It is often stated that Austria-Hungary was a great power in decline in 1914. How strong was Austria-Hungary's position in europe at that time? Especially regarding economy, science and education and foreign relations.
No, and the concept of Habsburg "decline and fall" is a particularly odious historical beast.
First, the traditional story of "Habsburg decline" as some sort of inevitability is easily traceable to British propagandists writing after the First World War. Henry Steed, Robert Seton-Watson and Lewis Namier all contributed greatly to the trope, which has lasted to this day, that the Habsburg Empire was some medieval, clunky anachronism that was doomed to fail. John Deak, a Habsburg revisionist, writes: "Steed combined the two ideas that he and his fellow British war propagandists had promulgated during the war: on the one hand, that the decline of the Habsburg monarchy was inevitable and the war merely hastened the process, and, on the other, that the war and the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy liberated its subjugate peoples from this antimodern polity." These two ideas are not entirely accurate and do a great disservice to the historiography of Central Europe under the Habsburgs.
The next generation of Habsburg historians really solidified this "decline and fall" narrative, which painted the Habsburg state as a doomed entity whose century-long decline was accelerated rapidly by the chaos of the First World War. Robert Kann and AJP Taylor both wrote landmark works that informed many a future Central European historian. Again, Deak offers a critique of their arguments: "Kann and Taylor framed the history of the monarchy in terms of long-term decline and contended that the empire’s domestic politics were broken beyond repair. They told countless historians of the Habsburg monarchy that there was no need to study the First World War itself: the real story lay in the long decline that gave rise to centrifugal national politics in the nineteenth century."
The works written by these English-language historians were corroborated by a string of nationalist nation-state histories produced by historians from the successor states: Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, Austria, etc. Historians and propagandists working in these countries during the interwar years felt the need to rationalize the state of things in Central Europe post-1918. Deak again: "It is partly, I think, that historians have sought not only to explain but also to justify the political world of the nation-state that emerged after 1918." The successor states in interwar Central Europe deserved to and had to exist because of the suffering and persecution they experienced under the Habsburgs. In reality, many of the "perscuted" ethnic groups did run into conflict with the Habsburg state. The Czechs had a very long history of being stymied by German nationalists at every turn in their efforts to gain for themselves autonomy in the Bohemian lands. The Czechs are probably the most commonly recycled example of an ethnic nation held in prison by the Habsburg Monarchy, but in reality, you would have been hard pressed to find a Czech politician before 1914 who could imagine or who desired a life for the Czechs outside the Monarchy. Autonomy within the Habsburg state was the goal, not independence. However, after the War, Czech nationalist leaders, like Thomas Masaryk, introduced this selfsame picture of Habsburg domination. In a similar manner, Czech nationalists also grasped and clung to narratives of "Czech unreliability" during the war, using stories like that of the Czech 21st Landwehr Infantry Division, to prove that the average Czech didn't want to live under the Habsburgs in 1914. These narratives are largely false and ahistorical and bely the fact that the overwhelming majority of Czechs fought bravely and tenaciously under the Habsburg banner during the First World War.
Thus, the story of some inevitable decline of the Habsburg state is a work of pure historical fiction. This is not to say that the Habsburg state was a perfect one in 1914. Its finances were terrible. The Hungarian position under the 1867 Ausgleich enabled Hungarian leaders to hold Austro-Hungarian foreign policy hostage and to retard the development of the k.u.k. Armee as a Twentieth Century fighting force. There were vast areas of the Monarchy which were underdeveloped and underserved by modern methods of communication (railroads and telegraphs). But these points in which Habsburg "decline" which corroborate the story of inevitable failure have been used to cloud the points in which the Monarchy showed dynamism and growth.
So what to do? Again we can consult Deak's essay on Habsburg historiography. He writes: "In other words, many historians of the Habsburg monarchy have given up on the “long decline” thesis. A full generation of scholars has worked within the paradigm that “the important fact about the monarchy before 1918 was not that it fell apart, but that it proved capable of surviving for so long."" (Internal quotation from John Boyer). New Habsburg historians are successfully showing how the Habsburg state was dynamically addressing the so-called "pathological" problem of the multiethnicism of the Monarchy. Work has been done on the various compromises reached in mixed-Nationality areas of the Empire, specifically in the Czech lands. John Deak himself has done work on the dynamic character of Austrian state-building efforts and bureaucratic reform prior to 1914. My own work on Austro-Hungarian military tactics during the First World War show an army that, while hogtied by financial constraints and dubious leadership at the top, wasn't that miserable vis-a-vis the other armies of First World War Europe.
TL;DR of it all: Don't trust the standard narrative of the long-term "decline" and ultimate fall of the Habsburg Empire and certainly don't trust any author who claims the decline and fall story to be inevitable. This line of historical thinking is a product of post-War and nationalist propaganda and historians informed by the same. While the Habsburg state in 1914 wasn't the healthiest in Europe, it was showing many signs of revitalization and development in terms of economy, communications, social relations, ethnic politics and arts. Treating the fall of the Habsburg Monarchy as inevitable and focusing on its "decline" forces the historian into the same tired, recycled Hegelian national narratives and ignores important works of transnational and revisionist history being done today. There is a small but robust school of Habsburg historians trying to remove the decline and fall bias from the history of the Habsburg Monarchy, and there are some exciting titles that have come out on the topic and will continue to come out.
