Yes, Austria had no real fondness for the Slavs, but they (at least some Viennese politicians) supported things like trialism not out of 'spite', but merely to curb Hungary's growing influence in the early twentieth century..Oh yes, Hungary was rather determined to get its language out there, though it varied in whether or not the people in the Hungarian government wanted it to only be Hungarian or if people could speak their own language in their free time. Having everyone being given schooling and learnt he language of the majority of country in itself wasn’t too bad I would say, though back then a lot of languages were just solidifying. Think it was in that book I read where the person codifying or pushing the Croatian language deliberate chose the dialect closest to Serbian. They kept their own Latin script of course, and they used Latin longer than the Hungarians did. As good a lingua Franca as any I suppose, at least back when they were a bunch of Military Frontiers with Germans of all strips coming in to settle and fight. Anyways, might you be able to list some of the examples given in the book? And we might not want to overstate Austria’s love for minorities, as it seemed that some of their support for them was to spite the Hungarians.
Here are just a few things I've found from Wawro's book at the moment:
- P. 32-33 - Franz Joseph proclaims universal male suffrage in 1907 - ignored in Hungary. In 1910 parliamentary elections, Hungary's vote confined to "wealthy, educated Magyars". "More chauvinistic among the Magyars... spoke proudly of a cultural 'policy of colonisation'."
35 - Unlike their German counterparts, Hungarian officers were usually exempt from learning the languages of their troops, "so desperate was the emperor to have proofs of 'loyalism' from the Magyars"
42 - "The survival of Magyar supremacy in Hungary depended on keeping the kingdom's Slavs and Rumanians cowed in a system that gave the Hungarians, with only 55 percent of Hungary's population, 98 percent of its 405 parliamentary deputies."
And from Christopher Clark in 'Sleepwalkers', who is relatively sympathetic towards Austria-Hungary:
66-67 - "Education laws imposed the use of the Magyar language on all state and faith schools... Teachers were required to be fluent in Magyar and could be dismissed if they were found to be 'hostile to the [Hungarian] State'. This degradation of language rights was underwritten by harsh measures against ethnic minority activists... In Cisleithania, by contrast, successive administrations tampered endlessly with the system in order to accommodate minority demands."