ABSTRACT
The troubled relationship of the provinces to the capital, Vienna, in the final days of the Habsburg monarchy has long served as a startingpoint in historiography, especially within the framework of constitutional history, for attempted explanations of the crisis-ridden development of the first republic. Inevitably, research was at first focused only on the initial phase of the post-war crisis in which the decisive steps were undertaken to create a new state order. Very often the provinces have been ascribed an independent revolutionary development in this period, and the revolutionary events which occurred there have been described as being a process set off from, if not running counter to, the national development. In this process, a ‘federalism of the provinces’ is supposed to have opposed the ‘centralism of the national government’.1 Yet in actuality, it can be shown that the ‘revolutionary events’ up to the law of 14 November 1918, concerning the assumption of state authority in the provinces (St.G.Bl. 24/1918), happened ‘concurrently’, so that it is not correct to speak of a ‘birth defect’ in this sense.2 Starting in mid-November, however, a widespread ‘break-with-Vienna movement’ was discernible in the provinces, as was an obvious deterioration of relations between the provinces. Whereas the latter, as Ernst Hanisch implied,3 was due chiefly to the intense conflicts over the apportionment of resources and the distribution of expenses among the provinces, tensions between the provinces and Vienna flared up on several levels. Vienna, as a large city, a metropolis, a former seat of a royal empire and now the country’s capital, became increasingly the focus of a very emotionally conducted, critical debate in the provinces during the course of this crisis.
