Cohen - Nationalist Politics and Dynamics of State and Civil Society 1867-1914

7/30/2019 Cohen - Nationalist Politics and Dynamics of State and Civil Society 1867-1914

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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,1867-1914Author(s): Gary B. CohenSource: Central European History, Vol. 40, No. 2 (Jun., 2007), pp. 241-278Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Conference Group for Central European History ofthe American Historical Association

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Central European History 40 (2007), 241-278.Copyright (? Conference Group forCentral European History of theAmericanHistorical AssociationDOI: 10.1017/S0008938907000532 Printed in theUSA

Nationalist olitics nd the ynamics fStateandCivil Society ntheHabsburg onarchy,1867- 1914Gary B. Cohen

H ISTORIANS ave conventionally depicted theHabsburg Monarchy as thelargestmodern European imperial polity to disappear from themapbecause of its inability to accommodate thenational aspirations of its

peoples. It is the locus classicus for the failure of an old-fashioned dynasticempire to develop among its subjects a broader civic identityand loyalty tothe state to counter the rise of nationalist demands for self-government. Forlaterhistorians aswell asmany contemporary observers of the frequent internalcrises after the 1890s, thiswas already a failed state even beforeWorld War Ibrought on the tragicdenouement. In thisperspective themonarchy's participation in thewar was not a purely exogenous factor that led eventually to thepolity's demise. Most scholars have agreed that themonarchy's entry into thewar came largelybecause of its need to preserve its status as a Great Power,defend its osition in theBalkans, and counter the challenges of its wn nationalistpolitical movements, some of them allied with political forcesbeyond theborders.1Older western European and North American histories also tendedto view nationalist politics inHabsburg centralEurope, in contrast towesternEuropean experience, as an intolerant and ultimately anti-democratic forcethathelped doom hopes forparliamentarydemocracy both under themonarchyand in thepost-1918 successor states.2

^ee, for example, A. J.P. Taylor, TheHabsburg Monarchy 1809-1918 (London: Hamish Hamilton,1948; reprinted, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 230-33; Solomon Wank, "SomeReflections on the Habsburg Empire and Its Legacy in theNationalities Question," AustrianHistory Yearbook 28 (1997): 140-41; Samuel R. Williamson, Jr.,Austria-Hungary and theOrigins ofthe irst World War (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991); and Steven B?lier, A Concise History ofAustria (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 182-85.Arguments for the special character of nationalism inEurope east of the Elbe date back to thescholarly generation ofHans Kohn and his Idea of ationalism, A Study in itsOrigins and Background,1sted. (New York: Macmillan, 1944). The long-term influence of this distinction is stillapparent inworks from theCold-War era, such asHugh Seton-Watson, Nationalism and Communism (New York:Praeger, 1964), pp. 3-8,11?20; and Peter F. Sugar, "External and Domestic Roots ofEastern European Nationalism," inNationalism in astern Europe, ed. P. F. Sugar and Ivo J.Lederer (Seattle:UniversityofWashington Press, 1969), 46-54. The notion of strong regional and national distinctions inEuropean nationalist ideologies and their relationship to democratic development still resonates in

241


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242 GARY B. COHENThere ismuch truth, f course, in the conventional wisdom regarding the

political decline of the Habsburg Monarchy during the late nineteenthcentury and itsultimate demise. Still, such a reading embodies some longstandingmisunderstandings and contradictions about the relationshipbetween the

Habsburg state and the internal nationalistmovements and about how popularloyaltiesand political life ctually developed there.Put simply,a polity thatper

mitted and inmany ways abetted the floweringof vigorous nationalist politicalmovements, an abundance of political parties and interestgroups, and a multifarious and assertivepolitical press could not have been so immobile or paralyticthatonly war and revolution could satisfy opular aspirations for self-rule.Aswill be discussed in this essay,recent scholarship offers a much more dynamicpicture of theHabsburg state and public administration, even in the era of themost intense national political conflicts.

For theirpart, the nationalist and other popular political forces in theHabsburgMonarchy during the late nineteenth centurywere hardly irresistible orcesdemanding a self-government that could be realized only by dissolving theempire.3 Indeed, the great majority of the political parties and organizationsup untilWorld War I contended forgreater empowerment within a reformedmultinational Habsburg state, not for independence. Even themost radicalCzech nationalists, forexample, theNational Social Party and theState-RightRadical Party,combined a rhetoric thatchallenged the legitimacy of centralizedHabsburg rulewith a practical politics of electing representatives to legislativebodies and tryingtowin concrete reforms and partisan advantage.4 The openattackson Habsburg rule and the Catholic Church by Georg von Schonerer'sPan-German movement and its calls for uniting Austria's German-speaking

sophisticated recentworks such as Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads toModernity (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 andthe oviet Union, ed.Richard L. Rudolph and David F. Good (New York: St.Martin's Press, 1992),243-56. For an analysis of thehistoriographical connection between nationalism and backwardnessin eastern Europe, seeMaria Todorova, "The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, andthe Study of Eastern European Nationalism," Slavic Review 64 (2005): 140-64. On the connectionsdrawn by scholarsmore generally between nationalism andmodernism or, alternatively,backwardness,seeAnthony D. Smith,Nationalism andModernism (London andNew York: Roudedge, 1998).A. J. P. Taylor made the confrontation of the seemingly unreformable monarchy with theirresistible forces of modern nationalism the basis of his The Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918. SeeDavid Hackett Fischer,Historians' Fallacies (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 35, on Taylor's frequent indulgence, as in this case, of what Fischer calls the "fallacy of contradictory questions."4On the Czech radical nationalist parties, see Bruce M. Garver, The Young Czech Party,1874-1901 and theEmergence of aMulti-Party System (New Haven and London: Yale UniversityPress, 1978), 295-304, 306-08; and T.Mills Kelly, "Taking It to the Streets: Czech National Socialists in 1908," AustrianHistory Yearbook 29 (1998), pt 1: 93-112.


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NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICS OF STATE 243population with Germany condemned thatmovement, in fact, to a minusculefollowing after 1900.5 Much more successful inwinning popular supportwere nationalist, agrarian, social Catholic, and social democratic parties,which accepted thecontinuation of themonarchy and itsbasic territorial ntegritywhile calling for significant reformsof one kind or another.

In the late 1980s theAmerican scholarJohnW. Boyer observed that,despiteall the researchon nationalistpolitics in theHabsburg Monarchy and the accompanying culturaldevelopments, historians had done littletoanalyze therelationship of the administrative state to civil society there compared with recent

writing on ImperialGermany.6 Since then a body of new research on themonarchyhas developed thatdemonstrates how nationalist politics developed withinthe context of an evolving civil society and changing government structures.

New studies have appeared on the evolution of popular politics, politicalparties, and representative institutions and on the broader institutional andlegal development of theHabsburg state.Nonetheless, historians have notbeen successful in developing cogent broader accounts of the relationshipbetween society and the state todepict the dynamic and indeed symbiotic processesof developing civil society,growing popular political action, and changinggovernmental structures. hile much has been written about the radicalizationof nationalist political demands and the conflicts both among the competingnational groups and between them and the state before 1914, scholars haveonlymade a limited start in explaining in broad structural terms thepoliticaland social context, the practical functions, and the very reach and limitsofnationalist politicswithin themonarchy.Much of the earlier historical writing was strongly influenced by deeplyentrenched central European nationalist narratives that saw the developmentof the nationalist political causes as the core issue in late nineteenth-centurypopular politics and as simply counterposed to the absolutist traditions andinstitutions f theHabsburg dynastic state.7 In this view the political history

On the Pan-German movement and other radical German nationalist formations in imperialAustria, see Lothar H?belt, Kornblume und Kaiseradler: Die deutschfreiheitlichenarteien Alt?sterreichs1882-1918 (Vienna and Munich: Verlag f?r Geschichte und Politik and R. Oldenbourg, 1993);Bruce F. Pauley, From Prejudice toPersecution:A History ofAustrian Anti-Semitism (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Andrew G. Whiteside, The Socialism ofFools: GeorgRitter von Sch?nerer and Austrian Pan-Germanism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975);andWhiteside, AustrianNational Socialism before1918 (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1962).

JohnW Boyer, "Some Reflections on the Problem ofAustria, Germany, andMitteleuropa,"Central European History 20 (1989): 11.See the critiques of the nationalist narratives in Jeremy King, "The Nationalization of EastCentral Europe: Ethnicism, Ethnicity, and Beyond," inStaging the ast: The Politics of ommemorationinHabsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the resent, ed.Maria Bucur andNancy M. Wingfield (W Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2001), 112-152; and for Slovak historiography inPeterHaslinger,"Nationale oder Transnationale Geschichte? Die Historiographie zur Slowakei im europ?ischenKontext," Bohemia 44 (2003): 326-41. For examples of nationalist narratives of varying shadesand stripes, see the syntheses on nineteenth-century Czech and Slovak history inOldrich Riha


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244 GARY B. COHENof theperiod was the story f theheroic struggleof thenationalmovementstypically the struggleof each nationalmovement viewed largely in isolation-todevelop against the powerful opposition of the state and other nationalities andto triumphultimately in 1918 with the creation of independent national states.Those nationalistnarrativesstillhave an important influence,particularlyamonghistorians in centralEurope. In contrast to those views, thisessaywill argue thatwe can best understand thedevelopment of thenationalist political formationsand their conflictswith other interests in society and the state as embeddedwithin the broader development of civil society and bound up with changesin theHabsburg state itself,rather than simply opposed to that supposedlyrigid ynastictructure.

