We routinely call the Habsburg monarchy an empire, but technically the monarchy never was an empire, a word that roughly translates into the German Reich. The closest the Habsburgs came to using imperial language to describe their realm came in 1804, when they proclaimed it a Kaisertum—an emperor state—but in 1867, they downgraded it to the Austrian-Hungarian Double Monarchy. The other major European land powers—the French, the Russian, the German—had no such hesitation, proudly calling themselves Empire, Tsarstvo, and Reich. The word Kaisertum tells us that Habsburg leaders valued the imperial title, but why did they not match it with a corresponding geographic reality? How could an emperor not preside over an empire?

In what follows I try to show that there is more involved here than merely a semantic quibble. The resonance of Reich in the German cultural world was profound, evoking the heritage of a universal empire, and Austria’s leaders worried what they would signal to the world by using that word. Would calling their realm a Reich, for example, not evoke the old empire’s claim to embody the German nation and unite the German lands? At the same time they were loath to forsake claims to supposedly ancient imperial glory, and in the late century began routinely making use of the word Reich to describe the trappings of their rule, such as in the Reichsrat in Vienna. I argue that Habsburg leaders' ambivalence on applying the word Reich to their holdings signaled an insecurity of identity, a fact that had dire consequences as Central Europe entered the twentieth century. After all, insecure states are potentially dangerous, often driven to desperate measures to bridge the gap between what they claim to be—and what they really are.

The origins of Reich were humble enough, going back to a Celtic word that meant realm, an area ruled by a king or some other potentate. We see traces of this original meaning in proper names like Heinrich, which means “ruler of the home.” There is also the word Königreich, a realm ruled by a king, as in Königreich England. Closer to our topic is Österreich, Austria, which designated an eastern march of Bavaria, the first recorded use of which dates from 966. In the modern period, Reich continued to mean something less than an empire, for example German speakers often applied Ungarisches Reich to Hungary and they spoke of Polnisches Reich.

Yet Reich also came to signify something grander, a realm above kingdoms, a universal empire in the tradition of Rome; from the twelfth century onward the words Heiliges Römisches Reich carried transcendent overtones missing from the British or French variants of empire, signaling divine appointment, far above a king's divine right. Thus, when people said simply das Reich in the year 1800, they meant precisely that ancient structure, supposedly universal, supposedly going back to Charlemagne and earlier, involving much of Italy, most German areas, parts of what became France, and all of Czechia. Yet over time the old Reich fell far short of what people nowadays consider imperial rule. From the thirteenth century, emperors ceded rights to many vassals, so that by the eighteenth century the empire's components, including hundreds of German city-states, principalities, archbishoprics, and a few kingdoms, lived free from direct imperial influence.

In 1806, the Holy Empire ceased to exist, but its evocative power grew; Germans of succeeding generations recalled not so much the dysfunctional entity of recent times, but the supposed glory of the medieval Reich. The Austrian scholar Julius Ficker captured some of this magical appeal in lectures given in Innsbruck in 1861. When thinking of Reich, he told his audience: “we recall powerfully ruling emperors at the head of a united nation, filled with the proud feeling of their supremacy, dominating neighboring peoples (Nachbarvölker), determining the fate of this part of the world.”Footnote ¹

In the course of the nineteenth century, the Habsburg state had no choice but to connect to that ancient tradition as it vied to remain relevant in German and European politics. In what follows I trace the struggles of top officials, especially chief minister prince Klemens Lothar von Metternich, to use or avoid using this powerful word when plotting the future of Austria. The word itself prompted, even seduced, statesmen into thinking in grand, often bombastic terms, and Metternich the conservative employed it with great care. Recalling and attempting to revive the past, after all, had revolutionary implications. But he too would eventually prove powerless to resist the word's mass appeal.

