The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  In the field of defence, the law laid down that ‘all questions relating to the unitary command, control and internal organization of the whole army, and consequently also of the Hungarian army, qua constituent part of the whole army, are recognized as falling within the competence of His Majesty’. But again as in the old days, the Parliament was competent for voting the intake of recruits, and for questions relating to recruiting, quartering and supply.

  Any Parliamentary discussion of the business of these portfolios was to be conducted through equal ‘Delegations’ of the two Parliaments, meeting separately and exchanging views by notes; if exchanges of notes failed to bring about agreement, they met and the point was decided by majority vote; in the event of a deadlock, the Monarch decided. The Delegations had to settle the total budgetary expenditure on the ‘common’ portfolios, and also what proportion thereof each half of the Monarchy should bear. This figure was to be re-discussed after ten years. When the sums had been agreed, each half of the Monarchy voted and collected the required taxes for itself.

  The Law also admitted that there were certain other questions on which the Pragmatic Sanction did not impose unity, but which could nevertheless be usefully treated by common agreement and on identical principles. These included the customs and commercial policy of the Monarchy, credit and currency, weights and measures, indirect taxation and communications of interest to both halves of the Monarchy. Agreements reached on these points were, again, to be reconsidered decennially.

  On all other points Hungary was, as the Laws of 1722–3 and 1790 provided, to be ruled exclusively by her own laws, as agreed between the King and the Parliament. The form of the latter was that given to it by the April Laws, and the powers of the Monarch vis-à-vis Parliament represented a modernization of those enjoyed by his predecessors before 1848. They were strictly limited in certain important respects. All enactments by the Monarch had to bear the counter-signature of the ‘responsible’ Minister. He was bound to rule ‘in agreement’ with Parliament, and did not even possess a legal veto on legislation duly enacted, although this gap was made good soon after by a conventional right conceded him by Andrássy to give or refuse ‘preliminary sanction’ to a Bill before it was introduced at all. He had the right to appoint the Minister President of his choice: there was no provision limiting his discretion in this respect, and it was his confidence, not that of Parliament, that the Minister President had to possess, so that he was entitled to retain a Minister President in office even in face of an adverse Parliamentary vote. He could also convoke, prorogue or dissolve Parliament at will. He could not, however, leave it in absentia indefinitely, for the annual budget had to come before Parliament and be voted by it, and the Hungarian Constitution, unlike the Stadion Constitution, the February Patent or the Austrian Law of 1867, contained no emergency provision enabling him to rule by Order in Council.154 The office of Palatine was declared to be ‘in suspense’ until agreement should have been reached on the legal position of its holder.

  Belcredi’s promise to the Landtage of the Narrower Reichsrat had now to be honoured. The new Landtag elections had brought no change in Carniola, but in Bohemia and Moravia influence brought to bear largely by the Emperor himself155 on the Great Landlords’ Curiae had changed the majorities in them and consequently in the Landtage as a whole, producing German majorities in them. When the Reichsrat met, on 20 May, the ‘German Left’, whose various fractions had managed to re-combine under the common nomenclature of ‘Party of the Constitution’, or ‘Constitutional Left’,156 numbered 118 Deputies, against only seventy-one Federalists and eleven German Clericals,157 and of the Federalists, not only were the Poles committed to vote for the Government on the Hungarian settlement, but the fourteen Czechs from Bohemia were absent: in April Palacký and Rieger had led a great deputation of Czechs158 on a ‘pilgrimage to Moscow’,159 where they made extravagant speeches, in a tone which was far more Pan-Slav than Austro-Slav, hailing Russia as ‘the rising sun of the Slavs’ – thereby, of course, giving their enemies a powerful handle against them, and especially incensing the Poles, whose kinsmen in Russian Poland were groaning under the reprisals which had followed the defeat of the 1863 revolution. On their return, the Czech Deputies adopted the policy, which they followed for the next twelve years, of boycotting the Reichsrat.

  The German centralists were still unhappy about ceding their control over Hungary, but they were not prepared to risk a federal majority in Cis-Leithania, and more of the Left was now of the Autonomists’ view. After all, it was 1849 that had been the novelty, not 1861. Beust had thus a reasonably safe majority for the Compromise, although in the event he hardly called on it. For the Hungarians were now maintaining that Law XII was a bilateral contract between the King of Hungary and the Hungarian nation: no other party had been entitled to be consulted while it was being negotiated, and for validity, once negotiated, it required nothing more than ratification by the King (except, indeed, for those of its provisions which envisaged action by Parliamentary representatives of Austria). Beust had become converted to this view, and accordingly proceeded by one of those quadratures of the circle so common in Austrian history. Francis Joseph informed the Reichsrat in the Speech from the Throne that a ‘satisfactory agreement’ had been concluded with Hungary, to which ‘he hoped that the Reichsrat would not refuse its assent’. The agreement was, however, presented to the Reichsrat only after Francis Joseph had ratified Law XII, and as a fait accompli.

