Towards a new quality of statehood : bureaucratization and state-building in empires and nation states before 1914

Abstract

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the European continental empires faced the challenge of integrating hugely diverse populations within political systems that could no longer rely simply on bureaucratic administration and military control. Both the Habsburg Monarchy and the Russian Empire attempted to channel political mobilization via local self-administration and increasing measures of parliamentary participation, without fully giving up their autocratic character. Similar attempts by the Ottoman Empire during the Tanzimat period were thwarted and could not stem the tide of disintegration and the emergence of nation states in the Balkans. New research on the development of imperial infrastructures has demonstrated that imperial rule itself began to take on features of the European nation states. The chapter focuses on these developments and discusses the challenges that rising popular expectations in various social fields posed to imperial rule, but also to which extent the new nation states in the Balkans coped with these tasks.