The Sleepwalkers (15 page)

Even a critical observer like the
Times
correspondent Henry Wickham Steed, a long-time resident of Vienna, recognized in 1913 that ‘the “race struggle” in Austria' was in essence a conflict for shares of patronage within the existing system:

The essence of the language struggle is that it is a struggle for bureaucratic influence. Similarly, the demands for new Universities or High Schools put forward by Czechs, Ruthenes, Slovenes, and Italians but resisted by the Germans, Poles, or other races, as the case may be, are demands for the creation of new machines to turn out potential officials whom the political influence of Parliamentary parties may then be trusted to hoist into bureaucratic appointments.
¹³

There was, moreover, slow but unmistakable progress towards a more accommodating policy on national rights (at least in Cisleithania). The equality of all the subject nationalities and languages in Cisleithania was formally recognized in the Basic Law of 1867, and a body of case law accumulated to provide solutions for problems the drafters of the Compromise had not foreseen, such as language provisions for Czech minorities in German areas of Bohemia. Throughout the last peacetime years of the empire's existence, the Cisleithanian authorities continued to adjust the system in response to national minority demands. The Galician Compromise agreed in the Galician Diet in Lemberg (today Lviv) on 28 January 1914, for example, assured a fixed proportion of the mandates in an enlarged regional legislature to the under-represented Ruthenes (Ukrainians) and promised the imminent establishment of a Ukrainian university.
¹⁴
Even the Hungarian administration was showing signs of a change of heart by the beginning of 1914, as the international climate worsened. The South Slavs of Croatia-Slavonia were promised the abolition of extraordinary powers and a guarantee of freedom of the press, while a message went out to Transylvania that the Budapest government intended to meet many of the demands of the Romanian majority in that region. The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Sazonov, was so impressed by the thought that these measures might stabilize Habsburg rule in the Romanian areas that he proposed to Tsar Nicholas II in January 1914 granting similar concessions to the millions of Poles in western Russia.
¹⁵

These case-by-case adjustments to specific demands suggested that the system might eventually produce a comprehensive mesh of guarantees for nationality rights within an agreed framework.
¹⁶
And there were signs that the administration was getting better at responding to the material demands of the regions.
¹⁷
It was the state, of course, that performed this role, not the beleaguered parliaments of the Habsburg lands. The proliferation of school boards, town councils, county commissions, mayoral elections and the like ensured that the state intersected with the life of the citizenry in a more intimate and consistent way than the political parties or the legislative assemblies.
¹⁸
It was not (or not primarily) an apparatus of repression, but a vibrant entity commanding strong attachments, a broker among manifold social, economic and cultural interests.
¹⁹
The Habsburg bureaucracy was costly to maintain – expenditure for the domestic administration rose by 366 per cent during the years 1890–1911.
²⁰
But most inhabitants of the empire associated the Habsburg state with the benefits of orderly government: public education, welfare, sanitation, the rule of law and the maintenance of a sophisticated infrastructure.
²¹
These features of the Habsburg polity loomed large in memory after the monarchy's extinction. In the late 1920s, when the writer (and engineering graduate) Robert Musil looked back on the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the last peaceful year of its existence, the picture that formed before his mind's eye was one of ‘white, broad, prosperous streets [. . .] that stretched like rivers of order, like ribbons of bright military serge, embracing the lands with the paper-white arm of administration'.
²²

Finally, most minority activists acknowledged the value of the Habsburg commonwealth as a system of collective security. The bitterness of conflicts
between
minority nationalities – Croats and Serbs in Croatia-Slavonia, for example, or Poles and Ruthenians in Galicia – and the many areas of ethnically mixed settlement suggested that the creation of new and separate national entities might cause more problems than it resolved.
²³
And how, in any case, would such fledgeling nation-states fare without the protective carapace of the empire? In 1848, the Czech nationalist historian František Palacky had warned that disbanding the Habsburg Empire, far from liberating the Czechs, would merely provide the basis for ‘Russian universal monarchy'. ‘I am impelled by natural as well as historical causes to seek [in Vienna] the centre called to secure and to protect for my people peace, freedom and justice.'
²⁴
In 1891, Prince Charles Schwarzenberg advanced the same argument when he asked the Young Czech nationalist Edward Grégr: ‘If you and yours hate this state, . . . what will you do with your country, which is too small to stand alone? Will you give it to Germany, or to Russia, for you have no other choice if you abandon the Austrian union.'
²⁵
Before 1914, radical nationalists seeking full separation from the empire were still a small minority. In many areas, nationalist political groups were counterbalanced by networks of associations – veterans' clubs, religious and charitable groups, associations of
bersaglieri
(sharpshooters) – nurturing various forms of Habsburg patriotism.
²⁶

The venerability and permanence of the monarchy were personified in the imperturbable, bewhiskered figure of Emperor Franz Joseph. His had been a life abnormally rich in private tragedy. The Emperor's son Rudolf had killed himself in a double suicide with his mistress at the family hunting lodge, his wife Elisabeth (‘Sissi') had been stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist on the banks of Lake Geneva, his brother Maximilian had been executed by Mexican insurgents at Queretaro and his favourite niece had burned to death when a cigarette set fire to her dress. The Emperor had borne these blows with a glacial stoicism. In public life, he projected a persona ‘demonic', as the satirist Karl Kraus put it, in its ‘unpersonality'. His stylized commentary on virtually every official ceremony – ‘It was nice, we were quite pleased' – was a household phrase across the lands of the monarchy.
²⁷
The Emperor demonstrated considerable skill in managing the complex machinery of his state, balancing opposed forces in order to maintain all within an equilibrium of well-tempered dissatisfaction and involving himself closely in all phases of constitutional reform.
²⁸
Yet by 1914 he had become a force for inertia. In the last two years before the war, he backed the autocratic Magyar premier István Tisza against minority demands for Hungarian franchise reform. As long as the Kingdom of Hungary continued to deliver the funds and votes Vienna needed, Franz Joseph was prepared to accept the hegemony of the Magyar elite, notwithstanding its disregard for the interests of the national minorities in the lands of the kingdom.
²⁹
There were signs that he was drifting out of touch with contemporary life: ‘The powerfully surging life of our times,' wrote the Austrian German politician Joseph Maria Baernreither in 1913, when Franz Joseph was eighty-three, ‘scarcely reaches the ear of our emperor as distant rustling. He is denied any real participation in this life. He no longer understands the times, and the times pass on regardless.'
³⁰

