Forging a Multinational State

State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War

John Deak

• Editore: Stanford University Press
• Anno: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780804795937
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: European History

The Habsburg Monarchy ruled over approximately one-third of Europe for almost 150 years. Previous books on the Habsburg Empire emphasize its slow decline in the face of the growth of neighboring nation-states. John Deak, instead, argues that the state was not in eternal decline, but actively sought not only to adapt, but also to modernize and build.

Deak has spent years mastering the structure and practices of the Austrian public administration and has immersed himself in the minutiae of its codes, reforms, political maneuverings, and culture. He demonstrates how an early modern empire made up of disparate lands connected solely by the feudal ties of a ruling family was transformed into a relatively unitary, modern, semi-centralized bureaucratic continental empire. This process was only derailed by the state of emergency that accompanied the First World War. Consequently, Deak provides the reader with a new appreciation for the evolving architecture of one of Europe's Great Powers in the long nineteenth century.

1

The Dynamics of Austrian Governance, 1780–1848

JOSEPH II suffered grievously at the end of his short life. He suffered from tuberculosis and was too weak to fight political battles anymore. His illness and his recent military and political failures soon led to depression. As he wrote to his brother and successor, Leopold, in lines that have become associated with his reign: “I confess that, brought low by what has happened to me, seeing that I am unfortunate in everything I undertake, the appalling ingratitude with which my good arrangements are viewed and I am treated . . . all this fills me with doubt.”¹ Joseph died February 20, 1790, less than a month later. He had ordered a simple, unadorned sarcophagus for himself, befitting the emperor’s taste for the simple, functional, and miserly.

Traditionally, historians have seen the death of Joseph and the rise of Emperor Francis as the beginning of the end—the moment in which the monarchy sets down the road toward decline.² This is especially the case within the grand narrative of German history, which seeks to explain why Prussia would eventually unite Germany. In the widely accepted narrative, Austria stood still while Prussia was forced to reform itself and become a modern state.³ But such ideas suggest that Joseph’s reforms and the institutions he created did not continue after his rule came to an end. This was not the case, however. First, the institutions that Joseph’s successors inherited, especially the administration and the legions of officials who staffed it, continued the work of state building. Second, Joseph’s most revolutionary action as monarch was the implementation of a new attitude—both toward rule and toward the Austrian state. This attitude would, over the course of his reign, permeate the imperial public administration and become a new ethos of state service. Joseph conceived the very concept of the Pragmatic Sanction and the indivisible and inseparable monarchy as depending on the networks of officials and public servants whom Vienna sent out into the hinterland. Joseph was able to imagine a centralized, unified monarchy and he worked to pound his lands into a mold that fit his preconceived ideas. It would be this attitude, “Josephinism,” or Joseph’s reformist, state-centered ethos, which would continue well after his death and shape the Austrian state-building project in the nineteenth century.⁴ In fact, Joseph’s departure from the scene in 1790 allowed his officials the freedom and independence to develop these ideas further and adapt them to the rapid changes of the nineteenth century, which brought with them not only new forms of industry and social change, but an increasing call for public participation in governance.

Joseph’s legacy is an important one, but it was not the only ethos which permeated the Austrian state in the nineteenth century. Joseph’s radical changes, his relentless drive to reform, was exhausting to some and struck others as dangerous. “Change” increasingly became something to fear, a slippery slope that would lead to revolution, social unrest, and anarchy. Fear of change only intensified with the outbreak of the French Revolution, which was held up as the possible outcome of state policies that sought to displace the nobility and alter the structures of social and economic life. Joseph’s successors increasingly turned away from reform and political change in order to maintain stability. Joseph’s state-reforming ethos quickly fell out of favor at court, even if it was preserved in the offices of Habsburg administrators.⁵

In essence, the period between Joseph II and the revolutions of 1848 established the modern Austrian dynamic: an interplay between storm and tranquility—between reform and its opposite, a desire to hold onto tradition and leave things as they are. This dynamic would structure political and social developments in the Habsburg monarchy from the late eighteenth century to the monarchy’s entry into the First World War in July 1914. For it was this interplay, not reaction, retrenchment, or incubation, that produced both Austria’s political frustrations and its flexibility in organizing and administering a multinational space in the center of Europe. Both forces, reform and resistance, were forged in the era of Joseph II and the French Revolution.