This essaywill offer a conceptual frameworkfordebate and furtherresearchby sketching thegeneral development afterthe 1860s of public life nd popularpolitics,which, although freer ndmore highly articulated in theAustrian half ofthemonarchy than in theHungarian, was an evolving modern civil societywhere nationalist loyaltiesfound expression alongside strong class and interestgroup allegiances as well as continuing loyalties to the state, its laws, andadministration. That civil society involvedwidening segments of the generalpopulation during the lastdecades beforeWorld War I, and it developed, infact, in close connection with evolving governmental and administrative structuresthathad toprovide a growing arrayof public services for amodern societyand findways to accommodate, to at least some extent, societal demands. Invarying degrees, the societallybased political forces, including those espousingnationalist ideologies, foundways to participate in policy making and aspectsof state administration at various levels of government, again more so in theAustrian half than inHungary.

and JuliusMesaros, eds., Pfehled ceskoslenskychd?jin, II: 1848-1918 [Outline of CzechoslovakHistory, II: 1848-1918] (Prague: Academia, 1969); John F. N. Bradley, Czechoslovakia: A ShortHistory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971); JosefKorbel, Twentieth-centuryzechoslovakia: The Meanings of ItsHistory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); and from aSudeten German perspective, Emil Franzel, SudetendeutscheGeschichte, eine volkst?mlicheDarstellung,expanded 4th ed. (Augsburg: A Kraft, 1970), and JosefM?hlberger, Zwei V?lker inB?hmen. Beitragzu einer nationalen, historischen und geistesgeschichtlichen trukturanalyse (Munich: Bogen-Verlag,1973); on Poland, Norman Davies, God's Playground:A History of oland, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982 );M. K. Dziewanowski, Poland in theTwentiethCentury (New York:Columbia University Press, 1977); Aleksander Gieysztor et al.,History ofPoland, 2nd ed. (Warsaw:PNW, Polish Scientific Publishers, 1979); and Oscar Halecki, A History of Poland, 9th ed.(New York: D. McKay, 1976); on Slovakia, JosephM. Kirschbaum, Slovakia: Nation at the rossroadsofCentral Europe (New York: R. Speller, 1960); Stanislav J.Kirschbaum, History ofSlovakia: TheStruggle or Survival, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); and Jozef Lettrich, History ofModern Slovakia (New York: F.A. Praeger, 1955); and on Hungary, Domokos Kosary, A History ofHungary (Cleveland and New York: Benjamin Franklin Bibliophile Society, 1941); and DenisSinor, History of ungary (New York: Praeger, 1959).


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NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICS OF STATE 245The concept of "civil society" isused here inabroad butnon-teleological sense,

meaning the sphereof individual and group discourse and action, formally ndependent of thestate,that ddresses issuesofpublic affairs, olitics, and governance.Civil society isa highlyvaried phenomenon inmodern societies. In the circumstancesof the nineteenth century, t included public assemblies, newspapers andjournals, voluntary associations, popular civic action, social and politicalmovements, and political parties, among other freepopular phenomena. Civil societymay draw upon social connections thatoriginate in thework place, cafes, andsalons,or the family; ut asPhilip Nord has argued, ithas amore public, collective,and ordered character.8Much recentwriting has tended to appropriate theconcept of civil society as an essential component ofmodern democracies andto envision thedevelopment of a vigorous civil societyas typically eading to thecreation or bolstering of democratic modes of government. During the lastdecades before World War I, though, the old empires of central and easternEurope each saw the emergence of civil society, process thatwas not predestinedto lead to stable democratic governments in those landsduring the interwarera.

Government and theBeginnings ofPoliticalMovementsin theMid-Nineteenth CenturyThe conventional nationalist historical narratives have typically depicted the

development of thenational politicalmovements in theHabsburg Monarchy asindependent of and opposed to the state,a polity thatolder,more extravagantlynationalist accounts portrayed as a "prison of nations." Yet itwas theHabsburgstate thatmade possible the growth of political space and institutionalvenuesforthedevelopment of amodern civil society and,with that,nationalistpolitics.Primarily because of thisfact,the emergingmodern political forcesduring themiddle and latenineteenth century, ncluding thenationalist interests, ontendedfor dvantage and power largelywithinthegoverning institutions f the state tselfBetween the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the Austrian Habsburgsknitted together a mosaic of centralEuropean territories,each of which hadits own traditions of law and government institutions.9The Habsburgs'

8Philip Nord, "Introduction," in Civil Society before emocracy: Lessons from Nineteenth-centuryEurope, ed. Nancy Bermeo and Philip Nord (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), xiv.On concepts of civil society, see also John Keane, ed., Democracy and Civil Society (London andNew York: Verso, 1988); and Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).On the rise of theHabsburg Monarchy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, seeR. J.W Evans, The Making of theHabsburg Monarchy, 1550-1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979);Robert A. Kann, A History of theHabsburg Empire, 1526?1918 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, andLondon: University of California Press, 1974); Karl Vocelka, Glanz und Untergang der h?fischenWelt. Repr?sentation, Reform und Reaktion in habsburgischenVielv?lkerstaat (Vienna: Ueberreuter,2001); and Thomas Winkelbauer, St?ndefreiheitund F?rstenmacht.L?nder und Untertanen desHausesHabsburgs imkonfessionalle eitalter, 2 vols. (Vienna: Ueberreuter, 2003).


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246 GARYB. COHENcentralization efforts rom the seventeenthcenturyonward combined theAlpineand Bohemian crown lands and eventuallywhat had been southern Polandunder a strong imperial authority centered inVienna.10 After 1526 theAustrianHabsburg sovereignswere also kings ofHungary, but the landsof the crown ofSt. Stephen escaped much of the centralizing efforts romVienna. InHungary,Croatia, and Transylvania, too, though, theauthorityof theabsolutist sovereigngrew over time at the expense of the diets and thecounty congregations. Evenwith the rise of a centralized, absolutist Habsburg state, though, the landednobility in each historic crown land continued to enjoy important privilegesgrounded in surviving older laws and institutions.Enlightened absolutistreformsduring the late eighteenth centuryweakened the diets of thevariouscrown lands and Hungary's county assemblies, and the crown authorities alsobegan to rationalize and modernize administration, law, public education, andeconomic regulation, encouraging thebeginnings of industrialization.

During thenineteenth centuryeconomic development, urbanization, and thegrowth of the state itself parked thedevelopment ofmodern middle-class andeventually working-class society andwith that the first nitiativestoward constructingmodern civil society.By the late 1830s and 1840s, as repressiveabsolutist overnment graduallywaned, themiddle and lower classes invarious partsof themonarchy began to develop voluntary associations aswell as literary ndjournalistic activity.11This nascent public lifeprovided the early nationalist

10On the development of Habsburg absolutism, see Derek Beales, Joseph II (Cambridge andNew York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Timothy C. W Blanning, Joseph II (London andNew York: Longman, 1994) ; harles W Ingrao, TheHabsburg Monarchy, 1618-1815, 2nd ed. (Cambridge 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 EnlightenedAbsolutism, 1753?80 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1994); Vocelka, Glanz undUntergang; andWinkelbauer, St?ndefreiheit ndF?rstenmacht.On thebeginnings 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 theAwakeningofHungarian Nationalism, 1791-1841 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), passim;JohnW Boyer, Political Radicalism inLate Imperial Vienna: Origins of theChristian SocialMovement,1848-1897 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 1-10, 122-132; Gary B. Cohen, ThePolitics ofEthnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861-1914, rev. second ed. (W Lafayette, IN:Purdue University Press, 2006), 18?56; Pieter M. Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics,Social Experience, and National Identity in theAustrian Empire, 1848?1914 (Ann Arbor: UniversityofMichigan Press, 1996), 11-164; Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A LocalHistory of Bohemian Politics, 1848-1948 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002),15-47; Rita A. Krueger, "Mediating Progress in the Provinces: Central Authority, Local Elites,and Agrarian Societies in Bohemia and Moravia," Austrian History Yearbook 35 (2004): 49-80;Robert Nemes, "Associations and Civil Society inReform-Era Hungary," AustrianHistory Yearbook32 (2001): 25-45; Nemes, The Once and Future Budapest (DeKalb, IL:Northern IllinoisUniversityPress, 2005), 33-106, passim; Alex Drace-Francis, "Cultural Currents and Political Choices: Romanian Intellectuals in theBanat to 1848," AustrianHistory Yearbook 36 (2005): 65-93; and ZsuzsannaT?r?k, "The Friends of Progress: Learned Societies and the Public Sphere in the TransylvanianReform Era," AustrianHistory Yearbook 36 (2005): 94-120.


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NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICS OF STATE 247intellectualsand professionalswith platforms tobegin tomobilize supporters,atfirstmostly in cities and larger towns. In the 1840s that emerging civil societyproduced demands for liberal and eventually also radical democratic reformsof government. In several crown lands, the urban middle and lower middleclasseswere joined by segmentsof the landed nobilitywho alsowanted liberaleconomic reforms to aid further gricultural and industrial development andconstitutional changes toweaken thecentral bureaucracy.While the revolutionary efforts f 1848-49 to liberalize government largely failed, the Habsburgimperial authoritieswere forced to confirm the final emancipation of the peasantry,renovate state administration, and then in the late 1850s liberalize economic regulations in general. Aftermilitary defeat in northern Italy and nearstate bankruptcy at the end of the 1850s, Emperor Francis Joseph (ruled1848-1916) had to bow to renewed demands from segments of the greatlandowners and the urban middle classes for constitutional government andfreedom of speech, press, and association.

