The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  And it was generally true that during these years the national problem of Cis-Leithania lost nothing either of its venom, or of its priority in the minds of most of the peoples. The one quarter in which national emotions looked to be going off the boil was that of the non-Socialist Germans. In 1903 Schönerer quarrelled with Wolf, who took his followers, and many of Schönerer’s, out of the Party, with the result that the number of ‘Schönerianer’ Deputies fell to three in 1907 (when Schönerer himself failed to secure re-election), and only went up by one more in 1911. The Nationalverband, unlike the Gemeinbürgschaft, did not adopt an agreed programme on national issues, and the Christian Socials often voted against the other German Parties. Generally speaking, the German Parties supported the Minister President in Parliament, and refrained from making intolerable nuisances of themselves.

  And the drop in temperature was not only apparent. It is true that the differences between Schönerer and Wolf were primarily personal, but the latter, with his followers, refused to stand for the dissolution of the Monarchy, while the lack of unity between the other Parties reflected a real reversion, if only a partial one, to the feeling that other issues could be more important than purely national ones.

  But this was simply because the Germans had stopped being frightened. One of their historians has described Thun’s Ministry as ‘the last attempt to rule against the Germans through the forms of Parliamentary rule by majority’. What followed was ‘a change of system’; Koerber’s Ministry ‘answered the demand of the first positive German national programme (sc., the Deutsche Vereinigung’s programme of 1897) ‘for a neutral Ministry’.138 The Germans regarded all Ministries after Koerber’s, except perhaps that of Gautsch, in the same light.

  But the Ministries were, of course, not really neutral. By refusing to let the Reichsrat raise national questions, and insisting on the maintenance of the status quo unless the parties concerned agreed to alter it, they were in reality overriding the principles of pure Parliamentary democracy; for the administrative status quo was still clearly, on balance, favourable to the Germans, whereas the introduction of general suffrage had already placed them in a minority in the Reichsrat. The Germans’ satisfaction was thus achieved by a tacit alliance with the bureaucracy, at the expense of the other peoples, and at the expense of the fair application of that very Parliamentary system for which the German Liberals had once fought so hard.

  The more logical among the nationally-minded Germans were already actively supporting the course – to which necessity increasingly drove the Ministers President of the time – of dispensing with the Reichsrat altogether and governing ‘administratively’, i.e., through the bureaucracy, for good and all. In other words, they were jettisoning the last remnants of Liberalism and reverting to a sort of neo-Josephinianism, based, like its prototype, on the German element in Austria. It was, indeed, possible to maintain that as conditions had developed, this was the only way of keeping the wheels of public life turning at all, but it was simply childish to suppose that a system which had begun to break down as soon as national feeling awoke in the Monarchy could be reimposed as a permanent solution for the Austrian problem at a stage when that feeling had become intense among all its peoples, including – not least important – the Germans themselves.

  Among the non-Germans, there was no abatement of national passions and aspirations, and it was also less generally true than it had been that the national struggle was one ‘for’ Austria, not ‘against’ her. Irredentism made further advances in the Italian areas, in small part as a reaction against genuine grievances, such as the unsolved problem of the Italian University, but much more, as before, in reaction to the international situation as relations between Austria and Italy deteriorated and the Government-encouraged irredentist agitation grew ever more unbridled.

  There were dangerous developments among the Czechs. The results of the 1907 elections, giving as they did, in spite of the electoral geometry, a majority in the Reichsrat (however minute) to the Slavs against the combined Germans, Italians and Roumanians, encouraged the Kramař school of politicians who thought in such spacious terms in their belief that the Monarchy could be turned into a State dominated politically by its Slavs, and to them Neoslavism came like manna from heaven.

  In theory Neoslavism was, of course, by definition not directed against the existence of the Monarchy, but the distinction between a strongly Russophile movement which was non-irredentist and one which was secretly irredentist was one which it would not be easy to preserve in a conflict between the Monarchy and Russia.139 Austro-Neoslavism was very different from the Austro-Slavism of the previous century, nor did the difference escape the Russians.

