The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

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  The Monarchy’s material defences against these dangers were still far less than adequate. Conrad’s agitation for ‘active policies’ against Italy and Serbia had grown so embarrassing to Aehrenthal that the Foreign Minister had appealed to Francis Joseph, who had supported him, and Conrad had resigned.102 Auffenberg-Komarow, another protégé of the Archduke’s, who succeeded Schönaich as part of the same transaction,103 carried through the reorganization of the periods of service in the armed forces,104 and succeeded in getting the regular annual intake of recruits raised to 159,500 (91,313 from Austria, 68,187 from Hungary105), which would raise the peace strength of the regular army from 295,000 to 350,000 and its war strength from 900,000 to 1,500,000, with corresponding increases in the strengths of the Landwehr (30,000) and the Honvédség (25,000). Considerable sums were spent on new artillery, fortifications, and the Navy, for which a big new programme was adopted at the end of 1911,106 while other provisions legalized the conscription of men and resources in case of war.

  Even this, however, left the strength of the Monarchy’s armed forces very low by comparison with other Powers,107 and its leadership, too, remained unsatisfactory, at least in the Archduke’s eyes, although, at his urgent request, Conrad was reinstated in December 1912, when (as part of the same transaction) Auffenberg-Komarow was replaced by F.M.L. Krobatin.

  One unfortunate effect of these developments was to re-import the old uncertainty into the Monarchy’s financial situation. The cost of two mobilizations, plus that of two partial mobilizations and expenditure on the railways (which also was largely strategic), was heavy.108 One consideration which undoubtedly weighed with the Monarchy in the fateful days of 1914 was unwillingness to spend both material and emotional capital on a third mobilization not followed by action.

  The history of Bosnia-Herzegovina after the annexation is quickly told. The problem of where the provinces belonged in the structure of the Monarchy was never finally settled; in the end, the Common Finance Minister went on representing them in the Delegations.

  The proclamation annexing the provinces had promised them ‘provincial representation in a form corresponding to the religious traditions and the traditional social structure of their inhabitants’. A Landtag was to be set up on the traditional Austrian pattern, with four Curias, representing respectively ‘the principal dignitaries, the persons of education and substance, the urban communes and the rural communes’. A Committee (from which the Serbs absented themselves) was set up to work out the details, and on 17 February 1910 there was introduced a statute defining the competence of the Landtag, a franchise law for the elections to it which assigned to each of the three local confessions a fixed quota of mandates, Standing Orders for its procedure, laws on association and assembly, and a law on District Courts.

  Elections were held in May 1910 and the Landtag met in June. The Croats formed a coalition with the Moslems, so that the Serbs were left in the minority. As the outbreak of the Balkan Wars brought renewed tension between the Monarchy and Serbia, Burian, whose policy of trusting the Serbs had produced such disappointing results, was replaced on 20 February 1912 by a Pole, Bilinski, who had not unravelled any of the tangles by the time war broke out in July 1914. Almost the Government’s only achievement had been a new agrarian law which proved little more effective than its predecessors.109 For the rest, Bilinski’s rule seems to have been gentle enough; as late as the spring of 1914 he was confident that the Serbs of Bosnia were completely loyal.110

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  During these years the political life of Cis-Leithania underwent a surface transformation which could not easily have been anticipated when the period opened. In 1903 the picture was completely stylized, for the Czechs, dissatisfied with the concessions which were all that Koerber could offer them without driving the Germans into hysteria, had reverted to their old tactics of paralysing the work of the Reichsrat by obstruction, and although a number of causes contributed to bring about Koerber’s resignation and the appointment of Gautsch to succeed him on 31 December 1904 – he had lost favour with the Monarch for consenting to the ‘Széll formula’ in the negotiations with Hungary, was having trouble with Parliamentary Parties over Land finances, and was suffering from nervous strain brought about by over-work111 – the decisive one was probably an offer by Kramař to Goluchowski to call the obstruction off if Gautsch, with whom he was personally friendly, was appointed. But Gautsch (who made few changes in his Ministerial team) was not expected to strike out on any sensationally new line, and in fact made no motions to do so during his first six months of office. Then, however, came Kristóffy’s inspiration to break the resistance of the Hungarian ‘Independence’ politicians by extending the franchise in Hungary. This inevitably stimulated further the already strong demand among the Austrian workers for a similar concession – the Austrian Emperor, people said, could not refuse what the King of Hungary was granting. Gautsch, who was personally against any such move,112 made reservations and objections, but into the middle of the excitement fell the news that the Czar had promised his peoples a Constitution and the convocation of a Duma. Now the workers’ demonstrations in Vienna, Prague and many other industrial centres reached formidable proportions, and on 3 November 1905, Francis Joseph – once again ahead of his Ministers on this question – informed Gautsch ‘that he had decided to introduce the institution of general suffrage in both halves of the Monarchy’.113 Gautsch obeyed.

