Lothar Dörner, Princes and Paupers in the Federal Empire (Heidelberg Univ. Press, 2011)
… Germany grew quickly after the war. Its growth consisted at first of repairing wartime devastation – it was 1902 before German industrial output exceeded prewar levels – but it continued apace from there. Industrial growth in Germany between 1897 and 1913 kept pace with that of the United States and exceeded that of France or Britain. Germany lagged behind France in research and development – there would be no German equivalent to Verne’s industrial research institute until 1911 – but made up for that in precision engineering, and Germany became a leader in the high technology industries of the time. Its economic hegemony over much of central and eastern Europe only increased its prosperity, and as the 1910s dawned, Germany rivaled the United States for the highest living standard in the world.
This era of prosperity was not without controversy, however, because a key part of Germany’s growth was immigration. Much attention is given, and deservedly so, to the Indian and African veterans who settled in Germany after the war and who became an enduring presence in the Hanseatic cities and Berlin, but a far greater part of the postwar labor shortage was alleviated by newcomers from Poland and the former Habsburg lands. Between 1900 and 1910, about a million citizens of the Kingdom of Poland immigrated to the German Empire, and even more came as refugees from the Hungarian civil war, many of them ethnic Germans but also Hungarians, Romanians, Slovaks, and Roma. (Bohemia, which was a prosperous, democratic and industrialized Zollverein member, drew immigrants rather than contributing them; the Bohemians in Germany were mostly professionals and businessmen.)
These immigrants were necessary to fill the jobs created by postwar industrial development, but some Germans resented them. The Roma, especially, were stereotyped as thieves and disease carriers, as were Africans after the “Congo disease” was identified in the late 1900s, but nobody – not even the Ostdeutschen – was immune. Opposition to racism became a rallying point for the Social Democrats and the liberal parties, who welcomed immigrants into their ranks, but the nationalist parties took an anti-immigration stance which became increasingly hard-line as the economic crisis of the 1910s progressed…
… The German constitution provided for a model democracy on the federal level, but many states retained their nineteenth-century voting systems and forms of government. In Prussia, especially, the three-class franchise and the open ballot ensured that the state government would be dominated by conservatives and that the state’s delegation to the Reichsrat would lean strongly to the right. This, combined with the smaller principalities and duchies, created a built-in conservative majority in the Reichsrat to balance the liberal-dominated Reichstag.
The balance of forces between the houses of parliament, and between the empire and the states, made for stable and centrist government. But it also meant that the states had considerable freedom to be repressive. The states could not resurrect the anti-socialist laws or impose political censorship – freedom of expression and association were part of the federal bill of rights – but the criminal police and tax authorities were used to break up labor unions and progressive organizations.
The result was that the battle for democratization, already won at the imperial level, shifted to the states, with the postwar constitutions of Bavaria and Baden serving as models. In the Hanseatic cities, a combination of electoral victories and public protests forced the adoption of universal suffrage and the transformation of the city senates into cabinets responsible to the municipal parliaments. Peaceful change was also effected in some of the small states, where the electorate was conservative enough that the ruling princes could implement universal suffrage without fearing loss of control. But Prussia, and to a lesser extent in Hannover and Saxony, resisted the calls for change, and any attempt to use the federal government as a vehicle to impose such change was thwarted by the Reichsrat.
The conflict became acute in the mid-1910s as the export-dependent economy was hit hard by the depression (it would reach its low point in 1918) and the Reichsrat vetoed many of the emergency relief measures proposed in the Reichstag. The period between 1914 and 1919 in Germany’s three largest states is often called the “Labor War,” with increasingly militant trade unions engaging in strikes and sometimes pitched battles with the police and the industrialists’ security forces. This period also saw increasing difficulties for the immigrant population, who were seen as working-class agitators by the state governments even while many workers considered them competitors for jobs.
