to convey something of the

flavour of national contestation in the pre-194 world. As the liberal
optimism of the mid-nineteenth century faded, so national aspirations
in much of Europe took on a darker garb. Ambitions fuelled by the
developmental processes of the time were matched by awareness of
difficulties in the way, assumptions not of cooperation but of hostility,
marked by one's own side's perceived feckless indifference in the face
of the other's relentless determination. British and German geopolitical
thinking is a good example of the mind-set. Frequently the professional
students of the 'other' took on themselves the task of look-out for
potential danger. Dominant motifs of the age of nationalism, amid the
bombast, were often insecurity and frustration. In the case of Hung-
arian Balkanists, these traits were compounded. The relation between
national ambitions and national resources was particularly strained by
two things: the Hungarian minority problem (which had first led K'allay
to seek accommodation with the Serbs) and the relationship with
Austria, which gave Hungary the illusion of great power status, while
limiting her freedom of action and side-lining the Balkan issue for the
general public. Burian's enforced departure on the grounds that
Hungarians could not fill two of the three common ministerial posts
gives the lie to paranoid Austrian charges of Hungarian domination
under Dualism, as later did Istvan Tisza's failure to prevent the
Monarchy's drive to war with Serbia in July I914 a war which
posed the problem of what Slav-glutted Hungary could do with a
beaten Serbia.
No doubt the frustrations should not be exaggerated. This period
was a high point in Hungarian power and influence, also in the South
Slav world, as Great Austrian resentment showed. Kallay's strategy in
the late I86os reflected a hope that Hungary could call the shots in
Habsburg foreign policy and establish a paternalist relation with Serbia
that would neutralize internal Serb or Croat threats to her position.
When it became clear that he could not outbid Russia for Serbia's
135 Ibid., 29 June I 9 I 4 (Cerovic) and 4 September I 914 (Zurunic). The dry tone
be set against Cerovic's effusive tribute to Thall6czy and his moral support in a postwar
work on the assassination based on documents Thall6czy had given him: B. Cerovic,
Bosanski omladinci i sarajevski atentat, Sarajevo, I930, pp. 3-4. Thall6czy evidently had a gift
for personal relations.
affections, and that the Monarchy posed no threat to Magyardom,

Kallay as architect of the I 88 I Austro-Serbian treaty and then Bosnian
Joint Finance Minister was able to control Serbian ambitions through
an ostensibly harder line than in his early Belgrade years, using the
weight of the Monarchy and equating its interest with Hungary's.
However, the feat proved increasingly difficult to bring off. Nationalism
in Bosnia mounted. Kallay was seen as an Austrophile, even still a
Serbophile, the Hungarian patriotism behind his policies remaining
unrecognized. Under his successor Burian a shift of policy to the Serbs
brought opposition from Great Austrians increasingly hostile to
Hungarian control of the Monarchy's South Slav policies. Thalloczy
grimly documented these tendencies but for all his prestige he was
unable to institutionalize Balkan studies in Hungary, even along the
relatively modest lines of his memorandum of I9I2, proposing a
university chair and seminar, Academy-sponsored dictionaries and
more language teaching and personnel exchanges.'36 A fear that her
politicians were not up to safeguarding Hungary's over-extended
position haunts his diary, feeding the concern for strong leadership
which is its chief link with inter-war authoritarianism. To be fair, both
possible courses of a Hungarian Balkan policy were fraught with
difficulties, whether Kallay's flirtation with small-nation combinations
or the later compact with Viennese imperialism. The real criticism of
late Dualist Hungary was not that it failed to solve this problem but
that a complacent leadership had largely shelved it.
In the event, the precariousness of Hungary's position in the scheme
of things was to be exposed in the final stage of Thalloczy's career, as
Civil Commissar in the Monarchy's military occupation of Serbia in
the First World War. Thalloczy found in Belgrade a Croat military
governor and a Czech chief of staff with a highly nationalist Croat as
his deputy. The governor told Thalloczy openly that he was seen as an
agent of the Hungarian government, while the chief of staff commented
that in view of Thalloczy's limited mandate he would not be surprised
if he went away again. 137 Burian, now the Monarchy's foreign minister,
and Hungarian prime minister Tisza, primarily responsible for Thal-
loczy's appointment, were not agreed over what should eventually
happen to Serbia, while the Germans and Bulgarians in situ simply
laughed at Hungary's pursuit of state-right issues in the midst of war
and the Germans called the economic shots in Serbia.'38 Thalloczy's
goal for the occupation, according to his deputy, Imre Suhay, was to
show Serbs how much better Habsburg administration was than their
136 See note iI6.