The Dynamic of Movement: Change and Reform

How should a monarch handle a body of civilian officials? What are they capable of doing? Joseph had been pondering these questions since his twentieth birthday. When he became co-regent in 1765 upon the death of his father, he could finally put many of his ideas into action.⁶ If Friedrich Wilhelm Haugwitz had made the argument under Maria Theresia that the presence of the crown’s officials in the provinces was necessary to enforce the crown’s will, Joseph II wanted these officials to be capable of much more. He wanted to instill them with a spirit that would match the system.⁷ In fact, he showed a deep—if sometimes harsh—interest in Austria’s corps of civil servants from his early involvement in the Council of State and throughout his co-regency with Maria Theresia (1765–80) and years of his sole rule (1780–90). Joseph II’s legacy, despite many of the reforms he attempted, would turn out to be the bureaucracy he left behind, “which held together the socially complex multinational empire until its fall.”⁸

Joseph’s attitude and his revisioning of the work of the state were his greatest and most consequential innovations. He imagined a state that was an entity in itself, a public good, which extended far beyond his own person. Joseph believed that the role of the state should be to benefit the largest number of people possible. Under Joseph, the state—this abstract entity that provides and encapsulates the common good—eclipsed the ruler and his dynasty. Joseph imbued his civil servants with these views, founding their self-conception as the guardians of the state. For them, self-sacrifice and service to the state—which took the form of the primary progressive agent in society—were the highest calling, a secular priesthood.

The drive for centralization, uniformity, and control brought Joseph again and again to devote his attention to his imperial civil servants, the officials who enacted his decrees and represented his authority outside the walls of Vienna. All of this imperial attention—imbued with the same principles of rationality, uniformity, and the value of efficiency—created a modern, professional civil service in the Weberian sense.⁹ Additionally, however, Joseph believed in the transformative power of good government; this would become the staple of Josephinism, to be adhered to by his intellectual heirs well into the nineteenth century. Joseph desired to create an administration that shared his ideas and ethos, and which would serve the common good. These officials would act as his instrument to create a simplified, efficient, and powerful state. Thus, the ten years he spent as the sole ruler of the Habsburg lands, after his mother’s death in 1780, were directed toward expanding the state apparatus, unifying territories, eliminating traditional privileges and constitutional exceptions, and combining the separate administrative systems and regimes. In terms of the general education and the restructuring of norms, regulations, and even language, we can see that for Joseph, state officials were to be ideal citizens, the very model of the new person Joseph wanted to create. They were to put aside their personal interests, their egos, and their own will, and conform to the general will of the state. Joseph wanted his authority to be handed down to every province, every county, and every town and village in the same way.

Max Weber’s sociology of statecraft captures how the drive for uniformity and centralization necessitates a restructuring of power. The creation of a loyal, hierarchically organized body of officials to carry out orders needs a corresponding body of professional and administrative norms. Body and spirit—or bureaucracy and law—worked together in the Habsburg lands to smooth out the rugged terrain of constitutional differences in the provinces. The Austrian state passed ordinance after ordinance relating to the conduct and the ideal behavior of state officials.¹⁰ Court decrees addressed discipline and punishments for officials if they embezzled, mistreated the local populace, or did not keep their assigned working hours.¹¹ Bureaus were established to maintain the secrecy of state affairs. In these bureaus the officials could be supervised and disciplined. Maria Theresia and Joseph II’s decrees also established a standard system of salaries; norms for how the state offered employment and what qualifications were required for various positions; what age officials should be at the time of first employment (it was between eighteen and forty years); when they would be promoted and given a pay raise; as well as how their children and widows would be cared for after they died. These reforms were important, but they were just the beginning.¹²

