The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  *

  The Christian Social Party, however, never succeeded in gaining serious support among the industrial workers: attempts in which Leopold Kunschak, then a young journeyman’s apprentice, took the lead, to found Christian Trade Unions, met with small success. The Trade Union movement and the political movement among the organized industrial workers remained the domain of the Social Democrat Party, which, once Adler had given it its fresh start, also went ahead very fast. Exact figures of its membership are extraordinarily difficult to discover, but by 1906 it had 90,797 members in Vienna, organized in 47 ‘political associations’.190 There were about 17,500 members in Styria, 20,000 in Bohemia-Moravia and a few thousand elsewhere. The Party now possessed its own Press – the daily Arbeiterzeitung, the weekly Kampf and other organs – and a whole network of women’s and youth organizations, etc.

  These were not, indeed, large absolute figures, at least outside Vienna, but the sympathizers with the Social Democrats outnumbered many times their organized members. The great strength of the Party lay in its close association with the Trade Unions, which also made great progress. In 1892 there were still only 46,606 organized workers, but the figure for 1902 was 135,178; for 1905, 323,099. This figure, again, was still relatively small compared with the total number of workers: in Vienna, where it was much the highest, it was still only about 25%, and in some of the outlying Lands, 5%, 2%, or 1%. The only trade in which a majority of the workers was organized was the printers (77·75%). Then came the dock labourers (almost entirely in Trieste), with 38·46%. No other trade had an organized membership of 30%, and only ten others, one of 20% or more. These numbers were, however, rising very rapidly.191

  The Party devoted especial attention to training and indoctrinating the Unions and to eliminating from them all influences except its own. In this it was extraordinarily successful. Naturally, not all members of the Unions were Party members, but in practice, the Party organization and that of the Unions were almost identical. The Party could count on the votes of nearly all Union members in any election and their support in matters of policy. In particular, it mobilized them regularly, and with great frequency, in strikes and demonstrations, not only for improvements in working conditions but also for political purposes, above all, for extension of the franchise, which Adler had designated to be the chief goal at which the Party must aim.192 The period saw a very large number of strikes, which brought about considerable further improvements in working conditions,193 and certainly contributed largely to the extensions of the suffrage which took place in this period and its successor.

  Between them, the Social Democratic Party and the Trade Unions made the workers’ movement into a powerful factor in the Austrian political life of the day. It is true that their influence was almost confined to central affairs, and locally, to the life of Vienna, Bohemia-Moravia and Styria; elsewhere it was negligible. It is also true that the strength of the movement was greatly diminished by the national conflicts within it described below.194

  *

  The parties representing the other end of the social and economic gamut were now fighting a rearguard action with dwindling numbers. The Liberals, as we have seen, almost disappeared in 1897; had the franchise not been extraordinarily favourable to them, their downfall would have been more spectacular still. The conservative elements in the Catholic Church put up a better fight against what they regarded as their three enemies in chief, Godless Social Democracy, Protestant extremist German nationalism and subversive Christian Socialism. The Catholic People’s Party which entered the lists in the 1897 elections with the objective of rallying the Germans of Austria under this flag had considerable success, especially in its stronghold, the Tirol; and it represented a spirit which enabled the Church to remain a powerful factor, especially in the Alpine Lands, up to the end of the Monarchy.195

  *

  The most important political phenomenon of the period was still the continued growth and exacerbation of national feeling among the peoples of Austria. From this radicalization of feeling no single one of the peoples, except perhaps the ‘satiated nationality’ of the Poles, was exempt, and several of them also began to look, much more than before, across the frontiers, if not of the Monarchy, at least of the Leitha.

  After German rowdyism had enforced the repeal of the Badeni Ordinances, Czech rowdyism failed, as we have seen, to get them restored and the position with respect to the use of the two languages in public life remained that of the 1880s, with German still enjoying a certain advantage. The Czechs had, however, caught up more ground in the economic, social and cultural fields and were now the Germans’ equals on all but the very highest levels.196 Meanwhile, the Czech leaders had begun to interest themselves again in the wider objective of swinging the foreign political alignment of the Monarchy away from Germany, towards the new Franco-Russian axis.

  The moving spirit in these endeavours was Dr Karel Kramař, who emerged in the 1890s as one of the most prominent Young Czech leaders. During the politically uncertain latter years of the decade Kramař was strongly urging in the Delegations that Austria should change her foreign political orientation, and his speeches and writings to this effect contributed not a little to the refroidissement which prevailed for a little while between Austria and Germany. The passing of the coolness only hardened his determination; in 1902 he sent Delcassé a memorandum warning France of the danger of the Drang nach Osten. His heart was, however, less with France than with Russia, for which he had a deep attachment, especially after he had married the daughter of a rich Kiev merchant and taken to spending much time in Russia, where he was in close touch with the Slavophile politicians and writers.

