AUSTRIA, FLAG OF

horizontally striped red-white-red national flag. When it is flown by the government, it incorporates a central black eagle. Its width-to-length ratio is 2 to 3. The coat of arms of Austria, a red shield with a white horizontal central stripe, is attributed to Duke Leopold V in the late 12th century. Legend has it that King Henry VI granted him that shield because the duke's tunic was drenched in blood, except for the white area beneath his belt, after the Battle of Ptolemais in 1191 in the Holy Land. Modern historians discredit this story, and the earliest known example of the arms dates from the seal of Duke Frederick II in 1230. Even when Austrian rulers held sway over the heartland of a great European empire, the duchy of Austria used that coat of arms and a flag of corresponding design. With the end of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 and of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, Austria lost its imperial banners and was reduced to its present borders. The new republic adopted the simple red-white-red flag, which reappeared in 1945 after seven years of Austrian amalgamation with Nazi Germany. The black imperial eagle, sometimes with one head and sometimes with two, has appeared on Austrian flags for hundreds of years and even today recalls the legacy of the nation. A broken chain was added to the legs of the eagle in 1945, as a symbol of freedom. The sickle clasped in its right talon symbolizes peasants, while the hammer is for workers and the crown on its head stands for the middle class. Like many older symbols, the Austrian shield (on the eagle's chest) has no established symbolic attributions, although it is sometimes said that the white stands for the shining waters of the Danube River. Whitney Smith History The Second Republic The Allied occupation On April 27, 1945, Karl Renner set up a provisional government composed of Social Democrats, Christian Socialists, and Communists and proclaimed the reestablishment of Austria as a democratic republic. The Western powers, afraid that the Renner government might be an instrument of communist expansion, withheld full recognition until the autumn of 1945. Because of similar suspicions, agreement on the division of Austrian zones of occupation was delayed until July 1945. Shortly before the Potsdam Conference (which stipulated that Austria would not have to pay reparations but assigned the German foreign assets of eastern Austria to the U.S.S.R.), control machinery was set up for the administration of Austria, giving supreme political and administrative powers to the military commanders of the four occupying armies. In September 1945 a conference of representatives of all states extended the authority of the Renner government to all parts of Austria. A general election held in November 1945, in which former Nazis were excluded from voting, returned 85 members of the Austrian People's Party (corresponding to the Christian Socialists of the prewar period), 76 Socialists (corresponding to the Social Democrats and Revolutionary Socialists), and four Communists. Renner was elected president of the republic; Leopold Figl, leader of the Austrian People's Party, became chancellor of a coalition Cabinet. The government decided not to draft a new constitution but to return to the constitution of 1920, as amended by the laws of 1929. In June 1946 the control agreement of July 1945 regulating the machinery of Allied political supervision was modified by restricting Allied interference essentially to constitutional matters. Denazification laws passed in 1946 and 1947 eliminated Nazi influence from the public life of Austria. In the postwar years, the Austrian People's Party and the Socialists were the sole partners in a coalition government that was formed in proportion to the parties' strength in parliament. This principle of proportional representation, originally introduced in 1919, was to be an important factor in Austrian political life after 1945. From 1945 to 1952, Austria had to struggle for survival. After liberation from Nazi rule, the country faced complete economic chaos. Aid provided by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and, from 1948, support given by the United States under the Marshall Plan made survival possible. Heavy industry and banking were nationalized in 1946, and, by a series of wage-price agreements, the government tried to control inflation. Interference by military commanders in political and economic affairs in the Soviet zone of occupation caused a considerable migration of capital and industry from Vienna and Lower Austria to the formerly purely agricultural western states. This brought about a far-reaching transformation of the economic and social structure. U.S., British, French, and Soviet forces occupied Austria until 1955. A treaty restoring Austrian sovereignty was expected early, but the atmosphere of the Cold War made agreement among the former Allied powers impossible. In 1953, however, a heavy burden was removed from the Austrian economy when the Soviet government declared that