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side general socialist statements, the first draft of the program of Ludwik YVarinski's socialist movement in 1879 declared: "YVe also believe deeplv that the Polish people, mobilized in the name of social-revolutionary principles, will demonstrate irrepressible strength and steadfast energy in the struggle with the partitioning governments, which have joined economic exploitation with unprecedented national oppression" (Porter 2000, 106). Unlike Dmowski's exclusive xenophobic nationalism, the other major new force of national independence, the Polish Socialist party (PrS), established from four socialist groups in 189}, advocated an "independent democratic commonwealth . . . [with] complete equality [of all nationalities] on the basis of a voluntary federation" and accepted the idea of insurrection. Rosa Luxemburg's separate Social Democratic partv of the kingdom of Poland (SDKP), which became the PPS-Lewica (Left) after a 1906 PPS split, maintained that proletarian revolution in the Russian empire would automatically eliminate national oppression.
Josef Pilsudski and the PPS-Rcwolucja, ot "social patriots," as Rosa Luxemburg lampooned the nationalist socialists in the PPS, argued that social progress was impossible without national independence. The homeland's independence, Pilsudski insisted, was "a condition characteristic of socialism's victoty in Poland" (Brock 1969, 346-48). The son of an impoverished Lithuanian Polish gentry family, Pilsudski studied medicine in Kharkov, was deported to Siberia fot five years in 1887, then became one of the founders of the PPS and editor of Robotnik. After another arrest in 1901, he gradually devoted himself entirely to the national cause and turned toward violent action. Although not a ttained soldier, Pilsudski began preparing cadres and officers for a futute Polish army for action against Russia. His paramilitary units launched various attacks during the revolutionary crisis of 1905-6, and in 1908, he moved to Galicia, in Habsburg Poland, as an outlawed terrorist, whete he founded his First Brigade.
HABSBURG AUTHORITARIANISM AND CZECH NATIONALISM
Although the Habsburg empire was the most enlightened absolute power in Central and Eastern Europe, it was nonetheless unquestionably autocratic for the first rwo-thirds of the nineteenth century, with heavy censorship, an army of police spies, and a politically influential Catholic Church. With the revoking of the liberal constitution that resulted from the revolution of 1848, the "entire administrative system [became] purely
FIGURE 67. The Berlin Conference, 1878. Courtesy Hadrorteneti Muzeum, Budapest.
figure 88. Alexander Cuza. Courtesy Magyar Tudomanyos Akadcmia Tortencttudomanyi Intczcte, Budapest.
figure 89. King Carol I of Romania. Courtesy Hadtorteneti Muzcum, Budapest.
figure 90. Nikola l'asic, prime minister of Serbia before World War I. Courtesy Hadtorteneti Muzcum, Budapest.
figure 91. KalmanTisza, prime minister of Hungary. Courtesy Hungarian National Museum, Budapest.
figure 92. King Ferdinand I of Bulgaria. Courtesy Hadtdrteneti Muzeum, Budapest,
figure 93, Hungarian gendarmes and Romanian voters, 1906. Courtesy Hungarian National Museum, Budapest.
figure 94. Emperor Franz Joseph in the uniform of a Hungarian hussar, 1898. Courtesy Hungarian National Museum, Budapest.
figure 95. The Kaiserlich und Königlich Kriegsmarinen dreadnought Viribus Unitis. Courtesy Hadrorteneti Miizenm, Budapest.
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FIGURE 96. Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary and his wife, Sophie, whose assassination triggered World War I. Courtesy Hadtorteneti Muzcum, Budapest.
figure 97. Serbian soldiers in the trenches, World War I. Courtesy Hadtorteneti Muzeum, Budapest.
authoritarian.''' As late as October i860, Emperor Franz Josef wrote to his mother: "We shall, indeed, have a little parliamentary government, but the power remains in my hands" (Macartney 1968,440,499)- However, unlike the Russian and Ottoman regimes, the Habsburg monarchy introduced Western European legal institutions at the end of the 1860s: censorship was abandoned, and freedom of speech, press, property, belief, and association were granted. Citizens became equal before the law, and the judiciary was separated from executive power.
