Class 12. Habsburg Curiosity (4)
The Poles have a nobility. They have some wealth.
Some of the Poles have gotten into the Austrian bureaucracy.
And so what do they do in 1848 in Galicia?
They encourage the Ukrainians, right?
They encourage the Ukrainians.
They encourage the establishment
of something called Ukrainian National Council,
which then makes Ukrainian political demands.
So rather than directly suppressing
or intimidating the Poles, they say,
"Oh, look what we can do over here.
Oh, there's some Ukrainians who also live there.
I bet they would like some things."
And so the Ukrainians issue political demands
like dividing Austria in half, which is gonna be,
I mean, not Austria, Galicia in half
into a western, eastern part,
which will be a Ukrainian idea all the way through,
all the way through 1918.
And so this is, I mean, this is going to be,
this kind of idea of compromise
is gonna be crucial all the way to the end,
and I just wanna set it up for you structurally.
The Ukrainians were not exactly
a national minority in Austria.
A national minority would be more like in interwar Poland,
which we're gonna talk about soon enough,
where it really is a nation state
for the Poles and the Ukrainians.
Five million, six million Ukrainian speakers are a minority.
But in the Habsburg monarchy, it's more like
the Ukrainians are one group of people in Galicia
and where they're contesting things with the Poles.
And when they contest things,
they have somewhere to go besides violence
or besides direct confrontation, which is Vienna.
They can go to Vienna.
The Habsburgs are at the top,
and the Habsburgs are always gonna be capable
down to the end of saying, "Okay, as a matter of fact,
let's make another compromise.
Let's redo this. Let's redo that.
Let's redo this. Let's redo that,"
which isn't the most exciting form of politics, I admit,
again, cross reference to European Union,
but it might be a form of politics, of national politics,
which is more durable than people thought
in the 19th century or the 20th century.
So this form of politics
comes alive after 1867.
So the other part of the famous saying of Corvinus,
"Let others fight wars.
Thou, happy Austria, marry,"
the slightly unkind part would be the suggestion that maybe
that the Austrians are going to lose a lot of wars,
which is also true, right?
They didn't exactly cover themselves with glory
in the wars of the 19th and the early 20th century.
They got embarrassed in 1859,
and which began the process of Italian unification.
They really got embarrassed in 1866 with the Germans,
which is the beginning of the story of German unification.
After they lost a war to Germany,
the Habsburgs had to make a compromise
from position of weakness
with the most important nationality within their borders,
which is the Hungarians.
And this is the famous Ausgleich of 1867.
That's one of these words, like later on Anschluss.
They're five German words you have to know,
and two of them are Ausgleich and Anschluss.
I don't have time for the jokes about the other three.
We're running out of time.
Hopefully it's some other lecture, but, anyway,
ausgleich just means compromise, just means compromise,
but in this context, it means the Compromise of 1867
in which the Hungarian nobility
was basically given the right to become a state
within a state of the Habsburg monarchy
and to do as they please with the Slovaks,
the Slovaks, the Croats, the Romanians.
The remainder of Austria,
which is in a funny kind of sea shape around Hungary,
from Galicia through Moravia, Bohemia, Austria itself,
down the Adriatic Coast, what's now Slovenia,
what's now Croatia, that Austria was governed after 1867
by a kind of constitutional law
which promised things like freedom of speech,
which promised equal rights for individuals
and equal rights for nations.
Never quite defined what a nation was,
but equal rights for individuals, equal rights for nations.
It's in this particular version of Austria,
not the Hungarian part, the non-Hungarian part,
that the story of Ukrainian nationality plays out.
And by now you will have noticed the timing, right?
The timing, the timing, the timing.
After 1867, many things are possible.
After 1867, freedom of speech, individual freedom.
After 1867, Austria is gonna move
until by 1907, there's gonna be full manhood suffrage,
which is pretty advanced for the standards of the time.
The United States didn't have it, for example.
And that means that along with full manhood suffrage,
the right of all males to vote, comes political parties,
and with political parties come political campaigns
and political demands, and with political campaigns
and political demands come newspapers, right?
Because there's freedom of speech.
And that includes, among many, many other things,
Ukrainian newspapers, Ukrainian political parties,
Ukrainian political demands,
which even if they're not fulfilled,
they're out there and they're aired.
And again, the timing, this is from 1867 to 1914.
The timing is the same moment when Ukrainian culture
and any kind of politics becomes impossible
in the Russian Empire.
That's so important to everything
because after 1867,
the leading thinkers and activists from the Russian Empire,
when they are banned after 1863 and again in 1876,
when they're banned by the Valuev Circular
and the Ems Decree from using Ukrainian language,
where do they go?
They go to Galicia.
They go to the Habsburg monarchy, right?
And the timing is that the timing is so important here.
Absolutely crucial.
The Habsburg monarchy is becoming a place
where you can do Ukrainian politics
at exactly the moment the Russian Empire is becoming a place
where you can't do Ukrainian politics
or, for that matter, Ukrainian culture.
