FROM 1890 TO SARAJEVO

The 1890s saw the rise of mass political parties and a growing radicalization, social and national, throughout East Central Europe. In Hungary the long rule of Kalman Tisza ended in 1890, and subsequent developments were the formation of a Hungarian Social Democratic Party (which held its first congress in 1894 and adopted its program in 1903) and a Smallholders Party in 1909. A small but increasingly vocal National Bourgeois Radical Party represented the voice of urban intelligentsia. Oszkar Jaszi was one of the leaders; the magnate Mihaly Karolyi gravitated toward it. None of these movements could successfully challenge the succeeding governments, which excelled in manipulations combined with occasional reprisals, and increasingly emphasized

Magyar nationalism. The celebrations of the Millennium in 1896 saw its veritable outburst. “Never did we talk so much of our being Hungarian,”49 commented a leading historian. The semi-mythical ancestor, “the Turanian rider,” fearless but realistic, an observer rather than a discoverer, was represented in various literary heroes as the embodiment of the national characteristics. The Magyar spirit was distinguished by love of one’s native land, rejection of servility, and creativity in politics. Students in Budapest vowed to wear only national costume; landowners subscribed to an agrarian program and fulminated against big business that was “international” and “cosmopolitan.” They opposed to it a program of national and Christian politics. Although there were antiSemitic undertones in the new, integral nationalism, many Jews eagerly participated in the Magyarization campaign. Articles in the press which they often owned or influenced prophesied that in forty years’ time there would be 17 million Magyars as against 7 million non-Magyars. Indeed, spontaneous and forced Magyarization resulted in an increase of Hungarians in the 1867-1914 period from 40 to 48 percent in all the lands of the Holy Crown.

Nationalism was a weapon used against democrats, socialists, and radicals, and even the Catholic Church, in a Hungarian version of Kulturkampf in 18926. But the chief battles were fought in the Magyar versus non-Magyar confrontations. The resistance of some nationalities stiffened visibly. Subject to pressures and manipulations and finding a common front with the Hungarian opposition difficult, the Croats were driven into cooperation with the Serbs (the Fiume 1905 Resolution). The Zagreb trial in 1908 and then the Balkan wars intensified the tensions. The Croatian constitution was suspended in 1912 and 1913. Although various deals still intervened, the Croatian political program was departing from the trialist (Austro-Hungarian-South Slav) conception and moving toward a Yugoslav system.

Romanians and Serbs, by virtue of their Greek Orthodoxy (or Greek Catholicism) were largely immune from Magyarization in the religious sphere. They could also look to Bucharest and Belgrade for support. Still, the Romanian Memorandum trial of 1894, to mention only one of the political persecutions, pushed them toward cooperation with the other nationalities. The results were a Budapest congress in 1895 and the emergence of a club of nationalities in the Hungarian parliament in 1906. The Slovaks were worst off. Linguistic Magyarization made new inroads (such as the Lex Apponyi in 1907) into education and Protestant churches. The Hungarian Catholic hierarchy supported by the state battled with Slovak parishes. An incident at the Cernova church resulted in some fifteen people being shot by the gendarmes. A Catholic political movement took shape in the Slovak People’s Party in 1905. Its leader, Father Andrej Hlinka, had some hopes of cooperation with the new Hungarian Catholic People’s Party. Similarly the Slovak social democrats organized themselves within the Hungarian social democratic movement. Another group associated with the periodical Hlas looked to Prague’s progressive circles for inspiration and guidance. The situation appeared desperate to Slovak leaders. Mass following was lacking. The feeble Slovak culture and national consciousness could, if the worst fears were justified, succumb in a generation or so to complete Magyarization. As it was, the percentage of the Slovaks in the region declined between 1880 and 1910. The hard life and a feeling of hopelessness drove nearly 500,000 of them abroad as emigrants.

The relations between Budapest and Vienna were not free from friction. The remark of Count Gyula Andrassy that through the Compromise the Hungarians had sacrificed their material interests to the idea of liberty reflected a feeling of dissatisfaction with various aspects of coexistence with Austria. The question of the army remained particularly sensitive, and demands for a national army set off a crisis that reached its high point in 1905. The governing liberals lost the election, a rare occurrence, and dualism itself was threatened.