it would pay its own occupation costs (as the United States had done since 1947). Thereupon, the British and the French followed suit. In 1949, former Nazis were allowed to participate in the general election. The Union of Independents (later renamed the Freedom Party), corresponding to the former German Nationalist group but free from ideological ties, won 16 seats in parliament. In subsequent elections (1953, 1956, 1959, 1962), the relationship of the three parties remained stable. When Renner died (Dec. 31, 1950), Theodor Krner, the Socialist mayor of Vienna, was elected president by direct popular vote. He was succeeded in 1957 by the leader of the Socialist Party, Adolf Schrf, followed in 1965 by Franz Jonas, former mayor of Vienna, and in 1974 by Rudolf Kirchschlger, former minister of foreign affairs. The influence of the Socialists in the coalition government, which had been relatively strong under Leopold Figl's chancellorship, was reduced when the Austrian People's Party replaced Figl with Julius Raab in the spring of 1953 and had Reinhard Kamitz appointed minister of finance. The subsequent economic reconstruction and the advance to a prosperity unknown to Austrians since the years before World War I is generally identified with the so-called Raab-Kamitz course, based on a modified free-market economy. The nationalized steel industry, electric power plants, and oil fields, together with the privately owned lumber and textile industries and the tourist traffic, were the major economic assets. The Austrian economy came to be dominated to a disproportionate extent by a trend toward the service sector because of the importance of tourist traffic, which transformed the economic and social character of the rural Alpine areas. The Berlin conference of the foreign ministers of France, Great Britain, the U.S.S.R., and the United States in January 1954 raised Austrian hopes for the conclusion of a peace treaty. For the first time, Austria was admitted as an equal conference partner, but the failure of the foreign ministers to agree on the future of Germany again prejudiced Austria's chances. The Soviet government was not prepared to forgo the strategic advantages of maintaining forces in Austria as long as Germany was not neutralized. In February 1955 the Soviet government suddenly extended an invitation to the Austrian government for bilateral negotiations. An Austrian delegation visited Moscow in April 1955, and an agreement was reached by which the Soviet government declared itself ready to restore full Austrian sovereignty and to evacuate its occupation troops in return for an Austrian promise to declare the country permanently neutral. Restoration of sovereignty The treaty was signed in Vienna on May 15, 1955, by the representatives of the four powers and Austria. It formally reestablished the Austrian republic in its pre-1938 frontiers as a sovereign, independent and democratic state. It prohibited Anschluss between Austria and Germany as well as the restoration of the Habsburgs. It guaranteed the rights of the Slovene and Croatian minorities in Carinthia, Styria, and Burgenland. Great Britain, the United States, and France relinquished to Austria all property, rights, and interests held or claimed by them as former German assets or war booty. The U.S.S.R., however, obtained tangible payment for the restoration of Austrian freedom. This included $150 million for the confiscated former German enterprises, which Austria bought back from the Administration of Soviet Property in Austria; $2 million for the confiscated German assets of the First Danube Steamshipping Company; and 10 million metric tons of crude oil as the price of Austrian oil fields and refineries that had been Soviet war booty. The treaty came into force on July 27, 1955, and by October 25 all occupation forces were withdrawn. On October 26 a constitutional law of perpetual Austrian neutrality was promulgated. The Austrian government had never left any doubts that the pledge to neutrality could be interpreted only as a military one and never as an ideological one. Throughout the Soviet occupation, the Austrians had proved their anticommunist attitude, and the spontaneous reaction of the Austrian people during the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 demonstrated their sympathy with Western democratic ideas. Austria preserved political stability; changes in the personal and ideological structure of the government and political parties were effected without major political crisis. Austria became a member of the United Nations in 1955 and of the Council of Europe in 1956. Major problems of foreign relations were the conflict with Italy over Sdtirol (Alto Adige) and the problem of association with the European Economic Community (EEC). During the Paris Peace Conference of 1946, an agreement was signed guaranteeing the rights of the German-speaking population of Sdtirol. The Austrian government, claiming that the Italians had not lived up to their obligations, initiated bilateral talks. In the early 1960s, acts of terrorism committed by