Czernin becomes foreign minister

On 22 December 1916 Emperor Charles I changed the man in charge of the monarchy’s foreign policy. The 44-year-old Count Ottokar Czernin, until August the Austro-Hungarian minister in Romania, became Austria-Hungary’s joint Minister of the Imperial House and of Foreign Affairs. He replaced Baron István Burián, who had directed diplomacy since January 1915. Burián did not leave the government: that same day he took office as joint finance minister. Some accounts, especially in English, give 23 December as the date of Czernin’s appointment. It was the new Emperor’s second great personnel decision in those weeks, after the change of government in Vienna.

An aristocrat from Franz Ferdinand’s circle

Czernin was born on 26 September 1872 at Dymokury in Bohemia, into an old family of the Bohemian aristocracy. He studied law in Prague, and in 1897 entered the diplomatic service, working at the embassy in Paris and then in The Hague. In 1902 he left diplomacy and devoted himself to his estate and to politics. From 1903 to 1913 he sat in the Bohemian Diet, where he belonged to the pro-German “Constitutionally Loyal” party of the great landowners, and made his name as a resolute conservative, a defender of monarchical power and an opponent of universal suffrage. From 1905 he was one of the advisers of the heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who saw in him the future head of government of a renewed, more strongly centralised monarchy. In 1912 the Emperor appointed him a life member of the Austrian House of Lords.

In the autumn of 1913, at the Archduke’s wish, Czernin returned to diplomacy as minister in Bucharest. He was regarded as an enemy of the Hungarians, and his appointment provoked opposition in Budapest, but in the end the Hungarian prime minister, István Tisza, agreed to it. Czernin soon concluded that allied Romania could not be relied on. After the outbreak of war he helped to keep her neutral, supported by the aged, pro-German King Carol I. According to some accounts he advised Vienna to offer Bucharest territorial concessions in Transylvania and Bukovina as the price of continued neutrality, which the Hungarian government firmly opposed. On 27 August 1916 it was to him in Bucharest that Romania’s declaration of war was handed, after which he returned to Vienna.

A minister for peace

Charles I knew Czernin from the circle of his uncle Franz Ferdinand. From the first days of his reign the young Emperor had made it known that he wanted to end the war as quickly as possible, and Czernin was convinced that the monarchy needed a quick peace if it was to survive. The new minister took office at a special moment. Ten days earlier the Central Powers, Austria-Hungary among them, had made a peace offer through the neutrals, and on 18 December the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, had called on the belligerents to state their terms. Vienna’s reply to the American note was one of the first matters to land on Czernin’s desk.

The appointment also strengthened the influence of the group of German-Austrian aristocrats in the House of Lords to which Czernin belonged. Historians describe his policy as a “German course”: Czernin sought a compromise peace but did not want to break the alliance with Germany, and the monarchy’s dependence on Berlin increasingly limited his freedom of action. At the beginning of 1917 he reluctantly agreed to German unrestricted submarine warfare, then tried in vain to persuade the German leaders to make concessions for the sake of peace, and at the beginning of 1918 he conducted the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest. He lost his office in April 1918, when the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, revealed Emperor Charles’s secret peace approaches. His successor was once again Burián.