Social Conflict, National Strife, or Political Battle? Violence and Strikebreaking in Late Habsburg Austria

Abstract

This article analyses the practices of violence during strikes in Habsburg Austria from the 1890s until the outbreak of the First World War. As the number of social conflicts rose at the turn of the century, strikes increasingly became one of the main sites of public violence in Austrian society, alongside demonstrations. Violent confrontations between strikers, strike-breakers, and the state forces protecting them frequently occurred. The first section discusses the state repression used to quell internal unrest and its consequences on the rule of law. The following sections explore the micro-dynamics of strikebreaking within the larger context of the reaction against Social Democracy in the period. Especially after the successful mobilization for suffrage reform in 1905–906, employers and other propertied classes saw strikers as part of a general threat. The Czech and German nationalist workers’ movements can also be reassessed through the lens of these social conflicts, rather than only as manifestations of radical nationalism. Strikes are here analysed as one case study addressing current debates in the historiography on the Habsburg Empire: first on the implementation of the rule of law on the ground in Habsburg Austria, then on the impact of democratization in the decades before 1914.

The Battle for Post-Habsburg Trieste/Trst: State Transition, Social Unrest, and Political Radicalism (1918–23)

“…In the prewar context of the rule of law, illiberal practices by the Habsburg authorities were designed to quell a growing number of demonstrations and strikes that went hand in hand with the growing political mobilization of the masses. 64 Yet the Great War created unprecedented crises, which weakened the rule of law and the predictability and solidity of the Habsburg state. These crises were not the product of any long-term imperial decline but rather of the wartime state of emergency, which dramatically altered the character of the Habsburg Empire and the basis for its legitimacy.…”