It was one of those little blurbs that appear as a sidebar below the fold on the back pages of the newspaper.  It is a story that doesn’t really bear much relevance to current world affairs, and no one would feel deprived if it never made it to print.  Still, it is the kind of story that intrigues me, that sends my mind to another time and place, another world entirely.  It was the small headline that first caught my attention:

Hapsburg who saw end of an empire dead at 98

Otto von Hapsburg, the last of that ancient family to claim a royal throne, died this week, just a few months shy of his 99^th birthday.  At the time of his birth in 1912, the old Hapsburg realm was already teetering on the brink of dissolution.  The empire had once included Hungary, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, and large swaths of Italy, Poland, Germany, and Romania.  In their role as Spanish monarchs from the 16^th – 17^th centuries (and for a while Portuguese monarchs, too), Hapsburg dominions even included virtually all of South America and a large part of North America. 

All of that was becoming a distant memory when Otto was introduced to the court at Vienna’s Hofburg Palace.  Ethnic tensions were seething, and the anachronistic dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary was by then little more than a puppet of its much more powerful neighbor and ally, the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II.  The centrifugal forces tearing at the seams of the monarchy increased dramatically two years after Otto’s birth.  That is when his great-uncle, Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo.  With Franz Ferdinand’s death, Otto’s father, Charles, became the heir apparent, succeeding to the throne in 1916 upon the death of the octogenarian emperor, Franz Josef. 

We all know what happened next.  The Hapsburg monarchy could not survive World War I.  The end of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy differed, however, from what happened with the other defeated powers of World War I.  The German Kaiser and Russian Czar abdicated, bring an official end to the family’s claim to power.  Upon the collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918, Otto’s father merely “renounced participation” in state affairs.  He never abdicated, and he spent the remainder of his life in a futile attempt to regain the throne from his home in exile.  Charles died prematurely in 1922, and for the next 40 years Otto continued his father’s doomed quest to restore the monarchy.

As Otto grew to adulthood, he became a man without a state.  He claimed to be the Emperor of Austria and the King of Hungary, but neither of those states would allow him entry into the country.  He lived at various times in Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, France, and Belgium.  As a fervent anti-Communist and anti-Fascist, he left Europe altogether at the outbreak of World War II, and spent most of the war years in Washington DC.  He was granted his first passport in 1946 from the Principality of Monaco at the request of Charles de Gaulle, and was later granted a diplomatic passport from Spain.

Since the end of World War II, Otto von Hapsburg has mostly been associated with the European Union movement.  He was actively involved in the Paneuropean Union, and became that organization’s honorary president in the 1970’s.  The Paneuropean Union is the oldest organization to advocate for a unified Europe.  Its mission envisions a Europe guided by the ideals of classical liberalism and Christian ethics.  As such, it was a fitting match for someone with Otto’s family history harkening back to the supra-national Holy Roman Empire. 

After World War II, as Europe began making tentative strides toward union, Otto von Hapsburg’s life seems to have moved from one of near tragic irrelevance to one of effective accomplishment and meaning.  In the early 1960’s, as his reputation as an advocate for democratic European unity grew, Otto officially renounced his claim to the Austrian and Hungarian thrones.  At about the same time, he was offered the crown of Spain by Francisco Franco, an offer he refused due to the long-standing absence of the Hapsburgs from the Spanish throne.  Due to his renunciation of hereditary rights, Austria restored his citizenship in the 1960’s, and eventually he was granted citizenship by Hungary, Croatia, and Germany, where he lived since 1954.

I am intrigued to think of the world that Otto von Hapsburg was born into.  How might his life of royal privilege have developed if Germany had defeated the French and British at the Marne and won an early, decisive victory in World War I?  Germany would quickly have come to the aid of Austria against Italy, Russia, and Serbia.  Those countries could not have overcome the full might of united Austro-German forces.  Surely, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy would have been granted a reprieve from its ethnic disintegration.  But could that reprieve have lasted long?  Would an aggressive Hohenzollern Germany consent to the presence of a realm next door that harbored similar imperial aspirations despite its internal weaknesses and dependence on German military protection?

If Otto had come to the throne in 1922 when his father died, would he still have lived to the ripe old age of 98 as a semi-constitutional monarch in a multi-ethnic Central European state?  I rather doubt it.  As the Austro-Hungarian monarchy began its rapid decline in the late 19th century, members of the royal family tended to meet an early death, often from the assassin's bullet.  Moreover, a German victory in World War I would only have slowed the ideological tidal wave that swept across industrial Europe.  It would no more have turned the clock back to a 19^th century milieu than Napoleon’s defeat succeeded in restoring 18^th century European civilization.  As we know now, the model created by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 lasted only a single generation and began to crumble with the revolutionary movements of 1848.

Not too long after Otto von Hapsburg renounced his monarchical claim in the 1960’s, he expressed misgivings and regret.  He consented to the renunciation, he claimed, “for purely practical reasons,” not out of any real conviction.  At one point, he said it “was such an infamy, I’d rather never have signed it.”  I think, however, that his life was much better for consenting to the end of an anachronistic and pointless royal title.  His life’s work for European unity was far more effective as conducted by a private citizen than if it had been pursued as the Austrian Kaiser or King of Hungary, royal titles that smack of anti-democratic imperialism. 

On this day following the passing of the last claimant to the Hapsburg throne, I applaud him as a man who could move beyond the sterile confines of Vienna’s Hofburg Palace.  I applaud the accomplishments of one who fought tirelessly against European oppression, whether it originated from National Socialism or Soviet Communism.  I am happy to share his vision of a strong Europe united for the common defense against threats to freedom and human dignity, whether those threats come from hostile nation-states or supra-national terrorist organizations.  I am glad to refer to this descendant of Holy Roman Emperors, not with the title of Kaiser or King, but with his more recent moniker, Herr Doktor Otto von Hapsburg.

Requiescat in pace.

Otto von Hapsburg, 1998