Yet what follows will not simply be a story of elites. Even if the Habsburgs did not officially designate their realm a Reich, their subjects colloquially used that word to describe it, especially from the 1870s, ironically just as the monarchy ceased being a unified state. But what did they mean? In the work of many outstanding students of Central Europe's past, empire, when applied to the Habsburg monarchy, connotes a positive force that kept peace among quarreling nationalities, promoting order and progress.Footnote ² Yet in other areas of the globe, the claim that an empire might accomplish something worthwhile would be unusual. The efforts of France or Great Britain to dispense civilization upon Algeria or India, for instance, have generated intense criticism. These and other empires exploited and often destroyed the peoples they ruled, and at the very least distorted other countries’ political and social development.Footnote ³

To connect the Habsburg lands to that broader story, I will also consider those who were on the receiving end of imperialism, subjects who felt that Austrian rule was rule by a foreigner set against their aspirations to self-government. I am thinking primarily of Czechs, Poles, and Hungarians—but there are many others—who resented the Habsburg monarchy's pretensions to spread a higher civilization to them. No doubt these groups respected imperial authority, but the word “empire” provoked an intuition we find among subjects of colonial rule elsewhere, that rule by a foreigner cannot be just. When they were free to speak, Austria's subjects discovered they had a story about themselves that differed from the story told by their masters, they had their own feast days, their own heroes; and their own times of mourning. Czechs or Hungarians recalled the glorious feats of empire as national tragedies.Footnote ⁴ Ironically but symptomatically, such critiques would reach full blossom after 1867, just as the monarchy softened censorship, and expanded civil rights.

The Habsburgs’ problems with empire—the specific problem of Reich—began much earlier. In May 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself emperor of the French, and proceeded to establish a Rhine Confederation—a large German state that would supply him soldiers and resources—looking aside as major collaborators in this new entity like Bavaria, Württemberg, or Hanover helped themselves to dozens of free cities and bishoprics. The old Reich was disappearing before everyone's eyes and Napoleon insisted that it be disbanded.

For Habsburg Emperor Francis II, this demand constituted a threat. The Habsburgs had been Roman emperors since the thirteenth century, and if the Holy Empire were disbanded, he would simply be king of Hungary and Bohemia, subordinate to Napoleon and the Tsar of Russia, maybe even their vassal. And so, in an act of dubious legality, Francis crowned himself emperor [Kaiser] of Austria in August of 1804.Footnote ⁵

On the background of global history, this was an odd way of founding an empire. The act was not aggressive and the aspiration not imperial as the British might understand that word; there was no ambition to grow and be boundless, usually an essential attribute of empire.Footnote ⁶ Rather, for Austria, becoming an empire was a step taken in fear to avoid falling a step lower on the European hierarchy of rulers.Footnote ⁷ The point was more to seem imperial than to be imperial and the word used was not Reich, but Kaisertum, thus it was an entity where the focus was the glory of a potentate holding an unmatched dignity.

More positively, as Gottfried Mraz and Robert Kann have noted, the challenge and motive in 1804 was consolidating the Austrian empire, thus state building. Once more we see an odd feature compared to other empires: here the Habsburgs endeavored to delimit and centralize rather than grow in a hierarchically structured, theoretically unlimited space.Footnote ⁸

In 1806, the old Reich was finally dissolved and now a vacuum of legitimacy opened in Central Europe, caught somewhere between the old regime and an emerging order of nation states. The new German national movement felt, as did many average Germans—as later reflected in Ficker's words—that an organizing entity was needed to unite and defend the lands of the old Empire, as well as the German nation, from a repetition of something like French occupation.

The Habsburg state could not ignore this new German nationalism. According to Brigitte Hamann, the monarchy's claim to leadership in Germany left it no choice but to appeal to the old empire's legacy, and therefore in succeeding decades, we see a movement away from diffidence and toward determination. Prince Metternich, Austrian Minister of state from 1809, presided over the shift, from his early days in office, when the Habsburg state hardly uttered the word Reich, to the 1840s, when it embraced the term, first in the more generic sense of “rule of realm” connoting the Austrian lands [mein Reich, later unser Reich] and then in the years before Metternich stepped down, as heir to the Holy Empire, implying leadership in and beyond Germany.