  Although Kramař was the leading representative among the Czechs of this new movement, many other Czech politicians shared many of his views. The annexation, in particular, evoked extremely tumultuous scenes. Czechs called up for military service appeared in mourning bands. The Czechs, alone among the peoples of the Monarchy, boycotted the celebrations of Francis Joseph’s sixty-year jubilee. The black and yellow flags were torn down in Prague, and Klofač, the ‘National Socialist’ leader, announced that ‘besides the flag of the old Dynasty, I know only one flag, that of the Kingdom of Bohemia, because we are primarily and exclusively Bohemian patriots’. Precisely in these days which ought to have demonstrated the loyalty of the Czech people, a state of emergency had to be proclaimed in Prague, and the Landtag dissolved. After further fruitless attempts to make it workable, the Landtag was replaced in 1913 by an ‘Imperial-Royal Administrative Commission’. And while the Czechs, as always, led the Monarchy’s army of Russophiles, they were not its sole component. The Polish National Democrats of Galicia, whom the extension of the franchise made into a considerable force (they emerged from both the 1907 and the 1911 elections as the strongest single Polish Party, and their leader, Glombinski, consequently presided over the Polish Club in the Reichsrat and sat in the Government),140 took the same view as their sister party in Russia of the possibility, and desirability, of a Polish-Russian reconciliation, and they found allies in the so-called ‘Podolian Conservatives’, i.e., the great East Galician landlords some of whose estates lay across the Russian frontier, who felt their position threatened by the Ukrainian national movement, and combined with the Russians against it. Among these was the Statthalter of Galicia, Potocki, who paid for his policy with his life, for in April 1908, he was assassinated by a Ukrainophile Ruthene student.141

  It is true that much of the Galician Poles’ enthusiasm for Russia vanished when the renewed Russification set in in the autumn of 1908; among the nobles, the pro-Austrian ‘Cracow group’ was much stronger than the Podolians, and the Galician socialists, under the influence of Pilsudski and other émigrés from Russian Poland, also took the Austrian side. Yet after 1905 the Austrian Government was no longer able to trust its Poles nearly so implicitly as it had between 1870 and that date.142

  On the figures, the tangible results of the Russian agitation among the Ruthenes do not look very impressive. In the 1907 elections only 5 Russophiles were returned to the Reichsrat, against 22 Young Ruthenes, and in 1911 the number was down to 2; one of their leaders then polled only 581 votes against 25,788 in a straight fight against a Young Ruthene opponent.143 The 1910 census recorded only three Orthodox villages in Galicia, with 2,770 inhabitants (0·04% of the population of the province).144 The figure had certainly increased by 1914, but the current phrase of ‘mass conversions’ seems to be an exaggeration.

  The Austrian authorities long attached little importance to the movement. Only in 1914 did they suddenly become alive to it, and suddenly put four persons on trial for treasonable activities, the prosecution maintaining that propaganda to persuade a person to change his religion to the Orthodox faith was treasonable. At the same time, the Hungarian Courts tried a number of persons on similar charges. High treason trials had become rather unpopular since the Friedjung fiasco, and the Lemberg jury (composed entirely of Poles) acquitted
all four defendants; the Hungarian Courts were more severe, but still not sensationally so.145 But the Austrian Government was now really alarmed; Berchtold, in particular, took the movement very seriously. ‘I am not exaggerating,’ he wrote to Stürgkh, ‘when I say that our relations with Russia … will depend in the future on our success in frustrating the Russification of the Ruthenes.’146 And he was probably right. The conversions were not artificial: it is highly unlikely that the rolling roubles got as far as any of the unfortunate converts themselves.147 But they reflected a widepsread, if not perhaps always conscious feeling. The Orthodix Church, besides the direct material advantages of membership of it,148 seems to possess a mystique which has a peculiar appeal to the Slavonic soul. It used certainly to identify itself with Moscow, and while it is probable that few of the peasant converts were consciously disloyal, many of them found it impossible to distinguish between the Ruski Czar in Petersburg and the other Czar in Vienna.149 Moreover, their total ignorance of the facts made it easy to persuade them that their condition would be easier under another Little Father.

