In the broadest sense, the political development of East European societies after the mid-nineteenth century was conditioned by two factors. Firstly, the increasing social variegation just described was reflected in the type of political aspirations and organisations that emerged. Secondly, the adoption of constitutional government by so many states in the region, however limited this was in some instances, meant that for the first time there was a forum within which political conflict could be worked out, albeit on the whole unsatisfactorily.
'Constitution' was a word capable of differing interpretations. In the sense of a decree or other legislative instrument specifically binding a ruler to certain norms of behaviour, however, constitutions were gaining ground. Prussia after 1848, and subsequently the German Empire from 1871, the two halves of the Habsburg Monarchy after 1867, and the Balkan states as they achieved autonomy or independence were all constitutional monarchies. The Ottoman sultan in 1876 felt obliged to grant a constitution, but then promptly annulled it; its restoration became one of the principal aims of the succeeding generation of reformers who finally seized power in 1908. Even the Russian autocracy experimented with local self-government in the 1860s and 1870s, and in 1905 Nicholas II was forced to concede the October Manifesto, which bound him at least in theory to govern with the assistance of representative institutions.
'Representative', however, was another term with elastic connotations. Initially most assemblies were elected on an extremely narrow franchise determined by property qualifications, like the notorious three-class suffrage in Prussia, which gave most representation to the wealthiest elite, the Junkers. Similar restrictions applied in the Habsburg Monarchy. In the Balkan states the system was ostensibly liberal, with the vote exercised by all male taxpayers or, in the case of the Bulgarian constitution of 1879, universal manhood suffrage. Yet electorates were all too easy to manipulate through corruption, outright intimidation or the manipulation of citizenship rights, as with Romania's Jews and Muslims, disenfranchised because they were not Christians. Some Balkan states, like Serbia, had several constitutions, depending on how often the ruler felt obliged to change the goalposts or how many revolutions there were. Nevertheless, within this inadequate and unsatisfactory framework, politics after a fashion was still possible, as was progressive change. In the 'Austrian' half of the Habsburg Monarchy, the franchise was widened in the 1880s and then, to general astonishment, extended to universal manhood suffrage in 1907. Serbia returned to democratic politics in 1903, admittedly as a result of a bloody palace coup.
The constitutional spaces in so many polities, and the political spectrum which filled them, reflected the balance of power in each society. Outside the Balkans the landowning aristocracy and gentry remained the dominant social class, and in Prussia and Hungary the most powerful political one as well. The landowners' interest in high protective tariffs against grain imports, for instance, exerted a baleful influence in Prussia and Hungary, and by extension on relations with other powers. The emerging middle class, by contrast, was less sure of its ground, and politically the heyday of liberal parties in both 'Austria' and the German Empire was confined to the period 1867—79. Socially conservative, liberals feared the eruption of the lower classes and did what they could to impede their enfranchisement; they also tended to defer to the prevailing aristocratic ethos of their societies and were susceptible to the lure of ennoblement.
Further down the social ladder, the evils of rapid urbanisation and the uncertainties of the new industrialism made the lower middle class and artisans susceptible to calls for social welfare legislation, as well as a new, more negative type of politics which blamed liberal capitalism itself, but also Jews and national minorities for society's problems. For the small but concentrated factory proletariat, meanwhile, the nostrum was initially self-help organisations such as trades unions and cooperatives, but increasingly, from the 1880s, Marxist socialist parties committed, in theory, to a revolutionary overthrowing of the social and political order. In the countryside, the peasant masses' politics were, to begin with, vaguely socialist as well. Marxism, however, was a political philosophy inimical to peasants, considering them to be inherently capitalist because of their desire to farm their own land. The alternative, for peasants, was 'populism', a world view with an emphasis on cooperativism in the formation of credit associations and land banks, but conservative in social values, strongly religious, hostile to the urban or gentry elite and convinced that the peasant was the true embodiment of the nation. The appearance of populist parties by the end of the century was a sign that nationalism had indeed become a mass political phenomenon, extending even to the peasantry.
Almost everywhere, in this period, nationalism became the common currency of politics, gradually spreading to something like a mass audience. In the Habsburg Monarchy the very act of creating representative institutions meant that, from the start, and even with a limited franchise, the Austrian Reichsrat and provincial diets contained parties representing national minorities; with the growth of these minorities' middle classes their representation also grew. Political discourse focused on such issues as educational provision and the right to administrative and judicial decisions in one's own language, as well as access to employment in the state bureaucracy. In Hungary it was rather the almost complete absence of minority representation in parliament, thanks to the Hungarian elite's control of the electoral machine, which was the overriding grievance. In Germany, although Polish representation in the Prussian Diet was artificially limited, at federal level the Polish faction in the Reichstag complained bitterly about this situation for decades. In the Balkan states governments were concerned from the first with creating a mass loyalty to the idea of the nation which had hitherto been impossible, through such instruments as the educational system, a conscript army and the constant iteration of the goal of liberating fellow nationals still under Ottoman rule. Even those 'stateless' nations still subsumed within the Ottoman and Russian empires developed a sense of themselves as nations in this period, sometimes in isolation, sometimes under the influence of contact with fellow nationals across the border.
I t would be a mistake, however, to see all political developments in this period through a nationalist prism. Not only did the dynasties and political institutions of multinational empires command at least a residual loyalty that our modern preoccupation with nationalism perhaps overlooks, but it is precisely in this period that, in response to the challenge of nationalism, more conscious efforts were made to counter nationalism's appeal. With regard to the Habsburg Monarchy, for instance, recent research has sought to 'recapture the contours of a non-nationalised world' by showing that not everyone shared the nationalist agenda.5 It is even argued that the 'Austrian' half of the
Monarchy offered 'a powerful example of modern state building not linked to nation building'.6 The imperial Russian government, increasingly alive to nationalism's disruptive potential, launched a campaign of 'Russification' which, while arguably a failure, was undoubtedly more about fostering a sense of imperial, or supranational, identity that it was about turning non-Russians into Russians in an ethnic sense. Increasingly, as Russia entered the twentieth century, leaders were preoccupied with the need to emphasise the central role of the Russian nation, without at the same time disbanding the empire.7 And we now know that the Ottoman state, from mid-century, was quite active in promoting a specifically Muslim but also Ottoman identity through the educational system, a project which was as much about responding to the perceived threat of Westernisation as it was a response to nationalism.8
World History
