On the other hand, Taaffe found it fairly easy to get promises of support from the Poles, and from the Clericals and most of the Feudals.23 This would still have been too little for a secure majority, but an important change was coming about in Czech politics.
Some years before a malcontent group had come into being in Prague which in 187424 had constituted themselves as a ‘Young Czech Party’, under the leadership of Dr Skladkovsky25 and the brothers Eduard and Julius Gregr. The Young Czechs were much more radical than the Old on social issues, and strongly anti-clerical. In these respects their tenets were so similar to those of the German Liberals that the latter, in their innocence, actually thought of them as potential allies. This was a disastrous illusion; but it was a fact that the Young Czechs disapproved of their elders’ alliance with the Feudal Landowners and the Clericals.
Another illusion of the Germans’, fostered by the fact that in 1875 Eduard Gregr had written in a pamphlet that ‘the Bohemian State Rights, as then formulated, were not worth a pipe of tobacco’, was that the Young Czechs were nationally less chauvinistic than their elders. The reverse was the truth, and even on the point of State Rights the Young Czechs, when they got the chance, opened their mouths even wider than the Old.26 But they did hold, as a point of tactics, that it was unprofitable for the Czechs to absent themselves from the Reichsrat, on the theoretical ground that it was not legally competent to legislate for Bohemia; in practice, this was simply playing into the Germans’ hands. Since their constitution as a Party they had been urging that the Czechs should return to the Reichsrat, and under pressure from them, which was strong (for, although as yet hardly represented in the Landtag, they already had a big following in Bohemia27), the Czech leaders now intimated to Taaffe their willingness to come to Vienna, on terms.
The negotiations did not go easily, partly because of Francis Joseph’s mistrust of the Czech nationalists, especially the Young Czechs,28 but eventually the Czechs agreed to return to Vienna if they received adequate administrative and cultural concessions. When their terms had been agreed (although not published), elections were held (July 1879) which gave a majority, although a small one, for the Right29 and the Emperor appointed Taaffe Minister President.
Even this did not signify an abrupt or immediate change of front, for Taaffe announced his Government as standing ‘above the Parties’, and as first composed it included three, if not four, men who ranked as German Liberals,30 and the only immediate concession to the Czechs was the appointment of one of them (Prazak, incidentally, a Moravian) as Minister without Portfolio in charge of Czech interests. But the Germans accepting portfolios had done so as individuals, not as representatives of their Party, which had not even been consulted when the appointments were made and did not regard them as committing it to support of the Government;31 while Taaffe, for his part, did not regard them as binding him to consult the Party’s wishes. Between 1880 and 1882 the Czechs’ bill was accordingly honoured in the form of three enactments. The first, dated 19 April 1880, and itself the work of the German, Stremayr, was a new set of language decrees for Bohemia and Moravia, which laid down that all State administrative and judicial officials, in any part of either Land, were bound to use the language employed by the ‘party’ with whom they were dealing, either orally or in writing. Officials of these services had to address autonomous bodies in the language of the latter. The second modified the franchise to the Bohemian Landtag in such fashion as to increase the representation of the Czechs in the First Curia, which was now to elect its representatives by constituencies, instead of en bloc, and also in the Chambers of Commerce. The third divided the ancient University of Prague into two entirely distinct foundations, one Czech and the other German.
It was difficult to deny the justice of the second and third of these concessions (although the Germans managed to do so). Even the first did not put Czech on a full equality with German, which it left as the language of inner service. But it did create equality for the outer service, and that for the whole of each Land, so that any official in it, even if his district was one inhabited exclusively by one of its nationalities only, was, in theory, required to know both languages. The Germans protested furiously, and when Taaffe refused to give way, Stremayr, Horst, Chertek and Korb-Weidenheim, tired of being abused as traitors, left the Government. The Liberal Party now declared itself to be ‘Oppositional’, leaving as ‘Government Parties’ what came to be known as the ‘Iron Ring’ of Feudalists, Clericals and Slavs. The vacant Ministerial posts were filled accordingly. A Pole (Dunajewski) became Finance Minister, Prazak took over Justice, and two non-Party men (Baron Pino and Count Welter von Welfersheimb) became Ministers of Commerce and Defence respectively.