German-speaking chauvinists interfered with the progress of the negotiations, but in 1969 agreement was finally reached on implementing the guarantees provided in the agreement of 1946. In 1958 Austria joined the European Free Trade Association, but a special arrangement with the EEC, accompanied by prudent dealings with the communist neighbours, maintained Austria's status as a neutral nation. Austria provided for large numbers of refugees from eastern Europe. The country also functioned as a transit link for Jewish migrs from the U.S.S.R. From 1962 disagreement over economic problems generated friction between the coalition parties. The annual budget led to grave disunity in the coalition, and in the autumn of 1965 the government resigned and called new elections. The elections, held on March 6, 1966, brought a setback for the Socialist Party, and the People's Party was returned to parliament with an absolute majority. Negotiations for a new coalition government failed. The Socialists, led by a former foreign minister, Bruno Kreisky, went into opposition, and Josef Klaus formed the first one-party Cabinet of the Second Republic. Contrary to widespread misgivings, the political stability of the country was not disturbed, and parliament was given new vigour and influence. In ensuing provincial elections, the Socialist Party demonstrated recovery from the setback of 1966, and in the national elections of 1970 the Socialists managed to win a plurality of votes, becoming the strongest party in parliament, with 81 seats, but falling short of a majority. After negotiations for a new coalition Cabinet failed, in May 1970 Kreisky was appointed chancellor and formed the first Austrian all-Socialist Cabinet. Sensing increased support for the Socialists, he called for new elections in October 1971, which gave his party a clear majority of 93 seats. In the subsequent elections of 1975 and 1979, Austrian voters demonstrated their approval of Kreisky's policy of moderate social reform and economic stability by returning the Socialist Party to parliament in increasing strength: the elections of May 1979 gave the Socialists 95 seats, while the Austrian People's Party, continually weakened by regional animosities and leadership squabbles, received 77 seats and the Freedom Party 11. The stability of Austrian politics in the 1970s was paralleled by an equally stable economy: besides having an elaborate system of social security and health insurance, the Austrians enjoyed an unbroken prosperity with one of the lowest rates of unemployment in Europe. The Kreisky governments carried through a host of reform programs, among which the reorganization of the legal code under the minister of justice Christian Broda had truly historical dimensions. In 1978 Kreisky suffered his first defeat when a majority voted against the opening of a nuclear power plant; this became a major rallying point for the Greens. The late 1970s also witnessed the first of a series of scandals, many of them related to the technocratic wing of the Socialist Party. This wing centred around Kreisky's minister of finance and political heir-apparent, Hannes Androsch. In particular, the dubious link between Androsch's tax consulting firm and the contractors building Vienna's new general hospital began a series of setbacks for the Socialist Party; these were aggravated by the troubles of the nationalized industries. The scandals that plagued Austria in the 1980s have overshadowed the considerable progress, reform, and modernization that are rightfully connected with the Kreisky government. The resulting social changes dramatically altered voter mobility and led to dissatisfaction with a stagnant sociopolitical system in which all important decisions were made behind closed doors by the interest groups represented in the Social Partnership (i.e., chambers of industry, trade, agriculture, and labour unions). A growing environmental awareness intensified voter frustration. After the Socialist Party lost its absolute majority in 1983, Kreisky resigned, and the Socialists, under Chancellor Fred Sinowatz, entered into a coalition with the Freedom Party. The coalition stumbled from one scandal into another until it was finally brought down by the election of Kurt Waldheim, who was alleged to have been a Nazi war criminal, as president in 1986. Although an international historians' commission found no evidence that Waldheim had personally committed war crimes, it proved his partial historical amnesia. With Waldheim's insistence that he had only done his duty, domestic political intrigue, the not-altogether-hidden anti-Semitism of some of his supporters, and the U.S. government's decision to place Waldheim on its watch list of undesirable aliens, the incident came closer to shattering Austria's domestic consensus than any other event since 1945. After the Waldheim debacle, Sinowatz resigned as chancellor, and the Socialist Party under Franz Vranitzky called for new elections, which resulted in a grand coalition of the Socialist and the People's parties. This government introduced partially successful