A century later came a still more epochal event for all European monarchies:
the First World War. This cataclysm saw the destruction of all
the major monarchies that entered it with a crowned head owning strong
executive powers and ended it on the losing side. The Romanov, Hohenzollern,
and Habsburg dynasties all fell (as did that of the Ottomans).
Ethnoreligious conflicts, made hotter still by war, had stoked the flames
that consumed the multiethnic Czarist and Austro-Hungarian empires.
In the nationalist and democratizing climate that came at war’s end in
1918, separate Austrian, Czechoslovak, Hungarian, and South Slavic
republics rose from the ashes of Habsburg rule.8
Russia’s Czarist regime
had teetered before a grave revolutionary challenge in 1905, and a decade
later found itself overwhelmed by the hardships of prolonged mass
combat and a welter of demands emanating from Poland, Ukraine, the
Baltic region, the Caucasus, and Bessarabia