  The reform did not, however, go smoothly, for Gautsch decided to adapt it to Austrian conditions in two ways. Firstly, the priority given by most electors to national questions was to be recognized, and those problems removed from the list of contested electoral issues, by re-delimiting constituencies to make them as far as possible uni-national. Secondly, the old advantage formerly possessed by the wealthier and more advanced nationalities was to be perpetuated by weighting the constituencies in their favour. In the key which Gautsch worked out, the total number of presumed German constituencies was left unchanged at 205 and the Czechs got an increase of 12 (from 87 to 99), but the Poles’ figure was reduced from 72 to 64, while that of the Ruthenes went up from 10 to 31. As the total number of mandates was to bre aised to 455, the Germans suffered a relative loss, and the Slavs of all types would have outnumbered slightly the non-Slavs (Germans, Italians and Roumanians). The Germans protested strongly, and the Poles, who demanded no less than 118 seats for themselves, so fanatically, that in April Gautsch resigned. His successor, Prince Konrad Hohenlohe, resigned after only a month;114 then Francis Joseph appointed another permanent official, Freiherr von Beck (another favourite of Francis Ferdinand’s),115 who revised his predecessor’s quotas in favour of the Poles and Germans, the new presumptive figures (in a Parliament of 516) being 241 Germans, 97 Czechs, 80 Poles, 34 Ruthenes, 23 Slovenes, 19 Italians116, 13 Croats, 5 Roumanians and 3 Serbs. For the rest, the franchise was now extended to all males aged twenty-four and upward who had resided for a year in their commune. After passing through the Herrenhaus with great difficulty, which was overcome only by strong pressure from the Crown,117 the Bill received the Emperor’s sanction on 26 January 1907. Parliament was now dissolved, and new elections held in May.

  The resultant Parliament of course presented an entirely new picture.118 The accustomed vertical stratification by nationalities (which, incidentally, had not worked out quite according to plan, for fewer Germans and Poles had been elected than had been expected, and more Czechs, and there were also four Zionists119 and one Jewish Democrat, on whom no one had reckoned) was now crossed by horizontal lines. Many of the national parties wore labels committing them to some social or economic ideology, and some of these refused to sit with their national Clubs, while the Social Democrats dispensed with the national epithet altogether. There was, naturally, a swing to the Left. The Christian Socials, although they had concluded an electoral pact with the Catholic People’s Party, in the interests of which they had toned down their programme, still retained some of their origina
l inspiration. The Social Democrats had made a big advance, while a number of the Czech, Polish and Ruthene Deputies, and even some of the non-Socialist Germans, were pronouncedly Left-wing in their various fashions.

