The question “Why did so many Europeans emigrate to the United States?” can be answered in one word — Lebensraum.

Many emigrants were peasants who didn’t have enough land to have a decent standard of living. The United States — with its far lower population density — provided them with the economic opportunity they craved. This would have been especially strong in the case of a country like Austria which had no colonial empire.

In fact, Hitler’s plan to conquer and depopulate Slavic Eastern Europe was from his point of view Germany’s (and by extension, Western Europe’s) last chance to escape American domination, by acquiring the natural resources (chiefly farmland, but also the oil of the Caucasus) needed to compete with the United States.

For the Nazis, racism played second fiddle to the ambition of re-establishing Europe as the world’s leading continent — that is why in a war with the white, racist Jim Crow US on one side and non-white Japan on the other, they sided with the non-whites against the whites. You can read more at the blog post “Europe versus Western Civilization” on the Three Hierarchies blog.

Nobody is perfect. Neither does any land.

But surely Austria-Hungary was a beautiful example how so many nations can indeed peacefully create one Empire.

1) The Hapsburgs would be preferable to the Romanov empire because the Hapsburgs were Catholic and the Romanovs not.

2) As is often the case, conscription is an evil it has taken long to appreciate the true significance of. No less a figure than Cardinal Ottaviani called conscription a maxima iniuria civibus (a “very great injustice to citizens”).

3) A large number of emigrants from the Austo-Hungarian empire were non-Catholics who did not greatly enjoy living under such an obviously Catholic regime, especially when confronted with an option of emigration to a potentially much more lucrative new land. Some were radicals who wanted to live in “the land of the free”.

Others may have left to escape the “Magyarization” attempts of the largely independent Hungarian government. I have a great love for Hungary, its culture, and history, but they undoubtedly played an obstinate part in the Empire, and caused a great deal of difficulties for many of the peoples they ruled.

The trouble was that if the Emperor intervened too heavily in affairs under Hungary’s purview, he risked upsetting the Magyars and provoking civil war. But at the same time, he could hardly ignore injustices committed against his subjects by his subjects. Franz Joseph basically tried to steer a delicate balance for the sake of peace. Franz Ferdinand was known to be in favor of simply removing most of the Hapsburgs’ Slavic lands from the Hungarian kingdom, but whether this would be realistically achievable is a subject of some debate.

As it happens — Sarajevo, the World War, and all that — events intervened, and we shall never know.

That said, a few questions I’d pose to Mr Zmirak:

* The words Kaiser and Czar share a derivation, and with regard to the place of rulers and people and religion, the Russia of the Czars had a similar cosmology to the Christian empire described in the piece. How in the writer’s view did the Czarist version differ and why was the Hapsburg-Holy Roman-Austro-Hungarian preferable?

* As for drafting children for foreign wars, WWI began with Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war, and Austro-Hungarian casualties in that conflict were staggering, with more than 5 million killed or wounded. (The number of casualties from America’s foreign wars is a fraction of that.) You want an argument against conscription for foreign wars, you could point to Austria-Hungary.

* Between 1820 and 1920 some 4 million people emigrated from the Austro-Hungarian empire to the United States. Only Germany, Ireland and Italy had higher figures. If the Austro-Hungarian Empire were so wonderful, why did so many people wish to leave it for America?