Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association

Nationalist Politics and the Dynamics of State and Civil Society in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1867-1914 Author(s): Gary B. Cohen Source: Central European History, Vol. 40, No. 2 (Jun., 2007), pp. 241-278 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20457228 . Accessed: 26/04/2011 21:22
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Central European History 40 (2007), 241-278. Copyright (? Conference Group forCentral European History of theAmerican Historical Association DOI: 10.1017/S0008938907000532 Printed in the USA

NationalistPoliticsand the ofState Dynamics andCivil Society in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1867- 1914
Gary B. Cohen

ISTORIANS have conventionally depicted theHabsburg Monarchy as the largest modern European imperial polity to disappear from themap peoples. the national aspirations of its It is the locus classicus for the failure of an old-fashioned dynastic empire to develop among its subjects a broader civic identity and loyalty to the state to counter the rise of nationalist demands for self-government. For laterhistorians aswell asmany contemporary observers of the frequent internal because of its inability to accommodate

crises after the 1890s, thiswas already a failed state even beforeWorld War I brought on the tragic denouement. In thisperspective themonarchy's partici pation in thewar was not a purely exogenous factor that led eventually to the polity's demise. Most scholars have agreed that themonarchy's entry into the war came largely because of its need to preserve its status as a Great Power, defend itsposition in theBalkans, and counter the challenges of itsown nation alist political movements, some of them allied with political forces beyond the borders.1 Older western European and North American histories also tended to view nationalist politics inHabsburg central Europe, in contrast towestern European experience, as an intolerant and ultimately anti-democratic force thathelped doom hopes forparliamentary democracy both under the monarchy and in the post-1918 successor states.2
^ee, for example, A. J.P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918 (London: Hamish Hamilton, Solomon Wank, "Some 1948; reprinted, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 230-33; on the Habsburg Empire and Its Legacy in the Nationalities Question," Austrian Reflections History Yearbook 28 (1997): 140-41; Samuel R. Williamson, Jr.,Austria-Hungary and the Origins of

theFirst World War (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991); and Steven B?lier, A Concise History of Austria (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 182-85. Arguments for the special character of nationalism in Europe east of the Elbe date back to the Nationalism, A Study in its scholarly generation ofHans Kohn and his Idea of Origins and Background, 1st ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1944). The long-term influence of thisdistinction is still apparent in works from theCold-War era, such asHugh Seton-Watson, Nationalism and Communism (New York: and Peter F. Sugar, "External and Domestic Roots of Eastern Euro Praeger, 1964), pp. 3-8,11?20; inNationalism inEastern Europe, ed. P. F. Sugar and Ivo J. Lederer (Seattle: Uni pean Nationalism," versity of Washington Press, 1969), 46-54. The notion of strong regional and national distinctions in European nationalist ideologies and their relationship to democratic development still resonates in

241

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There ismuch

GARY B. COHEN
truth,of course, in the conventional wisdom regarding the

political decline of the Habsburg Monarchy during the late nineteenth century and itsultimate demise. Still, such a reading embodies some longstand ingmisunderstandings and contradictions about the relationship between the Habsburg state and the internal nationalistmovements and about how popular loyalties and political lifeactually developed there.Put simply,a polity thatper mitted and inmany ways abetted the flowering of vigorous nationalist political movements, an abundance of political parties and interestgroups, and amulti farious and assertivepolitical press could not have been so immobile or paralytic that only war and revolution could satisfy popular aspirations for self-rule.As will be discussed in this essay, recent scholarship offers a much more dynamic picture of theHabsburg state and public administration, even in the era of the most intense national political conflicts. For theirpart, the nationalist and other popular political forces in theHabs burgMonarchy during the late nineteenth centurywere hardly irresistibleforces demanding a self-government that could be realized only by dissolving the empire.3 Indeed, the great majority of the political parties and organizations up untilWorld War I contended for greater empowerment within a reformed multinational Habsburg state, not for independence. Even the most radical Czech nationalists, for example, theNational Social Party and the State-Right Radical Party, combined a rhetoric thatchallenged the legitimacy of centralized Habsburg rulewith a practical politics of electing representatives to legislative bodies and trying towin concrete reforms and partisan advantage.4 The open attacks on Habsburg rule and the Catholic Church by Georg von Schonerer's Pan-German movement and its calls for uniting Austria's German-speaking

sophisticated recent works such as Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 1-26; Eric J.Hobsbawm, Nations andNationalism since 1780: Programme,Myth, Reality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), chapter 4, 101-30; and Dennison Rusinow, "Ethnic Politics in theHabsburg Monarchy and Successor States: Three 'Answers' to theNational Question," inNationalism and Empire: The Habsburg Monarchy and theSoviet Union, ed. Richard L. Rudolph and David F. Good (New York: St.Martin's Press, 1992), 243-56. For an analysis of the historiographical connection between nationalism and backwardness in eastern Europe, seeMaria Todorova, "The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of Eastern European Nationalism," Slavic Review 64 (2005): 140-64. On the connections drawn by scholarsmore generally between nationalism andmodernism or, alternatively,backwardness, see Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism andModernism (London and New York: 1998). Roudedge, A. J. P. Taylor made the confrontation of the seemingly unreformable monarchy with the irresistible forces of modern nationalism the basis of his The Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918. See David Hackett Fischer, Historians' Fallacies (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 35, on Taylor's fre quent indulgence, as in this case, ofwhat Fischer calls the "fallacy of contradictory questions." radical nationalist parties, see Bruce M. Garver, The Young Czech Party, 4On the Czech 1874-1901 and theEmergence of aMulti-Party System (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), 295-304, 306-08; and T. Mills Kelly, "Taking It to the Streets: Czech National ists in 1908," Austrian History Yearbook 29 (1998), pt 1: 93-112. Social

NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICS OF STATE 243

movement, in fact, to a minuscule population with Germany condemned that following after 1900.5 Much more successful in winning popular support were nationalist, agrarian, social Catholic, and social democratic parties, monarchy and itsbasic territorialinteg which accepted the continuation of the rity while calling for significant reformsof one kind or another. In the late 1980s theAmerican scholar John W. Boyer observed that,despite all the researchon nationalist politics in theHabsburg Monarchy and the accom panying cultural developments, historians had done little to analyze the relation ship of the administrative state to civil society there compared with recent mon writing on Imperial Germany.6 Since then a body of new research on the archy has developed thatdemonstrates how nationalist politics developed within the context of an evolving civil society and changing government structures. New studies have appeared on the evolution of popular politics, political parties, and representative institutions and on the broader institutional and legal development of the Habsburg state. Nonetheless, historians have not been successful in developing cogent broader accounts of the relationship between society and the state to depict the dynamic and indeed symbiotic pro cesses of developing civil society,growing popular political action, and changing While much has been written about the radicalization governmental structures. of nationalist political demands and the conflicts both among the competing national groups and between them and the state before 1914, scholars have only made a limited start in explaining in broad structural terms the political and social context, the practical functions, and the very reach and limits of nationalist politics within themonarchy. Much of the earlier historical writing was strongly influenced by deeply entrenched central European nationalist narratives that saw the development of the nationalist political causes as the core issue in late nineteenth-century popular politics and as simply counterposed to the absolutist traditions and institutionsof theHabsburg dynastic state.7 In this view the political history
On the Pan-German movement and other radical German nationalist formations in imperial Parteien Alt?sterreichs Austria, see Lothar H?belt, Kornblume und Kaiseradler: Die deutschfreiheitlichen 1882-1918 1993); (Vienna and Munich: Verlag f?r Geschichte und Politik and R. Oldenbourg, Bruce F. Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution: A History ofAustrian Anti-Semitism (Chapel Hill: The Socialism of Fools: Georg University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Andrew G. Whiteside, Ritter von Sch?nerer and Austrian Pan-Germanism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); andWhiteside, Austrian National Socialism before 1918 (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1962). JohnW Boyer, "Some Reflections on the Problem of Austria, Germany, and Mitteleuropa," Central European History 20 (1989): 11. of East See the critiques of the nationalist narratives in Jeremy King, "The Nationalization Past: The Politics ofCommemoration Central Europe: Ethnicism, Ethnicity, and Beyond," in Staging the in Present, ed.Maria Bucur and Nancy M. Wingfield (W Lafay Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the ette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2001), 112-152; and for Slovak historiography in Peter Haslinger, zur Slowakei im europ?ischen "Nationale oder Transnationale Geschichte? Die Historiographie

For examples of nationalist narratives of varying shades Kontext," Bohemia 44 (2003): 326-41. and stripes, see the syntheses on nineteenth-century Czech and Slovak history in Oldrich Riha

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of the period was the storyof the heroic struggleof the national movements typically the struggleof each national movement viewed largely in isolation-to develop against the powerful opposition of the state and other nationalities and to triumph ultimately in 1918 with the creation of independent national states. Those nationalist narratives stillhave an important influence,particularly among historians in centralEurope. In contrast to those views, this essaywill argue that we can best understand the development of the nationalist political formations and their conflictswith other interests in society and the state as embedded within the broader development of civil society and bound up with changes in the Habsburg state itself, rather than simply opposed to that supposedly

rigid dynastic structure.

This essaywill offer a conceptual framework for debate and furtherresearch by sketching the general development after the 1860s of public lifeand popular politics,which, although freerandmore highly articulated in the Austrian half of themonarchy than in the Hungarian, was an evolving modern civil society where nationalist loyalties found expression alongside strong class and interest as continuing loyalties to the state, its laws, and administration. That civil society involved widening segments of the general population during the last decades beforeWorld War I, and it developed, in fact, in close connection with evolving governmental and administrative struc tures thathad to provide a growing arrayof public services for amodern society and findways to accommodate, to at least some extent, societal demands. In varying degrees, the societally based political forces, including those espousing nationalist ideologies, found ways to participate in policy making and aspects of state administration at various levels of government, again more so in the Austrian half than inHungary. group allegiances as well

and Julius Mesaros, eds., Pfehled ceskoslenskychd?jin, II: 1848-1918 [Outline of Czechoslovak History, II: 1848-1918] 1969); John F. N. Bradley, Czechoslovakia: A Short (Prague: Academia, Czechoslova History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971); JosefKorbel, Twentieth-century kia: The Meanings of Its History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); and from a perspective, Emil Franzel, SudetendeutscheGeschichte, eine volkst?mliche Darstellung, expanded 4th ed. (Augsburg: A Kraft, 1970), and Josef M?hlberger, Zwei V?lker inB?hmen. Beitrag zu einer nationalen, historischen und geistesgeschichtlichenStrukturanalyse (Munich: Bogen-Verlag, 1973); on Poland, Norman Davies, God's Playground: A History of Poland, 2 vols. (New York: Colum bia University Press, 1982 ); M. K. Dziewanowski, Poland in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); Aleksander Gieysztor et al., History ofPoland, 2nd ed. (Warsaw: PNW, Sudeten German

Polish Scientific Publishers, 1979); and Oscar Halecki, A History of Poland, 9th ed. Crossroads (New York: D. McKay, 1976); on Slovakia, JosephM. Kirschbaum, Slovakia: Nation at the of Central Europe (New York: R. Speller, 1960); Stanislav J. Kirschbaum, History of Slovakia: The Struggle for Survival, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); and Jozef Lettrich, History of Modern Slovakia (New York: F. A. Praeger, 1955); and on Hungary, Domokos Kosary, A History of Hungary (Cleveland and New York: Benjamin Franklin Bibliophile Society, 1941); and Denis Sinor, History of Hungary (New York: Praeger, 1959).

NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICS OF STATE 245

The concept of "civil society" isused here in a broad but non-teleological sense, meaning the sphere of individual and group discourse and action, formally inde pendent of the state,thataddresses issuesof public affairs, politics, and governance. Civil society is a highly varied phenomenon inmodern societies. In the circum stances of the nineteenth century, it included public assemblies, newspapers and journals, voluntary associations, popular civic action, social and political move ments, and political parties, among other freepopular phenomena. Civil society may draw upon social connections that originate in thework place, cafes, and salons,or the family; but asPhilip Nord has argued, ithas amore public, collective, and ordered character.8Much recent writing has tended to appropriate the concept of civil society as an essential component of modern democracies and to envision the development of a vigorous civil society as typicallyleading to the creation or bolstering of democratic modes of government. During decades beforeWorld War the last I, though, the old empires of central and eastern

Europe each saw the emergence of civil society,a process that was not predestined to lead to stable democratic governments in those lands during the interwarera.

Government and theBeginnings of PoliticalMovements in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

The conventional nationalist historical narratives have typically depicted the development of the national political movements in theHabsburg Monarchy as independent of and opposed to the state, a polity thatolder,more extravagantly nationalist accounts portrayed as a "prison of nations." Yet itwas theHabsburg

state thatmade possible the growth of political space and institutionalvenues for the development of amodern civil society and,with that,nationalist politics. Primarily because of this fact, the emergingmodern political forcesduring the middle and latenineteenth century, including thenationalist interests, contended foradvantage and power largely within thegoverning institutions of the state itself Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the Austrian Habsburgs knitted together a mosaic of central European territories, each of which had its own traditions of law and government institutions.9 The Habsburgs'
Democracy: Lessons from Nineteenth-century 8Philip Nord, "Introduction," in Civil Society before (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), xiv. Europe, ed. Nancy Bermeo and Philip Nord On concepts of civil society, see also John Keane, ed., Democracy and Civil Society (London and New York: Verso, 1988); and Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). On the rise of the Habsburg Monarchy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see R. J.

