دانلود کتاب حکمرانی بر جوامع چندپاره: میراث دموکراتیک اتریشِ هابسبورگ و جمهوری اول چکسلواکی

In September 1897, the popular American writer, Samuel L. Clemens (1835– 1910), better known as Mark Twain, arrived in Vienna to begin a twenty-month stay. Among the highlights of the time he spent in the imperial capital of the Habsburg Monarchy were a number of visits to the parliament, which he duly summarized in a series of articles for the American journal Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. The picture he drew was unflattering. Elections to the recently expanded Reichsrat or Imperial Council had taken place in March with some of the deputies holding their mandates on the basis of universal manhood suffrage.1 Twain noted that the Reichsrat had “425 deputies from … nineteen or twenty states…. These men represent peoples who speak eleven different languages. That means eleven different varieties of jealousies, hostilities and warring interests.” As a result, “confusion and despair” characterized the public’s view of politics, parliamentary business was “paralyzed,” the government was “harried, bedeviled, and despairing,” and Twain himself wondered whether “parliament and the Constitution [can] survive the present storm.” Twain reasoned that the situation. could be expected to furnish forth a parliament of a pretty inharmonious sort, and make legislation difficult at times—and it does that. The Parliament is split up into many parties—the Clericals, the Progressists, the German Nationalists, the Young Czechs, the Social Democrats, the Christian Socialists and some others—and it is difficult to get up working combinations among them. They prefer to fight apart sometimes.