Public Order, Social Order, and the Politics of Urban Spaces in Late Habsburg Austria

• In Event: Politics of Urban Space in the Late Habsburg Bohemian Lands

Abstract

Urban space, the main squares and streets of cities in the Bohemian Lands, famously became an important site of nationalist conflicts in the last decades of the Habsburg Empire. This paper explores instead the contested aspect of public space in towns across the Bohemian Lands, not through the lens of nationalist conflicts, but focusing on social tensions. It examines the use of urban space to challenge the established order (through demonstrations) or, on the contrary, to uphold the social order. Definitions of what public space meant and who was entitled to its use had a highly charged political meaning. A democratizing polity meant that demonstrations were increasingly tolerated as part of the political process, but resistance to workers’ participation in the public sphere was still strong. The period immediately before the war witnessed a mobilization for the defence of order, in both the concrete sense of public order, but also in the more figurative sense of preserving the hierarchical organization of society. The fact that workers invested public space during demonstrations, attacked non-strikers in front of factories or campaigned for Social Democratic candidates during elections were all grouped under the term “Social Democratic terrorism”. Public space played a crucial role in the anti-Social-Democratic discourse, as threats to public order were also experienced as threats to the social order.

Author

• Claire Morelon, U of Manchester (UK)