The year 1905 was a year of revolution in Russia and its Polish lands. Strikes and unrest spilled into the Habsburg monarchy. After intricate political maneuvers in which the bait of universal suffrage was used by all sides to the conflict, so as to gain the support of the masses, Francis Joseph prevailed. Universal manhood suffrage was introduced in Cisleithenia in 1907 but not in Hungary. The liberals reorganized themselves and assumed power under a new name and under the undisputed leadership of Istvan Tisza. Did it mean that dualism was safe and Hungary firmly wedded to it? Or did it mean that on the eve of the First World War none of the real problems was resolved in the lands of the Crown of St Stephen, be they socio-political, or to do with nationalities, or with relations with Vienna? It is difficult to give a definite answer, for nationality problems contrasted with a relative stability, and popular grievances with material progress.

In culture lights shone brightly. Three universities in addition to that of Budapest represented high levels of scholarship. The capital was a glittering city in which radically inclined intellectuals were playing an important part. European readers were familiar with the novelist Ferenc Molnar and the earlier-mentioned Mor Jokai, whose impact in Hungary was comparable to that of Jirasek among the Czechs and even Sienkiewicz among the Poles. Less well-known abroad was the greatest poet of the early twentieth century Endre Ady, the “prophet of Hungarian destiny.” The fame of the historical painter Mihaly Munkacsy reached the West; the rising genius of Bela Bartok in music would later be generally recognized. As the war approached Hungarian civilization was in no way inferior to that of the West, and some of its cultural or artistic figures were international giants.

Shifting one’s sights from Hungary to Bohemia one is struck by certain parallel developments, although contrasts dominate. The 1890s also saw a reorientation of Czech politics that reflected a democratization and a radicalization of society. It was accompanied by conflicts about the direction which the nation should take to promote its objectives. The Centennial Exhibition in Prague in 1891 testified to the enormous material advancement that made the country the leading province, economically and in terms of its social program, of the monarchy. Yet political gains did not follow economic achievements. The 1890 agreement (the Punktace) on a German-Czech linguistic compromise in schools and in the courts was not acceptable to the Young Czechs, who came to the fore as the leading force in the country. The agreement was realized only in Moravia; in Bohemia the Young Czechs, representing liberal, anti-clerical, and radical nationalists, adopted policies of confrontation that lasted for the next four years. But student riots in 1893 that led to the so-called Omladina trials demonstrated the futility both of such demonstrations and of the martial law which followed.

A new cabinet in Vienna led by Kazimierz Badeni tried reforms. In 1896 it added a fifth curia of voters which comprised all adult males hitherto denied voting rights; this represented more electors than in the four existing curias (great landowners, chambers of commerce, towns, and villages) combined. Badeni also introduced language reforms which would have put Czech on a par with German. The Young Czechs, reverting to more opportunistic tactics, cooperated with the Badeni government; the Germans engineered its fall which prevented the realization of language reforms. Disappointed, the Young Czechs pursued policies of filibuster and obstruction in the Reichsrat. Their goal remained Austro-Slavism: a federalized monarchy and diplomatic reorientation away from Germany and toward France and Russia. In 1908 Karel Kramar launched Neo-Slavism with a congress in Prague, in which both the Russians and the Poles participated. But Kramar, who considered the idea of Czech independence an illusion and Slavdom “our last ultimate” refuge, really concentrated on current politics in the monarchy. Moreover, the Young Czech monopoly of power was being undercut by the emergence of mass political parties, a consequence of the electoral reforms of 1896 and 1907, and by the appearance on the Czech scene of Tomas Masaryk. A new generation educated in Czech schools was now entering public life, and Czech modernism was challenging not only arts but also the prevalent view of society, nation, and politics.

The oldest Czech mass party, the social democrats, in 1896 gained a far-reaching autonomy within the all-Austrian party. Those who put more stress on nationalism and less on Marx established the National Socialist Party two years later. Its program carried some anti-Semitic overtones. The middle-of-the-road agrarians came into being in 1899; the forerunners of the Catholic Party also joined the political spectrum. Of all these groups and parties only the small Progressive State Rights Party openly advocated the destruction of the dual monarchy and an independent Czech state. Masaryk, who headed another tiny party of Realists, never went that far. But when he wrote to Kramar, “You are fighting for Austria! I am not!” he expressed a novel approach and a new philosophy of Czech politics.

Masaryk turned to history for inspiration, and he largely followed in the footsteps of Palacky. Rejecting futile lamentations over the catastrophe of the White Mountain, he insisted that the strength of the Czech nation was derived from spiritual values. These, which he termed profoundly humanistic, he traced back to the Hussites and the Czech Brethren. They, much more than the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, were in Masaryk’s opinion the catalyst of the nineteenth-century Czech national renaissance. Although, as mentioned in the preceding chapter, the historian Pekar disputed Masaryk’s interpretation of the Czech past and rejected the concept that the nation was a carrier of a single idea in history, Masaryk’s ideas had a wide resonance. Being a moralist to philosophers and a philosopher to politicians, Masaryk was above all seen as a sage, an intellectual, and a moral giant. This did not mean that he escaped criticism, even bitter attacks. His defense of the Jew Hilsner, accused of ritual murder, and his exposure as forgery of some cherished Czech medieval documents earned him public disapproval. His call for action through moral regeneration was not fully appreciated; his universalist approach to the Czech question (“The Czech question was either a world question or no question at all”) was not fully comprehended.