The beginnings of this evolution occurred beyond public view in the chambers of the Austrian bureaucracy. In 1812, a memo went out telling officials that it was now possible to use “our Kaiserreich” or “our Reich” to describe the Habsburg lands, but chiefly for appearance's sake: the alternative historical terms (Erbstaaten, erbländisch) seemed weak and non-imperial, not wrong but “more or less embarrassing (mehr oder minder compromittirend).”Footnote ⁹ And so a notation was added banning all discussion; the order was to be communicated “by way of quiet intimation” (mittelst einer stillen Intimation). Such was the entrance of the Austrian Reich into world history, barely audible even to top officials.Footnote ¹⁰

Not surprisingly the new usage had limited effect, and hardly appeared in published form until the 1840s. Perhaps the government feared the word Reich for how Germans might understand it. To use the word openly implied either a return to the situation before 1789, thus undoing the territorial adjustments that had taken place since then to places like Bavaria, Hanover, or indeed Austria; or it meant opening the map to aspirations of the young German nationalists, who dreamed of a reformed Reich, fitting the boundaries of the old empire, but perhaps going beyond them, and ruled by a principle abhorrent to Metternich: popular sovereignty. Yet when speaking French in these years Metternich said “notre empire” without a second thought.Footnote ¹¹ Reich had a different valence, however, and he preferred language left by the Corsican to refer to Germany, confédération, in German deutscher Bund, an expression that seemed harmless to the conservative because it had no history.

Still, in published materials, we note gradual acceptance of the words “Austrian Reich,” from a handful of cases in the 1820s, to a dozen in the 1830s, to a broader if still modest proliferation by the 1840s.Footnote ¹² The formula seemed useful and meaningful, and Metternich too adopted it after 1840 in order to rhetorically counterbalance fresh challenges to Austria's status in Europe. Prussian king Frederick William III had been replaced by the more vigorous Frederick William IV, thus reviving the Austro-Prussian dualism that had tested the old Empire; an assertive France was hinting at designs on territory in the German Rhineland; and national movements in Italy, Hungary, and Germany were growing rather than subsiding. The Austrian state's response could not be simple suppression: it had to project a positive image, something to inspire, to make the Habsburg state seem a relevant force within and beyond the space of the old Empire.Footnote ¹³

But if Metternich employed the word Reich, he did so in a resolutely conservative way. Austria was to become a cohesive, culturally German state whose radiant power would make it attractive and relevant in Germany, maintained as a Staatenbund of princes that would ward off all talk of a Bundesstaat of the people. In July 1847, Metternich told the Prussian ambassador “Austria is an empire [Reich] which includes under its rule peoples of differing nationality. But as a Reich it has only one nationality. Austria is German, German by virtue of its history, by virtue of the core of its provinces, by virtue of its civilization.”Footnote ¹⁴ That same month he dilated upon the challenges to German rule in Austria to the Habsburg representative in St. Petersburg: within “our Reich” there were four types of Slavism of which the Polish was the most dangerous. This “evil” had to be fought in various ways.Footnote ¹⁵

The primary one was to strengthen the monarchy's Germans. After the 1846 revolution in Galicia, Metternich had written in an internal memorandum: “Galicia needs promotion of the German element. By this promotion I do not mean what might easily be considered to be Germanization. A people [Volkstamm] can only be transformed into another people with the assistance of time—a very long time. The promotion of the German element should be pursued by maintaining it and its influence with all possible means, that is, civilization in the real meaning of the word. These means include promoting the acquisition of property by Germans, raising up the German middle class, helping spread the German language in schools, and other ways as well.”Footnote ¹⁶

Somewhat incongruously, Metternich added that in no Reich was nationality more honored than in the Austrian Kaiserreich; yet he did so precisely because the actual substance of nationality in his view was negligible. “Polonism,” he wrote, “is just a formula, a wording, behind which stands revolution in its most garish and extreme form. It is revolution itself, as we know from remarks made by the Polish emigration.”Footnote ¹⁷

Like our day's constructivists, Metternich thus believed that nationality and culture were easily malleable. In 1815, he had put forth a plan for dividing the monarchy into six zones, fostering a regional identity in each, while promoting the German element in all. Poles in Galicia, for example, would “forget they are Poles” and become Galicians, and their elites would be gradually germanized.Footnote ¹⁸ Metternich also wanted to promote Roman Catholics in Illyria, as supposedly more supportive of the Austrian state.Footnote ¹⁹ Such proposals amounted to soft denationalization; if the state supported museums and primary schools in Czech that was from the self-confidence of a higher culture, sure that German civilization would prevail.Footnote ²⁰ Metternich made aid available to Slavic scholars (funding the work of Ljudevit Gaj for instance), but that was in order to check Magyar pretensions. Yet supporting native cultures was an instrument to be used carefully; Metternich worried that Slavic “cultural” nationalism might act as a bacillus for transporting western liberalism into Central and Eastern Europe.Footnote ²¹

