Читать книгу Civl society - Группа авторов - Страница 24

Initially, the “German” bourgeoisie only dominated in Austria in the form of the bureaucracy.¹¹ However, simultaneously with the retraction of “civil” liberties, the entrepreneurial upper classes were granted considerable freedoms. The state’s difficult financial situation increased the possibilities of the financial bourgeoisie to have an influence, seeing that the state needed a tremendous amount of money to develop the new court and administration system with its countless new civil servants. At the same time, the expenses for the army and (new!) gendarmery remained high.¹² And they increased even further when Austria occupied the Romanian princedoms during the Crimean War and stationed an army in Galicia. These politics led to a state of permanent hostility with Russia, without being able to win the liberal Western powers (England and France) as allies. Finally, after the defeat near Solferino in 1859, the Emperor was informed that there could only be new loans for the highly-indebted state with parliamentary representation – at least for a control of the state’s finances. In this way, the unwilling Emperor was forced to establish representative bodies from the individual parliaments and imperial Reichsrat that were principally intended to act as the taxpayers’ controllers of the state’s non-transparent expenditure policies.

The voting rights for the communities and individual parliaments, which were legislated within the framework of the “February patent” in 1861, from which the representatives in the Reichsrat were to be elected were quite clearly tailored to satisfy the interests of the bourgeoisie. Seeing that it was, in principle, a matter of controlling finances, the right to vote was linked to the tax payments: each person who paid a direct tax (property, trade, building, or income tax) in the communities was entitled to vote. However, only the top two-thirds of community voters, and those in the cities who paid taxes amounting to more than 10 guilders annually, were entitled to vote for the parliaments. Those in possession of an education patent – teachers, professors, priests, doctors, engineers, and attorneys, as well as captains in coastal regions – were also eligible. The aim was to ensure that community councils, parliaments and the “Reichsrat” were dominated by “property and education”.

It was not until 1867 – after the defeat at Königgrätz – that these representative bodies were given more responsibilities and all citizens were given the five fundamental constitutional rights (“December Constitution”) that had long been demanded by the liberal bourgeoisie: independence of the judiciary, the separation of justice and the administration, and a clear definition of the positions of the parliament and (imperial) government. This resulted in the introduction of the first government to be made up almost entirely of men from the bourgeoisie – the “citizens ministry”. To provide a balance to so much bourgeois culture, its head, the Minister-President, was “Carlos” Prinz Auersperg, the “first cavalier of the empire”. The bourgeois ministers actually did particularly good work. Here, I should mention the passing of the Elementary School Law that was presented to the Reichsrat by the Minister of Education Hasner Ritter von Arta (1818–1891). In the years before 1875, the representatives of the bourgeoisie, German, centralistic liberalism developed considerable problem-solving competence in areas that, in the future, would make “civil-society” commitment easier. These included the Cooperatives Law (1873), which complemented the freedom of association in the area of economic activity that had been attained in 1867. The liberals also simplified the self-organisation of workers through the coalition freedom. However, after several confessional laws, its creative powers became paralysed around 1875. The liberals became the defenders of the already-achieved legal and material possibilities, but they lost their role in the forefront of bourgeois society. They truly became conservative.