Examining the history of the Habsburg Empire through the lens of its bureaucracy, John Deak portrays this allegedly ramshackle, failed state as a relatively successful, healthy, modern, and distinctive European experiment in state building. Not many recent historians of the Habsburg monarchy focus specifically on the bureaucracy and its relationship to society, despite the bureaucracy's key place in the history of this state. Deak appears to be at the cutting edge of a new wave of scholarship on Habsburg bureaucracy and administration, on both sides of the Atlantic. He builds in part on some key earlier works, including Karl Megner's social history of the Austrian bureaucracy (Beamte.Wirtschafts- und sozialgeschichtiche Aspekte des k.k. Beamtentums [Vienna, 1986]) and, more importantly, Waltraud Heindl's innovative two-volume cultural and sociological study (Gehorsame Rebelle. Bürokratie und Beamte in Österreich 1780 bis 1848 [Vienna, 1991] and Josephinische Mandarine: Bürokratie und Beamte in Österreich 1848–1914 [Vienna, 2013]) and Harm Hinrich Brandt's history of Austria in the 1850s (Der österreichische Neoabsolutismus. Staatsfinanzen und Politik 1848–1860, 2 vols. [Göttingen, 1978]).

In Forging a Multinational State, Deak courageously presents a coherent narrative history of a challenging subject. He highlights two main state-building themes over the 150-year period he covers. The first is an ongoing identification of the bureaucracy with the good of both state and society, from the time when Joseph II (1780–90) elaborated rigorous rules designed to maintain its service ethos. Second is the creation by reformers in the mid-nineteenth century—Deak focuses especially on the enigmatic figure of Franz Stadion—who developed a (for specialists quite famous) “two-track” local and regional administrative structure in Austria. This arrangement paired government-appointed bureaucrats with those appointed by popularly elected institutions. It sought to create a responsible citizenry by inviting enfranchised people and later their highly organized political parties to participate in the administration of local and regional government. Deak focuses a great deal of his analytic powers on the origins and development of this scheme, and he is right to do so. This remarkable system brought the bureaucracy together with the society it served through a developing relationship to political parties, their voters, and their interests in the last half-century of the monarchy's existence. Thanks to this system, even when serious disagreements in the parliament or the diets made them incapable of legislating (much like the U.S. Congress or many state houses today), society nevertheless continued to have input into and some control over administrative decisions. Moreover, because by the late nineteenth-century political parties worked hard to influence bureaucratic appointments, they too had an interest in working with and through the bureaucracy. Forms of popular participation in government administration thus functioned in many ways in Imperial Austria and were not simply tied to elections or legislatures. One could even argue that nationalist political conflict too was highly embedded in an administrative system that promoted the interests of both the monarchy and society.

Deak's work reminds us of several key points about late imperial Habsburg history. First, the monarchy may technically have been a dynastic state, but it clearly developed in the same general directions taken by other—ostensibly politically more progressive—states in Europe, grappling creatively and often effectively with challenges posed by mass mobilization and democratization in the decades before 1914. Second, Deak shows how the provision of ever more social services, labor regulations, education, archiving, systems of assessment, and self-policing within the administration, and the constant expansion of communications and transport infrastructures, were all produced by this coordination of bureaucracy and legislators. Third, Deak argues (brilliantly in my opinion) that if there were a fundamental weakness to the Habsburg state in 1914 it was not a product of nationalist political conflict or international crisis. Rather, the very real predicament the Austrian state faced was fiscal in nature. The provincial administrations especially faced critical questions of how to finance these rapidly expanding areas of service. Most provincial governments were falling rapidly and dangerously into debt precisely because of their ambitious expansion of services. Deak shows how this crisis also produced highly creative suggestions for solution in the form of government inquiries and officials’ memoranda for reforming finances and streamlining the various levels of administration. The outbreak of war in 1914, however, shelved these reforms. Fourth, Deak hints at an argument he has made effectively elsewhere, that the war unleashed a brutal conflict between the military and the administration, a conflict that the military appeared at first to have won. Intent on depoliticizing the state by removing the parties (and their voters) from influencing policy, the military imposed a brutal dictatorship in the first two years of the war that cut the political links that had connected the people to their administrators. It undid much of the work that the bureaucracy and elected officials had together accomplished over the previous fifty years.

Given the sheer complexity and size of his topic, Deak's achievement is remarkable. He argues forcefully in clear, often stylish language for a different appreciation of the accomplishments of the Habsburg monarchy and particularly of the bureaucracy. Using a variety of illuminating—and often astonishing—local examples, he addresses head-on the changing nature of the relationship between bureaucracy and the society it was meant to serve, a relationship that too many scholars have ignored for too long in this reviewer's opinion. Of course, not every reader will agree with the self-assuredness and content of Deak's arguments, nor even with the basics of his narrative arc. The history of the bureaucracy could possibly be told from other perspectives, for example from that of the constant recreation of a composite state, from the perspective of the repeated failures of Josephinist centralism, or from a more Hungarian-oriented perspective. These considerations should in no way detract from the quality of Deak's achievement. Moreover, the particularly Austrian framework of Deak's analysis should remind us that we simply need to know a great deal more about the ways that Hungary—both before 1848 and especially after 1867—worked differently. Or did it? Several scholars are currently studying the changing character and workings of the county- and national-level bureaucracies in Hungary after 1867. They can learn much from Deak's approach, and it will be exciting soon to see his work placed in even broader critical contexts.