This mixing of pragmatism and opportunism terrified advocates of the Slavic peoples who knew that slow assimilation had led to the disappearance of Slavs in Lusatia, Silesia, and elsewhere. And Metternich's words only lightly shrouded a proto-racism; in his mind, Poles constituted a danger by their very being; Polonism had as its goal the “destruction of all common foundations which form the basis of society.”Footnote ²² We see a further peculiarity of Austrian imperialism beyond its conservatism; unlike supposed ideal types of empire, the Habsburg state was not satisfied with difference and produced energies that would seek homogeneity (though never as radically or forcefully as the other European land empires).Footnote ²³ For the time being, Austria of the 1840s presented soft imperialism, Habsburg half-measures. Was any property ever really transferred to Germans in Galicia?

Younger Austrian imperialists were bolder than Metternich, wanting their state to figure at the head of a united Germany but also much more. In one of most influential books to appear in these years, Austria and its Future (1847), the moderate-liberal Victor von Andrian-Werburg wrote that the Vienna settlement could not last forever and Austria had to absorb and make useful the forces of the age.Footnote ²⁴ A prime consideration was its connection to two large regions, Germany in the west and the Danube valley in the east; to the former Austria was bound by a two thousand years of brotherhood, and to the latter by “trade interests.”Footnote ²⁵ This project would transmute into a conservative “seventy million Reich,” and later, under German domination, Mitteleuropa.

Andrian-Werburg did not ask about the desires of the peoples involved, yet, unlike Metternich, this liberal believed Austria should lead Germany to unity against the monarchical principle, getting people used to the idea that their interests differ from those of the princes, “loosening the bonds of dependence and deference between people and its princes.” Yet in the imperial civilizing mission, liberal and conservative were united.

Just months after these lines were printed, revolution broke out across Europe and Metternich fled to England. Now the term Reich burst out of hibernation, not only useful but necessary for Germans imagining the future of Central Europe. For the history of a German Reich, the year 1848 would form a bridge between two understandings, reflecting the dualism in the German question itself, from the nominally unitary Reich before 1806, to two entities laying claim to this word after 1871, one officially (deutsches Kaiserreich) the other colloquially (Habsburgerreich). In 1848, a number of variants were suddenly on the table as the German question took on accelerated momentum to that linguistic dualism, and a splitting of the old imperial idea that would last until 1918.Footnote ²⁶

The most popular variant was the liberal German one which aimed to include Germans in a constitutional monarchy called deutsches Reich, connecting to plans that had emerged in the wars of liberation.Footnote ²⁷ Thinking of German unity in terms other than a Reich was not possible—the words republic and Reich seemed to imply one another—but the parliamentarians in Frankfurt were divided over whether Austria could belong, ultimately voting by a bare majority in favor. They did not, however, include Austria's non-German lands, and thus without saying so were opting to destroy the Habsburg monarchy. Austria's rulers understandably rejected this plan, and it became null and void in April of 1849 when the Prussian king refused the crown offered to him, while still harboring romantic notions of a Prussian-led resurrection of the Holy Empire.

On 9 March 1849, Minister President prince Felix von Schwarzenberg put forth to Frankfurt an Austrian counterproposal, calling for a Reich that would include the German Confederation as well as the Habsburg lands.Footnote ²⁸ Such a Reich represented a quantum advance in his country's willingness to embrace its mission as empire; much more than a Kaisertum, it involved claims to legitimacy in an enormous space, larger than any European state since the days of Charlemagne, save Russia. Schwarzenberg also hoped that Austria would absorb the German national idea before that idea destroyed it. But in contrast to the hopes of German democrats to create an empire based in popular rule, Schwarzenberg's plan called for a union of princes, among whom the Habsburgs would be the leader.Footnote ²⁹