budgetary and tax reforms and a privatization scheme for the nationalized industries. These reforms promoted economic growth and social stability that kept Austria a model pupil of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). However, scandals (notably the Lucona affair, involving insurance fraud and homicide, and the Noricum affair, involving the illegal sale of arms to Iran by a state-owned company), the traditional internal bickering of the People's Party, and the rejuvenated opposition from the right, as well as the emergence of the Greens (in parliament since 1986), gave the grand coalition the image of being losers. In the 1990 elections, the Socialists avoided disaster only through a combination of Vranitzky's appeal and the weakness of the People's Party. The reshaped Socialist-People's Party coalition faced new problems that were largely due to the dramatically changed international situation: Austria's application for membership in the EEC renewed heated debates over domestic repercussions and over EEC membership's compatibility with neutrality. The latter issue was raised again in connection with the breakdown of the Warsaw Pact and the turmoil in Yugoslavia. In 1990 the government unilaterally revoked some of the provisions of the 1955 State Treaty governing Austria's neutrality. During the 1991 Persian Gulf war, in a controversial decision, the government permitted air transit rights to Allied planes and the transportation of U.S. salvage tanks through Austrian territory. The explosive increase of refugees has tested the political consensus and helped the right-wing Freedom Party to win strong support in the provincial elections of autumn 1991. These issues, along with the repercussions of German unification and the takeover of major industries and newspapers by German companies, call into question Austria's role in a newly structured Europe. History The First Republic and the Anschluss The early postwar years On Oct. 21, 1918, the 210 German members of the imperial parliament (Reichsrat) of Austria formed themselves into a national assembly for Deutschsterreich, or German-Austria, and on October 30 they proclaimed this an independent state under the direction of a State Council (Staatsrat) composed of the leaders of the three main parties and other elected members. Revolutionary disturbances in Vienna and, more important, the news of the German revolution forced the State Council on the republican path. On November 12, the day after Charles's abdication, the National Assembly resolved unanimously that German-Austria is a democratic republic and German-Austria is a component part of the German republic. Karl Renner, a leading socialist, became head of a coalition government, with Otto Bauer, the acknowledged spokesman of the left wing of the Social Democrats, as foreign secretary. On November 22 the territory of the republic was further defined: the National Assembly claimed for the new state all the Habsburg lands in which a majority of the population was German. It also claimed the German areas of Bohemia and Moravia. From the first day, the republic was faced with the disastrous heritage of the war. Four years of war effort and the breakup of the Habsburg empire had brought economic exhaustion and chaos. The resulting social distress and poverty inspired revolutionary activities, making bolshevism appear the greatest danger to the new republic, especially after a Soviet republic was established in Hungary at the end of March 1919. The Austrian Social Democrats were determined to resist bolshevism with their own forces without making an alliance (as the German Social Democrats did) with the old order. A Volkswehr (People's Guard) was organized and was twice effective (April 17 and June 15) against communist attempts at a putsch. Otto Bauer and Friedrich Adler staked their popularity on defeating the communist agitation in the workers' and soldiers' councils, which had been set up on the Soviet model. By mid-1919, political and social order was restored on parliamentary lines, the Communist Party relapsing into insignificance. More dangerous was the tendency of the Lnder (states) to break away from Vienna or to claim almost complete independence. Though the principal motive of this was reluctance to send food supplies to Vienna, it also represented a genuine social, political, and ideological conflict: the administration of the industrialized capital was socialist-controlled, while the states, being predominantly agrarian, remained conservative and faithful to the Roman Catholic tradition. This difference was aggravated by the fact that the monarchy had been the only bond between the German Austrian lands; with the abdication of the emperor, no symbol of loyalty common to all states remained. Vorarlberg voted for union with Switzerland in May 1919, and Tirol also attempted to secede. In February 1919 elections for a constitutional assembly were held. The Social Democrats were returned as the largest single party, with 69 seats. The Christian Socialists won 63 and the German Nationalists 26. When this