Without any Revolution and Riots: The Quiet Collapse of the Habsburg Empire, 1918

Recorded October 18, 2018. This public lecture will be presented by
Professor Alexander Watson, Professor of History, Goldsmiths,
University of London. The end of the First World War was a
transformative moment for East-Central Europe. The historiography
is dominated by the fraught peace deliberations to build a brave
new world and the ethnic rivalry and ideological conflict within
and between the newly forming nation states in 1919-23. This talk
will focus on the earlier, neglected instant of Habsburg imperial
collapse in October 1918. It will ask why, in a period usually
defined by its violence and chaos, the revolutions that spread
across the empire were so strangely bloodless, rapid and orderly.
The talk explores the complex reasons for this swift transition of
power and what it reveals about the potential for a more harmonious
post-war world. This lecture is part of the 1918 and the New Europe
lecture series. Learn more at:
https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/