Authors

Discussion

The last decades before the First World War saw a wave of social unrest and mobilization for the democratization of the political process in Central and Eastern Europe. The Habsburg monarchy was traditionally a Rechtsstaat (a state ruled by the rule of law) but its police and gendarmerie forces were often overstretched and, like other European states, it struggled to cope with the increased occurrence of street protests and strikes in the period of transition to mass politics. This paper will analyse reactions to growing political participation in the crucial period of democratization. It will examine different forms of state repression or mediation used to quell internal unrest, especially focusing on the interactions between municipal police, state police, gendarmerie, and army. The increasing demands from common citizens for respect of the principles of the rule of law in the last decades of the Habsburg Empire were met with active pressures from employers or local elites on state authorities to preserve social hierarchies. The paper will focus on the functioning of rule of law principles on the ground and analyse the discourses highlighting the conflicting demands between protection of constitutional rights and protection of public order, which created tensions between state authorities and different categories of citizens. Through the topic of social conflict, this paper will discuss the changing relations between state and society, as well as the unease provoked by the democratization process, as franchise expanded in Austria-Hungary. Beyond formal opposition to suffrage reforms, this research calls for a recognition of other instances of resistance to broader political participation, such as violence and intimidation during elections, counter-demonstrations, and strategies against strikers. Tensions around the maintenance of public order emerge as revealing of deeper tensions over the conception of social order in a changing society.