Legacy Media Bankruptcy, Politico Ed.: 'Austria-Hungary' as a Threat to Ukraine and, by Extension, the EU

Another day, another instance of intellectual bed-wetting by legacy media 'journalists': read and weep about the decay and decadence of Western 'elites'

German version here.

Source.

The many problems of legacy media are well known, and a recent piece in Politico shows this again. This time, however, it is arguably even worse as one can quite easily discover an ‘even’ more serious fact on the basis of a few moments worth your time conducting a brief internet search: ‘spin’, agit-prop, and propaganda are, of course, a given, but Politico’s Matthew Karnitschnig’s article shows much ‘more’: decadence, stunning levels of historical ignorance, and dishonesty.

First of all, I would like to invite you all to read the article by the Austro-American journalist, Mr. Karnitschnig. Entitled ‘Watch out Ukraine, Here Comes the Hungaro-Austrian Empire’, it is thoroughly unworthy of even a middle school paper, let alone anyone who once went to an Ivy League College and received a master’s degree in ‘journalism’. In fact, the facts (misre)presented in Karnitschnig’s piece are so far off the mark, I’m honestly unsure if I’m offended—professionally speaking—or should simply laugh this off as yet another example of someone courageously parading his intellectual nakedness for everyone to see.

Who is Matthew Karnitschnig?

The author of this abysmally low-level piece is none other than the US journalist (sic) Matthew Karnitschnig, who, according to his German-language (only) Wikipedia entry, is the ‘son of an Austrian father and an American mother’ (no more than two genders back in the early 1970s, I suppose, but I digress). Raised in Arizona, he began his ‘journalism career...in North Carolina’ before becoming a ‘reporter and editor for Bloomberg, Reuters, and Business Week’. Karnitschnig then moved to the Wall Street Journal before joining Politico in 2015 where he has been since, reporting on Central European issues from his base in Berlin. You can find his Twitter account here.

Yesterday, friend-of-these-pages Thomas Oysmüller wrote a brief piece about Mr. Karnitschnig’s article, arguing that the latter’s piece is perhaps best understood ‘as an explicit warning to the political elite’. Oysmüller then quoted Karnitschnig’s piece:

Kickl’s far-right Freedom Party has been leading the country’s national polls by several points since November as soaring inflation and a sharp increase in asylum applications fuel discontent with the current government, a coalition between the center-right Austrian People’s Party and the Greens. With the other main opposition party, the Social Democrats, plagued by infighting, Kickl’s party has the best chance in years to seize power.

That would spell major trouble for the European Union, which is already struggling to cope with Hungary, where nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has systematically taken control of all major levers of power and undermined independent media, transforming the country into what critics see as a semi-authoritarian state in the middle of the EU.

All this may be so, but it is little more than a description whose ‘analytical’ content derives from the opinion of some ‘critics’.

Yet, it gets worse, for almost equally embarrassing for Karnitschnig is a Tweet, dated 16 May 2023, which should be mentioned:

Oysmüller’s Tweet: ‘On 15 May 1955, the Austrian State Treaty was signed. It signified the perpetual neutrality of Austria, which did not become a military base of the Americans.’

What a nice little tempest in a teacup, you might say—but not so fast.

Obviously, European political elite of whatever faction or country have no interest in pursuing European or even the interests of the nation-states whose people they ostensibly serve. There is no doubt that this is a gesture of submission (acquiescence) that is certainly welcome by the US. Nevertheless, this statement inevitably leads to questions about the historical roots of EU integration, which after all has been increasingly promoted by the same political elites over the last 30 years or so.

Using the example of a recent book publication (S. Wertheim, Tomorrow the World, 2020), I have shown what has changed in recent years:

Wertheim’s book is a quite good read, and, if I’d daresay, it’s a marvellous achievement for one particular reason: the careful, if very much deliberate, planning behind US global supremacy after 1945, which Wertheim meticulously reconstructs over 250+ pages, was very much anathema to anything resembling mainstream scholarship across the Humanities and Social Sciences so far.

Yet, in the autumn of 2020, it suddenly became acceptable in polite society to call out the careful planning conducted by US officials, which (kind of) ‘reveals’ — to Western audiences, if only they’d read anymore — what once far-leftish ‘dissidents’ such as Noam Chomsky had been saying for decades.

Further content on that subject matter is available in a long-form essay over at Propaganda in Focus.

Ignorance, Decadence of Legacy Media: Austria-Hungary

Thus, what Karnitschnig offers here is—neither anything new nor unexpected. The extent to which US legacy media serves as spear carriers for the American hegemonic enterprise has been well known for decades; the ‘propaganda model’ by Herman and Chomsky is mentioned here merely for the sake of completeness.

