Austria-Hungary - Ethnic Relations

Ethnic Relations

See also: United States of Greater Austria

In July 1849, the Hungarian Revolutionary Parliament proclaimed and enacted the first laws on ethnic and minority rights in the world. (The next such laws were in Switzerland.) But these were overturned after the Russian and Austrian armies crushed the Hungarian Revolution. When Hungary made a compromise with the dynasty in 1867 one of the first acts of the restored Parliament was to pass a Law on Nationalities (Act Number XLIV of 1868). It was a liberal piece of legislation, and offered rather extensive language and cultural rights, but refused to recognize the non-Hungarians as state-forming elements with territorial autonomy.

The "Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867" created semi-independent states of Hungary and Austria linked by personal union, and entailed the rise of an assertive Magyar identity within the Kingdom of Hungary. Nationalism prevalent in the Empire of Austria also created tension between ethnic Germans and ethnic Czechs. In addition, the emergence of national identity in newly independent Romania and Serbia also contributed to ethnic issues in the empire.

Article 19 of the 1867 "Basic State Act" (Staatsgrundgesetz), valid only for the Cisleithanian (Austrian) part of Austria-Hungary, said:

All races of the empire have equal rights, and every race has an inviolable right to the preservation and use of its own nationality and language. The equality of all customary languages ("landesübliche Sprache") in school, office and public life, is recognized by the state. In those territories in which several races dwell, the public and educational institutions are to be so arranged that, without applying compulsion to learn a second country language ("Landessprache"), each of the races receives the necessary means of education in its own language.

The implementation of this principle led to several disputes, as it was not clear which languages could be regarded as "customary". The Germans, the traditional bureaucratic, capitalist and cultural elite, demanded the recognition of their language as a customary language in every part of the empire. Italian was regarded as an old "culture language" (Kultursprache) by German intellectuals and had always been granted equal rights as an official language of the Empire, but the Germans had difficulty in accepting the Slavic languages as equal to German. On one occasion Count A. Auersperg (Anastasius Grün) entered the diet of Carniola carrying what he claimed to be the whole corpus of Slovene literature under his arm to provide evidence that the Slovene language could in his view not be substituted for German as a medium of higher education.

Nevertheless the following years saw an emancipation of several languages, at least in Cisleithania. From 1867, laws awarded Croatian equal status with Italian in Dalmatia. From 1882, there was a Slovene majority in the diet of Carniola and in the capital Laibach (Ljubljana), which replaced German as the dominant official language. Polish was introduced instead of German in 1869 in Galicia as the normal language of government. The Poles themselves systematically disregarded the large Ukrainian minority in the country, and Ukrainian was not granted the status of an official language.

The language disputes were most fiercely fought in Bohemia where the Czech speakers formed a majority and sought equal status for their language. German speakers lost their majority in the Bohemian diet in 1880 and their dominating position in the cities of Prague and Pilsen (while retaining a slight numerical majority in the city of Brno (Brünn)) and found themselves in an unfamiliar minority position. The old Charles University in Prague, hitherto dominated by the German speakers, was divided into German and Czech parts in 1882.

At the same time, Hungarian dominance faced challenges from the local majorities of Romanians in Transylvania and in the eastern Banat, of Slovaks in today's Slovakia, of Croats and Serbs in the crown lands of Croatia and of Dalmatia (today's Croatia), in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the provinces known as the Vojvodina (today's northern Serbia). The Romanians and the Serbs also looked to union with their fellow nationalists in the newly-founded states of Romania (1859–78) and Serbia.

Hungary's leaders were generally less willing than their Austrian counterparts to share power with their subject minorities, but they granted a large measure of autonomy to the Croatia in 1868, paralleling to some extent their own accommodation within the Empire the previous year. The Croatian government, in spite of nominal autonomy, was in fact an economic and administrative arm of Hungary, which the Croatians resented.

Language was one of the most contentious issues in Austro-Hungarian politics. All governments faced difficult and divisive hurdles in deciding on the languages of government and of instruction. The minorities sought the widest opportunities for education in their own language, as well as in the "dominant" languages—Hungarian and German. On one notable occasion, the "Ordinance of 5 April 1897", the Austrian Prime Minister Count Kasimir Felix Badeni gave Czech equal standing with German in the internal government of Bohemia, leading to a crisis because of nationalist German agitation throughout the empire. Badeni was dismissed.

The Hungarian Minority Act of 1868 gave the minorities (Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs, et al.) individual (but not also communal) rights to use their language in offices, schools (although in practice often only in those founded by them and not by the state), courts and municipalities (if 20% of the deputies demanded it). From June 1907, all public and private schools in Hungary were obliged to ensure that after the fourth grade the pupils could express themselves fluently in Hungarian; which led to the closing of several minority schools, mostly Slovak and Rusyn.

It was not rare for the two kingdoms to divide spheres of influence. According to Misha Glenny (The Balkans, 1804–1999), the Austrians responded to Hungarian persecution of Czechs by supporting the Croatian national movement in Zagreb.

Emperor Franz Joseph realised that he reigned in a multiethnic country, and spoke German, Hungarian and Czech fluently, and Polish and Italian to some degree.

The situation of Jews, who numbered about two million in 1914, was ambiguous. Antisemitic parties and movements existed, but Vienna and Budapest did not initiate pogroms or implement official antisemitic policies – mainly for fear that such ethnic violence could ignite other ethnic minorities and result in violence that could spin out of control. The antisemitic parties remained on the periphery of political sphere due to their low popularity among voters in the parliamentary elections. The majority of Jews lived in small towns in Galicia and rural areas in Hungary and Bohemia, although there were large communities in Vienna, Budapest, Prague and other large cities. Of the pre-World War military forces of the major European powers, the Austro-Hungarian army was almost alone in its regular promotion of Jews to positions of command. While the Jewish population of the lands of the Dual Monarchy was about five percent, Jews made up nearly eighteen percent of the reserve officer corps.