Francis Joseph's Fatal Mistake: The Consequences of Rejecting Kremsier/Kroměříž

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Notes

For a brief yet comprehensive discussion of the draft constitutional structure laid out in the document, see Kann, The Multinational Empire, vol. II, 35–39. For the debates within the draft constitutional committee at Kremsier/Kroměříž, see 21–35. In addition to Kann's still-definitive account, there has been much scholarly ink spilled on the content of the document as well as the context in which it emerged. This article does not seek to revisit these aspects of the draft constitution, but rather focuses on the impact of its rejection by the emperor.

Rogers Brubaker's collection of essays Ethnicity without Groups has offered an important critique of studies of nationalism, and the ways in which scholars and others continue to reify nationalists’ own constructs by utilizing their terms. A detailed discussion of his argument is beyond the scope of this article. I will simply note that Brubaker and others, in particular Pieter Judson, have made a valuable point criticizing the adoption by scholars of Central Europe of the language of nationalists when talking about them. I will employ the terms “nationality,” “people,” and “ethnic group” (but not “nation,” which connotes the nation-state) more or less interchangeably to refer to the groups into which the Habsburg population increasingly divided itself in the years leading up to 1914. While there may be disagreements among scholars about the subtle differences among these terms, I use each of them to similarly describe a group of people who, without respect to any political or territorial claims of sovereignty, claim to share (or are identified by others, such as the state, as sharing) a language, cultural and literary traditions, a religion, descent from an earlier people, or any combination thereof.

The Monarchy did actively seek to inculcate loyalty to the dynasty through rituals and publicly staged celebrations. For Francis Joseph's reign, see Unowsky, The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism.

The difference is made clear by the famous apocryphal question of Emperor Francis I, when informed that one of his subjects was indeed an Austrian patriot, queried “but is he a patriot for me?” (Qtd. in Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809–1918, 22. Taylor's book originally appeared in 1941.

By arguing that it lacked a civic nationhood binding together its nationalities, I am not suggesting that the Habsburg Monarchy had no civil society. Among other scholars, Gary B. Cohen has emphasized the vitality of civil society in Austria and even Hungary in his recent article “Nationalist Politics and the Dynamics of the State and Civil Society in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1867–1914,” 241–78.

Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 311. The reference is to Benedict Anderson's concept laid out in his book Imagined Communities.

I have made this argument about the lack of a common, pan-Austrian civic identity and its impact on the Monarchy's survivability in more detail in Reifowitz, Imagining an Austrian Nation. Joseph Samuel Bloch, along with his political mentor Adolf Fischhof, openly lamented the lack of an ethnically neutral Austrian civic identity and called for its creation as part of a reform process that included greater democratization and federalization. See also Jászi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy. Irrespective of its age, Jászi's book remains to my mind among the keenest analyses of Austria–Hungary, its political system, and the reasons for its demise.

King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans; Judson, Guardians of the Nation.

Ferguson, Virtual History.

Ibid., 1–90. Ferguson's presentation of this debate cannot be properly summarized in an endnote, and its specifics are not directly relevant for the purposes of this article. What is relevant is that counterfactual history has support among academics, as Ferguson makes clear.

Qtd. in Kann, The Multinational Empire, 35–36. This clause, with minor changes, also appeared in the 1867 draft constitution, although, as Jászi, Beller, and many others have argued, the achievement of equality across the board for all languages and cultures in public life after 1867 was uneven at best, as demonstrated by continued political strife among nationalists over, for example, the language spoken by bureaucrats in Bohemia. For a more positive assessment of the post-1867 political system as it relates to the nationalities, see Stourzh, Die Gleichberechtigung der Nationalitäten in der Verfassung und Verwaltung Österreichs, 1848–1918.

Kann, The Multinational Empire, 32.

See his statement cited in ibid., 138.

Rath, “Three Score and Fifteen Years of Habsburg and Austrian Historiography and a Quarter of a Century of Editing the Austrian History Yearbook,” 1–20.

Even earlier than Redlich and Jászi, Otto Bauer, who wrote his own history of Austria in 1913, praised Kremsier/Kroměříž in his 1908 book Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie, as “the first and best attempt by the Austrian nations to secure their co-existence by law.” See Bauer, Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie, 238. He further noted: “Doubtless this draft constitution would not have fully spared Austria from national strife. However, it would have given each nation the opportunity, on its own language territory and by its own power, to build up its national educational system, and it would have spared the nations from having to fight for each school in the Reichsrat or the Landtag” (ibid.). See also idem, Geschichte Oesterreichs.

See Redlich, cited in Sked, The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815–1918, 144.

Redlich, cited in ibid.

Redlich, cited in Jászi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, 95. Jászi called Redlich Kremsier/Kroměříž's “keenest analyst” (ibid.) and stated that among historians of his time “on the Austrian side nobody has so much aroused my admiration as Professor Joseph Redlich” (x).

Ng, Nationalism and Political Liberty.

