AUSTRIA

In Austria the property-based suffrage ensured that the German liberal element predominated in the new Reichsrat for the first 12 years of the Dualist period. Germans were also initially dominant in the diets of both the Austrian and Bohemian crownlands. The exception was Galicia, where Polish landowners were still the wealthiest class and a sort of sub-Compromise was reached, whereby this province was effectively under Polish control. The Galician Diet was dominated by the szlachta and Polish was the language of administration, the judiciary and secondary education, to the outrage of the Ruthenes. In return the Polish faction in the Reichsrat was willing to support virtually any government. Other nationalities, however, felt excluded. The Czechs in particular denounced the Ausgleich and refused to attend the Reichsrat which ratified it; their demand for a separate settlement for the Bohemian crownlands and a more representative franchise was initially ignored by the emperor. In protest, not only Czechs but also Italians refused to send delegates to the Reichsrat until the late 1870s.

Austrian ministers-president were uniformly aristocrats, but the bulk of their supporters in the Reichsrat were from the urban middle class. They combined an assumption of the superiority of German culture with a genuine commitment to building a modern society based on economic freedom and the rule of law. Unlike in Hungary, Austrian governments were not responsible to parliament but to the emperor. By a series of supplements to the Basic Law of 1867, the Reichsrat was given the power to initiate legislation, and civil liberties such as the right to association, freedom of the press and judicial independence were enacted, with a special constitutional court to invigilate their infringement; this court became one of the levers available to national minorities for gaining fairer treatment.5 All religions were declared equal in status by an act of 1868, which gave Jews among others civil rights, civil marriage was relegalised and the Church's role in the school system limited. There was a burst of economic growth, including much new railway construction, which was halted only by the stock market crash of 1873.

The only interlude in this pattern of German dominance was in 1871, when Francis Joseph, disturbed at the enthusiasm of many Austrian Germans for the German cause in the Franco-Prussian War, briefly contemplated restructuring the Monarchy to give greater voice to Slavs, especially the Czechs. Negotiations began for a 'Czech Compromise', whereby the Bohemian crownlands would enjoy the same autonomy as Hungary. These proposals, however, raised such a storm of protest not just among Austrian Germans, but also on the part of the Hungarian government, that Francis Joseph backed down. This one effort between 1867 and 1918 to reconfigure the Monarchy failed, and non-German and non-Hungarian opinion was further alienated.

German liberal dominance was restored until 1879; yet the drawbacks of this dominance were increasingly apparent. Not only did most non-Germans continue to feel excluded from the system, but the decade-long fallout from the 1873 crash, which bankrupted many firms and caused widespread unemployment, did much to discredit liberalism itself and to split the Austrian Germans politically. The disenfranchised working class turned increasingly towards socialism, a trend culminating in the founding of a Social Democratic Party in 1888. The lower middle class also deplored the evils of capitalism, but turned instead to Christian Socialism, a movement which stressed the need for social justice based on Catholicism but which also specifically associated liberalism with Jewish influence. There was a marked rise in anti-Semitic prejudice in the 1870s, fuelled by an influx of Jews from the eastern provinces following emancipation, and by the increased prominence of Jews in the professions and economic life, including the financial market. Finally, a small but violently vocal minority of Austrian Germans embraced Pan-Germanism: these German nationalists (and anti-Semites) argued for the dissolution of the Monarchy and the incorporation of its German population in the new German Empire.

Francis Joseph broke decisively with the German liberals in 1879 when they objected to the occupation of Bosnia—Hercegovina, on the ground that it upset the ethnic balance of the Monarchy still further. Incensed at this interference in his exclusive domain of foreign affairs, the emperor found an acceptable replacement in Count Eduard Taaffe. Taaffe's government, nicknamed the 'Iron Ring' because of its supposed durability, lasted in fact for 14 years. It rested on an assortment of conservative, clericalist Germans, landowners and non-German minority parties. The Poles were happy to support Taaffe in return for a continued free rein in Galicia. Most eye-catchingly, however, the Czechs were brought into the magic circle of government, much to the disgust of many Austrian Germans, and Czech deputies resumed attendance at the Reichsrat.

The Iron Ring was founded on a calculated strategy of securing the loyalty of the Monarchy's Slavs by judicious concessions in matters relating to education, language rights and, crucially, the suffrage. The paradox of this was that, necessary as such concessions were, they nevertheless made nationality problems worse. Austrian Germans found it hard to accept a situation where they were no longer the dominant element in the state, while among Czechs in particular the concessions heightened nationalism as well as a sense of grievance at the immutability of Dualism. And all the while the demographic balance was shifting steadily in favour of the non-German nationalities, in that economic development was increasing the number of educated and propertied non-Germans, who were likely to qualify for the vote even without suffrage reform.

The trend was accelerated in 1880, when the Austrian census, for the first time, asked individuals to declare their language of daily use; regardless of ethnicity, this had the effect of crudely forcing people into one or another 'national' category.6 In addition, language ordinances for Bohemia and Moravia required all administrative and judicial decisions to be in the language of the petitioner, while criminal trials had to be in the language of the accused. The practical effect of this was to give an advantage in gaining civil service employment to Czechs, who were more likely to be bilingual. The numbers of non-Germans in the provincial and imperial bureaucracy started climbing. There was also an increase in the number of schools founded for national minorities generally. Most revolutionary was the suffrage reform of 1882, which halved the property qualification for town dwellers and thus enfranchised large numbers of non-Germans, with a consequent jump in the number of non-German deputies in the Reichsrat. The effect was felt soonest in provincial diets: in the Bohemian Diet elections of 1883 the majority swung decisively from Germans to Czechs.