Indeed, a kind of national schizophrenia reigned in Bohemia with simultaneous displays of rebelliousness and loyalism, both tinged by a petit bourgeois mentality. The constant talk about a small nation and small possibilities resulted, in the opinion of the historian Koralka, in a cult of the average little Czech. “In no way do we lack gold and silver in our conflict with Vienna,” commented a prominent contemporary figure, “but we lack manliness and courage, perseverance and self-sacrifice in political struggles.”50 Masaryk himself castigated Czech politicians who unable to be lions turned into foxes, and unable to be heroes turned into lackeys. In a sense it was convenient for the nation to be without its own statehood, for it could derive benefits from the economic, cultural, and political life of a state for which it bore no responsibility. True, there were the customary two Czech members of the Vienna cabinet, but they were hardly representative of national aspirations. Still, the Czechs, as a leader affirmed in 1911 in parliament, had a real interest in the survival of the monarchy. Had the Austrians handled them more cleverly they could have, as a Czech writer put it, “wrapped the Czech nation around their little finger.”51

Although the 1905 strikes shook Bohemia the country was hardly an oppressed province. True, a certain political deadlock existed as German intransigence made a genuine federalization of the monarchy impossible. But not only economic, but also cultural life was thriving. The two giants in music, Bedrich Smetana and Antonin Dvorak died respectively in 1884 and 1904, but their impact remained. Modernist Czech painters worked chiefly in France but the tradition of the romantic, national paintings of J. Manes was very much alive. Prague was the centre of a special Jewish-German culture of which Kafka was in many ways a symbol and an embodiment.

Turning to the lands of partitioned Poland, the 1890s saw the rise of a challenge to Warsaw positivism and “triloyalism,” perceived as degenerating into policies of vested class interests and servility toward the government. The challenge came from the left and right: from the nascent forces of socialism and the national democratic movement. Somewhat later populism arose. All these trends were assisted by the broadening of the political and social base, especially after the 1905 Revolution, and they stressed an all-Polish character transcending the borders of Austria, Prussia, and Russia. They were sustained by a single Polish culture.

The national democratic movement grew out of the Polish League, founded in Switzerland in 1887. Its program rejected passivity or reconciliation with the partitioning powers and sought to mobilize Poles for active struggle for independence. Transformed into a National League in 1903 with headquarters in Warsaw, the movement developed an ideology that was shaped largely by the ideas of Roman Dmowski. A natural scientist by training, and coming from a poor urban milieu, Dmowski became a herald of integral nationalism in Poland that represented a drastic change in Polish political thought.

Regarding the nation, “a living social organism,” as the supreme value, and its interests as transcending those of the individual and humanity, Dmowski denounced the old noble nation for having compromised national interests. Furthering its own advantages, he wrote, it had promoted an eastern expansion which diluted and weakened the ethnic Polish core. By relying on Jews the szlachta had ruined towns and prevented the rise of a middle class. Tying the Polish cause to liberalism, revolution, or humanitarian sentiments, the Poles had engaged in foolhardy uprisings counting on the non-existing solidarity of peoples. Dmowski saw politics in terms of social Darwinism, as a struggle in which national egoism was the norm and survival the object. He wanted to mold a modern Polish nation out of its healthiest and strongest elements, namely the peasantry. In practice this meant waging a largely successful educational action of promoting national awareness. But it entailed a conflict with non-Polish nationalities: Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Belorussians, and Jews. The first three groups Dmowski sought to polonize, but according to him only individual Jews could be assimilated. Anti-Semitism, enhanced by the growing number of Jews in the Congress Kingdom and the economic competition with the Polish middle class, played an ever increasing role in Dmowski’s ideology.

Dmowski considered that on political grounds Polish and Jewish interests clashed. While to the national democrats Germany was the most dangerous enemy and Russia a potential ally, the Jews believed exactly the opposite. Dmowski pointed to the visible Jewish presence in the socialist movement that was increasing his anti-socialist stance. An important characteristic of the Polish League and the national democrats was that they did not look upon themselves as representing a political trend, but rather, the very basic interests of the nation. Hence their tendency toward political-ideological monopoly and intolerance of other programs.