Civil society, including nationalist groups, already showed signs ofreinvigoration in the late 1850s; and itgave voice to the demands to liberalizegovernment. The constitutional reformsafter1860, in turn,greatly stimulatedthe furtherdevelopment of civil society.After several years of constitutionalimprovisation and the Austro-Prussian War, Francis Joseph in the famous1867 compromise sanctioned two constitutions, one for theKingdom ofHungary, including Transylvania and Croatia, with a centralized parliamentand cabinet in Budapest, and the second for the Alpine, Bohemian,Carpathian, and Adriatic crown lands gathered together under a separateparliament and cabinet ofministers in Vienna. Both halves of themonarchysoon approved legislation togrant civil equality to the formerlydisadvantagedreligious minorities and recognized at least formally the equal linguistic andcultural rightsof citizens of allmajor nationalities, defined primarily on thebasis of language.12Representative institutionsand a vibrant civic lifeof political parties andinterestgroups enjoyed strongdevelopment throughout theHabsburg Monarchy during the half century after 1867. At firstduring the 1860s, parties ofnotables, similar to those common in the German states and France, dominated the representative bodies, basing themselves on systems of limitedsuffrage and local associational networks and habits of social deference.

On theAustro-H?ngarian compromise of 1867 and the constitutional arrangements in the twohalves of themonarchy, see Peter Berger, ed., Der ?sterreichisch-ungarischeusgleich von 1867. VorgeschichteandWirkungen (Vienna: Herold, 1967); L'udovit Holotik, ed., Der ?sterreichisch-ungarischeAusgleich 1867 (Bratislava:Verlag der Slowakischen Akademie derWissenschaften, 1971); RobertA. Kann, Das Nationalit?tenproblem derHabsburgermonarchie, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Graz and Cologne:B?hlau, 1964); and Gerald Stourzh, Die Gleichberechtigung erNationalit?ten inderVerfassungund Verwaltung?sterreichs 1848-1918 (Vienna: Verlag der?sterreichischen Akademie derWissenschaften,1985).


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248 GARYB. COHENThe firstnationalist political formations emerged in various crown lands asparties of local and regional notables committed in themain to the cause ofconstitutionaleform.13

Conventional nationalist historical narratives saw littleneed forcomparisonsbetween the riseof their wn nationalistmovements and others, but such comparisons can help us understand better thedynamics of each movement's development andwhat was specific to each.14 Czech, German, and Italiannationalistpolitical activity in theAustrian half of theHabsburg Monarchy initially took theformof classic centralEuropean liberalnationalistmovements, based largely inurban social networks of voluntary associations led bymembers of the professional and entrepreneurialmiddle classes, but also drawing on alliances withpartsof the local landowning elites.The liberalpartiesofnotables in theAustrianhalf of themonarchy established strong foundations at the local and regionallevels by taking advantage of the considerable autonomy granted to communalcouncils and the provincial diets. The Slovene-, Ukrainian-, Slovak-, andRomanian-speaking populations, which resided largely nmore slowlydeveloping and stillstrongly grarian regions, developed nationalist political formationssomewhat later than theCzech-, German-, and Italian-speaking populations.The national movements in the economically less developed regions hadmore predominantly lower middle-class and peasant farmer constituencieswith larger leadership roles for local clergy and schoolteachers. It should notbe forgotten, though, thateven with a limited suffrage nd a stratified, urialelectoral system,Slovene national interests, or instance, alreadywon amajority

See Boyer, PoliticalRadicalism, 1-39; Cohen, Politics of thnic Survival, 41-56; Judson, ExclusiveRevolutionaries, 69?116; King, Budweisers, 15?48; Lukas Fasora and Pavel Kladiva, "Obecni samospr?va a lok?ln? elityv ceskych zemich 1850?1918. Koncept a d?lc?vysledky vyzkumu" [CommunalSelf-Government and Local Elites in the Bohemian Lands, 1850-1918: Sketch and Partial Results],Cesky casopishistoricky102 (2004): 796?827; Lukas Fasora, "Socialni a profesni struktura brn?nsk?komunaln? reprezentace v letech 1851-1904" [Social and Professional Structure of theBrno Communal Representatives, 1851-1904], Cesky casopishistoricky 03 (2005): 354-81; Ale?a Simunkov?,"B?hmische Skizzen: Reflections on Social Space and Nationhood inNineteenth-century Prague,"Nationalities Papers 30 (2002): 335-50; Gerald Sprengnagel, "Nationale Kultur und die Selbsterschaffung des B?rgertums. Am Beispiel der Stadt Prost?jov inM?hren, 1848-1864," ?sterreicischeZeitschriftf?r eschichtswissenschaften 0 (1999): 260-91; and Otto Urban, Cesk? spolecnost 1848-1918[Czech Society, 1848-1918], (Prague: Svoboda, 1982), 123-83.14Robert A. Kann, particularly inDas Nationalit?tenproblem derHabsburgermonarchie,was uniqueamong North American and Austrian historians of themonarchy of his generation in examiningall the national movements together, but he did not attempt any structural analysis or comparisonof the nationalist political movements. In the next generation, the Czech historian MiroslavHroch was unique in central Europe in drawing systematic comparisons of the national revivalsand the nationalist political movements. See Hroch, Die Vork?mpfer er nationalenBewegung bei denkleinen V?lkern Europas. Acta Universitatis Carolinae Philosopohica etHistoria Monographia 24(Prague: Universita Karlova, 1968) [English transi.,Social Preconditions of ational Revival inEurope:A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition ofPatriotic Groups among the Smaller EuropeanNations (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985]; and Hroch, Obrozemmalych evropskychn?rod?. I. N?rody severn?a vychodniEvropy [The Revival of Small EuropeanNations, I: The Nations of Northern and Eastern Europe] (Prague: Universita Karlova, 1971).


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NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICS OF STATE 249in theCarniolan diet in 1867.15 In contrast, thestrong grip on theGalician dietof Polish landowners and later lso Polish urbanmiddle-class interests ongblockedthepolitical advance of theRuthenian nationalist interests. he limited suffragesystems forHungary's county congregations and parliament prevented Slovak,Ruthenian, and Romanian nationalists from electing more than smallnumbers of representatives ach at any one time throughout the dualist era.

During themiddle third f thenineteenth century,the lessernobility played astrong role as founders and carriers of nationalist politics among thePolish-,

Magyar-, and Croatian-speaking populations within the monarchy. Thesenationalists, too, became committed to constitutional reforms, though oftenwith amore conservative, federalistbent. In the 1840s and then increasinglyafter1860, the reformingnationalist nobilitywas joined by growing numbersof urban-based professionals, public and private officials, and entrepreneurs,who graduallybecame more prominent inPolish,Magyar, and Croatian nationalist politics during the last decades of the century.16 he governmental autonomy thatFrancis Joseph granted toHungary in 1867 and de facto toGalicia aswell after themid-1860s empowered conservative and moderate nationalistlandowning, bureaucratic, and professional interests n each of those territories.The Nagodba, the agreement worked out between theHungarian governmentand the Croatian diet in 1868, nominally reserved significant autonomouspowers to that diet, the Sabor, while recognizing the incorporation of Croatiain a now more unitaryHungarian state.

During the late 1860s and 1870s German liberals in theAustrian crown landsandMagyar liberalnationalists in theKingdom ofHungary both used systems flimited suffrage nd gerrymandering of the parliamentary voting districts tobolster the strengthof theirpropertied and educated constituents and protecttheirown partisan interests. tmust be remembered, though, that civil societyextended well beyond the limits of the enfranchised electorate. With theadvance of free capitalist agriculture and industry fter the 1850s, continuingurbanization, and the growth of public education, increasingnumbers of thepetty bourgeoisie and working classes participated in aspects of civil society.Mass politicalmovements flowered after themid-1880s, picking up in societywhere the parties of notables leftoff,often initiallyusing many of the samebasic organizationalmethods while attacking the elitist liberal and conservativepartieswith harshpopulist rhetoric.17 rban pettybourgeoisie, peasant farmers,

15SeeJanko Pleterski, "Die Slowenen," inDie Habsburgermonarchie 1848-1918, III. Die V?lker desReiches, ed. Adam Wandruszka and PeterUrbanitsch (Vienna: Verlag der?sterreichischen AkademiederWissenschaften, 1980), pt. 1, 807.For generally sound English-language overviews of the formation of all the nationalistmovements, see Sugar and Lederer, eds.,Nationalism inEastern Europe.On the rise ofmass politics out of the older parties of notables, see Boyer, PoliticalRadicalism,passim; and Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries, 193-266.


