UC San Diego

This dissertation explores the formation and development of elite and popular conservatism in the Habsburg Empire during the period from 1867 to 1918. Examining two of the most influential conservative parties in the empire, Austria’s Christian Social Party and Croatia’s Pure Party of Rights, I challenge conventional historiographical understandings of anti-liberal politics as the projects of essentially opportunistic movements that were concerned with preserving their own parliamentary power and that offered no viable alternative to liberalism. My findings suggest that these parties, working from deep ideological foundations in Catholicism and in long-established conservative understandings of the virtues and beneficence of dynastic rule, articulated traditionalist solutions to the distinctly “modern” problem of new demands that the state grant its people national autonomy, liberty, and popular sovereignty, that is a share in state power. They did this in a way consistent with their principles, without sacrificing what they believed to be a security and peace that had lasted for centuries in Central and Eastern Europe. In short, these conservatives proposed that both Habsburg subjects and the ethnically-defined nations of the empire could only be free and sovereign in a state in which the governing power was understood as part of an eternal, divinely-ordained order and in an organic relationship to society. Only this this type of state, they believed, was one in which (1) popular participation in the state was in accordance with the people’s natural will and (2) Christian moral obligations meant that the government remained absolutely limited in the power it could assert. Although these ideas may appear outmoded today, they enjoyed a remarkable popularity and proved central to a multi-partisan debate on some of the most pressing issues in modern politics, such as interethnic conflict, parliamentary competence, and even the influence of money in politics.