assembly met (March 4), it had to make wide concessions to federalism in order to appease the states. In exchange, Vienna was elevated to the rank of a state, and the mayor made the equivalent of a state governor. This proviso subsequently enabled Red Vienna to pursue an autonomous policy, even though the Bundesregierung (federal government) was controlled by the conservative parties from 1920 to 1934. The constituent assembly also settled the constitution of the federal republic (Oct. 1, 1920). The State Council was abolished, and a bicameral legislative assembly, the Bundesversammlung, was established. The Bundesrat (upper house) was to exercise only a suspensive veto and was to be elected roughly in proportion to the population in each state. This represented a defeat for the federal elements in the states, which had wanted the Bundesrat to exercise an absolute veto and to be composed of equal numbers of members from each state. The lower house, or Nationalrat, was to be elected by universal suffrage on a basis of proportional representation. The Bundesversammlung in full session elected the president of the republic for a four-year term, but the federal government, with the chancellor at its head, was elected in the Nationalrat on a motion submitted by its principal committee; this committee was itself representative of the proportions of the parties in the house. The foreign policy of Otto Bauer and representatives of the major political parties had insisted firmly on Anschluss (union) with Germany, and as late as 1921 unauthorized plebiscites held in the western provinces returned overwhelming majorities in favour of Anschluss. But Article 88 of the peace treaty of Saint-Germain, signed on Sept. 10, 1919, forbade Anschluss without the consent of the League of Nations and stipulated that the republic should cease to call itself Deutschsterreich (German-Austria); it became the Republik sterreich (Austrian Republic). The Austrian claim for the German-speaking areas of Bohemia and Moravia was denied by the peace conference, and Austria had to recognize the frontiers of Czechoslovakia along slightly rectified historical administrative lines. The southern frontier with Yugoslavia was threatened by Yugoslav armed invasion, and it was finally decided that the question should be settled by a plebiscite, which, on Oct. 10, 1920, returned a majority of 59 percent in favour of Austria. The German-speaking districts of western Hungary were to be ceded to Austria outright; but Austria, in the face of Hungarian resistance, was obliged to hold a plebiscite. The area of Sopron was finally restored to Hungary. After the elections of February 1919, Renner formed another coalition government; however, following a government crisis in the summer of 1920, a caretaker cabinet under the Christian Socialist Michael Mayr was formed. This government prepared the draft of the constitution and introduced it into parliament. After its approval, new elections were held on Oct. 17, 1920. The Christian Socialists were returned as the strongest party, gaining 82 seats, while the Social Democrats were reduced to 66 and the German Nationalists to 20. Mayr formed a Cabinet composed of Christian Socialists; the Social Democrats went into opposition and never returned to the government during the First Republic. This political division hardened, and no decisive change took place during the following years. The system of proportional representation combined with the ideological background of Austrian parties made oscillations of political allegiance unlikely. Of the two mass parties, the Social Democrats had an unshakable majority in Vienna (in which about a third of the republic's population lived), while the Christian Socialists had an equally secure majority among the Roman Catholic peasants and the conservative classes, the latter consisting largely of army officers, landowners, and big business. The urban middle classes, hostile to both workers and peasants, became German nationalists. But German nationalism was not limited to the middle classes. The workers and even the peasants felt themselves to be Germans and responded to the national appeal. Economic reconstruction and political strife The main task of the nonsocialist governments in power from the autumn of 1920 was to restore financial and economic stability. Between 1919 and 1921 Austria's urban population lived largely on relief from the United States and Great Britain, and, although production improved, distress was heightened by inflation that threatened financial collapse in 1922. In October 1922 the chancellor, Ignaz Seipel, secured a large loan through the League of Nations, enabling Austrian finances to be stabilized. In return, Austria had to undertake to remain independent for at least 20 years. The controller general appointed by the League of Nations reported in December 1925 that the Austrian budget had been balanced satisfactorily, and in March 1926 international financial supervision was withdrawn. Seipel's success in October 1922 gave Austria some years of stability and made economic