  Austria thus now possessed a Parliament in which almost all classes of the population were represented – a big change indeed from the situation of only a few years, not to speak of decades, before. Yet if we regard ‘democracy’ as connoting general and equal opportunity to influence policy on the top level, through constitutional channels, we are bound to reject the description given by a distinguished Austrian historian120 of the effects of the franchise reform as bringing about ‘the democratization of Austria’, for the good reason that the Reichsrat did not govern Austria. For perhaps eighteen months after the reform Beck did preside over something like a genuine Parliamentary government. Half his assistants were permanent civil servants like himself, but the other half were Parliamentarians, drawn from German, Czech and Polish Conservative Parties who had sunk their differences in the face of the emergent forces of the Left, and in return for various political douceurs.121 But this phase did not last for long. Although, as we have seen,122 Austria probably gained more in substance than she conceded in the long and exhausting economic negotiations with Hungary, the Archduke blamed Beck for making any concessions whatever, and for that reason, and because he had presided over the electoral reform, turned against his former favourite with extraordinary bitterness.123 The annexation of Bosnia was in the wind and the military party demanded a ‘Government of the strong hand’ in view of the international situation. Beck offended Aehrenthal by opposing the annexation. The Czech Great Landlords started a campaign against him when he tried to introduce a reform of the Bohemian Landtag which would have weakened their influence there. On 15 November 1908 he was intrigued out of office by a combined manoeuvre in which these forces were joined by the Christian Socials, who were playing for the Heir Presumptive’s favour, and also hoped to bring about a new coalition government with themselves playing the leading part in it. As, however, the parties whom the Christian Socials had hoped to make their partners proved as greedy as themselves, the idea of a genuine Parliamentary coalition had to be given up, and Francis Joseph appointed as the new Minister President another permanent civil servant, Freiherr von Bienerth, whose position differed from Beck’s only in the respect that the Archduke and Aehrenthal were, at least for a time, on his side. Bienerth, whose first instructions had been to govern by Parliamentary methods, formed another Cabinet composed mainly of permanent civil servants, with three ‘Landsmannminister’ representing the Germans, Czechs and Poles respectively, and the Christian Socials, German nationals (whose leading parties formed themselves in February 1910 into a new association, the Deutscher Nationalverband124) and Conservative Poles gave him enough formal, although unenthusiastic, support to enable him to keep a nominally Parliamentary regime alive for a couple of years. It was, however, a barren period (described by the historian, Friedjung, as one of ‘Parliamentary chaos and administrative absolutism’), for whenever Bienerth tried to get the Reichsrat to carry through any constructive measure whatever, one or another of its thirty parties or five independent members contrived to make this impossible; the scenes in the Reichsrat in February 1909 went down to history as the most scandalous on record. Hoping to get a more secure majority, Bienerth dissolved the Reichsrat in May 1911 and held new elections, but in these, although the parties of the Nationalverband increased their vote, the Christian Socials, much of whose virtue had gone out of them with their fusion with the Clericals, and more when Lueger died on 10 March 1910, lost heavily,125 and the Poles were now hopelessly divided.126 Bienerth resigned, and the Emperor once more fell back on Gautsch, who again tried to get the Czechs to support him, but as usual, the Czechs asked a price which the Germans refused to pay, and Gautsch gave up in despair on 31 October. The Emperor now appointed Count Karl Stürgkh, a Styrian landowner who had left the administrative service in 1891 to enter Parliament as a member of the United German Left, and had held the portfolio of Education (not unsuccessfully) under Bienerth. Stürgkh got together another cabinet of civil servants, with only one professed ‘Landsmannminister’, the Pole, although Stürgkh paid tribute to German and Czech national susceptibilities by choosing Departmental Ministers from men of those two nationalities. He avoided raising national issues at all in the Reichsrat, and got through necessary business chiefly by extensive use of Paragraph 14. In March 1914 obstruction, chiefly by the Czech Radicals, forced him to adjourn the Reichsrat altogether, and it had not been re-convoked when Austria declared war on Serbia four months later.

  So far, then, all that the extension of the franchise had done had been to prove the complete impossibility of governing Cis-Leithania, with its immense complex of sometimes interlocking, sometimes mutually frustrating national, social and economic interests through the medium of a single Parliament on the conventional basis. If, as an Austrian historian has pointed out,127 the Landtage were sometimes able to carry out more fruitful work, the answer is that the franchise reform had not been extended to them,128 and further, that many of them had not to cope with the national problem. Where they had to face the same problems as the Reichsrat, they proved equally unable to deal with them.129

  It was true that Austria had become more democratic in the broader sense that the political weight of the different social classes had shifted considerably. The Christian Socials had, indeed, sacrificed almost all their original inspiration for the sake of office. After the 1907 elections they and the Catholic People’s Party had fused, and if the name of the Party which emerged from the process was theirs, the spirit was that of the other component. They were now essentially a Catholic Conservative Party, resting on the rural electorate of the Alpine Lands.130 But they still had to make most of their appeal to the peasants, who now constituted much the largest class of rural electors, and were emancipating themselves from the spiritual leadership of the big landowners. Even outside the Christian Socials, the peasants were now strongly represented.