  Reluctant, but not at that stage prepared to face a collision with the Crown, the Reichsrat then appointed representatives to negotiate the various ‘common’ questions with Hungary. It was agreed in November that the common services should be financed in the first instance out of the yield of the joint Customs duties, the residue being made up by Austria and Hungary in the proportions of 70% to 30%. For the first period, the Monarchy was to constitute a Customs Unit (Zolleinheit) with a single commercial policy; the other questions of common interest were to be regulated on identical principles. The old crux of the national debt was the object of prolonged wranglings; finally, the Hungarians, while not admitting any legal liability, consented as an act of grace to pay a fixed annual contribution of twenty-nine million gulden towards the annual service of the debt, then running at 122 m.g., and 1,150,000 gulden annually towards its amortization.

  The ‘Delegations’ were to consist of 60 representatives of each body (20 from each Upper, and 40 from each Lower, House), meeting in Vienna and Budapest in alternate years.

  On 21 December the Reichsrat adopted the laws embodying these arrangements. It did so with an ill enough grace. Skene, the German Centralist leader, described the laws as ‘Austria’s domestic Königgrätz’. From outside the House, the Czechs did not conceal their passionate dislike of the Dualist system. The aged Palacký wrote a Jeremiad in which he prophesied that Dualism would bring about the end of the Monarchy; he comforted himself with the reflection that ‘we Slavs were here before Austria, and we shall be here after it’.

  The Monarch now formally appointed the three ‘common’ Ministers: Beust, Foreign Affairs; von Becke, Finance; John, War.161

  Even including the Austrian legislation connected with it, the central settlement with Hungary formed only a part of the great mass of legislation of the period. Further laws were needed in Hungary to fill in gaps left in Law XII; the Reichsrat had to have its counterpart to that instrument, and the new constitutional picture necessitated some readjustments of the central machinery of the Monarchy. Some of these pieces of work were not completed until after several years, but it will be convenient to describe at this point all of them which can fairly be taken as forming integral parts of the great general settlement of which Law XII was the first-fruit.

  That Law itself contained two points, both connected with the Army, over which difficulties arose which it took some years to settle. The military leaders in Vienna objected to the phrase in the Law which spoke of ‘the Hungarian Army, qua constituent part of th
e whole Army’161 as breaching the unity of the defence forces. The Hungarian Left insisted on them, precisely for that reason, and tried to interpret them as authorizing the establishment of a separate Hungarian Army, controlled, commanded and organized by the Crown, but using Hungarian badges and Magyar as the language of service and command.162 This conflict was resolved in 1868 by a compromise: the full central regime, with the German languages of service and command, was to be applied to all the regular armed forces, including the Hungarian units of them; but each half of the Monarchy was to have a second-line force, known in Austria as the Landwehr and in Hungary as the Honvédség, composed of infantry and cavalry only. In these, the indigenous language of command was to be used (in Hungary this was at once made Magyar),163 and these two forces were under Ministers of National Defence, who also represented the Crown in putting the votes for them to the Parliaments.

  The higher Viennese military circles, led by the Archduke Albrecht,164 also fought a stubborn rearguard action against the ‘provincialization’ of the Military Frontier, and it took all Andrássy’s eloquence to convince Francis Joseph that it would be a breach of faith to keep the Frontier under its old dispensation. Even after the Monarch had given way in principle, the provincialization was carried through only in stages, the last of which (the complete introduction of the regular Hungarian tax system) was not completed until 1886. It was, incidentally, very unpopular among the Frontiersmen themselves and in October 1871 two crack-brained adherents of Starčević – Kvaternik and Ljudevit Bach – collected some hundreds of armed Frontiersmen and tried to incite the inhabitants of the Lika – always a storm-centre – into a rebellion which was to culminate in the establishment of a fantastic Southern Slav State. The rising was, indeed, easily and quickly put down, and its chief effect was to discredit the Croat extremists.165

  Of the subsidiary or consequential arrangements in Hungary necessitated by the Compromise, the main step with regard to Transylvania had already been taken when it had de facto incorporated itself in Hungary in December 1866. Its separate status was formally abolished in 1868 (under Law XLIII of that year); the steps taken later to complete its integration are described elsewhere.166 The Compromise itself should have included a law embodying a new Hungaro-Croat settlement, but it had not proved possible to achieve this in time. After the dissolution of the Sabor, the Croats had still refused to approach Pest, and attempts by the Hungarians, and even by Francis Joseph himself, to move them had failed. In May they sent another petition to Vienna; thereupon the King dissolved the Sabor.