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250 GARYB. COHENindustrial labor, and eventually also farm laborerswere attracted to themasspolitical movements. Suffrage reform for theAustrian crown lands in 1882gave voting rights to wider segments of the lower middle classes. Anotherreform in 1897 added a new group of deputies to the Austrian chamber ofdeputies elected by universal male suffrage. fter 1907, thewhole chamber ofdeputies was elected by universal, direct, and equal male suffrage. o the endof themonarchy, however, the electoral systems formost of the provincialdiets and communal councils in theAustrian crown lands remained restrictedand stratified. nHungary, thecounty congregations and theparliament retainedstrictly imited suffrage ystemsup to 1918, surviving even the emperor's threatin 1906 to initiate a law establishinguniversalmale suffrage or the lowerhouseof parliament. Nonetheless, mass political formations, including social democrats, Christian socials, agrarians, and various non-Magyar nationalist partiesarose inHungary as well after the late 1880s.18The governmental system thatdeveloped in theHabsburg Monarchy afterthe 1860s was verymuch a hybrid. It preserved considerable authority for thecrown and for the central bureaucracy in each half of the realm along withelaborate privileges for various elite groups and historic institutions such asthe Catholic Church and the diets of each crown land. Yet the system alsoguaranteed a wide sphere of individual civil liberties and permitted increasingengagement of societal interests npublic debate and agitation for the creationof new laws, policies, and government services. JohnW Boyer has termedthe arrangements for the Austrian half of the monarchy a "mixedconstitutional-bureaucratic political system," and this applies in generalterms toHungary aswell.19There is no denying thedevelopment of a vigorous political press and highlydiverse public political action throughout themonarchy during the half centuryafter the 1860s, but political freedomswere not absolute. Article 13 of the constitutional laws adopted inDecember 1867 for theAustrian half included a fulllistingof individual civil rights,comparable to contemporary liberal legislation

On the development ofmass politics in the two halves of themonarchy, see the overviews fortheAustrian half byRobin Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy from Enlightenment toEclipse (New York:St.Martin's, 2001), 257-309, 336-56; Helmut Rumpier, ?sterreichischeGeschichte, 1804-1914.Eine Chance f?r Mitteleuropa. B?rgerliche Emanzipation und Staatsverfall in derHabsburgermonarchie(Vienna: Ueberreuter, 1997), 486-523, 549-60; and Ernst Hanisch, ?sterreichische Geschichte,1890?1990. Der lange Schatten des Staates. ?sterreichischeGesellschaftsgeschichtem 20. Jahrhundert(Vienna: Ueberreuter, 1994), 209-41; and forHungary, Andrew C. Janos, The Politics ofBackwardness inHungary, 1825-1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 149-89; J?rgK. Hoensch, A History ofModern Hungary, 1867-1986 (London and New York: Longman,1988); Ervin Paml?nyi, ed., Geschichte Ungarns (Budapest: Corvina, 1971), 424?79; and PeterSugar and P?ter Han?k, eds., A History of ungary (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UniversityPress, 1990), 267-91.JohnW Boyer, "Freud, Marriage, and Late Viennese Liberalism: A Commentary from 1905,"Journal of odern History 50 (1978): 73.


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NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICS OF STATE 251elsewhere inEurope.20 The constitutional laws adopted inHungary after1867rested on themodel of the 1848 reform legislation, but in contrast to theAustrian half, theydefined civil rights in broad, general terms. L'aszlo Peter,George Barany, and other scholars have argued that civil rights inHungarywere based not somuch inprivate or penal law but in the sovereign legal authority f the state itself. he Hungarian state structure,as Peter views it,wasbased on autocratic legal presumptions thatpostulated an overriding responsibility to assure law and order throughsustained surveillance of society.21 lthoughgovernment inHungary, like that in theAustrian crown lands, followed theprinciples of a Rechtsstaatafter the late eighteenth century, the basing of civilrights in the powers and obligations of the state allowed formore far-reachingregulation and restriction f individual rights than in theAustrian crown lands.

Inboth halves of themonarchy after 867, infact, overnment limitedfreedomof assembly, ssociation, and thepress.The development of civil rights eeds moresystematic istorical research, ut therewas a clear tensionbetween abroad publicand official recognition of theprinciplesf freedom of thepress, association, andassembly inboth Austria andHungary and thepracticesfgovernmental regulationand interventionwhen officialsfelt threatenedby subversive forces. Libel andsedition lawshemmed in thepress,and both theAustrian andHungarian administrationsharassed, restricted,and at times prohibited anarchist, revolutionary22socialist, and some of themost radical nationalist groups. To combat thesocial democraticmovement, theAustrian government inJune 1886 had theparliament pass repressivemeasures against "anarchist agitation,"modeled after er

many's anti-socialist laws.The Hungarian government similarly estricted ocialistactivity in the late 1870s and 1880s, arrestingleaders and banning meetings andpublications.23 By late December 1888, though, Austrian social democratswere able to convene inHainfeld the foundingmeeting of theAustrian SocialDemocratic Workers Party. In late 1889 and 1890 Hungarian socialistsworkedto transform he small General Workers' Party ofHungary into theHungarianSocial Democratic Partyand convened itsfirst ongress inearly ecember 1890.

On Austrian constitutional and legal development, see the syntheses byWerner Ogris, "DieRechtsentwicklung inCisleithanien, 1848-1918," inDie Habsburgermonarchie, 1848-1918, II. Verwaltung undRechtswesen, ed. Adam Wandruszka and Peter Urbanitsch (Vienna: Verlag der ?sterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1975), 538-662; and Wilhelm Brauneder, "DieVerfassungsentwicklung in?sterreich 1848-1918," inDie Habsburgermonarchie, 1848-1918, VII.Verfassungund Parlamentarismus, ed. Helmut Rumpier and Peter Urbanitsch (Vienna: Verlag der?sterreichischen Akademie derWissenschaften, 2000), pt.l, 69-237.L?szlo P?ter, "Die Verfassungsentwicklung inUngarn," inDie Habsburgermonarchie, 1848?1918,VII, ed. Wandruszka and Urbanitsch, pt. 1, 372-78; and George Barany, "Ungarns Verwaltung:1848-1918," inDie Habsburgermonarchie, 1848-1918, II, ed.Wandruszka andUrbanitsch, 417-18.On restrictions of civil liberties after 1867, see forHungary, Barany, "Ungarns Verwaltung,"417-18; and for theAustrian half of themonarchy, Ogris, "Die Rechtsentwicklung inCisleithanien, 569-571.23See Paml?nyi, ed., Die Geschichte Ungarns, 402-04, 438-40.


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252 GARY B. COHENOverall, theAustrian government proved to be fairly olerantof awide spectrumof political activity, articularlyafter the early 1890s, while theHungariangovernment generally treatedmore harshlywhat itviewed as subversivegroups.

Given the determination of the rulingMagyar nationalist forces after the early1870s to create aMagyar nation-state inHungary, authorities there tended tobe more openly repressive towardnationalist political activity among the nonMagyar groups thanwas theAustrian officialdom.Both theAustrian andHungarian state bureaucracies reserved broad powers of surveillance by requiringregistrationof voluntary associations and having police agents attend politicalmeetings, but therewere similar controls inmuch of Germany, for instance,during this era. The Austrian and Hungarian interior ministries could alsoinvoke emergency powers to deal with civil unrest and natural disasters.24Such occasions arose, but one should not exaggerate their number. For themost part, thepolice authorities inboth halves of themonarchy at the end ofthecentury operatedwithin the frameworkof settledpublic law and regulations.

When theAustrian and Hungarian governments imposed restrictionson civilrights and combated groups that they considered threatening to law andorder, they typicallydid so under the cover of law and established ordinancesand with judicial due process.25

By European standards of the era, theAustrian halfof theHabsburg Monarchy after the 1860s enjoyed broad freedom of speech, thepress, association, andassembly andwidely respected guarantees of legal process. Popular expectationsabout guarantees of justicewere sufficiently igh by the 1880s and 1890s thatblatant governmental abuse of the judicial systemwas an infrequent andloudly protested phenomenon. When state officialsdid pervert justice as theydid, forexample, in theOmladina conspiracy trials inPrague during the early1890s, theyfaced loud condemnation innewspapers and legislative chambers.26After relaxing the anti-socialistmeasures in the late 1880s, theAustrian government made no furtherefforts to outlaw opposition political forces outright.Short of creating civil unrest, engaging in criminal action, or threatening thediscipline of themilitary and police forces, the various mass-based partieswere free to develop opposition politics. The government typicallydealt with

On the legal basis fordeclaring a stateof emergency, see for theAustrian crown lands, LudwigSpiegel, "Ausnahmszustand," in?sterreichischesStaatsw?rterbuch, nd ed. rev., ed. ErnstMischler andJosefUlbrich, 4 vols. (Vienna, 1905), 1: 370-73; and Brauneder, "Die Verfassungsentwicklung in?sterreich 1848-1918," 190; and forHungary, P?ter, "Die Verfassungsentwicklung inUngarn,"487-92.P?ter, in "Die Verfassungsentwicklung inUngarn," 373-81.6On theOmladina trials, see Karen Johnson Freeze, "The Young Progressives: The CzechStudent Movement" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1974); Bruce M. Garver, The YoungCzech Party, 178-189; Urban, Cesk? spolecnost 1848-1918, 431-33; JiriPernes, Spiklenci proti ehovelicenstvu: historie tzv. spiknutiOmladiny vCech?ch [Conspirators againstHis Majesty: A History ofthe So-Called Omladina Conspiracy inBohemia] (Brno: Barrister & Principal, 1992).


