In 1905, the Austrian baroness Bertha von Suttner became the first female recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, praised for having ‘taken the lead among women of today’ in the struggle against war.Footnote 1 She had been an internationally renowned campaigner ever since the publication of her anti-war novel Die Waffen nieder in 1889 and was credited with influencing Alfred Nobel's endowment of the peace award.Footnote 2 Accordingly, many of her supporters deemed the honour long overdue: as a liberal Austrian newspaper put it, she ‘might have been considered worthy of the Prize already earlier on’.Footnote 3 Only six years later, one of Suttner's closest associates received the same accolade: the Viennese journalist Alfred Hermann Fried was rewarded for having ‘devoted his entire life [since 1891] to work for peace, one of the few men to do so’.Footnote 4
Suttner and Fried represented a wider international movement, as reflected in congresses and peace societies with transnational links. Like their counterparts in other countries, the two Austro-German activists drew attention to the horrors of war, argued for disarmament, and campaigned for new international institutions and the extension of international law. The very term ‘pacifism’ originated in Suttner and Fried's lifetime: as a neologism coined in 1901, it described a general commitment to the principles of peace and arbitration. However, it did not denote a categorical rejection of violence and could hence involve an acceptance of defensive wars.Footnote 5 ‘Patriotic pacifism’ is therefore an apt label for the stance of many European activists.Footnote 6 Most of them did not question the social order, and their preference for reform over revolution contrasted with socialist anti-militarism. Fittingly, Roger Chickering has viewed pacifists in Imperial Germany as ‘small groups of ardent liberals … drawn from the ranks of those who were opposed to the illiberal aspects of the empire and who also rejected social revolution’.Footnote 7
The fact that two major pre-war pacifists stemmed from Austria is at once striking and plausible: international crises impacted significantly on the Habsburg Monarchy, owing to its geopolitical role and the growing national tensions within the monarchy itself. These circumstances produced significant challenges for the Austrian peace movement, and its history has therefore been presented as ‘a story of frustration, apathy and defeat’.Footnote 8 In this context, the pacifists’ ambivalent relationship with Austro-German liberalism was a significant factor. Austro-pacifism grew from the political and social milieu of liberalism – yet, as Christian Jansen has argued, liberal movements contained forms of militarism early on and maintained an ‘elective affinity with modern antagonistic nationalism’.Footnote 9 Austrian liberalism was a multifarious phenomenon, albeit with unifying characteristics such as constitutionalism, anti-clericalism, and appeals to the Bürgertum. Its main party comprised different factions and experienced further fragmentation after 1879. Over the subsequent decades, liberals competed with political Catholicism, socialism, and different nationalist movements.Footnote 10 In this period, liberal activists themselves increasingly embraced language-based politics, in particular in border regions.Footnote 11 The national dimensions of fin-de-siècle liberalism ensured uneasy relations with pacifists, who strove to be acceptable to liberals while championing supranational ideas and loyalty to the monarchy.
An examination of Austro-pacifism thus involves much wider issues: it draws attention to domestic obstacles for the peace movement, but also sheds light on the political culture of the late Habsburg Monarchy. Traditionally, scholarship on Austrian peace activism focuses on the figure of Suttner. In contrast, this article considers a broader cast of characters. It draws particular attention to the Österreichische Friedensgesellschaft (ÖFG), whose ‘relative neglect by scholars of Austrian pacifism’ has been noted by Richard Laurence.Footnote 12 Founded by Suttner in 1891 as Österreichische Gesellschaft der Friedensfreunde, it was the principal Austro-German peace organization. Although the ÖFG's statutes described it as ‘apolitical’, Austria-Hungary's internal dynamics invested peace activism with political meanings. By contextualizing the work of the ÖFG, the article reveals the domestic implications of promoting international reconciliation in a multi-national empire.
I
Before Suttner's rise to prominence, key stimuli for the Austrian peace movement came from the Viennese democrat Adolf Fischhof and the Styrian liberal Robert von Walterskirchen. Both were well-known politicians: the former had played a major role during the 1848 revolution, and the latter became a deputy in the Austrian Reichsrat in 1873. Already, three years before being elected, Walterskirchen called for an international association of deputies; by 1880, he specified his ideas on disarmament and the international co-operation of parliamentarians.Footnote 13 In this context, he drew on the writings of Fischhof, who had discussed this issue in 1875. Fischhof criticized the economic burden of war policies and favoured the creation of a ‘general Representative Diet of Nations’ that would initiate international disarmament.Footnote 14 The ÖFG later acknowledged Fischhof's influence and sponsored a wreath at his funeral.Footnote 15
Richard Laurence has concluded that ‘Fischhof's proposals were not those of a pacifist’ because of his acceptance of defensive wars.Footnote 16 Yet, such an assessment risks obscuring the nature of the international peace movement in this period: like Fischhof, many peace activists championed arbitration and transnational co-operation without ruling out wars entirely. Fittingly, an English version of Fischhof's writings followed shortly after their original publication. The translator, a radical MP, stated in his introduction that no one ‘would have read [this pamphlet] with greater interest than Richard Cobden’.Footnote 17 Reflecting such transnational links, the Spanish campaigner Arturo de Marcoartu addressed a meeting of forty-three Austrian parliamentarians in 1876. The event – fondly recalled by the visitor over fifteen years later – resulted in a short-lived committee for a ‘congress of parliaments’, with Walterskirchen among its members.Footnote 18 Furthermore, by 1882, the International Peace and Arbitration Society listed eight Austrian adherents, including the liberal deputy Peter Freiherr von Pirquet. Although no Austrian was present at the organization's international congress in Brussels that year, both Fischhof and Pirquet sent messages of support.Footnote 19
The efforts of Fischhof, Walterskirchen, and Pirquet suggest that early Austrian peace activism involved both democrats and liberals. The divide between these two political currents had already become apparent in 1848, as democrats advocated further-reaching social and political change. Admittedly, in the late 1860s, the Democratic Clubs and the liberals could be viewed as ‘branches of a still common movement, like the radicals in the British liberal movement’.Footnote 20 Nonetheless, the liberal movement was ‘institutionally splintered’ – and this was the case even before it lost its dominant role in Cisleithanian politics at the end of the 1870s.Footnote 21 In 1882, both Fischhof and Walterskirchen contributed to the abortive effort to found a German People's Party, seeking to unite different left-liberal and democratic groups. When the ÖFG was launched in 1891, it involved figures who had supported the plans for this party: Theodor Hertzka, editor of the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, co-founded the peace society; Walterskirchen joined it; and Fischhof gave his blessing.Footnote 22 Two years later, the leader of the Viennese democrats, Ferdinand Kronawetter, presented the ‘peace and arbitration idea’ to the Delegations, the joint session of representatives from the Hungarian and Cisleithanian parliaments.Footnote 23 However, given the small numbers of democrats in parliament, the ÖFG's path to political influence seemed to lead through the moderate liberals. This strategy was particularly important since the outlooks of the two growing Austro-German mass parties of the 1890s – the Social Democrats and the Christian Socials – differed significantly from the Austro-pacifists, as later parts of this article will show.
The Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) was a key vehicle for engaging liberal deputies. This international organization had been founded in 1889 to unite parliamentarians from different countries and to support campaigns for peace and arbitration.Footnote 24 In 1903, Vienna hosted an Inter-Parliamentary Conference, opened by the liberal prime minister Ernst von Körber. By 1913, over 100 Austrian deputies – most of them liberals – had joined the IPU, amounting to one out of five members of the lower chamber.Footnote 25 The Inter-Parliamentary Conferences often shared delegates and the host city with the Universal Peace Congresses, which were the main events of international pacifism. For instance, in 1896, Budapest hosted both an Inter-Parliamentary Conference and a Universal Peace Congress, with considerable public resonance.Footnote 26 Suttner viewed the conferences and congresses as two chambers of one ‘peace parliament’.Footnote 27 Accordingly, the masthead of the periodical Die Waffen nieder! – named after Suttner's famous pacifist novel – described it as the ‘organ of the Inter-Parliamentary Conference, the International Peace Bureau in Bern and the Peace Society in Vienna’. In Austria, the connection between pacifism and inter-parliamentarianism was personified by Pirquet, who headed the Austrian IPU delegation and remained involved in the ÖFG.
The IPU managed to attract some political support as it focused on the least controversial parts of the peace agenda, especially arbitration, which was ‘probably the single most influential strand of internationalism’ before 1914.Footnote 28 In contrast, liberals were reluctant to get involved in the ÖFG, whose criticism extended to armaments policies and the military. Pirquet therefore remained the sole deputy to be consistently active in the association. The views of Ernst von Plener, the liberals’ parliamentary leader in the 1890s, illustrate this ambivalence. He succeeded Pirquet as head of the Austrian IPU delegation and presided over the Inter-Parliamentary Conference of 1903. His role in drafting proposals for compulsory arbitration seemed to underscore his internationalist credentials, and he has even been described as a ‘leading spokesman’ of the ‘Liberal peace advocates’.Footnote 29 Yet Plener declined the invitation to chair pacifist events and denounced the Universal Peace Congresses as ‘foolish’.Footnote 30 In his correspondence with Alfred Fried, he stressed his unwillingness to be associated with pacifism.Footnote 31 He thus ‘shared the ambivalent involvement with the peace movement characteristic of Austrian liberalism’.Footnote 32
Plener's stance needs to be understood in the context of his party's fall from power after their opposition to the occupation of Bosnia in 1878. Andrew Whiteside has described anti-militarism as ‘the principal immediate cause of the Germans’ loss of the “commanding heights” of government’.Footnote 33 Ten years later, Plener explained how these events had triggered a revision of his party's critique of armaments.Footnote 34 His memoirs also expressed regret about earlier liberal opposition to military expenditure.Footnote 35 Plener's response to his party's declining influence was to work within the Austrian institutions: in 1895, he accepted the presidency of the Supreme Court of Accounts. His attitude contrasted with Walterskirchen who in 1880 stated his disinterest in government participation.Footnote 36 Evidently, the latter stance made an alignment with the peace movement much easier.
The attitudes to pacifism thus connected with power-political considerations. In this respect, the orientation of the Austrian Foreign Office was a complicating factor. Under the foreign minister Alois von Aehrenthal, it had the reputation of being populated by ‘narrow-minded, frivolous, and arrogant aristocrats’.Footnote 37 Aerenthal himself spoke out against both the IPU and the peace movement, perceiving both of them as challenges to the existing order.Footnote 38 Solomon Wank has confirmed the ministry's conservative nature, although he has pointed out that Habsburg foreign policy ‘became more aggressive and more expansionist’ after Aerenthal's death in 1912.Footnote 39 Even before his ministerial tenure, Austro-Hungarian diplomats rejected a permanent arbitration tribunal during the negotiations at the Hague Peace Conference of 1899. At the successor conference in 1907, they opposed armaments limitations and compulsory arbitration in international disputes.Footnote 40 Seen from this angle, any push towards the peace movement's goals implied a challenge to key features of Habsburg policy.