The empire, nevertheless, preserved its autocratic character: "The Crown in fact emerged with its power not greatly shorn," C. A. Macartney observes; the new laws left it "in a very strong position dejure, and de facto it was even stronger." The monarch and his government claimed the right of supervision of associations and assemblies. He remained the commander of the army and had virtually no limits with respect to foreign affairs. He retained the right to veto legislation and die right to dissolve parliament. His supremacy was based on the bureaucracy and the army, the "cement" of the monarchy. Regarding Hungary, the king-emperor did not have veto power, but "the unofficial right of'preliminary sanction' filled the gap." The monarch was entitled to appoint the prime minister of his choice and to retain him in office in the face of an adverse parliamentary majority. In Austria, die emergency clause allowed the government to enact necessary measures if the Reichsrat was not in session. These measures required a retroactive endorsement by die Reichsrat, but it was a formality, since there was no case of refusal. "ThcRticksrat had become in fact little more than. .. an advisory body to the Crown."Although the parliament, which was elected by 5 9 percent of the population, had some control, "where. . . fundamentals were at issue, the Monarch's will was enforced, if necessary, over Parliament's head" (Macartney 1968, 561-67). "The malfunctioning of the representative system produced in practice a transfer of power to die bureaucracy. Political and administrative functions were intertwined and were not uncommonly identified as one and rhe same," Paul Haves adds. A huge, self-serving bureaucracy of tiiree million people (in 1914), preoccupied widi its own advancement and preservation of privileges, grades, and ranks, became a major, authoritative player (Hayes 1992, 69).
Although less expansionist than Russia, die Habsburg empire launched various wars to maintain and enlarge the monarchy. It participated in the partition of Poland at die end of the eighteenth century and gained Gali-cia. In 1775, it took over Bukovina, with its mixed Romanian, Ukrainian, German, and Jewish population, and it participated in the French wars
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and in the struggle with Prussia to lead German unification. It fought wars to hold onto northern Italy and Hungary in the mid nineteenth century and enlarged the Habsburg domains by first occupying (1875) and then annexing (1908) Bosnia-Herzegovina. Even after die creation of the dual kaherlich imdkiiniglkh (imperial and royal, or It. tmdIt.), system, Austria's first reaction to the 1903 electoral victory of the nationalist opposition in H ungary was to use military force. A plan called die Losuttg der mtgarischen Krisc dnrch Waffiiijjavalt (solution to the Hungarian crisis by military force) was prepared and discussed in the emperor's hunting mansion in Bad Ischl at a meeting chaired by Franz Josef on August 22,1905.
In 1879, the empire became a partner with Germany in the Dual Alliance (which was enlarged by Italy in 1882 and became the Triple Alliance), an aggressive political and military agreement that was a part of war preparation. Austria-Hungary was also a pillar of the Dreikaiserbund, the alliance of the three emperors of Russia, Germany, and Austria (1881) to maintain the status quo they had created in i8i> and liarmoni/.e expansion in the Balkans.
Hie Habsburg empire's authoritarian character was especially clearly exhibited in its relations with the subordinated nations. Prince Felix Schwarzenberg established the concept of an absolutist, centralized state, leader of a reorganized German Confederation, in 1848. Alter the suppression of the revolution of 1848-49, absolute power without differentiation among subordinated nationalities was established by the Sylvester Patent of December 31,1851. As was sarcastically noted and often quoted, those who were loyal to the Habsburgs in 1848 received the same treatment as a reward that those who had fought the empire got as punishment. In 185+, in order to create an "Austrian nation," the "nationalizing" monarchy made German the empire's only official language. After the dream of Grossdeutsch unification vanished in 1866, however, and Austria made its compromise with the empire's strongest nationality, the Hungarians, in 1867, Habsburg subjects fell into three separate categories: privileged Germans and Magyars; semiprivileged Poles and Croats, in Galicia and Croatia, respectively; and nonprivileged peoples, such as the Czechs (until 1910), Serbs, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Romanians, Slovenes, and Croats living outside Croatia. Roughly a quarter of the population belonged to the latter category, and another quarter to the semiprivileged group. Approximately 60 percent of Hapsburg subjects—whether German, Polish, Romanian, or Serb—had "brother" co-nationals living outside the empire, and some 40 percent even had a "motherland" nation-state not far off.
