I've got most of this update done, but some of it is still on my laptop and apparently I had to format the flash drive again so everything's still not backed up.
I'll post what I have now and get the other stuff finished and added once I back up the files again.
Part Sixty-Two: Order From Chaos
The State of Illyria: After Galizien and Moravia were stabilized as independent states, the rest of the former Habsburg lands remained in a state of disorder for several years. However, by 1880, the region was finally coalescing into a small number of political entities. In Austria proper, two main polities that emerged as the dominant countries. The Slovene lands and southern Austria were merged into the Illyrian Republic as local cities formed together to stabilize the region. From 1876 to 1879, Illyria was ruled by a Cities' Council in Klagenfurt where each municipality sent a delegation and elected one of the delegates to be the Supreme Consul for that year. However, the Illyrian Republic descended into a tyranny within a year after president Hugo Poltermann[1] dissolved the Cities' Council that had originally formed the state.
The Viennese Commune:
In Vienna, the exile of the Habsburgs brought a number of opportunist political groups out of the shadows. A new generation of liberal militants rose up in an attempt to ignite a second round of revolutions akin to the Midcentury Revolutions. While these liberals were somewhat successful, they were pushed back east of the Danube by the local military elements in three months of the uprising in 1872, where it soon dissipated. However, the liberal element lingered in the Viennese underground, and encouraged further revolts in later years. By 1876, another underground movement had been growing in Vienna: a new socialist movement. In March of 1877, the leading aristocrat in the Viennese socialist movement, Gustav von Hayek[1], had recruited a German follower of Hegel by the name of Karl Marx to help direct the planned uprising against the military law that had been largely established in the capital.
Marx and von Hayek made their plans and the uprising began in the middle of May of 1877. The two main worker districts in the city were located in the northwestern edge of the city where many factories were located and in the south by the main railway station. Marx took command of the northern group while von Hayek took command of the southern group. On May 17th, a planned protest in Stephensplatz brought the military to put the protest down. While much of the local militia was distracted by this protest, Marx's group overran the nearby gun manufactory and the military hospital. Von Hayek's group seized the arsenal to the east of the railway station after hours of fighting. From this first day of the worker uprising, the fighting in the city lasted five months before the last of the military elements had been trapped in the city center. The worker uprising now had the support of most of the citizens of Vienna and after a ten day siege of the Innere Stadt with captured artillery placed in the surrounding glacis, the flag of the new Wiener Arbeiterstaat[2] was raised at the top of the Stephensdom. Over the next year, the Wiener Arbeiterstaat would absorb control over the surrounding towns and villages and come into control over all of Austria proper.
The Hungarian Republic:
The nation of Hungary managed to stay relatively together, although Romanian, Serbian, Slovakian, and Croatian nationalist rebellions broke out with varying success soon after the exile of the Habsburgs. The Diet in Budapest continued to function as the supreme Hungarian political institution in the early 1870s, although powers were increasingly given to the new executive position of Chancellor, as the separatist uprisings in the more remote Hungarian lands grew worse. The first Hungarian Chancellor was Hungarian nationalist and poet Sándor Petőfi.
During Petőfi's time as Chancellor, the Romanian and Slovakian rebellions were largely crushed, and a number of nationalist reforms were enacted, such as requiring Hungarian instruction in all primary educational institutions and requiring that all electoral ballots be printed in Hungarian. Many policies were also implemented to crush localized rebellions and encouraged migration of citizens from central Hungary to the outer regions in a process of Magyarization. Many of these policies promoted the Magyarisation of the Hungarian hinterlands and were supported by Petőfi's economic and interior minister Kálmán Tisza.
Petofi was Chancellor of Hungary until 1885 and did much to stabilize the country. The Slovakian and Romanian revolts were quelled and many ethnic Romanians in Hungary fled across the Carpathians to Romania. While these two groups were appeased, the Croatians in the south sought most of Petofi's attention in the Magyarisation campaigns. Attempts to generate a Croatian national revival similar to the one that occurred in Illyria were stamped out and towns north of the Szava River were subject to large forced movements of Croatians south of the Szava River, which the Hungarian government claimed was the natural southern border of Hungary proper. Croats and other minorities were mainly encouraged to emigrate from the country through economics means, and by issuing regional passports. An agreement with the Adriatic League in 1878 was made to increase trading through the coastal cities, but also included an allowance of free passage in the cities for people holding the regional passports that were not from Hungary proper[4]. Many poorer Croatians began emigrating to other countries through this method to seek better economic conditions, and the 1880 Zagrab earthquake only accelerated the exodus as economic conditions in Slavonia worsened.
After the Zagrab earthquake, the railway connection between Budapest and the Adriatic Sea had been severed. The Hungarian National Railway, when rebuilding the connection, moved the railway further south and east, crossing the Szava River at Sziszek. After 1885, Kalman Tisza was elected by the Diet to succeed Petofi as Chancellor of Hungary. Tisza continued the persecution of the various minorities in Hungary and expanded the Magyarisation efforts in all regions. In 1889, the Hungarian Diet passed a law that enforced Hungarian as the sole language in primary schools and made Hungarian the official language of government transactions. Despite major rioting in Slovakia and Croatia in the 1890s that were put down by police and army regiments, the Magyarisation campaigns slowly increased the Hungarian population ratio in the outlying regions, spurred by poor economic conditions compared to opportunities in the cities in Hungary proper, as well as in other countries. By 1900, over 5 million ethnic Croatians had left Hungary, primarily to Italy, Canada, and the United States, and the provinces between the Drava and Szava rivers had become over 50 percent Hungarian.
[1] The Illyrian movement was an OTL Slovene/Croatian nationalist movement in the early 19th century. ITTL after the collapse of the Habsburgs, it got hijacked by Styria during the chaos in order to gain control over the Slovene lands. This is why the country is controlled by a German.
[2] In OTL the grandfather of economist Freidrich Hayek
[3] Viennese Workers' State.
[4] This is similar to an effort at Magyarization in Hungary in OTL, where Hungary arranged a direct steamship route from Rijeka to New York with the Cunard Steamship Company, but the company didn't issue passports to ethnic Hungarians.