137 Reformatus Leveltar, Burian Papers, VIII/38, Thall6czy to Burian, I February I9I6.
138 Ibid., Thall6czy to BuriAn, 9 February I9I6.
266 ROBIN OKEY
own, which both echoed Kallay and anticipated racial arrogance to

come. His comments on the material he had to train for this task were,
however, apparently unprintable, and there is evidence that he was
pessimistic of the war's outcome, and was seeking to mitigate post-war
antagonisms. Suhay's claim that he hoped to win Serb people's
sympathy and esteem appears contradicted by his correspondence with
Burian, which criticizes illusions along these lines, adducing the Serbian
national soul and calling only for vigilance.'39 The whole complex
muddle of the occupation and Thalloczy's role in it shows how
embattled were Hungarian notions of their country's hegemony on its
southern flank.
In the thick of the fray, Thalloczy died in a train crash returning
from Franz Joseph's funeral in December I9I6. It was Buri'an who
survived into shrunken Trianon Hungary, recording in his diary his
hopes for Woodrow Wilson's principles and attempts to convince Allied
figures like Cunningham and Coolidge of the need to cooperate against
revolution.'40 It was the same pawky rationalism with which he had
tried throughout his career to make the facts fit Magyar national
interests. Again, it showed the difficulties of doing so, in more extreme
circumstances. The last entry was made by his wife: '20 October I 922.
Istvan Buri'an died. R.I.P."'4 It was a suitably bleak epitaph for two
generations of Hungarian Balkan policy which found it increasingly
difficult to implement Kallay's dream of a Hungarian Balkan hegemony
tied to a Hungarian-orientated Dual Monarchy.
139 Suhay, Thall6czy mint polgari biztos, pp. 6-8; Reformatus Leveltar, ibid., Thall6czy
Burian, i 6 July I 9 I 6. In line with experience in Bosnia, the Serbian commercial class was
included in the dangerous intelligentsia: see Tisza's letter to the Army High Command of 4
April I91 6, SzKK, Fol. Hung. I682/2.
140 Reformatus Levltar, Burian Papers, XXVIII, Burian's diary I9I9-22: entries for 20
February, I March, 7 March I 9 I 9.
141 Ibid., XXVIII, Burian's diary, I 9 1 9-22.

OKEY - A Trio of Hungarian Balkanists

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

OKEY - A Trio of Hungarian Balkanists

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

A Trio of Hungarian Balkanists: Béni Kállay, István Burián and Lajos Thallóczy in the Age

Modern Humanities Research Association, University College London, School of

A Trio of Hungarian Balkanists:

ONE of the least attractive products of East European nationalism,

Robin Okey is Reader in History at the University of Warwick.

field of Moh'acs in I526. Austria-Hungary's occupation and later

I There is no satisfactory monograph on Hungarian nationalism in this period. See

4 I. Nemeskurty, 'Egy elfelejtetett magyar allamferfi. Kallay Beni', Ne~pszabadsdg, I987,

Hungarian Prime Minister Gyula Andrassy, were a mere ruse cooked

13 KWllay, pp. I 03-o6.

view to a Balkan rising and war with Turkey. 14 In these circumstances,

avenues opened up for Hungary by Dualism and the ambition of

solidarity of small nations beyond the point of Hungarian self-interest.

That tutelage by the Monarchy would have greater assimilative

Sheikh-ul-Islam respectively in Constantinople were zealously weak-

of all the fanciful dreams, whether Pan-Croat or Pan-Serb, would be

Hindsight should give Kallay credit for recognizing that Bosnia

42 Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Zajednicko ministarstvo finansija (ABiH, ZMF), Prasidial

him into direct conflict with the merchant-dominated Bosnian Serb

47 ABiH, ZMF, PR BH 26/ I 89I, Killay to Kutschera, n.d.

51 Voluminous records of the anti-Kallay press campaign are contained in OL.

scheme, western and orientalist ideal types, the reactivation of a

58 J. E. E. Dalberg-Acton, The Histogy of Freedom and other Essays, London, i 907,

what is now western Slovakia. With a diplomatic background and

crisis of 1905 -o6. He followed events at

69 Ibid., i 6 January I 899 (Athens).

presentations to Franz Joseph (May I907) and his fellow ministers

was which state of the Monarchy Bosnia should join. Predictably,

77 Ibid., XI/44, Emlekirat-tervezet a boszniai-hercegovinai allamjogi kerdes megoldAs

moderate Serbs, wrote Civil Adlatus Benko.8' Government should not

81 Ibid., VIII/20, Baron Benko to Burian, 24 July I9I0.

Burian found loss of office painful and was

evidence that Burian believed in a Bosnian Serb loyalty without arriere

As the most perceptive observer of Kallay and life-long acquaintance

93 Reformatus Leveltar, Burian Papers, XI/44, 'Adalek a magyar nemzetisegi kerdeshez',

Albania. Thalloczy claimed to be able to speak a new language

97 F. Glatz, TdrtMnetir6 es politika. Szekfu, Stiener, 7him is Miskolczy nemzetr6l es allam

But perhaps Thalloczy's most signal contribution to Hungarianism

the much-respected figure of Franz Joseph.'07 Thalloczy's Albanian

consul-general in Budapest, Mons, and the king of Saxony, who

114 SzKK, Thall6czy's diary, June I 892.

not. Horrified by an overlooked statement in a Croatian textbook

120 ABiH, ZMF, BH 14158/I892 , Thall6czy's comments, n.d.; BH 12914/I9

teachers and university education for the first generation of Bosnian

126 ABiH, ZMF, PR BHI 282/I 904, Thall6czy's report, n.d.

128 SzKK, 2549/ 7, Thall6czy's diary, i 9 September 1907.

and Vienna, was, for a Magyar, the Austro-Hungarian relationship.

130 Ibid., for example, p. 893 (entry for I 3 September I 908).

over, and the Sarajevo Provincial Government figure Zurunic, tacitly

The above portraits have been intended to convey something of the

affections, and that the Monarchy posed no threat to Magyardom,

136 See note iI6.

own, which both echoed Kallay and anticipated racial arrogance to

You might also like