Nobody would really win the labor war: the unions weren’t strong enough to overcome the police, but the Hanseatic cities and princely states, worried that the militancy of Prussian labor would spread to their jurisdictions, added to the pressure for reform. Hannover’s adoption of universal suffrage in 1917, and the election of a liberal state government the following year, deprived Prussia and Saxony of key support in the Reichsrat, and in early 1919, the Prussian government reluctantly agreed to end the three-class system and take a less confrontational stance toward the unions. The immediate threat receded, but neither side regarded the conflict as finished…
Anna Lindh-Malmström, Scandinavia and the Beginnings of Neo-Feudalism (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1987)
… The “Postponed Crisis” of 1911 nearly finished the Swedish-Norwegian personal union, but it would transform the union instead – and with it, all Scandinavia and even all the world.
The crisis’ catalyst was a renewed attempt to change the terms of trade between the two countries, a measure that had first been proposed in 1895 but was shelved due to the exigencies of the wartime economy. The issue remained dormant during the postwar prosperity that both nations shared, but as the global economy began to deteriorate in the early 1910s, it again became a factor. As Sweden moved to protect its farmers and manufacturers from foreign competition – which included Norwegian competition – the Norwegian Storting, increasingly dominated by rural populists, debated the imposition of retaliatory tariffs or even severing the union altogether.
The Storting’s approach was accentuated by its long-standing dispute with Sweden over control of foreign policy, which had traditionally been conducted by the Swedish Foreign Ministry on behalf of both countries. Many of the Norwegian populists saw an independent foreign policy as integral to local control of the economy, and the appointment of a Norwegian foreign minister after the 1911 election was a direct challenge to the Swedish crown. When the Swedish king refused to swear in the new government until the proposed foreign minister stood down, matters stood at a knife edge. The Storting reappointed the government by an overwhelming vote and resolved that the king would forfeit the throne if he refused again to swear it in; Swedish parliamentary leaders declared that all options, including war, would be on the table if the Storting continued on its course.
Catastrophe was averted through the efforts of the Swedish and Norwegian prime ministers, both of whom viewed the escalating crisis with alarm and had no desire to go where their more eager subordinates were leading. In June 1911, after a month of secret negotiations, they presented a resolution to their respective governments. In broad outline, it was a straightforward compromise: the common market between Sweden and Norway would be restored in exchange for Norway giving up its claim to an independent foreign ministry. But the Swedish foreign ministry would also be abolished; going forward, foreign policy would henceforth be conducted by a “crown ministry” that was part of neither country’s government. This ministry would be headed by a Swede, but Sweden and Norway would have equal representation on its governing board, and each embassy would include a Norwegian-interest section staffed by a consul appointed by the Norwegian government.
There was considerable opposition to the prime ministers’ plan, but with war as the alternative, the more moderate members of both parliaments embraced it. The king, eager for a way to climb down, gave it his seal of approval, which swung many waverers behind it, and on July 18, both parliaments voted in favor. The new Norwegian government, minus the foreign minister, was sworn in the following day, and the union was saved.
The impact of the crisis might have ended there if not for the lessons drawn from it by a member of the Swedish negotiating team, Nils Branting. In 1913, Branting, a junior member of the prime minister’s staff, published an essay entitled
A New Paradigm of Sovereignty, which argued that national sovereignty was a package of rights rather than an indivisible unity, and that these rights could be delegated downward to autonomous regions or upward to multi-national entities. More than that, he argued that such delegations
should be made, and that they were a possible answer to the conundrums of nationalism and collective security.
Among the more controversial parts of Branting’s thesis was his view of constitutional monarchy as a means of splitting national sovereignty. He argued that a monarch, as an apolitical figure, could embody several levels of sovereignty at once in a way that a political body could not, and pointed to the Swedish-Norwegian resolution and Wilhelm II’s role as Duke of Alsace-Lorraine as proof that a personal union could bridge the gaps between national aspirations in a way that did not involve conquest or dispossession. His many critics would refer to his prescriptions as “neo-feudalism,” a label he adopted, and which he gave effect four years later when he arranged for the Gustav V to take oath as Count of Åland and secure autonomy for that archipelago within the Finnish kingdom. He is also believed to have been influential in the devolution of Iceland and the Faroe Islands as kingdoms under the Danish crown in 1918, with the latter becoming the world’s smallest nominally independent nation.
