Conditions of Democracy in German Austria and Hungary, 1918–1919

Abstract

With the end of the First World War, the longstanding and apparently God-given Habsburg order broke apart. The war-weary population was angry and mobilized, and longed for stability and prosperity.1 The long-lasting war with its devastating consequences functioned as a catalyst for democratization. The political and socioeconomic crises at the end of the war posed the utmost challenge for the new political elites, especially those on the losing side. No government considering itself civilized could deny the right to vote to the returning soldiers, who had risked their lives for the nation. Nor could it be denied to the many women who had replaced the men in the workplace. The democratization of political life promised a certain easing of the postwar crisis and inserted itself into the transnational democratization trend. Out of the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy arose the first democratic experiments in Central Europe, which had however to struggle with politically and socioeconomically unfavorable conditions and a lack of democratic experience. At the end of the lost war a rapid democratization of political life was proclaimed in both successor states. But its outcome and duration were completely divergent in Austria and Hungary. The democratic experiment survived in Austria until 1933,2 while its counterpart had already failed in Hungary by 1919,3 although both provisional governments equally committed themselves in the late fall of 1918 explicitly to the construction of a democratic republic.This study will analyze the Austrian and Hungarian transitions to increased democratization in the postwar years. Democratization is understood in terms of the contemporary democratic praxis, not a fixed model of democracy. The focus will be on the diversity and variety of forms of these democratic experiments, which were strongly dependent on structural and procedural conditions as well as the respective political cultures of both countries. My analysis is based mainly on a review of contemporary Austrian and Hungarian legislation, the protocols of the Austrian and Hungarian Councils of Ministers, archival documents, and contemporary press reports.The history of democracy has established itself as a concept in the contexts of academic study and memory politics. The earlier approaches based on modernization theory assumed that states with a democratic deficit would see the so-called Western model of democracy (constitutional and liberal democracy) as desirable.4 The concept of “Western liberal democracy” was a product of the First World War. “It was the period after the First World War, in which democracy took on a mass democratic image, synchronized different speeds of development and experimented with new formulas for the procurement of freedom and equality, and in which was constituted what we came to recognize as Western, liberal, social democracy.”5 The concept of Western democracy at war’s end was, however, nothing more than a hope for a comprehensive democratization in Europe.6 But this democracy was in 1918 more an expectation than a real experience of democratic practice. In Central Europe after 1918, on the ruins of the Habsburg Monarchy, democracy was something in the process of formation; it was a transition to a democratic order. This period fell between the symbolic proclamation of a democratic form of government and the moment7 when citizens could for the first time elect their executive and legislative bodies in a free and fair vote. In this period the structures and institutions of democratic government were being constructed, and confirmed by the population by means of the elections to a constitutive National Assembly.The successful transition from the authoritarian monarchy to a democratic republic lasted in the case of Austria from November 12, 1918, when the democratic republic was anchored in law, until spring of 1919, as on February 16 the voting for the constitutive National Assembly took place and on March 12 the constitutive National Assembly ratified the Law of November 12, 1918 regarding the organization of state and government. For Hungary, the determination of the time period of the transition to democratic governance is no easy undertaking, which itself points to the failure of the establishment of democracy. In public discourse, by the end of October/beginning of November 1918 the adjective “democratic” in the context of the change of government was in fact on everyone’s lips. During these autumn days the Social Democratic Party newspaper, Népszava [Voice of the People] emphasized day in and day out that Hungary was experiencing a democratic new beginning. However, Count Mihály Károlyi, provisional prime minister, spoke of the “young republic with a democratic foundation” only on November 16, the day of the proclamation of the republic.8 At the end of 1918, the Hungarian Council of Ministers did not define why it regarded its own policy as democratic.In spite of all of this, in no legal act—using contemporary terminology, in no néphatározat [people’s decision] or néptörvény [people’s law]—was it established that Hungary was a democratic republic. The written declaration of a democratic structure in Hungary was missing. In public discourse, democracy was packed in elegant phrases and promises and constantly theorized. Since up to the point of the establishment of the Hungarian Council Republic in March 1919 as a matter of fact no elections to a constitutive National Assembly actually took place, one can also establish no endpoint for the abortive democratic transition.Democracy is a fundamentally controversial concept; it is a “concept of expectation.”9 At the end of World War I, democracy was shaped by expectations and hopes, and subsequently also by experiences. The concept of “democracy” is contested, which also has to do with the variety of democratic models. Basically, it is concerned with a political form of government, which