Page - 350 - in Der griechisch-orientalische Religionsfonds der Bukowina 1783–1949 - Kontinuitäten und Brüche einer prägenden Institution des Josephinismus

350 Die Institution: Struktur & Werte statement for the Cisleithanian part of the Habsburg monarchy, but, as the results of this study make clear, the lead time for developing a nation should not be underestimated, even within the, until 1914/18, uncontested and effective imperial framework. So there is no real contradiction in the Religious Fund, who furthered the interests of the empire until the dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy, on the one hand, i.e. assisted the needs (demands) of the state and represented them, and at the same time experienced fierce debates and pushes for nationalisation within its own ranks, on the other. It was only outside the imperial context, in the Romanian state of the post-war years, that radical national positions began to dominate within the institution. From that time on, how- ever, the nationalisation process, massively forced by Bucharest, started a gradual loss of mitigating options within the Fund. The creeping deprivation of power of the Bukovina Religious Fund’s actors and bodies put the Fund increasingly at the mercy of politics, much more than would have been thinkable before the World War. Let us return to the start of these developments, the era of bishop Eugen Hackmann. His time in office presents two central and, in their manifestation, quite ambivalent aspects. There was the process of gradual institutionalisation. The Fund moved incrementally from its previous exclusive function of managing church property and became an ac- tor in the political and social arena of the crown land. At the same time, early national demands became more noticeable from 1848 onwards, even if they did not yet reach many people in the Bukovina with its predominantly agrarian population. Church dignitaries of traditional values like Hackmann, loyal to state and dynasty, took up a position of great distance to such demands. Especially in the debate about creating a joint Greek-Oriental diocese of all Romanians within the Habsburg monarchy (even before the 1867 Austro-Hungarian Compromise) this became clear in the contrasting positions of A. Schaguna and E. Hackmann. Schaguna’s demand for a Church congress did not, however, stem from a basically nationalising intention, but from the many ob- vious disadvantages of the Romanian population and its everyday life in Transylvania under strictly Hungarian domination. For Hackmann such a broadening of the basis would have led to an inadmissible restriction of the traditional, legitimate hierarchy of his Church on internal decision-making. Hackmann may have exaggerated when he said that the sheep would lead the shepherd, but he nailed the essence of the noticeable progress of institutional change. In addition  – boosted by general political developments within the Habsburg monar- chy  – a national component began to dominate this change in the Religious Fund. Under closer inspection this component reveals itself as rather heterogeneous. For instance, the group of the large land owners, who had an essential role in the political discourse in the Bukovina up to the big electoral reform of 1907, pursued mainly their own interests in Open Access © 2020 by BÖHLAU VERLAG GMBH & CO.KG, WIEN