A question often raised is whether Branting’s views were influenced by his connection to the Carlsenist settlements in East Africa; two of his uncles were among the early settlers, and Branting himself visited the Rift Valley and Zanzibar as a young man. There is nothing in his thesis that can be directly connected to Carlsenist doctrine, but one cannot help but wonder if he drew inspiration from the Omani empire’s own quasi-modernist feudalism or from Carlsen’s emphasis on personal unity as a means of combining nations and races…
Stjepan Pavletić, The Habsburg Lands in the Twentieth Century (Vienna: Karl Linder, 2005)
… Well before the voting took place in 1903, the result of Austria’s referendum on unification with Germany was a foregone conclusion. The German volunteers who fought for Austria in the Burgenland conflict did much to reduce the bitterness of the war, but Austrians still remembered that Wilhelm II had wanted to conquer them and that Franz Joseph had given his life to maintain their independence. By the early 1900s, Austria had also begun to see itself as an alternative to Germany, a rural and conservative nation of yeomen which preserved its traditional ways of life better than its industrial northern neighbor. It was sometimes hard to reconcile this view with the existence of cosmopolitan and creative Vienna, of which Austrians were also proud, but the perception was real nevertheless, and it contributed to nearly all major parties calling for a “no” vote and to the referendum being disapproved by 86 percent of the voters.
Austria also adjusted surprisingly well to its new role as a kingdom of no greater status than the other two Habsburg lands. Some nationalists did lament the loss of Austria’s empire, but more remembered how much trouble it had been to juggle the demands of the various nationalities, and they decided that it was better to be a small, but prosperous and firmly German, nation than the master of an empire always on the verge of falling apart. Again, polyglot Vienna was something of an exception, but Viennese tolerance became much easier to accept when the minorities were no longer potential separatists but citizens praised for their wartime loyalty. And Vienna ensured that, no matter what it may have lost politically, Austria would always be the
cultural center of the Habsburg lands, and that it would be the mecca for Slovenes and Dalmatians eager to take part in the vibrant music and art scene of the 1900s and 1910s.
Carniola, too, prospered; it was another conservative yeoman nation, and now that it was an autonomous kingdom, it was fully reconciled to Habsburg rule. It was Dalmatia that was the odd one out. Dalmatia was the poorest of the Three Lands, and it also had revanchist claims over the coastal cities that were Italy’s prizes of war as well as a sizable contingent that wanted to join Hungarian Croatia. The Hungarian civil war, and the repression carried out by the nominally autonomous Croatian government after the war’s end, dampened enthusiasm for such a union, and the parties that supported it never came close to a majority of votes, but the unionists increasingly carried out assassinations and terror bombings, and there were frequent allegations that Hungary supported them…
… On June 28, 1914, a blast ripped through a theater in Dalmatia’s capital, killing 127 people including the ambassadors from Austria and Carniola. The bomber was quickly caught and proved to have connections to three members of the Hungarian regency council. Hungary refused a demand for extradition and reparations, mobilizing its army instead; internal papers made public after the fact show that a majority faction on the regency council wanted a short victorious war in order to distract the public from the worsening economy. Efforts at mediation broke down, and on July 5, the parliaments of all three Habsburg kingdoms declared war on Hungary; at dawn the following day, the Hungarian army crossed into Dalmatia, hoping to present the unprepared Habsburgs with a fait accompli.
To say the least, things did not go as the regents had planned. The Dalmatian army fought a valiant rearguard action in the mountains, and the Hungarian advance bogged down. A Hungarian attempt to surround Fiume and cut off the rail connection to Carniola and Austria failed, and armored trains of Slovene soldiers quickly began arriving to reinforce the Dalmatian resistance. And the Habsburgs received support from unexpected quarters as Serbia and Romania, wary of the regency council’s revanchism, threatened to enter the fight on the Habsburg side unless Hungary withdrew. The Ottomans also preferred a divided Croatia, and although they didn’t offer to join the fight, they agreed to supply the Habsburg forces through Bosnia. The Hungarian war effort fell apart quickly, and by mid-October, Hungary quit Dalmatia, formally recognized the prewar border and agreed to pay reparations for the bombing.