  Berchtold, indeed, found it hard to suggest a remedy, for he went on: ‘We must absolutely avoid, when supporting the Ukrainians, putting the Poles in such a position that they might one day become receptive to Russian influences.’

  The position in the Bukovina was complicated almost beyond comprehension by the extension of the franchise, which led to the emergence of a number of new parties and groups – a Social Democrat, a Christian Social, and others, some of which adopted, on principle, a non-national basis, while in others, social and economic conditions having grown very critical in this province (in the same way, and for the same reasons, as in Galicia), the representatives of the poorer classes were prepared to sink their national differences in a common struggle against the landowners and/or the Jewish middle-men. A ‘Democratic Party’ founded in 1900 by Dr Aurel Ritter von Onciul and a ‘Freethinking Association’ (Freisinniger Verband) with which it allied itself, both included representatives of the non-Roumanian nationalities. Further, as we have said, the various nationalities evolved a model machinery for conducting the public affairs of the Duchy. But the extreme, irredentist Roumanians, although still constituting only a small minority of the people, were probably rather on the increase than the reverse.

  Unhappy but convincing evidence of the continued, and increasing, predominance of the national factor in the life of the Monarchy was furnished by the fortunes of the Social Democrat Party, within which another national conflict broke out soon after the Brünn settlement had been reached.150 This time the Trade Unions were the bone of contention. The Czechs wanted a separate Trade Union organization in Bohemia, and a recognized right of the Trade Unions controlled by Prague to enrol Czech workers in other parts of the Monarchy. The German-Austrians insisted that the Unions had to remain unitary: it was impossible to have workers in the same area, even the same enterprise, belonging to different national unions. The Czechs then complained that their German colleagues were ‘denationalizing’ Czech workers. After complaining to the Trade Union Congress in 1905, they appealed in 1907 to the International Socialist Congress, and when the decision went against them, refused to accept it and formed what amounted to a separate Party, with its own political organization and Trade Unions. They did not, indeed, altogether abandon the principles of Hainfeld; they rejected the ‘Böhmisches Staatsrecht’ and continued to stand for an Austria organized as a federation of free and equal peoples, and were hated accordingly by the bourgeois Czech national parties.

  The other national sections of the Party remained affiliated to it, but were little less independent. Both the Poles and the Italian sections followed policies dictated by national considerations.

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  The non-Socialist political parties with social bases (which included a fair number of workers’ parties which refused to join the Social Democrats precisely because of their international character151) regularly sided with the specifically national parties on any national issue. If the regular commissioned ranks of the Army (and up to a point, the long-service N.C.O.s), most of the higher grades of the central civil service, the bulk of the aulic aristocracy, the episcopate and most of the German members of the lower grades of the clergy, still thought in the old terms, these were now about all who did so. The civil services of the Lands divided almost entirely on national lines, and here even senior posts had often to be given to nationalists, as price for their party’s vote in the Landtag or the Reichsrat. The national parties of Slavs and Italians were as often as not led by their clergy, and the reserve officers seldom adopted the outlook of their professional brothers.

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  It was still true that only a relatively small fraction of the peoples of the Monarchy wanted to leave it. In the great majority of cases they were still manoeuvring for position within the existing Monarchy. A feature distinguishing these years from those preceding them was the increased frequency of the assumption that such plans need not consider the Dualist system, nor even the territorial integrity of Hungary, as immutable data. The ideas of many of the Czechs, Southern Slavs and Roumanians envisaged a complete reconstruction of the Monarchy, as, confessedly or not, did those of many of the Social Democrat thinkers. The Christian Socials’ Party Conference of 1905 adopted a resolution condemning ‘the deprivation of the non-Magyar Nationalities of their rights’, and demanding that the ‘Empire’ (Reich) ‘be set on an united, consolidated basis in place of the present rotten form of State’.

