Austria-Hungary 1900–1914

Summary

To the south and south-east of Germany there lay the dominions of the Habsburgs ruled in 1900 by an old man of 70. Since 1867 the administration of Austria had been sharply divided from that of Hungary. Within Austria the authorities had haltingly admitted the non-German, mainly Slav, populations to certain rights, first and foremost that of being educated and tried in court in their own languages. In 1907 the Minister-President of the day, Freiherr von Beck, put an end to a system for electing the House of Representatives of the central Reichsrat by electoral bodies called curiae which gave German voters great advantages. He enfranchised virtually all men of 24 and over, and he grouped the constituencies so as to make them homogeneous nationally, not racially mixed. For some time the Germans of Austria had failed to recognise that they were a diminishing minority, but the new system made evident that Austria was predominantly Slav. The most flourishing Slav group was that of the Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia, with its own university in Prague—it demanded a second one in Brno (Brünn) in Moravia. The Moravian Compromise of 1905 had arranged for the roughly proportional representation of Germans and Czechs in the Moravian Diet. The inability of the Czechs and Germans to come to similar terms with one another in Bohemia was, however, already in 1900 ominous, since for many reasons Bohemia was of great importance to the Monarchy.