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NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICS OF STATE 253opposition groups, including radical nationalists and the social democrats, bypolitical means, propagandizing against them, and trying to strengthen theiropponents but also at timesby negotiating and offeringconcessions.Hungary's central government exercisedmuch greater power to restrict ndividual libertiesand political opposition than did itsAustrian counterpart, andHungarian law offered fewermechanisms for legal recourse. The Hungariangovernment authorities tended toview nationalistopponents toMagyar nationalinterests as opposition to the Hungarian state itself and invoked ever tighterrestrictions n political expression, popular political agitation, the authority ofthe county congregations, and even parliament itself norder tomaintain thepoliticalstatusquo. For most of the era after1867 theHungarian interiorministryand the administrative officials it sent to the counties used their authority torestrain, harass, and occasionally jail leaders of the non-Magyar nationalistformations and of the radical lower-classmovements that they foundmostobnoxious. All thiswas done, though, under the cover of laws andministerialdecrees; and the Hungarian government generally recognized political andlegal limits to themeasures it used againstpolitical opposition.The failureof some of theHungarian government's cruder efforts o controlthepolitical situation inCroatia between 1907 and 1913 shows that the resistance of civil society and the judicial system limitedhow far thegovernment'sexecutive authority reached. Baron Pavao Rauch, the tough-minded governorappointed by theWekerle ministry in 1908, responded to therising agitation forreform inCroatia by a new Serb-Croat coalition with repeated dissolutions ofthe Sabor and rule by decree. The government mounted a mass trial inZagreb in 1909 of some fiftyerbs and Croats on trumped-up chargesof a treasonous conspiracy to oin Bosnia andCroatia with theKingdom of Serbia. TheZagreb trial, however, soon backfired: newspapers throughout themonarchyand abroad denounced the shoddy evidence and obvious breaches of justice,and the convicted defendantswere ultimately exonerated by a higher court.In themeantime, the Austrian historian Heinrich Friedjung published anarticle inVienna's Neue Freie Presse inMarch 1909, apparentlybased on documents from theAustro-Hungarian foreignministry, inwhich he claimed aconspiracy of Serb and Croat politicians inCroatia with the Serbian government. Sued for libel, Friedjung had to admit the fraudulence of some of his27assertions. Now, both the j'oint foreign ministry and the Hungarian

27On theZagreb trial and the Friedjung affairsee the brief treatments inArthur J.May, TheHapsburg onarchy, 1867-1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), 383-85; Barbara andCharles 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 ofAustria-Hungary :A Multi-National Experiment inEarly Twentieth-Century urope,ed. Mark Cornwall, rev. ed. (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002), 131; andHugh and Christopher Seton-Watson, TheMaking ofaNew Europe: R. W. Seton-Watson and the ast Years of ustriaHungary (London: Methuen, 1981), 68-78.


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254 GARY B. COHENgovernment faced public disgust for the apparently crude attempts to discreditand repress dissident politicians inCroatia. The Hungarian government againsuspended the Sabor in 1911 and 1912 and tried to ruleCroatia with royal comnissioners, but after stvanTisza became speaker of theHungarian parliament in

May 1912 and thenprimeminister inJune 1913, he saw thenecessity of amoreconciliatory, constitutional approach inCroatia.28

Rising Popular Political Engagement and theGrowthof theNational MovementsThe emperor and appointed government officials retainedmuch authority indomestic as well as foreign affairs, nd theHungarian ruling elites stubbornlyresisted any realmoves toward a democratic suffrage, ut representativegovern

ment and popular political engagement advanced significantly nboth halves ofthemonarchy after the 1860s. The two parliaments, the elected communalcouncils and provincial diets in theAustrian lands, and the county assembliesinHungary gave a direct voice in lawmaking and the formation of publicpolicy to thosewho enjoyed voting rights. roader segmentsof thepopulation,however, made their views and interestsknown throughmeetings, lobbying,demonstrations, and thepress.

The development of representative institutions, olitical parties, and interestgroups and the state officials' growing responsiveness to them resulted in agradual, albeit uneven empowerment of various segments of society. JohnW Boyer has argued that theGerman liberal reformers of the 1860s didmuch more to liberalize the state structurein theAustrian halfof themonarchythan older historicalwriting typicallyrecognized. InBoyer's reading, theconstitutional reforms f the 1860s gave theAustrian propertied elements, particularlytheprivileged German Burgertumnd thegreat landowners, alongwith the statebureaucracymuch increased power at the cost of the emperor. Despite the federalist claims ofmany conservative noblemen and Czech, Polish, and Croatiannationalists, ultimate authority still residedwith the crown and the centralministriesor achhalf f themonarchy.29he two arliamentsadsubstantiallegislative authority, but the Austrian and Hungarian ministries conducted

See Hodimir Sirotkovic, "Die Verwaltung imK?nigreich Kroatien-Slawonien, 1848-1918," inDie Habsburgermonarchie, 1848-1918, VII, ed.Rumpier andUrbanitsch, pt. 2, 497-98; and GaborVermes, Istv?nTisza: The Liberal Vision andConservative Statecraft faMagyar Nationalist (Boulder andNew York: East European Monographs/Columbia University Press, 1985), 196-97.29See JohnW Boyer, "Religion and Political Development inCentral Europe around 1900: AView fromVienna," Austrian History Yearbook 25 (1994): 32?34; and Theo ?linger, "Zur Entstehung, Begr?ndung und zu Entwicklungsm?glichkeiten des ?sterreichischen F?deralismus," inAus?sterreichsRechtsleben inGeschichte undGegenwart. Festschrift?r Ernst C Hellbling zum 80. Geburtstag,ed. Ernst Carl Hellbling (Berlin:Dunker & Humblot, 1981), 314-15.


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NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICS OF STATE 255much 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 societalinterests in public policy making grew substantially during the last decadesof the century. Representatives of the propertied and educated foundavenues into government decision making and administration thanks to theconsiderable autonomy vis-a-vis the central state authorities granted tothemunicipal and communal councils by the Stadion law of 1849 and theReichsgemeindegesetzf 1862 and to the provincial diets and their executivecommittees by the various constitutional reforms of the 1860s.30 In theAustrian crown lands between the 1860s and the 1890s, conservative andliberal nationalist political forces, based largely in propertied and educatedsocial elements, established bastions of power and influence in communalcouncils, in the provincial diets and their executive committees, and inthe chamber of deputies of the Austrian parliament. The German liberalsin the Alpine and Bohemian lands and the conservative Polish forces inGalicia began with considerable advantages in the 1860s, but the OldCzech and Young Czech parties carved out important positions inBohemia and Moravia during the 1870s and 1880s as did Slovene liberaland Catholic nationalist forces inCarniola after the late 1860s.

InHungary theMagyar propertied and bureaucratic elites' resistance to suffrage reform and determined government effortsto centralize state administration impeded the penetration of societal interests into policy makingduring thewhole dualist era, but thegovernment could not silence the risingvoices of society. Inmany ways, theKingdom ofHungary functioned morelike a constitutional monarchy with a unitary administration and strongcabinet based on a parliamentarymajority thandid theAustrian half.Restrictedvoting rights nd gerrymandereddistrictshelped to assure theHungarian LiberalParty a safemajority in theparliament from themid-1870s through the 1890s,and theLiberal Partyministers carefullymanaged legislativebusiness. SuccessiveHungarian governmentsworked to take autonomous powers away from thecounties and to impose on them administrators appointed by the interiorministry.The Hungarian state stillreliedheavily on the counties' administrativepersonnel to execute government policies, and the numbers of the latterin thelate nineteenth century considerably exceeded theministerial employees.31

^oyer, "Freud, Marriage, and Late Viennese Liberalism," 73. Austrian historian Ernst Hanischdescribes the state as at once "a dynastic, bureaucratic, authoritarian state" (dynastischer,?rokratischerObrigkeitsstaat) and a liberal stateof law (Rechtsstaat);Hanisch, ?sterreichischeGeschichte, 1890?1990,209-10.

On the centralization of domestic administration inHungary, see Barany, "Ungarns Verwaltung," 409-46; and P?ter, "Die Verfassungsentwicklung inUngarn," 476-503, 537-40. On thenumbers ofministerial and county officials, see Janos, Politics ofBackwardness, 94.


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256 GARY B. COHENHungarian government at all levels, however, was hardly immune to increasingpressures during the last decades of the century frompolitical movements andinterestgroups based in society.With thematuring of an industrialmarket economy and advancing urbani

zation afterthe 1880s, the responsibilities f theAustrian and Hungarian centralgovernments grew steadily. n theAustrian crown lands, thepublic services provided bymunicipalities and the individual lands also grew at a rapidpace, rangingfromprimary education, sanitation, and local police to roads, highways, publicutilities, public health, and industrial and housing regulation. In the Austriancrown landsmany of those new public services were the responsibility f theelectedmembers of theprovincial diets and of the communal councils, workingwithin regulatory schemes established by the ministries inVienna or by theprovincial governors responsible to the interiorministry.Vigorous public debateregarding those services demonstrated thattheywere the subject of considerablepublic interest. ndeed, recent researchon theAustrian crown landshas shownthat after the 1880s public administration at all levels became subject tocomplex political negotiation involving competing local political organizationsand interest groups, elected local representatives, and various governmentoffices nd agencies.32By around 1900, thegrowing responsibilities f the autonomous communal and provincial administrationswere causing serious frictionbetween the elected communal councils and provincial diets on the one handand theAustrian ministerial authorities on the other.Ministerial officialscomplained frequently bout the extent of communal and provincial autonomy.33 Ina famous study published in 1904, Austrian minister-president Ernest vonKoerber called in vain for the reduction of the authority of the communalbodies. 34

