| Changes in Government Policy | 3. NEW TENDENCIES AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY | The Coalition Era and the Last Viennese Experiment: The Initiatives of Francis Ferdinand |
At the turn of the century, the political activity of Transylvania's Romanians entered a new phase, although the initial signs were barely perceptible. The traditional, confrontational approach had exhausted itself in the memorandum case. Although that episode had given some moral satisfaction to the chief participants and their supporters, it brought no remedy to their grievances, nor guidance for the future. Years would pass before the Romanian national party managed to adapt its ideology to the new political circumstances and to the needs of a Romanian intelligentsia and bourgeoisie in the midst of social change.
The party's leaders were still in prison when a crisis shook their movement. Although the party now owned Tribuna, the paper continued to be run by the founding group, which was led, from emigration, by its 'captain,' Brote. The group openly criticized the party's inflexible leadership and its supporter, Romania's conservative party; from prison, Raţiu and his associates issues manifestos denouncing the latter party. The Tribuna 'strike' was facilitated by the fact that the leaders selected to lead the national party during the others' imprisonment (Vasile Mangra and Ioan Rusu-Şirianu) also came from founding group. Raţiu and the other imprisoned leaders decided that their replacements would have to be 'dismissed from all functions.'[66] Raţiu knew that he had the backing of the much-reduced national committee; upon his release, the party chairman transferred ownership of the paper to a new consortium and made forceful attempts to expel his opponents. People hostile to the Romanian movement took malicious pleasure at the vicious quarrel — marked by appeals to the courts, external audits, and even the smashing of windows — between the two groups. The Tribunists toured around to rally support and organized meetings in Sinaia and Brassó. Raţiu retaliated by dismissing the remaining Tribunists from the paper, in one case under police escort. The party's disunity {3-703.} was vividly exposed. Some Romanian notables in Arad protested against his high-handed measures, and many members of the national committee boycotted the talks between the two sides. In 1896, the factional dispute flared up among the emigres in Bucharest.
The first stimulus for the development a new program came from political changes in Romania. As noted earlier, when Sturdza came to power in autumn 1895, he saw the necessity of forging a modus vivendi and advised his followers in Transylvania to adopt a conciliatory approach toward Hungary. As a first step, the party would have to give up its tactical passivism and return to parliament in order to seek a compromise with the Budapest government; instead of demanding autonomy for Transylvania, it should aim at an extension of the franchise. (In Hungary, the government and the liberally-oriented parties had long considered that such a proposal would be a sound basis for negotiation even if it could not definitively solve the minority problem.) The Tribunists in Transylvania and Bucharest joined forces to launch a new newspaper. They chose to do so not in Transylvania but in Arad, where Romanians were active in county politics, and where they could count on support from wealthy peasants; moreover, the Romanians in Arad and the Banat had not been infected by passivism. Although Romanians made up only 15 percent of Arad's population, they constituted the second largest Romanian community after the one in Brassó. The city was home to a Romanian bishopric and seminary as well as to their second largest bank, the Victoria. The Tribunists, young and old, who founded the newspaper believed that the booming town could provide a propitious environment for constructive dialogue between Romanians and Hungarians. Launched in 1897, Tribuna Poporului soon became the best Romanian paper, overshadowing the original Tribuna published in Nagyszeben. Lacking good journalists, the latter went into a long decline and ceased publication in 1903.
{3-704.} The new paper in Arad proceeded gingerly in promoting a more activist approach. In early 1897, a series of seven articles made the case for a posture of 'friendly reserve' vis-à-vis the Bánffy government. The newspaper urged party leaders to participate in the elections called in 1901 by the Széll government. By then, Tribuna Poporului openly hailed the advent of a new era of constitutional struggle. The paper was gaining in influence, notably with regard to some important appointments. In 1899, Iosif Goldiş was chosen orthodox bishop at Arad; the next year, Mangra became vicar at Nagyvárad, and Roman Ciorogaru, principal of the Arad theology school; in 1901, Vasile Goldiş was appointed secretary of the consistory. Meanwhile, the paper's editors established contacts with Hungarian politicians.