The Czech lands and Bukovina did not enjoy any important elements of political, linguistic, or cultural autonomy. The Czech national movement's traditional demand since František Palacky's Old Czech movement, which was taken up by his son-in-law, František Rieger, was the restoration of the Böhmisches Staatsrecht—the old constitution of the Czech kingdom as an autonomous unit within the monarchy. After 1863, following the prototype of Hungarian passive resistance during the years of absolutism, the Czechs withdrew from the Reichsrat and boycotted it for sixteen years.
Anew hope rose in 1871, when Count Siegmund Hohenwart, the newly appointed prime minister, in cooperation with the Old Czech party, worked our the Fundamental Articles, The plan was to establish a Diet of the Czech Lands, so that Bohemian representatives would not sit in the Rcichsrat, but would instead participate in a joint congress of the delegates of the Austrian, Hungarian, and Czech parliaments (Scharf 1996). Autonomy was planned for the Bohemian administration in economic aftairs as well. A drafted nationality law would have conferred equal official status for the Czech language with the German in each district where at least 20 percent of the population spoke Czech as their native language. Government officials would have been required to speak both languages. This reasonable compromise, however, failed. Gyula Andrássy, the prime minister of Hungary, angrily defended the dual structure of the monarchy and opposed any movement toward federalism. The emperor himself preferred the structure created by the Ausgleich.
The defeat of the Old Czech concept led to the decline of the movement itself and the rise of the Young Czech movement, organized in 1874, following a break with the Old Czechs. The Young Czechs used different tactics and stressed cultural and educational programs. Aided by the flourishing Czech economy, the Marica Česká and Matica Školská patriotic societies and the sports organization Sokol developed into an increasingly radical national mass movement. The language war was not easily resolved. In Bohemia—according to the 1910 census—while 03 percent of the population was Czech, 37 percent was German. In Moravia, the Czech majority constituted 72 percent of the population, and the German minority only 28 percent. In the third "Czech land," Silesia, however, the Germans were most numerous, 44 percent, and even the Poles outnumbered the Czechs (32 and 24 percent, respectively), The Taaffe government, during the 1880s, made some concessions by reinstating Czech as the so-called external language of the judiciary and public administration, and then, as the internal language of the Prague and Brno superior courts when
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processing Czech cases. Prague's venerable Charles University was also divided into Czech and German units. Endless debates and various resolutions yielded no solutions. Austrian Germans who opposed the creation of a "Slavstate" within the monarchy founded a pan-German party, whose Linz program proposed Anschluss— union — with Germany. "It was among the Germans, in reaction to the concession made primarily to the Czechs, that the first movement [that] advocated the dissolution of Austria-Hungary emerged," Peter Sugar writes (Sugar 1999, iv, 26).
The deadlock helped the Young Czechs, who turned to the "average" Czech of the rising middle class rather than to their rivals' constituency of aristocratic landowners. Under the leadership of Karel Kramář, a believer in Slav unity, the Young Czechs performed well in the 1891 Rcichs-rat elections, winning three times as many votes as the Old Czechs. An organized filibuster paralyzed the work of the parliament. Riots raged in Prague, and the Austrian authorities introduced a state of emergency, banned several Czech national organizations, and arrested many of their members.
