The Czech-German Compromise in Moravia

District school board – Bezirksschulrat

District school committee – Okresní školní výbor

Free Pan-German Party – Freialldeutsche Partei

German Agrarian Party – Deutsche Agrarpartei

German Moravian Party – Deutschmährische Partei

German National Party – Deutschnationale Partei Mährens

German People’s Council – Deutscher Volksrat

German People’s Party – Deutsche Volkspartei

German Progressive Party – Deutsche Fortschrittspartei

German Radical Party – Deutschradikale Partei

German Workers’ Party – Deutsche Arbeiterpartei

Chamber of Commerce and Trade – Handels- und Gewerbekammer

Chamber of Deputies of the Cisleithanian Imperial Council – Abgeordnetenhaus des Cisleithanischen Reischsrates

Christian Social Party in Moravia and Silesia – Moravsko-slezská křes-ťansko-sociální strana

Christian Social Provincial Party in Moravia – Christlichsoziale Landespartei für Mähren

Imperial Council – Reichsrat

Imperial Court of Justice – Reichsgericht

Kingdom of Bohemia – Königtum Böhmen

Lands of the Bohemian Crown – Böhmische Kronländer

Language of daily use – Umgangssprache

Large landholders/landowners – Grossgrundbesitzer

Local school board – Ortsschulrat

Margraviate of Moravia – Markgrafschaft Mähren

Matice School Association – Matice školská

Ministry of Cult and Education – Ministerium für Kultus und Unterricht

Moravian (Provincial) Diet – Mährischer Landtag

Moravian Compromise/Pact/Settlement – Mährischer Ausgleich

Moravian National Party – Moravská národní strana

Moravian Progressive Party – Moravská strana pokroková

Municipal (local) self-government – Gemeindeausschuss

National Catholic Party in Moravia – Katolická strana národní na Moravě

National Social Party – Národně sociální strana

National Union (association) – Národní jednota

Pan-German Party – Alldeutsche Partei

People’s Party in Moravia – Lidová strana na Moravě

People’s Party in Moravia of Hynek Bulín – Lidová strana na Moravě H. Bulína

People’s Progressive Party – Lidová strana pokroková

Political Progressive Association for Northern Moravia – Politický spolek pokrokový pro severní Moravu

Progressive Political Club – Politický spolek pokrokový

Provincial Agricultural Board – Landeskulturrat

Mainly economic (in rural areas peasant⁴), reading, professional, school or craft associations, and further savings associations (in towns) and credit unions (in rural areas) provided a practical benefit. Their leaders expanded knowledge generating an increase in the profitability of production, and were appreciated by common people for their ability to write a request for a subsidy or compensation after a natural disaster, in keeping accounts, etc. Even nationalistic organisations like National Unions (Czech; Národní jednoty) and Unions of Germans (Bund der Deutschen) ensured, in addition to nationalist agitation, subsidies from public budgets through elected members of parliament. These organisations, established in Moravia in the late 1880s, aimed to win over the widest possible sections of the population for the national programme,⁵ by building a network of local organisations – branches uniting women were also formed in cities. Two main lines in the activity were supposed to reach the common people, namely cultural and economic. The cultural was closely connected with agitational activity and consisted in the organisation of educational lectures, national celebrations, in the support of the nation’s schooling as well as in the development of its reading literacy through publishing activities and the building of public libraries. The economic programme was related to the support of tradesmen, artisans and merchants, it can be said that to some extent it aimed to create more closed national markets. An economic boycott of shops, products, and services of “the others” was put into practice.⁶ Nationalist organisations entered the urban real estate market; they also interfered with the sales of small producers’ workshops. They arranged placements for apprentices and provided work for servants.⁷

At the end of the 19^th century, the lower classes often remained on the edge of literacy. But precisely because they were pragmatically oriented, they were able to appreciate the practical benefits, even if the more abstract national idea was harder for them to grasp. And what is crucial, the public discourse informed them that these benefits were brought to them by national (Czech, German) organisations, national communities. National organisations and political parties connected to them thereby strengthened their legitimacy and gained support for their political programme. At that time, everyday life was already largely connected with public life.⁸ Of course, it was true that not every person was a convinced nationalist, i.e. an active supporter of the national movement (Czech or German). However, even for the non-initiative or completely passive majority, it had become practically impossible to live completely outside the national discourse. And trying to do so would also be disadvantageous for that majority, because the modernisation, civic programme bringing specific benefits was already linked to the national programme even in the rural areas (and even more so in the cities). Czech and German national activists (lawyers, journalists, teachers, doctors, officials, etc.) and the national organisations behind them brought not only a nationalist vocabulary, but also a tangible benefit. They were the drivers of associational life. Civil modernisation and nationalisation intersected in their persons.

Cisleithania’s state administration also had to reflect the significant rise in the importance of the national idea, which was reflected in the legislation and the executive. In the final decades of its existence, the Cisleithanian state worked to reconcile legal equality for persons with legal equality for peoples, or nationalities. That bold experiment, which Jeremy King has called a system of separate and equal,⁹ sought to solve the incapacity of classic liberal thought to cope with national, ethnic, or racial difference within the citizenry. Gerald Stourzh, who has long been involved in Cisleithania’s constitutional and legal development, writes about the ethnicization of politics and law.¹⁰