  These ideas were, of course, encouraged by the Heir Presumptive’s notorious hostility to the ruling regime in Hungary, for it was almost universally assumed that when he came to the throne, he would enforce radical changes in the structure of the Monarchy at the expense of that element which he so openly detested. This supposed intention of his made him the object of many high hopes while he lived, and has even caused some later writers to write him down as a great statesman. It is difficult to see the justification for these praises. It was easy enough to see the defects in the Dualist system: the test of statesmanship would be the ability to provide something better to put in its place, and if there is one lesson which the history of the Monarchy should teach, it is that there was never, at any time, any ideal answer to its problems. It is, as a matter of fact, quite uncertain what Francis Ferdinand would have done, or tried to do, if he had ever really come to the throne, for he changed his mind on the point many times.152 The plan first favoured by him seems to have been a sort of re-edition of the system of 1850, a reorganization of the Monarchy into a system of federated provinces, Hungary being broken up into four or five of these, and Bohemia and Galicia into two each. Then he took up the idea, with which his name is most often associated, of replacing the Dualist system by a ‘Trialist’ one, the third component of which was to be constituted out of the Serb and Croat areas of the Monarchy.153 This, however, did not last long: he was put off it by the Fiume Resolutions and the Serbo-Croat fraternization.154 Later he showed some interest in a plan put forward in 1906 by Aurel Popovici, the Transylvanian Roumanian of ‘Memorandum’155 fame, in his book Die Vereinigten Staaten Gross-Oesterreichs,156 but there is no evidence that he proposed seriously to adopt it. In the spring of 1914 he had committed another plan to paper: this was to postpone his coronation in Hungary, appoint a Ministry with a General at its head and non-Magyar Ministers of the Interior and Justice, enact general franchise by octroi and then have a ‘people’s Parliament’ reform the Constitution.157 He might quite possibly have changed his mind yet again, even towards his avowed enemies, for his bullying manner concealed a deep inner irresolution. Baron Schönaich – not, indeed, a friendly witness – once prophesied of him that ‘he would make more concessions in twenty-four hours than Francis Joseph had made in twenty-four years’,158 and there are other witnesses to his essential instability.

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  Whether any of the Archduke’s plans would really have set the Monarchy on a more solid basis, or whether whic
hever he chose would simply have initiated another period of frustrating experiment, like that of 1859–67, must remain for ever doubtful, for the question was never put to the test. The Army manoeuvres for 1914 were arranged to take place in Bosnia, beginning on 25 June. The close of them brought the Archduke, in his capacity of Inspector General, to Sarajevo precisely on 28 June – Vidov Dan, the anniversary of the Battle of Kossovo, where independent Serbia had been crushed by the Turks in 1389, and ever since charged for all Serbs with a peculiar national emotion. It was obviously a provocative day on which to parade Habsburg rule over Bosnia, and several warnings had been received that the Archduke would be unwise to expose himself, but he did not lack courage, and preferred to ignore them. His wife accompanied him. On the fatal morning a bomb was thrown at the cortège as it drove into Sarajevo from the small summer resort of Ilidže where Francis Ferdinand had spent the previous night. It bounced off the hood of the Archduke’s car and exploded under one of those following, severely wounding one of its occupants, but leaving the Archduke and his wife untouched; but three-quarters of an hour later, when the couple were driving to the hospital to visit the wounded officer, a singular series of mischances brought their car to a halt immediately opposite another of the band of assassins, who fired on them with a revolver, mortally wounding both. She died almost immediately, he, ten minutes after her.