National-Cultural Autonomy and its Contemporary Critics

Ephraim Nimni, Ephraim Nimni

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134534135
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In his seminal essay 'Staat und Nation' ('State and Nation') Karl Renner presents his model for national-cultural autonomy, with a two-tier system of government that devolves considerable non-territorial autonomy to national communities, while sustaining the administrative unity of the Multination State.

This new book delivers the first English translation of 'State and Nation' and brings together a collection of distinguished and leading political scientists to provide a detailed and critical assessment of Renner's theory of national-cultural autonomy. From a variety of perspectives, the contributors discuss the contemporary validity of Renner's arguments paying particular attention to theories of state, liberal democracies, minority nationalism and multiculturalism, and models of regional integration.Making an important contribution to the literature on nationalism and national minorities, this volume is a vital research tool for students and scholars of nationalism and political theory. Readers of this volume may also be interested in the forthcoming companion volume by Ephraim Nimni, Multicultural Nationalism

1 Introduction
The national cultural autonomy model revisited

Ephraim Nimni

The model for national cultural autonomy (‘NCA’) discussed in this volume is rarely mentioned in the West nowadays, even if it is debated and seriously considered in post-communist states and in a diluted and perhaps distorted form has been recently implemented in post-communist Russia (Bowring below). The original model, which is explained in Karl Renner's article State and Nation, first published in 1899 and published in English for the first time in this volume, represents an ingenious, daring and, some say, a complex and counter-intuitive model (Forman 1998: 108) for managing persistent and obstinate national and ethnic conflicts within a single democratic state framework. The model has something important to say to many contemporary multinational and multi-ethnic societies governed in accordance with the canons of the nation state model but which show a glaring discrepancy between this model and their multinational and multiethnic composition.

When first discussed, around the turn of the twentieth century within the Social Democratic Party of the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire, the model was designed to manage ethno-national conflicts and prevent secession by offering national and ethnic minorities constitutionally guaranteed collective rights, wide cultural autonomy and non-territorial self-determination. A century later, and following the John Stuart Mill (1862/1976: 361) dictum that ‘free institutions are next to impossible in a country made of different nationalities’ it is still widely accepted that sovereign states have to be nation states in order to legitimately represent their citizens. This deceptive assumption engendered states which are nation states only in name, an anomaly that motivates not only the tendency of many liberal democracies to be linguicidal, but countless internal wars and acts of ethnic cleansing when a nation in one such state wishes to live up to Mill's unfortunate assertion.

As the twenty-first century commences, there is a conspicuous discrepancy between the cultural and political borders of most nation states, in an international system that has 191 nation states represented in the United Nations, all of whom together contain 3,000 to 5,000 nations and 575 potential nation states (Ryan 1997: 162). The majority of armed conflicts, and the most bloody, are between ethnic and national groups seeking some kind of independence or autonomy and those who want to prevent them from reaching that goal.

The problem remains as urgent and perplexing as it was nearly 100 years ago, at the time of the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the first formulation of the NCA model. This shows how little we have advanced in the interim period in accommodating the collective rights of national minorities within a single state. In spite of this, a contemporary discussion of the NCA model elicits, as it will be seen in this volume, a diversity of objections that echo turn-of-the-century Austrian socialist debates. Sadly, by doggedly adhering to the model of the territorial nation state, we have made little progress over the last 100 years towards conceptualizing a multination state that offers collective rights and collective forms of representation to its constituent national and ethnic groups.

The origins of the NCA model

On 24–29 September 1899 the All-Austrian Social Democratic Party (Gesamtpartei) met in the Moravian city of Brno (Brünn) to discuss what should be the nationalities programme of the young multinational Socialist Party. The central committee of the Socialist Party proposed to the congress the dissolution of the strong centralist tendencies that characterized socialist organizations and the creation of a confederation of nationally based parties. In an attempt to preserve the unity of the Austrian state, the congress also proposed the radical reform of democratic Cisleithanian Austria into a federation of nationalities, with no dominant language and with a complex web of autonomous arrangements for territorial and non-territorial minorities. This proposal was not only daring and original, but also ran against the dominant idea that national communities should be organized according to the canons of the territorial nation state model.