And because the center of Ukrainian intellectual, political,
and cultural life was actually the Russian Empire,
this means that all these people are coming into Galicia
who can do things like occupied share
in East European history, right?
There's a fellow called Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi,
the most important historian of Ukraine,
who basically applies the methods
of what we would call social history
and writes a continuous history
of Ukraine from the Middle Ages.
Hrushevs'kyi leaves the Russian Empire, comes to Galicia,
and, lo and behold, he has a chair in Lviv.
He has a chair,
and he's able to teach this version of history,
which that's actually incredibly significant, right?
The difference between nobody and one,
and nobody having to share in Ukrainian history
and the most important Ukrainian chair having to share
in Ukrainian history and lecturing
and publishing his books, very, very important.
But that's just pars pro toto.
That's just one example of many other things.
Very important thinkers,
like Panteleimon Kulish, like Drahomanov,
they all come from the East and they go to the West,
and they bring radical political ideas.
They bring the idea, for example, a fundamental idea,
which I'll just mention and then we'll move on,
that politics belongs to the people as such.
So in the Russian Empire,
the serfs were freed in 1861,
which raises the basic question of, okay,
if they're free of bondage, who now owns them?
Whom do they belong?
Are they gonna be loyal to the czar?
Are they gonna be loyal to something else?
And the main radical political reaction,
the end of serfdom, was something called,
in the Russian Empire was called populism
or going to the people.
The Ukrainian populists were the ones who went to the people
and found out they were Ukrainian, essentially,
which coincides in time with the emergence
of a new discipline of science which we call anthropology,
but at the time was called ethnography,
which we think of as the method of anthropology.
At the time, they said ethnography for the science.
Going to the people, recording their songs,
recording their stories, recording their history,
recording everything you can, taking the people seriously
as an object of science coincides
with taking the people seriously as an object of politics.
And it leads to the notion that in addition to history
and politics and power mattering for a nation,
also the people and its culture and its durability matter.
So if there are songs, if there's a culture,
if there's a language, then that means there's a nation.
This is the ethnographic idea of a nation,
a very powerful idea, and that ethnographic idea of a nation
is obviously very useful in Galicia,
not against the Russians, Russians don't matter in Galicia,
but against the Poles because in Galicia,
I mean, this is so important, it's not that the Ukrainians
are a national minority struggling against the center.
No, no, no, no.
The Ukrainians are struggling against the Poles
and the Polish gentry.
After 1867, the Poles as a historical nation,
as people said back then, as a gentry nation,
they are also the beneficiaries of a compromise.
They get control over schools, very important.
They get a local parliament.
They get some control over local administration.
And what does that give for the Ukrainians?
It gives the Ukrainians something to struggle for, right?
And in some of that, they're gonna claw back
and get control of, especially at the level of schooling.
They're gonna claw back and try to get control of that.
In the free politics, it was possible,
the Habsburg monarchy.
But what are the intellectual
or ideological weapons they're gonna use?
The Polish argument is that we're a nation
because we always were.
It's not that the Polish speaking peasants are the nation.
They didn't think that, right?
The nation are the gentry.
The nation are the people who used to be able to vote
in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,
the gentry, the historical nobility.
That's the nation, the historical nation, as people said.
But the Ukrainians now have a different kind
of argument to make.
Their argument can be, well,
maybe we don't have the gentry.
Maybe we weren't the political class a hundred years ago
in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,
but at least in certain parts of the territories,
we have the people, we have the majority,
we have the culture, and that is the nation.
And that's a very powerful argument, right?
That's a very powerful...
That version of the nation, by the way,
is broadly victorious.
I mean, people can disagree about this and that,
but you wouldn't generally say like,
there are very few countries now where you can say,
"I belong to the nation because I belong to nobility."
In general, if I say nation now,
you're not gonna think of some elite.
You're gonna tend to think of everybody
or at least some large group, right?
So Ukrainians, with the help of the,
Ukrainians and Galicia with the help
of the Ukrainians coming for the Russian Empire
can make this argument.
They can say, "We're the majority."
And this argument also has,
it also has political ramifications.
It means if you mobilize enough people to vote,
you can send your representatives to parliament, as they do.
You can have debates in parliament
You can make your camp.
They never win this argument, but they make it to the end,
but we should divide Galicia into East and West,
and have our own Eastern Galicia.
And so with the help of these people, with the help of,
with the help of these arguments,
but above all with the help
of the very specific Habsburg political system,
the period between 1867 and 1914 becomes the period
when Ukrainian politics explodes.
Ukrainian politics becomes mass politics.
There are suddenly Ukrainian nationalists
and Ukrainian socialists and Ukrainian liberals,
and Ukrainian every possible thing,
and Ukrainian newspapers, Ukrainian civil life.
Civic life, in other words.
That in turn is going to be incredibly important
when we get to the moment
when the empires begin to break up,
which is the First World War,
which is where we're gonna start again next time.
So thank you very much.
(bright tones resonating)
