Provincial Politics in the Habsburg Empire: The Case of Galicia and Bukovina

Abstract

The creation of an Austrian province, titled “The Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria” (“with the Grand Duchy of Cracow” added later) was the result of the first partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772. The addition of this territory to the already imposing number of Habsburg's realms was ostensibly based on the dubious claim of the Hungarian kings to sovereignty over the medieval Ruthenian (Ukrainian) realm of Galicia and Volhynia. Under the subsequent Polish rule, the southern part of this duchy was organized as thewojewództwo ruskie(Ruthenian [Ukrainian] Province), which was one of the several provinces in the so-calledZiemie Ruskie(Ruthenian Lands) of the Commonwealth, or rather of theKorona(Kingdom of Poland),vis-à-visthe Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Galicia as an Austrian creation included small parts of the adjacent Ruthenian provinces of Podilia (Podole), Volhynia and Belz, (i.e. Galicia proper), and in the west also the province of Cracow, with territorial enclaves, really medieval relics, such as the “Duchy of Oświȩcim [Auschwitz]” and “Duchy of Zator” (i.e. the non-historical “Western Galicia”). Under Austrian rule, Galicia became a common home for Ukrainians (officially called Ruthenians) in the eastern counties and Poles in the western counties. Many Poles lived in Galicia proper. The Polish or Latin-Polish culture deeply influenced the Ukrainian population. However, it stubbornly, though inarticulately, maintained a sense of ethnic community with the Ukrainians who lived under the Russian imperial rule. A prominent Polish historian (and for more than a decade President of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow), Stanislaw Smolka, ascertains the “common features” of the “ethno-historical indivudiuality” known in Polish history as Ruś (Ruthenia) which had been “dormant through the centuries but never moribund [obumarla].” This Ruthenia “at the present attempts to find for herself a new distinguishing name and wants it to be ‘Ukraine'.” He also determines “the historical continuity” in the past of the old Ruthenia of Yaroslav and Monomakh and the “Ruthenian Lands” of the Commonwealth.