Author Description

"This book connects the political history of German-speaking provinces of the Habsburg Empire before 1914 (Vienna and the Alpine Lands) with the history of the Austrian Republic that emerged in 1918. It presents the case of modern Austria as a fascinating example of democratic nation-building. The construction of an Austrian political nation began in 1867 under Habsburg Imperial auspices, with the German-speaking bourgeois Liberals defining the concept of a political people (Volk) and giving that Volk a constitution and a liberal legal and parliamentary order to protect their rights against the Crown. The decades that followed saw the administrative and judicial institutions of the Liberal state solidified, but in the 1880s and 1890s the membership of the Volk exploded to include new social and economic strata from the lower bourgeoisie and the working classes. The war crisis of 1914/1918 exploded the Empire and also accelerated the emergence of new structures of democratic self-governance in the Austrian lands, enshrined in the republican Constitution of 1920. The catastrophe of 1938 resulting in the Nazi occupation closed off the temptation to view Austria as having a vague attachment to a larger German nation. After 1945 the surviving legatees of the Revolution of 1918 reassembled under the four-power Allied occupation. They then fashioned a shared political culture which proved sufficiently flexible to accommodate intense partisanship, but a partisanship in which each side claimed resources within the given democratic legal order, rather than seeking to dominate the general political system solely for their own purposes"--Publisher's description.