The Arad faction was not suited to become the organizer of a new, activist movement, for it was too impatient and too committed to the liberals in Romania. That political function was served by a prosperous and expanding social stratum, the Romanian bourgeoisie, which appropriated the Arad program and applied it to the traditional party system. In March 1902, Ioan Mihu, a major landowner and bank director, wrote in the new Szászváros paper Libertatea that the 'cart should be moved out of its rut': in concrete terms, he proposed that the 1881 program be revised to accept Dualism and Transylvania's union with Hungary, and to present a new and detailed cultural and social policy. One of the lawyers of the Balázsfalva archbishopric, Iuliu Maniu, drafted an action program for developing the party in the countryside, for active involvement in county affairs and political propaganda through the press. Even the death of the old-guard leader, Raţiu, failed to weaken opposition to this program, and so a few activists, in their thirties at the time, decided to form a new party, or at least a new faction. The new party chairman, Gheorghe Pop de Băşeşti (György Pap Illésfalvi), tried to forestall scission by relaxing party discipline. Thus, in the summer of 1903, Aurel Vlad made no mention {3-705.} of the goal of national autonomy when he ran as the Romanian party's candidate in a by-election in Hunyaddobra. His success in winning the seat had a great impact on the new Romanian bourgeoisie, which yearned to escape from political impotence, and it was hailed in Romania's press. The more ardent activists in Arad anticipated that Romanians might soon obtain as many as forty seats in parliament.
The nomination, in autumn 1903, of Count István Tisza as prime minister met with some misgivings on the part of Hungarians, but it aroused great expectations among Romanians and Saxons. Tisza was regarded as the king's man; he had always acknowledged the importance of the Romanian problem, and he understood that Transylvania's Romanians had strong links to their conationals in Romania. He tried, in his own fashion, to consolidate the multinational Hungarian state and the monarchy by seeking an accord with the largest national minority, the Romanians. Tisza criticized the Hungarian press's chauvinistic tone and the anti-minority campaigns that 'directly serve the provocateurs who attack the country's interests and drive even loyal citizens into the arms of the enemy.'[67] In his inaugural address, the prime minister declared that 'winning and reinforcing the trust and sympathy of non-Magyar citizens' was an important national task; political moderates and people disposed to cooperate had to be won over from 'dangerous agitators.'[68] He quickly reached agreement with the Saxons, who rejoined the government party. Interpreting Tisza's remarks as a vindication of their policy, the left-wing Romanian activists in Arad sought a rapprochement with the government in a manifesto that was prominently displayed in their newspaper:
'We recognize the unity of the Hungarian state unconditionally and without ulterior motives, and we are ready to sacrifice our blood and resources for this political unity and the preservation of Hungary's territorial integrity if the state {3-706.} offers strong and clear institutional guarantees that allow us to develop in keeping with our national-ethnic distinctivenes. We take this position because we are convinced that a strong Habsburg state in central Europe offers a stronger guarantee of survival for our ethnic group than a Romania that, in the absence of a Habsburg state, would encompass all the Romanians of Trajan's Dacia. This is our response to the declarations of Count István Tisza.'[69]
However, the majority of the Romanian party's leaders distrusted Tisza. Indeed, the latter considered that his first priority was to resolve an unprecedentedly acute parliamentary crisis. He soon reached a compromise with the opposition Independence party: the latter gave up its demand that Hungarian be made the exclusive language of the armed forces, and, in exchange, Tisza promised to take new measures for Magyarizing schools — necessarily at the expense of the minority languages.