  The other prominent Czech politician who refused to hobble himself to the Bohemian parish pump was Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, the later President of the Czechoslovak Republic. Masaryk had, indeed, begun his career by mortally offending the conventional Young Czech politicians by a work in which he exposed the true origin of the ‘Königinhof forgeries’197 (this being not the only occasion on which he braved unpopularity by championing an unpopular cause).198 In 1890 he and a few friends had founded a ‘Realist Party’ which gave itself that name because it rejected as ‘unrealistic’ making the Böhmisches Staatsrecht the basis of Czech claims; Masaryk wished to derive these rather from natural right, and said that he would be satisfied with an Austria organized as a democratic federation of equal peoples.

  Most of Masaryk’s early associates, who included Kramař, soon forsook him for the Young Czechs, and in the years which we are now describing his party in the Reichsrat usually consisted only of himself and one other, and its influence on immediate political developments was negligible. On a wider view, however, Masaryk proved more dangerous to the Monarchy than Kramař himself. Although he did not begin as a declared enemy of the Monarchy and his conversion to the view that it was delenda was only gradual;199 and although when he reached that view, he still had no clear programme for the Czechs after the Monarchy had disappeared,200 yet he gradually became convinced that the Monarchy was irreparably lacking in the qualities of justice and democracy which would justify its existence and set himself ‘to de-Austrianize (the Czechs) thoroughly while they were still in Austria’.201

  Masaryk was such an incomparably disruptive force because he expounded ideas of such moral loftiness that they made an irresistible impression on foreign observers; at the same time, they lent themselves to translation by less scrupulous men on to political planes some of which were far less lofty.

  Meanwhile, he also became one of the most dangerous enemies of Dualism. His lectures at the Czech University in Prague (to which he had been appointed on its creation in 1882) were attended by many students, including Croats, Slovaks and Serbs from Hungary, who sought its relatively free atmosphere. Himself a Moravian Slovak, Masaryk probably did more than any one other man to revive the then rather drooping plant of Czecho-Slovak nationalism, and he was also a great advocate of Serbo-Croat unity. His affections did not li
e with Russia, which he found even less satisfactory than Austria, and he never acknowledged himself to be particularly pro-Slav, even in cultural respects, but his was probably one of the chief influences in the Monarchy in promoting the self-confidence and ambitions of its Slav inhabitants.

  If now, as always, less was heard of the Slovenes and Croats than of the Czechs this did not mean that they were, fundamentally, more quiescent. The national consciousness of the Slovenes had been enormously stimulated by the Cilli episode and they were now making progress at a great pace in almost every field and area. Only in Carinthia were they still losing some ground through assimilation: they were holding their own ethnically in Styria, advancing in the rural districts of Gorizia-Gradisca and penetrating Trieste.202 In Carniola (as in South Styria) only the landlords and the haute bourgeoisie were still German. Laibach was an almost purely Slovene city,203 and in it, and other local centres, the Slovenes now possessed a considerable middle and lower bourgeoisie which had definitely discarded the role of a ‘servant people’ with which the Slovenes had been content a century before. The same could be said, mutatis mutandis, of the Croats of Dalmatia, who were also becoming very strongly conscious of their national identity with their kinsfolk in Croatia and the Herzegovina.

  The voice of the people had by now definitely answered in favour of Ukrainian the question of what the Ruthenes were, or at least, what their language was,204 and since Russia, during these years, was devoting little attention to the peoples across her south-western frontiers, the Ukrainophiles, or Young Ruthenes, had matters pretty well their own way against the ‘Muscovites’ or Old Ruthenes. By now, however, the Young Ruthenes had been forced to see the futility of their hopes of getting anywhere by collaboration with the Poles, who maintained unabated their grip on the political life and educational system (above the elementary level) of Galicia,205 and the relations between the two peoples were now openly hostile. The statistics continued to show a further slight diminution in the relative numbers of the Ruthenes,206 and this doubtless reflected some continued assimilation, though the influence of emigration was probably greater. But the hard core was hardening further,207 and the Ruthenes were now clamouring, in truly bellicose tones, for satisfaction of their national desiderata, especially equality of official usage for the two Landessprachen, to which was added a demand for the administrative division of Galicia, and more educational facilities, in particular, an independent Ruthene University in Lemberg (in favour of which seven hundred Ruthene students walked out in 1902).

  The deplorable social conditions in East Galicia, and the circumstance that the Ruthenes constituted the social and economic underdogs there, suffering under the dual oppression of Polish landlords and Jewish tradesmen and usurers, had the result that their national movement became strongly tinged with extremist Left-wing or even near-anarchist elements; although it might be more accurate to say that the unrest described elsewhere,208 while primarily social, acquired a national colouring in consequence of the national stratification of the social classes involved.209

  Even the Roumanians of the Bukovina grew more active. In 1892 their two traditional Parties fused with certain other groups in a ‘Roumanian National Party of the Bukovina’, under the slogan of ‘solidarity of all Roumanians in political, national and ecclesiastical questions’ – a more specifically ‘national’ line than that of either of its predecessors. Almost at the same time, the Bucharest Liga Culturale began extending its propaganda to the Duchy.

