!!!Liberalismus

Liberalism: Liberal and progressive conception of the state, 
economics, and society rooted in the age of  Enlightenment, opposed to 
 Absolutism and the abdication of individual and intellectual 
responsibility to higher authorities. The liberals represented 
primarily the educated and more wealthy industrialist bourgeoisie and 
certain intellectual circles (independent professions as well as some 
parts of the civil service), fought against social, economic, and 
religious barriers, and had considerable power of the press at their 
disposal. In the "Vormaerz" period preceding the 1848 
revolution, liberal ideas could only be articulated in private 
circles; however from the  Revolution of 1848 onward, there was no 
silencing liberal and democratic tendencies in Austria's political 
landscape. After the liberal State Minister A.  Schmerling (of the 
Deutschliberale Partei - the German-Liberal Party) and his ministry 
(1860-65) had created a centralist constitution in1861 by means of the 
 February Patent, which was conducive to the promotion of the liberal 
ideology, the actual liberal era in Austria began. From the beginning, 
however, various political schools of thought arose within the liberal 
movement, represented in groups such as the "Buergerklub", 
the "Deutschdemokratischer Verein", the 
"Grossoesterreicher" (E. A. Muehlfeld), the 
"Unionisten" (E. Herbst), or the Styrian 
"Autonomisten" (M. Kaiserfeld). They were nevertheless 
united in their battle against the supremacy of the aristocracy and 
the clergy, against the federalist endeavours of the Slavic 
nationalities, in their economic concept ("free" economy), 
and in their attempt to expand and secure the liberal and 
constitutional basis of the state (rule of law, constitution, 
separation of powers, independent judiciary, sanctioned basic rights 
and freedoms). After the Compromise of 1867 with Hungary and the 
passing of the  December Constitution, for the formulation of which 
Hungary was responsible to a great extent, the liberals (bourgeois 
liberal German "Party of the Constitution") became the 
ruling party in the Austrian half of the Empire and supplied the  
Buergerministerium ("Bourgeois Ministry", 1868-1870) with 
the liberal ministers K. Giskra, E. Herbst, J. N. Berger, R. 
Brestel, L. Hasner von Artha, and I. Plener, and the ministry of 
Prince A. Auersperg (1871-1878/79) with the ministers J. von 
Lasser, J. Glaser, K. von Stremayer, A. Freiherr von Banhans, J. 
Unger, and others. These years represented the heyday of liberalism, 
and were characterised in particular by a building boom ( 
Gruenderzeit). Factories, industrial plants, railway lines, and 
numerous other undertakings were established, as well as banks, 
building societies, insurance companies, etc. As a result, 
considerable social restructuring and local population shifts began, 
particularly in the large cities. The liberals were opposed to any 
claims to control of education on the part of the church and forced 
the Catholic Church into a defensive position. Their major victories 
included the laws regulating matters of mutual interest to the church 
and the state which were passed in 1868 and 1874 (marriage law, 
schools law, interdenomination law: the  Maigesetze), the 
Reichsvolksschulgesetz (1869), the abolition (in 1870) of the  
Concordat of 1855 and the election reform of 1873. However, the  
Nationality Question remained unsolved; the liberals also failed to 
find satisfactory solutions to the social problems of the times. The 
conflicting schools of thought within the liberal movement soon came 
to the fore again. The Styrian Autonomists spoke up in favour of the 
separation of Galicia (Poland), Bukovina (Beech Wood Land), and 
Dalmatia from Austria, in order to secure the domination of the 
German-speaking (German Nationalist) members of parliament in the 
Austrian half of the Empire. The election held after the election 
reform of 1873, the first in which the Reichsrat was elected directly, 
brought heavy losses for the German-Liberal Party. This was primarily 
the result of setbacks to their economic policy, the climax of which 
was the stock market crash of 1873. In the 1879 election, the Liberals 
lost the majority in the house of representatives; they went into 
opposition against the Taaffe ministry. After the resignation of E. 
Taaffe, the Vereinigte Deutsche Linke (United German Left) formed a 
temporary coalition with the conservative "Hohenwart-Klub" 
and the Poles and supported the Windisch-Graetz ministry (1893-1895). 
The election of 1897 was a serious failure for the German Liberals. In 
the long run they were unable to prevail against the Christian 
socialist movement and the social democratic labour movement. 
Moreover, the liberal political party mutated more and more (although 
in varying degrees from faction to faction) in the direction of the  
Deutschnationale Bewegung (German nationalist movement); in the end 
even the progressive party, the last successor of the liberal groups, 
was eventually absorbed into this movement. The "Deutsche 
Nationalverband", founded in 1910, united all "German 
Liberals" and liberal parliamentary groups of the parliament 
elected in 1907 on the basis of full and equal suffrage for men. In 
the provincial assemblies and in the municipal councils (elected on 
the basis of the limited suffrage of "Kurien" or electoral 
classes), the liberal political groups held their own much longer, 
some even until 1918. Moreover, some of their ideas had found their 
way into the programmes of other political parties, so that all 3 of 
the political camps formed at the end of the 19%%sup th/%  century 
could claim, not without good reason, to have taken up the legacy of 
liberalism - each in its own specific way. In attempting to generally 
assess the phenomenon of liberalism in the period before the First 
World War, it is important to mention, in addition to its 
organisational decline on a political party basis, the implementation 
of a large number of the legal and institutional concepts of 
liberalism, which, although pushed into the background in the period 
between the World Wars by a general anti-liberal trend, have become 
the generally recognised basis of civil society in the Second 
Republic. With regard to cultural liberalism, the slackening of 
intellectual restraints resulted in a considerable upswing in science 
and art, which, in fin de siècle Vienna (as well as in other 
places), led to a flowering of Central European thinking and artistic 
creativeness which lasted into the 1930s, when it was abruptly broken 
off.

\\
In the First and Second Republics, traditions of liberalism 
continued to affect the economic thinking of the Christian Socialists 
and later the Austrian People's Party (OeVP) as well as the political 
thinking of the Social Democrats and the Green Party. With regard to 
political parties, in the First Republic the  Grossdeutsche 
Volkspartei and the  Landbund assumed the heritage of the Liberals. 
After 1945 the Verband der Unabhaengigen (VdU, "Association of 
Independents"), laid claim to liberal tendencies, followed for a 
long time by its successor organisation, the Austrian Freedom Party 
(Freiheitliche Partei Oesterreichs, FPOe), although in this case these 
tendencies remained at variance with German National ideas. The FPOe's 
turn towards right-wing populism ultimately led in 1993 to the 
splitting off of the  Liberal Forum, a group dedicated to the entire 
spectrum of liberal values.

!Literature
K. Eder, Der L. in Alt-Oesterreich, 1955; G. Franz, L. Die 
deutsch-liberale Bewegung in der habsb. Monarchie, 1955; J. Vesely, 
Der Niedergang des deutschen Liberalismus in Oesterreich und seine 
Ursachen, doctoral thesis, Vienna 1959; D. Harrington-Mueller, Der 
Fortschrittsklub im Abgeordnetenhaus des oesterreichischen Reichsrats 
1873-1910, 1972; K. Vocelka, Verfassung oder Konkordat, 1978; W. Wadl, 
Liberalismus und soziale Frage in Oesterreich, 1987; L. Kammerhofer, 
Studien zum Deutschliberalismus in Zisleithanien 1873-1879, 1992; L. 
Hoebelt, Kornblume und Kaiseradler, 1993.


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