Under The Influence of Enlightenment ideals of rational administration and cameralist notions of increasing the productivity and welfare of the populace, Joseph II and his ministers embarked on an aggressive program of reform for the Habsburg monarchy in the late eighteenth century. Their view as to what needed change was wide-ranging, but among their chief concerns was the desire to restructure the relationship between the Catholic church and Austrian society. As the largest and most powerful religious denomination in the Habsburg monarchy, the Catholic church possessed immense human and material resources, which could possibly be exploited to benefit the Austrian people and state. For Joseph II, the process whereby Catholicism could best be put to use in Austrian society necessarily involved seizing partial administrative control over the Catholic church. The Catholic church, he believed, did not distribute material and moral benefit to the Austrian people evenly, and changing this situation required the active intervention of the Austrian government.

Two Decades Ago, Holger Herwig's The German Naval Officer Corps: A Social and Political History, 1890–1918 (1973) chronicled the story of the new military elite that rose to prominence when imperial Germany went to sea: a corps that sought to emulate the traditions of the Prussian army, its middle-class officers eager to embrace the values and attitudes of the more aristocratic army officer corps.1 Recently Istvan Deak's excellent work Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848–1918 (1990) has provided a comprehensive picture of the officer corps of the Habsburg army.2 Like imperial Germany, Austria-Hungary was a central European land power with few long-standing traditions at sea, but differences in social composition, training, and outlook distinguished the Austro-Hungarian naval officer corps from its German counterpart. Within the Dual Monarchy the navy had to deal with the nationality question and other challenges that also faced the army, but in many respects its officer corps reflected the diversity of the empire more than the Habsburg army officer corps did, contributing to the navy's relatively more successful record as a multinational institution.

TheSokol (Falcon), the Czech gymnastic organization, was a major component in the transformation of Czech nationalism into a mass movement. It was also one of the few organizations to mobilize women for the national cause, and their involvement in the club forms a major chapter in the history of women in Czech society. There are few sources on Czech women's history, in part because historians have tended to focus on the more advanced feminist movements of Western Europe or the United States to the detriment of the smaller nations of Europe's borderlands, where the complex ethnic composition created a special context for the emergence of the “women's question.” In the Czech lands, the rivalry between Czechs and Germans defined the conceptual framework of Czech feminism and lent the national struggle an overriding importance that served both to inspire and to limit the campaign of Czech women for expanded rights and opportunities. This convergence of feminism and nationalism is evident in the changing role of women in the Sokol from the founding of the organization in 1862 until World War I, a time when the Sokol emerged as a leading force in the Czech national movement, and when Czech women began to challenge traditional attitudes and demand equality with men. In manifesting these broader processes, the history of women in the Sokol exemplifies their larger effort to define their role within an evolving national community.

Adistinctive Feature of nineteenth-century Czech nationalism was its consistent promotion of Czech business and economic interests. Since the 1850s, Czech national leaders had argued that economic prosperity was a prerequisite for eventual political power and provincial autonomy within the Habsburg monarchy. They demanded equality for Czechs and for the Czech language not just in schools, courts, and the bureaucracy, but also in the business world, and they gradually established a wide network of cooperatives and voluntary associations to support Czech business.

Some aspects of the relationship between the Polish aristocracy and the Ukrainian peasantry in Eastern Galicia in the last quarter of the nineteenth century have been treated by many scholars over the years. This relationship has been seen primarily as one of class and then national conflict, played out in the economic and political spheres of Galician life. The traditional picture has been one of discrimination against and exploitation of the peasants by the numerically small class of Polish magnates and gentry. The emphasis has been on forced peasant labor, on inequities in the size of landholdings, on the brutality of the landlords and oppression by their stewards, on beatings, on the illegal annexation of peasant lands, and on the expected and automatic obedience and subservience of the peasant to the manorial lord. All of these elements were certainly part of the relationship in pre-1848 Galicia, though even in this respect one may ask questions about the growing number of Ukrainian village schools, and so on.

In 1878 The Habsburgs exercised their rights under the Treaty of Berlin and marched an army of occupation into the former Ottoman provinces of Bosnia and Hercegovina. Between then and their expulsion in 1918, the Habsburg authorities attempted to weld their new province into the Austro-Hungarian polity and economy. Responsibility for governing Bosnia-Hercegovina was entrusted to the Common Finance Ministry. Its officials, especially during the administration of Count Benjamin Kalláy (1882–1903), saw their task as a “civilizing mission” and the Bosnian economy as clay to be worked according to their prescriptions. The developmental outcome of their endeavors forms the subject of this paper.

This Essay Provides a critical assessment of the system of military justice established in Austria by the American occupation authorities. It places military justice and its function in the wider context of U.S. occupation policy as it developed from total control to increasingly milder forms of tutelage under the impact of the Cold War and increasing Austrian self-assertion. The essay is based on the hitherto largely untapped files contained in seventy-five boxes of the Legal Division of the U.S. Military Government in Austria, collected in two visits in 1990 and 1991 to the National Archives in Suitland, Maryland.