*
This was the beginning of the ‘Taaffe Era’, which was destined to last until 1893, so that Taaffe holds the record of having kept going at the head of Austrian affairs longer than anyone since Metternich and Kolowrat before him, and much longer than anyone after him. But he did so because his government was, at bottom, not Parliamentary. It was supported by the ‘Iron Ring’, and in internal affairs, paid, within limits, deference to the wishes and interests of the parties which formed the Parliamentary ‘majority’. Thus, generally speaking, agrarian interests were favoured rather than industrial, clerical more than free-thinking Liberal, Slav more than German. But it must be emphasized that the parties of the ‘Iron Ring’ were not the masters of Austria even to the extent that the Liberals had been. Taaffe was not their servant, but the Emperor’s: so he described himself, and this was why Francis Joseph, who also saw his regime in that light,32 gave him his confidence for so long. And his internal policy was far from being one-sided, as the Germans, for whom not ruling with them was equivalent to ruling against them, always called it.33 He himself once described it, in an often-quoted phrase, as ‘keeping all the nationalities of the Monarchy in a condition of even and well-modulated discontent’. In fact, his concessions to his supporters34 never went beyond the reasonable; above all, he made no single move to alter the structure of the Monarchy in the direction of more federalism.
He has been accused equally of fomenting national passions, and of repressing them. In fact, he did neither. Except in the case of the international workers’ movement, he repressed nothing, and neither did he foster. He let things take their course, balancing and adjusting when they threatened to get out of equilibrium. His opponents described his policy as one of ‘muddling through’ (fortwürsteln),35 which, in a way, was what it was; but he muddled with very considerable adroitness. His regime was not only the longest experienced by Austria after the Vormärz, but also the least tumultuous.
But it was also the least constructive, for good or ill. Taaffe not only did not produce an answer to the riddle of the Monarchy; he did not even look for one. Thus in the whole decade after the Czechs had re-entered the Reichsrat there is only one single event which is most appropriately recorded in this sketch of Austria’s central political life.36 In 1882 another franchise reform was enacted, which extended the vote in the urban and rural communes. This enfranchised large numbers of peasants and petits bourgeois,37 both classes the sworn enemies of big business and financial interests. In consequence, when the next elections were held (in the summer of 1885) they brought a further swing to the Right. The Poles (fifty-seven), Czechs (fifty-six) and Clericals held their own, although the nineteen German Clericals now formed a separate group under the Princes Alfred and Alois Liechtenstein, leaving the Hohenwart Club with thirty-four members. Various splinter groups (there were in all twelve Parliamentary Clubs) brought the voting strength of the Right up to 190. The ‘German Left’ was down to 136 in all, including four Radicals; the non-Radicals re-grouped into a ‘German-Austrian Club’ (eighty-four) and a ‘German Club’ (forty-eight),38 who, however, agreed to sit together under a single chairman as the ‘United German Left’. With its splinter groups, and counting in the eleven members of the Coronini Club, the Left mustered a total voting strength of 1
63.
The other developments of the period are more conveniently described under subject headings, allowing us to bring up to date the general picture of the state of the various economic, social and national forces in Austria at the point near the end of Taaffe’s regime when the pressure of them compelled the end of temporising.