The period was the high point of nationalism, and the nation state was not only the emerging dominant model, but it was consolidated into the matrix of the twentieth-century international system. The then dominant mixture of territorial ethno-nationalism, self-determination and nation state sovereignty signalled emancipation for some but also left a brutal trail of exile, pain and destruction for those national communities that resided in mixed areas of residence and could not therefore consummate a nation state without oppressing or dislocating others.

The resolutions of the Brno conference incorporated a much diluted version of Renner's NCA model, which was supported mainly by Czechs and Slovenes and was opposed by some German delegates, including the respected leader of the party, Victor Adler (Kogan 1949: 204–17).¹ However, the Brno resolutions incorporated important elements of the NCA model, which were not considered sufficient by Renner and Bauer as they disapproved of the dilution of the original argument that resulted from party negotiations. Why did the Austrian socialists decide on a course of action that blatantly contradicted prevailing models of state organization and territorial self-determination? The Austrian situation was an initial encounter with a problem that became endemic in the twentieth century, and its recurrence shows that we have few effective mechanisms to deal with it.

Under these circumstances, it might be useful to reconsider the juridical and organizational principles proposed by Karl Renner and see if they help us navigate the very contemporary quagmire of demands for self-determination, secession, cultural recognition and collective rights.

Historical background

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Habsburg Empire was a dual monarchy with a total population of 53 million made up of more than fifteen different nationalities, occupying an area smaller than the Iberian peninsula (Pauley 1972: 23). After Prussia defeated Austria in 1866, the empire was divided into a dual monarchy through the Compromise (Ausgleich) of 1867, which remained the constitutional basis of the multinational empire until its dissolution in 1918. The Austrian part of the dual monarchy was called Cisleithanian Austria, because a significant part of its territory lay west of the Leithe river. Austria was a complicated mosaic of national, ethnic, religious, linguistic and social groups, and the two parts of the empire had separate parliaments and a significant degree of autonomy, even though foreign affairs, defence and finance were common concerns. The largest ethnic group in each part of the empire constituted a minority in the area that it controlled: Germans numbered only some 36 per cent of Cisleithania's population, and Magyars slightly under half of Hungary's. Czechs, the majority in Bohemia and Moravia, Poles and Ukrainians and Slovenes sought a greater say in Cisleithanian affairs.

At the same time, and within the limitations of the period, Austria was a constitutional monarchy with periodical elections to its parliament through male universal suffrage. The Social Democrats had significant parliamentary representation. The circumstances of the dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy cemented the hegemony of the most powerful nation within each part, respectively the Austro-Germans and the Magyars (Hungarians). The main compromise was followed by minor ‘compromises’ between different ethnic and national communities and some unusual class alliances to protect local interests. This resulted in an intricate web of group coalitions that not only anticipated contemporary consociationalist models, but, according to Otto Bauer, amounted to an understanding among the ruling classes of the large nations (Germans, Magyars, Poles and Croats) to maintain their advantage over the mass of their disenfranchised fellow nationals and the newer nations — Czechs, Slovenes and Ukrainians in Austria, and Slovaks, Serbs and Romanians in Hungary.

As the Austro-German rulers needed a working majority in parliament, they granted administrative autonomy and linguistic rights to the Poles of Galitzia, a region that also included other minorities. This concession to the Poles antagonized in particular the Czech nationalist leadership because the main demand of their movement was to recover for Bohemia the status of a historical kingdom (Staatsrecht) with a significant degree of autonomy. The parliamentary coalition between Austro-Germans and Poles effectively neutralized the political influence of Czech deputies. In Bohemia, the part of the empire that Czech nationalists considered Czech, there was a significant German-speaking minority. At the same time, industrialization and differential development fuelled internal migration within the empire and many Czechs and Germans resided outside their historical homelands. This situation resulted in the Czech nationalists resenting the German presence in Bohemia and Pan-Germanic nationalists resenting the presence of Czechs in the German part of the empire. In a situation that reminds of obstructions to the contemporary ‘Good Friday Agreement’ in Northern Ireland, Czech nationalists often blocked legislation in the Austrian parliament, and the Pan-Germans were equally bent on obstructing the provincial diet in Prague (Nimni 1994: 120–1).