reconstruction and relative prosperity possible. In socialist-controlled Vienna, an ambitious program of working-class housing, health schemes, and adult education was carried out under the leadership of Karl Seitz, Hugo Breitner, and Julius Tandler. Red Vienna thus acquired a unique reputation in Europe. In 1920 all three major parties spoke in democratic terms. Despite democratic rhetoric, however, preparations for civil war had never been abandoned. The Christian Socialists, led by Seipel, a believer in strong government, were convinced that they had to protect the existing social order against a Marxist revolution. In the provinces, reactionary forces (the Heimwehr, or Home Defense Forces), originally formed for defense against the Yugoslavs or merely against international disorder, gradually acquired fascist tendencies. The Social Democrats felt that their social-reform program was endangered by reaction. They had their own armed force, the Schutzbund (Defense League), descended from the People's Guard of 1918, and they and the reactionary forces regularly demonstrated against each other. In 1927, in the course of a clash between members of the Schutzbund and certain reactionary forces at Schattendorf, an old man and a child were accidentally shot by the reactionaries. When the latter were acquitted by a Vienna jury on July 14, the Social Democrats called for a mass demonstration, which got out of hand and ended in the burning down of the ministry of justice. In fighting between the police and the demonstrators, almost 100 persons were killed. The Social Democrats then launched a general strike, but it had to be called off after four days. Seipel had used the opportunity for a violent assertion of government authority. The balance between socialist and nonsocialist forces in Austria was never secure after this decisive date. The Christian Socialists, pressed increasingly by the Heimwehr, began to take the offensive against the Social Democrats. Wilhelm Miklas, a leading Christian Socialist, was elected president as successor to the nonparty Michael Hainisch, who had been in office since December 1920. There were repeated attempts to revise the constitution, principally with the object of strengthening the power of the executive. After protracted negotiations, a compromise was reached late in 1929. On Dec. 7, 1929, a series of constitutional amendments gave increased powers to the president. Of particular importance were the rights to appoint ministers and issue emergency decrees. But Vienna preserved its autonomy, and the democratic principle was preserved against the far-reaching authoritarian demands of the Heimwehr. In the elections of November 1930, the Social Democrats were returned as the largest single party, with 72 seats. The Christian Socialists held 66, the German Nationalists 19, and the Heimwehr, now posing as a fascist party on the Italian model, 8. These political events were overshadowed by the great world economic crisis. Though the Social Democratic leaders believed that the crisis should be met by the orthodox means of deflation and spending cuts, they were resolved not to be compromised by supporting these measures and refused to enter a coalition government. On the other hand, in October 1931 they acquiesced in suspending the election of the president by direct popular vote, as had been provided by the constitution of 1929, and agreed to the reelection of Miklas by parliament. The government, meanwhile, led by Otto Ender and Johann Schober, was driven to desperate devices to stave off collapse. Schober, leader of the middle-class German Nationalists, launched a project for a customs union with Germany in March 1931; this provoked violent opposition from France and the alliance of the Little Entente (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania) and was subsequently condemned by a majority of the International Court at The Hague. The bankruptcy in May 1931 of the Creditanstalt, the country's most influential banking house, brought Austria close to financial and economic disaster. This, together with the rise of the National Socialists in Germany, resulted in considerable support being given to the Nazis in Austria. Provincial elections in 1932 showed that the Nazis were draining off votes from the conservative parties. The Nationalists began to demand a general election, and this demand was taken up by the Social Democrats, who saw a chance of winning a majority in parliament. History Austria-Hungary, 18671918 The Ausgleich of 1867 The economic consequences of the defeat in the war of 1866 made it imperative that the constitutional reorganization of the Habsburg monarchy, under discussion since 1859, be brought to an early and successful conclusion. Personnel changes facilitated the solution of the Hungarian crisis. Friedrich Ferdinand, Baron (later Count) von Beust, who had been prime minister of Saxony, took charge of Habsburg affairs, first as foreign minister (from October 1866) and then as chancellor (from February 1867). By abandoning the claim that Hungary be simply an Austrian