Nevertheless: the Emperor remained the focus of powerful political and emotional attachments. It was widely recognized that his popularity was anchored outside of his constitutional role, in broadly shared popular emotions.
³¹
By 1914, he had been on the throne for longer than most of his subjects had been alive. He seemed, in the words of Joseph Roth's masterpiece
The Radetzky March
, ‘coffered up in an icy and everlasting old age, like armour of an awe-inspiring crystal'.
³²
He made regular appearances in the dreams of his subjects. His sky-blue eyes continued to gaze out from portraits across tens of thousands of taverns, schoolrooms, offices and railway waiting rooms, while the daily newspapers marvelled at the supple and elastic stride with which the old man leapt from his carriage on state occasions. Prosperous and relatively well administered, the empire, like its elderly sovereign, exhibited a curious stability amid turmoil. Crises came and went without appearing to threaten the existence of the system as such. The situation was always, as the Viennese journalist Karl Kraus quipped, ‘desperate, but not serious'.

A special and anomalous case was Bosnia-Herzegovina, which the Austrians ‘occupied' under Ottoman suzerainty in 1878 on the authorization of the Treaty of Berlin and formally annexed thirty years later. Late nineteenth-century Bosnia was a heavily forested, mountainous land bounded by peaks of over 2,000 metres in the south and by valley of the river Save in the north. Herzegovina consisted mainly of a wild, high karst plateau crossed by swift watercourses and closed in by mountain chains – a land of harsh terrain and virtually non-existent infrastructure. The condition of these two Balkan provinces under Habsburg rule has long been the subject of controversy. The young Bosnian Serb terrorists who travelled to Sarajevo in the summer of 1914 to kill the heir to the Austrian throne defended their actions by reference to the oppression of their brothers in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and historians have sometimes suggested that the Austrians themselves were to blame for driving the Bosnian Serbs into the arms of Belgrade by a combination of oppression and misgovernment.

Is this right? There were widespread protests during the early years of the occupation, especially against conscription. But this was nothing new – the provinces had experienced chronic turbulence under Ottoman rule; what was exceptional was the relative serenity of the period from the mid-1880s down to 1914.
³³
The condition of the peasantry after 1878 was a sore point. The Austrians chose not to abolish the Ottoman
agaluk
estate system, on which about 90,000 Bosnian serfs or
kmets
were still working in 1914, and some historians have seen this as evidence of a ‘divide and rule' policy designed to press down the mainly Serb peasantry while currying favour with the Croats and Muslims in the towns. But this is a retrospective projection. Cultural and institutional conservatism, not a philosophy of colonial domination, underpinned Austrian governance in the new provinces. ‘Gradualism and continuity' characterized Austrian rule in all areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina where they encountered traditional institutions.
³⁴
Where possible, the laws and institutions inherited from the Ottoman era were harmonized and clarified, rather than discarded out of hand. But the Habsburg administration did facilitate the emancipation of subject peasants by means of a one-off payment; over 40,000 Bosnian
kmets
purchased their autonomy in this way between the occupation and the outbreak of war in 1914. In any case, the Serbian
kmets
who remained within the old estate system on the eve of the First World War were not especially badly off by the standards of early twentieth-century peasant Europe; they were probably more prosperous than their counterparts in Dalmatia or southern Italy.

The Austrian administration also did much to increase the productivity of agriculture and industry in Bosnia-Herzegovina. They set up model farms, including a vineyard and a fish-farm, introduced rudimentary agronomic training for country schoolteachers and even established an agricultural college in Ilidze, at a time when no such institution existed in neighbouring Serbia. If the uptake of new methods was still relatively slow, this had more to do with the resistance of the peasantry to innovation than with Austrian negligence. There was also a massive influx of investment capital. A road and railway network appeared, including some of the best mountain roads in Europe. These infrastructural projects served a partly military purpose, to be sure, but there was also massive investment across a range of sectors, including mining, metallurgy, forestry and chemicals production. The pace of industrialization peaked during the administration of Count Benjamin Kállay (1882–1903) and the consequence was a surge in industrial output (12.4 per cent per annum on average over the period 1881–1913) without precedent elsewhere in the Balkan lands.
³⁵
In short, the Habsburg administration treated the new provinces as a showcase whose purpose was to ‘demonstrate the humanity and efficiency of Habsburg rule'; by 1914, Bosnia-Herzegovina had been developed to a level comparable with the rest of the double monarchy.
³⁶

The worst blemish on the record of the Austrian administration in Bosnia-Herzegovina was the appallingly low rate of literacy and school attendance, which was worse even than Serbia's.
³⁷
But this was not the consequence of an Austrian policy of mass stultification. The Austrians built primary schools – nearly 200 of them – not to mention three high schools, a teacher training college and a technical institute. It was not a stellar effort, but it was not outright neglect either. The problem lay partly in getting peasants to send their children to school.
³⁸
Only in 1909, after the formal annexation of the provinces, was compulsory primary education introduced.