The limited support for the ÖFG mirrored the situation in Imperial Germany where the main party on the liberal left was reluctant to support pacifism.Footnote 41 Alfred Fried conceived academia as the arena in which pacifism's isolation could be overcome, as exemplified by the foundation of the Verband für internationale Verständigung under the law professor Ottfried Nippold in 1911. In Austria, the ÖFG member Arthur Müller adopted a similar strategy when launching the Österreichischer Völkerverständigungs- und Freundschaftsverband ‘Para Pacem’ in 1914. Out of its 101 founding signatories, 50 were university professors. Fried's plan of a banquet in honour of Heinrich Lammasch, the legal scholar and Austrian delegate to the Hague Peace Conferences, can also be seen in this context.Footnote 42 Fried even received Plener's backing for this event, which was attended by the former prime minister Paul Gautsch.Footnote 43 In 1914, Fried invited Lammasch to preside over the Universal Peace Congress that was scheduled to take place in Vienna.Footnote 44 However, Lammasch appears as somewhat exceptional in bridging the gap between ‘leading peace activists … and the highest circles of government’.Footnote 45
II
Given the limited involvement of leading liberals, what was the actual profile of the ÖFG and its members? Bertha von Suttner tends to overshadow the association that she had founded. To the movement's detractors, pacifism was ‘Suttnerei’ and her supporters reinforced this focus. Even during her lifetime, two fellow campaigners – Leopold Katscher and Alfred Fried – published books about her.Footnote 46 Both were significant figures in their own right: Katscher was well known in literary circles and contributed to both Austrian and Hungarian pacifism. Alongside Suttner, he helped establish the Hungarian Peace Society in 1895.Footnote 47 Meanwhile, Fried's field of action extended to Imperial Germany: he lived and worked in Berlin from 1887 until returning to his hometown Vienna in 1903. In 1892, he co-founded the German Peace Society, which he modelled after the ÖFG. He subsequently fell out with the leadership of the German association, but nonetheless emerged as the leading theorist and publicist of the German-language peace movement. The connection to Suttner was of central importance, as Fried had collaborated with her on the pacifist periodical Die Waffen nieder!. This experience enabled him to launch the journal Die Friedens-Warte in 1899 – ‘undoubtedly the most efficient periodical of the Pacifist movement in the world’, as the famous British journalist and peace campaigner Norman Angell put it.Footnote 48
In 1891, Suttner optimistically predicted a fast-growing membership for the ÖFG.Footnote 49 Yet, over two years later, its secretary referred to a relatively modest 3,000 members.Footnote 50 In 1905, Fried gave an even lower estimate of 2,000.Footnote 51 Although the ÖFG maintained seven branches outside Vienna by that stage,Footnote 52 its main focus was on the Imperial capital. As a whole, the society's membership remained stagnant at best. However, such limited active involvement was not a peculiarity of Austro-pacifism seeing that the ÖFG's British and German counterparts had a comparable profile.Footnote 53 Importantly, the ÖFG attracted highly educated and often well-connected individuals: for instance, a quarter of the 372 subscribers to an ÖFG booklet in 1892 held a doctorate.Footnote 54 Writers and journalists were well represented, including figures such as Hermann Fürst, who wrote for the liberal high-circulation newspaper Neues Wiener Tagblatt.
These observations suggest that the ÖFG bore the characteristics of Honoratiorenvereinigungen – ‘societies of luminaries’ that were the predominant form of association-building among Austro-German liberals.Footnote 55 A Marxist account of the Austrian peace movement later claimed members joined the ÖFG as a token of their ‘peace-mindedness’ rather than reflecting genuine commitment.Footnote 56 Suttner, however, viewed the passive membership of well-regarded individuals as a vital service, as it helped demonstrate the movement's respectability.Footnote 57 To similar ends, the ÖFG forged links with the associations of teachers and civil servants. Meanwhile, individual members were also involved in Masonic networks: Fried was active in the Viennese lodge Sokrates and corresponded with freemasons in other parts of Austria-Hungary.Footnote 58
As a whole, then, the ÖFG was a vehicle for middle-class sociability, although it also involved liberal aristocrats. Only on rare occasions did the association venture towards mass action: in 1910, it claimed 120,000 signatures for an international petition on compulsory arbitration.Footnote 59 By and large, Austro-pacifists focused on the cultural realm, as reflected in their creation of academic and literary organizations with close ties to the ÖFG.Footnote 60 Such endeavours extended to the field of education: in 1894, Leopold Katscher compiled a literary anthology to counter militaristic content in school textbooks.Footnote 61 In a similar vein, the ÖFG activist Arthur Müller wrote a Pacifistisches Jugendbuch for which the organization acted as co-publisher.Footnote 62 Yet not all pacifists supported this cultural approach. Fried favoured a ‘scientific pacifism’ that would demonstrate global interdependence by listing the sheer extent of international contacts and organizations. When the Belgian peace leader Henri La Fontaine requested a list of literary works on peace, Fried reprimanded him for pursuing the ‘questionable path of compromising our peace technology through music and poems’, declaring himself an ‘absolute opponent of such sentimental propaganda’.Footnote 63 In a letter to Arthur Müller, Fried argued that appeals to reason would ultimately convince the masses: those who defended militarism with ‘hooray-enthusiasm’ would soon shout ‘hooray for pacifism’.Footnote 64
Fried's approach reflected a major strand in European pacifism, namely the effort to gather economic and social evidence on the futility of war.Footnote 65 The academic Rudolf Kobatsch, one of the ÖFG's vice-presidents, was another exponent of this approach: in 1911, he analysed armament expenses to show their detrimental effects for the Austrian economy.Footnote 66 Another ÖFG member, Rudolf Goldscheid, considered the wider military impact on the ‘human economy’. He suggested that the ‘entanglement of different peoples’ meant that war would become rarer ‘because every national conflict threatens to incite a world war’.Footnote 67 Goldscheid remained a prominent figure in pacifist and academic circles: in the interwar period, he led the ÖFG and also edited the Friedens-Warte for three years.