Paradoxically, to preserve national oppression, the Austrian government democratized the electoral system: to counterbalance the restive Czech middle class, the number of eligible voters was tripled in 1893. The emperor appointed a Polish count, Casimir Badeni, an experienced and loyal administrator in Galicia, as prime minister in 1895. He sought to cut the Gordian knot of debate over language widi a new regulation: both German and Czech would become official languages throughout the former Czech kingdom, and state employees would have to learn both languages within three years. The new effort to find a compromise led virtually to civil war; the German nationalists organized a filibuster, then even violence in parliament and on the streets of Vienna and Graz. The emperor dismissed Badeni and dropped the plan. A Czech revolt followed and paralyzed the work of the Reichsrat. Bohemia remained in a state of permanent unrest.
The political domination of the Young Czechs gradually evaporated during the 1890s and early 1900s. The enfranchisement of the lower urban and rural classes, owing partly to electoral reform in 1896, but mostly to the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1907, broadened the social base of some new parties that advocated lower-class interests, such as the Social Democratic party, the National Socialists, and the Agrarians. In the 1911 elections, the Young Czechs won only 19 scats compared to the 52 won by the Social Democrats and Agrarians combined (Oskar Krejčí 1995). However, the national question remained in focus, and the
various Czech parties formed a consultative National Council in Prague in 1900.
It was in this context that the former Young Czech dcptity and pro-lessor of sociology Tomáš Masarýk formed his nationalist and lcft-of-center Realist party in 1890. For the first time in the decades-long history of the Czech national movement, the traditional demand for the rcintro-duction of Czech Staatsrccbt was rejected. Masarýk regarded it as unrealistic and advocated a democratic federal reorganization of the monarchy instead. Almost alone in the region, the new Czech national movement, with its middle-class backing, linked the national question with democracy and human rights. Masarýk was a unique national leader in Central and Eastern Europe. This highly cosmopolitan intellectual—who had a Moravian-Slovakian father, a Moravian-German mother, and an American wife—was a firm believer in the ethnic identity of Czechs and Slovaks. He maintained that the Slovaks were Slovak-speaking Czechs, while the Czechs were Czech-speaking Slovaks. Small wonder, then, that he gradually turned toward a new national concept: Czechoslovakism, the unification of Czechs and Slovaks within the monarchy. Similarly, he endorsed Serbo-Croat unity.
The Slovak national movement declined after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. As early as 1S61, at the Turčiansky Svätý Martin meeting, Slovaks demanded equality of language and Slovak as the official language in the Hornouhorské Slovenské Okolie, the "North Hungarian Slovak District," but the tactic of passive resistance and abstention from political activities between 1875 and the mid 1890s proved counterproductive. Slovak nationalism staged a comeback in the mid 1890s. The most ardent new advocate of the traditional demand for Slovak autonomy within Hungary was Father Andrej Hlinka, who established a Slovak wing of the Hungarian Néppárt (People's party) in 1896. This embryonic party became the Slovak People's party after the turn of the century and won seven seats in die Hungarian parliament in 1906. The party organized credit cooperatives, people's banks, and reading rooms, and propagandized among Slovak peasants, inter alia using anti-Semitic slogans. A Slovak intellectual group in Budapest led by Milan Hodža, a member of the Hungarian parliament, worked for universal suffrage and federal reorganization of the monarchy based on a "trialism" that included Slavs to replace the "dualist" Austro-Hungarian structure of the empire. Union with the Czechs was not, however, on the agenda among the Slovak p< ip ■ ulation of northern Hungary.
Slovak students at (Iharlcs University, the youngest generation, none-
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diclcss still ted tlie Ccskoslovcnsk.i Jcdiiiita, or Czechoslovak Society, and given that Masaryk was the most prestigious intellectual leader of the Czech national movement before the war, Cz.echixslovaki.sm gained ground. It was popularized, moreover, by tlie journal Hlas {1898), founded by Vavro Srobar, who was influenced by Masaryk. After 1907, all the Slovak political parties built contacts with the Czechs. In the spring of 1914, the Slovak National party, a kind of umbrella organization of all the parties, amended its program by stressing close cooperation with the Czechs and endorsing the concept of democratic federal reorganization of the monarchy (Kann and David 1984,584).