presupposes a sovereign state. Until the end of 1921, with the allocation of Burgenland to Austria, full state sovereignty in Austria and Hungary did not exist.10 The partial foreign occupation burdened and even obstructed the population’s democratic expression of opinion. The residents of the Italian-controlled South Tirol and the Sudeten Germans of the Bohemian and Moravian areas did not take part in the Austrian elections held on February 14, 1919. Because of South Slavic occupation, the vote in southern Styria and southern Carinthia also took place only partially. As compensation for this, 50 seats in the constitutive National Assembly were retroactively assigned.11 In the first Public Law of November 23,12 the provisional government of Hungary in fact adopted the general and equal right to vote, but up to the end of February 1919 announced no elections for a constitutive National Assembly. The provisional government justified the postponement of the elections by the foreign occupation of Hungarian territory. Interior Minister Vince Nagy explained this reasoning in mid-January 1919 in Budapest to Archibald Cary Coolidge, leader of the US political mission, as follows: holding the vote would de jure confirm the surrender of the occupied territories.13In assessing the democratic composition of a government after World War I, we must keep in mind the wide gap between contemporary attributions and objective political science criteria. The discrepancy between self-perception and the perception of others rested on several factors. It was not possible in Central Europe to import a consummate democratic model from the West. At war’s end there was no catalogue of criteria, no sanctioned system of rules for an effectively functional Western democracy. “Democracy in the early twentieth century was far from becoming a reality, as little in Great Britain as elsewhere.”14 Democratic structures and institutions between the world wars were characterized by diversity and a richness of forms.The effort for more political participation was at the end of the nineteenth century a transnational and long-term process. Samuel P. Huntington described the democratization drives across the history of democracy as waves.16 According to the American political scientist, the first wave of democratization took place between 1828 and 1926. In this wave, a series of states overcame the hurdles to democracy,17 if with great variations in democracy and its institutions and structures. These extranational democratic impulses awoke the appearance that the extension of voting rights and political participation were signs of modernization. Thus, the democratic expectations, also in the Danubian Monarchy at the end of the nineteenth century, became projection screens for progress, which resonated with the optimism about progress of the then still-prevailing liberalism.The endogenous democratic traditions in the Habsburg Monarchy went back decades. The revolutions of 1848 served as a starting point, which in collective memory accompanied the ideas of nationalism and democratization under the sign of liberalism. In late fall of 1918, the Social Democrats of German Austria18 and Hungary also appealed to the liberal democratic traditions of 1848. The traditions of 184819 symbolized for the Hungarian Social Democrats their demands for a republic, national independence and social emancipation.20 In the fin-de-siècle period, however, nationalism in the Austro-Hungarian Empire increasingly detached itself from the liberal and democratic traditions of 1848. Particularly in the Hungarian half of the realm, an aggressive majority nationalism crystallized vis-à-vis minorities, seeking to protect the alleged dominance of the Hungarian nation, the “supremacy” of the Hungarians. This “supremacy,” the superiority of the Hungarian-speaking population, was based not just on the growth in the number of citizens declaring themselves as Hungarians, but also their supposed higher level of culture as well as their political and financial dominance over the ethnic minorities.21 The 1897 Badeni Crisis,22 however, made it clear in the Austrian half of the Empire that the ethnic German representatives to the Imperial Council were not prepared to let go of the linguistic dominance of the German over the Czech language.The expansion or rejection of the right to vote was in the Habsburg Monarchy closely bound up with the nationality question. The political elite of the Dual Monarchy considered the ethnic-linguistic endeavors in the second half of the nineteenth century, in light of the traditional German-speaking and Hungarian dominance as well as the unity of the empire, as a threat. The example of voting rights shows that the governments in Vienna and Budapest followed different concepts regarding their defense against ethnic minority demands. The expansion or rejection of the right to vote reflected the persistence of the traditional political elite as well as the political influence of the proponents of democracy. In Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century the majority of the socialist and liberal Left agitated for more democracy.23 In the Habsburg Monarchy, the political supporters of democracy were otherwise engaged. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was the Social Democrats who decidedly engaged in the struggle for the general right to vote and for more democracy. The establishment of a democratic state and the introduction of the general, direct right to vote had been part of the political agenda of the party since the fifth Day of the Worker in 1868.24 The Christian Social Party stood for the idea of universal voting rights for men from 1896.25 With the 1907 expansion of voting rights in the Austrian half of the empire, the highest decision makers had in mind the preservation of their own power as well as the forestallment of the breakup of the Empire,26 and not the democratization of the country. This moderate and evolutionary path to more democracy stood under the sign of saving the empire, and served the consolidation of the imperial power structure. Direct elections, the secret ballot, and the general right to vote for men,27 however, also made possible the formation of two mass parties: the Social Democrats and the Christian Social Party. With that began the development of a mass society and the political integration of the worker and the rural population into state and society. In the wake of the Imperial Council elections of 1911, both mass parties rose to be significant political and democratic forces in their half of the empire, which made possible their participation in the consolidation of state power after the end of the lost war.28The nobility of the Hungarian kingdom, whose grip on the reins of political leadership stood unaltered at the beginning of the twentieth century, on the other hand, protected its traditional privileges and not only resisted all centralizing tendencies from Vienna, but also blocked all attempts at the expansion of voting rights with the justification that this would endanger the national predominance of the Hungarians. Furthermore, the aristocratic political elite protected its supremacy over rising social classes, such as the politically organized workers and the still rather apolitical peasantry. This persistence and political leading role on the part of the nobility hindered the evolutionary and not war-dependent development of a political mass society. Because of the prevention of the introduction of universal suffrage, only parties made up of dignitaries, which to be sure intended no political representation of the new rising social classes, served in the Hungarian Parliament; thus, no mass parties could establish themselves. The Hungarian Social Democratic Party, founded in 1890, following the German and Austrian model, indeed stood for the democratization of political life, which for its part was also seen as a solution to the recognized threat of nationality problems. The greatest weakness of the party was however that, as a result of the restricted voting rights, it developed as an extraparliamentary opposition, and could not build up the strict and disciplined party and trade union structure of a mass party, as was the case in the Austrian half of the empire and in Germany. There did exist in Hungary on the cusp of the First World War further parties that took up democratization in their party platforms. The National Christian Socialist Party [Országos Keresztényszocialista Párt], founded in 1907, remained an oppositional minority in Parliament until the end of the war. The National Civic Radical Party [Országos Polgári Radikális Párt], founded in June 1914, represented the urban, democratically oriented intelligentsia, and demanded the introduction of universal suffrage and the secret ballot. But these measures found an extremely limited level of support among the Hungarian population. In the Hungarian half of the empire, the process of governmental and social integration of workers—not to mention the agrarian population, divorced from politics, which made up the overwhelming majority (over 60%) of the population—had not even begun. Democratic traditions in the Hungarian half of the empire before 1914 were anchored neither in the political leadership nor in the population; thus here the chances for a successful development of a democratic state after the crisis-filled war years were far worse than in the Austrian half.29The development of a mass society began in the Danube Monarchy around the turn of the century. The first portents and trends appeared in the rapidly growing big cities of Austria-Hungary (Vienna, Budapest, and Prague). This period of social change threw into question the survival chances of the monarchy as a form of government and the position of the nobility, already before the war. Neither the Habsburg royal family nor the nobility in general was willing however to abdicate its longstanding positions of power. The First World War was waged in the name of national and imperial interests. The liberal narrative regarding the outbreak of the war sees it as the defensive reaction of a regime which had resisted the socioeconomic modernization and democratization of the turn of the century. Thereafter it saw no other choice but to fight a war for the retention of its positions of power.30On the one hand, the world war made possible the concentration of power in the executive branch and a restriction of citizens’ rights and freedoms in all of the war-fighting states. Thus the war, especially in its first years, had an autocracy-producing rather than a democracy-producing effect. On the other hand, the “democratization of war,” to use Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase, points to the fact that wide swaths of the population were directly affected by the consequences of war, either on the military or the home front.31 The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy indeed declared war in the summer of 1914 with ambitious war aims; it however suffered one defeat after another on all fronts. It gained temporary control of territory starting in 1915, but only due to the economic and military support of its German allies, which necessarily led to power asymmetry in the German-Austrian alliance.32 The war began with a completely self-imposed domestic “castle truce,” with the closing of ranks on the part of the state, the political parties, and the population in the entire Habsburg Monarchy. The war aims were the common denominator, which was meant to temporarily paper over the already existing chasm between the two halves of the empire, as well as the constantly increasing social tensions arising from modernization and industrialization. The declaration of war and of an expected quick victory before the end of 1914 veiled only for a short time the many-sided and complex problems within the Habsburg Monarchy. The economic capacity of the monarchy was not sufficient over the course of the war for the simultaneous