Alongside its cultural and ‘scientific’ dimensions, the ÖFG's endeavours also related to women's activism. Rosa Mayreder, a prominent Austrian feminist, was an ÖFG member;Footnote 68 and Austrian pacifists received invitations from women's clubs.Footnote 69 At the time, many Austrian feminists evoked women's ‘political qualities’ rather than ‘arguments based on the natural rights of women’.Footnote 70 This approach extended to portraying women's politics as inherently peaceful. The feminist Auguste Fickert – founder of the General Austrian Women's Association (1893) – claimed that once women had received the vote, they would ensure better funding for education and welfare, and a reduction in military spending.Footnote 71 Fickert's organization and the ÖFG shared some underlying features: both presented themselves as apolitical and co-operated with female educators’ associations. Links between pacifists and feminists extended to the Hungarian part of the Dual Monarchy: Anna Zipernowsky – ‘the Hungarian Bertha von Suttner’ – was a member of the Hungarian Peace Society and helped launch the peace section of the Hungarian Women's Association.Footnote 72 Furthermore, Leopold Katscher's niece Rosika Schwimmer was a renowned Hungarian feminist who became a major peace campaigner during the Great War. Reflecting the links between the women's and peace movements, the abortive Universal Peace Congress of 1914 – scheduled to take place in Vienna – included plans for a women's assembly and a debate on the relationship between pacifism and feminism. Nonetheless, Austro-pacifism never entered a full partnership with the women's movement. In 1911, Suttner praised the feminist Adelheid Popp for her criticism of the costs of armaments, yet stressed that pacifists strove for humane rather than feminine politics.Footnote 73
III
The ÖFG's raison d’être was to transform the conduct of international politics. However, its critique of militarism had evident domestic implications, if ‘militarism’ is understood as the subordination of civilian values or powers to military ones.Footnote 74 While militarism is frequently associated with pre-1914 Germany, its application to the Habsburg context is more complex. Gunther Rothenberg has argued that the Austro-Hungarian army ‘never achieved separate or superior standing from political authorities’.Footnote 75 This assessment contrasts with Richard Laurence's comment that ‘the armed forces functioned as an extra-constitutional organization, privileged and protected from outside interference in all matters essential to their operation’.Footnote 76 These contrasting interpretations reflect the peculiarities of the political situation in Austria-Hungary: after 1867, the Landwehr in Cisleithania and the Honvédség in Hungary co-existed with the Imperial Army. The latter came under increasing pressure from Hungarian politicians who aimed to establish the Honvédség as a national army. The reluctance of both the Hungarian parliament and the Cisleithanian Reichsrat to increase military spending suggested limitations to the army's bargaining power. In 1911, the overall defence budget amounted to 420 million Crowns – less than in Italy, and a mere quarter of the German equivalent.Footnote 77 Yet, in another respect, the army's role as a supranational institution increased its importance: along with the crown and the court, the Imperial Army served as Klammer des Reiches – a device that kept the monarchy's parts together.Footnote 78
Stig Förster has distinguished between ‘bourgeois’ and ‘conservative’ militarism, with the former being expansionist and nationalist, and the latter aiming at stability.Footnote 79 Within the Habsburg context, the inspector-general Archduke Albrecht personified conservative militarism: he regarded the army as ‘the instrument of governmental conservatism to sustain the existing order both externally and internally’.Footnote 80 In 1874, his influence triggered the resignation of the minister of war, Franz Freiherr Kuhn von Kuhnenfeld. The controversy marked a defeat for attempts to lead the army towards constitutionality, a path that Kuhn's anonymous treatise Über die Reorganisation der Militär-Bildungsstätten had outlined in 1869. Indeed, parliamentary control over military matters remained limited. More than two decades before joining the ÖFG, the journalist Moritz Adler expressed his concern about ‘cosmetic constitutionalism’ and specifically mentioned the military in this context.Footnote 81 One aspect was the absence of regulations allowing the Delegations to censure the Imperial war minister. The problematic nature of these constitutional arrangements became evident in 1878 as the loan for the occupation of Bosnia passed despite the opposition of Cisleithania's lower house. Similarly, in 1911, War Minister Moritz von Auffenberg placed new armaments orders despite the Hungarian government's opposition. Such incidents seemed to confirm the pacifist quip that in disputes between the Imperial war minister and the Austrian and Hungarian finance ministers, ‘the war minister always wins’.Footnote 82 Unsurprisingly, Suttner criticized parliamentarians for their subservient attitude towards the army.Footnote 83
At the turn of the century, two military figures sought to shape Habsburg politics: as head of the general staff (1889–1906), Friedrich Beck endorsed expansion in south-east Europe and, from 1904, also drew up plans for a possible military intervention in Hungary. Significantly, Beck managed to establish ‘a powerful general staff over the resistance of the imperial war ministry’ – something which Scott Lackey has described as ‘Prussian-style’.Footnote 84 While avoiding the use of the label ‘militarist’ for Beck, Lackey confidently applies it to Beck's successor, Conrad von Hötzendorf, a ‘captive of the cult of the offensive’.Footnote 85 When discussing the military in Austria-Hungary, it is possible to extend the argument to the monarch himself: Francis Joseph rejected parliamentary interference in foreign affairs and frequently wore a military uniform. István Deák has therefore labelled the Habsburg Monarchy a ‘militaristic state’, comparing it to Imperial Germany and the Russian empire: ‘the rulers of these countries viewed themselves first and foremost as soldiers’.Footnote 86
In their anti-militarist critique, peace activists did not only comment on the military's political role: they also attacked military modes of thinking. This aspect resonates with Michael Howard's definition of militarism as the ‘acceptance of the values of the military subculture as the dominant values of society’.Footnote 87 The prevalence of such attitudes is frequently noted in discussions of Wilhelmine society and provides a potential explanation for pacifists’ limited success in Imperial Germany.Footnote 88 Yet fin-de-siècle Austria too was marked by the ‘militarization of society's conditions’.Footnote 89 The monarchy provided numerous examples of folkloristic militarism as reflected in ‘the notably martial tone to representations of imperial power’.Footnote 90 Francis Joseph's jubilee in 1898 was a case in point, with the army playing a prominent role in the celebrations.Footnote 91 Pacifists evidently disapproved of the staging of military values. For instance, Suttner's famous novel sarcastically cited press coverage of soldiers’ departure for the Austro-Prussian War ‘with music playing and banners waving’.Footnote 92