province, he induced Francis Joseph to recognize the negotiations with the Hungarian politicians (Ferenc Dek and Gyula, Count Andrssy) as a purely dynastic affair, excluding non-Hungarians from the discussion. On Feb. 17, 1867, Francis Joseph restored the Hungarian constitution. A ministry responsible to the Hungarian parliament was formed under Andrssy, and in May 1867 Law XII was approved by parliament, legalizing what became known as the Ausgleich (Compromise). This was a compromise between the Hungarian nation and the dynasty, not between Hungary and the rest of the empire, and it is symptomatic of the Hungarian attitude that Hungarians referred to Francis Joseph and his successor as their king and never called them emperor. In addition to regulating the constitutional relations between the king and the nation, Law XII accepted the unity of the Habsburg lands for purposes of conducting certain economic and foreign affairs in common. The compromise was thus the logical result of an attempt to blend traditional constitutional rights with the demands of modern administration. In December 1867 the engerer Reichsrat, the section of parliament representing the non-Hungarian lands of the Habsburg monarchy, approved the compromise. Though after 1867 the Habsburg monarchy was popularly referred to as the Dual Monarchy, the constitutional framework was actually tripartite, comprising the common agencies for economics and foreign affairs, the agencies of the kingdom of Hungary, and the agencies of the rest of the Habsburg landscommonly but incorrectly called Austria. (The official title for these provinces remained the kingdoms and lands represented in the Reichsrat until 1915, when the term Austria was officially adopted for them.) Under the Ausgleich, both parts of the Habsburg monarchy were constitutionally autonomous, each having its own government and a parliament composed of an appointed upper and an elected lower house. The common monarchy consisted of the emperor and his court, the minister for foreign affairs, and the minister of war. There was no common prime minister and no common cabinet. Common affairs were to be considered at the delegations, annual meetings of representatives from the two parliaments. For economic and financial cooperation, there was to be a customs union and a sharing of accounts, which was to be revised every 10 years. (This decennial discussion of financial quotas became one of the main sources of conflict between the Hungarian and Austrian governments.) There would be no common citizenship, but such matters as weights, measures, coinage, and postal service were to be uniform in both areas. There soon developed the so-called gemeinsamer Ministerrat, a kind of crown council in which the common ministers of foreign affairs and war and the prime ministers of both governments met under the presidency of the monarch. The common ministers were responsible to the crown only, but they reported annually to the delegations. The Ausgleich for all practical purposes set up a personal union between the lands of the Hungarian crown and the western lands of the Habsburgs. The Hungarian success inspired similar movements for the restoration of states' rights in Bohemia and Galicia. But the monarch who only reluctantly had given in to Hungarian demands was unwilling to discontinue the centralist policy in the rest of his empire. Public opinion and parliament in Austria were dominated by German bourgeois liberals who opposed federalization of Austria. As a prize for their cooperation in compromising with the Hungarians, the German liberals were allowed to amend the February constitution of 1861; the Fundamental Laws, which were adopted in December 1867 and became known as the December constitution, lasted until 1918. They granted equality before the law and freedom of press, speech, and assembly and protected the interests of the various nationalities, stating that The authority of parliament was also recognized. Such provisions, however, were more a promise than a reality. Although parliament, for instance, did theoretically have the power to deal with all varieties of matters, it was, in any case, not a fully representative parliament (suffrage was restricted, and it was tied to property provisions until 1907); and the king was authorized to govern without parliament in the event that the assembly should prove unable to work. Austrian affairs from 1867 to 1918 were, in fact, determined more by bureaucratic measures than by political initiative; Josephine traditions, rather than capitalist interests, characterized the Austrian liberals. Domestic affairs After the December constitution had been sanctioned, Francis Joseph appointed a new Cabinet, named the bourgeois ministry by the press because most of its members came from the German middle class (though the prime minister belonged to the Austrian high aristocracy). In 1868 and 1869 this ministry was able to enact several liberal reforms, undoing parts of the Concordat of 1855. Civil marriage was restored; compulsory secular education was established; and