In the early twentieth century, three provinces of the Austrian half of the Habsburg Empire enacted national compromises in their legislation that had elements of non-territorial autonomy provisions. Czech and German politicians in Moravia reached an agreement in 1905. In the heavily mixed Bukovina, Romanian, Ukrainian, German, Jewish and Polish representatives agreed on a new provincial constitution in 1909. Last but not least, Polish and Ukrainian nationalists compromised in spring 1914, just a few months before the outbreak of the First World War vitiated the new provisions. Even though the provisions of these agreements varied substantially, new electoral laws introducing national registers were at their heart. These were designed to ensure a fairer representation of national groups in the provincial assemblies and to keep national agitation out of electoral campaigns. The earliest compromise in Moravia went furthest in consociational power sharing. However, the national bodies within the provincial assembly had no right to tax their respective national communities, and the provisions of the provincial constitutions kept the non-nationally defined nobility as an important counterbalance. The compromises in Bukovina and Galicia, even if they categorised all inhabitants nationally, contented themselves with even less autonomous agency for the national bodies in the provincial assemblies and rather emphasised the symbolic elements of national autonomy. The non-territorial approach in all three crownlands, however, was an instrument to reorganise multi-ethnic provinces that increasingly became the model for national compromises in other Austrian provinces.

This chapter investigates the history of the idea of non-territorial autonomy as a form of corporate collective minority rights. The concept originated in the Habsburg Empire, where it was both implemented in several Austrian provinces, at least partly, as well as discussed theoretically by Austro-Marxist thinkers. While Zionist Jewish protagonists unsuccessfully suggested this form of minority protection at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, it continued to be discussed and applied in several Eastern European countries, in particular in the Baltic states, often with reference to its Habsburg origins. The European Nationalities Congress, a transnational advocacy group of European minorities during the interwar period, also strongly supported the idea of non-territorial autonomy. The chapter argues that despite the Congress’s final inability to convince the League of Nations of this model of corporative minority rights, non-territorial autonomy was lively discussed in the international arena of European minority protection with the protagonists pointing to the legacy of the demised Habsburg Empire.

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This article provides an overview of the political representation and integration of Galician Jews on the municipal, provincial, and central state level under Austrian rule. It demonstrates that political representation on the latter two levels started only after the revolution of 1848 and was rather modest considering the numeric and economic weight Jews enjoyed in Galicia. Even though representation in municipal councils started earlier, the position of Jews depended very much on local circumstances. After the turn of the century, the widening of the electorate to the lower classes led to a broader Jewish representation and participation not only in terms of numbers but also within the political spectrum. This is particularly true for the paper’s second part. In this section, the text explores the reform of the electoral system for Galicia’s provincial parliament and the attitude of Jewish politicians towards the compromise eventually found in 1914. The article argues that among Jews the positive or negative assessment of the new voting system depended largely on their position in the larger antagonism between Jewish nationalists and assimilationists. The former complained that the entire reform was on the backs of the Jews ignoring their numeric strength and their national rights. Assimilationists, on the other hand, were satisfied that, against all counterclaims of Zionists and Anti-Semites, the compromise legally established that Jews were Poles.

By bringing together the most important refugee crises that struck first the Habsburg Empire and later the Republic of Austria during the last three hundred years, this paper analyzes the longue durée experiences this country has had in dealing with such situations. It explores the driving factors behind societal and governmental responses and conceives four topics that are recurrent, if in different forms: 1) the socioeconomic disruption and the ethical imperative to provide relief; 2) the legal authorities and their power to determine a legal settlement and the ultimate right to belong; 3) their quest to maintain sovereignty and control; and 4) the question of the legitimacy of refugees as perceived by authorities but also by a (fickle) public opinion.