waging of war and the adequate feeding of the population. Thus the governments in Vienna and Budapest, like all of the warring states,33 were forced to give in and to centrally direct the supply and demand of the civil population.The socioeconomic burden of the world war intensified the political, economic, and social transformations of modern society,34 the majority of which resulted from the structural change from an agrarian into an industrial society. This transformation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in addition burdened the multiethnic composition of the empire. Just like the Tsarist Empire of the Romanovs, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy of the Habsburgs was a multinational imperium, shaped during the First World War by widespread war weariness as well as socioeconomic strain.The material and human resources for waging war became ever more exhausted during the second half of the war. Up until 1917, the demands of the front could be “satisfactorily” addressed; as of 1918, however, the provisioning of the troops threatened to collapse. Hungary had always served as the “breadbasket” of the monarchy, but in the last years of the war strict state rationing of foodstuffs had to be instituted even there. Nevertheless, in the Hungarian half of the realm adequate state provisioning could be guaranteed up until the end of the war, even if at the cost of starving the urban population of the Austrian half. This supply discrepancy deepened the gulf between Austria and Hungary, both on the governmental-political side and at the level of the population.35 State provision of foodstuffs was highly relevant to the rising discontent on the part of the population. The failure of state provisioning in the last two years of the war undermined citizens’ trust in their government. This loss of trust weakened the population’s internal acceptance of the state, the bureaucracy, and the ruling dynasty, as well as exhausting the integrational capabilities of the Dual Monarchy.In spring of 1917, after the February revolution in Russia and the entrance of the US into the war, democracy came into fashion, leading to the increasing participation of the masses in politics, especially in the defeated states. The declaration of a democracy-professing republic in Russia in February 1917 took on a central role in the course of the war. This Russian announcement of a democracy deprived the Central Powers of their argument that they were fighting a defensive war. The Bolsheviks’ peace offering shook up the military chances of the Central Powers. The events in Russia pushed the Left in the Danube Monarchy and the German Empire unavoidably into an intensive democratic platform. “The democratic ‘zeitgeist’ was vehemently reflected in international debates.”36 But it consisted of two completely different understandings of a new social order, which from 1917 condensed into a propaganda war. With the entry of the US into the war began the crystallization of the idea of a “Western” democracy. This was based on a contemporary assumption: that democratization, the spread of the Western democratic model, was an inevitable function of modernity.37 But in 1918 democracy was in practice only an expectation, rather than an experience. “War was supposed to bring democracy, and democracy would in the future make war impossible.”38 On the one hand, the idea of a liberal and social democracy was legally anchored and internationally institutionalized in the peace treaties of 1919–1920. On the other, the idea of the Bolshevik “total democracy”39 began its triumphant progress after the Communists’ accession to power in Russia in November 1917. This new type of regime strove from 1919 on for international expansion, in the form of Council Republics in Hungary and Bavaria, as well as within the framework of the Communist International (Comintern).The Hungarian Social Democrats broke with the politics of the castle truce in the summer of 1916, and their Austrian comrades in the autumn of 1916, after Friedrich Adler assassinated Prime Minister Karl Stürghk.40 The social democratic parties began to intensively engage in political struggle again, which also manifested itself in an increase in membership of their trade unions. The war’s interminability encouraged the display of power on the part of Austrian Social Democracy; this power shift in favor of the Hungarian Social Democrats was far less pronounced. The growth in the socioeconomic tensions caused by the war called for an intermediary between the government and the workers. The tight labor market led in the last years of the war to the expressions of workplace grievances in the form of large numbers of walkouts and strikes. These furthered the radicalization of workers’ culture, which in turn was reflected in new battle cries, such as demands for peace and democracy. In order to retain their own supporters, Social Democrats in both halves of the empire after 1917 needed radical solutions. The Party however supported the strikes only as long as that brought them advantage and increased their room for maneuver.41 In this can be seen Austromarxism’s “specificity” and ambivalence.The significant difference lay rather in the positions of the two parties vis-à-vis political power. The Austrian Social Democrats led a mass party, and starting in 1916 they were active as a strong oppositional party in the reactivated Imperial Council. With their countrywide network of trade unions, they could use well-established intervention mechanisms to defuse the radicalism of labor conflicts. Especially in the second half of the war, there was no shortage of labor conflicts and rebellions across the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The fact that the traditional political leadership in Vienna was forced by the threatened collapse of food provisioning to make concessions was a necessary condition for the governmental and political integration of the Austrian Social Democrats. This integration of the Social