It is not everyone who can turn bureaucrats into the protagonists of an interesting and readable tale. That is, however, exactly what John Deak accomplishes in Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War. Each chapter begins with an arresting anecdote that Deak then uses to launch an important analytical intervention into our current understanding of Habsburg history. Chapter 2, “The Madness of Count Stadion,” opens with a talented interior minister who suffers a nervous breakdown and descends into insanity in 1849. Later come a ministerial secretary who is ordered to draft an interpellation condemning the government on behalf of a radical Czech nationalist political party; a Ministerialrat outraged by the demand that he reorganize the entire ministerial archive; and a field marshal who desperately tried to delay the onset of martial law in Trieste. Each episode imbues the bureaucrat—a word designed to depersonalize a human being by describing him or her as a piece of furniture—with desires and interests, motives and frustrations.

The most important of these opening anecdotes is, however, the first one: Francis Joseph, aged eighty, sits at his desk, filling out a census form, pondering how to describe his occupation. Deak trots out a few of the familiar titles, Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, Duke of Styria, as well as the one most likely to amuse: King of Jerusalem – before revealing the phrase the old emperor actually chose: “self-employed chief official” (1). This is not just amusing: it also reframes Habsburg history in the long nineteenth century. Instead of bemoaning the emperor's many titles—far too many, standard textbooks remind readers, for a modern world of unitary nation-states—Deak points to the foundational basis for the unity of the empire in its last seventy years. That basis, Deak argues, was its bureaucracy and, more important, its many bureaucrats.

Bureaucrats, more than the abstract state, are at the center of this story. The “legions of bean counters, minute takers, building inspectors, and… censors and police officials” (62) who populated the Habsburg administration created one unitary state out of a patchwork of municipalities, counties, provinces, crown lands, duchies, and kingdoms. They did this when the emperor told them to do so, as Joseph II did, and they continued to do it when the emperor lost interest in centralization, as did his son, Francis.

Deak strips away many of the causal elements that are used to explain the eventual dissolution of the monarchy. Emperor Francis was not actually a reactionary, but his fear of change paradoxically allowed a culture of promoting change to lie dormant in the civil service. The year 1848 was not a failed revolution that left Austria bereft of a constitution but rather a “different revolution, a silent one that sought to harness revolutionary change to a stronger and more centralist state apparatus” (79) by institutionalizing “public involvement” (86). What historians have long thought of as absolutist retrenchment after 1848—a sort of holding period in which one waits for Francis Joseph to allow, finally, a constitution in 1867—Deak calls “a twenty-year period of constitutional and political experimentation” (97).

Previous historians have pointed to the extraordinary power of the nobility in prerevolutionary Austria. In Deak's words, there were parts of the monarchy where “a single seigneur could and often did hold all the territory in an administrative district… A peasant who looked at his lord would see not only his landlord, but his local justice, his local government official, his local military recruiter and draft officer, his school superintendent, his tax collector, sanitation official, and whatever else was remotely governmental” (47). This is not new in itself, but Deak does not stop with an observation about the diminution of noble power in 1848. Instead he shows his reader what filled that gap: the “local judicial and administrative offices” that not only represented both emperor and state, but also brought both of them “closer to every Austrian citizen” (99). The 1850s saw absolutist retrenchment but also an unprecedented increase in the size of the administrative apparatus—hundreds of offices staffed by “pioneers” on the front lines of state creation. Yes, state creation, because, as Deak argues, this bureaucracy amounted to a new “infrastructure state, building wealth and its own legitimacy,” one not based on some putative national identity, but rather created by the “bridge builders and bridge inspectors, road and building inspectors, veterinarians, sanitation officials, and engineers” (131) who did the state's work.

The claim that the unification of Austria into a single state “embodied Austria's attempts to modernize and to meet the challenges of the modern world” (62) suggests that Austrian civil servants and key administrators operated with a shared sense of what constituted a “modern” state, as well as a shared admiration for the “modern” itself. Even readers skeptical of this uncritical use of the concept of the “modern” will recognize that Deak dismantles a long-held view. Instead of seeing the seeds of destruction at every turn, Deak retraces paths towards participatory politics that were long taken before they were not taken any more.

The empire nevertheless did “fail,” in the end, and Deak offers a few hints about how that came about: with World War I, “the state no longer would bring civilization and progress to the countryside; it would bring troop recruiters, gendarmes, food commissars, and then, after years of war, death, hunger, and suffering” (260). It is easy enough to criticize a dominant explanation (and many have done so before Deak), but it is much harder to propose an alternative. Indeed, Deak does not do this fully in Forging a Multinational State, and it is important to look at his current work on World War I as a continuation of the main argument of the book. If neither absolutist ineptitude nor backwardness spelled doom for the monarchy, what did? Deak has hinted here and elsewhere that the answer lies in the process of war making as undertaken by the empire, not just in the occurrence of war, and readers would be wise to watch his work for future development of that thesis.