LIBERAL REFORM IN CROATIA, 1872-75: THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN CROATIA UNDER BAN IVAN MAZURANIC

Between 1872 and 1875 the government and legislature of the Kingdom of Croatia, an autonomous part of the Hungarian half of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, enacted an extensive program of reform in the spirit of classic nineteenth-century liberalism. Among the thirty-six separate reform measures passed in these years were the reorganization of the administrative structure and the courts, the founding of a state-run public school system and a university, a slight broadening of civil liberties, Jewish emancipation, a penal reform, a reorganization of the public health system, and tentative economic legislation. The responsibility for these reforms lay with the ban, or chief executive of Croatia, Ivan Mazuranic, and with the sabor, the local legislature, dominated by the Nationalist Party to which Mazuranic belonged. The ban and sabor majority consciously imitated liberal reforms enacted elsewhere in Europe, borrowing eclectically but showing a preference for Austrian and German models. Although many of their reforms encountered opposition inside and outside the sabor, this opposition remained fragmented and ineffectual, directed more at the details of the legislation than at its liberal inspiration. The enactment of these reforms and the legislative and newspapers debates over them offer striking proof of the acceptance of the beliefs of classical liberalism by Croatia's politically active minority.;This dissertation surveys the reforms, the debates over them, and the political situation responsible for this spate of legislation in order to illuminate a neglected aspect of Croatian nationalism, the commitment to liberalism of the Croatian Nationalist Party. Furthermore, by concentrating on political life within the Kingdom of Croatia and not on the Croatian nationalist movement as a whole, the dissertation also results in a revision of traditional views of two important problems in Yugoslav historiography, the relationship between Croats and Serbs and the relationship between Croatia and Hungary. It shows that in the early 1870s Croats and Serbs within the Croatian Kingdom cooperated as much as they quarreled. It also demonstrates that, in this period at least, relatively amicable Croat-Hungarian relations were still possible and that post-1867 relations between Budapest and Zagreb were not always characterized by unremitting Hungarian attempts to curtail Croatian autonomy.;The reformers were, however, more representative of Croatia's small educated urban population than of the majority of the inhabitants, who were peasants and mostly illiterate. The reforms themselves were more congenial to the city dwellers, who partook of the general political life of the Habsburg Monarchy and were aware of political, social, and economic developments elsewhere in Europe, than they were to the peasants, whose still traditional life was under assault from these same European developments. The reformers, aware of this, proceeded from the assumption that their reforms would be a first step toward educating Croatia's masses to the benefits of the modern nineteenth century. Their reforms did represent a successful effort to bring Croatia into line with then generally accepted European political ideals and established the framework for Croatian government and society for the next fifty years.