Conscription was another key issue as it provided ‘an opportunity for indoctrination’.Footnote 93 In Austria-Hungary, this tendency became evident with the introduction of universal military service in 1868. While most Liberals supported the new legislation, the pacifist Moritz Adler described it as ‘the first delirium of [war] fever’.Footnote 94 The changes also involved the creation of a ‘reserve officer corps’ which, as Déak has suggested, meant that military ‘ideology and lifestyle penetrated an ever-widening circle of middle-class civilians’.Footnote 95 The introduction of conscription had different implications: it could spread military values and promote dynastic loyalty.Footnote 96 It also meant that military jurisdiction potentially concerned every male citizen. This change allowed critics to evoke the rule of law in regard to military matters: in 1888–9, Pirquet and Kronawetter spoke up in parliament to criticize the workings of military tribunals.Footnote 97 Over the subsequent decades, peace activists also addressed other measures related to the dissemination of military values: in 1894, they noted the positive press coverage for the foundation of a Reichskriegercorps.Footnote 98 In 1912, Suttner commented critically on the introduction of shooting lessons in middle schools.Footnote 99
Most activists were aware of the unpopularity of their cause. Answering Fried's claims that the peace movement spoke for half the population, ÖFG member Arthur Müller deplored the public's lack of interest and stated that ‘millions’ of Austrians were convinced of the ‘necessity of militarism’.Footnote 100 As early as 1892, peace activists also reported difficulties in attracting support among university students.Footnote 101 In 1906, Oswald Richter, another ÖFG member, later described an example that he deemed typical of the ‘military spirit’: in a public lecture, the rector of the German University of Prague had labelled the peace movement ‘damaging’ because of its alleged ‘propagation of utopias’.Footnote 102 Pacifists were particularly concerned about the role of the press. In the wake of the Bosnian Crisis of 1908, the Friedens-Warte denounced the large Austrian newspapers as ‘Aehrenthal trombones and Hötzendorf trumpets’ because of their ‘bellicose’ stance.Footnote 103 One year later, the periodical featured an appeal against anti-Italian ‘war-mongering’, signed by ÖFG members such as Suttner and Kobatsch. The document singled out the right-wing press for worsening the tension between the two states.Footnote 104 The military features of Austrian society made it a difficult environment for pacifists, as testified by anti-pacifist caricatures and articles: the periodical Die Waffen nieder! included a monthly column which reprinted the most vitriolic attacks. The ongoing problems surrounding coverage contrasted with more positive assessments in the early years of the ÖFG, when its secretary, Alfred Count Wrede, optimistically estimated that forty ‘large newspapers’ supported the peace movement.Footnote 105
In light of these domestic obstacles, the ÖFG stressed its respect for state and army. The first paragraph of its statutes affirmed the ‘patriotic duty’ to ‘make the sacrifice and put on the military boots in the fatherland's service’.Footnote 106 In a similar vein, Fried dismissed anti-militarism – defined as a categorical rejection of the military and military service – as ‘the pacifism of the uneducated’.Footnote 107 The fear of repercussions may have been one factor, with the arrest of a conscientious objector in 1895 constituting a clear warning.Footnote 108 The ÖFG's stance was in line with the mainstream of European pacifism: before the Great War, none of the large European peace associations promoted conscientious objection.
The ambivalent nature of this approach became apparent in the pacifists’ reaction to the Bosnian Crisis. On the one hand, they denounced the measure as an ‘adventure’ that would trigger increases in military expenditure.Footnote 109 With military conflict seemingly imminent, the ÖFG distributed 10,000 copies of an anti-war leaflet in Vienna.Footnote 110 On the other hand, the association subsequently congratulated Aehrenthal on his handling of the crisis.Footnote 111 Fried later suggested that the Berlin treaty of 1878 might have provided a legal basis for the Austrian move.Footnote 112 Peace activists often cast themselves as respectful of authority and mindful of their patriotic duties. Such attitudes also became manifested in their praise for autocratic rulers: in 1910, Fried suggested that Wilhelm II might become a ‘peace emperor’.Footnote 113 In similar terms, the head of the ÖFG's Linz section paid homage to Francis Joseph as ‘the greatest friend of peace’ in 1913.Footnote 114
IV
Several diary entries suggest that by the end of her life, Suttner viewed socialists as the sole hope in the quest for a peaceful future.Footnote 115 This assessment is hardly surprising, as anti-militarist critiques featured prominently in international socialism. As early as 1892, Wilhelm Liebknecht assured Suttner that socialists would ‘implement your aims, namely peace on earth’.Footnote 116 One year later, Suttner described the International Socialist Congress in Zurich as a ‘highly significant demonstration against chauvinism’. She expressed particular gratitude for a resolution that had ended the ‘misunderstanding that kept the socialists at a distance from our supposedly bourgeois movement’.Footnote 117 Furthermore, in a letter to August Bebel, Fried stressed the similarities between pacifist objectives and aspects of the socialists’ Erfurt programme.Footnote 118
After the turn of the century, socialists in Austria-Hungary and Imperial Germany extended their involvement in peace campaigns. This development was exemplified by mass demonstrations during the Bosnian Crisis, agitation for naval disarmament, and the debates of the International Socialist Congress at Stuttgart in 1907. Suttner praised one of the Stuttgart resolutions for its reference to the anti-war obligations of socialist parliamentarians, noting that ‘groups within the Inter-Parliamentary Union rarely remember this duty’.Footnote 119 The year 1907 was of particular significance for the Austrian socialists, as their parliamentary representation increased substantially as a result of the introduction of universal male suffrage. They remained strong critics of Aehrenthal's foreign policy, as reflected in their party conference of 1909.Footnote 120 The intellectual basis for their stance was outlined by the German socialist Karl Liebknecht when he visited Budapest in 1912: he denounced the army as a ‘machine to earn money for the ruling classes’, exemplifying the Marxist position on the relationship between militarism and class.Footnote 121
Common aims and a shared hostility to militarism did not, however, produce an alliance between socialists and pacifists. According to Marxist principles, an end to class-based society was the sole way of securing permanent peace. Furthermore, German and Austrian socialists favoured the model of a militia early on in their history.Footnote 122 The Austro-Marxist Karl Renner even viewed military service as ‘a step up in the life of the common man’.Footnote 123 Czech socialists adopted a similar line: when the arms question was debated at their 1911 congress, their leader Bohumil Šmeral suggested arming the people. He contrasted this approach with Tolstoyan non-resistance and Suttner's emphasis on disarmament.Footnote 124 As a whole, Austrian socialists were reluctant to adopt strikes as a means of war prevention; their stance played a role in the failure of the Second International to adopt a binding policy on war resistance.Footnote 125
In contrast to the socialists, the Austro-pacifists believed that the political and social system would improve once the economic burden of armaments had been lifted. Walterskirchen, for instance, outlined a pacifist version of historical change that contradicted historical materialism. According to his narrative, one system of organized warfare succeeded another until the arrival of a new, conflict-free order.Footnote 126 Suttner expressed the view that ‘war bears its conditions within itself’, rather than deriving from class antagonism.Footnote 127 At the same time, peace activists opposed revolutionary change. An article on ‘Social democracy and peace societies’ in Die Waffen nieder! favoured individualism over collective values.Footnote 128 Similarly, in a 1906 leaflet, German peace activists reassured the public that they did not seek to transform the system of government.Footnote 129 Two years later, Leopold Katscher co-authored a brochure on industrial strikes in which he acknowledged the validity of social demands, but affirmed the need to maintain public order.Footnote 130