Beyond Austria and Germany, 1848 was a springtime of many peoples, including those of the Habsburg monarchy. The Hungarians, with Habsburg consent, had passed a constitution in March 1848 that was recognized by the crown in April. Yet from the summer of 1848, the monarchy stepped away from its obligations, ultimately triggering war. Bohemia had been part of the Holy Roman Empire as well as the German Confederation so Frankfurt's constitution drafters assumed it would be part of their new Germany. Within Bohemia, Germans loyally voted for a German state, while Czechs staged a boycott, electing representatives to an Austrian Reichstag that met first in Vienna, then at Kremsier (more below on this body's crucial importance for the history of the Habsburg Reich).Footnote ³⁰

The best-known proponent of the Czech boycott was historian and statesman František Palacký. In April 1848, he politely rejected an invitation to participate in the Frankfurt assembly, saying he was a Bohemian of Slavic origin. But he worried that by taking Austria's Germans into a Greater Germany, the Frankfurt Parliament would destroy the Austrian state. As is well known, he therefore lauded Austria and its necessary place in Europe. What is less known is that his response suffers from a mistranslation. What we usually read is the following:

In fact, Palacký wrote Kaiserstaat and not empire. He did not allude to the tradition of Reich, which from the times of Otto I, had been a mostly German dominated entity.Footnote ³¹ More important, he did not share Schwarzenberg's idea of a Central European union of princes, a Staatenbund. His idea, rather, was a Völkerverein, a union of peoples, a democratic confederation:

Putting these words into the context of our time, we can appreciate a paradox. The politician who in line with today's sensibility believed that nationhood was just a word and that, in line with a pronouncement of Ernest Gellner, nationalists create nations and not the other way around, was the reactionary jailmaster and peace and order keeper Metternich. The prince wanted to suppress nationalism because he worried what free human beings might do if they used principles of consent to create representative institutions.Footnote ³³ And the politician who now seems antiquated and out of touch with our current wisdom was the liberal enemy of imperialism who thought nationhood was real and based in history and language.

Palacký was no “primordialist,” however; his vision featured a certain plasticity. Slavs for instance might form nations in various ways, as would Vlachs (Romanians). Palacký was also no chauvinist. His Austria had room for Germans and Turks as regional and not imperial peoples. The important thing was that nationhood was the state building principle. When people in Central Europe were permitted to imagine self-government in freedom, they would do so within the framework of nations. There could be a community of nations—in fact there had to be with the Russian Empire looming beyond Austria's borders. And because Palacký believed in rule by the people, of the people, and for the people, for him the choice was either national self-determination or monarchy made honest by a multinational constitutional structure.

In the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions, the Habsburg state reformed despite the neoabsolutism of the new Emperor Francis Joseph, and dramatic advances took place in the economy and in state building.Footnote ³⁴ We also see much more frequent employment of the word Reich, though the origins are difficult to discern. The historians Brigitte Mazohl and Karin Schneider have concluded that the word entered official and popular usage in a backhanded and unintentional way in early 1848, as Austrian citizens used Reichstag to denote the legislature meant to give definitive shape to the constitutional monarchy instituted by Ferdinand.Footnote ³⁵ Why they chose that precise word is not clear—the Frankfurt assembly was called Parlament—but Reichstag as a venerable term for a representative body appealed to people across the political spectrum. The sudden and unplanned emergence of this word for parliament led to a “renaissance” in the use of the word Reich in the Habsburg lands after a half-century's absence.Footnote ³⁶

In March 1849, Francis Joseph dissolved the Reichstag, but created an advisory body called Reichsrat, and Habsburg administrators, now habituated to the word Reich, used it unhesitatingly, producing a Reichsgesetzblatt and Reichsstaatsbürgerschaft, and much more. With its echoes of centralizing Josephinism—which Metternich had warned against—Francis's neoabsolutism also favored German as an efficient means of communication, and imperial bureaucrats decided which languages would count as Cultursprachen.Footnote ³⁷ The court itself Germanized, while those who had hoped for Czech, Hungarian, or Polish self-rule (in the manner envisioned by Palacký) experienced these years as a time of humiliation.Footnote ³⁸

Yet Austria's progress in state building took place in a competitive environment, and it soon fell behind its rivals in economic and therefore military terms. France and Prussia cut the monarchy down in two wars, first in 1859, forcing it out of much of Italy and onto the path of grudging constitutionalism, and then in 1866, expelling the Habsburgs from Germany, where they had been maintaining pretensions to leadership and keeping alive the flame of a seventy million strong state.

