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

Online ISBN:
9780804795937
Print ISBN:
9780804795579
Publisher:
Stanford University Press
Book

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

Published online:
19 May 2016
Published in print:
23 September 2015
Online ISBN:
9780804795937
Print ISBN:
9780804795579
Publisher:
Stanford University Press

Abstract

This book tells the story of the origins and shared history of representative and democratic institutions in central Europe—a history that has been largely erased by the nation-state-centered histories which have dominated European historiography after 1918. This is a political history of constitution making and state building in one of the most complex polities that modern European history has known, the Habsburg monarchy. The book specifically aims at looking at how the Habsburg state was built, how its political institutions developed, and how the imperial bureaucracy—normally regarded as an absolutist organization—participated and even led this process. The imperial administration fostered and developed first representative institutions and then democratic ones over the course of the nineteenth century. By engaging in state building through the channeling of public participation in governance, the Habsburg state administration not only built the foundations of democratic practice and liberal citizenship in much of central Europe, but it—in the process—attempted to retool itself to accommodate popular participation in policy making. The book is clearly a revisionist work. It argues for seeing the ways in which the Habsburg state actively developed a vibrant political culture through political practice and representative institutions.

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