Evans, The Making of the (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Habsburg Monarchy, 1550-1700 Robert A. Kann, A History of theHabsburg Empire, 1526?1918 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1974); Karl Vocelka, Glanz und Untergang der h?fischen Welt. Repr?sentation, Reform und Reaktion in habsburgischenVielv?lkerstaat (Vienna: Ueberreuter, 2001); and Thomas Winkelbauer, St?ndefreiheitund F?rstenmacht.L?nder und Untertanen desHauses Zeitalter, 2 vols. (Vienna: Ueberreuter, 2003). Habsburgs im konfessionalle

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centralization efforts from the seventeenth century onward combined theAlpine and Bohemian crown lands and eventually what had been southern Poland under a strong imperial authority centered inVienna.10 After 1526 theAustrian Habsburg sovereignswere also kings of Hungary, but the lands of the crown of St. Stephen escaped much of the centralizing effortsfrom Vienna. In Hungary, Croatia, and Transylvania, too, though, the authority of the absolutist sovereign grew over time at the expense of the diets and the county congregations. Even with the rise of a centralized, absolutist Habsburg state, though, the landed absolutist nobility in each historic crown land continued to enjoy important privileges grounded in surviving older laws and institutions. Enlightened reformsduring the late eighteenth century weakened the diets of the various

crown lands and Hungary's county assemblies, and the crown authorities also began to rationalize and modernize administration, law, public education, and economic regulation, encouraging the beginnings of industrialization. During thenineteenth century economic development, urbanization, and the growth of the state itselfsparked the development ofmodern middle-class and eventually working-class society and with that the firstinitiatives toward con structing modern civil society.By the late 1830s and 1840s, as repressive abso lutistgovernment graduallywaned, themiddle and lower classes in various parts of themonarchy began to develop voluntary associations aswell as literaryand journalistic activity.11This nascent public life provided the early nationalist
10On the development of Habsburg absolutism, see Derek Beales, Joseph II (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Timothy C. W Blanning, Joseph II (London and New York: Longman, 1994) ;Charles W 2nd ed. (Cam Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618-1815,

bridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Oswald Redlich, Weltmacht des Barock. ?sterreich in derZeit Kaiser Leopolds I, 4th ed. (Vienna: R. M. Rohrer, 1961); Franz A. J. Szabo, Kaunitz and Enlightened Absolutism, 1753?80 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Vocelka, Glanz und Untergang; andWinkelbauer, St?ndefreiheitund F?rstenmacht. On the beginnings of associational life and civil society in the early and mid-nineteenth century, see in English, for example, Hugh L. Agnew, Origins of theCzech National Renascence (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993), passim; George Barany, Stephen Sz?chenyi and the Awakening (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), passim; of Hungarian Nationalism, 1791-1841 JohnW Boyer, Political Radicalism inLate Imperial Vienna: Origins of theChristian Social Movement, 1848-1897 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 1-10, 122-132; Gary B. Cohen, The rev. second ed. (W Lafayette, IN: Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861-1914,

of Michigan Press, 1996), 11-164; Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), History of Bohemian Politics, 1848-1948 15-47; Rita A. Krueger, "Mediating Progress in the Provinces: Central Authority, Local Elites, and Moravia," Austrian History Yearbook 35 (2004): 49-80; and Agrarian Societies in Bohemia

Purdue University Press, 2006), 18?56; Pieter M. Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848?1914 (Ann Arbor: University

Robert Nemes, "Associations and Civil Society inReform-Era Hungary," Austrian History Yearbook 32 (2001): 25-45; Nemes, The Once and Future Budapest (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), 33-106, passim; Alex Drace-Francis, "Cultural Currents and Political Choices: Roma nian Intellectuals in the Banat to 1848," Austrian History Yearbook 36 (2005): 65-93; and Zsuzsanna T?r?k, "The Friends of Progress: Learned Societies and the Public Sphere in the Transylvanian Reform Era," Austrian History Yearbook 36 (2005): 94-120.

NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICS OF STATE 247

intellectuals and professionalswith platforms to begin tomobilize supporters, at first mostly in cities and larger towns. In the 1840s that emerging civil society produced demands for liberal and eventually also radical democratic reforms of government. In several crown lands, the urban middle and lower middle classeswere joined by segments of the landed nobilitywho also wanted liberal economic reforms to aid furtheragricultural and industrial development and constitutional changes toweaken the central bureaucracy. While ary effortsof 1848-49 the revolution to liberalize government largely failed, the Habsburg

imperial authoritieswere forced to confirm the final emancipation of the peas antry, renovate state administration, and then in the late 1850s liberalize eco nomic regulations in general. After military defeat in northern Italy and near state bankruptcy at the end of the 1850s, Emperor Francis Joseph (ruled 1848-1916) had to bow to renewed demands from segments of the great classes for constitutional government and landowners and the urban middle

freedom of speech, press, and association. Civil society, including nationalist groups, already showed signs of reinvigoration in the late 1850s; and it gave voice to the demands to liberalize government. The constitutional reforms after 1860, in turn, greatly stimulated the furtherdevelopment of civil society. After several years of constitutional improvisation and the Austro-Prussian War, Francis Joseph in the famous 1867 compromise sanctioned two constitutions, one for the Kingdom and cabinet of Hungary, including Transylvania and Croatia, with a centralized parliament Carpathian, in Budapest, and the second for the Alpine, Bohemian, and Adriatic crown lands gathered together under a separate

parliament and cabinet of ministers inVienna. Both halves of themonarchy soon approved legislation to grant civil equality to the formerlydisadvantaged religious minorities and recognized at least formally the equal linguistic and cultural rights of citizens of all major nationalities, defined primarily on the basis of language.12 Representative institutions and a vibrant civic life of political parties and interestgroups enjoyed strong development throughout theHabsburg Monar chy during the half century after 1867. At firstduring the 1860s, parties of notables, similar to those common in the German states and France, domi nated the representative bodies, basing themselves on systems of limited suffrage and local associational networks and habits of social deference.
On theAustro-H?ngarian compromise of 1867 and the constitutional arrangements in the two halves of themonarchy, see Peter Berger, ed., Der ?sterreichisch-ungarische Ausgleich von 1867. Vor geschichte and Wirkungen (Vienna: Herold, 1967); L'udovit Holotik, ed., Der ?sterreichisch-ungarische 1971); Robert Ausgleich 1867 (Bratislava: Verlag der Slowakischen Akademie derWissenschaften, A. Kann, Das Nationalit?tenproblem derHabsburgermonarchie, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Graz and Cologne: B?hlau, Nationalit?ten in der Verfassungund Ver 1964); and Gerald Stourzh, Die Gleichberechtigungder (Vienna: Verlag der ?sterreichischen Akademie derWissenschaften, waltung ?sterreichs 1848-1918 1985).

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firstnationalist political formations emerged in various crown lands as to the cause of

parties of local and regional notables committed in themain

constitutional reform.13
Conventional nationalist historical narratives saw littleneed for comparisons between the rise of theirown nationalistmovements and others, but such com parisons can help us understand better the dynamics of each movement's devel opment and what was specific to each.14 Czech, German, and Italian nationalist Austrian halfof theHabsburg Monarchy political activity in the initiallytook the form of classic central European liberal nationalistmovements, based largely in urban social networks of voluntary associations led by members of the pro fessional and entrepreneurialmiddle classes, but also drawing on alliances with Austrian parts of the local landowning elites.The liberalparties of notables in the half of themonarchy established strong foundations at the local and regional levels by taking advantage of the considerable autonomy granted to communal councils and the provincial diets. The Slovene-, Ukrainian-, Slovak-, and more slowly develop Romanian-speaking populations, which resided largely in ing and still stronglyagrarian regions, developed nationalist political formations somewhat later than the Czech-, German-, and Italian-speaking populations. The national movements in the economically less developed regions had more predominantly lower middle-class and peasant farmer constituencies with larger leadership roles for local clergy and schoolteachers. It should not be forgotten, though, that even with a limited suffrageand a stratified,curial electoral system,Slovene national interests,for instance, alreadywon amajority
Ethnic Survival, 41-56; Judson, Exclusive See Boyer, Political Radicalism, 1-39; Cohen, Politics of Revolutionaries, 69?116; King, Budweisers, 15?48; Lukas Fasora and Pavel Kladiva, "Obecni samo spr?va a lok?ln? elity v ceskych zemich 1850?1918. Koncept a d?lc? vysledky vyzkumu" [Communal Self-Government and Local Elites in the Bohemian Lands, 1850-1918: Sketch and Partial Results], Lukas Fasora, "Socialni a profesni struktura brn?nsk? Cesky casopis historicky102 (2004): 796?827; komunaln? reprezentace v letech 1851-1904" [Social and Professional Structure of the Brno Com

munal Representatives, 1851-1904], Cesky casopis historicky103 (2005): 354-81; Ale?a Simunkov?, inNineteenth-century Prague," "B?hmische Skizzen: Reflections on Social Space and Nationhood Nationalities Papers 30 (2002): 335-50; Gerald Sprengnagel, "Nationale Kultur und die Selbsterschaf M?hren, 1848-1864," ?sterreicische Zeit fung des B?rgertums. Am Beispiel der Stadt Prost?jov in and Otto Urban, Cesk? spolecnost 1848-1918 schriftf?r Geschichtswissenschaften10 (1999): 260-91; [Czech Society, 1848-1918], (Prague: Svoboda, 1982), 123-83. 14Robert A. Kann, particularly inDas Nationalit?tenproblem derHabsburgermonarchie,was unique

and the nationalist political movements. See Hroch, Die Vork?mpferder nationalen Bewegung bei den et Historia Monographia kleinen V?lkern Europas. Acta Universitatis Carolinae Philosopohica 24 National Revival inEurope: (Prague: Universita Karlova, 1968) [English transi., Social Preconditions of A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985]; and Hroch, Obrozem of Small European malych evropskych n?rod?. I. N?rody severn? a vychodni Evropy [The Revival Nations, I: The Nations of Northern and Eastern Europe] (Prague: Universita Karlova, 1971).

among North American and Austrian historians of the monarchy of his generation in examining all the national movements together, but he did not attempt any structural analysis or comparison In the next generation, the Czech historian Miroslav of the nationalist political movements. Hroch was unique in central Europe in drawing systematic comparisons of the national revivals

NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICS OF STATE 249

in theCarniolan diet in 1867.15 In contrast, the stronggrip on theGalician diet long blocked of Polish landowners and lateralso Polish urbanmiddle-class interests The limited suffrage the political advance of theRuthenian nationalist interests. systems forHungary's county congregations and parliament prevented Slovak, than small and Romanian nationalists from electing more Ruthenian, numbers of representativeseach at any one time throughout the dualist era. During the middle thirdof thenineteenth century, the lessernobility played a strong role as founders and carriers of nationalist politics among the Polish-, Magyar-, and Croatian-speaking populations within the monarchy. These nationalists, too, became committed to constitutional reforms, though often with a more conservative, federalistbent. In the 1840s and then increasingly after 1860, the reforming nationalist nobility was joined by growing numbers of urban-based professionals, public and private officials, and entrepreneurs, who gradually became more prominent in Polish,Magyar, and Croatian nation The governmental auton alist politics during the last decades of the century.16 in 1867 and de facto toGalicia as omy thatFrancis Joseph granted toHungary well after the mid-1860s empowered conservative and moderate nationalist landowning, bureaucratic, and professional interestsin each of those territories.

The Nagodba, the agreement worked out between theHungarian government and the Croatian diet in 1868, nominally reserved significant autonomous powers to that diet, the Sabor, while recognizing the incorporation of Croatia in a now more unitaryHungarian state. During the late 1860s and 1870s German liberals in theAustrian crown lands andMagyar liberal nationalists in theKingdom ofHungary both used systemsof limited suffrageand gerrymandering of the parliamentary voting districts to bolster the strengthof their propertied and educated constituents and protect theirown partisan interests. Itmust be remembered, though, that civil society extended well beyond the limits of the enfranchised electorate. With the advance of free capitalist agriculture and industryafter the 1850s, continuing urbanization, and the growth of public education, increasing numbers of the petty bourgeoisie and working classes participated in aspects of civil society. Mass political movements flowered after themid-1880s, picking up in society where the parties of notables left off, often initiallyusing many of the same basic organizational methods while attacking the elitist liberal and conservative Urban petty bourgeoisie, peasant farmers, partieswith harsh populist rhetoric.17

III. Die V?lker des 15SeeJanko Pleterski, "Die Slowenen," inDie Habsburgermonarchie 1848-1918, Reiches, ed. Adam Wandruszka and Peter Urbanitsch (Vienna: Verlag der ?sterreichischen Akademie derWissenschaften, 1980), pt. 1, 807. overviews of the formation of all the nationalist For generally sound English-language movements, see Sugar and Lederer, eds., Nationalism inEastern Europe. On the rise of mass politics out of the older parties of notables, see Boyer, Political Radicalism, passim; and Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries, 193-266.