  The Social Democrat-Trade Union combination had made big advances.131 Its strength still lay overwhelmingly in Vienna and its environs, and in Bohemia-Moravia; outside these areas, and to a lesser extent, Styria, it was still insignificant. Moreover, as we shall see, even this party had now fallen a prey to national differences. Yet its strength in the key centres of Vienna, Wiener Neustadt, etc., was now sufficient to make it a force with which every Government had to reckon, to the extent of having to find answers to its demands other than that of organized repression, and was to enable it to play a decisive part in the years of the Monarchy’s death-agony. The ‘Feudals’ were now almost confined to the Herrenhaus, and the old Party of capital was represented only by Plener’s handful of followers.

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  So far as social questions were concerned, Austria might have evolved with time into something like a Parliamentary democracy. The national question, however, was proving as intractable as ever.

  Against this statement, when it is made, is often adduced the fact that during these years several Crownlands succeeded in evolving satisfactory modus vivendi between their local nationalities. The earliest and most famous of these was the ‘Moravian Settlement’,132 reached in November 1905. Under this, the first Curia of the Landtag and its Standing Committees, composed of the two virilist members133 and the representatives of the Great Landowners, was left bi-national, while the other Curias were divided in agreed proportions between Czechs and Germans, each nationality electing its own representatives, for which purpose electors were registered in national ‘catasters’, compiled on the basis of free declaration.134 Either local language could be used equally in any business. The same proportional system was applied to the various vocational, etc., bodies. In local units the language was decided by the local majority, but a 20% minority could claim to be dealt with officially in its own language. In all matters of interest to one nationality alone (schools, etc.) appointmen
ts were made only by that nationality, which paid for such appointments out of its own budget. In 1910 the Bukovina introduced a similar system of national catasters (in this case, four: German, Ruthene, Roumanian, Polish).135 There were six curias, all but the first uni-national. Here German was by general consent used as the language of the Landtag.136 Negotiations also took place in Galicia, through the mediation of the Ruthene Metropolitan, Count Szeptycki, between Poles and Ruthenes, and a Landesgesetz was actually passed and sanctioned by the Crown in July 1914, although never applied, owing to the outbreak of war. This again provided for separate voting to the Landtag in, which the Ruthenes would have received 61 mandates out of the total of 227 – a figure far below that to which their numbers entitled them but still much bigger than they had ever previously achieved. At the same time, they were promised also their own University, and certain other cultural concessions.137 Even in Bohemia talks for a settlement between representatives of the two nationalities got so far that when they broke down, in 1912, one of the negotiators said that ‘only the thickness of a sheet of paper’ had separated the two parties.

  It would, however, be a grave mistake to draw from these words, as certain Austrian historians have tried to do, the deduction that the Czech and the German peoples in Bohemia, or in the Monarchy, had come within a hair’s-breadth of composing their differences. The hope of a rapprochement, such as it was, had come only after years in which Czechs had made work in the Reichsrat impossible by their obstruction, and Germans had done the same in the Prague Landtag, where business had broken down completely, since the procedure of the Landtag contained no Para. 14 to enable the authorities to carry on in spite of the politicians. Other negotiators, in earlier days (so under Taaffe, in 1892) had actually reached agreement, with no result whatever, and as then, so now, those representatives of each nation who had sincerely tried to reach a modus vivendi with the other were virulently attacked by their kinsmen for traitors, German and Czech extremists vieing with one another for the credit of having wrecked the treacherous attempt. In fact, the Bohemian problem remained as intractable as ever up to the end of the Monarchy (and beyond it); in 1914 the Bohemian Landtag was out of action, like the Reichsrat, and for similar reasons.