The aftermath of the fiasco would see a coup by the minority faction among the regents, the replacement of the regency council by a single leader bearing the title “head of state,” and the restoration of a limited parliament, but the cost of the war would cripple Hungary for years to come. The consequences for Austria would, unfortunately, be hardly less catastrophic. Austria had always struggled with its wartime debt obligations, and with the cost of even a brief war added to the general economic downturn, it was forced into default by the end of 1914. This would be the last default among the Great War-era powers, but it would deepen the crisis throughout the world, and it would be most of a decade before the Habsburg kingdoms recovered. In the later 1910s and 1920s, “Austrian tolerance” would struggle to maintain itself…
Hans Tieleman, A Modern History of the Low Countries (Amsterdam: Schouten, 1945)
… Belgium in the 1900s and 1910s was a stable, if repressive, country. By 1905, the improvisations of the postwar era had solidified into an ideology in which the Church, the military, industry and labor were all organs of a corporate state. The Church and the industrialists, however, were definitely first among equals. Independent labor organizations and confrontational tactics were outlawed, and the state-sponsored unions emphasized a cooperative relationship with business. The clergy and the industrialists also dominated the board that vetted parliamentary candidates – all political parties were banned, and only approved candidates could run as independents.
The heavy state censorship and cultural repression, both of liberal Catholics and the country’s Jewish minority, led many to leave for Paris, Amsterdam and elsewhere. But the state ideology’s emphasis on solidarity also helped cushion Belgium from the worst effects of the 1910s depression. The ex-Legion influence in the government and business fostered a paternalistic attitude toward employees, and although many concerns reduced wages, social pressure ensured against mass layoffs in most cases, and the state stepped in to keep key employers from failing. The Belgian government also followed Germany and France, albeit for very different reasons, in organizing sports and country weekends for urban workers and their families.
The relative stability of the Belgian economy would help the “Belgian model” compete with liberalism and socialism in the Netherlands, Iberia and parts of the former Habsburg empire. In the 1917 Dutch election, the Catholic Unity Party won 20 percent of the vote, eclipsing the Catholic Liberals and winning most of the “Catholic seats” in the consociational cabinet. The performance of another Belgian-aligned party in the Portuguese election of 1919 would be even more successful…
… The “Ethical Policy” in the Dutch East Indies, as the Dutch governments called it, would prove more enduring than the “partnership raj” in India. Not only was it enshrined in a formal agreement, but both sides had endured years of bitter warfare to reach that accord, and as such, neither was willing to disregard it lightly. The
santri teachers who had been the heart of the rebellion now turned their formidable energies toward supporting the agreement. This was particularly true of the
jajis who had mobilized the peasant women and who now held high status in rural Javanese society; women in general would become the backbone of the new order, and would have an important place in education and even in local government.
The
santri prospered during the 1900s and 1910s with the end to racial discrimination in business and professional licensing, with many holding municipal office and sending their children to study in the Netherlands. Relaxation of travel restrictions also brought many peasants and tribesmen from rural Java and Sumatra to the cities, aiding in the spread of goods and ideas. The Minangkabau people of West Sumatra, with an established tradition of sending young men abroad to find work, traveled to Batavia and the Malay cities in increasing numbers, and although they distrusted the strictness of the
santri, brought reformist ideas home when they returned from their years of wandering…
… In the outlying princely states of Borneo and Sulawesi, the Dutch honored their wartime arrangements, under which the rulers would have broad autonomy in exchange for preferential trade and resource exploitation rights. As in India, however, the rulers’ arrangement with the colonial power did not shield them from challenges by their own subjects. By the mid-1910s, the reformist doctrines of the
santri and the Bugis were joined by the independent Filipino sultanates, and an increasing number of people in the towns demanded more internal democracy and called for a regional federation…