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industrial labor, and eventually also farm laborerswere attracted to the mass political movements. Suffrage reform for the Austrian crown lands in 1882 gave voting rights to wider segments of the lower middle classes. Another reform in 1897 added a new group of deputies to the Austrian chamber of deputies elected by universal male suffrage. After 1907, thewhole chamber of deputies was elected by universal, direct, and equal male suffrage. To the end of the monarchy, however, the electoral systems formost of the provincial diets and communal councils in theAustrian crown lands remained restricted and stratified.InHungary, the county congregations and theparliament retained strictlylimited suffragesystemsup to 1918, surviving even the emperor's threat in 1906 to initiate a law establishing universal male suffragefor the lower house of parliament. Nonetheless, mass political formations, including social demo crats, Christian socials, agrarians, and various non-Magyar nationalist parties arose inHungary aswell after the late 1880s.18 The governmental system that developed in the Habsburg Monarchy after the 1860s was verymuch a hybrid. It preserved considerable authority for the crown and for the central bureaucracy in each half of the realm along with elaborate privileges for various elite groups and historic institutions such as the Catholic Church and the diets of each crown land. Yet the system also guaranteed a wide sphere of individual civil liberties and permitted increasing engagement of societal interests in public debate and agitation for the creation of new laws, policies, and government services. JohnW Boyer has termed the arrangements for the Austrian half of the monarchy a "mixed constitutional-bureaucratic political system," and this applies in general terms to Hungary as well.19 There is no denying the development of a vigorous political press and highly diverse public political action throughout the monarchy during thehalf century after the 1860s, but political freedomswere not absolute. Article 13 of the con stitutional laws adopted inDecember 1867 for theAustrian half included a full listingof individual civil rights,comparable to contemporary liberal legislation
On the development ofmass politics in the two halves of themonarchy, see the overviews for the Austrian half by Robin Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy from Enlightenment toEclipse (New York: St. Martin's, 2001), 257-309, 336-56; Helmut Rumpier, ?sterreichische Geschichte, 1804-1914. Eine Chance f?r Mitteleuropa. B?rgerliche Emanzipation und Staatsverfall in derHabsburgermonarchie

Modern History 50 (1978): 73. Journal of

and Ernst Hanisch, ?sterreichische Geschichte, 549-60; (Vienna: Ueberreuter, 1997), 486-523, 1890?1990. Der lange Schatten des Staates. ?sterreichische Gesellschaftsgeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert and forHungary, Andrew C. Janos, The Politics ofBackward (Vienna: Ueberreuter, 1994), 209-41; ness inHungary, 1825-1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 149-89; J?rg K. Hoensch, A History ofModern Hungary, 1867-1986 (London and New York: Longman, and Peter 1988); Ervin Paml?nyi, ed., Geschichte Ungarns (Budapest: Corvina, 1971), 424?79; Sugar and P?ter Han?k, eds., A History of Hungary (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univer sity Press, 1990), 267-91. JohnW Boyer, "Freud, Marriage, and Late Viennese Liberalism: A Commentary from 1905,"

NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICS OF STATE 251

elsewhere in Europe.20 The constitutional laws adopted inHungary after 1867 rested on the model of the 1848 reform legislation, but in contrast to the Austrian half, they defined civil rights in broad, general terms. L'aszlo Peter, George Barany, and other scholars have argued that civil rights in Hungary were based not so much in private or penal law but in the sovereign legal au thorityof the state itself. The Hungarian state structure, as Peter views it,was based on autocratic legal presumptions thatpostulated an overriding responsibil ity to assure law and order through sustained surveillance of society.21 Although government in Hungary, like that in theAustrian crown lands, followed the principles of a Rechtsstaat after the late eighteenth century, the basing of civil rights in the powers and obligations of the state allowed for more far-reaching regulation and restrictionof individual rights than in theAustrian crown lands. In both halves of the monarchy after1867, in fact,government limited freedom of assembly,association, and thepress.The development of civil rights needs more historical research,but there systematic was a clear tensionbetween a broad public and official recognition of theprinciples of freedom of the press, association, and of governmental regulation assembly inboth Austria andHungary and thepractices and interventionwhen officials felt threatened by subversive forces. Libel and sedition laws hemmed in thepress, and both the Austrian and Hungarian admin istrationsharassed, restricted, and at times prohibited anarchist, revolutionary 22 socialist, and some of the most radical nationalist groups. To combat the social democratic movement, the Austrian government inJune 1886 had thepar liament pass repressive measures against "anarchist agitation,"modeled after Ger many's anti-socialist laws.The Hungarian government similarlyrestrictedsocialist activity in the late 1870s and 1880s, arresting leaders and banning meetings and publications.23 By late December 1888, though, Austrian social democrats were able to convene inHainfeld the foundingmeeting of theAustrian Social Democratic Workers Party. In late 1889 and 1890 Hungarian socialistsworked to transformthe small General Workers' Party of Hungary into theHungarian Social Democratic Party and convened itsfirst December 1890. congress in early
On Austrian constitutional and legal development, see the syntheses byWerner Ogris, "Die inCisleithanien, 1848-1918," inDie Habsburgermonarchie, 1848-1918, II. Ver Rechtsentwicklung and Peter Urbanitsch waltung und Rechtswesen, ed. Adam Wandruszka (Vienna: Verlag der ?ster and Wilhelm reichischen Akademie "Die der Wissenschaften, Brauneder, 1975), 538-662; inDie Habsburgermonarchie, 1848-1918, VII. 1848-1918," Verfassungsentwicklung in ?sterreich

and Peter Urbanitsch (Vienna: Verlag der Verfassung und Parlamentarismus, ed. Helmut Rumpier ?sterreichischen Akademie derWissenschaften, 2000), pt.l, 69-237. L?szlo P?ter, "Die Verfassungsentwicklung in Ungarn," inDie Habsburgermonarchie, 1848?1918, and Urbanitsch, pt. 1, 372-78; and George Barany, "Ungarns Verwaltung: VII, ed. Wandruszka inDie Habsburgermonarchie, 1848-1918, 1848-1918," II, ed.Wandruszka and Urbanitsch, 417-18. On restrictions of civil liberties after 1867, see forHungary, Barany, "Ungarns Verwaltung," and for theAustrian half of themonarchy, Ogris, "Die Rechtsentwicklung 417-18; nien, 569-571. 23See Paml?nyi, ed., Die Geschichte Ungarns, 402-04, 438-40. in Cisleitha

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Overall, theAustrian government proved to be fairlytolerantof awide spec trumof political activity,particularly after the early 1890s,while theHungarian government generally treated more harshly what itviewed as subversive groups. Given the determination of the ruling Magyar nationalist forces after the early 1870s to create aMagyar nation-state inHungary, authorities there tended to be more openly repressive toward nationalist political activity among the non Magyar groups thanwas theAustrian officialdom. Both theAustrian and Hun garian state bureaucracies reserved broad powers of surveillance by requiring registrationof voluntary associations and having police agents attend political meetings, but therewere similar controls inmuch of Germany, for instance, during this era. The Austrian and Hungarian interior ministries could also invoke emergency powers to deal with civil unrest and natural disasters.24 Such occasions arose, but one should not exaggerate their number. For the most part, the police authorities in both halves of themonarchy at the end of When the century operated within the frameworkof settledpublic law and regulations. theAustrian and Hungarian governments imposed restrictionson civil

rights and combated groups that they considered threatening to law and order, they typicallydid so under the cover of law and established ordinances and with judicial due process.25 By European standardsof the era, theAustrian half of theHabsburg Monar chy after the 1860s enjoyed broad freedom of speech, the press, association, and assembly and widely respected guarantees of legal process. Popular expectations about guarantees of justice were sufficiently high by the 1880s and 1890s that blatant governmental abuse of the judicial system was an infrequent and loudly protested phenomenon. When state officialsdid pervert justice as they did, for example, in theOmladina conspiracy trials in Prague during the early 1890s, they faced loud condemnation in newspapers and legislative chambers.26 After relaxing the anti-socialistmeasures in the late 1880s, theAustrian govern ment made no further efforts to outlaw opposition political forces outright. Short of creating civil unrest, engaging in criminal action, or threatening the discipline of the military and police forces, the various mass-based parties were free to develop opposition politics. The government typicallydealt with

On the legal basis for declaring a state of emergency, see for theAustrian crown lands, Ludwig Spiegel, "Ausnahmszustand," in ?sterreichisches Staatsw?rterbuch,2nd ed. rev., ed. Ernst Mischler and and Brauneder, "Die Verfassungsentwicklung in JosefUlbrich, 4 vols. (Vienna, 1905), 1: 370-73; inUngarn," ?sterreich 1848-1918," 190; and forHungary, P?ter, "Die Verfassungsentwicklung 487-92. P?ter, in "Die Verfassungsentwicklung inUngarn," 373-81. 6On the Omladina trials, see Karen Johnson Freeze, "The Young Progressives: The Czech Student Movement" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1974); Bruce M. Garver, The Young Czech Party, 178-189; Urban, Cesk? spolecnost 1848-1918, 431-33; Jiri Pernes, Spiklenci protijeho velicenstvu: historie tzv. spiknutiOmladiny v Cech?ch [Conspirators against His Majesty: A History of the So-Called Omladina Conspiracy in Bohemia] (Brno: Barrister & Principal, 1992).

NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICS OF STATE 253

opposition groups, including radical nationalists and the social democrats, by political means, propagandizing against them, and trying to strengthen their opponents but also at times by negotiating and offeringconcessions. Hungary's central government exercisedmuch greater power to restrictindi vidual liberties and political opposition than did itsAustrian counterpart, and Hungarian law offered fewermechanisms for legal recourse. The Hungarian government authorities tended toview nationalist opponents to Magyar national interests as opposition to theHungarian state itselfand invoked ever tighter restrictionson political expression, popular political agitation, the authority of the county congregations, and even parliament itselfin order to maintain thepo litical statusquo. For most of the era after1867 theHungarian interior ministry and the administrative officials it sent to the counties used their authority to restrain, harass, and occasionally jail leaders of the non-Magyar nationalist formations and of the radical lower-class movements that they found most obnoxious. All this was done, though, under the cover of laws and ministerial decrees; and the Hungarian government generally recognized political and legal limits to themeasures itused against political opposition. The failureof some of theHungarian government's cruder effortsto control the political situation in Croatia between 1907 and 1913 shows that the resis

tance of civil society and the judicial system limited how far the government's executive authority reached. Baron Pavao Rauch, the tough-minded governor Wekerle ministry in 1908, responded to the risingagitation for appointed by the reform in Croatia by a new Serb-Croat coalition with repeated dissolutions of the Sabor and rule by decree. The government mounted a mass trial in Serbs and Croats on trumped-up charges of a trea Zagreb in 1909 of some fifty sonous conspiracy to join Bosnia and Croatia with theKingdom of Serbia. The Zagreb trial,however, soon backfired: newspapers throughout themonarchy and abroad denounced the shoddy evidence and obvious breaches of justice, and the convicted defendants were ultimately exonerated by a higher court. In the meantime, the Austrian historian Heinrich Friedjung published an article inVienna's Neue Freie Presse in March 1909, apparently based on docu ments from the Austro-Hungarian foreign ministry, in which he claimed a conspiracy of Serb and Croat politicians in Croatia with the Serbian govern ment. Sued for libel, Friedjung had to admit the fraudulence of some of his 27 assertions. Now, both the j'oint foreign ministry and the Hungarian
27On the Zagreb trial and the Friedjung affair see the brief treatments inArthur J. May, The Haps (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), 383-85; Barbara and burg Monarchy, 1867-1914 Charles Jelavich, The Establishment of theBalkan National States, 1804-1920 (Seattle and London: University ofWashington Press, 1977), 257-58; Janko Pleterski, "The Southern Slav Question," in The Last Years of Austria-Hungary :A Multi-National Experiment inEarly Twentieth-CenturyEurope, ed. Mark Cornwall, rev. ed. (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002), 131; and Hugh and Chris Last Years of Austria topher Seton-Watson, The Making of aNew Europe: R. W. Seton-Watson and the Hungary (London: Methuen, 1981), 68-78.

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government faced public disgust for the apparently crude attempts to discredit and repress dissident politicians in Croatia. The Hungarian government again suspended theSabor in 1911 and 1912 and tried to ruleCroatia with royalcom nissioners, but after IstvanTisza became speaker of theHungarian parliament in May 1912 and thenprime minister inJune 1913, he saw the necessity of amore conciliatory, constitutional approach in Croatia.28

Rising Popular Political Engagement and theGrowth of theNational Movements

The emperor and appointed government officials retainedmuch authority in domestic as well as foreign affairs,and theHungarian ruling elites stubbornly resistedany realmoves toward a democratic suffrage, but representativegovern ment and popular political engagement advanced significantlyin both halves of themonarchy after the 1860s. The two parliaments, the elected communal councils and provincial diets in theAustrian lands, and the county assemblies in Hungary gave a direct voice in lawmaking and the formation of public policy to thosewho enjoyed voting rights. Broader segments of thepopulation, however, made their views and interestsknown throughmeetings, lobbying, demonstrations, and the press. The development of representative institutions,political parties, and interest groups and the state officials' growing responsiveness to them resulted in a gradual, albeit uneven empowerment of various segments of society. John W Boyer has argued that the German liberal reformers of the 1860s did much more to liberalize the state structure in theAustrian half of the monarchy than older historicalwriting typicallyrecognized. In Boyer's reading, the consti tutional reformsof the 1860s gave the Austrian propertied elements, particularly the privileged German Burgertum and the great landowners, along with the state bureaucracy much increased power at the cost of the emperor. Despite the fed eralist claims of many conservative noblemen and Czech, Polish, and Croatian nationalists, ultimate authority still resided with the crown and the central

for eachhalf of the ministries monarchy.29 The two parliaments had substantial
legislative authority, but the Austrian and Hungarian ministries conducted
See Hodimir Sirotkovic, "Die Verwaltung imK?nigreich Kroatien-Slawonien, in 1848-1918," Die Habsburgermonarchie, 1848-1918, and Gabor VII, ed. Rumpier and Urbanitsch, pt. 2, 497-98; Vermes, Istv?n Tisza: The Liberal Vision and Conservative Statecraftof aMagyar Nationalist (Boulder and York: East European Monographs/Columbia University Press, 1985), 196-97. in Central Europe around 1900: A 29See JohnW Boyer, "Religion and Political Development View from Vienna," Austrian History Yearbook 25 (1994): 32?34; and Theo ?linger, "Zur Entste des ?sterreichischen F?deralismus," inAus hung, Begr?ndung und zu Entwicklungsm?glichkeiten ?sterreichs Rechtsleben inGeschichte und Gegenwart. Festschrift f?r Ernst C Hellbling zum 80. Geburtstag, ed. Ernst Carl Hellbling (Berlin: Dunker & Humblot, 1981), 314-15.