In Vienna, internal migration caused dramatic changes. The population of the capital increased more than four times in fifty-three years. With the migration of people from all over the empire, Vienna became a lively cosmopolitan city. It experienced an unprecedented level of intellectual and artistic development, which was deeply resented by conservative Pan-Germans. This situation generated protracted controversies over schools instructing in languages other than German (particularly Czech), bilingual notices and place names. Victor Adler, the veteran socialist leader and founding member of the Socialist Party, was moved to say that even the names of railway stations had become an important question of principle in Austria (Joll 1974: 122).

The Austrian Socialist Party was one of the very few multinational organizations in late imperial Austria that survived this period of ethnic and national confrontation more or less intact. To avoid the threat of ethnic and national disintegration, the Austrian socialists made considerable efforts towards overcoming national and ethnic mistrust. This was first done within the Socialist Party, and subsequently by drafting programmatic proposals that attempted to maintain the unity of the Cisleithanian Austrian state, while giving maximum institutional, political and cultural recognition to the constituent national and ethnic minorities.

The problems faced during this period have a clear contemporary resonance and the protocols of several congresses of the Socialist Party not only make fascinating reading, but also prove how little we have advanced in the last 100 years on the question of ethnic and national minority representation. For many delegates to the 1899 Socialist convention in Brno, the recognition of the equal value of minority cultures in the public domain was a key political demand, something that more than a century later continues to be the subject of a protracted political and academic discussion. For this reason, the study of late Habsburg history can help our understanding of the difficult relationship between ethnic and national identity, and help to illustrate how we may secure multination states, channel ethnic politics into a constructive direction, understand the complex relation between ethnicity and political democracy, and, not least, how we may develop (and discover) imaginative models of ethnic conflict resolution.

The genesis of the NCA model discussed here must be understood against the backdrop of the very pressing nationalities problem faced by Austrian socialists. The process of rapid industrialization in Austria and the growing urban working class provided the conditions for the emergence of the socialist movement, which was deeply affected by national divisions from the outset. Several socialist organizations emerged among Czechs and other non-German communities, but these remained independent and suspicious of the German socialist organization at first. Finally, in 1889, and thanks to the intense efforts of Victor Adler, the socialists became a single organization, initially named the Gesamtösterreichischen (‘All-Austrian’) socialist party and later referred to as the Gesamtpartei (‘whole party’). The name was carefully chosen to suggest the multinational character of the organization.

The difficult nationalities problem of late imperial Austria and the need to counteract the claims of nationalist parties impelled the Socialist Party to relinquish the simplistic and misleading formulas that prevailed in most turn-of-the-century socialist parties. Austrian Socialists were obliged to evaluate difficult questions of minority rights, ethnic political representation and conflict resolution in great detail, and were compelled to adopt more nuanced positions that displayed greater sensitivity to national demands than was normally the case in socialist organizations.

In 1897 the biennial congress of the Gesamtpartei took place in the Wimberg Hotel in Vienna. Following Czech demands, the party decided to transform itself into a federative organization of six national parties (Ukrainian, Czech, Polish, German, Italian and Slovene), with a common executive committee. This new organizational arrangement gave way to an intense and prolonged discussion of theory and strategy in regard to the nationalities question, which culminated two years later in the historic 1899 congress in Brno. It is in this interim period that the NCA model took shape.

Otto Bauer and Karl Renner developed the model of national cultural autonomy in a string of writings, and one of the most significant is Karl Renner's State and Nation (1899, Chapter 2 of this volume). Karl Renner (1870–1950) was a renowned constitutional jurist and one of the most important leaders of Austrian Social Democracy. He was twice Chancellor of Austria (1918–20,1945) and he became President in 1945 (1945–50). He played a major role in re-establishing Austrian independence after the end of the German occupation in 1945. As an accomplished constitutional jurist he first sketched the model for national cultural autonomy around the turn of the twentieth century.

As he was a civil servant and barred from political activity in his youth, he wrote under the pen names of Synopticus or Rudolf Springer, publishing a number of works on nationalism and the state. These included Staat und Nation (State and Nation) in 1899, Der Kampf...