Greater Austria proposal

Between 1849 and 1851, Austria repeatedly proposed that all Habsburg-ruled territories should join a German confederation. Large areas of the Habsburg lands in east-central Europe (such as Hungary and northern Italy) were not part of the previous German state union, the German Confederation. The corresponding plans were given names such as Greater Austria, the Seventy Million Empire or, according to the proposers, the Schwarzenberg Plan or the Schwarzenberg-Bruck Plan.

The outlined Greater Austria (Germany and the whole of Austria, shown here in green) would have had around seventy million inhabitants

An important initiative in this direction was the plan of the Austrian head of government Felix zu Schwarzenberg of March 9, 1849. The accession of Hungary and northern Italy would have considerably strengthened Austrian supremacy in Germany. The ideas of his trade minister Karl Ludwig von Bruck from October 1849 went in a similar direction: He sketched out the outlines of a corresponding customs union with world power ambitions.

The plans of 1849 and 1850 are to be understood partly as genuine offers and partly as propaganda in the German political debate of the time. Austria rejected the German Empire supported by the Frankfurt National Assembly because it was too liberal and because Austria was not allowed to join with all its territories. It also opposed the Prussian attempt in 1849/1850 to establish a more conservative federal state (Erfurt Union). This union would have united either most of the non-Austrian German states or at least many of them.

Neither Prussia nor Austria were able to push through their plans: The middle states such as Bavaria and Hanover were afraid of a federal state without Austria, in which Prussia would have been the dominant power, but equally afraid of a Greater Austria.

See also

• German question

Literature

• Manfred Luchterhandt: Österreich-Ungarn und die preußische Unionspolitik 1848–1851. In: Gunther Mai (Publisher): Die Erfurter Union und das Erfurter Unionsparlament 1850. Böhlau, Cologne 2000, ISBN 3-412-02300-0, p. 81–110.