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
206 Hsi-Huey Liang To compound the difficulties of the European situation in the second half of the nineteenth century, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and also Russia — all three of them autocratic, bureaucratic, and militaristic — were convinced that their individual problems could not be resolved by political reform inside their own frontiers. Unilateral democratization brought to each nation the hazard of domestic turmoil and foreign intervention, especially since each of the three empires had cause to believe that it could ease its own domestic tensions without weakening its autocracy by a measured dose of foreign conquest. No wonder something like creeping paralysis affected Europe’s diplomatic relations following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. France and England remained twenty years in diplomatic isolation. Bismarck’s various short-term alliances with Russia and Austria-Hungary were aimed at preserving the status quo. The wave of secret societies and terroristic attacks between 1871 and 1905 may be regarded as the outcome of political frustration in a world governed by a complicated machinery of sovereign states whose overlapping security needs and mutually destructive war-making capacity had produced an impasse. The solution seemed to lie in the abolition of war and the elimination of absolute national independence in matters of police, and finally in some means of synchronizing social and economic reform across national frontiers, an idea first put into practice by the International Labor Office in 1919. The police needs of the European states after 1871 led to a number of diplomatic meetings as well as to direct contacts between professional security men, by-passing the foreign services of their respective governments. Dieter Fricke in his study of the Prussian political police during this period furnishes us with a virtual time-table of conferences between the Prussian government and foreign representatives on international police problems41). He mentions a meeting in 1871 between Bismarck and the Austrian chancellor Beust to discuss the international repercussions of the Paris Commune. Another conference between the same parties took place the following year to consider joint measures for the suppression of socialism. In 1883, the Danish police cooperated with Berlin in watching a German Social Democratic Party meeting in Copenhagen, while the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 produced a spurt of mutual consultations between policemen in Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg. The murder of the French President Sadi Carnot by an Italian terrorist in 1894, and the murder of Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary in 1898, finally prompted the holding of the International Anti-Anarchist Conference in Rome from 24 November to 26 December, 18 9 8 42). 41) Dieter Fricke Bismarcks Prätorianer. Die Berliner politische Polizei im Kampf gegen die deutsche Arbeiterbewegung (1871-1898) (Berlin 1962) passim. 42) HHStA Politisches Archiv (hereafter PA) XXVII 64 (Liasse II Konferenz zu Rom zur Bekämpfung des Anarchismus, Vorgeschichte) and 65 (Liasse II Konferenz ..