Now major claims on the term Reich shifted northward. After Prussia's victory against France in 1870, a Kaiser in Berlin presided over a Kaiserreich, with Otto von Bismarck the undisputed Reichskanzler. This occurred although millions of Germans, especially in Austria and Bohemia, understood that the Prussian-led state was a very incomplete successor to the old Reich; many felt left out and deeply aggrieved, later contributing to the formation of proto-fascist parties, strongest in Bohemia.Footnote ³⁹

Meanwhile, in 1867, the House of Habsburg ceased being a Kaisertum and divided into the dual monarchy, Austria-Hungary, a realm with two citizenships, where a basic expectation of statehood, undivided sovereignty, no longer applied. Simply to maintain order Francis Joseph had cut a deal with Hungary's political classes, which had been boycotting Habsburg institutions and refusing to pay taxes. Thus, the Hungarian elite came to control more than half the old Kaisertum and the Kingdom of Hungary became a virtual nation state within the Habsburg lands.

Francis Joseph held onto the title “Kaiser,” and in Vienna the Reichsrat became housed in massive neo-classical marble across from the Hofburg, while the Reichsgericht made do in a handsome if unspectacular Italianate structure in the Nibelungenstrasse just off the Ring. The monarchy's universities taught Reichsgeschichte, meaning Austrian history, and even the Reichsapfel remained among the symbols of legitimacy.Footnote ⁴⁰ In a typical muddle, confirming old Austria's gift for operating comfortably in zones of shade and nuance, people called the monarchy's two halves “Reichshälften.”Footnote ⁴¹ Two halves, no whole. Yet if one listened to street conversations, just when empire no longer existed in any terms on Austrian territory, one heard people calling the monarchy not simply Kaisertum but Reich.

The expression Habsburgerreich was not unknown before 1867 but the proliferation of this word after about 1870 is startling, and by the 1890s, it was everywhere, referring not just to the past but also to the present. In part what was going on was a filtering down from the Habsburg administration which, as we saw, embraced Reich early in the rule of Francis Joseph; from the early 1850s, the usage was absorbed into schoolbooks and geographies. But as Pieter Judson has noted in his pathbreaking study, people called the monarchy not just Reich or Habsburgerreich, but our Reich. Judson argues that Habsburg subjects were not just bystanders but actively co-created the empire, and calls them “Austro-Hungarians” to emphasize their identity as imperial citizens, irrespective of ethnicity or religion.Footnote ⁴²

However, if one takes the non-imperial view, one finds that many Austrian and Hungarian citizens, especially of Slavic nationalities, did not consider themselves Austrians let alone Hungarians. Did they also say, “our Reich”? Of special interest are the Czechs, whose political class was famously enraged by not getting a deal like that accorded the Hungarians, and therefore they periodically boycotted politics in Vienna.Footnote ⁴³ Yet when we probe digitized sources from the late century, the story turns out to be very similar. Czechs hardly used “our Reich” [naší říší ] before about 1870, but after that we witness a proliferation just like in the German lands. But what did the Czech speakers mean?

In 1887, Palacký's son-in-law, the Old Czech František Ladislav Rieger, along with the Bohemian noble prince Karl Schwarzenberg, put forward a resolution to the Bohemian Parliament for creating an institution that would show lasting reverence for Francis Joseph, who would soon be celebrating forty years of rule. The proposal passed unanimously. However, throughout his extensive remarks, Rieger called the monarch not just our Kaiser but also our king, meaning the king of Bohemia. Rieger was thus leveraging empire language for sake of the nation. Of course, he claimed, no nation was as loyal to the monarch as the Czech nation.