New

NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICS OF STATE 255

much governmental business by means of ministerial decrees and ordinances, endorsed where needed by the sovereign. In the Austrian half of the monarchy the role and influence of societal interests in public policy making grew substantially during the last decades of the century. Representatives of the propertied and educated found avenues into government decision making and administration thanks to the considerable autonomy vis-a-vis the central state authorities granted to the municipal and communal councils by the Stadion law of 1849 and the of 1862 and to the provincial diets and their executive Reichsgemeindegesetz committees by the various constitutional reforms of the 1860s.30 In the Austrian crown lands between the 1860s and the 1890s, conservative and liberal nationalist political forces, based largely in propertied and educated social elements, established bastions of power and influence in communal councils, in the provincial diets and their executive committees, and in the chamber of deputies of the Austrian parliament. The German liberals in the Alpine Galicia Czech Bohemia and Bohemian Czech lands and the conservative Polish forces in advantages in the 1860s, but the Old parties carved out important positions in liberal began with and Young and Moravia considerable

during the 1870s and 1880s as did Slovene

and Catholic nationalist forces in Carniola after the late 1860s. In Hungary the Magyar propertied and bureaucratic elites' resistance to suf frage reform and determined government efforts to centralize state adminis tration impeded the penetration of societal interests into policy making during thewhole dualist era, but the government could not silence the rising voices of society. In many ways, theKingdom of Hungary functioned more like a constitutional monarchy with a unitary administration and strong cabinet based on a parliamentarymajority than did theAustrian half.Restricted voting rightsand gerrymandered districtshelped to assure the Hungarian Liberal Party a safe majority in the parliament from themid-1870s through the 1890s, and theLiberal Partyministers carefully managed legislativebusiness. Successive Hungarian governments worked to take autonomous powers away from the counties and to impose on them administrators appointed by the interior ministry.The Hungarian state still relied heavily on the counties' administrative personnel to execute government policies, and the numbers of the latter in the late nineteenth century considerably exceeded the ministerial employees.31

^oyer, "Freud, Marriage, and Late Viennese Liberalism," 73. Austrian historian Ernst Hanisch describes the state as at once "a dynastic, bureaucratic, authoritarian state" (dynastischer, b?rokratischer Hanisch, ?sterreichischeGeschichte, 1890?1990, Obrigkeitsstaat) and a liberal state of law (Rechtsstaat); 209-10. On the centralization of domestic administration in Hungary, see Barany, "Ungarns Verwal and P?ter, "Die Verfassungsentwicklung inUngarn," 476-503, 537-40. On the tung," 409-46; numbers ofministerial and county officials, see Janos, Politics ofBackwardness, 94.

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Hungarian government at all levels, however, was hardly immune to increasing pressures during the last decades of the century from political movements and interestgroups based in society. With thematuring of an industrial market economy and advancing urbani zation after the 1880s, the responsibilitiesof theAustrian and Hungarian central governments grew steadily. In theAustrian crown lands, the public services pro vided bymunicipalities and the individual lands also grew at a rapid pace, ranging fromprimary education, sanitation, and local police to roads, highways, public utilities, public health, and industrial and housing regulation. In theAustrian crown landsmany of those new public serviceswere the responsibilityof the elected members of the provincial diets and of the communal councils, working within regulatory schemes established by the ministries in Vienna or by the provincial governors responsible to the interiorministry.Vigorous public debate were the subject of considerable regarding those services demonstrated that they public interest. Indeed, recent research on theAustrian crown lands has shown that after the 1880s public administration at all levels became subject to complex political negotiation involving competing local political organizations and interest groups, elected local representatives, and various government officesand agencies.32 By around 1900, the growing responsibilitiesof the auto were causing serious friction nomous communal and provincial administrations between the elected communal councils and provincial diets on the one hand and theAustrian ministerial authorities on the other.Ministerial officialscom plained frequentlyabout the extent of communal and provincial autonomy.33 In a famous study published in 1904, Austrian minister-president Ernest von Koerber called in vain for the reduction of the authority of the communal
bodies. 34

On the growing responsibilities of theAustrian communal and crown land governments and the rising engagement of societally based political and social groups in their affairs, see JohnW Boyer, Culture and Political Crisis inVienna: Christian Socialism inPower, 1897-1918 (Chicago and London: inCentral University of Chicago Press, 1995), passim; Boyer, "Religion and Political Development Europe," Cathleen

in ?sterreich 31-36; Brauneder, "Die Verfassungsentwicklung 204-05; 1848-1918," Middle Giustino, Tearing Down Prague's Jewish Town: Ghetto Clearance and theLegacy of Class Ethnic Politics around 1900 (Boulder and New York: East European Monographs/Columbia in des Gesundheitswesens University Press, 2003), passim; Margarete Grandner, "Regelungen im 19. Jahrhundert," Wiener Zeitschrift zur Geschichte derNeuzeit 4 (2004): 79-99; ?sterreich

King, Budweisers, 48-113, passim; and Gary B. Cohen, Education andMiddle-Class Society in Imperial Austria (W Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1996), 55-126, passim. See, as examples, Erich Graf Kielmansegg, Kaiserhaus, Staatsm?nner und Politiker (Vienna: Verlag

"Die Lokalverwaltung in Cisleithanien," inDie Habsburgermonarchie 1848-1918, II, ed. Klabouch, Wandruszka and Urbanitsch, 190-269, 270-305. On Koerber's ideas for reform, see Alfred Ableitinger, Ernest von Koerber und das Verfassungs 1973); and Fredrik Lindstr?m, "Ernest von Koerber and Jahre 1900 (Vienna: B?hlau, problem im

furGeschichte und Politik, 1966), 8-9, 205-06; and Enqu?te derKommission zur F?rderung der Ver veranstaltetin derZeit vom 21. Oktober bis 9. November 1912 (Vienna: K. u. K. Hof- und waltungsreform Staatsdruckerei, 1913), 5-6, 161. On provincial and local government in theAustrian lands during the late nineteenth century, see Ernst C. Hellbling, "Die Landesverwaltung inCisleithanien,"and Jiri

NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICS OF STATE 257

Inmany areas of domestic policy after the 1880s the pressures of civil society pushed up stronglyfrombelow while ministerial officials tried to maintain what they could of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century traditions of powerful top-down state administration. Increasingly, the Austrian state bureaucracy had to compromise inmatters of domestic policy with representa

tives of political parties and interest groups, including nationalist parties and interestgroups among many others.35Even in policy areaswhere theAustrian ministries continued to have broad authority, such as public education and social welfare, the officials after the late 1880s often had to bow to pressures from societal interestsand the autonomous provincial and communal councils and to accept innovations demanded by popular interestgroups and political parties. At the end of the century books, journals, and newspapers presented a rich flowering of political and social criticism of all stripes in all themajor languages of the Austrian crown lands.36Nationalist politicians and organi zations were deeply engaged inmost of these debates, but they were only part of a broader trendof increasing impingement by civil society on thework of

government.

Public education, always of vital interest to nationalist politicians, offered many instances of this.The Austrian Ministry of Religion and Instruction, for instance, tried repeatedly to restrict the growth of Gymnasium and Realschule enrollments and to limit the founding of new secondary schools; but the

Slavic Review 59, no. 4 Prague-Berlin: The Hidden Geography of Czech Modernism," "The 1890s Generation: Modernism and National Identity (2000): 735-760; Katherine David-Fox, in Czech Culture, 1890-1900" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1996); Freeze, "The Young Progres and the sives"; T. Mills Kelly, "Feminism, Pragmatism, or Both? Czech Radical Nationalism Woman Question, 1898-1914," Nationalities Papers 30 (2002): 537-52; Derek Sayer, The Coasts Vienna, Scott of Bohemia: A Czech History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 154-63; National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Si?cle Spector, Prague Territories: (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000); LarryWolff, "Dynastic Conserva tism and Poetic Violence in Fin-de-Si?cle Cracow: The Habsburg Matrix of Polish Modernism," American Historical Review 106 (2003): 735-764; and Nathaniel D. Wood, "Becoming a 'Great City': Metropolitan Imaginations and Apprehensions Austrian History Yearbook 33 (2002): 105-130. in Cracow's Popular Press, 1900-1914,"

Intellectual and Social History, 1848?1938 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972); Jacques Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity:Culture and Society in Fin-de-Si?cle Vienna (New York: Continuum, 1993); Boyer, "Freud, Marriage, and Late Viennese Liberalism," 72-102; Cohen, Education andMiddle-Class Society, 119-26; Margarete Grandner, "Conservative Social Politics in Austria, 1880-1890," Austrian History Yearbook 27 (1996): 77-107; Katherine Feminists and Nationalism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy: "Czech 'The First in David, Austria,'" Journal ofWomen's History 3, no. 2 (1991): 26-45; Katherine David-Fox, "Prague

theAustrian State Idea: A Reinterpretation of theKoerber Plan (1900-1904)," Austrian History Year book 35 (2004): 143-184. See Boyer, Culture and Political Crisis, passim; Cohen, Education and Middle-Class Society,67-75, and Hans Peter Hye, Das politische System in der 95-126; Habsburgermonarchie (Prague: Karolinum, 1998), 160-77. 36For soundings in these rich and varied debates, seeWilliam Johnston, The Austrian Mind: An

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provincial diets and communal councils could simply start new secondary schools at theirown expense, providing therebypolitical trophies fornationalist interests while they hoped to get ministerial funding later. Ministerial officials long resisted the granting of equal opportunities towomen in secondary and higher education and the introduction of new curricular options for the state gymnasia, but afteraround 1900 the pressure for change from societal interests was so great that theministry had to grant one concession after another on women's education and other issues.37 InHungary, the cabinets, typicallybased on carefully cultivatedmajorities in the Budapest parliament, took advantage of their broad freedom of action to exercise strong central control over domestic affairs. The Liberal Party prime vested in ministers great powers a growing ministerial bureaucracy and system aticallyweakened the traditional authority of the county congregations. Tran sylvaniawas fullyamalgamated into theKingdom of Hungary, and only Croatia continued to have its own diet in Zagreb, dominated by native propertied elements. Nonetheless, the Hungarian cabinet worked steadily through the last decades of the century to impose tight central control over Croatia by appointing strong-willed governors, manipulating the Sabor, passing much legislation forCroatia in theHungarian parliament, and, as alreadymentioned, repeatedly suspending the Sabor.38 The Hungarian cabinet gained even greater power over the parliament in the 1890s and again after 1912 as the reorganized Liberal Party forces, now led by Istvan Tisza, imposed tighter controls over

legislative procedures.39

The increasing centralization of authority over Hungary and Croatia in the Hungarian ministries limited opportunities for any broad range of societal inter ests to participate directly in policy deliberations and governance compared to Austria. Throughout the era after the 1870s, theHungarian government was willing to use more openly repressivemeasures against dissident nationalist groups and lower-class radical movements. Nonetheless, a growing range of mass-based interestgroups and political movements arose in Hungary as well after the late 1880s; and they found ways to exert increasing pressure on the government. In the last fifteenyears beforeWorld War I, the rising demands of disaffected landowners, professionals, the urban lower-middle classes, peasant farmers,and laboring groups, both urban and rural, forced theHungar ian government to make at least some concessions on social and economic
See Cohen, Education and Middle-Class Society, 108-26; and Helmut Engelbrecht, Geschichte des Monarchie (Vienna: ?sterreichischer ?sterreichischen Bildungswesens, Band 4. Von 1848 bis zum Ende der Bundesverlag, 1986), 30. On theHungarian government's control of Croatia, see Barany, "Ungarns Verwaltung," 379, im K?nigreich Kroatien und Slawonien 386, 396; Sirotkovic, "Die Verwaltung 1848-1918," and P?ter, "Die Verfassungsentwicklung inUngarn," 351-52. 479?98; See P?ter, "Die Verfassungsentwicklung inUngarn," 472?77; and Vermes, Istv?n Tisza, 86?88, 180-84.

NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICS OF STATE 259

questions and to adopt social reforms even while it frequently crushed strikes and demonstrations and stepped up measures to Magyarize the minority nation alities.40Hungary, too, saw a rapid growth of new public services at the end of the century,which theministries, counties, or cities administered and which attracted growing popular political interest.41Public debate about political and social issues in voluntary associations, the press, and academic circles was every bit as varied and vigorous in Hungary around 1900 as in theAustrian crown lands. The Hungarian government officials could neither stifle nor ignore the criticism voiced by radical democratic, Christian social, social demo cratic, and minority nationalist groups.42 The growth of civil society and the gradually increasing responsiveness of government agencies to the public in theHabsburg Monarchy at the end of the nineteenth century surely represented rising democratizing pressures and tendencies, but one cannot argue that any far-reaching democratization of government occurred in either half of the realm.43Outright democratization would require clear moves toward popular control over government action on allmajor public issues, includingmore parliamentary oversight of central execu tive authority and broader voting rights for all themajor representativebodies, than actually arose before 1918. Rather thanmaking any excessive claims for democratization as such, it seems better to speak of the increasing penetration of public interests into some areas of government decision making, their in the functioning of parts of the state administration, and growing implication perhaps an advancing cohabitation of public interestgroups and political parties with the state bureaucracy-with all these tendencies significantlystronger in theAustrian half of themonarchy than in theHungarian. The growth of civil society and constitutional, representative government in the Habsburg Monarchy opened up considerable space for thedevelopment of a range ofpopular politicalmovements, including thenationalist formationsamong them. By 1900 nationalist political parties and their affiliated social, economic, and

On the political calculus of the ruling elements inHungary in the late nineteenth century, see Janos, The Politics ofBackwardness, 84-170, passim; Paml?nyi, ed., Die Geschichte Ungarns, 379-498; Peter Han?k, Ungarn in der Donaumonarchie. Probleme der b?rgerlichen Umgestaltung einesVielv?lkerstaates and Budapest: Verlag f?rGeschichte und Politik, 1983), 195-239. (Vienna, Munich, On developments in the city of Budapest, see the overview inZsuzsa L. Nagy, "Transformations in the City Politics of Budapest, 1873-1941," in Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan ed. Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske (New York: Russell Sage Transformation, 1870-1930, Foundation, 1994), 35-54. On various aspects of the social and political debates inHungary, see Lee Congdon, The Young Luk?cs (Chapel Hill, NC: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1983); Mary Gluck, "The Modernist as Primitive: The Cultural Role of Endre Ady in Fin-de-Si?cle Hungary," Austrian History Yearbook 33 (2002): 149-62; P?ter Han?k, The Garden and the Cultural History ofVienna Workshop: Essays on the and Budapest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 63-97, 110-134; Janos, The Politics ofBackwardness, 167-189; and Sugar et al., eds., A History of Hungary, 284-88. 43See the comments inHanisch, ?sterreichische Geschichte, 1890-1990, 28-29, 209-12.

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mon cultural groups had acquired strong support and influence in all parts of the By then largepartsof thepopulation, although by no means all, had devel archy. oped national loyaltiesand chosen sides in the nationality contests.The nationalist activists' pioneering cultural initiatives and effortsfor economic improvement between the 1820s and early 1840s and their political agitation in the crisis years of the 1840s and again after the late 1850s gradually built up bodies of fol lowerswho accepted the nationalist arguments that their respective languages of birth defined or, for some, a combination of language, religion, and territory who were in society,determined their life chances, and provided the basis they Nationalist activistsconstructed historical forgroup action to shape their future. narratives that postulated that their respective nationalities had always been present in their home regions with shared identities based on distinct group culture, family descent, and local rootedness. Yet throughout the nineteenth century,nationalist leaders in centralEurope had to admit thatnational identities universallyby birthwhen theycomplained about partsof the were not transmitted population that remained nationally "indifferent"or "amphibious," bilingual (or "utraquist" in theBohemian Lands), or perhaps even polylingual. To the end of themonarchy and into the interwarperiod, nationalist activistsstruggled towin the loyaltyof popular elements that often spoke several languages and were ambivalent about ethnic and national affiliations,particularly in rural areas where inhabitants saw the nationalist political struggles of the larger cities as remote to their livesand disruptive to established customs of social interaction.44

For examples of recent treatments of the creation of nationalist historical narratives as part of the (Prague: development of national ideologies, see Vladimir Macura, Cesky sen [The Czech Dream] Nakl. Lidov? noviny, 1998); Macura, Znamenx zrodu. Cesk? n?rodn? obrozen?jako kulturn? typ [Birth as a Cultural Type], 2nd expanded ed. (Prague: H & H, Signs: The Czech National Revival 1995); Derek Sayer, The Coasts ofBohemia, 82-153; Brian A. Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Nation and History: Polish Historians from theEnlightenment to theSecond World War, ed. Wr?bel Peter Brock, John D (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Stanley, and Piotr J. Press, 2006). On the continuing ambiguity and mutability of national loyalties in parts of the popu lation, seeMark Cornwall, "The Struggle on the Czech-German Language Border, 1880-1940," The English Historical Review 109 (1994): 914-51; Pieter M. Judson, "Frontier Germans: The Inven um tion of the Sprachgrenze," in Kulturelle Praktiken und die Ausbildung von Imagined Communities 2001),

ed. Daniel Segal and Richard Handler, Social Analysis 33 (1993): 47-67; Judson, in Creating theOther, ed. Nancy in Cisleithania, 1880-1914," "Nationalizing Rural Landscapes M. Wingfield (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 127-148; King, Budweisers, passim; Robert am in B?hmen. Zur Problematik 'nationaler Zwischenstellungen' Luft, "Nationale Utraquisten Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts," inAllemands, Juifs et Tch?ques ? Prague?Deutsche, Juden und Tschechen in Prag, 1890-1924, ed. Maurice God?, Jacques Le Rider, et Fran?oise Mayer (Montpellier: Universit? Paul-Val?ry-Montpellier III, 1996); Tara Zahra, "Reclaiming Children for theNation: in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1945," Germanization, National Ascription, and Democracy and M?tropoles,"

1900, ed. Susan Ingram,Markus Reisenleitner, and Cornelia Szabo-Knotik (Vienna: Turia + Kant, the Geography of a German 85-99; Judson, "Frontiers, Islands, Forests, Stones: Mapping in The Geography of Identity,ed. Patricia Yeager 1848-1900," Identity in the Habsburg Monarchy, Press, 1996), 382-406; (Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Judson, "Inventing Germans: Class, Margins of theHabsburg Monarchy," in "Nations, Colonies, Nationality, and Colonial Fantasy at the

NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICS OF STATE 261

As long ago as 1948, thehistorianA.J. P. Taylor warned that in centralEurope simply speaking a particular language or a dialect thereof did not necessarily 45 entail a conscious loyalty to a particular larger ethnic or national grouping. Only in the last twenty-fiveyears, though, have historians and social scientists gone beyond studying the political and intellectual processes of building nationalist movements and begun to address systematicallypopular national identification and the popular imagining of national communities in central and east-central Europe change.46 The as complex processes of political, social, and cultural founding of local and regional nationalist organizations, the

development of electoral politics, the opening of schools or classeswith alterna tive languages of instruction, and the introduction of census questions on mother tongue or language of everyday use were among themany changes in public life after the middle of the nineteenth century that gave the general populace the occasion to choose sides and eventually created pressure to national loyalties. affirm Nationalist campaigning forgroup cultural and political rights,including edu cation and other public services in native languages, and government conces sions to those demands led gradually to dividing much of public life in the monarchy on linguistic lines and eventually politically articulated national lines. Numerous voluntary associations and political organizations divided of nationality inmany of the crown lands soon after the inau sharplyalong lhnes guration of constitutional rule in the 1860s, although some charities, special interestgroups, craft and labor organizations, and many religious institutions remained nationally neutral for years or even decades thereafter. The consti tutional laws for theAustrian half of themonarchy from the late 1860s recog nized the cultural rights of individual citizens, including their language and nationality, although not any formal political rightsof nationalities as collective entities.47 Those legal commitments and the autonomy of communal and

Austria," Austrian History Yearbook 22 (1991): 21-34; and Karl F. Bahm, "Beyond the Bourgeoisie: in Nineteenth-Century Central Europe," Austrian Rethinking Nation, Culture, and Modernity History Yearbook 29 (1998): 19-35. On the rights of the nationalities in theAustrian half of themonarchy, see Stourzh, Die Gleich

of East Central Europe: Ethnicism, central and east-central Europe in King, "The Nationalization Ethnicity, and Beyond," 112-152; King, Budweisers, 6?11; Pieter M. Judson, '"Whether Race or Conviction Should be the Standard': National Identity and Liberal Politics in 19th-century

Central European History 37 (2004): 501-543; and Zahra, "Your Child Belongs to theNation: Nation in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1945," alization, Germanization, and Democracy (Ph.D. diss., Uni versity ofMichigan, Ann Arbor, 2005). 264. 45Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918, See the critiques of the historiographical traditions on nationalism and national identity in

der Nationalit?ten, particularly 189-200; Emil Brix, Die Umgangssprachen inAlt?sterreich berechtigung zwischen Agitation und Assimilation. Die Sprachenstatistik in den zisleithanischen Volksz?hlungen, 1880 bis 1910 (Vienna: B?hlau, 1982); Hannelore B?rger, Sprachenrecht und Sprachgerechtigkeit im

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it possible to develop full systems of it could claim sufficient

provincial governments in Austria made

public primary schools and, somewhat more slowly, secondary schools teaching in the language of each national group wherever numbers of residents, typically at least twentypercent of the local population. In Austrian secondary and higher education, German-speakers continued up I to enjoy disproportionate advantages in enrollments and in the numbers of institutions that used German as the language of instruction, but after1871 the universitiesof Cracow and Lemberg/Lwow/L'viv taughtpri toWorld War marily in Polish. Prague had, in addition to German-language institutions, a Czech technical college after 1868 and a Czech university after 1882. By the firstdecades of the twentieth century, the Slovene-, Ukrainian-, Italian-, and Serbo-Croatian-speaking populations in theAustrian crown lands all had exten sive systemsof public primary schools and were able to complete at least the lower formsof secondary education in theirown languages, although they did not get universities or technical colleges teaching in their respective languages under themonarchy.48 InHungary thegovernment policies ofMagyarization and repressive measures against non-Magyar nationalist politics impeded but could not stop the develop ment of nationally divided public life and distinct national communities in the public sphere. The ostensibly liberalHungarian nationality law of 1868, like its Austrian counterpart,did not recognize national groups as collective political enti ties, but it guaranteed the rightsof individuals to use their own languages in elementary and secondary education, indealingswith thegovernment, and in reli mid-1870s gious affairs.49 In practice, however, theHungarian cabinets from the onward worked tomake Magyar the language of all importantgovernment ser vices, to demand competence inMagyar for all public school teachers, and to requireMagyar as a subject in the higher formsof all elementary schools and in all secondary schools. The Hungarian authorities shut down Slovak gymnasia in 1875-on Matice slovenskain late late 1874 and the Slovak nationalist educational society, the pretext that theywere propagating "unpatriotic" and Pan-Slavist

ideas. Over time theministerial bureaucracy required that increasing numbers of subjects in non-Magyar schools be taught in Magyar and granted or withheld state subsidies in order tomake Magyar the language of instruction in the vast majority of Hungary's primary and secondary schools. By the last years before 1914, seventy-eightpercent of theprimary schools and ninety percent of the sec ondary schools inHungary (not including Croatia) used Magyar as the primary

der Akademie ?sterreichischen Unterrichtswesen 1867-1918 (Vienna: Verlag der ?sterreichischen Wissenschaften, 1995); and Kann, Das Nationalit?tenproblem der Habsburgermonarchie, passim. On the development of Austrian education, see Cohen, Education andMiddle-Class Society, and Bildungswesens, Band 4. Engelbrecht, Geschichte des ?sterreichischen See the brief discussion inRobert A. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 362.

NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICS OF STATE 263

language of instruction.50In 1906-7, Hungary had 205 accredited gymnasia and Realschulen, of which 189 used Magyar as the language of instruction, eight German, sixRomanian, one Italian, and one mixed Magyar and Romanian. At that time no gymnasium inHungary used Slovak or Ukrainian as its language of instruction.51 During the era after1867, all universities and technical colleges inHungary proper used Magyar as the language of instruction.Spokesmen for the Hungarian Liberal Party justified theirMagyarization understood as aMagyar nation-state: must "Since patriotism is inconceivable without a common language, our task be to create one ...What we expect from them isnot only that they speak the Magyar vernacular but that they start to feel likeMagyars themselves."52 The centralized state administration under theHungarian ministries and the limited suffrage for the Budapest parliament and the county congregations meant that the non-Magyar nationalities and the lower classes in general had littledirect role inHungary's government and public administration.There was certainly less penetration of public policy making from society at large in Hungary than in theAustrian half of themonarchy, and during the lastyears were only small numbers of deputies at any one time beforeWorld War I there representing the non-Magyar nationalistmovements in the lower house of the parliament. Nonetheless, throughout theHungarian half of themonarchy from the 1890s onward, small farmers,urban lower-middle classes, and urban and rural laborers of all nationalities increasingly found their own political voices. Advancing literacy in whatever language, economic development, and urban population growth, all encouraged by the government's own policies, helped drive forward the development of civil society.The Hungarian authorities com bated the Slovak nationalist groups, for instance,with the harshest repressive measures, but Slovak nationalistpolitical activitycontinued to grow.The Hungar ian government shut down many Romanian nationalist organizations and news papers inTransylvania during the 1880s and 1890s butmoderated its stance after when IstvanTisza came to power. Relations between the Hun 1900, particularly garian government and Serbian nationalist groups in the 1880s and 1890s were less confrontational than thosewith the Slovak and Romanian groups, and the governor of Croatia in themid-1880s, K'aroly Khuen-Hedervary, even showed some favor to Serbian nationalist groups there in order to play them off against Croatian nationalists. A major impediment for the Hungarian authorities in tryingto Magyarize Romanians and Serbs was that theyconld not easily establish
Statistics quoted in Janos, The Politics ofBackwardness, 127. 5 Statistics quoted inC. A. Macartney, The Habsburg Empire, 1790-1918 1969), 724. 52JozsefSandor, 1910, quoted

policies simply in

terms of the requirements for good citizenship and loyalty to the state, a state

(New York: Macmillan,

in Janos, The Politics ofBackwardness, 126.

