Since the days of the great empress Maria Theresa education has been considered a political concern in Austria. That is to say, its provision has been regarded as an obligation of the state and as one of its legitimate fields of activity. When the state assumed responsibility for education the nationality problem and the language question began to affect the Austrian school system.

The Czechs have always been the Slavic nation living farthest to the west. With a population of 6,500,000 in 1910, they were the third strongest ethnic group in the monarchy, although they formed only 12.7 percent of its total population. At that time the Czechs, as well as the Magyars, Croats, and Slovenes, with a few minor exceptions, lived only within the Habsburg empire. In the largely agricultural countryside between the Czech and German populations there was a clearly demarcated line which changed only rarely. Strong nationalists on both sides of this boundary, however, paid much attention to even the slightest changes in it. The dividing line between the Czechs and the Slovaks, which was the same as the frontier between the Czech lands and Hungary, was also stable. It cannot be said that this line actually amounted to a language barrier, since dialects which were nearly the same were spoken on both sides of the Morava River. The gradual transition between Czech and Polish dialects in Silesia, together with the strong westward Polish migration, however, made the nationality frontier between the Czechs and Poles relatively unstable.

For nearly a century and a half the peoples of a large part of the old Polish state shared the destinies of the Habsburg empire. Annexed when the monarchy was entering the phase of Enlightened Despotism, Galicia commenced its history as a mere province of the Habsburg empire. When in 1918 this province broke away from Austria-Hungary, which by then had advanced far in the direction of constitutionalism and capitalism, Galicia had become almost a junior partner in the monarchy.

Although it cannot be denied that the primordial manifestations of nationalism can be traced back to the pre-capitalistic age, it has long been obvious to scholars who have investigated the economic and social factors involved in nationalism that its development has been closely connected with that of modern capitalism. It is just as apparent that economic developments in Eastern Europe have differed fundamentally from those in the western part of the same continent.2 These differences in development can be detected as far back as the fifteenth century, and they have become more and more evident during the course of the succeeding centuries. The relationship between social and economic factors and nationalism has consequently been entirely different in Eastern Europe from what it has been in the countries of Western Europe, which have more advanced economies as well as populations constituting a more or less homogeneous nationality.

During the past hundred years a vast literature ranging from scholarly analyses of a high order to crudely polemical disputations has been devoted to analyzing the question of why all attempts to consolidate the Habsburg monarchy ended in failure. Since 1945 it has become increasingly possible to investigate and explain the causes of failure without national or other partisan bias. The dissolution of the empire in 1918 was, after all, the result not of defeat on the battlefield but of a long organic process.

Enormous as the problems of the Habsburg empire had become by 1914, war, for that matter even a victorious war, was unlikely to solve any of them; on the contrary, it was bound to make their solution even more improbable than before. When before approving the war against Serbia Count István Tisza demanded assurances from Count Leopold von Berchtold that it would not lead to the incorporation of substantial numbers of Serbs into the Dual Monarchy, his demand should have raised doubts in sober minds about the practicability of war as a means of improving the stability and power of the Habsburg monarchy. Most of the Austrian policymakers believed that Austria-Hungary was forced to go to war in order to retain her reputation as a great power, but after Serbia had accepted practically all the demands of the Austrian ultimatum, Austria-Hungary could have been reasonably certain that it would emerge from the crisis sufficiently respected. A radical policy of prestige, such as that which the German government urged upon the Austrians during the July crisis, can, however, easily produce a neglect of reality.

The question of whether the Poles were an integrating or a disintegrating factor within the Habsburg monarchy has yet to be fully studied by Polish historians. Up to now they have concerned themselves mainly with the part played by the Austrian empire in the history of the Polish nation after the eighteenth century partitions and have overlooked the role of the Poles in the Austrian empire. They have concentrated their attention on the fate of the territories of the historic Polish state which fell under Habsburg rule and have studied the social, cultural, and political transformations which affected Galicia during the century and a half of Austrian domination. Polish historians have even studied the contributions made by former Habsburg subjects to the reconstruction of the Polish state after the dissolution of the monarchy, but they have rarely discussed the part which the Poles took in the political life of the multinational empire.

In order to evaluate properly the position of the Germansin the Habsburg monarchy during the nineteenth century, certain factors whose roots go back to earlier centuries shouldbe taken into consideration. The explanation for many of theproblems under discussion in this paper can be found byexamining these roots.

In its final phases, World War I was a revolutionary war. When it ended, several of the belligerents, on both sides of the front lines, had been swept or were about to be swept by revolutions. Among them was the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. When the Allied Powers signed an armistice with Austria-Hungary in the Villa Giusti near Padua on November 3, 1918, the empire was in the process of dissolution. National committees, councils, and assemblies had sprung up all over the multinational Habsburg empire and declared the independence of the peoples whom they claimed to represent. Encountering little resistance from the imperial bureaucracy, they formed nuclei governments of the Successor States.

In commenting on the papers presented in this session on the Czechs and the Poles, I would like to discuss Professor S. Harrison Thomson's approach to the interpretation of Czech history and Professor Piotr Wandycz's concept of divide et impera. In addition, although the main emphasis of this conference is on the nations within the monarchy, I believe that some remarks about the relationship of the individual to the empire might also prove useful.

