Nationalist Politics and the Dynamics of State and Civil Society in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1867–1914

Abstract

Historians have conventionally depicted the Habsburg Monarchy as the largest modern European imperial polity to disappear from the map because of its inability to accommodate the national aspirations of its peoples. It is the locus classicus for the failure of an old-fashioned dynastic empire to develop among its subjects a broader civic identity and loyalty to the state to counter the rise of nationalist demands for self-government. For later historians as well as many contemporary observers of the frequent internal crises after the 1890s, this was already a failed state even before World War I brought on the tragic denouement. In this perspective the monarchy's participation in the war was not a purely exogenous factor that led eventually to the polity's demise. Most scholars have agreed that the monarchy's entry into the war came largely because of its need to preserve its status as a Great Power, defend its position in the Balkans, and counter the challenges of its own nationalist political movements, some of them allied with political forces beyond the borders. Older western European and North American histories also tended to view nationalist politics in Habsburg central Europe, in contrast to western European experience, as an intolerant and ultimately anti-democratic force that helped doom hopes for parliamentary democracy both under the monarchy and in the post-1918 successor states.