HUNGARIAN NATIONALISM
Slovak nationalism in northern Hungary, Romanian nationalism in Transylvania, Croat nationalism in Croatia, and Serb nationalism in the Voivo-dina all met stubborn opposition from Hungarian nationalism. The Carpatho-Ukrainian religious movement that sprang up in the late nineteenth century and led to a mass conversion of Ukrainian peasants from Greek Catholicism to Greek Orthodoxy provides a telling example. The Hungarian authorities, worried by pan-Slavism, responded with mass arrests and charges of treason and antisrare activity. At a mass trial in Mara-marossziget in 1913-14, thirty-two Ukrainian peasants were sentenced and jailed.
The Hungarians were more fortunate than other peoples in the Hahs-burg empire with respect to the national question. Even though their 1848-49 revolt suffered both defeat and retribution, it led to the compromise of 1867, The Hungarian noble elite, exhausted by passive resistance against Austria and hungry to reassert their political domination in the country and lill lucrative public positions, wciv ready to negotiate. Thev sought to stabilize their power over the nationalities and consolidate the multiethnic state. The same was true of the emperor and his Austrian political elite, especially after Austria's defeat by Prussia in 1866 dashed its hopes of leading German unification. The Austrian-Hungarian Ausglcich of 1867 restored the constitutional integrity of Hungary and guaranteed the country quasi-independent, autonomous self-government. This found symbolic expression in the personality of Count Gyula Andrassy, Hungary's first prime minister (18A7-71). As a colonel in the revolutionary army, Andrassy had fought against Austria in 1848 and was sent to Istanbul by Kossuth in 1849 to try to persuade the Porte to intervene against
the I labshurgs. While in exile after the defeat of the rebellion, he had actually been sentenced to death in absentia by the Austrians in 1851.
''Today is the day of festive joy and national pride," the German-language Budapest newspaper Pester Lloyd proclaimed on May 9, 1867: Franz Josef had allowed himself to be crowned king of Hungary in the Mathias Church in Buda. A decade before, in 1857, the poet János Arany had "welcomed" Franz Josef with his mctaphoric "The Bards of Wales," in which one of the bards tells the visiting king:
Our brave were killed, just as you willed, Or languish in our gaols: To hail your name or sing your Rime You find no bard in Wales
(Makkai lyyft, iKo)
Franz Josef now had a rather different welcome. Thousands jammed the railway station to greet the emperor. A thick cordon of people lined the route and showered the royal couple with flowers. The entire political elite attended the ceremony, and Liszt's Hungarian Coronation Mass was played (Freifcld 2000,215,218-19). The hated butcher of 1848, whose bedroom in the Hofburg in Vienna was decorated with paintings of the major battles that had defeated the Hungarian revolution, would henceforth be the beloved father of the Hungarians.
The compromise reestablished Hungarian domination over all ethnic minorities in the country. They altogether represented half of the population that had actually allied itself with the emperor to defeat the Hungarian revolution in 1848-49. An independent Hungarian government was formed, responsible to the Hungarian parliament. The monarchy was transformed into a dual state, renamed Austria-Hungary. The Austrian emperor was crowned king of Hungary, and the most important portfolios of the government of the dual monarchy—defense, foreign affairs, and finance—became "common aftairs."The joint army used German as the language of command, although small national military units, the Honvéd army in Hungary and the Landswehr in Austria, were also established. Common finances included a common Central Bank in Vienna. The three ministers of common affairs were responsible to delegates rep-resenring the two parliaments. One of the three common ministers was almost always Hungarian, and four out of eleven ministers of finance and four out of ten ministers of foreign affairs were Hungarians during the period of the dual regime.
A so-called economic compromise retained a customs union and di-