Defending Parliamentary Privilege: Foreign Policy, Liberal Opposition and the Responsibility of State Power

Abstract

In the late 1870s there were three interrelated developments that gradually con- verged on the Reichsrat elections in 1879. First, was a long-running constitutional struggle between the Imperial Foreign Minister Gyula Andrâssy and the Austro- German liberals — led by Herbst — that began in the mid 1870s and culminated in the army law debates of December 1879; a few months after the Reichsrat elec- tions. Second, was a gradual thawing of relations between the Bohemian Germans and Old Czechs with the possibility of a multinational liberal alliance. Third, was the possibility, entertained by the Emperor and a core of advisors, that there could be a conservative Reichsrat (possibly with a pro-government Middle Part)/) that would be more amenable towards Imperial policy-making. There were two preconditions: first, the conservative Bohemian nobles and Czechs had to send delegates to the Reichsrat and, second, sufficient official pressure would have to be applied in the swing curia and seats in the 1879 election — mainly in the various Great Landowners’ curias. In the end, the effort succeeded. While the individual developments have been investigated in other works, no account has looked in depth at their interrelationship within the context of the overall political situation.¹ The confluence of events culminating in 1879 form the subject of the next two chapters and constituted a ‘paradigmatic change’ both in the course of Austro-German liberalism and of Cisleithanian parliamentary development.²