Unsurprisingly, the socialist–pacifist relationship remained tense. In 1899, many socialists rejected Nicholas II's initiative for the Hague Peace Conference, considering it impossible that a reactionary ruler might promote a progressive cause – an attitude which the pacifists deemed ‘deplorable’.Footnote 131 Left-wing hostility did not only target autocratic rulers but extended to pacifists as well. Austrian and German socialists remained absent from Inter-Parliamentary Conferences and Universal Peace Congresses. Furthermore, Roger Chickering has noted that in Imperial Germany ‘Social Democrats were as abusive of the pacifists as were nationalists themselves’.Footnote 132 In 1903, the Austro-Marxist Victor Adler stressed that socialists did not advocate ‘disarmament in this “peace-mongering” way’.Footnote 133 In 1912, Fried was so concerned about socialist scorn for the ‘bourgeois’ pacifists that he contacted Eduard Bernstein, the leading theorist of socialist revisionism.Footnote 134 Yet, such broader tensions did not preclude occasional collaboration. Earlier that year, Bernstein had written an article for the Friedens-Warte, with Fried praising his contribution.Footnote 135 Indeed, Fried even intended to nominate the International Socialist Bureau for the Nobel Prize. He asked Rudolf Goldscheid to contact Austrian socialists on his behalf, since the latter was both a socialist and an ÖFG committee member.Footnote 136 Goldscheid himself expressed the pacifist message in socialist terms, arguing that war and armaments perpetuated the class system.Footnote 137 He hoped to outline this position at the Universal Peace Congress of 1914. After the event's cancellation, he published the manuscript of his speech which argued that, unlike Karl Marx, pacifists had grasped the extent to which the social and national questions were interrelated.Footnote 138
V
In 1914, Goldscheid suggested that the ‘national ideal’ had been a ‘revolutionary device’ which, deplorably, had become associated with reactionary principles.Footnote 139 He believed that nationhood could still be a productive force and provide ‘the essential meaning of internationalism’ when approached in a spirit of openness.Footnote 140 Goldscheid's somewhat laboured attempt to define the relationship between nationalism and internationalism illustrates how Austro-pacifists struggled with the phenomenon of modern nationalism. Despite their championing of dialogue and reconciliation, the pacifists’ response to national tensions within Austria-Hungary was vague and contradictory. The ÖFG itself did not make a pronouncement on the national question and never drew up a programme for national reconciliation. As a result, the historiography of the Austrian peace movement rarely discusses its engagement with nationalism. However, as publicly engaged figures, peace activists could hardly ignore nationalism. After all, as Lothar Höbelt has noted, ‘[i]t is a truism that politics in the Habsburg Monarchy was almost always tied up with the nationality question in one way or another’.Footnote 141 Peace activists had several options when confronting the national challenge: they could deny the relevance of domestic matters for their cause or claim that pacifist endeavours were compatible with an attachment to the nation. A third possibility was to apply pacifist principles to the Dual Monarchy's internal situation. Austro-pacifists veered between all three positions, as an analysis of their pronouncements and efforts demonstrates.
The first of these approaches – to treat national issues as irrelevant for pacifists – was reflected in the ÖFG's foundation: it stated that the association did not consider the empire's internal, but only its external affairs.Footnote 142 In consequence, peace periodicals mostly refrained from discussing domestic matters, and divergences from this path were soon rectified. For instance, in 1909, Suttner's column in the Friedens-Warte briefly mentioned the conflicts between Czechs and Germans in Bohemia. Her comments provoked letters from both sides; Suttner subsequently apologized for raising an issue that was inappropriate for a ‘journal of supranational ideas’. She nonetheless expressed the hope that the two communities could co-operate ‘on a higher level than the national one’.Footnote 143 Such views resonated with the beliefs of the Friedens-Warte's editor: according to Fried, the nation-state was not the ‘highest level of social development’.Footnote 144 However, as he later explained, pacifists did not concern themselves with national questions as the ‘pacifist idea is not based on relations between nationalities, but between states’.Footnote 145
Yet, even when considering inter-state relations, pacifism was conceived within the existing order. When a Polish delegate to the Universal Peace Congress of 1892 demanded the re-establishment of the kingdom of Poland, the congress president, Frédéric Passy, rejected a debate on this issue as it was not the pacifists’ task to revise Europe's political map.Footnote 146 Recalling this incident, Suttner suggested that ‘burning political issues’ should not feature at peace congresses: to raise national issues at such events would be like arguing for papal infallibility at the congresses of freethinkers.Footnote 147 In discussing Austro-German culture at the fin de siècle, Carl Schorske and Péter Hanák have used the image of ‘the garden’ to describe a bourgeois retreat into aesthetic realms and a detachment from politics.Footnote 148 Suttner's warning against the discussion of ‘burning political issues’ suggests a preference for the garden – at least as far as domestic matters were concerned. Such attitudes were not confined to activists in the Dual Monarchy's Cisleithanian part: for instance, at the Inter-Parliamentary Conference in Budapest in 1895, the Hungarian internationalist Albert Apponyi portrayed Hungary's national disputes as ‘a domestic matter’.Footnote 149
While affirming their apolitical nature, peace activists stressed that they were not ‘anti-national’ – an argument which constituted their second possible answer to the national question. For instance, in 1893, the author Robert Plöhn argued that internationalism could benefit the nation. He claimed that exclusivist nationalism was, in fact, ‘anti-national’, since it shut off nations from positive influences and prevented them from responding to contemporary challenges, which were international in nature.Footnote 150 Goldscheid expressed similar views in 1912, stating that internationalism could be a ‘cultural form of patriotism’, whereas aggressive nationalism amounted to ‘heartless particularism’.Footnote 151 Two years later, Fried claimed that the term ‘international’ did not mean to be ‘anti-national, but hyper-national’ as it extended principles of collaboration that formed the very basis of nationhood.Footnote 152 Such professions were significant if pacifists wanted to appeal to Austro-German liberals. After all, national questions played an increasingly central role for the latter. This stance became evident in 1895 as the main liberal party – the United German Left – ended its government participation over the question of a Slovene school in the Styrian town of Cilli.Footnote 153 Yet, it was not only in Cisleithania that pacifists sought to avoid suspicions of being at odds with national thinking: a similar line of argument was adopted by Hungarian activists. At the foundation of the Hungarian Peace Society, its president, the poet Mór Jókai, argued that the ‘fighting bond of the nation must not be weakened by the promotion of the peace alliance’.Footnote 154 The retired Hungarian general István Tür seemed to embody this convergence: his renown stemmed from his membership of Kossuth's army in 1849 and later of Garibaldi's forces, yet he also served as president of the Universal Peace Congress in Budapest in 1896.
