Burián becomes foreign minister

On 16 April 1918, two days after the resignation of Count Ottokar Czernin, Emperor Karl I entrusted the direction of the monarchy’s diplomacy to Baron István Burián. The British chronology of the war records this change under 17 April. For the 67-year-old Hungarian it was his second term in the post. He had first become Joint Minister of the Imperial House and of Foreign Affairs in January 1915, and in December 1916 he had had to make way for Czernin, the young emperor’s favourite. He did not leave the government then, but took over the joint ministry of finance. Now Karl turned to the man he himself had pushed aside barely a year and a half earlier.

Burián was born in 1851 at Stampfen, today Stupava near Bratislava, into a noble family from Upper Hungary. He was a diplomat of the old school. He served as consul general in Moscow, from 1887 to 1895 was Austria-Hungary’s representative in Sofia, and then minister in Stuttgart and in Athens. From 1903 to 1912, as joint minister of finance, he also administered Bosnia and Herzegovina, occupied and from 1908 annexed. Later he served in the Hungarian government as minister attached to the King’s person. Throughout his career he was a close associate and confidant of the former Hungarian Prime Minister István Tisza. In July 1914 he acted as intermediary between Tisza and the foreign minister Leopold Berchtold, and as minister in 1915–1916 he conducted pedantic and unsuccessful negotiations with Italy and pushed the Austro-Polish solution of the Polish question.

The choice of Burián in April 1918 was a choice made for want of a better candidate. After the Sixtus affair the most important thing was to rebuild Berlin’s trust, and the old diplomat, known for his loyalty to the alliance, aroused no suspicion in Germany. The Austrian historian Elisabeth Kovács writes that he could only continue the strictly pro-German course for which Czernin had paid with his post. Burián also kept the joint ministry of finance, which he ran in parallel until 7 September 1918. In Hungary his return was read as a strengthening of the Tisza camp. The Social Democratic “Népszava” quoted the opinion that Burián’s appointment was “not a cause but a symptom”, and linked it to the crisis of Sándor Wekerle’s government, which resigned the next day.

The new minister’s immediate tasks were set by the consequences of the affair and the unfinished negotiations in the east. On 7 May the final peace with Romania was signed in Bucharest, and on 12 May Burián accompanied the Emperor to the German headquarters at Spa, where a closer union of the two monarchies was agreed. The future of the Kingdom of Poland also returned to the agenda. The best-known gesture of Burián’s second term was the note of 14 September 1918 to all the belligerent states proposing confidential peace talks, which the Entente rejected. Burián resigned on 24 October 1918, a few days before the collapse of the monarchy. He was succeeded by Count Gyula Andrássy, who directed the diplomacy of the dying monarchy for only a few days.