On thegrowing responsibilities of theAustrian communal and crown land governments and therising 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:University ofChicago Press, 1995), passim; Boyer, "Religion and Political Development inCentralEurope," 31-36; Brauneder, "Die Verfassungsentwicklung in?sterreich 1848-1918," 204-05;Cathleen Giustino, TearingDown Prague'sJewish Town: Ghetto Clearance and theLegacy ofMiddleClass Ethnic Politics around 1900 (Boulder and New York: East European Monographs/ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2003), passim; Margarete Grandner, "Regelungen des Gesundheitswesens in?sterreich im 19. Jahrhundert," Wiener Zeitschrift zur Geschichte derNeuzeit 4 (2004): 79-99;King, Budweisers, 48-113, passim; and Gary B. Cohen, Education andMiddle-Class Society inImperialAustria (W Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1996), 55-126, passim.See, as examples, Erich Graf Kielmansegg, Kaiserhaus, Staatsm?nner und Politiker (Vienna: VerlagfurGeschichte und Politik, 1966), 8-9, 205-06; and Enqu?te derKommission zur F?rderung derVerwaltungsreformeranstaltetnder eit vom21. Oktober bis9.November 1912 (Vienna: K. u. K. Hof- undStaatsdruckerei, 1913), 5-6, 161. On provincial and local government in theAustrian lands duringthe latenineteenth century, seeErnst C. Hellbling, "Die Landesverwaltung inCisleithanien,"and JiriKlabouch, "Die Lokalverwaltung inCisleithanien," inDie Habsburgermonarchie 1848-1918, II, ed.Wandruszka andUrbanitsch, 190-269, 270-305.On Koerber's ideas for reform, see Alfred Ableitinger, Ernest vonKoerber und das Verfassungsproblem imJahre 1900 (Vienna: B?hlau, 1973); and Fredrik Lindstr?m, "Ernest von Koerber and


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NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICS OF STATE 257Inmany areas of domestic policy afterthe 1880s the pressures of civil society

pushed up stronglyfrombelow while ministerial officials tried tomaintain whatthey could of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century traditions ofpowerful top-down state administration. Increasingly, the Austrian statebureaucracy had to compromise inmatters of domestic policy with representatives of political parties and interestgroups, including nationalist parties andinterestgroups among many others.35Even inpolicy areaswhere theAustrianministries continued to have broad authority, such as public education andsocial welfare, the officials after the late 1880s often had to bow to pressuresfromsocietal interests nd the autonomous provincial and communal councilsand to accept innovations demanded by popular interestgroups and politicalparties.At the end of the century books, journals, and newspapers presenteda rich floweringof political and social criticismof all stripes in all themajorlanguages of theAustrian crown lands.36Nationalist politicians and organizations were deeply engaged inmost of these debates, but theywere only partof a broader trendof increasing impingement by civil society on thework ofgovernment.

Public education, always of vital interest to nationalist politicians, offeredmany instancesof this.The AustrianMinistry ofReligion and Instruction, forinstance, tried repeatedly to restrictthe growth of Gymnasium and Realschuleenrollments and to limit the founding of new secondary schools; but the

theAustrian State Idea: A Reinterpretation of theKoerber Plan (1900-1904)," AustrianHistory Yearbook 35 (2004): 143-184.See Boyer, Culture and PoliticalCrisis, passim; Cohen, Education andMiddle-Class Society,67-75,95-126; and Hans Peter Hye, Das politische System inderHabsburgermonarchie (Prague: Karolinum,1998), 160-77.36For soundings in these rich and varied debates, seeWilliam Johnston, The AustrianMind: AnIntellectual and Social History, 1848?1938 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of CaliforniaPress, 1972); Jacques Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity:Culture and Society inFin-de-Si?cleVienna (New York: Continuum, 1993); Boyer, "Freud, Marriage, and Late Viennese Liberalism,"72-102; Cohen, Education andMiddle-Class Society, 119-26; Margarete Grandner, "ConservativeSocial Politics inAustria, 1880-1890," Austrian History Yearbook 27 (1996): 77-107; KatherineDavid, "Czech Feminists and Nationalism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy: 'The First inAustria,'" Journal ofWomen's History 3, no. 2 (1991): 26-45; Katherine David-Fox, "PragueVienna, Prague-Berlin: The Hidden Geography of Czech Modernism," Slavic Review 59, no. 4(2000): 735-760; Katherine David-Fox, "The 1890s Generation: Modernism andNational IdentityinCzech Culture, 1890-1900" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1996); Freeze, "The Young Progressives"; T. Mills Kelly, "Feminism, Pragmatism, or Both? Czech Radical Nationalism and theWoman Question, 1898-1914," Nationalities Papers 30 (2002): 537-52; Derek Sayer, The CoastsofBohemia: A Czech History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 154-63; ScottSpector, Prague Territories:National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Si?cle(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000); LarryWolff, "Dynastic Conservatism 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 'GreatCity': Metropolitan Imaginations and Apprehensions in Cracow's Popular Press, 1900-1914,"Austrian History Yearbook 33 (2002): 105-130.


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258 GARYB. COHENprovincial diets and communal councils could simply startnew secondaryschools at their wn expense, providing therebypolitical trophies fornationalistinterests hile theyhoped to getministerial funding later.Ministerial officialslong resisted the granting of equal opportunities towomen in secondary andhigher education and the introduction of new curricular options for the stategymnasia, but afteraround 1900 thepressure forchange fromsocietal interestswas so great that the ministry had to grant one concession afteranother onwomen's education and other issues.37

InHungary, thecabinets, typicallybased on carefullycultivatedmajorities inthe Budapest parliament, took advantage of theirbroad freedom of action toexercise strong central control over domestic affairs. he Liberal Party prime

ministers vested great powers in a growingministerial bureaucracy and systematicallyweakened the traditionalauthorityof the county congregations. Transylvaniawas fully malgamated into theKingdom ofHungary, and only Croatiacontinued to have its own diet in Zagreb, dominated by native propertiedelements. Nonetheless, theHungarian cabinet worked steadily through thelast decades of the century to impose tight central control over Croatia byappointing strong-willed governors, manipulating the Sabor, passing muchlegislation forCroatia in theHungarian parliament, and, as alreadymentioned,repeatedly suspending theSabor.38 The Hungarian cabinet gained even greaterpower over theparliament in the 1890s and again after 1912 as the reorganizedLiberal Party forces,now led by Istvan Tisza, imposed tightercontrols overlegislativerocedures.39The increasing centralization of authority overHungary and Croatia in theHungarian ministries limitedopportunities foranybroad rangeof societal interests toparticipate directly inpolicy deliberations and governance compared toAustria. Throughout the era after the 1870s, theHungarian government waswilling to use more openly repressivemeasures against dissident nationalistgroups and lower-class radical movements. Nonetheless, a growing range ofmass-based interestgroups and political movements arose inHungary aswellafter the late 1880s; and they foundways to exert increasing pressure on thegovernment. In the last fifteenyears beforeWorld War I, the risingdemandsof disaffected landowners, professionals, the urban lower-middle classes,peasant farmers, nd laboring groups, both urban and rural,forced theHungarian government to make at least some concessions on social and economic

See Cohen, Education andMiddle-Class Society, 108-26; andHelmut Engelbrecht, Geschichte des?sterreichischenBildungswesens, Band 4. Von 1848 biszum Ende der onarchie (Vienna: ?sterreichischerBundesverlag, 1986), 30.On theHungarian government's control ofCroatia, see Barany, "Ungarns Verwaltung," 379,386, 396; Sirotkovic, "Die Verwaltung im K?nigreich Kroatien und Slawonien 1848-1918,"479?98; and P?ter, "Die Verfassungsentwicklung inUngarn," 351-52.See P?ter, "Die Verfassungsentwicklung inUngarn," 472?77; andVermes, Istv?nTisza, 86?88,180-84.


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NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICS OF STATE 259questions and to adopt social reformsevenwhile it frequentlycrushed strikesand demonstrations and stepped upmeasures toMagyarize theminority nationalities.40Hungary, too, saw a rapidgrowth of new public services at the end ofthe century,which theministries, counties, or cities administered and whichattracted growing popular political interest.41Public debate about politicaland social issues involuntary associations, the press, and academic circles wasevery bit as varied and vigorous inHungary around 1900 as in theAustriancrown lands. The Hungarian government officials could neither stiflenorignore the criticismvoiced by radical democratic, Christian social, social democratic, andminority nationalist groups.42The growth of civil society and the gradually increasing responsiveness ofgovernment agencies to the public in theHabsburg Monarchy at the end ofthe nineteenth century surely represented risingdemocratizing pressures andtendencies, but one cannot argue that any far-reaching democratization ofgovernment occurred in either half of the realm.43Outright democratizationwould require clearmoves towardpopular control over government action onallmajor public issues, includingmore parliamentaryoversightof centralexecutiveauthority and broader voting rightsforall themajor representativebodies,than actually arose before 1918. Rather thanmaking any excessive claims fordemocratization as such, it seems better to speak of the increasing penetrationof public interests into some areas of government decision making, theirgrowing implicationn the functioningof parts of the stateadministration, andperhaps an advancing cohabitationf public interestgroups and political partieswith the statebureaucracy-with all these tendencies significantly tronger intheAustrian half of themonarchy than in theHungarian.The growth of civil societyand constitutional, representative overnment in theHabsburgMonarchy opened up considerable space for thedevelopment of a rangeofpopular politicalmovements, including thenationalist formations mong them.By 1900 nationalist political parties and their affiliatedsocial, economic, and