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Magyar leadership over the Serbian and Romanian churches as they did in the Catholic and Lutheran churches in the heavily Slovak-speaking regions. In the 1880s and 1890s grassrootscultural and political organizations grew sub stantiallyamong all the non-Magyar nationality groups inHungary and Croatia, and they even organized a "congress of nationalities" in Budapest in 1895. Despite the barriers of restricted suffrageand gerrymandered districts,deputies from the non-Magyar nationalities sat in theHungarian parliament throughout the dualist era. The largestcontingent was ethnic Germans, mostly fromTran sylvania, although many of these supported pro-government parties.Romanian nationalists,when they did not boycott elections, won parliamentary seats in Romanian small numbers throughout the era after the 1860s. There were fifteen deputies of all political stripes in 1905, five in 1910. The parliament also regularly included smaller numbers of Serbian deputies. In 1901 the Slovak People's Party organized formally,ledmost prominently by theCatholic priestAndrej Hlinka and allied with the clerical People's Party in Hungary. The Slovak People's Party soon managed to elect four deputies to the parliament, despite the Despite thecontinuing policies ofMagyarization spon limited suffrage system.53 sored by allHungarian cabinets in the lastdecades beforeWorld War I, some in the Magyar political establishment, including the otherwise authoritarian Istvan Tisza, increasingly recognized that thenon-Magyar nationalistmovements were not going to disappear and thatnegotiation and some conciliatorymeasures were prudent.54 Relations between the non-Magyar nationalist parties and theHun garian central government remainedmuch more contentious than those between the nationalist parties and theAustrian government during the last two decades before 1914, but there were at least some opportunities forpolitical negotiation inHungary aswell.

Mass Politics and Nationalist Radicalism in theEra of Crises

Conventional beforeWorld War views of theHabsburg Monarchy during the last twenty years I have focused on growing domestic political crises in both halves, caused by the lack of stablemajorities in

theAustrian and Hungarian

the two parliaments and the radicalization of nationalist demands encouraged by mass politics. In this perspective, both halves of the monarchy became increasingly ungovernable, forcing repeated dissolutions or suspensions of provincial diets and the two parliaments.With the Austrian parliament and ministers and provincial governors several of the diets frequentlydeadlocked, the relied increasinglyon rule by executive decree. In theAustrian half after 1897,
See the overview of the composition of theHungarian parliament inAdalbert Toth, "Die soziale 1848 bis 1918," inDie Habsburgermonarchie 1848- 1918, VII, Schichtung im ungarischen Reichstag ed. Rumpier and Urbanitsch, pt. 1, 1061-1105. See Vermes, Istv?n Tisza, 196-210.

NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICS OF STATE 265

the emperor frequently appointed cabinets composed of experts and career bureaucratswith few parliamentary leaders, and most of theminister-presidents had to manage without stable parliamentary majorities. Despite repeated attempts, the government and moderate party leaders failed to resolve the most intense national conflict, thatbetween Czechs and Germans inBohemia. In 1905-06 Hungary entered its deepest political crisis of the pre-war era when the declining Hungarian and a coalition of opposition Magyar Liberal Party lost control of the parliament nationalists, conservatives, and clerical

the coalition challenged the emperor politicians gained a majority. When regarding control of the common Austro-Hungarian army, Francis Joseph responded by appointing his own prime minister above the parties and propos ing to introduce a bill for universal male suffragefor the parliament. After the coalition agreed to a compromise with the emperor and formed a new cabinet, it then passed various minor social reforms.To placate Magyar nation alists, the government enacted a new education law in 1907 that called for Magyar as the language of instruction in all primary schools that served the other nationalities. In June 1913, Istv'anTisza, the son of Kalman Tisza, who had built the Liberal Partymachine back in the late 1870s and 1880s, returned as prime minister, leading his own Party of National Work. As speaker of the parliament during theprevious year, he had taken toughmeasures against oppo sition filibustering; now he asserted the government's authority over society with new restrictive regulations on civil rights. Fearing Pan-Slav and pro Russian tendencies among the Ruthenians in northeastern Hungary, the Tisza government responded to a wave of conversions from theGreek Catholic Church toEastern Orthodoxy by ordering the arrestof nearly two hundred and on charges of sedition.55 the trialof fifty-eight Tisza upheld the central government's longstanding policies of Magyariza tion, but he also supported negotiations and modest conciliatory measures toward some Croatian and Romanian political groups. The Hungarian govern of Croat and Serb poli ment had reacted stronglyafter1905 to the joint efforts ticians in Croatia to resist Magyarization effortsfromBudapest. An emerging coalition of Croat and Serb politicians asserted the autonomy of Croatia from Hungary and called for the union of Croatia with Dalmatia, heretofore one of the Austrian crown lands. In 1908 the Budapest government suspended the Sabor; it did so again in 1912 and imposed dictatorial control under the gover nor appointed from Budapest. Tisza moderated the government's tactics in 1913, however, and worked out a new understanding with moderate Croatian deputies to reconvene theSabor and restore thenormal Croatian administration on terms acceptable to theHungarian cabinet.

55Ibid., 194-95.

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With Count Karl Stiirgkh serving asAustrian minister-president after1910 and relyingheavily on rule by decree and IstvanTisza using authoritarianmethods to control the Hungarian parliament and limitcivil rights, one could easily conclude that thegrowing discord of the political parties and, above all, the nationalist for mations was making it impossible to govern either half of the monarchy by con stitutional methods. The nationalist parties appeared tobecome evermore radical in theirdemands, colliding with each other and with the constitutional arrange ments anchored in the seemingly immutableAustro-Hungarian compromise. If the revival of bureaucratic absolutism was the only remaining alternative to this growing chaos, that development, according to many conventional historical accounts, leftlittlehope at all for the futureof theHabsburg polity.56 If,however, one places the domestic political crises after themid-1890s into the context of theongoing structural transformation of popular politics and gov ernment, one draws a different understanding of the changing relationsbetween society and the state and the nature of nationalist politics in this period. The growing conflicts and political instability were not simply the resultof nationalist feeling acting as an independent factor but more the product of the transfor mation of civil society and political life,of which the radicalization of national politics was only one of many results.Throughout theAlpine and Bohemian lands after themid-1880s and inmost of the other Austrian crown lands after the early 1890s, the landowners and urban middle-class notables who had con trolled the old Honoratiorenparteien found themselves increasingly challenged by insurgent movements of peasant farmers, shopkeepers, craftsmen, white-collar employees, and wage laborers,marching under flagsof class interestor a com bination of economic and national or social Catholic interests.The middle and upper-class interests formerly represented by the parties of notables were increasingly fragmented along socioeconomic, national, and ideological lines, and they faced strengthening opposition from groups representing petty bourgeois and laboring interests. In Hungary mass-based politics developed a little more slowly than in theAustrian half of themonarchy, and theHungarian noble landowners and officialdom were much more successful in resisting expansion of the suffrage and major social reforms. Nonetheless, the increasing fragmentation of Hungarian politics after the late 1890s and the loss of Liberal Party resulted from a broad structural transformationsimilar to that in theAustrian crown lands.57

hegemony by the Hungarian

56See Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918, passim, for a classic statement of this interpre tation of themonarchy's political development in the last decades. Modern Hungary, 68?73, for a brief summary of the development of 57See Hoensch, A History of mass-based political movements inHungary around 1900. See Alice M. Freifeld,Nationalism and the Crowd in theLiberal Hungary, 1848-1914 (Washington, Baltimore, and London: Johns Hopkins for a vivid description of University Press andWoodrow Wilson Center Press, 2000), 281-306, mass politics inHungarian popular culture and everyday life around 1900.

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In both halves of themonarchy afteraround 1890, multiple new mass-based parties challenged the old deferential politics of great landowners, conservative clerical interests,and the urban middle class of property and education. The mass-based formations presented theirown populist notions of community to replace those of the national liberals and clerical conservatives,whether itwas a secular radical nationalism and anti-Semitism, Catholic or secular agrarianism, urban social Catholicism, or social democracy. Many in the older conservative and liberal formations tried to survive by embracing the most compatible elements of one or another new popular ideology. InAustria's older conservative clerical circles, for instance, many initiallyopposed populist social Catholicism, but after1900 they tended tomerge forces, most notably in the union between the rural clerical elements from theAlpine provinces and Karl Lueger's Vienna based Christian Social Party. National liberal parties such as the Young Czech Party and the German

Liberal Party in theBohemian and Alpine crown lands shifted to amore aggres sive integralnationalism to tryto retainold constituencies, capture new support, and compete with radical nationalists, agrarians, and social democrats forvotes fromwithin theirown language groups. The growth of the radical nationalist parties, such as Georg von Sch6nerer's Pan-Germans and their offshoots, the Czech National Democrats Socials and State-Right Radicals, and the Polish National typically represented populist revolts against the elitism of the old conservative or liberal nationalists. In general, the radical nationalists, in Galicia,

whether German, Czech, Polish,Magyar, or Croat, urgedmaximalist nationalist goals in order to counter the appeals of the liberal nationalists, social Catholics, and the agrarian and social democratic parties. In fact, the radical nationalists typically focused more on competing with rival parties within their own national camps than in combating their so-called national enemies. The Czech National Socials, for instance,deployed their radical nationalist offensives more often to combat other Czech parties in order to win Czech popular support than to fight the German interests in Bohemia and Moravia. The Alpine true for many of the German nationalists in Bohemia and the lands, who contended with the liberal and clerical forces for voter more radical Polish nationalist and peasant parties thatcontested support, or the the Polish conservatives' power inGalicia.58 In Carniola, the divisions grew so same was

On radical Czech nationalism, see Kelly, "Taking It to the Streets," 93-112; andjif? Malir, Od [From spolk? k modern?mpolitickym stran?m. Vyvoj politickych stran na Morave v letech 1848?1914 Associations toModern Political Parties: The Development of Political Parties inMoravia, 1848 1914] (Brno: Filozofick? fakultaMagarykovy university v Brne, 1996), passim. On the German

Genesis ofPeasant National

radical nationalists' competition with the German liberals and progressives, see H?belt, Kornblume und Kaiseradler, passim; Whiteside, The Socialism ofFools, passim; andWhiteside, Austrian National Socialism before 1918, passim. On Polish nationalist, agrarian, and Ruthenian competition with the conservative Polish forces in Galicia, see Keely Stauter-Halsted, The Nation in the Village: The Identity inAustrian Poland, 1848?1914 (Ithaca and New York: Cornell

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deep between the Slovene Catholic

interestsand the Slovene national liberals, that the Slovene liberals formed a coalition with German liberals in 1896 to run the diet. That Slovene-German liberal coalition was renewed afterelections in 1901, and the Slovene Catholic forces responded with obstructionist tactics

and calls for electoral reform directed against both the Slovene and German liberals.59The radical populist appeals to national community at the turn of the century, of course, often included an anti-Semitic dimension, particularly where members of the larger "enemy" nationalities were few in number and where Jews could be attacked as supporters of the existing liberal constitutional and legal order and as allies of hated German or Hungarian liberals or Polish conservatives.60 The parties of the non-Magyar nationalities inHungary may have been less finelydifferentiatedthan those of theGermans or Slavic nation alities in theAustrian half,but after the late 1890s itwas hard forany nationality in themonarchy to find political unity around a common national interest for any significant length of time. Mass politics challenged and ultimately dissolved many, but not all, of thepre viously negotiated relationships between the older parties of notables and the government bureaucracy. In the process, political discourse and partisan demands were radicalized on all sides.The new,mass-based groups offeredcom peting notions of community, civic identity,and loyalty.In theAustrian crown lands, the conflicting popular interestscompeted for control of local govern ment, district and provincial school boards, the provincial diets and executive committees, the officialdom of the provincial executive committees, and, of course, seats in the parliament. At the grass roots, one can easily see how the growing competition of themass-based parties and interestgroups for popular support led directly to the radicalization of political demands and rhetoric.61 On the surface, the heated political contests after 1890 between Czech and German nationalists in the Bohemian lands, between German and Slovene

in the last decades beforeWorld War I, see Peter On anti-Semitism in theHabsburg Monarchy G. J. Pulzer, The Rise ofPolitical Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Pauley, From Prejudice toPersecution;Dirk van Arkel, Antisemitism in Austria (Leiden: Proefschrift-Leiden, 1966); and Vera Ranki, The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion: Jews andNationalism in Hungary (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1999). See, for example, the accounts by Judson, "Nationalizing Rural Landscapes," and King, Budweisers, pp. 80-147, passim. "Taking It to the Streets," 93-112; 127-148; Kelly,

Harvard University Press, 1983), 152-79. 59See Andrej Rahten, "Der Krainer Landtag," Rumpler and Urbanitsch, pt. 2, 1755-65.

University Press, 2001), 60-94, 216-42; Daniel Unowsky, The Pomp and Politics ofPatriotism: Impe rialCelebrations in (W Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005), Habsburg Austria, 1848-1916 PartitionedPoland, 1795-1918 64-75; Piotr S.Wandycz, The Lands of (Seattle and London: Univer and John-Paul Himka, Socialism inGalicia: The sity of Washington Press, 1974), 226-28, 288-95; Emergence of Polish Social Democracy and Ukrainian Radicalism (1860?1890) (Cambridge, MA: inDie Habsburgermonarchie 1848-1918, VII, ed.

