Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs 33. (1980)
LIANG, Hsi-Huey: International Cooperation of Political Police in Europe, 1815–1914. An Essay Based on Some Austrian Archival Sources
International Cooperation of Political Police 205 took the form of large-scale revisions in the territorial and/or the sociological base of state power. The immediate examples were the German revolution which took the form of a horizontal amalgamation of Prussia and most of Northern and Southern Germany betwen 1866 and 1871, bringing in its wake a concomitant revision in Austria’s political direction southward, and the redistribution of power between Vienna and Budapest. Almost at the same time Russia presented the world with an equally bold revolutionary innovation through the Peasant Emancipation of 1861, which amounted to a sociological and territorial expansion of the Russian state basis from the towns to the country-side. Needless to say, the Russian revolution of 1861 was only just the beginning. Even the hardiest advocates of peasant emancipation knew that the Russian rural masses could not be expected to help modernize Russia for several decades to come. And similarly the revolutionary changes that had produced the second German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy were understood as only the first steps in a protracted task of reform. This was the threshhold of the “Contemporary Age” with its so characteristic phenomenon of the “perpetual revolution”, whose dynamics ultimately pointed towards totalitarian control in home affairs and aspirations towards full hegemony in foreign affairs. The strongest urge to revolution existed in Central and Eastern Europe, where new means of controlling increasingly larger land masses inhabited by more and more people, and of defending vaster domains against outside challenge, met with the least resistance from traditional social and political institutions. The situation was dangerous insofar as a serious discrepancy developed in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia between the rate at which the rulers could impose obedience to the state by coercive means from above (police), and the rate at which the society’s voluntary endorsement of the state and its policies could be elicited by political education. Another difficulty was the disparity that existed between the optimal territory a state could at any given time desire for its military security and the optimal frontiers it needed for effective police control. Imperial Germany at the turn of the century was militarily highly vulnerable — the Schlieffen Plan is eloquent testimony to that — though she scarcely could increase her territory without endangering her domestic stability. Austria-Hungary on the other hand was undermined at home by the conflict of nationalist and socio-economic interests, while her external frontiers were fairly safe. France, since'Waterloo without far-reaching national ambitions had no outstanding security problems requiring close police surveillance outside her frontiers. But her ally after 1892, Tsarist Russia, faced not only peasant unrest at home, but also urban disquiet, as her secret police had to infiltrate revolutionary circles there and in the chief capitals abroad, obliging her to seek the collaboration of foreign police authorities.
