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  • Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War by John Deak
  • John Connelly
Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War. By John Deak. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Pp. 376. Cloth $65.00. ISBN 978-0804795579.

The failed Habsburg Empire was a great success as a state, providing welfare, infrastructure, and rule of law—things millions of former imperial subjects sorely missed after the dissolution of 1918, whether as émigrés in North America or citizens of the empire's unstable successor states. In his meticulous, highly readable, and tightly argued monograph, John Deak reminds us that the Austrian state's accomplishments did not come automatically, but resulted from the efforts of a special caste [End Page 630] of bureaucrats who by and large remained above nationality. Their work meant that the regime in Vienna continued to improve people's lives even when parliamentary government became unworkable.

Deak traces these officials' remarkable professional ethos back to the obsessive state-maker Joseph II, who attempted a century's work in his one decade of rule (1780–1790). While listening only to Prince Kaunitz, Joseph II toured one end of his realm to the other, and inspected legions of bureaucrats, rewarding some and disciplining many others. Joseph's reforms in education and justice proved enduring, but from his deathbed he retracted the centralizing measures that had called national movements to life in Hungary and Bohemia—movements that would tame the ambitions of the brilliant state-builders who followed.

The suppressed 1848 revolution was a missed chance to make use of the balancing skills of one of these Austrian officials, Franz Stadion, author of a constitution meant to "organize political participation in a multinational state" (69). Stadion's draft was gutted under Franz Joseph's neoabsolutism in 1851, but liberal reforms continued quietly in the Josephine spirit and the economy grew. Especially promising was the rise of local administration permitting officials with local knowledge to manage treasuries and funds. With constitutional reforms after the Solferino fiasco, the central state also became more efficient and the number of officials declined by almost half between 1862 and 1874.

But there were setbacks to liberal bureaucrats' hopes for efficient central rule. The 1860 October diploma recreated crown lands as autonomous polities of the empire, and international bankers demanded a rationalizing reform that sundered the empire into halves in 1867, causing it to evolve into separate states: Hungary, where officials forcibly Magyarized, and Cisleithania with its multiplicity of distinct regions—with Dalmatia very different from Galicia, and Bohemia unsettled by German-Czech tensions.

The heroes of the story are Kaunitz, Stadion, and Franz von Koeber, grey figures little known outside Habsburg studies, who made Austria an increasingly modern state despite circumstances—reactionary old elites, Joseph's unimaginative successors, and, above all, the national movements within and beyond their territories.

That last feature consumed energies of the governing class beyond all rational calculus. Tiny Serbia posed no military or economic challenge; the real danger to Franz Ferdinand's safety as he toured Bosnia in the summer of 1914 was an incompetent local governor. But in the minds of top officials, Serbia came to symbolize nationalism as such—the world-historical menace that had forced upon them the extraparliamentary government in Vienna lamented by the critic Maurice Baumfeld from his perch in the United States.

Authors from C.A. Macartney to A.J.P. Taylor and Henryk Wereszycki have zeroed in on Badeni's 1897 language ordinances as the turning point, the moment after which ordinary work in the Viennese Reichsrat became impossible. But Deak keeps his focus [End Page 631] on the reformers, Koerber, in particular, who proposed restructuring the monarchy by devolving power and tax authority into smaller units. Yet his plans were opposed by a majority of forces, seen as too Slav by some, too German by others, and he was let go.

Though Deak thematizes "possibilities for multinationalism" (260), he is less concerned with proposals to resolve the nationality problem, which appeared intractable. In Bohemia, the Czech side resisted attempts to limit bilingualism...

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