A little more than one thousand and ten years ago, the annus mirabilis of Otto I taught the unruly Magyars that “nomadism in one country” was not a workable proposition2 and that they had to make adjustments if they wished to belong to the nascent European community. A little less than ten years ago, the Hungarians received another object lesson suggesting that too much emphasis on western civilization might become another source of danger. Since they were separated by a whole millennium, the meaning of the two events is certainly very different. But both were results of a mis judgment of domestic forces and international relations—a phenomenon which was far from uncommon in the history of Hungary.

I feel greatly honored to have been selected by the committee that has planned this conference to discuss the papers of two such distinguished scholars as Professors Wandycz and Wereszycki. Most of you have already had an opportunity to read their essays, and I am certain you will agree with me that both deserve only the highest praise. In their comprehensive treatment of the subject and in their judicious interpretation of the facts, the papers reflect the superior scholarship of their authors. While praising these two excellent accounts makes my assignment to discuss them a very pleasant one, the task is, at the same time, rather difficult. Since the authors have said so much so well, what else is there to say? Fortunately, the subject is vast and complex, and a commentator can always find many facets of the subject which have not been covered in any limited treatment of the topic.

It is not an easy task for a historian to give an objective picture of the internal relations of the multinational empire. This is especially true with regard to Hungary's part and position in the monarchy. Was Hungary's status in the empire one of preponderancy or dependency? Did Hungary play a disintegrating role in the Dual Monarchy or was she the pillar of dualism? These are difficult questions to answer. Wherever he turns the historian finds articles and books dealing with the monarchy which are replete with arguments and counterarguments. The most common feature of studies thus far is that historians have approached these questions concerning Hungary's role with traditional sympathies or hostilities. Detailed objective accounts based on up-to-date methods for studies on Hungarian political, economic, and social development are missing.

I hope I will meet with sympathy if I state here that my task as a discussant is a difficult one. Faced with four lengthy, excellent, and basically different essays, I am now expected—and within twenty minutes at that—to criticize, to laud, to summarize, and to incite further discussion. Let me therefore take the bull by the horns and challenge the very topic of this discussion. It is my contention that the subject of this debate is neither justified nor valid and that it is precisely because of the contradiction inherent in the topic that our four participants used widely divergent methods and arrived at widely divergent conclusions. I would argue that there were no dominant nationalities in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. There were only dominant classes, estates, institutions, interest groups, and professions. True, German and Magyar nationals formed the majority of these dominant strata of society, but the benefits they derived from their privileged position were not shared by the lower classes of their own nationality. If the Austrian Germans-but not the Magyars–generally enjoyed a relatively high living standard, this was due to their geographic position and their industry and not to legislation or to the allegedly dominant position the Germans as a whole occupied in the monarchy. While Profs. Barany, Hanak, and Whiteside were very much aware of the distinction between class privilege and national privilege, they could not, directed as they were by the title of their discourse, fully develop this distinction.

May I congratulate the four authors straightaway on their very stimulating papers. They are complementary, and there is much in them that is valuable and much that I have learned from them. But I have come to discuss the papers, not to praise them.

In this concluding lecture I wish to express my thanks for the excellent papers presented at this carefully prepared and in many ways unique conference. In one who grew up, now more than half a century ago, under the reign of Francis Joseph and who has always retained some emotional loyalty to those years of his own youth and his own student days, who went to war in 1914 under the black and yellow flag of the Austrian monarchy—in such a person the fact that here in faraway Midwestern America the problems of the long defunct monarchy are being discussed with a sense of actuality in an international scholarly gathering by men of diverse ideologies and nationalities arouses a feeling of satisfaction and some melancholy.

The example of the Slovaks, next to the Ruthenians the weakest and least privileged people of the Danubian monarchy, is eminently fitted to the examination of Austria's ability to deal with the main problem of its modern political life, namely, that of the coexistence and possible reconciliation of its nationalities. One of the first to point out this fundamental issue for the continued existence of Austria with unusual clarity was František Palacký in his 1848 letter to the Vorparlament of the Frankfurt National Assembly. Far from being an expression of unreserved faith in the future of the monarchy, his memorable words on the necessity of the Habsburg state1 were dictated by political realism and foresight. Emphasizing the dangers of German nationalism and Russian imperialism, which he perhaps intentionally exaggerated,2 the Czech leader was fully aware of the political weakness of the small Slav nations who were only gradually establishing their national identity. It was for their sake that he gave a final expression to the policy of Austro-Slavism, seeking the salvation of the Austrian Slavs in the preservation of the monarchy. He endeavored, however, to give it a new raison d'être based on the creation of a common defensive system for its individual nationalities in which all were to be given “complete equality of rights and respect.” While sincere, Palacký's support of Austria was neither unconditional nor devoid of a strong element of doubt. The nationalist policies of the Austrian Germans and the rebellious Magyars, whose chauvinism was only thinly covered by a veneer of liberalism, caused him to moderate his opinion in regard to the ability of the Austrian rulers to change the empire into a federal and democratic state. Thus, at the end of his Frankfurt message Palacký expressed only the hope that the Habsburg monarchy would not miss the opportunity to change into a state based on principles of justice, which alone could save it from disintegration.