In this carefully researched and well-argued book, Laurence Cole offers the first substantial treatment of how military culture developed in late imperial Austrian society and the extent to which it supported popular state loyalties. In doing so, the book makes a significant contribution to the rapidly growing body of scholarship on the evolving relations among citizens, civil society, and government in the fifty years before 1918.
Cole situates his work in the context of recent historical and social science discussions of militarism, societal militarization, and military culture in modern societies, as well as of historians' debates regarding the Habsburg Monarchy in the era of Emperor Francis Joseph (r. 1848–1916). This broad perspective brings the experience of late imperial Austria into larger conversations about nineteenth-century Europe and gives deeper meaning to Austrian developments. It also helps test long-standing assumptions about the role of the military in Austrian society and culture. While much of the developed world experienced an increasing militarization of society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Cole sees the military as a particularly central element in the Habsburg polity, constituting it as a “military monarchy” (10–11). He notes that the Habsburg state engaged in armed conflict more frequently than did any other major European state in the course of the nineteenth century, even if major victories were few after 1849. The emperors and other male members of the ruling house associated themselves closely with the military, regularly assuming symbolic or actual leadership roles in the army. Most of the major cities had military garrisons with imposing facilities, and officers and soldiers made up significant components of urban society. Cole rightly points to the importance of military parades, band music, ceremonies, and monuments in everyday life. The countless tributes and statues for the widely revered Field Marshal Joseph Radetzky serve as prime examples in this discussion, and they make a strong case for the role of military symbolism and military service in shoring up popular enthusiasm for the Habsburg state.
An extended treatment of the formation and functioning of local military veterans' associations takes up much of the second half of the book. Cole argues here that the myriad local organizations of veterans, which grew strongly in the decades after the introduction of universal male military service in 1868, offer the best venue for examining the spread of military culture and its reception in the general population. After a review of the history of military recruitment and service obligations, as well as of organizations and services for veterans before the late nineteenth century, Cole analyzes the growth of veterans' associations, their memberships and activities, and their relationship to civil society and government over the decades after the 1860s. He relies on archival materials and printed sources to examine a large number of such groups in the German-speaking Alpine crown lands, Bohemia and Moravia, southern Tirol, and the Adriatic Littoral. Galicia, Bukovina, and Dalmatia figure only minimally in the discussion.
Cole shows that veterans' associations typically emerged as local initiatives of former noncommissioned officers and common soldiers and that they first formed to provide mutual aid, insurance programs, and general sociability. As the associations grew, they wanted to display their presence in local community life with celebrations, uniforms, and marches. Many of them looked to members of the Habsburg family or to high military officers for patronage and monetary support; they asked government offices for assistance as well. Fearing veterans' encroachment on the functions of the regular military, the imperial War Ministry was generally skeptical about this at first, which was why it opposed their requests to bear arms and wear insignia or uniforms that might be confused with those of regular military units. Only after 1900 did the War Ministry and Ministry of Home Defense seriously encourage the veterans' associations to join into a larger federation. After 1907, the ministerial authorities began efforts to bring the veterans into an Imperial-Royal Austrian Soldiers' Corps that the military authorities could control and use to support the home defense forces (Landwehr) and reserve militia (Landsturm). The emperor and ministerial authorities favored such efforts in hopes of militarizing the veterans' groups, reinforcing other defense forces in the event of foreign conflicts, and strengthening the veterans' groups' patriotic sentiments across class and national lines.
Cole gives considerable attention to the relationship of the veterans' associations to local civil society, party politics, and nationalist political movements. As one might expect, national divisions and nationalist politics affected the development of the veterans' groups, but not always in simple, predictable ways. Many of the associations asserted their loyalties to the Habsburg crown and state and tried to downplay divisive nationalist sentiments, often looking to solidarity with the Catholic Church and local, social Catholic politicians, whose dynastic and state loyalties remained strong. In regions with linguistically mixed populations, however, such as southern Tirol, Bohemia, Moravia, and the Littoral, many—but not all—veterans' associations became identified with a single nationality, and some groups faced criticism by nationalists of being too fervent in their loyalties to the dynasty and the Austrian state, and not sufficiently dedicated to nationalist causes.
Cole treats the dynamics of the veterans' movement and its relationship with civil society and the state with great sensitivity and insight, even if the narrative occasionally gets bogged down in the presentation of numerous local cases. Not surprisingly, in light of Cole's previous research on nationalist politics in Tirol, the experience of veterans' groups there and in the Littoral looms large in the latter parts of the book; Bohemia and Moravia largely disappear from the concluding sections. These minor reservations do not detract, however, from the considerable achievement of this book and its contribution to understanding the changing relationship between society and the imperial Austrian state and its military in the last decades before 1918.
