Count István Tisza de Borosjenő et Szeged was a Hungarian politician, prime minister, political scientist and member of Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The prominent event in his life was Austria-Hungary's entry into the First World War when he was prime minister for the second time.
Background
István Tisza was bom to Prime Minister Kalman Tisza on April 22, 1861, in Budapest. István Tisza was the son of Kálmán Tisza de Borosjenő, prime minister of Hungary between 1875–1890 from the Liberal Party. The Tiszas were originally a Calvinist untitled lower nobility (regarded as equivalent to the British gentry). His mother was a southern German aristocrat Ilona Degenfeld-Schomburg, from Baden-Württemberg (born: Helene Johanna Josepha Mathilde Gräfin von Degenfeld-Schonburg).
Education
The young Stephen raised in a puritanical and authoritarian Calvinist environment with high expectations. Stephen has studied at home until the age of twelve, then he entered the Calvinist Gymnasium (a college-preparatory school) of Debrecen. Tisza took legal studies in Budapest, international law in Heidelberg University, economics in Humboldt University of Berlin, where he received PHD, and political science in Oxford University, where he received a doctorate in political science.
Career
After studies in Berlin and Heidelberg, Tisza returned to Budapest and entered parliament in 1886. Hungary was then on the brink of civil war. An army bill introduced in 1889 triggered a crisis between the Liberal party, which supported the Compromise of 1867, and the parties of "1848," which sought to restore the Hungary of Louis Kossuth. In September 1903, Emperor Francis Joseph issued the famous order at Chlopy upholding the principle of a unitary army, but the following month he began negotiations with Tisza, head of the Liberal Party Committee of Nine, to allay an open rift. Tisza, a stubborn and courageous man, was made of sterner stuff than his father, yet had to endure defeat at the polls in January 1905 by the 6 percent of the population that could vote over the issue of magyarization of the army. Tisza firmly believed in the Compromise of 1867; in fact, he viewed it as the supreme guarantor of Magyar-Hungary against Germans, Slavs, and Rumanians, to whom he was unwilling to make concessions. He also opposed the introduction of general suffrage.
Tisza returned as prime minister in June 1913 and, against the will of the heir presumptive, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, received virtually dictatorial powers. He devoted his efforts to maintaining the privileged position of the Magyars against the demands of other ethnic groups for representation. Unlike Minister-President Karl von Sturgkh in Austria, Tisza maintained parliament in session in Budapest throughout the war, and he ruled it with an iron hand. In the July crisis of 1914 Tisza sought a diplomatic rebuff of Serbia, but opposed the desires of Count Leopold von Berchtold and General Conrad von Hotzendorf for war with Belgrade at any cost.
At a crucial meeting of the joint Austro-Hungarian Council of Ministers on July 14, Tisza persuaded Berchtold to dispatch an ultimatum to Serbia and to desist from plans to invade at once; later the prime minister added the caveat that the Dual Monarchy would under no circumstances annex Serbian territory. Tisza desired no additional Slav subjects in the empire, and he hoped that such a declaration might in the future constitute a bridge towards Russia.
Early in 1915 Tisza managed to have his friend Burian von Rajecz appointed foreign minister and worked hard to ward off the entry of Italy and Rumania into the war on the side of the Entente by suggesting territorial compensations for them, to no avail. Tisza rushed to Vienna in November 1916 upon the death of Emperor Francis Joseph and obtained from the new Emperor Charles an agreement for an early coronation in Budapest, which committed Charles to uphold Dualism. But the honeymoon was short-lived: in May 1917, Charles dismissed Tisza, whose pride, stubbornness, and Calvinist creed he disliked. Tisza had also bitterly quarreled with Count Mihâly Kârolyi, whom he regarded as a traitor to his class, over the frondeur's demands to introduce universal suffrage, to grant national autonomy to Hungary, and to break up the large estates. After a brief tour of duty at the front as Honvéd colonel, Tisza was murdered by Red Guards in Budapest on October 31, 1918, the very day of Kârolyi's appointment as Hungarian prime minister. Ironically, Tisza's stance at the council meeting on July 14, 1914, had been kept such a well-guarded secret that he was viewed by many throughout the war as the driving force behind it. Robert Kann has depicted Tisza as "an incorruptible man of determination, ability, and political blindness."
Politics
Tisza opposed the expansion of the empire on the Balkan (see Bosnian crisis in 1908), because "the Dual Monarchy already had too many Slavs", which would further threaten the integrity of the Dual Monarchy.
In March 1914, Tisza wrote a memorandum to Emperor Francis Joseph. His letter had strongly apocalyptic predictive and embittered tone. He used exactly the hitherto unknown "Weltkrieg" (means World War) phrase in his letter. "It is my firm conviction that Germany's two neighbors Russia and France are carefully proceeding with military preparations, but will not start the war so long as they have not attained a grouping of the Balkan states against us that confronts the monarchy with an attack from three sides and pins down the majority of our forces on our eastern and southern front."
On the day of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Tisza immediately traveled to Vienna where he met Minister of Foreign Affairs Count Berchtold and Army Commander Conrad von Hötzendorf. They proposed to solve the dispute with arms, attacking Serbia. Tisza proposed to give the government of Serbia time to take a stand as to whether it was involved in the organisation of the murder and proposed a peaceful resolution, arguing that the international situation would settle soon. Returning to Budapest, he wrote to Franz Joseph saying he would not take any responsibility for the armed conflict because there was no proof that Serbia had plotted the assassination. Tisza opposed a war with Serbia, stating (correctly, as it turned out) that any war with the Serbs was bound to trigger a war with Russia and hence a general European war. He thought that even a successful Austro-Hungarian war would be disastrous for the integrity of Kingdom of Hungary, where Hungary would be the next victim of Austrian politics. After a successful war against Serbia, Tisza adumbrated a possible Austrian military attack against Kingdom of Hungary, where the Austrians want to break up the territory of Hungary. He did not trust in the Italian alliance, due to the political aftermath of the Second Italian War of Independence. He felt the threat of Romania and Bulgaria after the Balkan wars and was afraid of Romanian attack from the east. He was also not sure about the stand of the Germans. Germany's stand was of ultimate importance due to the security of the state.
Personality
For many, he was the representative of the war policy in the Monarchy, so he was an assassination target. The fourth assassination attempt against him was successful.
The first attempt was made in the Hungarian parliament in 1912 by Gyula Kovács, an opposition politician. He shot two bullets, but missed Tisza. Kovács was arrested by the police, but he was acquitted by the court, the justification was "temporary insanity".
The second was made by a soldier when Tisza was returning from the front line during the war. The bullet missed him.
The third attempt came on 16 October 1918 when János Lékai, a member of the society Galilei-circle and an anti-military group led by Ottó Korvin, tried to kill Tisza while he was leaving the Hungarian Parliament, but the revolver malfunctioned and Tisza managed to flee. The assassin was sent to prison but was released after 15 days during the Chrysanthemum Revolution.
The fourth and successful attempt came on 31 October 1918, when soldiers broke into his home, the Roheim villa in Budapest in front of his wife. Mihály Károlyi's government initiated an investigation but the killers were not found. However, the family members identified the killers in the trials. In the trial that followed the fall of the Communist regime and ended on 6 October 1921, Judge István Gadó established the guilt of Pál Kéri, who was exchanged with the Soviet Union; József Pogány, aka John Pepper, who fled to Vienna, then Moscow and the USA; István Dobó; Tivadar Horváth Sanovics, who also fled; Sándor Hüttner, who died in a prison hospital in 1923; and Tibor Sztanykovszky, who was the only one to serve his 18-year sentence, being released in 1938.