When former communist minister Aleksander Kwaśniewski was elected to the Presidency of the Republic of Poland, in 1995, some Cracovians set up border crossing stations where the border between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire once was. Although it was nowhere near an attempt to effectively declare the independence of the former province of Habsburg’s Galicia, protesters referred to that long time gone reality to justify differences in traditions and way of thinking between them and the other Polish lands. The Habsburg legacy certainly lives on to this day.

During the 90’s, the newborn Ukrainian state was somewhat affected by an Habsburg nostalgia, mostly in its westernmost part that largely coincided with former eastern Galicia. Exactly one hundred years before, in 1895, one of the last Austrian Archdukes was born in present-day Croatia: Wilhelm Franz of Habsburg-Lorraine. His father, Charles-Stephen, was committed to reform the House’s view of the very concept of “nation”.

At the turn of the century

A multiethnic empire, Austria-Hungary was struggling to maintain its control over Slavic populations. On the southern border, Serbian designs on unifying Jugoslavia led to mounting tensions between the Empire and Belgrade. The contention became potentially explosive after 1908, when Bosnia was annexed to the Habsburg domains and the house of Karadjordevic, adverse to Austria, usurped the Serbian throne. It was in fact the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, by the hand of a Serbian-Bosnian terrorist that brought these two countries, and the World, at war.

North of the Balkans, on the other side of the Hungarian plains and the Carpathian mountains, the border with Russia was certainly problematic as well. Poland and Ukraine were divided, some people living under the rule of Wien, some others under the Tsar. The Polish nation was a largely recognized and ancient entity, once a leader of East Europe alongside Lithuania in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the biggest countries in late medieval and modern era. However, the Commonwealth was partitioned three times during the XVIII century and ceased to exist in 1795, ending in the Polish lands being divided between these empires and Prussia.

Ukraine was, instead, not yet recognized as a nation: Russia called its Ukrainian speaking population “Malorussians”, literally little Russians, and conducted russification policies to eradicate their language. Moreover, Austria named those Ukrainians living in eastern Galicia “Ruthenians”, from the Latin term for Russians.

Although the Tsars and the Habsburgs feared Polish and Ukrainian desires for union, both knew that, if war came, these national aspirations could be turned against each other. That’s why Charles-Stephen decided to act in a revolutionary way for an Austrian Archduke. He became the first Habsburg not only to recognize the concept of nation as essential to the stability of a country, but to embrace a well-defined nationality himself. He dedicated his life to the creation of a Polish branch of the Habsburg dynasty, with his final goal being the creation of a new Kingdom of Poland. The territories of this new country should have been carved from the Russian Empire and unified with Galicia, under the rule of an Habsburg ruler.

Revolutionary Archdukes

Charles-Stephen knew that to succeed a lot would have to be sacrificed. First of all he moved from Pola, on the Adriatic coast, to the Polish city of Żywiec. Located in the Duchy of Teschen, part of Austrian Silesia, Żywiec was not that far from the Galician border and Krakow itself. Its population was largely Polish, but the Habsburgs ruled that land since 1653, making it the oldest possession in which the two coexisted. When his children grew up to marriage age, Archduke Charles-Stephen managed to connect his House with high Polish nobles. Two of his daughters and one of his sons, Charles-Albert, paved the way to an Habsburg-Polish lineage, but in doing so they had to renounce to their imperial and royal status, making it impossible for them and their heirs to claim Wien and Budapest crowns. Both Charles and his family became fluent in Polish language, studied Polish literature and decided to define themselves as Polish.

It was an absolute novelty for an Habsburg archduke to embrace a defined nationality. During the XIX century the Empire tried to crush any nationalistic aspiration but visibly failed in doing so. To Charles-Stephen, the conviction that nation states were stronger than non-national ones came from the incredible rise of the German Empire. The only way for the Austro-Hungarian Empire to survive and expand was to recognize its constituent nations, giving them some autonomy, but still under an Habsburg rule.

While Charles-Stephen was busy building the foundation of a new Polish Kingdom, his son Wilhelm travelled to Galicia and got acquainted with another nation: Ukraine. Day after day, the young prince made his father plan his own, and started dreaming of an Ukrainian Kingdom with him as its monarch. The creation of both Poland and Ukraine would have certainly created problems in defining their borders in Eastern Galicia, where the majority of the population was Ukrainian, but the aristocracy was Polish. Nevertheless, when Austro-Hungarian and German troops advanced in the western territories of the Russian Empire during World War One, Charles-Stephen and Wilhelm golas of redrawing the map of Europe came close to reality.

The fight for independence in the interwar period

The reason why no Habsburg Poland or Habsburg Ukraine were created was the rivalry between Berlin and Wien over the newly acquired territories – and the Central Powers losing of the war didn’t help. Germany was the strongman of the alliance and tried to gain control of both Polish and Ukrainian territories: Poles should have served as cannon fodder on the western front while Ukraine was meant to provide wheat for the army. Although Wilhelm reached popularity in Habsburg-occupied Ukraine and Charles-Stephen came close to a Polish throne, the Germans got the upper hand.