Democrats, already at hand before the war, was decisively propelled by the failure of the state supply system. The imperial power elite increasingly treated the Social Democratic Party and its trade unions as a partner, mirroring the situation in Great Britain, France, and Germany.42 Social democratic politicians received positions in the state supply system that constituted the first governmental roles for the party in its history. The general expansion of further social services compelled by the wartime conditions drove the absorption and further integration of the workforce into state structures.43 These social achievements pointed the way towards the construction of a democratic welfare state at war’s end.The Hungarian Social Democrats, due to the extremely limited property-qualified voting rights, remained in extra-parliamentary opposition until the war’s end. For that reason, despite its nationwide trade union network, in the case of labor conflicts it could offer no experienced and state-recognized mediation potential. Hungary’s aristocratic political elite recognized the labor clashes of the last war years as a political but not a social conflict, and employed ever heavier state repression. As the provisioning crisis in the Hungarian half of the empire seemed less serious, the traditional political leadership did not see it necessary to share political responsibility with the Social Democrats and thereby further their political integration.Since food shortages were less severe in Hungary, the state and the political elite were much less in need of a social democratic intermediary to “tame” unsatisfied industrial workers. The great estate owners of the political class took a restrictive position towards labor conflicts until the end of the war, which closed off the possibility of democratization. The state interventions on behalf of employees after 1917 were carried out separately at the level of enterprises, and mostly concerned only the improvement of labor conditions and provisioning, as well as wage increases.The downfall of the Habsburg Empire opened the way to a new international order for Central Europe. The victor states were aiming to divide the centuries-old multinational realm into smaller, democratically organized national states. But as to the question of what this Central Europe of small states should look like, there were in 1918 different, competing concepts, one “Eastern” and one “Western.” In his appeal to the self-determination of peoples, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin proclaimed the self-delineated, rather theoretically considered, territorial sovereignty of every people. US President Woodrow Wilson understood under the same slogan the self-government of a democratic administration.44 Although the word “democracy” appeared nowhere in his ultimately famous Fourteen Points, he delivered “the message of global democratization.”45In the last year of the war both transnational “ideological offensives”46 reached the crisis-wracked Habsburg realm, where they hastened its disintegration and offered a new orientation for the region’s rebirth. Numerous obligations of modernity had piled up in complicated fashion in Central Europe by the end of the war. Territorial independence and the sovereignty of the nation formed the uncontested main goal. A further amalgamation of demands for national autonomy and increased participation crystallized in political discourse in the late fall of 1918.47 The global “Wilsonian moment”48 had finally reached Central Europe. The “messianic” expectation of understanding between peoples was attached to the person of the American President. The projection screen “democracy” in this way underwent a new extension of meaning: democracy became identified as the path to a “just peace” based on the right of nations to self-determination.“Democracy” in the year 1918 in the Danube region had “suddenly” come into fashion, even become normality,49 and served as a counterproject to that of the authoritarian “hated elders,” which could be identified with the Habsburg Monarchy with all its weaknesses and the war with all its suffering. Behind this declaration stood the contemporary assumption that Central Europe’s social and economic deficit stemmed from a lack of sovereignty on the part of national states. According to these conceptions, the emergence of new national states and their democratic self-organization would open the door for economic catch-up on the ruins of the authoritarian Habsburg Monarchy.At the beginning of November 1918, Count Mihály Károlyi, provisional prime minister of Hungary, as well as the Hungarian Social Democrats espoused this position, as the questions of state sovereignty and a republic as the form of governance came to the fore.50 Thomas G. Masaryk, president of Czechoslovakia, characterized the First World War as a struggle between the “feudal” autocracy of the Central Powers on one side and the ideas of democracy and freedom of conscience, borne by the Entente, on the other. Subsequently, Czechoslovakia would be the “agent of the civilized and democratic West” in the East, guaranteeing the new order.51 The popularity of a putative democracy was also increased by the recognition that at Versailles only parliamentary democracies were acceptable as participants in the negotiations.52 The new political actors hoped by means of the declaration of a democratic new order to gain more sympathy from the victors, and thereby also better peace settlement conditions. Of course a rooted, stable democratic political culture was lacking across wide social strata. Especially in Hungary there were hardly political forces—aside from Social Democracy and some radical intellectuals—standing behind the political slogan “democracy.”The transition from monarchical authoritarian state to liberal democracy in Austria and Hungary was due to war and crisis, and the social democratic parties played a significant role in it.53 Total war with its mass mobilization and industrial milit