  This was, naturally, not without its effects, and the police reports on unreliable elements, suspicious strangers, etc., grew longer. At the same time, the policy of the official leaders, nearly all of whom belonged to the old cliques, remained as impeccably loyal as before, and there was little trace of anti-German feeling. The Roumanians now saw their chief national antagonists in the local Ruthenes. Whatever had happened a century earlier (when, according to the Roumanians, there had been a big immigration of Ruthenes from Galicia and Russia just when many Roumanians had been emigrating to Moldavia – for it had not been landowners and priests alone who had preferred Moldavian to Austrian rule: there had also been a steady clandestine trickle of peasant emigrants), the respective shares of the two peoples in the total population of the Duchy had since remained almost constant,210 and the main line between their respective ethnic territories had hardly changed, but the Ruthenes, who, after all, outnumbered the Roumanians, had become nationally conscious and were demanding the share in the Crownland’s affairs to which their numbers entitled them. The Roumanians, whose extremists regarded the Ruthenes as interlopers without any justification at all for their existence, opposed these demands with acerbity, although even in this respect the very complexity of the national conditions and the presence of the big German and Jewish elements, which formed a mediating cushion between the two antagonists in chief, prevented the struggle from becoming as envenomed as it was in the more advanced provinces.

  The Italian question had grown perceptibly more acute, as a result, especially, of the developments in Italy. The Lega Nationale and its sister body, the Pro Patria, were now carrying on an embittered positional warfare of the familiar type with their opposite numbers, the Deutscher Schulverein (1880), the Südmark (1889), the Tiroler Volksbund (1905) and the Slovene Cyrill and Method Society. The language of every village school, the appointment of every minor official, the ownership of every border farm, was made into a national question and any grievance, real or imaginary, magnified into a scandal by the chauvinistic Press of the side affected.

  It was as true now as in the preceding period that the Italians of the Monarchy had few genuine grievances, unless the continued refusal to constitute the Trentino a separate Crownland be counted as such. This demand of theirs was, indeed, never granted,211 nor did the Austrian Government ever find a way to satisfy what was at the time their Italian subjects’ other chief demand, which was for a University of their own – a refusal which was due less to ill-will than to the extraordinary intractability of the problem.212 For the rest, the higher Austrian authorities (it must be admitted, the lower authorities and local populations were less indulgent) went out of their way to avoid presenting the Italians with legitimate grievances, and even turned a blind eye to much which they might legitimately have resented.213

  And awareness of this fact was not altogether lacking among the Italians of Austria themselves. The number of Austriacante among them was not insignificant and perhaps not even greatly on the decline. But more than ever, Austria’s ‘Italian question’ was not one between her Government and her Italian subjects, but between the Austrian Monarchy and the Kingdom of Italy. As such, it was growing steadily more acute, and also acquiring a scope which made it far more dangerous to the Monarchy as Italy’s new ambitions reached out towards objectives the loss of which would cripple the Monarchy’s very existence.214

  Ultimately most dangerous of all to the Monarchy was the growth and radicalization of national feeling among its Germans. We should not, indeed, follow those Austrian-German historians who call either the Cilli episode or the Badeni Ordinances a ‘decisive turning-point’ in this development, for the trend had been there long before. But the impetus given to it by each was enormous. Cilli was momentous not only for the violence of the passions which it awoke in an area in which they had previously been relatively restrained215 but also for the realization (previously obscured by differences between their tactical interests) which it brought to the Germans of the Alpine Lands that their national problem was fundamentally identical with that of the Germans of Bohemia. The issue of the Badeni Ordinances was the first event in Austrian history which really shook the Germans’ faith that somehow or other Fate, or the Emperor, or someone, would keep Austria essentially a German State.

  Historians have tended to depict the developments which followed in terms of the fortunes of Schönerer’s extremists. Schönerer did now become increasingly unrestrained. He insisted on his party’s taking the name of Alldeutsch, a
nd said openly in the Reichsrat that ‘he longed for the day when a German army would march into Austria and destroy it’. In his campaign against every prop on which the Monarchy rested he and his lieutenant, Karl Hermann Wolf, launched in 1898 a Los von Rom movement for conversion to the Protestant Church, which Schönerer promised to join (Wolf was a Protestant already) when twenty thousand other converts had done so. The Heir Presumptive was entirely right when he said that Los von Rom meant Los von Oesterreich.216 We can hardly doubt that this was the spirit that prompted certain circles in Germany217 to give the movement, as they did, generous support.

  As before, Schönerer was unable to make his a mass movement. In spite of widespread resentment among the othr Germans when the Catholic People’s Party joined Thun’s government, the Los von Rom movement gained in the end only between 50,000–100,000 converts.218 If the Alldeutsch Party secured twenty-one mandates in the 1901 elections, this was due chiefly to the efforts of Wolf, who had organized an Alldeutsch Party of his own in German Bohemia, where spirits had been excited to near-hysteria by the Badeni Ordinances, and the success even of that movement proved, as we shall see, short-lived.