  Croatia was not even represented officially at the Coronation.167 Immediately after this, however, the Ban resigned and Andrássy appointed Baron Levin Rauch, the leader of the ‘Magyarone’ Party in Croatia, to succeed him. Rauch promulgated a new electoral law, ordered new elections, and exercised such effective administrative pressure at these as to secure a substantial Magyarone majority.168 The diminished Opposition withdrew from the Sabor, and the majority dropped the idea of trialism and reopened negotiations. Agreement was reached in September 1868. This Nagodba (Hungarice, Law XXX of 1868) declared Hungary and Croatia-Slavonia-Dalmatia to constitute ‘one and the same State complex’, whence it followed that they had the same representation, legislature and executive in respect of all affairs common to the Lands of the Hungarian Crown and the other territories of the Dynasty: Croatia was therefore to be proportionately represented on the Delegations, etc. Questions left to Hungary as interna under the Austro-Hungarian Compromise were again divided into ‘common’ Hungaro-Croat affairs and Croat interna. The former included taxation, credit and currency, commercial policy and communications of interest to both countries (broadly the subjects treated as ‘pragmatic’ under the Austro-Hungarian Compromise). When these matters were under discussion in the Hungarian Parliament, Croat Deputies (to the number of forty)169 attended that body; they were allowed to speak in Croat. A Croat Minister without Portfolio represented Croatia’s interests in these fields in the Hungarian Government. All other questions were Croat interna, and in respect of them Croatia was completely autonomous, although the value of her independence was reduced by the fact that the Ban, who was the head of the Croat ‘autonomous provincial Government’, was, while responsible to the Croat Diet, yet appointed by the Crown on the proposal of the Hungarian Minister President. The official language in Croatia was solely Croat.

  The ratio of contributions towards common expenditure was generous towards Croatia, which was allowed to retain forty-five per cent of the yield of her taxes for her own interna. Territorially, Hungary gave up her hopeless claim to Slavonia, but retained the Muraköz. The Hungarian text declared Fiume (in which the Hungarian administration had already been installed) a corpus separatum of the Hungarian Crown, whose future status would have to be regulated by negotiation between Hungary, Croatia and Fiume itself; the Croat text simply stated that agreement on this question could not be reached.170 In the event, the town remained attached to Hungary.

  As regards Dalmatia, Francis Joseph announced that it could be incorporated in the Triune Kingdom only if its Landtag voted to that effect. This, under the conditions of the day, was tantamount to a refusal, for the Italians, tiny minority as they were in Dalmatia, still constituted the majority in its Landtag.171

  After reassembling at the end of 1865, the Diet had appointed another Committee, again under the presidency of Eötvös, to resume the interrupted preparation of a Nationalities Law. This time there were no Slovak nationalists on the Committee (none had been returned to the Diet in the 1865 elections172), but it now contained representatives of the Roumanians and Saxons from Transylvania, as well as Serbs from the Voivodina, so that the opponents of the politically unitary State were not lacking, and they fought their battles tenaciously, and sometimes bitterly enough. But they were still in a minority compared with the Magyars and the less extreme representatives of the Nationalities who sided with the latter,173 and were reduced in the end to what amounted to gestures of protest; the two Serbs and a Roumanian laid their own Nationalities Bill before Parliament174 (which rejected it by an enormous majority), while the Slovak nationalists, unable, owing to their lack of representation in Parliament, to follow this example, announced in their Press that the Thurócz Szent Martón memorandum remained their programme.

  The majority of the Committee, however, simply took the 1861 report for its starting-point, and proposed such amendments or additions to that document as it thought advisable.

  The Committee was genuinely anxious (as was the Diet as a whole) to reach an acceptable settlement with the Nationalities, and no attempt was made to go back on the cardinal principle of the international nature of the Hungarian ‘political nation’ and the equality in principle of its components. Nor did the changes in the operative clauses of the Bill place further restrictions on the use of non-Magyar languages. These, outside the addition of some paragraphs regulating linguistic usage in Courts of law175 which followed the general pattern of linguistically Magyar top-level services with provision for the use of other languages on lower levels, were chiefly in the direction of tidying up and introducing greater precision, and in some cases were even more generous than the 1861 draft: thus the Minister of Education, who prescribed the language to be used in State schools, was bound, not only, as in the 1861 draft, ‘to take into account the languages in use in the district of the school in question’, but ‘to ensure that citizens living together in considerable numbers, of whatever nationality, shall be able to obtain instruction locally in their mother-tongue, up to the point at which higher academic instruction begins’.

  There was, however, one point on which the Diet insisted: that the Nationalities, as such, could be allowed no corporate recognition whatever. It rejected a proposal made by Eötvös himself to allow the ‘national’ districts to form administrative units, and it eliminated from the draft all wording which seemed to confer any corporate rights on the Nationalities: for example, while the 1861 draft had declare
d ‘every denomination and nationality’ free to set up secondary and higher schools, its successor conferred that right on ‘individual citizens, communes, churches and congregations of whatever nationality’. As the wording of Eötvös’s ‘principles’ had been unsafe in this respect, Deák provided the Law with a preamble which, while reaffirming in lapidary form the rest of the ‘principles’, avoided this danger. This ran:

  Since, according to the basic principles of the Constitution, all citizens of Hungary constitute a single nation, the indivisible, unitary Hungarian nation,176 of which every citizen, to whatever nationality (nemzetiség) he belongs, is equally a member: and since this equality can be qualified by special regulations only in respect of the official use of the different languages current in the country,177 and only in so far as is necessitated by the unity of the country, the practical possibilities of government and administration and the claims of the administration of exact justice: while the complete equality of rights of all citizens remains intact in every other respect, the following rules will serve as guidance in respect of the official use of the various languages.