Two Decades of Constitutional Upheaval, 1895‒1914

Abstract

Abstract This chapter takes the book’s narrative down to 1914 on the eve of the war. It provides a comprehensive overview of the course of state-level politics from the Badeni government in 1896 down to the ministry led by Karl Stürgkh in 1914. The book shows how the ongoing crisis in Bohemia and Moravia became one chronic axis of conflict that destabilized the Empire, but that this was counterposed to two new social and political movements emerging in Vienna—Christian Socialism and Social Democracy—which had an entirely different, non-ethnic logic. The institution of universal suffrage in 1907, which was meant to try to ameliorate the bitter ethnic conflicts in Bohemia and Moravia, also gave huge impetus to expansion of the Viennese mass ideological parties as well. By 1907 the two largest parties in the Austrian parliament (Reichsrat) were the Christian Socials and Social Democrats, neither of which had existed in the 1880s. The result was that, upon the collapse of the Empire in 1918, these two ideological movements—the Catholics and the Socialists—were ready to take possession of the new republican state. The chapter concludes by reviewing the plans that Archduke Franz Ferdinand had developed for his accession to the throne and suggests that the perennial debate about the longer-term possible survival of the Habsburg Empire in the twentieth century which has much preoccupied recent scholarship has to hinge on how historians evaluate Franz Ferdinand’s capacity for effective administrative leadership.