On the political calculus of the ruling elements inHungary in the latenineteenth century, seeJanos, The Politics of ackwardness, 84-170, passim; Paml?nyi, ed.,Die GeschichteUngarns, 379-498;PeterHan?k, Ungarn inder onaumonarchie. Probleme derb?rgerlichenmgestaltung einesVielv?lkerstaates(Vienna, Munich, and Budapest: Verlag f?rGeschichte und Politik, 1983), 195-239.On developments in the cityofBudapest, see the overview inZsuzsa L. Nagy, "Transformationsin the City Politics of Budapest, 1873-1941," in Budapest and New York: Studies inMetropolitanTransformation, 1870-1930, ed. Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske (New York: Russell SageFoundation, 1994), 35-54.On various aspects of the social and political debates inHungary, see Lee Congdon, The YoungLuk?cs (Chapel Hill, NC: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1983); Mary Gluck, "The Modernistas Primitive: The Cultural Role ofEndre Ady inFin-de-Si?cle Hungary," AustrianHistory Yearbook33 (2002): 149-62; P?terHan?k, The Garden and theWorkshop: Essays on the ulturalHistory ofViennaandBudapest (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 63-97, 110-134; Janos, The PoliticsofBackwardness, 167-189; and Sugar et al., eds., A History of ungary, 284-88.43See the comments inHanisch, ?sterreichischeGeschichte, 1890-1990, 28-29, 209-12.


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260 GARYB. COHENcultural groups had acquired strongsupport and influence in allpartsof themonarchy. y then largepartsof thepopulation, although bynomeans all, had developed national loyalties nd chosen sides in the nationalitycontests.The nationalistactivists' pioneering cultural initiatives and effortsfor economic improvementbetween the 1820s and early 1840s and their political agitation in the crisisyearsof the 1840s and again after the late 1850s graduallybuilt up bodies of followerswho accepted the nationalist arguments that their respective languagesor, for some, a combination of language, religion, and territoryf birth definedwho theywere in society,determined their lifechances, and provided the basisforgroup action to shape their future.Nationalist activistsconstructed historicalnarratives that postulated that their respective nationalities had always beenpresent in theirhome regionswith shared identitiesbased on distinct groupculture, family descent, and local rootedness. Yet throughout the nineteenthcentury,nationalist leaders in centralEurope had to admit thatnational identitieswere not transmittedniversallybybirthwhen they omplained about partsof thepopulation thatremained nationally "indifferent" r "amphibious," bilingual (or"utraquist" in theBohemian Lands), or perhaps even polylingual. To the end ofthemonarchy and into the interwarperiod, nationalist activistsstruggled towinthe loyaltyof popular elements that often spoke several languages and wereambivalent about ethnic and national affiliations,particularly in rural areaswhere inhabitants saw the nationalist political strugglesof the larger cities asremote to their livesand disruptive to established customs of social interaction.44

For examples of recent treatmentsof the creation of nationalist historical narratives as part of thedevelopment of national ideologies, seeVladimir Macura, Cesky sen [The Czech Dream] (Prague:Nakl. Lidov? noviny, 1998); Macura, Znamenx zrodu. Cesk? n?rodn? obrozen?jako kulturn?typ [BirthSigns: The Czech National Revival as a Cultural Type], 2nd expanded ed. (Prague: H & H,1995); Derek Sayer, The Coasts ofBohemia, 82-153; Brian A. Porter, When Nationalism Began toHate: ImaginingModern Politics inNineteenth-Century Poland (New York: Oxford University Press,2000); andNation andHistory: Polish Historians from theEnlightenment to theSecond World War, ed.Peter Brock, JohnD Stanley, and Piotr J.Wr?bel (Toronto and Buffalo: University of TorontoPress, 2006). On the continuing ambiguity andmutability of national loyalties inparts of the population, seeMark Cornwall, "The Struggle on theCzech-German Language Border, 1880-1940,"The EnglishHistorical Review 109 (1994): 914-51; Pieter M. Judson, "Frontier Germans: The Invention of the Sprachgrenze," inKulturelle Praktiken und dieAusbildung von Imagined Communities um1900, ed. Susan Ingram,Markus Reisenleitner, and Cornelia Szabo-Knotik (Vienna: Turia + Kant,2001), 85-99; Judson, "Frontiers, Islands, Forests, Stones: Mapping theGeography of a GermanIdentity in theHabsburg Monarchy, 1848-1900," in The Geography of dentity, d. Patricia Yeager(Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press, 1996), 382-406; Judson, "Inventing Germans: Class,

Nationality, and Colonial Fantasy at theMargins of theHabsburg Monarchy," in "Nations, Colonies,andM?tropoles," ed. Daniel Segal and Richard Handler, Social Analysis 33 (1993): 47-67; Judson,"Nationalizing Rural Landscapes in Cisleithania, 1880-1914," in Creating theOther, ed. NancyM. Wingfield (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 127-148; King, Budweisers, passim; RobertLuft, "Nationale Utraquisten in B?hmen. Zur Problematik 'nationaler Zwischenstellungen' amEnde des 19. Jahrhunderts," inAllemands, Juifs etTch?ques ? Prague?Deutsche, Juden und Tschechenin 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:Germanization, National Ascription, and Democracy in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1945,"


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NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICS OF STATE 261As long ago as 1948, thehistorianA.J. P.Taylor warned that n centralEurope

simply speaking a particular language or a dialect thereofdid not necessarily45entail a conscious loyalty to a particular larger ethnic or national grouping.Only in the last twenty-fiveyears, though, have historians and social scientistsgone beyond studying the political and intellectual processes of buildingnationalist movements and begun to address systematically popular nationalidentification and the popular imagining of national communities in centraland east-central Europe as complex processes of political, social, and culturalchange.46 The founding of local and regional nationalist organizations, thedevelopment of electoral politics, the opening of schools or classeswith alternative languages of instruction, and the introduction of census questions onmother tongue or language of everyday use were among themany changes inpublic life after the middle of the nineteenth century that gave the generalpopulace the occasion to choose sides and eventually created pressure toaffirm ational loyalties.

Nationalist campaigning forgroup cultural and political rights, ncludingeducation and other public services in native languages, and government concessions to those demands led gradually to dividingmuch of public life in themonarchy on linguistic lines and eventually politically articulated nationallines. Numerous voluntary associations and political organizations dividedsharply long lhnes f nationality inmany of the crown lands soon afterthe inauguration of constitutional rule in the 1860s, although some charities, specialinterestgroups, craftand labor organizations, and many religious institutionsremained nationally neutral foryears or even decades thereafter. he constitutional laws for theAustrian half of themonarchy from the late 1860s recognized the cultural rightsof individual citizens, including their language andnationality, although not any formal political rights f nationalities as collectiveentities.47Those legal commitments and the autonomy of communal and

CentralEuropean History 37 (2004): 501-543; and Zahra, "Your Child Belongs to theNation: Nationalization, Germanization, andDemocracy in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1945," (Ph.D. diss., University ofMichigan, Ann Arbor, 2005).

45Taylor,The Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918, 264.See the critiques of the historiographical traditions on nationalism and national identity incentral and east-central Europe inKing, "The Nationalization of East Central Europe: Ethnicism,Ethnicity, and Beyond," 112-152; King, Budweisers, 6?11; Pieter M. Judson, '"Whether Race orConviction Should be the Standard': National Identity and Liberal Politics in 19th-centuryAustria," AustrianHistory Yearbook 22 (1991): 21-34; and Karl F.Bahm, "Beyond theBourgeoisie:Rethinking Nation, Culture, and Modernity inNineteenth-Century Central Europe," AustrianHistory Yearbook 29 (1998): 19-35.On the rightsof thenationalities in theAustrian half of themonarchy, see Stourzh, Die GleichberechtigungerNationalit?ten, particularly 189-200; Emil Brix, Die Umgangssprachen inAlt?sterreichzwischenAgitation und Assimilation. Die Sprachenstatistikin den zisleithanischen Volksz?hlungen, 1880bis 1910 (Vienna: B?hlau, 1982); Hannelore B?rger, Sprachenrecht und Sprachgerechtigkeit m


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262 GARY B. COHENprovincial governments in Austria made it possible to develop full systems ofpublic primary schools and, somewhat more slowly, secondary schools teachingin the language of each national group wherever it could claim sufficientnumbers of residents, typicallyat least twentypercent of the local population.In Austrian secondary and higher education, German-speakers continued uptoWorld War I to enjoy disproportionate advantages in enrollments and inthe numbers of institutions that used German as the language of instruction,but after1871 the universities of Cracow andLemberg/Lwow/L'viv taughtprimarily in Polish. Prague had, in addition to German-language institutions,aCzech technical college after1868 and a Czech university after1882. By thefirst ecades of the twentiethcentury, the Slovene-, Ukrainian-, Italian-, andSerbo-Croatian-speaking populations in theAustrian crown lands all had extensive systemsof public primary schools and were able to complete at least thelower forms of secondary education in theirown languages, although they didnot get universities or technical colleges teaching in their respective languagesunder themonarchy.48

