Building a Modern Austrian State: Liberal Visions and Political Realities in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1861–c. 1900

This paper investigates the grand liberal project to construct a powerful, progressive, modern Habsburg state. It focuses on the concrete steps taken from the time of the February Patent (1861) to the collapse of liberalism around the turn-of-the-century. In general, the historical literature has passed a harsh judgment on the liberals, variously criticising them as divided, elitist, doctrinaire, focused on anti-clerical matters, German nationalist, rigid, exclusionary, distracted and riven with personal rivalries. Despite the work of Pieter Judson, who has highlighted the importance of the liberals to the Monarchy’s political development, and Lothar Höbelt, who has written on the practical politics of the later liberals, the scale and ambition of the liberals’ vision has often been underplayed by historians of the Monarchy.

Particular attention will be given to the 1860s, when the opening of the public sphere allowed the liberals to articulate a coherent view of state and society aimed at the regeneration of the Monarchy. In a multitude of books, articles and newsprint, the liberals defined who should participate in politics, what the priorities of government were and how society should be ordered. They set the agenda for modern politics in the Monarchy. Over the next decades, the liberals strove to implement these principles in the context of a traditional monarchy with an extremely diverse population undergoing the process of modernization. The inherent difficulties of the Austro-German liberal project and the constant need to readjust to changing realities will form the bulk of my paper.

This paper argues that politics in the Monarchy were fluid and that while the Austro-German liberals adapted to this reality (as Judson and Höbelt have argued), there was nevertheless a continual tension between an older idealism and new pragmatism. This strange mixture of stability and fluidity has been an enduring characteristic of Austrian politics.