However, the Austrian state ran into clear barriers resting on the basic pillars of its internal (Germans, Hungarians) and foreign (German Empire) policy. If it did not want to risk internal disruption, it could meet the demands of the political representatives of its other nations less than the demands of Germans and Hungarians, even if it at least strove for well-tempered discontent, i.e. about keeping dissatisfaction within reasonable limits. In this regard, the breaking point came in the period around the turn of the 20^th century associated with political differentiation, universal suffrage and heightened national antagonism. An important milestone was the events around the adoption (1897) and subsequent abolition (1899) of the so-called Badeni language regulations, which in Bohemia and Moravia equalised Czech with German in internal official communication, and thus required all civil servants to know both languages. German MPs rioted in parliament, radicalised the masses, and initiated street protests. When the government backed down and revoked the regulation, a similar reaction followed from the Czech side. The upsurge of national antagonism after the Badeni language regulations marked Czech-German coexistence far more fundamentally and intensely than earlier mutual conflicts, even at the communal level. After the final cancellation of Badeni language regulations on 17 October 1899, 53 Moravian towns were affected by Czech demonstrations, clashes with the police, or anti-Jewish excesses. Acts of vandalism against Jewish property took place in several “Czech” towns in Moravia, i.e. not in the largest towns controlled by German town halls.¹¹ Until the fall of the monarchy Moravian Jews remained political allies of Germanism, or more precisely formulated, of German liberalism, which is why Czech anti-Semitism was more virulent in Brno or Olomouc¹² than in Prague that had a Czech city hall.¹³

A great wave of national and, in this case, social mobilisation of the Moravian public took place during the hectic autumn of 1905, linked, following the example of the Russian Revolution, to the movement for universal suffrage. Demonstrations and strikes took place in a number of Moravian towns.

The most serious national conflict in Cisleithania was the conflict between Czech and German political representatives in Bohemia and Moravia. While in Bohemia a stalemate was reached because the leading political representatives of the Czechs and Germans could not find an acceptable compromise, in Moravia, due to different local conditions (more on them in the first chapter), an agreement was concluded during the socially stormy autumn days of 1905. The Moravian Compromise of 1905 had two basic levels, national and social. The social level was undoubtedly more controversial. The dominant political groups in the Moravian Diet – landed aristocrats and bourgeois Germans and Czechs – pushed for such an electoral reform that would preserve their influence against mass political parties, in other words, they agreed to the introduction of universal and equal suffrage only for a small part of the mandates. Even the national level of the compromise was not without problems, but it was undoubtedly less hypocritical, and mainly was the first harbinger of the culmination of state efforts at “pacification by institutional separation,”¹⁴ at reducing national conflict by creating, among other things, nationally separated school systems and electorates.

It was not possible to draw a territorial dividing line between the Czech-speaking and German-speaking population in Moravia, because linguistically uniform areas and municipalities were in a significant minority. The only feasible solution was non-territorial (personal) autonomy. Every voter to the Provincial Diet and Imperial Council, every member of the school boards was, regardless of the region and municipality he lived in, included in the curia or council reserved for the respective nationality. An applicant’s chances of gaining employment by the crownland also became tied to his national status. This type of classification was rather problematic and created new friction areas. For it proved impossible to determine definitively, in accord with Cisleithanian constitutional law, the “national belonging” of all persons – some of whom were bilingual and/or nationally indifferent. And Moravia became a laboratory where judges, administrative officials, national leaders, and ordinary citizens struggled to develop procedures for determining who was who without violating individual or group rights. Gerard Stourzh used the term ethnic attribution, explaining it in the following way: “Individual citizens by legislative enactment were supposed to be attributed, in certain cases or for certain functions, to one or another of the nationalities living within a province, and… when in doubt, one had to a devise a method of finding out who was to be attributed to one nationality or another, and according to which criteria.”¹⁵

The group rights to national representation and education created through the Moravian Compromise required national classification. Yet the procedures for national classification specified in the Compromise were inconsistent and incomplete. And national belonging was not polled in the census, which instead recorded a single Umgangssprache,¹⁶ “language of daily use” for each person. Thus, the classificatory procedures, along with the very definition of nationality and national belonging, had to be developed by two high courts of law: the Administrative Court of Justice (Verwaltungsgerichtshof) and the Imperial Court of Justice (Reichsgericht).

Our story takes place more than a hundred years ago, at a time when the non-German nations in the Central European area were experiencing successful economic, social, and political emancipation, when belonging to a nation was a more important component of the population’s identity than it is today. We may not like the intensity of the nationalism of that time from today’s point of view, but let’s try to analyse and understand the reasons rather than artificially reduce or even stigmatise its contemporary significance, as is often the case. Let’s be observers, not judges. Let’s observe with the help of period sources. Let’s try to find in them an explanation why the ethnicization of politics and law¹⁷ occurred in Cisleithania in the last decades before World War I, and why the role of the pioneer fell to Moravia.

Continuity with recent researches

The scene of the story is Moravia in the last years before World War I, when the Austrian half of Austria-Hungary was changing from “non-national” to “supra-national”. Cisleithania in its legislation, everyday administrative practice (the language of offices and courts), and schooling took the ethno-linguistic composition of the population in individual countries, districts and municipalities, and the demands of nationalities represented by their political representatives more and more into account. As Gary B. Cohen has aptly expressed, the outline of the developing civil society in the Cisleithanian part of the monarchy during the last three decades before World War I points to the perspective of the changing relations between society and governmental power. Political parties, interest groups, and public opinion penetrated the decision-making processes in local, district, provincial and parliamentary bodies. The municipal and provincial self-government in Cisleithania provided ever greater scope for the development of political activities. The rise of mass parties and interest groups points to a broad process of political modernisation in imperial Austria and partial democratisation of some elements of political decision-making and administration. The growth and development of civil society and mass politics – and not the lack of them – caused the recurrent domestic political crises from the late 1890s.¹⁸