The Collapse of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires and the Brutalization of the Successor States

This essay explores the interconnected issues of demobilisation and brutalisation in the collapsing Habsburg and Ottoman empires in the period immediately after 1918. Post-imperial Austria, Hungary and Turkey witnessed the emergence of sizeable paramilitary subcultures that were shaped by the successive traumatising experiences of war, defeat, territorial disintegration, occupation, and revolution nationalist or socialist. Members of these subcultures fed on a doctrine of ethnic nationalism and shared a determination to use violence in order to suppress real or alleged internal enemies and to avenge their perceived humiliations resulting from military defeat. Ex-officers brutalised by wars and infuriated by their outcomes joined forces with, and transmitted their values to, members of a younger generation, who compensated for their lack of combat experience by often surpassing the war veterans in terms of radicalism, activism and brutality. Together the veterans and members of the war youth generation formed ultra-militant milieux that differed from the community of the trenches in their social make-up, their liberation from the constraints of military discipline, and their self-imposed post-war mission of destroying external and internal enemies.