The pacifists’ affirmation of their national credentials should not obscure a third strand within their response to nationalism. The intensity of conflicts within the Habsburg Monarchy meant that activists – some of them sporadically, others more consistently – spoke up and offered solutions. For instance, in the 1860s, Adolf Fischhof presented a reform programme that has been described as ‘the most significant German liberal contribution to the Austrian national problem’ since 1849.Footnote 155 Nearly a decade before his writings on peace and arbitration, Fischhof envisaged federalism as a solution to national conflicts within the Habsburg Monarchy. Another protagonist of the Austrian peace movement – the liberal deputy Pirquet – applied the pacifist idea of arbitration to the domestic realm: in 1894, he proposed an arbitration court for disputes between Cisleithania and Hungary. Combined with such suggestions, pacifist periodicals occasionally published general appeals for mutual understanding. In 1898, for example, Die Waffen nieder! published a letter by Türr, in which he considered the pacification of relations between different nationalities.Footnote 156 One year later, the journal deplored ‘paroxysms of nationalism everywhere’, presenting ‘federation, tolerance and internationalization as the solution’.Footnote 157 By this point, language rights had become a divisive issue across the Habsburg Monarchy. In this context, Moritz Adler rejected the drive for linguistic purity, mentioning Magyarization policies in this context.Footnote 158 Tellingly, key figures of Austro-pacifism, including Fried, were active Esperantists, viewing the auxiliary language as a means for international understanding.
In the monarchy's Cisleithanian half, the language-related struggles between Czechs and Germans intensified during the 1890s. The conflict escalated in 1897, when German nationalists protested violently against the Badeni Language Ordinances. With this measure, the prime minister sought to strengthen the Czechs’ cultural rights in Bohemia, intending to accord their language equal status with German. Two years before the Badeni crisis, Rudolf Jenny, Suttner's later secretary, had claimed that Czechs were ‘less chauvinistic than their German counterparts and that an understanding between both nations would be possible, if only people wanted it’.Footnote 159 Suttner herself had travelled to Prague and praised the ‘readiness, understanding, enthusiasm’ she had encountered among the city's Czech and German inhabitants.Footnote 160 In her memoirs, she suggested that, being Prague-born, she might have learnt Czech if their national movement had been stronger in her youth.Footnote 161
Fried's comments on the Pan-Slav Congress of 1898 provide an interesting perspective on the Czech–German conflict. The congress marked a double anniversary: the founding figure of the Czech national movement, František Palacký, had been born in 1798, and in 1848 he had organized the first Pan-Slav Congress. Both congresses countered German nationalism: the first in the context of the 1848 revolution, the second in regard to German resistance to the Badeni decrees. At first sight, Fried's comments on the 1898 meeting suggest sympathies with German nationalism. The journalist – who still resided in Berlin at the time – noted that representatives of the ‘Slavic world … had thrown the gauntlet down to Deutschtum in general’. He criticized ‘foreigners’ who ‘on the hospitable soil of a European empire’ sought to ‘besmirch the image of a nation that has provided the cultural foundations of this empire’.Footnote 162 Fried expressed particular resentment about the Russian general Vissarion Komarow, editor of the pan-Slavist periodical Ruskii Mir, whose Prague speech had encouraged Czechs in their conflict with the Austro-Germans.Footnote 163 Yet, to Fried, such incidents were mere reflections of a wider problem, namely ‘this woeful chauvinism, this exaggerated cult of the nation and this pigheaded addiction to self-adulation, from which all of Europe suffers’. Fried interpreted the Prague congress as the mirror image of ‘our own chauvinism’. As evidence of this diagnosis, he cited the infamous remarks of the German classicist Theodor Mommsen who, during the Badeni crisis, had described ‘Czech skulls’ as ‘impervious to reason, but susceptible to blows’.Footnote 164 Thus, Fried's discussion served as a plea to Germans and Slavs to abandon aggressive nationalism and engage in dialogue.
Austro-pacifists fostered Czech–German contacts after the turn of the century. Fried himself exchanged letters with Alexandr Batěk, a journalist writing for the Czech newspapers Přednášky pro lid and Přednášky z oboru vzdělanosti. Batĕk sought advice concerning the publication of a Czech-language pamphlet on peace, and the establishment of the review Zájmy všelidské with a permanent pacifist section.Footnote 165 Meanwhile, Suttner agreed to lend her name to a ‘committee for cultural reconciliation between Czechs and Germans’, which the author Hermann Bahr – initially close to Pan-Germanism and by no means a pacifist – intended to set up in 1909.Footnote 166 The same year, Austrian pacifists co-operated with Czech associations in a joint appeal for an international ‘peace day’.Footnote 167 The Czech leader Thomas Masaryk acknowledged the ÖFG's efforts when advocating a freeze on armaments expenditure at a session of the Delegations in October 1910.Footnote 168 Nonetheless, attempts to create a supranational Bohemian Peace Society failed on several occasions.