Education and competence joined rank and standing in imperial service. Maria Theresia worked to establish Vienna as a center of cameralism, an emerging discipline in the German-speaking world which focused on the study of statecraft and the “science of governing.”¹³ Cameralists believed that good government meant paying attention to the treasury, the Kammer, and for coming up with ways to stimulate growth in state revenues without taxing subjects into debtors’ prison. Habsburg institutions of learning sought out prominent cameralists to teach and brought in leading scholars like Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi, who took up a post at the Theresianum. The Theresianum itself was a testament to the new educational program. Maria Theresia founded this secondary school in 1746 with a curriculum which prepared nobles and burgher alike for posts in her state.¹⁴ Joseph von Sonnenfels likewise accepted a professorship in 1763 in Polizei,¹⁵ and political economics, at the University of Vienna.¹⁶ Both Justi and Sonnenfels would publish books and texts based on their lectures, making Vienna, in the process, a center of cameralist thought.¹⁷

Building on the work of his mother, Joseph again deepened the state’s commitment to educating officials in the sciences of state. He expected his “political officials,” those responsible for local or provincial policy and administrative matters, to be university-educated jurists.¹⁸ Better training and education would serve as a reliable foundation for a state that would expand into areas where it previously feared to tread. These included matters of public welfare, sanitation, and economic development (agriculture and trade), forestry, water regulation, bridges and roads, and veterinary medicine. He and his successors would continually engage in efforts to establish and refine the education for civil servants to make them capable of carrying his ideas, his reforms, or even “the enlightenment” to the far corners of the monarchy.¹⁹

As Joseph expanded his reach, he needed officials who understood his regulations and could put his ideas and laws into action. Joseph worked to animate the spirit of the bureaucracy, not just create new offices and structures. As such, Joseph made his officials’ education, their attitudes and ethos, a primary concern. Under Joseph, universities became seminaries for the servants of the state. Their primary purpose became the training of civil servants, who received the elite education of the monarchy.²⁰ Universities under Joseph were reformed so that the practical knowledge of the law received a pride of place. In the Juridicum, natural law, constitutional law, canon law were supplemented by coursework on administrative writing, political economy and cameralism, and legal praxis in the courts.²¹ Additionally, technical institutes filled the need for a new crop of “technical” officials: as the monarchy took a greater interest in its economic infrastructure and the welfare of its citizens as economic producers, it needed more officials to serve as building, sanitation, agricultural, forest, or even mine inspectors.²²

Joseph’s insistence on practical knowledge required changes in the university and technical academies’ curricula. Knowledge of foreign languages and the semester abroad were written out of the university curriculum for juridical students. Chairs of French, Spanish, and even Latin were eliminated in favor of “Bohemian” and other Slavic languages, which were more practical for the administration of the Habsburg lands. The refinement of German was also emphasized. As government was formalized by moving into bureaus and out of the rooms and apartments of the local notables, so too was writing and communication standardized. Josef von Sonnenfels covered proper German grammar in his course on administrative writing.²³ His text for the course, On Office Style (Über den Geschäftsstil), reached its fourth edition by 1820 and was vastly important for instilling a cultural and linguistic component to the Josephinist bureaucratic ethos.²⁴ Requiring precision in language and grammar, use of simple phrases, and the reduction of foreign words, served to rationalize further the work of state. Sonnenfels not only taught his students how to write reports with precision, his book and lectures contained information on how to number, file, and later, find documents. Sonnenfels’s ideas on office management combined and emphasized clarity of style with clarity of government. Through the standardization of the written word, knowledge could be standardized. A local official could be promoted or let go and replaced, and his successor could quickly understand local conditions by looking into the files. The state’s expanded activity necessitated a more standard and widened communication network. Naturally, the written word would connect center and periphery, monarch and official. In the process, the “bureaucratic gaze” in the core land...