Bulletin n. 2/2009 | ||
October 2009 | ||
Hirschhausen von Ulrike |
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From imperial inclusion to national exclusion: citizenship in the Habsburg monarchy and in Austria 1867-1923 | ||
in European Review of History - Revue Européene d'Histoire , Volume 16, Issue 4, August , 2009 , 551-573 | ||
This paper examines the development of citizenship in Austria-Hungary between 1867 and the 1920s. At the beginning, the paper analyses the reform of citizenship laws in both Austria and Hungary after the Settlement of 1867. Whilst the Austrian citizenship law maintained legal traditions stretching back into the first half of the nineteenth century, the new Hungarian citizenship law of 1878 emulated the laws in effect in Wilhelmine Germany. The basis of Hungarian citizenship law was, however, much broader than German law, in order to allow for the effective integration of the non-Magyar population. An evaluation of applications for Austrian naturalisation illustrates the remarkable capacity of Austrian citizenship law to integrate and to uphold a concept of nationality independent from ethnicity, religious denomination, class or gender. Only during, and above all after, the First World War did the inclusive practice of the Cisleithanian bureaucracy give way to the more exclusive policy of the new German-Austrian Republic, as civil servants now introduced the vague notion of 'race' as a criterion for naturalisation. In contrast to Tsarist Russia and the Second German Empire, both of which introduced similar agendas for nationalisation in the latter part of the nineteenth century linking citizenship to ethnic and religious identity, the Habsburg Monarchy remained basically untouched by such tendencies and with the constitutionally guaranteed principle of 'national equality' upheld its early modern tradition of ethnic and religious tolerance well into the later Imperial period. | ||