InHungary the government policies ofMagyarization and repressivemeasuresagainst non-Magyar nationalistpolitics impeded but could not stop thedevelopment of nationally divided public lifeand distinct national communities in thepublic sphere.The ostensibly liberalHungarian nationality law of 1868, like itsAustrian counterpart,did not recognize national groups as collectivepolitical entities, but it guaranteed the rightsof individuals to use theirown languages inelementaryand secondaryeducation, indealingswith thegovernment,and in religious affairs.49n practice, however, theHungarian cabinets fromthemid-1870sonwardworked tomake Magyar the language of all importantgovernment services, to demand competence inMagyar for all public school teachers, and torequireMagyar as a subject in thehigher formsof all elementary schools and inall secondary schools. The Hungarian authorities shut down Slovak gymnasia inlate 1874 and the Slovak nationalist educational society,Matice slovenska n late1875-on thepretext that theywere propagating "unpatriotic" and Pan-Slavistideas. Over time theministerial bureaucracy required that increasingnumbersof subjects innon-Magyar schools be taught inMagyar and granted or withheldstate subsidies in order tomake Magyar the language of instruction in thevastmajority of Hungary's primary and secondary schools. By the lastyears before1914, seventy-eightpercent of theprimary schools and ninety percent of thesecondary schools inHungary (not includingCroatia) usedMagyar as theprimary

?sterreichischennterrichtswesen 1867-1918 (Vienna: Verlag der ?sterreichischen Akademie derWissenschaften, 1995); and Kann, Das Nationalit?tenproblem derHabsburgermonarchie, passim.On the development of Austrian education, see Cohen, Education andMiddle-Class Society,andEngelbrecht, Geschichte des ?sterreichischenBildungswesens,Band 4.See the brief discussion inRobert A. Kann, A History of theHabsburg Empire, 362.


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NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICSOF STATE 263language of instruction.50n 1906-7, Hungary had 205 accredited gymnasia andRealschulen, ofwhich 189 used Magyar as the language of instruction, eightGerman, sixRomanian, one Italian,and one mixed Magyar and Romanian. Atthat time no gymnasium inHungary used Slovak orUkrainian as its languageof instruction.51uring the era after1867, all universitiesand technical collegesinHungary proper used Magyar as the language of instruction.Spokesmen fortheHungarian Liberal Party justified theirMagyarization policies simply intermsof the requirements forgood citizenship and loyaltyto the state, a stateunderstood as aMagyar nation-state:

"Since patriotism is inconceivablewithout a common language, our taskmustbe tocreate one ...What we expect fromthem isnot only that they speak theMagyar vernacular but that theystart to feel likeMagyars themselves."52The centralized state administration under theHungarian ministries and the

limited suffragefor the Budapest parliament and the county congregationsmeant that the non-Magyar nationalities and the lower classes in general hadlittledirect role inHungary's government and public administration.There wascertainly less penetration of public policy making from society at large inHungary than in theAustrian half of themonarchy, and during the last yearsbeforeWorld War I therewere only small numbers of deputies at any one timerepresentingthenon-Magyar nationalistmovements in the lower house of theparliament. Nonetheless, throughout theHungarian halfof themonarchy fromthe 1890s onward, small farmers,urban lower-middle classes, and urban andrural laborers of all nationalities increasingly found theirown political voices.Advancing literacy inwhatever language, economic development, and urbanpopulation growth, all encouraged by the government's own policies, helpeddrive forward the development of civil society.The Hungarian authorities combated the Slovak nationalist groups, for instance,with the harshest repressivemeasures, but Slovak nationalistpolitical activity ontinued togrow.The Hungariangovernment shut down many Romanian nationalist organizations and newspapers inTransylvania during the 1880s and 1890s but moderated itsstance after1900, particularly hen Istvan isza came topower.Relations between theHungarian government and Serbian nationalist groups in the 1880s and 1890swerelessconfrontational than thosewith the Slovak andRomanian groups, and thegovernor ofCroatia in themid-1880s, K'aroly Khuen-Hedervary, even showedsome favor to Serbian nationalistgroups there in order to play themoffagainstCroatian nationalists. A major impediment for theHungarian authorities intrying oMagyarize Romanians and Serbswas thatthey onld not easilyestablish

Statistics quoted inJanos, The Politics ofBackwardness, 127.5Statistics quoted inC. A. Macartney, The Habsburg Empire, 1790-1918 (New York: Macmillan,1969), 724.52Jozsef andor, 1910, quoted inJanos, The Politics ofBackwardness, 126.


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264 GARY B. COHENMagyar leadership over the Serbian and Romanian churches as theydid in theCatholic and Lutheran churches in theheavily Slovak-speaking regions.

In the 1880s and 1890s grassroots cultural and political organizations grew substantially mong all thenon-Magyar nationality groups inHungary andCroatia,and they even organized a "congress of nationalities" inBudapest in 1895.Despite thebarriers of restrictedsuffrage nd gerrymandered districts,deputiesfrom the non-Magyar nationalities sat in theHungarian parliament throughoutthe dualist era. The largestcontingentwas ethnicGermans, mostly fromTransylvania, although many of these supported pro-government parties.Romaniannationalists,when theydid not boycott elections, won parliamentary seats insmall numbers throughout the era after the 1860s. There were fifteen omaniandeputies of allpolitical stripes n1905, fivein1910. The parliament also regularlyincluded smallernumbers of Serbian deputies. In 1901 theSlovak People's Partyorganized formally, edmost prominently by theCatholic priestAndrej Hlinkaand allied with the clerical People's Party inHungary. The Slovak People'sParty soon managed to elect four deputies to the parliament, despite thelimited suffrage ystem.53 espite thecontinuing policies ofMagyarization sponsored by allHungarian cabinets in the lastdecades beforeWorld War I, some intheMagyar political establishment, including theotherwise authoritarian IstvanTisza, increasingly recognized thatthenon-Magyar nationalistmovements werenot going todisappear and thatnegotiation and some conciliatorymeasures wereprudent.54Relations between thenon-Magyar nationalist parties and theHungarian centralgovernment remainedmuch more contentious than thosebetweenthe nationalist parties and theAustrian government during the last two decadesbefore 1914, but therewere at least some opportunities forpolitical negotiationinHungary aswell.

Mass Politics andNationalist Radicalism in theEra ofCrisesConventional views of theHabsburg Monarchy during the last twenty yearsbeforeWorld War I have focused on growing domestic political crises inboththeAustrian and Hungarian halves, caused by the lack of stablemajorities inthe two parliaments and the radicalization of nationalist demands encouragedby mass politics. In this perspective, both halves of themonarchy becameincreasingly ungovernable, forcing repeated dissolutions or suspensions ofprovincial diets and the two parliaments.With theAustrian parliament andseveralof the diets frequentlydeadlocked, theministers and provincial governorsrelied increasinglyon rule by executive decree. In theAustrian half after1897,

See theoverview of the composition of theHungarian parliament inAdalbert Toth, "Die sozialeSchichtung imungarischen Reichstag 1848 bis 1918," inDie Habsburgermonarchie 1848- 1918, VII,ed. Rumpier andUrbanitsch, pt. 1, 1061-1105.See Vermes, Istv?nTisza, 196-210.


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NATIONALIST POLITICS AND THE DYNAMICS OF STATE 265the emperor frequently appointed cabinets composed of experts and careerbureaucratswith few parliamentary leaders, and most of theminister-presidentshad to manage without stable parliamentary majorities. Despite repeatedattempts, the government and moderate party leaders failed to resolve themost intensenational conflict, thatbetween Czechs and Germans inBohemia.

In 1905-06 Hungary entered itsdeepest political crisis of the pre-war erawhen the declining Hungarian Liberal Party lost control of the parliamentand a coalition of opposition Magyar nationalists, conservatives, and clericalpoliticians gained a majority. When the coalition challenged the emperorregarding control of the common Austro-Hungarian army, Francis Josephresponded by appointing his own prime minister above the parties and proposing to introduce a bill foruniversal male suffrage or theparliament. After thecoalition agreed to a compromise with the emperor and formed a newcabinet, it thenpassed various minor social reforms.To placateMagyar nationalists, the government enacted a new education law in 1907 that called for

Magyar as the language of instruction in all primary schools that served theother nationalities. In June 1913, Istv'anTisza, the son of Kalman Tisza, whohad built the Liberal Partymachine back in the late 1870s and 1880s, returnedas prime minister, leading his own Party of National Work. As speaker of theparliament during theprevious year,he had taken toughmeasures against opposition filibustering;now he asserted the government's authority over societywith new restrictive regulations on civil rights. Fearing Pan-Slav and proRussian tendencies among the Ruthenians in northeastern Hungary, theTisza government responded to a wave of conversions fromtheGreek CatholicChurch toEastern Orthodoxy by ordering the arrest f nearly twohundred andthe trialof fifty-eightn charges of sedition.55Tisza upheld the central government's longstanding policies ofMagyarization, but he also supported negotiations and modest conciliatory measurestoward some Croatian andRomanian political groups. The Hungarian government had reacted strongly fter1905 to the oint efforts fCroat and Serb politicians inCroatia to resistMagyarization efforts romBudapest. An emergingcoalition of Croat and Serb politicians asserted the autonomy of Croatia from

Hungary and called for the union of Croatia with Dalmatia, heretofore one oftheAustrian crown lands. In 1908 theBudapest government suspended theSabor; itdid so again in 1912 and imposed dictatorial control under thegovernor appointed fromBudapest. Tisza moderated the government's tactics in1913, however, andworked out a new understandingwith moderate Croatiandeputies to reconvene theSabor and restore th

Documents

Cohen - Nationalist Politics and Dynamics of State and Civil Society 1867-1914