Socialism and decentralization

How did Marxists in the late Habsburg Empire theorize federalism? To most Marxist thinkers before 1914, federalism was a territorial question. It went hand-in-hand with the puzzle of democratizing the political, economic, social, and cultural spheres located and doubly materialized within particular crownlands and within the empire taken as a whole. Federalism went to the heart of resolving various national questions; decentralization was understood as laying the groundwork for a socialist transformation of the state and society. However, alternative voices emerged, too. Some Marxists argued that only through the strict centralization of the state in a unitary framework could the dictatorship of the proletariat be established. Others argued not for a federalism of territory but rather for various non-territorial solutions. The urgency of these ideas came to the fore after Austria-Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908. The Marxist answer to the Bosnian Crisis, including the independence of Bulgaria, was support for a Balkan federation, an idea based on earlier theorizations. Before the First World War, this chapter argues, the most productive and contested Marxist theorizations of federalism in East Central Europe came from within the South Slavic social democratic parties spanning Austria-Hungary and the Balkans.