When the war came to an end, Eastern Europe was a total mess: Poland and Ukraine were struggling to define their borders, fighting each other in Galicia. At the same time they feared a Soviet aggression (that actually happened). While the Poles succeeded in preserving their independence and established a quite vast country, most Ukrainians ended up living as part of the USSR, suffering under communist rule. The Treaty of Riga in March 1921 defined the soviet-polish border until World War 2, and caused the first relocation of Ukrainians and Poles among the Galician frontier.

Despite this lackluster result, the very fact that a semi-independent Ukraine existed between 1918 and 1921 meant much to nationalists in the homeland and abroad. While the latter resorted to guerrilla until the defeat by soviet forces, those who expatriated found support under German and Austrian protection. Instead, the Allies didn’t consider the Ukrainian nationality to be fit for self-determination and didn’t support its cause for independence, Ukrainian nationalists cooperated mostly with right-wing revanchist groups of the former German Empire and the Habsburgs. Archduke Wilhelm, or Vasyl Vyshyvani as he began to name himself during his stay in Ukraine in 1918, was one of those committed conspirers for independence, and identified himself as Ukrainian. In the meantime, Charles-Stepehen and his son Charles-Albert pledged allegiance to the Polish Republic, recognized themselves as Poles, and kept on living in Żywiec.

All the attempts to overthrow Soviet rule over Ukraine in the interwar period failed. Nonetheless, the dream of a free country never faded, and seemed to gain new strength with the rise of national-socialism. Wilhelm was formlery known ad a constitutional-monarchist, a democrat and socialist – to the point of being nicknamed “The Red Prince” when he protected Ukrainian partisans who acted against his own Empire during WWI occupation. Surprisingly, he partially embraced Hitler’s ideology, while probably not understanding it to the full, especially considering the contradiction of him identifying himself as Ukrainian but being racially German. On the other hand, he appreciated the nationalistic and anti-soviet principles of national-socialism. Anyway, after realizing that the Third Reich had no intention to free Ukraine as an independent and friendly country, numerous nationalists tuned to arms against both German occupation forces and the Red Army, fighting at the same time against Ukrainian communists and nazi collaborationists.

World War II, Soviet oppression and finally freedom

After the war began, Wilhelm became even more critic of national-socialist Germany. The Polish branch of his family suffered terribly from the occupation, for Charles-Albert refused to identify himself as racially German during the census in Silesia. His insistence in calling himself Polish, alongside with the fact that he actually fought in the ranks of the Polish army during the 1939 invasion, provoked the Gestapo’s reaction, resulting in imprisonment and torture. Its family estates in Żywiec were seized and his wife, a Swedish aristocrat, didn’t follow his consort fate only because of the Gestapo’s unwillingness to prosecute her, even though she was herself staunchly Polish.

In Wien, while receiving news both from his sister-in-law and Ukraine, Wilhelm started cooperating with the French intelligence in signaling potential objectives for Allied airstrikes. He also worked with Ukrainian expats and western secret services to reach his long-standing goal of Ukrainian independence. Unfortunately, the fate of Easter Europe was to be decided somewhere else, among high profile politicians and military officials. In 1947, Wilhelm was arrested by the Russian counter-intelligence in the Soviet-occupied area of Wien he was living in, and died in prison the next year. Charles-Albert and his family fled the communist regime in Poland and expatriated to Sweden.

After the collapse of Soviet Union, new nations gained independence and old ones regained their lost freedom. The Baltic countries came back onthe maps, while Ukraine and Belorussia found their own new place. Poland went back to democratic life. Wilhelm and Charles-Stephen dreams partially became true: no monarchies were founded and the Habsburgs never regained a central role in European geopolitics, but both Poland and Ukraine are now officially recognized, although Russia is trying to destabilize the region once again.

Nonetheless, the concept of identifying both as a nation and as something greater still lives to this day through a revolutionary institution: the European Union. To be clear, such a concept was not an Habsburg exclusive, but the life of those late Archdukes can be an example of the commitment some people have been willing to carry out for a better Continent – a general idea far more similar to the one of the European founding fathers than some of us may be ready to accept when talking about monarchies and the Habsburg Empire.

As of today, Poland is one of the most staunch supporters of Ukrainian EU membership bid, and their historical Habsburg ties are not unrelevant: some time after the aforementioned protest in Cracow where demonstrators recreated a symbolical Galicia, a group of Ukrainians in Kiev celebrated the 170th birthday of Franz-Joseph. This partial wiennese legacy contributes to an ideal separation from the East, from Russia, and to strenghten the European feeling. The EU motto is “United in diversity”: to reject existing differences is crazy, but not to recognize a shared past and to embrace a common future is foolish.