The year 1893 saw the rise of another challenge to the existing political and socio-economic order, namely the appearance of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). Its most forceful personality was Jozef Pilsudski. An impoverished member of the Lithuanian gentry, brought up in the cult of the January uprising,

Pilsudski believed in the tradition of the old Commonwealth and saw Poland’s way to emancipation through the collapse of the tsarist empire. PPS combined Marxist tenets with Polish national objectives, and invoked Marx to claim that the role of socialism in Poland was to be a rampart of the progressive West against the reactionary and backward East. Pilsudski insisted that the social oppression of the Polish workers was intensified by the oppression of the whole nation. He regarded the industrial proletariat in much the same way as Polish radicals had once viewed the peasantry, namely as an indispensable force to carry on the old struggle for national liberation and social justice.

The program of PPS was rejected by the leftist, “internationalist” Social Democratic Party grouped around Rosa Luxemburg and Feliks Dzierzynski, which by 1918 would provide the nucleus for the Communist Party of Poland. The social democrats (SDKPiL) argued that for the Polish proletariat national independence (most unlikely in any case on economic grounds) would mean regression and not progress. The socialist fatherland was as real to Rosa Luxemburg as Poland was to Pilsudski. But what form and shape could a future Poland take? PPS came to favor a federalist approach that recognized the national rights of Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians and hoped for their voluntary union with the Poles. The growth of nationalism among these nations, however, was making such a program highly problematic.

The 1905 Revolution in the Russian empire brought the national democrats and the socialists in the Kingdom to an open confrontation. When at the height of the Russo-Japanese war in 1904 both Pilsudski and Dmowski had gone to Tokyo, the first argued for a Japanese-supported insurrection in the Congress Kingdom, the latter opposed it. Tokyo opted for caution. In the Kingdom the PPS fighting squads were already battling the Russians and engaging in semirevolutionary activities; the national democrats clashed with the socialists. Dmowski, insisting on the need for peace and order, tried to gain concessions from St Petersburg, both then, and subsequently at the Duma (parliament) when it was called into existence. By 1908 the policies of Dmowski had failed to bring any concessions from Russia, and the attempts to raise the Polish-Russian dialogue to an international level through the Neo-Slavist movement proved unsuccessful. Thwarted in another electoral bid to the Duma, Dmowski blamed the Jews and in 1912 launched a boycott of Jewish businesses. Feelings ran high.

Pilsudski’s increasingly insurrectionist-type actions produced a split in the PPS, and Pilsudski transferred his headquarters to Galicia. There he embarked on the preparation of a Polish military force that could show the Polish flag in the international war which to many seemed imminent. By necessity this force would have to be on the Austrian side, contrary to Dmowski’s view, which had put the place of the Poles on the side of France and Russia against Germany and Austria.

Austrian Galicia witnessed a wave of emigres from Russian Poland after the 1905 Revolution. They colored the political life of the province. On an earlier date Dmowski had also operated from this Polish Piedmont. The rule of Galician conservatives was constantly challenged from the right and the left. The earlier-mentioned electoral reforms in the monarchy did not apply to local Galician elections, which explains why the conservatives could still maintain themselves in power. But the fifth curia and then universal male suffrage helped the growth of the Social Democratic Party of Galicia, of national democrats and later of the peasant party, “Piast,” and of similar groupings on the Ukrainian side. The Ukrainian-Polish tension grew and in 1908 resulted in the assassination of the Polish viceroy. Attempts to achieve some form of compromise were interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War.

Shifting one’s sights, Prussian Poland continued its economic progress, especially as Chancellor Caprivi’s government gave the Poles a respite which allowed them to strengthen their national position. But the germanization onslaught continued and it gained impetus with the German militant organization known as Hakate (HKT). Children at Wreschen (Wrzesnia) who refused to say the Lord’s Prayer in German were flogged; land expropriations occurred under flimsy pretexts. No wonder that the local Poles espoused the national democratic program, and the Silesian leader W. Korfanty joined the National League.

Although the partition borders had deepened division among Poles and even affected their mentality, Polish culture continued to be the surest and strongest national link. Poles everywhere were under the spell of the historic novels of Sienkiewicz, and saw their past through the eyes of the Galician painter Jan Matejko. Modernism in the “Young Poland” version added new elements to national expression. Whether it was the plays of S. Wyspianski or the works of S. Zeromski tinged with social radicalism, they all had a ringing national message. The reality of peasant life was masterfully represented by W. Reymont. Literary and art critics, journalists, prominent scholars, to mention only the historian S. Askenazy, or great musicians like the virtuoso I. J. Paderewski, contributed to the maintenance of high levels of Polish culture.