Perhaps only in Central Europe could there be an international scholarly conference commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of a relatively obscure law that did not achieve what the framers intended. But such is the continuing fascination that Habsburg, Czech, and German historians (including this author) have with the Moravian Compromise of 1905.

What is it about the Compromise of 1905 that continues to fascinate scholars of the region? Perhaps more than anything else is the simple fact that there has been so little compromising between various national communities in East Central Europe over the past century that any concrete step toward an actual solution to ethnic conflict through legal, as opposed to the all too common violent, means seems well worth careful scrutiny.

Reading the contributions to this volume, which are revised versions of papers given at the conference in Brno in 2005, one is struck by how far scholars of the compromise have moved from the older, more nostalgic vision of the Moravian Compromise as some sort of model for ethnic comity that might have either (a) saved the Habsburg monarchy from its demise or (b) provided a model for other feuding ethnic communities. Instead, most of the authors represented here take a more critical view of the law and its results.

Despite this more critical approach to the events of 1905 in Moravia, there is not really that much new in these essays, with a few notable exceptions. Most of the essays revisit ideas that have been in the literature on the compromise for the past two decades, particularly the fact that the terms of the law meant that the principal result of the new law was the hardening of ethnic identification—primarily through legal actions rather than personal choice—in the province. To be sure, the reader will come away from these essays with a much richer perspective on the law and its results, but with the exceptions noted below, not so much in the way of new information about what happened and why.

The most important exceptions to this lack of new findings come from Jiří Malíř and Tara Zahra. Malíř, perhaps the most accomplished historian of Moravian politics, draws our attention to a second compromise drafted in the province in 1914. Particularly compelling is his finding that the framers of the second compromise intended to extend the terms of the law beyond the codification of national identity. As Malíř points out, this intention raises the possibility of even greater legal barriers being erected between the Czech and German communities, which is not exactly what we think of when we say “compromise.”

Zahra's essay on the consequences of the law for the children in Moravia is the first fresh perspective on the compromise in a long time. Her essay is a careful investigation of the social consequences of legal decisions—in this case, the impact on children in the schools—and demonstrates that the provisions of the law that required individual citizens to be classified as either Czech or German through an administrative process turned the children of Moravia into a nexus of ethnic contention. That children could become enmeshed in the political struggles of their parents in this way, that their educational experiences could be so disrupted, and that the state and political actors could so callously disregard the wishes of parents regarding the schools they chose to send their children to is clear evidence of a hardening, not lessening of ethnic conflict in Moravia as a result of the compromise.

Finally, it is worth calling attention to the fact that several of the essays in this volume take a first, but still underdeveloped, stab at contextualizing the compromise within the history of local administration—meaning communal government, not provincial government—in Austria. The history of local self-government in the Austrian lands is still waiting for the comprehensive treatment it so richly deserves and the essays by Lukáš Fasora and Martin Markel are small examples of what such a more comprehensive treatment might offer. These essays pull back the curtain a little on this mostly blank spot in Habsburg history and, thus, are a welcome addition to this volume.

Because the Moravian Compromise is such an obscure branch of knowledge, the essays in this volume will be of interest almost exclusively to the specialist in late-Habsburg political history. But to those specialists, this book will be a welcome addition to their personal or library collections.