In the Realm of the Legal Unconscious: Citizens and State Power in Habsburg Austria, 1900–18

Historians who have recently refused to indict Austrian liberalism now reappraise its legacies from the constitutional era. For the period from 1900 to 1918, these scholars reassess not only liberalism, but also that ideology’s influence on historical interpretation. Specifically, T. Mills Kelly takes aim at the “Whig” nationalist conception of Central European history, and its assumption that nationalism divided and destroyed the multinational empire, reaching a seemingly inevitable conclusion in the nation state. Similarly, in his study of the Koerber era from 1900 to 1904, Fredrik Lindström indicates that Koerber’s bureaucratic strategies constituted an alternate liberal path in multinational democratization. This path indicates that outcomes long assumed in Central European Whig historiography must be reconsidered.

Moreover, this revised analysis of the multinational state also challenges assumptions about the rise of liberal nationalism and the nation state in nineteenth century European history, a historiographical concern recently raised by Pieter Judson. To refuse to see Austria as an anomaly and to return the de facto reality of her liberal state to mainstream accounts of Western Europe is to reevaluate modern European history itself.

These themes are explored here with reference to the library of Vienna’s Juridical-Political Reading Society. In this collection, contemporary debates located new democratic origins of the state’s legal power in various formulas for representation. Conclusions from these debates are tested against late Habsburg treason trials, Baernreither’s studies of the Balkans, and Josef Redlich’s plans for administrative reform during World War I. The resulting legal embodiments of Austrian multinational democratization point to long lines of continuity in state evolution, which persisted even when the outer form of the state changed completely in 1918. Such continuities, resting on various legal connections between the individual, the people and the state, enable us to reintegrate Central European and European historiographies.