interconfessional relations were regulated, in spite of a strong protest from the Roman Catholic church. In 1870 the Austrian government used the promulgation of the dogma of papal infallibility as pretext for the total abrogation of the concordat. The progressive legislation of the bourgeois Cabinet stood in sharp contrast to its inability to cope with the demands of the non-German nationalities. In 1868 the Czechs and the Poles issued declarations demanding a constitutional status analogous to that of the Hungarians. The government in Vienna did give the Poles in Galicia a considerable amount of self-government, which was later used to Polonize the Ruthenian minority. In 1871 a ministry for Galician affairs was set up, and the Poles remained the staunchest supporters of the Austrian government well into World War I. The bourgeois ministry was split into a liberal-centralist and a conservative-federalist faction; its members could not reach an agreement on policies to be adopted. The liberal members of the Cabinet opposed Czech demands; the conservatives were willing to consider them. Francis Joseph, indignant because of the anticlerical policy of the liberals, dismissed the prime minister, Karl, Prince von Auersperg, in 1868, replacing him with the conservative Eduard, Count von Taaffe, his boyhood friend. A period of indecision nevertheless persisted. The emperor wavered between the liberals, whose anticlericalism and parliamentarianism he disliked but with whom he sympathized in their centralist, German-oriented policy, and the conservatives, whose political legislation he favoured but who aroused his fears by their demands for federalization. Neither Taaffe nor his successors, Leopold Hasner (from December 1868) and Alfred, Count Potocki (from April 1870), could solve the Czech problem. The Franco-German War of 187071 temporarily diverted public attention from the Czech demands. Opinion was divided strictly along lines of nationality: Austro-Germans celebrated the victories of the Prussian army, whereas the Slavs were decidedly pro-French. The Austrian government remained neutral, because conflicting international interests had blocked the Austro-French negotiations that had culminated in a meeting of Francis Joseph and Napoleon III at Salzburg in 1867. The victory of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and the establishment of the Second German Empire under the leadership of the Prussian king gave finality to the military decision of 1866. Austria was definitely excluded from the German scene, and a reorientation of dynastic interests seemed a logical consequence. Francis Joseph decided to explore the possibility of satisfying the Czechs with some measure of federalism. On Feb. 5, 1871, he appointed as prime minister Karl Siegmund, Count von Hohenwart, a staunch clericalist. The driving mind in Hohenwart's Cabinet was the minister of commerce, Albert Schffle, an economist whose socialism may not have appealed to the emperor but whose federalism did. As a first step toward conciliation with the Czechs, the Cabinet dissolved parliament and the provincial diets. When the Bohemian elections improved the federalist position, Hohenwart proceeded to deal directly with the Czechs, copying in certain measure the method used to conclude the compromise with Hungary. Secret talks with the Czech leaders Frantiek Ladislav Rieger and Frantiek Palack led to the issuance of an imperial rescript by Francis Joseph on Sept. 12, 1871, promising the Czechs recognition of their ancient rights and showing his willingness to take the coronation oath. The Czechs answered this rescript on Oct. 10, 1871, by submitting a constitutional program of 18 articles, called the Fundamental Articles. According to this program, Bohemian affairs should be regulated along the principles of the Hungarian compromise, raising Bohemia to a status equal to Hungary. With this, Hohenwart, who had been up against violent German opposition from the first day of his appointment, aroused Hungarian resistance too. Andrssy, fearing that the Czech program could incite minority groups in Hungary, convinced Francis Joseph that the stability of the Habsburg monarchy was endangered by the Czech program. On Oct. 27, 1871, Hohenwart was dismissed and Francis Joseph returned the government to the hands of the German liberals. The new prime minister, Adolf, Prince von Auersperg, entrusted the key ministries of his Cabinet to university professors and lawyers. The ministry of doctors, as it was nicknamed, concentrated on legal and administrative reform and tried to strengthen German control in parliament. After the dismissal of Hohenwart, the Czechs turned to passive resistance, withdrawing from the Bohemian diet and again abstaining from attendance at the parliament in Vienna. This gave the government the chance to weaken the federalist position by introducing a bill for electoral reform. Instead of the existing modus, whereby the diets selected the deputies that were sent to parliament, the new bill set up electoral districts, each of which was to elect one deputy directl