When Romania's tone also turned less conciliatory, the Tisza government drew up plans to restrict the independence of the Greek Orthodox Church and to impose state supervision over the minorities' schools. Education Minister Albert Berzeviczy drafted a bill to top up the salary of primary school teachers whose schools could not afford the minimum annual emolument of 800 crowns; the bill also aimed to increase state control over schools by prescribing the modalities of effective Hungarian-language instruction. When the bill was tabled in October 1904, moderate Saxons in the government party joined other nationalities in protest; the Hungarians, for their part, objected that the bill was not strong enough and demanded more extensive intervention by the state. A noted opposition deputy, the Transylvanian Miklós Bartha, complained that the bill was 'merely a threshold. I don't find it justified. It offends our Turanian nature, and the nationalities as well. It satisfies neither us nor them.'[70] Within a month, Tisza had withdrawn all government {3-707.} bills in order to clear the decks for a debate on the amendment of house rules. One of the casualties was the Berzeviczy project, which was revived a few years later, in more nationalistic form, under the name of 'lex Apponyi.'
From the point of view of the Romanian movement, the significance of the first Tisza administration lay in less spectacular and more moderate initiatives, all of which foreshadowed the conciliatory policy adopted by the prime minister in the 1910s. Tisza conferred with the lords lieutenant of certain counties about relations 'between the Romanian middle class and Hungarian society,' instructing them to make every effort to involve the former in social and political life. He held back from launching politically-motivated proceedings against the minority press; allowed the Romanian intelligentsia to hold meetings in protest against the Berzeviczy bill; and transferred to ASTRA, the Romanian cultural association at Nagyszeben, the funds (as well as the accumulated interest) that had been raised illegally for a memorial to Avram Iancu, and which Bánffy had confiscated. During Tisza's administration, the Romanians felt freer to speak up at county assemblies in defence of their linguistic rights. And it was upon his instructions that a Romanian nationalist was allowed to be elected mayor of Fehértemplom, which had an ethnically-mixed population. For the first time in many years, talks were held with Romanian party leaders and other prominent public figures, notably Mihu and Gheorghe Pop de Băşeşti. However, Tisza remained wedded to the traditional Dualist concept: he would allow Romanian politicians greater leeway only if they followed the example of the Saxons and merged with Hungarian parties, especially the governing party. In the event, a deepening political crisis precluded such experimentation, and the opposition groups in parliament joined forces to bring down the Tisza government.
In January 1911, on the eve of parliamentary elections, the Romanian National Party convened at Nagyszeben for its first {3-708.} conference in eleven years, and finally ratified the activist strategy advocated by the younger generation. The new platform departed from that of 1881 by dropping the long-standing demand for Transylvanian autonomy. Instead, it invited 'recognition of the state-founding, political character of the Romanian people, and institutional guarantees for their ethnic and constitutional development;' full implementation of the nationalities law; autonomous administrative districts that coincided with linguistic boundaries; and a universal, secret ballot.[71] There were other demands, inspired by the agrarian 'social oil-drop' approach, for the inalienability of landed property below a certain minimum area, exemption of low incomes from taxes, the redistribution of crown estates, health insurance, pensions, and free medical care for the poor.
Tisza, whose government was about to fall, perceived the significance of the Nagyszeben resolutions. While the monarch addressed letters to Church leaders urging them to rally in support of the government, Tisza shared his anxiety with the Romanian bishops: 'Our country's Romanian citizens can best serve their national ideals by devoting their full energy to the consolidation of the Hungarian state.' One of his 'enduring and fundamental objectives,' wrote Tisza, was to draw the minorities' politicians into Hungarian public life, and thus to 'rid them of the burden of exaggerated demands. I note with a heavy heart that the majority of Romanians, hitherto passive, have now endorsed a resolution that will impede, or even nullify this initiative — for a long time, perhaps forever.'[72]
The first results of the Romanian national movement's new attempt to secure its goals by constitutional means were rather disappointing. Although they put forward 23 candidates in some 40 constituencies, and although there was unusually little official pressure, they obtained only eight mandates. Their hopes of forming a sizeable parliamentary group were dashed.
The 1905 elections brought the defeat of Tisza's party. For the first time in nearly forty years, the majority of the electorate (but {3-709.} only a minority of Transylvanian voters) deserted the government and voted for an opposition alliance. The victory of the so-called coalition presented the national minorities with a new political challenge.
| Changes in Government Policy | 3. NEW TENDENCIES AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY | The Coalition Era and the Last Viennese Experiment: The Initiatives of Francis Ferdinand |