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269 Conclusion The Wilson note should in the next few days lead to the forming of all the Austrian Volksstaaten. The strange thing about this is that the army, the police, and the civil administration so far work like normal also in the Slavic lands: the “state” has thus been reduced to its true nature, as the function of a historically established power structure!1 Josef Redlich (1918) In October 1918, Josef Redlich made this sharp observation about how the Josephist state continued functioning fully right through the “dissolution” process; viewed thus, “transition” would probably be a better term to describe this process. However, the view implicit in the observation of a parallel existence of the two Austrias—the old Josephist Zwangsstaat and the new multinational Volksstaat—had been part of Redlich’s perception of things for some time. Indeed, I would argue that this division constitutes an important key to understanding the development of late Imperial Austria and its dissolution. By shifting the perspective from the nationality problem to this vertical field of tension, a new view on late Imperial Austria will be opened, one that shifts focus from nationalism and national identity to the state, the political system, and the hesitant emergence of a multinational democratic politics. There have been two very interesting perspectives on Austria presented in later years that focus one on each side of this field of tension. Gary B. Cohen has convincingly argued that we need “new narratives on society and government in late Imperial Austria.” Cohen presented a broad, empirewide perspective on the development of political participation on different levels in the constitutional monarchies of Austria and Hungary after 1867, arguing that the internal political development in Austria-Hungary needs to be considered anew.2 While Cohen’s perspective focuses on the emerging multinational Volksstaat of Austria (and that of Hungary), James Shedel’s complementary perspective focuses on the perseverance of the Josephist Rechtsstaat in Austria until the very last phase of the monarchy. Shedel emphasizes that the Josephist state functioned as a very stable framework for the sometimes turbulent political life of the multinational state. Parliamentary life was to a degree irresponsible exactly because it could be; the Rechtsstaat and its Verwaltung guaranteed stability and continuity.3 270 ◆ CONCLUSION This field of tension had been institutionalized in the Austrian constitutional monarchy since 1860–62, when the October-Diploma and the Reichgemeindegesetz created the famed “dual administration” (Doppelverwaltung) of Austria, one state structure and one autonomous structure. In his study of the Beamte in late Imperial Austria, Karl Megner makes the very interesting empirical observation that there were even two parallel, sometimes competing and opposing political cultures that had evolved around these two administrative structures. However, Megner also notes how in the later phases of the parallel developments of mass politics and a growing administrative apparatus, the average Beamte also increasingly acquired an integrative function between these two political cultures.4 The long-term development here seems to be that of the Rechtsstaat and its Verwaltung filling the role of a paternalistic educator, and supporting structure, of an emerging system of political participation. Dressed in Max Weber’s terminology, a central process in the state and society of late Imperial Austria was the interaction between a strong and firmly established bureaucratic leadership and an emerging political leadership. In Weber’s view, the balance between them in late Imperial Austria would not have been ideal. However, because of the problem noted in the introduction, that the overshadowing question of unity in diversity in Austria probably necessitated a stronger bureaucratic leadership than in the average nation-state, this process might indeed have been exactly what could have secured the long-term survival of the multinational state. In my view, this perspective on the development of state and society needs to be considered more closely in Habsburg scholarship. In the present biographical studies, the state side of this problem has been focused on; in a wide sense, for all the political projects examined here, the Josephist Rechtsstaat was more or less central, but it played different roles. Koerber, Renner, and Redlich focused on the need for this state to move with the times. Ernest von Koerber’s solution was the most traditionally Josephist, aiming to buttress the state and to shape the Verwaltung into an efficient instrument for bureaucratic leadership in the modernization of Austria. I would simply characterize Karl Renner’s approach as neo-Josephist: his solution aimed at democratizing the Josephist...

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