*
In the half-century up to 1890, the population of Austria had again increased rapidly. The 17½ millions at which it had stood at the end of the Vormärz,39 had risen to nearly 20½ millions in 1869, over 22 in 1880, and nearly 24 in 1890. This growth had been accompanied by further differentiation and urbanization, although neither of these processes had gone on so fast as in England or Germany. The biggest gainer among the occupational groups had been industry, but its progress had been neither easy nor uniform. The year after the reorganization of 1848 had been very favourable for those Austrian industries whose chief markets lay inside the Monarchy, and even to some of the exporting industries, but the freer trade with the West had proved a two-edged sword, and the balance of advantage had been in Austria’s favour only so long as the depreciation of the currency acted as an export premium. After the abrupt check administered to the boom by the Stock Exchange crash of 1857, industry had suffered for a decade under the rigidly deflationary policy adopted by the Government, the shortage of private credit, and the impoverishment caused by the over-numerous wars and mobilizations. As, under these conditions, Austrian industry had developed more slowly than German, the Austrian industrialists welcomed the ‘economic divorce’ of 1865 between the Austrian and German systems, and this was, in fact, followed almost immediately by the spectacular boom years of 1868–72, which brought with them another very rapid spurt of industrialization. This, however, was followed in its turn by the ultra-sensational Krach of 1873, the dimensions of which may be indicated by the single fact that the consumption of iron in the Monarchy fell by almost half in three years (from 18·2 million tons in 1872 to 9·5 million in 1875), the number of workers in the iron and steel industries falling in the same measure. Meanwhile, even the increased protection which Austrian industry had secured against German had been partly counter-balanced by the treaties with the West, to which a similar treaty with Italy had been added in April 1867. Austrian woollens and textiles, in particular, complained of under-cutting from Britain.
The strong agitation for protection which this situation had evoked among the Austrian manufacturers had been opposed by the agricultural interests, especially those of Hungary (with whom the commercial policy of the Monarchy had to be agreed), who not only wanted maximum freedom for the exportation of their own products, but naturally preferred a system which allowed them to import cheaper and better articles from abroad to one which confined them to the expensive and far inferior products of the Austrian factories; and Hungary made her consent to the introduction of protection conditional on revision of the financial clauses of the Compromise. The competition from other countries continued, and meanwhile, the internal effects of the Krach were slow to work themselves out. The foreign capital which had so largely contributed to the boom had retreated out of the Monarchy, and the Austrian public, reverting to its old mentality, preferred to put its savings into savings-banks or Government stocks, rather than invest them in equities or deposit them with the banks, which were themselves short of money for financing industry.40 Industry found it almost impossible to obtain long-term credit, while short-term credit was exceedingly expensive.
The Government itself, although at that time still a ‘Liberal’ one, had been frightened by the Krach, and to avoid a repetition of it, discouraged the formation of new joint-stock companies, for which it issued licences only sparingly.41
The depression had worsened steadily until 1876, and for two or three years after that had been kept on the low level then reached by the threatening international situation. It was not until 1879 that the war clouds in the Balkans passed, and confidence returned, assisted by another series of good harvests. By this time, too, agreement had been reached with Hungary to continue the old customs alliance (in practice, union) and to allow the introduction of some protection against the outer world, provided it was kept on a low level. On 1 January 1879, Austria had then introduced a new autonomous tariff, and whether as an effect of this or in spite of it (both views have been maintained), and whether thanks to or in spite of Government policy, which certainly favoured agricultural interests where they clashed with industrial,42 but presumably wanted at least some industries developed – a number of industries made important progress in the next few years. The history of the railways has been mentioned elsewhere: the steady but modest progress during the years of financial stringency, followed by the feverish expansion during the great boom. Private activity in this field also had been abruptly halted by Black Friday, but there had been this difference, as compared with industry, that the State had perforce seen to it that the railway construction was carried on, partly to relieve unemployment, partly on strategic grounds. By 1880 the Cis-Leithanian mileage had risen to 11,429 km.
Trade and finance had followed the same rhythm, and so, on the whole, had urbanization. Throughout the period there had been a steady drift to the towns of the victims of agricultural depression or rural congestion, so that the increase in the urban population, especially that of the larger towns, had always been faster than that of the rural. The movement, however, had been rapid only at the times of industrial prosperity; during the slumps it had slowed down, and there had even been a certain reverse flow of unemployed factory workers returning to the land.
