Seite - 37 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

The Socialisation of Violence 37 In the Austrian half of the Empire there were around forty political parties that were merged into twenty clubs, which primarily reflected the concerns of the nationalities.60 The clubs brought together parties that were keen to promote conservative, clerical, lib- eral, socialist or simply cultural interests. Thus, parties representing major landowners were to be found alongside parties for small business enterprises in the same club, as were left- and right-wing parties that merged together and drifted apart again.61 The situation in Hungary was different, particularly since voting rights were still less developed than in Austria, and the parties were therefore composed differently. However, the fluctuation was similar. In 1910, the ‘National Party of Work’ had gained a majority in the Hungarian Reichstag (Imperial Diet). Prime Minister László Lukács remained in office, although the leader of the fraction representing the National Party of Work, Count István Tisza, was the man who held the reins  – and who was a po- lariser. On 23 May 1912, the day after his nomination as Speaker of the House, there were huge riots in Budapest. Six demonstrators were killed and 182 wounded. An at- tempt was made to assassinate Tisza in parliament. Shots were fired in the House of Representatives and troops were called in to reinstate public order. While in terms of the intensity of the nationalities conflict and the stages of democratisation there were certainly differences between the Austrian and Hungarian halves of the Empire, they did have one thing in common : the socialisation of violence. In Austria, a noticeable relaxation had occurred in domestic policy around 1908. Two major problems appeared to have been resolved satisfactorily : the Austrian voting rights reform, which was designed to give all men an equal chance to vote, and the renewal of the ‘Compensation’ with Hungary, which established the quotas for contributions from the two halves of the Empire towards the state as a whole. Rudolf Sieghart, who at the time was sectional head of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers, went so far as to say that a general sense of pessimism had given way to a certain degree of hopefulness. The Dual Monarchy could be regenerated after all, and a democratic, tapered political system could mark a new beginning. However, the euphoria was short-lived.62 The first general elections in the Austrian half of the Empire, which resulted in a completely transformed Reichsrat in which the 516 representatives included 86 Social Democrats, failed to result in the hoped-for democratisation and relaxation. The national parties simply re-grouped, and not even the Social Democrats, a class-based party, were ca- pable of overcoming their contradictions sufficiently to become an ‘Empire party’. The language issue resurfaced, and in light of the ever increasing danger of war, national- ism, militarism and bellicosity became intertwined in a manner that would have severe long-term effects. In Austria-Hungary, militarism was certainly of lesser importance than in other European states, but here too it was growing. While it adopted a very different form to that of the German Empire or France, in Austria-Hungary, we also encounter what Franz Carl Endres called an armaments race63 or Harold D. Lasswell