Austria 1867-1955 connects the political history of German-speaking provinces of the Habsburg Empire before 1914 (Vienna and the Alpine Lands) with the history of the Austrian Republic that emerged in 1918. John W. Boyer presents the case of modern Austria as a fascinating example of democratic nation-building. The construction of an Austrian political nation began in 1867 under Habsburg Imperial auspices, with the German-speaking bourgeois Liberals defining the concept of a political people (Volk) and giving that Volk a constitution and a liberal legal and parliamentary order to protect their rights against the Crown. The decades that followed saw the administrative and judicial institutions of the Liberal state solidified, but in the 1880s and 1890s the membership of the Volk exploded to include new social and economic strata from the lower bourgeoisie and the working classes. Ethnic identity was not the final structuring principle of everyday politics, as it was in the Czech
lands. Rather social class, occupational culture, and religion became more prominent variables in the sortition of civic interests, exemplified by the emergence of two great ideological parties, Christian Socialism and Social Democracy in Vienna in the 1890s. The war crisis of 1914/1918 exploded the Empire, with the Crown self-destructing in the face of military defeat, chronic domestic unrest, and bitter national partisanship. But this crisis also accelerated the emergence of new structures of democratic self-governance in the German-speaking Austrian lands, enshrined in the republican Constitution of 1920. Initial attempts to make this new project of democratic nation-building work failed in the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in the catastrophe of the 1938 Nazi occupation. After 1945 the surviving legatees of the Revolution of 1918 reassembled under the four-power Allied occupation, which fashioned a shared political culture which proved sufficiently flexible to accommodate intense
partisanship, resulting, by the 1970s, in a successful republican system, organized under the aegis of elite democratic and corporatist negotiating structures, in which the Catholics and Socialists learned to embrace the skills of collective but shared self-governance.
Author(s): John W. Boyer
Series: Oxford History of Modern Europe
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 1147
City: Oxford
Cover
Austria, 1867–1955
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: The Terms of Austrian History
The Lineaments of the State
Writing Austrian History
The Dynasty and the Court
1. The Settlement of 1867 and the Creation of a Liberal Constitutional Order
The Revolution of 1848 and the Aftermath
Neo-absolutism
The Limits of Centralistic Rule, 1860‒1866
The War of 1866 and the Ausgleich with Hungary
The December Laws: The Ethos and Structure of the Austrian Constitution
2. Liberalism Ascendant: State Politics and Administration in the Austrian Lands, 1867‒1879
The Liberal Era and the Bürgerministerium
Creating a New Rechtsstaat
Defense and Finance
Education, Church, and State
The War of 1870‒1871 and the Potocki/Hohenwart Interlude
1873 and Liberalism’s Second Chance
Bosnia and Berlin
3. The Era of the Iron Ring: State Consolidation and the Emergence of Civic Radicalism, 1879‒1895
The Breakthrough of the 1880s
Eduard Taaffe and the Iron Ring, 1879‒1890
Ethnic and Linguistic Nationalism and the Enlargement of Regional Power in the Crownlands
The Czechs
The Germans
Mittelstand Radicalism and the Emergence of Austrian Political Catholicism
Social Radicalism and the Founding of Austrian Social Democracy
The Death of a Liberal Mirage: Taaffe and Mayerling
The Last Years of the Iron Ring
From Taaffe to Badeni: The Ill-fated Coalition of 1893–1895
Taaffe and the Vagaries of Nationalism
4. Two Decades of Constitutional Upheaval, 1895‒1914
The Badeni Crisis and the Hyper-Politics of Language, 1896–1897
The Language Ordinances of April 1897
Intermezzo after Badeni
The Koerber Era, 1900 to 1905
The Apogee of Mass Politics in Vienna after 1897
Max Vladimir von Beck and the Constitutional Reforms of 1906‒1908
The Last, Daring Act: The Bienerth and Stürgkh Regimes, 1909‒1914
The Monarchy in 1914
5. Late Imperial Society and Culture: The Crucible of Vienna
Vienna in the Empire
Worlds of Wealth, Prestige, and Mobility: The Aristocracy
Worlds of Toleration, Aspiration, and Assimilation: The Jewish Community
New Micro-Communities in Search of Full Citizenship Rights: The Fin-de-siècle Women’s Movements
New Forms of Communication and Social Understandings: The World of Information and Political Advocacy
The Public World of Science and Learning
Stresses on the Systems of Equity and Access in Higher Education
Academic Freedom and Mass Politics
6. The Monarchy in the First World War
The Decision for War
Austrian Military Strategy between 1914 and 1917
Wartime Absolutism and War Government
The Octroi and Austrian Politics, 1915‒1916
The War and Austrian Society, 1914‒1917
The Death of the Emperor and the Onset of the New Regime, 1916‒1917
The Last Years of the War, 1917‒1918
The Collapse of the Empire
Finale
7. The Revolution of 1918‒1919
A Revolution Manqué
The Crisis of the Late Empire
The October Revolution in Vienna
Toward November 10: Why Renner?
Territories of Rights
The Alpine Crownlands and the Revolution
The Anschluß Question
The Constitution of 1920 and the End of the Revolution
The Collapse of the Coalition
8. The First Austrian Republic, 1920–1932
Getting Organized: The Political Framework of the New Republic, 1920–1922
Seipel and the Travails of High Politics, 1922‒1929
A Revolution Frozen in Place: Interwar Social Democracy and Red Vienna
Contested Communities: Church, Schools, Family, and Race
The Church
Schools and Universities
Families
Race
The Constitutional and Economic Crises of 1929‒1933
9. The Catholic Dictatorship and the Nazi Occupation, 1933‒1945
Dollfuß and the Overthrow of the Republic in February 1934
February 1934 and the Conquest of Vienna
The Launching of the Catholic Dictatorship
The Nazi Putsch of July 1934
Schuschnigg and the Loneliness of Corporatist Society
March 15, 1938: Who Welcomed Hitler on the Heldenplatz?
The Attack on the Jews
Täter versus Opfer: Austrian Society under Nazi Rule, 1938‒1945
The End Days: The Collapse of the Regime in April 1945 and the Launch of the Provisional Government
10. The Reconstruction of a Republican Political System, 1945‒1955
The Occupied State
Renner’s Cabinet
The Great Coalition from 1945 to 1955
Shreds of the Past: Denazification, Reparations, and Historical Memory
The Case of the Universities
Catholicism and the Second Republic
The Marshall Plan and the Revival of Austria’s Economy
The State Treaty of 1955
Conclusion: The Construction of a New Political Culture, 1955‒1983
Bibliography
Archival Sources
Government Documents and Other Primary Sources
Contemporary Printed Materials
Secondary Sources
Dissertations and Other Unpublished Academic Papers
Index