The only striking thing is that Karnitschnig drastically deviates from the established research landscape on the late Habsburg monarchy and obviously displays his own ignorance of what Western legacy media was reporting some 10 years ago.

With regard to historical literature, in particular the quite positive (re)interpretation of Austria-Hungary (Hungary-Austria, the moniker used by Karnitschnig, did not exist), the reader is referred to two recent syntheses: on the one hand, there is Pieter Judson’s The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, Mass., 2016), which presents a quite positive reconstruction. The second title is by Steven Beller, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1815-1918 (Cambridge, 2018), offers an equally engaging overview.

Both titles have in common that the later Habsburg monarchy is interpreted in a very positive way, thereby deviating drastically from the very negative interpretation that dominated scholarship from 1918 through the Cold War. This is clearly evident in the example of the author. Pieter Judson is Professor of Modern History at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and he wrote his dissertation at Columbia University under the supervision of the recently-deceased István Deák, who for decades was the doyen of Habsburg research in the USA and is regarded as a key figure of the so-called ‘revisionist’—positive-re-interpretation of Austria-Hungary.

As an aside in the spirit of ‘full disclosure’: I once was invited to teach a term at Columbia University as the István Deák Visiting Professor (back in 2018), and there I had the pleasure of meeting István Deák and, a bit later back in Europe, also Pieter Judson.

The only relevant issue thing about these historiographical aspects is that Mr. Karnitschnig studied journalism at Columbia University, but apparently knows nothing about these things (or is omitting them, although the latter notion is speculation on my part).

Decadence of Legacy Media: the EU

Karnitschnig's article is particularly ridiculous, however, in connection with his profession, because I would like to use his example to briefly show how ‘the EU’ was understood by legacy media and our ‘intellectual gate-keepers’ as little as a decade ago.

I would thus like to refer to Robert Cooper, an ennobled British diplomat (Wikipedia bio), who is certainly many things, but due to his work as an advisor to the EU Commission (2013-14), he could hardly be considered ‘unbiased’.

In 2012, Cooper published an essay in the EU-affiliated magazine Eurozine with the innocuous title ‘The European Union and the Habsburg Monarchy’ (my emphases):

The Habsburg Monarchy lasted five centuries. It was both solid and flexible; it aroused genuine affection among its citizens. But it vanished in a puff of smoke. Should we expect the European Union, shallow in history and unloved by those it serves, to do better?

To be fair, it was more than a puff of smoke. The bullets from Gavrilo Princip’s revolver killed the Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia. What killed the Habsburg Monarchy was the four years of pounding by artillery that followed. This brought death and ruin to the old Europe; in Russia it brought revolution and tyranny, and in Germany regime change accompanied by failed revolution, then inflation and depression, and finally world war and genocide.

What arose from the ashes? The answer is: the European Union and NATO. It is the EU and its resemblance to the Habsburg Monarchy that is the subject of this essay, but something needs first to be said about NATO which was and is its indispensable partner.

I’ll skip over the NATO adoration and move on to the EU-specific parts:

it is striking that after the unhappy interval of the 1930s and World War II, Europe—or rather Western Europe—found itself with a body that in many ways resembles the Habsburg Monarchy. Like the Habsburg Monarchy, the EU is not a nation state but a complex confection of states, nations, centralised bureaucracy and local autonomy. Both have grown by voluntary accession (in the old days it was called dynastic marriage) [this is too stupid to comment on, for if there’d be no military, no dynastic marriage would be accepted; also, note that those who aren’t royalty would have likely objected to this white-wash of the realities of pre-modern Europe, to say nothing about, say, constitutions, treaties, and the like] rather than by conquest. The EU is partly bound together, as the Habsburg Monarchy was, by transnational elites: in the Habsburg case it was the officer corps and the civil service; for the EU it is business elites and civil servants, both national and European.

Above all, both the Habsburg Monarchy and the EU have provided a home for the small nations of Europe who would have difficulty surviving alone: in the nineteenth century, their need was to avoid being at the mercy of the less liberal German and Russian Empires. In the twentieth, belonging to a larger framework has brought both political and economic security. Had it not been for the catastrophe of war, the Habsburg Monarchy would have continued to develop in its haphazard way, no doubt giving more autonomy to those who wanted it but still providing the smaller states with things that mattered a lot to them.