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nationalists in southern Styria and Carniola, between Polish and Ruthenian or Ukrainian nationalist parties inGalicia, or among Magyars and Slovak, Croatian, Serbian, and Romanian nationalists inHungary and Croatia increasinglycaused public confrontations and political breakdowns in local governments and parlia mentary chambers. Time and again, though, radical nationalists launched initia tives in the legislative bodies in direct connection with effortsto rallypopular support within theirown national populations. As Lothar H6belt has pointed out, the radical nationalists' extreme demands and obstructionist tactics in the Austrian parliament often representedgestures to demonstrate to theirown con stituents that they were doing at least something on behalf of the national cause. The outrageous scenes in the Austrian chamber of deputies and occasionally also in the Austrian crown lands earned Hungarian parliament or various diets in the much public contempt for parliamentary politics. Nonetheless, as H6belt has both the deputies and the ministerial officials argued about Austrian political life, learned to deal with the frequent interruptions in legislative business and used the periods during filibusters and adjournments for vigorous, multi-sided negotiations about actions to be taken by the bureaucrats or the parliament and dietswhen they reconvened.62 while the development ofmass politics It is important then to recognize that

and the rise of the various radicalmovements increased political conflict, the work of stateadministration and government continued as did also complex pro cesses of political negotiation among nearly all the contending interests and between them and the state. Itwas not easy to recast the patterns of negotiation developed during the era of parties of notables to deal with mass politics, but mechanisms of negotiation were developed and utilized at all levels in both theAustrian and Hungarian halves of themonarchy. Recent historical research has begun to recover and clarify those processes of continuing negotiation and governance, although the picture is clearer in thewestern language literature for theAustrian half than forHungary. While political wrangling in a number of the Austrian crown lands led to periodic boycotts or obstruction of represent ative bodies by one group or another,most of the political parties and interest groups, in fact, found ways towork with each other and with the state officials to at least some extent. The obstruction of proceedings obliged the governors to suspend diet sessions occasionally in Upper Austria and repeatedly in Bohemia or to call long recesses in Styria. Typically, though, the governors

Dienste des alten ?sterreichs (Vienna: Bergland, 1958), 132-38, 144-45, 167-68, 175-85, 302 51-52, 56-57, 263, 356, 13; and Kielmansegg, Kaiserhaus, Staatsm?nner und Politiker, 44-45, 410-11.

62Lothar H?belt, "Parliamentary Politics in a Multinational Setting: Late Imperial Austria," Center for Austrian Studies Working Paper, 92-6 (Minneapolis: Center for Austrian Studies, 1992), See also Hanisch, 4-6, 11-13; and H?belt, Kornblume und Kaiseradler, 180-99, 248-90, 305-14. 230-31. On the tactics used by the Austrian minister ?sterreichische Geschichte, 1890?1990, presidents to deal with radical deputies in the parliament, see thememoirs of Robert Ehrhart, Im

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took these actions to allow time for cooling off,hold negotiations among all the parties, and prepare for new sessions or elections. The Austrian minister president used similar tacticswhen obstruction led to suspending parliament and temporary rule by decree.63 The boycotts and obstruction of various provincial diets and the two parlia ments attracted much public criticism at the time, and historians have used these episodes to demonstrate the failingsof parliamentary development in themon archy.These episodes, however, must be viewed in context. Not just radicals, but a range of political interestsused parliamentary boycotts and obstruction as tools. Typically, they did so to achieve practical political goals. In most cases theywanted to return to normal legislative business as soon as they won suitable concessions and rewards, and that iswhat often happened.64 The premier example was theAustrian parliament after1897, where repeated episodes of disorder and sustained obstruction made it the subject of great opprobrium. For many observers then and since, the scenes in the chamber of deputies epitomized the increasinglydysfunctional character of the whole polit ical system in the Austrian half of the monarchy.65 After 1911 theAustrian minister-president resorted frequently to dissolving parliament and governing by emergency decrees, but as a contemporary journalist put it, article 14 in theAustrian constitutional laws was really a "round-trip ticket for the consti tution." The decrees had force only between parliamentary sessions, and the minister-president was under pressure to summon the parliament again after each crisis subsided.When theReichsrat reconvened, the government had to submit to it all the emergencymeasures, and, in fact, they were usually ratified.66 The government looked to make deals wherever it could, even with radical nationalist deputies. On at least one occasion, a member of theminister-presi dent's staff had to draft both an interpellation for a radical Czech nationalist deputy and the ministerial response to it as part of an agreement to stop obstruc tion in the chamber.67 Lothar Hobelt has pointed out that the government's emergency decrees often broke stalemates in the Vienna parliament and typically led to negotiations and often eventually to some productive legislativework.68

See the overviews of the development of the two parliaments and the individual diets of the crown lands in Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848-1918, and Urbanitsch, parts 1 VII, ed. Rumpler and 2. the practice of parliamentary obstruction inAustria, see H?belt, Kornblume undKaiseradler, and Ehrhart, Im Dienste, 167-68, 302-13. 248-90, 305-14; See, for example, the famous journalistic account of the turmoil at the end of 1897 byMark Twain, "Stirring Times inAustria," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 96 (March 1898): 530-40. 66Ehrhart, Im Dienste, 167-68, 302-13. 67Ibid., 144-45. see also Hanisch, ?sterreichische 305-14; 68H?belt, Kornblume und Kaiseradler, 180-99, 248-90, On 180-99, Geschichte, 1890-1990,230-31.

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The suspension of theBohemian well diet by imperial decree in 1913 illustrates the dynamics of obstruction by nationalist politicians and the responses available to theAustrian government. In July 1913, after Czech-German con tention and German nationalist obstruction had paralyzed theBohemian the so-called Annapatente. With diet formonths, theAustrian cabinet under Count Stiirgkh had the emperor issue these extraordinary decrees the central govern ment dissolved the diet and the provincial executive committee and put an administrative committee in charge of the provincial government. In protest, Czech nationalists then blocked legislative business in theAustrian chamber of deputies, forcing itssuspension. In fact, Count Stiirgkh and his aides had con ferred intensivelywith nearly all the leading politicians in Bohemia before invoking the imperial decrees. In the end he felt constrained to suspend the diet and the provincial executive committee by themounting fiscal crisis and impending collapse of public services inBohemia caused by the diet's inaction.69 was no surprise that thenew special administrativecommittee took on Perhaps it of the provincial executive committee, who carried many officialsfrom the staff on much of their old work.70 Czech and German nationalist politicians alike loudly condemned the Annapatente. Privately, though, as Hobelt and others have shown, they expressed relief that the central government had temporarily resolved the fiscalparalysis of theBohemian administration,making itpossible to assure public services.71 The Czech and German nationalist interestsand theAustrian government failed to find any compromise in Bohemia, but negotiations in other locales achieved modest successes before World War I. Agreements were reached governing the representation of competing national interests in the provincial diet and administration ofMoravia in 1905, Bukovina in 1910, and Galicia in 1914. Czech and German nationalist interestsalso worked out a compromise in early 1914 for the city of Budejovice (Budweis) in southern Bohemia.72
On theAnnapatente, see J?rgHoensch, Geschichte B?hmens von der slavischen Landnahme bis ins20. Jahrhundert (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1987), 405; Jan Galandauer, "Husuv n?rod amost Frantiska Fer dinanda" [The Nation ofHus and the Francis Ferdinand Bridge], Historie a vojenstv? 44 (1995): 3-20; 550-51; Lothar H?belt, "Bohemia 1913?A Consensual Urban, Cesk? spolecnost 1848-1918, coup d'?tat?," Parliaments, Estates, and Representation 20 (Nov. 2000): 207-14; Karel Kazbunda, Ot?zka cesko-n?meck?v pfedvecer velk? v?lky [The Czech-German Question on the Eve of the Great War], (Prague: Univerzita Karlova, 1995); and Gerald Stourzh, "Verfassungsbruch B?hmen. Ein unbekanntes Kapitel zur Geschichte des richterlichen Pr?fungsrechts im alten ?sterreich," in Staatsrechtund Staatwissenschaften inZeiten desWandels. Festschrift f?r Ludwig and Bernd-Christian Funk (Vienna and New York: Adamovich, ed. Ludwig Karl Adamovich ed. Zden?k im K?nigreich Springer-Verlag, 1992): 675-90. See Anton?n Kl?stersky, Vzpom?nky a portrety [Recollections and Portraits] (Prague: F. Borovy, 1934), 172-74. H?belt, "Parliamentary Politics in aMultinational Setting," 13; H?belt, Kornblume und Kaiser and H?belt, "Bohemia 1913," 207-14. adler, 288-290; See Kann, Das Nationalit?tenproblem derHabsburgermonarchie, vol. on Moravia, Stourzh, Die GleichberechtigungderNationalit?ten, 213-40; K?rn?k

1, 199-200, 231, 331-35; Horst Glassl, Der m?hrische

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the one hand, the compromises for the three crown lands earned sharp criti cism frommany democratic mass-based parties for preserving the privileged representation of landed and urban elites in the diets. On the other hand, the Moravian agreement did add a new curia of deputies to the diet, to be divided nationally between Czechs and Germans and elected by universal male suffrage. Voters for this curia had to be registered as Czechs or Germans by nationality and would vote for separate listsof candidates. The agreement forBukovina generally followed the Moravian model but was more complex, since it provided for national voting groups of Romanians, Ruthenians, Germans, and Poles along with arrangements to distinguish Jewish from non Jewish voters. In the case of the Galician compromise, not put into effect because of the outbreak ofWorld War I, the decision to distinguish voters for the added new voting groups based on the "language of everyday use" (Umgangs sprache)as reported in the last census permitted greater freedom of choice for

those who were ambivalent or indifferentabout nationality. The Moravian agreement also provided thatpublic schools therewere to be administered by separateCzech and German provincial and local school boards and thatchildren must attend schools with language of instruction according to theirnationality. This latter provision created significant difficulties,of course, for those who might be ambiguous about nationality or wanted to cross over in choosing

schools.73

Historians who have been concerned with the question ofwhether the mon archy'snationality problem could be solved have divided in assessing these com promises.74 The parties to the agreements believed that they represented siguificantprogress in resolving the nationality disputes, although itwas uncer tain what the compromises portended in the longer term. The agreements demonstrated that at least conservative and moderate nationalist politicians in

See Zahra, "Reclaiming Children," 501-543; and Zahra, "Your Child Belongs to theNation." 74Kann, Das Nationalit?tenproblem derHabsburgermonarchie, vol. 1, 199-200, 231, 331-35; May, 200?01, Hapsburg Monarchy, 340; and Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy 1809?1918, emphasize what theMoravian compromise or all such agreements demonstrated was actually possible, while or "Last Last Best Chance and Geschichte 1804? Kelly, Gasp?," 300?01, Rumpier, ?sterreichische 1914, 554-55, stresshow little of the larger conflicts they could resolve.

Ausgleich (Munich: Fides-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1967); and T. Mills Kelly, "Last Best Chance or Last of 1905 and Czech Politics inMoravia," Austrian History Yearbook 34 Gasp? The Compromise on Bukovina, John Leslie, "Der Ausgleich in Bukovina von 1910. Zur ?sterrei (2003): 279-303; vor dem Ersten chischen Nationalit?tenpolitik in Geschichte zwischen Freiheit und Weltkrieg," Ordnung. Gerald Stourzh zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Emil Brix, Thomas Fr?schl, and Josef Leidenfrost (Graz: Styria, 1991), 113-44; and Al?n Rachamimov, "Diaspora Nationalism's Pyrrhic Victory: The Controversy Regarding theElectoral Reform of 1909 inBukovina," in State andNation Building inEast Central Europe: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. JohnMicgiel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 1-16; on Galicia, John Paul Himka, "Nationality Problems in theHabsburg Monarchy and the Soviet Union: The Perspective ofHistory and the Soviet Union," inNationalism and Empire, ed. Rudolph and Good, 79-93; and on Budejovice, King, Budweisers, 137-47.

NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICS OF STATE 273

the respective territoriescould reach limited understandings on critical issues in within collaboration with the government. For itspart, the state showed that, limits, itwas able to change some institutionsand regulations tomeet current political needs and to accept at least a partial formalpartitioning of the political and constitutional spheres on national lines. To the extent that the compromises all established separate cadastres of voters defined by nationality (or by language of everyday use in Galicia) who were then to vote for candidates of theirown Austrian constitutional principles with the nationality, theybroke fundamentally of 1867 which did not recognize collective rights to political representation for the nationalities as such. The various national compromises and the effortsin the 1907 suffragereform tomake voting districts for theAustrian chamber of deputies as uninational as possible pointed, in fact, in the direction of government of each nationality by officials and institutionsof itsown in a sort of "national autonomy," as the Austrian constitutional scholar Edmund Bernatzik termed it.75 This trend suggests that, amid all the domestic turmoil during the last decade before World War I, the basic relationship between nationalist politics and the state in theAustrian half of themonarchy may have been entering a new phase of development. In the short run, of course, these stepswere only partial, applying merely to certain territories;and theychanged law, state institutions,and politi cal practice only in limited, equivocal ways. The compromises themselves tended to recognize national loyalties alongside broader allegiances to the Habsburg state,but as JeremyKing has commented, they also had significant structural flaws with regard to how individuals' nationality was defined, where the officially registered nationality might limit some civic and legal rights,and how individualsmight be able to change theirnational registration.76 Moravia and Budejovice, for instance, leftlegacies of con The compromises for Czechoslovak Republic.77 siderable political and legal debate to the first Developments inHungary during the lastdecade before 1914 did not include any important agreements among contending national interestsor reveal any capacity of the state to change institutionsand laws significantlyto accommodate From the era ofKalman Tisza in the late 1870s non-Magyar nationalist interests. World War I, prime min and 1880s to thatof Istv'an Tisza in the lastyears before isterscarefully tried to stage-manage the parliament and elections for it.They repeatedly used authoritarian measures against political opponents, whether they were representatives of the non-dominant nationalities or opposition
Nationalit?ten, 200; and Edmund Bernatzik, ed., Die ?sterrei Stourzh, Die Gleichberechtigungder chische Verfassungsgesetzemit Erl?uterungen, 2nd exp. ed. (Vienna: Manz, 1911), 989, cited in Stourzh. On the Austrian electoral reform of 1907, seeWilliam A. Jenks, The Austrian Electoral

Reform of 1907 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950). 76King, Budweisers, 145-47. and Zahra, "Your Child Belongs See Zahra, "Reclaiming Children," 501-543;

to theNation."