In 1913, a new organization, entitled Austria Nova, Gesellschaft zur Förderung des nationalen Friedens in Österreich, sought to pacify Czech–German relations. Its programme echoed pacifist arguments, for instance by portraying the struggle between different national groups as detrimental to economic development. ‘Organizational work towards peace’ was one of the association's declared aims.Footnote 169 At its founding meeting, Josef Václav Drozda, a leader of the Viennese Czechs, argued that Austria's ‘true vocation’ was the ‘concert of European peoples’ and that its ‘higher vocation’ was to offer equal treatment to its different nationalities.Footnote 170 The ÖFG committee member Kobatsch was among the society's founding members, and Fried was the first person to sign its public appeal.Footnote 171 These examples highlight the ambiguities of pacifist engagement with the national question: instinctively, many activists favoured reconciliation not only between states but also domestically. However, the ÖFG declined to present a comprehensive reform programme, offering its ‘apolitical’ nature as an excuse.
Austro-pacifists were more outspoken when it came to another divisive force in fin-de-siècle Austria: anti-Semitism. In the 1880s, the nationalist Georg von Schönerer rose to prominence, blending anti-Semitism with Pan-Germanism and anti-Slavism. In the subsequent decade, a new party – Karl Lueger's Christian Socials – turned political Catholicism, middle-class politics, and anti-Semitism into a winning electoral formula. As a result, Vienna became ‘the only European capital … to have an elected anti-Semitic municipal government’.Footnote 172 Steven Beller has distinguished between Schönerer's racial anti-Semitism and the Christian Socials’ more diffuse variant: the latter alternated between religious, economic, and ethnic arguments, with Lueger ‘milking the ambiguities of Viennese antisemitism for all they were worth’.Footnote 173 Strikingly, the leader of the Christian Socials and mayor of Vienna had started his political career as a liberal. Moreover, in 1882, he supported the abandoned project of a German People's Party – despite the involvement of Fischhof, who has been described as ‘the most significant political theorist of Jewish origin in the Austro-German Bürgertum’.Footnote 174 Lueger's trajectory is, however, less surprising if one considers John Boyer's argument that ‘the history of the Christian Socials owed much to the Liberal and Democratic traditions’.Footnote 175 The Christian Socials managed to form a party that attracted broad middle-class support and thus performed a role that had previously been taken by the liberals.
Even before the Christian Socials’ breakthrough in 1895, Austro-pacifists campaigned against anti-Semitism. In 1891, Suttner's husband set up a Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus, supported by peace activists such as Rudolf Count Hoyos. In launching this initiative, Arthur Gundaccar von Suttner evoked Austrian patriotism, describing it as a ‘society to save the good old Austrian spirit’.Footnote 176 Two years later, an article in Die Waffen nieder! stressed the incompatibility of pacifism and anti-Semitism.Footnote 177 Pacifists such as Bertha von Suttner viewed militarism and anti-Semitism as being animated by a similar spirit of destruction, and noted that anti-Semitism could serve as a tool for militarist forces.Footnote 178 Their resistance to anti-Semitism did not, however, trigger pacifist support for Zionism. For instance, Fried – who came from a secular Jewish family – kept his distance, although newspaper cuttings in his personal papers suggest that he followed the debates on the Zionist project.Footnote 179 Meanwhile, Suttner maintained direct links with Theodor Herzl, the Viennese journalist and founding father of Zionism. Herzl disagreed with the ÖFG's pacifism, but nonetheless sponsored Suttner's journey to the Hague Peace Conference, on which she reported for Herzl's newspaper Die Welt.Footnote 180 One person who knew and respected both Herzl and Suttner was the celebrated writer Stefan Zweig: he described the former as ‘one of the creators of ideas who disclose themselves triumphantly in a single country, to a single people at vast intervals’ and praised the latter as the ‘majestic and grandiose Cassandra of our time’.Footnote 181 Zweig portrayed himself as ‘an Austrian, a Jew, an author, a humanist, and a pacifist’ – yet he was neither a Zionist nor an ÖFG member.Footnote 182 Instead, his pacifism was based on wider notions of European culture and on the experience of an empire whose ‘supranational character and cosmopolitan tradition’ appeared to intellectuals such as Zweig as a ‘model of European co-operation’.Footnote 183
VI
Zweig's view of the Habsburg Monarchy seems to contrast with the experience of the Austro-pacifists, whose problems illustrate the turbulent nature of Austrian politics at the fin de siècle. The late Habsburg Monarchy was a state whose army performed a unifying role and whose monarch emphasized his military credentials. In such an environment, campaigns for international federations, compulsory arbitration, and disarmament had limited appeal. Furthermore, Austro-pacifism was a form of middle-class politics and, as such, sought alliances with political liberalism – yet the latter was subject to both internal rifts and external challenges. In Vienna, the Christian Socials succeeded the liberals as the party of the Bürgertum, and in different parts of Cisleithania, liberal activism occurred within voluntary associations dedicated to German language and culture.Footnote 184 The ÖFG's focus on supranational ideas and tolerance therefore seemed at odds with the broader direction of Austrian politics. As a result, pacifists largely avoided discussions of controversial domestic matters. They thus missed the opportunity to define what the multi-national nature of the Habsburg Monarchy might mean for peace activism – or what pacifism might mean for Austria-Hungary's domestic conflicts.
The pacifists’ disillusionment became evident in 1914: ‘Oh well, Austria as the location for a Universal Peace Congress: what nonsense!’, Suttner wrote in April that year, expressing her frustrations at the attempt to organize this event.Footnote 185 After her death in June 1914, Fried continued to prepare the gathering. Having anticipated ‘the most brilliant congress’, Austria-Hungary's declaration of war on Serbia put paid to his efforts ‘in the most brutal manner’. He viewed the cancellation as an ‘immense disappointment and a great loss for our propaganda’.Footnote 186 Following the outbreak of military conflict, Fried and the ÖFG planned a peace demonstration.Footnote 187 However, after the government's prohibition of the event, most activists rallied behind emperor and army.Footnote 188 As this article has shown, their stance in 1914 did not represent a simple volte-face: from the outset, Austro-pacifism was characterized by a quest for respectability and a willingness to operate within the limitations of Austrian fin-de-siècle politics.