The overall picture in 1890 was thus one of an economy which stood half-way between the rural societies to which Austria herself had belonged a century earlier, such as Russia and the Balkans still were, and the much more advanced ones west of her frontiers. The pattern was still mainly agricultural, and mainly rural. Agriculture still employed 62·4% of the working population,43 and two out of every three Austrians still lived in a scattered farm or a small village. The great majority even of the towns were small and essentially semi-rural; of the 1,312 ‘towns’ of Cis-Leithania, 1,062, with an aggregate population of 3,011,000, had populations of less than 5,000, and 150 more (967,000) of 5–10,000.
At the same time, industry and mining accounted for 21·2% of the gainfully employed population, and the figures for some industries were quite imposing: 296,000 persons were employed in textiles, excluding homeworkers – perhaps half a million in all; 149,000 in food-processing, breweries, etc.; 99,000 in the metal industries, 72,000 in stone and glass; 57,000 in the machine industry; 33,000 in the chemical. The manufacturing industry employed in all 2,880,000 persons. There were a few really large cities; thus Vienna (including its suburbs) had a population of 1,305,000; Prague had 184,000; Trieste (whose municipal boundaries had been enlarged), 150,000; Lemberg, 128,000; and Graz, 114,000. Brünn, Cracow, Czernowitz and Pilsen were all over the 50,000 mark and Linz not far below it. The aggregate population of the twenty-two towns with populations of 20,000 plus, was 2,870,000, and those of the sixty-eight of 10–20,000, 920,000.
The smaller towns now included a number of a type hardly before known to Austria, the factory or mining community pure and simple.
Trade, banking and communications now employed between them 6·2% of the employed population, and the professional and leisured classes, too, had increased.
While the changes so far effected had been relatively modest, the trend was a fairly steady one. Every year saw the percentage of the population employed in agriculture a little smaller, that of most other groups, especially industry, a little larger, and every year the percentage living in towns, especially the largest towns, increased.
Important for the future of Austria was the shift that was taking place in the distribution of the population. Galicia, where the natural increase had been particularly rapid, now had well the largest population of any Land, with over 6·5 millions, Bohemia coming next with 5·8. The growth had been much slower in t
he German Lands, except Lower Austria, where the figure had been swollen by the rapid growth of Vienna and its suburbs.
The chief centres of industrial expansion were still the traditional areas: Lower Austria and the Bohemian Lands (which had increased their lead owing to the development of the North-Moravian-Silesian area into a great industrial complex).44 The iron works of Styria, too, had recovered with the foundation in 1881 of the great Alpine Montan concern, and thereafter had expanded greatly. Otherwise, there had been relatively little industrial development in the Alpine Lands, except Upper Austria, where a munitions industry had been founded in Steyr. A textile industry was taking root in Vorarlberg. A newcomer to industry was Galicia, where oil had been discovered (as a commercial proposition) in the 1870s, and the exploitation of it was growing into one of the big industries of the Monarchy (although the profits from it went largely abroad). Galicia remained, indeed, overwhelmingly agricultural: in 1890 seventy-seven per cent of its population was still employed in agriculture, forestry or fisheries, the highest figure of any Land except Dalmatia.
*
Here we may record the pleasing fact that by the end of the period, Austria’s finances had at last reached equilibrium. The hard-earned gains of 1868–73 had, indeed, soon been lost again, for the Krach caused a grievous falling-off in State revenue, and the State had also been forced to step in and take over bankrupt railway lines, and carry on with their construction, and with other public works, to relieve unemployment. Thus, although attempts had been made to increase taxation, every budget up to 1885, except only that of 1880, had closed with a deficit, which had been covered by the regular device of borrowing.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 98