He was doing more than simply engaging with empire. Rieger claimed that the Czechs’ forefathers, supposed proprietors of the Czech lands from time immemorial, had of their own free will, given the “impetus to create the Austrian empire in good conscience and reason, and in this empire they find support and backing of the other united nations.”Footnote ⁴⁴ That was why they were “eternally loyal to the dynasty. (Excellent! Applause).” Rieger said the Czechs loved the flowering of civilization brought by “our empire”; and he also found time to sympathize with the emperor and his difficult position, admiring how despite the realm's complexity Francis managed to keep peace and promote progress among “all the Austrian peoples. (Much applause and salutations).”Footnote ⁴⁵

Pieter Judson has called the Habsburg monarchy a “liberal empire,” but we can wonder whether that term applies here.Footnote ⁴⁶ Rieger's behavior, and that of the other Czech delegates who fawned on the monarch, was not liberal. Their tone was obsequious and opportunistic, reflecting the attitude not of citizens but of subjects, to whom rights had been accorded by the grace of a divine right sovereign.Footnote ⁴⁷ In 1848, Rieger had wanted rule of the people and by the people, yet like other Central European liberals his liberalism atrophied as he pursued nationalism. By 1887, Rieger had become hyperloyal because of all the gifts he claimed the Habsburgs had showered upon the Czechs: progress and civilization. Where were we before 1849, he asks. What were we? Mostly poor peasants.

Again, he subordinated the rhetoric of empire to the interests of nationalism. Here, we have another paradox. As liberal democracy emerged in the early nineteenth century, it generated nationalism, that is, a political world where demands were raised for basic respect for nationalities and their cultures, and an end to the assumption of the natural superiority of German or Hungarian culture. Yet nationalism tethered to ultimate rule of a monarch—this was also true in Germany—could also corrupt liberalism. If one wants a whiff of liberal spirit in this time one can turn to John Stuart Mill who praised English peoples’ love of liberty and law and said: “In all questions between a government and an individual the presumption in every Englishman's mind is that the government is in the wrong.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The presumption in Rieger's mind seemed to be just the opposite.

Yet Rieger's loyalty did not achieve the desired results: at his death in 1903 political equality for Czechs in Bohemia was still far out of reach. This was the view not of right-wing nationalists, but of Czech Social Democrats, believers in class struggle, as internationalist as one got among Czechs or any Central European people. Like Rieger, Czech socialists cared deeply about the substance of nationalism, namely culture and language.

In contrast to the Czech mainstream, they only tersely eulogized Rieger, for despite consorting with non-democratic forces of the monarchy's upper classes, he had failed to achieve equality for Czechs.Footnote ⁴⁹ One socialist author wrote that for the German political class, right to left, any shack was still good enough for a Slavic school.Footnote ⁵⁰ Like Rieger Czech socialists did speak of “our empire,” but they meant something different: the empire was not eternal; in fact, it had entered its “death throes” because of the undemocratic manner in the way it was constituted.

The most vivid evidence of its inexorable dissolution was the failure of Austrian and Hungarian negotiators to agree on the dual monarchy's tariffs during their decennial meetings, threatening the two imperial halves with dissolution into two medium-sized powers. Yet the socialists asked if that would be so bad. The point of an agreement on finances after all was to permit Austria-Hungary to maintain its pretensions to being an empire, at the cost of its peoples. This was, as we have seen, a syndrome going back a century from the demise of the old Reich. The monarchy's governing concern was to seem an empire with all the grandeur of Rome or of the Hohenstaufens.Footnote ⁵¹ In 1903, that meant funding as many warships as the imperial neighbors, the Hohenzollerns, while education, justice, public wages, and workers’ insurance took a back seat. And so it let the empire dissolve into two states.Footnote ⁵²

For the socialists, the empire's political system was absolutist and not liberal. Ultimately, the Reichsrat—which never shook its function of being a consultative body—had no decisive say in foreign policy, meaning that top officials operated in the unchecked realm of their obsessions and fears, ironically about and of nationalism. Yet the fact that these socialists could produce incisive critiques indeed attests to a certain liberality in Habsburg practice. Perhaps due to their faith in history, the Czech left did not despair: Austria's future lay in democracy. Socialists assumed that when Austria became a democracy it would evolve into the kind of order Palacký had imagined:

Federal state, not empire. Implicitly socialists raise the question whether any state called an empire could be ruled by the consent of the governed.Footnote ⁵⁴ What they understood was that states that constrained liberties of self-expression, whether through Czech or any other language, could not be liberal in the sense of a liberal democracy. The notion that the empire really was their empire was an illusion.