These also included roads, railways, laws, police to enforce them, courts, parliaments, education, and a centralized bureaucracy to manage it all. The Habsburg Monarchy liberated its serfs some twenty years before Russia and America, and introduced universal male suffrage early in the twentieth century. All these were useful and helped bring modernization to many parts of the Empire; but the peoples of central Europe could have got them from Germany and maybe even from Russia one day. What was unique in the Habsburg zone was that it enabled the small nationalities to survive, keep their culture, some level of autonomy, and even to thrive with it. The security it provided was political; but was backed—for this was the nineteenth century—by military force [and here Mr. Cooper found the military again, which, as thoroughly postmodern, ‘better’ peoples, we didn’t need in the 20th century, eh…?].

In these few paragraphs there is a great deal of absurd and stupefying ignorant glorification of the past. What is presented is a severely distorted image that, while a reflection of such rosy views is supported by historical research (albeit with quite a few more reservations than what Cooper is offering), but this is so absurd in the context of the EU.

The reference to military power seems to me to be particularly important here, whereby in the case of the EU this is above all NATO or the US war machine mentioned by Cooper at the beginning of his essay. Taken on its own, Brussels may be happy to huff and puff about ‘soft power’ (Joseph Nye), but this does not make the EU any more relevant in geopolitical affairs.

Cooper’s essay, however, shows how much the image—rather: the distorted images of the transatlantic elites and their spear carriers in legacy media’—has changed in the last 10 years.

One is almost tempted to note that research opinion has remained the same, but that the findings of ‘da Science™’ are no longer as useful for the propaganda of these elites as they were 10 years ago.

Epilogue: The Bankruptcy of ‘Legacy Journalism’

A particularly amusing second example of this change is also offered by the Economist, which published an article entitled ‘The Holy Roman Empire: European Disunion Done Right’ almost at the same time as Cooper’s essay appeared back in December 2012. In its own way, the Economist ‘complained’, as it were, about the bureaucratic-unattractive summit meetings in Brussels:

SUMMITS were more fun in those days. When Ferdinand III, the Habsburg monarch of the Holy Roman Empire, arrived in Regensburg, the Brussels of its time, in late 1652, he brought 60 musicians and three dwarves. There were sleigh rides, fireworks and the first Italian opera ever performed in Germanic lands. Aside from that, the Reichstag (imperial diet) was much like today’s European Council, the gathering for leaders of the member states. The emperor arrived with a retinue of 3,000 people to meet the empire’s princes, bishops, margraves and other assorted VIPs. They negotiated for more than a year. By the time Ferdinand left again for Vienna, with 164 ships floating down the Danube, quite a lot had transpired.

As if the many meetings of the Eurocrats, lobbyists, and opinion leaders in Brussels would be ‘improved’ by musical accompaniment or dwarfs.

Likewise, in the Economist, an article appeared as late as 2018 (!) that spoke of the ‘Lessons for the EU from the Austro-Hungarian Empire’. The most important of which was (again with my emphasis):

One lesson above all lives on: do not take the loyalty of a multinational block for granted. The Habsburgs charmed their subjects by giving them relative freedom, material benefits and protection under the law from the whims of local barons. ‘They created a situation where ordinary people could see their own interests in institutions of empire’, explains Pieter Judson, a leading historian of the empire. But when tough times came with the start of the war, he explains, it turned out that these loyalties had been contingent: ‘The state didn’t provide what it promised to provide. There was no food and no fuel. Men went to the front, women to the factories and children were left on the streets. Loyal nations—the Ukrainians, the Serbs, the Czechs—were persecuted without foundation.’ When the empire was dissolved after its defeat, it was not greatly mourned.

The analogies are obvious: the EU will probably be accepted as long as it offers relative freedom (‘Green Passport’, though, are here to stay), material benefits (‘Eurozone Sinks into Recession’, the Guardian reported yesterday [8 June 2023]) and legal protection from the whims of local barons (EU heat pump mandates).

As long as supply chains don’t break, the EU will exist. ‘But when tough times came with the start of the war, he explains, it turned out that these loyalties had been contingent.’ The coming months and years will provide the proverbial proof of the pudding.

Certainly it would be helpful if Matthew Karnitschnig learned a little history, but it is doubtful that it would do any good.

It would be even more practical if, instead of snappy tweets, he would explain why Politico and many other leading media have now, within a very short period of time, departed from the until recently widespread, if supremely anachronistic, talking point that Austria-Hungary would be a good example—or at least a plausible analogy—for the EU.

This, however, would probably signify the bankruptcy of legacy journalism, even though the signs of its decay are all around us.