Sources:
Deak, John. "The Great War and the Forgotten Realm: The Habsburg Monarchy and the First World War." The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 86, No. 2 (June 2014), pp. 336-380.
Zahra, Tara. Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948. 2011.
Schindler, John. A Hopeless Struggle: The Austro-Hungarian Army and Total War, 1914-1918. 1995.
Personal research done in the Vienna War Archives.
After suffering a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Prussians in 1866 and in light of the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1848 (which was only put down due to Russian assistance), other states within the Austrian Empire began to seriously consider independence.
The Ausgleich of 1867 that formed the Dual Monarchy was intended to stabilize the empire by bringing the Hungarians back into the fold, giving them semi-sovereignty in exchange for their continued loyalty to the crown. Although it seemed like a good idea on paper, the Austro-Hungarian compromise had some disastrous consequences for the Habsburg monarchy.
By giving the Hungarians their own parliament, the Austrians gave them the power to veto proposals that came out of Vienna. There was still a great of resentment towards the Viennese from the failed revolution, and some Hungarian politicians actively worked within the system to bring the empire down. Proposed tax reforms? Vetoed. Proposed military reforms? Vetoed. It got so bad that, leading up to WW1, the Austrians began to refer to the Hungarians as der innere Feinde - the inside enemy. Plans were drawn up to invade Hungary and shutter their parliament, bringing them back into the fold by force.
Diplomatically, the Austrians had managed to shoot themselves in the foot as far as Russo-Austrian relations went. The two were allies only scant years before as members of the League of 3 Emperors. The Russians had rescued the Austrians from the Hungarian revolution, but when the Russians asked for Austrian assistance in the Crimean war, Austria refused to come to their aid. This was made even worse when Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, as the Russians considered themselves to be a big brother to the Slavs in the Balkans.
I suggest reading "A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire" - it goes into great detail about the military unpreparedness of Austria-Hungary. I don't remember the specifics, but a few of the notes mentioned in the book are as follows:
Just going to make a statement about "decline" from a historiographical perspective. All too often we read history "backwards", and this is a real serious issue. Whether it's looking at the Qing dynasty, Ottoman Empire, or Austria-Hungary, we have a tendency to look at 1911, 1922, 1918 and say "oh, since they collapsed then, we must find the obvious signs of decline before then". History does not really work like that.
States, no matter their size, don't experience a "decline" in absolute terms. They just deal with one issue after another, as it comes and goes.
Were their issues within Austria-Hungary? For sure, but were they terminal? I don't think so, there have been many times in history, when circumstances have changed for a state, and we ignore the previous "decline" that they were experiencing. It is in other words, highly circumstantial, where we attribute "decline" and where we don't.
I know in Ottoman historiography, this term of "decline" has been abandoned, as it is not how the Ottomans saw it (most of the 19th century seemed like a turning point for the Empire), and its not how we should view it either. All states have their ups and downs, trying to attribute sources of "terminal" decline is just bad history.
On mobile. Excuse the typos
Yes, it had been weakening for some time by the onset of the war. Austria-Hungary (or just the Habsburg empire until the Ausgleich in 1867 elevated Hungary to a more or less politically equal status to Austria) was slow to modernize and adopt new technology like electricity and the telephone, leaving it behind other European powers in terms of development in the 19th century. The nobility were suspicious of industry and the empire suffered from a lack of skilled workers and capital.
Tradition and formality were something of an obsession among Austrians and a running joke was that they were slow to embrace the phone because it took them too long to get through all their titles and niceties before actually holding a conversation (see Joseph Roth's novel 'Radetzky March' to see the eastern given to honor and perceived social status by Austrians; it's fictional but faithful to real life). This extended to the actual administration of the empire: emperor Franz Josef, a young and promising reformist at the beginning of his reign, was 84 and increasingly ineffectual by the time WWI started.
The Austrian army was bogged down by the same formality as the rest of society, constantly running through marches and drills, outfitted with spectacular uniforms but outdated equipment. By the time they mobilized for the war they were outclassed by most of the other actors involved.
The domestic situation was also unstable. Austro-Hungarian politics were notoriously petty and fickle and grew increasingly conservative and nationalistic as pan-Germans and anti-Semetics like von Schonerer gained power and hurried the decline of liberalism. Parliament was neutered and had little legislative ability.
The populace comprised dozens of ethnicities and naturally led to some tension. Pan-German movements pushed monolingualism and suppressed other cultures like the Czechs. Hungary maintained a strong degree of linguistic and cultural separation and didn't truly integrate; its own politics were heavily rooted in rhetoric, nationalism and oratory rather than merit. The Balkans were fragmented and notably erupted into war in 1912, one of many factors in the empire's destabilization. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the spark that started the war, was motivated by Serbian separatism, though that line of thinking was common among many of the nations under the Austro- Hungarian helm.
Sources: Carl Schorske, 'Fin-de-Siecle Vienna'; John Lulacs, 'Budapest 1900'