Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War

Stanford Studies on Central and Eastern Europe

by John Deak

The Habsburg Monarchy ruled over approximately one-third of Europe for almost 150 years. Previous books on the Habsburg Empire emphasize its slow decline in the face of the growth of neighboring nation-states. John Deak, instead, argues that the state was not in eternal decline, but actively sought not only to adapt, but also to modernize and build.

Deak has spent years mastering the structure and practices of the Austrian public administration and has immersed himself in the minutiae of its codes, reforms, political maneuverings, and culture. He demonstrates how an early modern empire made up of disparate lands connected solely by the feudal ties of a ruling family was transformed into a relatively unitary, modern, semi-centralized bureaucratic continental empire. This process was only derailed by the state of emergency that accompanied the First World War. Consequently, Deak provides the reader with a new appreciation for the evolving architecture of one of Europe's Great Powers in the long nineteenth century.

Genres: History

373 pages, Hardcover

First published September 21, 2015

Reviews

[Evan Þ. · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book keeps looping around the threshold of being interesting to me. From one angle, it's the history of nationbuilding in Austria, focusing on the long nineteenth century (between Napoleon and WWI). What was Austria to be? Torn between so many conflicting visions of what it was to be, what should the state actually do?

But from another angle, it's the history of the Austrian imperial bureaucracy that - an eye in the storm of those conflicting visions - kept trying to bind the nation together on their own hybrid of modernist centralism and medieval pomp. This gets most of the book's page count. Unfortunately, this doesn't hold my interest in itself - though it keeps intersecting with interesting things, such as the first angle of the book.

[Marsha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent inquiry into the Habsburg Empire and the dynamics of bureaucracy in a multinational state. Deak looks closely at the vast array of governmental systems operating under the Habsurgs, and efforts to consolidate them. The tug of war between dynastic rule and inner management becomes clear as Deak dealves into the inner workings of inner-empire diplomacy.