Bohemian Germans in protest boycotted the Diet from 1886 to 1890, at which point a conference of moderate Czechs and Germans agreed to Czech-language schooling in any community with 40 or more Czech children and the division of Bohemia along language lines into separate administrative and judicial areas. Neither side, however, really spoke for its respective community. Most Czech nationalists refused to countenance the division of historic Bohemia and obstructed the bill physically in the Diet, leading to its suspension. In the Reichsrat elections of 1891 the Young Czechs supplanted the older moderate Czechs, threatening the stability of the Iron Ring itself. Taaffe tried to neuter the effects of nationalism in 1893 by persuading Francis Joseph to introduce a bill for universal manhood suffrage. This proved too much for Taaffe's conservative supporters and the Iron Ring disintegrated.

The following decade and a half was a period of mounting nationalist cacophony and parliamentary paralysis, in which government both provincially and centrally was often forced to suspend diet or Reichsrat and rule by emergency decree. In 1896 the Polish Count Kazimir Badeni succeeded in passing a complicated system of indirect suffrage, and the elections held on this basis in March 1897 returned a kaleidoscope of 25 parties to the Reichsrat, which made government more than ever dependent on the votes of the Czechs. To keep the latter sweet, Badeni introduced new language ordinances for Bohemia and Moravia, but designed to be applicable elsewhere. By these all civil servants were to be fully bilingual by 1901, and plaintiffs in the courts were to be entitled to proceedings in their own language at all levels.

The Badeni language ordinances unleashed a tempest of nationality conflict. Germans everywhere demonstrated violently against the legislation and were met with equally violent Czech counter-demonstrations. German obstruction led to the prorogation of the Reichsrat and mass protests on the street. Francis Joseph at this point dismissed Badeni in favour of Baron Paul von Gautsch. A compromise proposed by Gautsch, whereby Bohemia and Moravia would be divided into three administrative zones depending on which language, or neither, was dominant, was attacked by the Czechs as an unacceptable weakening of the 'historic' Czech crownlands. A succession of ministries governed by decree into the new century, scrapping the Badeni ordinances on the way but suffering constant Czech obstruction as a result. This was the period in which even foreign observers began to wonder how long the Monarchy could survive such stress.

In January 1900 Francis Joseph appointed as minister-president Ernest von Koerber, a bureaucrat specialising in commercial and transport matters. Koerber's novel approach to nationality problems was to attempt to nullify them by economic development, since 'our productive activity has been greatly impeded and has suffered grievously from the consequences of the continuing nationality strife'.7 Modernisation itself, it was hoped, would give all the nationalities a common, uniting interest. The government initiated a major programme of railway building, drafted plans for an extension of the canal network and, above all, invested heavily in railway connections from the interior of the Monarchy to Trieste, its principal seaport. Despite this stimulus, and the maintenance of industrial production artificially through high tariff barriers, the economy remained depressed. Worse, economic development showed no sign of allaying acrimony between the nationalities. The general election of 1901 returned an even greater number of nationalist Czechs and Pan-Germans. Relations in Galicia between the Polish elite and the Ruthenes remained poisonous. Conflict in Trieste between Italians and Germans over Italian-language education facilities led to riots, causing Koerber to resign late in 1904.

Throughout 1905 Francis Joseph, the former neo-absolutist, pondered the strategy of defusing nationality problems by extending the suffrage. The emperor's willingness to contemplate such a radical step was increased by the constitutional crisis in Hungary (see below) and by the revolutionary events of that year in Russia, where even the tsar was forced to concede a popularly elected Duma. In 1906 the government of Baron Max von Beck introduced a suffrage bill enfranchising virtually all adult males. The bill was signed into law by the emperor in January 1907.

The Reichsrat elected under the new dispensation in May 1907 was radically different in composition. Out of the 516 seats, each nationality was allotted a fixed number: Germans, 233; Czechs, 107; Poles, 82; Ruthenes, 33; Slovenes, 24; Italians, 19; Serbs and Croats, 13; and Romanians, 5. What was novel was the type of parties represented: explicitly nationalist parties were in fact severely reduced in strength, with a corresponding increase in the size of socially based parties. Thus the Czech nationalists and Pan-Germans shrank dramatically, while the biggest groups were the Christian Socialists, the German Clericals, the Social Democrats and the Czech Agrarians. Shared nationality was certainly no guarantee against party division: the Polish deputies were distributed among five different factions, while Ruthenes were split between so-called Ukrainophiles and Russophiles.

More democratic representation nevertheless did not make Austria any easier to govern. Beck was forced to resign in 1908 when his criticism of the annexation of Bosnia incurred the wrath of Francis Joseph, but there was no let-up of nationality disputes: Czechs versus Germans, Germans against Italians, Italians against Slovenes. Elections in 1911 produced a pandemonium of factions, and the last peacetime government, under Count Karl Sturgkh, was managed largely by ignoring parliament or doing without it entirely. As a result the Austrian representative assembly was not even sitting when, in July 1914, the Monarchy undertook the fateful step of going to war.

Numerous observers in the last decades before the war speculated as to whether the Habsburg Monarchy was doomed. Parliamentary government in the Austrian half was certainly not a success, and most of the nationalities were in some way disaffected. Yet, with the exception of the Italians, whose ambitions of joining Italy were increasingly open by 1914, no nationalities in the Austrian part of the Monarchy actively sought independence, since the only circumstance that could make such an option even conceivable, the Monarchy's dissolution, was itself almost unthinkable. It took the solvent of a world war for the unimaginable to become practicable.