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Magyar interests. After the deep crisis provoked in 1905-06 by the opposition Magyar coalition, Istv'anTisza and his allies from the old Liberal Party ranks responded with new steps to tighten central government authority over parlia ment and society along with modest social reformsand other limited gestures to mollify lower-class and non-Magyar nationalist opposition. Once IstvanTisza was prime minister, he pulled back from theheavy-handed, confrontational tacticsused by his immediate predecessors to control theCroa tian political situation; and he offerednegotiations toRomanian nationalists in Transylvania. At the same time, though, he pushed through parliament legis lation to provide for far-reaching emergency powers during wartime, narrow citizens' rights to jury trials, toughen the press and libel laws, and tighten con trolson associations and public assemblies. Tisza pursued his own Sammlungspo litik, hoping to reunite in support of a strengthened central government all the Magyar propertied and educated classes along with some moderate and conser vative non-Magyar interestsaswell. Tisza recognized that the government now faced stronger and more diverse challenges than before from a society that was demanding evermore loudly a democratic and pluralistic political system. In his determined, self-righteous perspective, the government must take positive, forward-looking steps to defend the interests of the ruling classes. Tisza's cabinet put through a token suffrage reform in 1913 thatexpanded the electorate showing both Magyar and non-Magyar opponents a strong hand, Tisza, like most Hungarian prime ministers after the 1890s, offered opposition groups modest concessions and tried to engage some of the more tractable in negotiations and other political processes that the govern ment expected to control.78 only minimally. While

One Structural Model-or

Two?

The evolution of constitutional, representativegovernment in theAustrian and Hungarian halves of themonarchy and the growth of a wide spectrum of po liticalparties and interestgroups demonstrates a broad process ofmodern politi cal development during the half century beforeWorld War I. With thiscame a gradually increasing penetration of policy making and state administration by societal interestsin theAustrian half and growing pressures to broaden societal participation inHungary's government aswell. Throughout themonarchy, the evolution of civil society, which theHabsburg statepermitted and abetted, sup ported thegrowth of nationalist political causes. To be sure,nationalist politics in central Europe beforeWorld War I, particularly in the hands of radicals, had its violent, destructive side; but the nationalist formations, like their clerical,
On see Vermes, Istv?n Tisza, 135-49, Istv?n Tisza and Hungarian politics in 1912-14, Modern Hungary, 67-76; Paml?nyi, ed., Die Geschichte Ungarns, 160-210; Hoensch, A History of and Sugar et al., eds., A History of 466-79; Hungary, 284-91.

NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICS OF STATE 275

agrarian, and socialist rivals, also served in fundamentalways to empower their constituencies. John W Boyer wisely pointed out more than a decade ago that politicized nationality in imperial Austria functioned "within the context of a dynastic state system" [emphasis in the original] as a factor among the various developments that fueled a popular revolt against the traditionsof state absolut ism and elitist liberalpolitics. Boyer went on to argue that thenationality conflict inAustria functioned not merely as a "destructive, centrifugalprocess" but also

asan "emancipatory, that the centripetal process" helpedtotransform post-1867

state,making all the bourgeois ethnic and national groups "agents, as well as subjects," of their political futures.79 By now many historians have distanced themselves from the traditionalnationalist historical narratives,but scholars, par ticularlyin centralEurope, stillneed to be cognizant of their lingering influence. In particular, historians stillneed to explore more fully, both inmonographic research and in broader syntheses, the complex relationship of the nationalist political formations to the Habsburg state, their context in an evolving civil society, and how the nationalist formations functioned within the framework of the state and succeeded in enhancing their own political influence during the last three decades before 1914.80 Compared to theAustrian half, the governmental system in Hungary was much more resistant to popular penetration and to the empowerment of the non-dominant nationalities and the lower classes in general. Still, growing polit icalmobilization of the non-Magyar nationalities and the petty-bourgeois and working-class masses after the late 1880s and 1890s created ever strongerpublic debate and demands for democratization. The intransigence of theHungarian ruling elements and their tendency to strengthencentral government authority in the face of challenges made the domestic conflictsmore intractable and the confrontations between government and opposition, if anything,more volatile than those in theAustrian half. In this regard, one could only be even more pessimistic in early 1914 about the short- and medium-range outlook for Hungary's internal political situation than forAustria's. The unwillingness of Hungary's conservative political forces to accept any significant compromise with democratizing forces and their tendency to demonize opposition before World War I, of course, helped sow the seeds for the failure of the broad democratic coalition led byMihaly Karolyi at the end of thewar, the rise of Bela Kun's communist republic, and the right-wing counter-revolution that

followed.
Boyer, Culture and Political Crisis, xii. On the 1912 law on emergency powers inwartime, see P?ter, "Die Verfassungsentwicklung inUngarn," 487-92. For an example of the fresh insights that can be achieved by carefully examining popular political loyalties and the relationship of populace to the state in the context of changing civil society, see

Maureen Healy, Vienna and theFall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life inWorld War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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It cannot be emphasized enough, though, that the greatmajority of nation alist politicians and organizations throughout themonarchy during the dualist era were eager to work within the framework of the Habsburg state. They looked for democratic reform and the development of self-government under theHabsburg Monarchy, which, as theCzech historian Frantisek Palacky had famously recognized in 1848, would assure security and other practical benefits of being part of a large state in centralEurope. Before theoutbreak of World War I, itwas not surprising then that few nationalist politicians within the monarchy expected it to disappear from themap any time soon or, apart from small fringe groups such as theSerbian radicals in the recentlyannexed Bosnia, were working actively toward that end. For most of the general population, national loyalties continued to coexist until well into World War Iwith strong allegiances to the laws and institutions of the Habsburg state. Throughout the realm after the 1860s, the public ment of a state towhich showed great respect and affection forEmperor Francis Joseph as the embodi they feltgenuinely attached.81 As Daniel Unowsky,

Peter Urbanitsch, and other scholars have shown, imperial celebrations and local visits by the emperor and other members of the imperial house were occasions both for central state authorities to seek popular affirmation of loyalty to the state and the dynasty and for local and regional political forces to demonstrate their own influence through participation in the public cer emonies.82 After the 1890s court officials often feared the possible disruption of such occasions by protesters,but typically these events proceeded peacefully,

History Yearbook 34 (2003): 145-172; Unowsky, The Pomp and Politics ofPatriotism; and Laurence Cole and Daniel Unowsky, eds., The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Celebrations and theDynamics of State Patriotism in theLate Habsburg Monarchy (forthcoming, New York: Berghahn Books, 2007). See Unowsky, Pomp and Politics, passim; Urbanitsch, "Pluralist Myth," 101-42; Laurence Cole, "Patriotic Celebrations in Late-Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Tirol," in Staging the Past, ed. Bucur andWingfield, 75-111; Freifeld, Nationalism and the Crowd, 266-78; Nancy Wingfield, "Statues of Emperor Joseph II as Sites of German Identity," in Staging the Past, ed. Bucur andWing field, 178-208; and Cole and Unowsky, eds., The Limits ofLoyalty. See also the treatment of officially Modern Poland Shaping of

and Germans in Bohemia," Austrian History Yearbook 24 (1993): 114-15; Milan Hlav?cka and Frantisek Kol?r, "Tschechen, Deutsche und die Jubil?umsaustellung 1891," Bohemia 32 und Politik in Lothar H?belt, (1991): 380-411; "Ausgleich und Ausstellung?Wirtschaft B?hmen um 1890," Bohemia 29 (1988): 141-47; Daniel Unowsky, '"Our gratitude has no limit': Polish Nationalism, Dynastic Patriotism, and the 1880 Imperial Inspection Tour of Galicia," Austrian Czechs

276-98. On the response of local politicians and populace to imperial visits in 1996), 200-36, various parts of themonarchy, see Pernes, Spiklenci proti jeho velicenstvu,5-6; Catherine Albrecht, "Pride in Production: The Jubilee Exhibition of 1891 and Economic Competition Between

On the issue of loyalty to the dynasty, see Peter Urbanitsch, "PluralistMyth and Nationalist Re alities: The Dynastic Myth of theHabsburg Monarchy?A Futile Exercise in the Creation of Iden tity?"Austrian History Yearbook 35 (2004): 101-142. For a somewhat more traditional perspective on loyalties to the dynasty and theHabsburg statemore generally, see Ernst Bruckm?ller, Nation ?ster reich. Kulturelles Bewu?tsein und gesellschaftlich-politische Prozesse, 2nd ed., rev.& exp. (Vienna: B?hlau,

sanctioned Polish nationalist celebrations inGalicia in Patrice M. Dabrowski, Commemorations and the (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), 25-74.

NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICS OF STATE 277

and local and regional political forces competed to use the occasions for their own purposes. This was consistentwith thewell-established determination of most political groups inAustrian society to compete for influence and control over parts of the state and to try to use its symbols for their own political advantage. This was much harder, of course, in Hungary for the non Magyar nationalist groups and the new mass-based political formations. Still, most of themworked vigorously where they could to use the local and parlia mentary elections and whatever other political space was available to voice their own interestsand goals. By 1914 there was a broad and significantdevelopment throughout theHabs burgMonarchy of civil society and popular engagement in political debate and action.With Vienna parliament and some of theprovin reformsfor the suffrage a gradually In varying cial diets and the growth of autonomous communal and provincial adminis tration in theAustrian crown lands, the state also accommodated increasing penetration of societal interests into policy making.

degrees, nationalist parties and organizations of all the non-dominant national ities in theAustrian half ultimately advanced their intereststhrough thisprocess. In many ways, political tensions and confrontations grew more intense in Hungary after 1900 than in theAustrian half because, while popular political engagement was growing rapidly, it confronted political elites and aHungarian governmental system that resistedmuch more determinedly any opening to broader segments of society. The modernization of theHabsburg state over the long nineteenth century led to the development of modern which laws, regulations, and public services, the public accepted as legitimate and as theirs, for better or worse. Indeed, with the development of parliamentary institutionsand, in theAustrian half, of autonomous communal and provincial government, the population in many parts of the realm became so deeply invested in the legal systems and public services thatmany were happy to continue significant elements of them after 1918. The Poles of Galicia took with them into the new Polish Republic the great advantages of a fullydeveloped system of state-supported Polish-language education up to university level, something lacking in the formerRussian and Prussian zones, aswell as a large Polish-speaking educated professional class. Slovenes and Croats similarlyenjoyed considerable advantages in educational and social development in thenew Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes compared to theirnew compatriots fromSerbia,Montenegro, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. World War I, Along with the intensepolitical conflictsofthe lastdecades before theHabsburg Monarchy lefta powerful legacy to all the successor states in the instrumentalities of civil society, interestgroups, and political parties. It also left a strong legacy in law and public administration, perhaps strongest,most obvious, and persistent in theAustrian Republic, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.

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for example, demonstrated the

Alois Rasin, the doughty Czech nationalistwho served asminister of finance in the first Czechoslovak government in 1918-19, strongattachmentsofmany Czechs to the legal and administrative systemsdevel much of Czechoslovakia's first oped under the monarchy when he drafted general law, issuedwith the declaration of independence on October 28, 1918. The second paragraph declared simply that "all previous provincial and imperial laws and regulations remain for the time being in effect." Rasin later explained candidly this insistence on continuity: "The basic purpose of this law was to prevent any anarchic situation fromdeveloping so thatour whole state adminis tration (cela nase sprava)would remain and continue on October 29 as if there had been no revolution at all" ("jako by revoluce viubec nebylo").83 Rasin, Tomas G. Masaryk, Edvard Benes, Milan R. Stefanik, Vavro Srobar, and the and otherswho joined in founding Czechoslovakia were all committed Czech

Slovak nationalists, but they considered much of the state administration devel oped under themonarchy as not simply the instrumentalities of the emperor or the old Austrian and Hungarian governments, but theirown.84 UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, TWIN CITIES

R. Oldenbourg,

Alois Ras?n quoted in Vera Olivov?, D?jiny prvn? republiky [History of the First Republic] (Prague: Karolinum, 2000), 67. See George Barany, "Political Culture in the Lands of the Former Habsburg Empire: Author itarian and Parliamentary Traditions," Austrian History Yearbook 29, pt. 1 (1998): 195-248; and Helmut Slapnicka, ?sterreichs Recht ausserhalb?sterreichs.Der Untergang des ?sterreichischen Rechtsraums. Ostund 4 vol. Schriftenreihe des ?sterreichischen (Munich: S?dosteuropa-Instituts, 1973).