Ibid., 171. Redlich's comment on the condescension with which these Austro-German politicians viewed their Slavic counterparts is echoed in the writings of the great 1848 Austro-German Jewish democrat Adolf Fischhof. The writings of Fischhof, whose politics were arguably more even-handed towards the Monarchy's Slavs and other non-Germans than that of any other German in Austria, nevertheless confirm Redlich's characterization. See Fischhof, Österreich und die Bürgschaften seines Bestandes. In analyzing the role of the Monarchy's Germans vis-à-vis their non-German neighbors, he writes of the “civilizing power of the German language” (27), and discusses the Austrian Slavs as children needing to be educated (30). For more on Fischhof, see Reifowitz, Imagining an Austrian Nation, Chap. 2.

Ng, Nationalism and Political Liberty, 185.

Jászi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, 90–95.

Ibid., 98–99.

Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809–1918, 79–80.

Macartney, The Habsburg Empire, 1790–1918, 418.

Ibid., 1.

May, The Passing of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914–1918, vol. 1, 484.

Ibid., 817.

Ibid., 27.

In addition to the aforementioned, scholars have identified a number of areas of strength, including the Church, the officer corps, the economy, the bureaucracy's commitment to upholding the rule of law, and the idea of the Rechtsstaat in general. See Boyer, Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna; idem, Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna; Cohen, Education and Middle-Class Society in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918; Deák, Beyond Nationalism; Good, The Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire, 1750–1914; Heindl, Gehorsame Rebellen; Shedel, “Fin de Siècle or Jahrhundertwende,” 80–104.

Kann, The Multinational Empire, 39.

Ibid.

Hantsch, Geschichte Osterreichs, vol. 2, 336.

Sked, The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815–1918, 144.

Beller, Francis Joseph, 51–52.

Idem, A Concise History of Austria, 129.

Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy, 156.

Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries.

For the Habsburg Monarchy specifically, see also Wingfield, Creating the Other, for a superb collection of essays that surveys how identities were constructed largely through the process of “Othering,” i.e. negative integration, among the Monarchy's various peoples all across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Another recent collection operating from the same basic principle that national identities were constructed is Judson and Rozenblit, Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe. These two collections combined offer a comprehensive examination, both in terms of regions and time periods, of national identity construction in modern Habsburg Europe. Another recent case study focusing on Bohemia is Glassheim's Noble Nationalists. With an argument that builds on King's work, Glassheim examines how a discrete group of individuals gradually came to choose an ethno-national identity to replace pre-existing identities, in this case class and regional-based ones.

King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans, 46–47.

See Kann, The Multinational Empire, 59–65, for a detailed analysis of the Stadion draft constitution.

See Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy, 159–65.

For a discussion of how Francis Joseph's view of monarchic rule was shaped by his education, see Beller, Francis Joseph, 31–34.

Beller, A Concise History of Austria, 129. Beller's point parallels the earlier-cited remarks of Hantsch.

Redlich, Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria, 161.

Beller made this argument in Francis Joseph, 85–87.

Beller makes a similar argument regarding Serbia, noting that “the Monarchy's domestic politics prevented this” (Beller, A Concise History of Austria, 179).

Ibid., 145. The assessment that the Magyars wielded disproportionate influence amounting to a veto over significant changes to the 1867 agreement represents a broad consensus among non-Hungarian Habsburg historians.

Cohen goes so far as to suggest that the nationality compromises reached at the provincial level in Moravia, Bukovina, and Galicia, and at the local level in Budweis/Budejowice in the years just before 1914, combined with the introduction of universal, equal male suffrage in Cisleithania in 1907, are evidence that “the basic relationship between nationalist politics and the state in the Austrian half of the Monarchy may have been entering a new phase of development” (see “Nationalist Politics,” 273). Beller's recent work offers a much more critical overall assessment of the health of political life in the Monarchy in the years between 1866 and 1918; see A Concise History of Austria, 141–95.

Sked, The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815–1918, 221.

Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy, 222–23.

Sked, The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815–1918, 222.

Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy, 223; Beller, A Concise History of Austria, 144.

There is a huge literature on the topic of the German–Czech rivalry in the post-1867 Monarchy, too vast to cite here. For an excellent synthetic analysis of that rivalry and its impact on the Monarchy, see Albrecht, “The Bohemian Question,” 75–96.

Höbelt, Kornblume und Kaiseradler, 182. See also Beller, A Concise History of Austria, 163–67.

For a comprehensive analysis of the revolution in Hungary, see Deák, The Lawful Revolution. On Vienna specifically, see Rath, The Viennese Revolution of 1848; and for the Czechs, see Pech, The Czech Revolution of 1848.

Evans, Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs, 255. On this point, Evans also cites Redlich, Das österreichische Staats- und Reichsproblem; and Lányi, Das Nationalitätenproblem auf dem Reichstag zu Kremsier/Kroměříž, 1848–9.

Reifowitz, Imagining an Austrian Nation, 229–30.

See Bloch, Der Nationale Zwist und die Juden in Österreich, 46–48. See also Reifowitz, Imagining an Austrian Nation, 142–45.

On von Schönerer, see Whiteside, The Socialism of Fools; and Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 120–33.