Vol. XXXIV · 2003

T. Mills Kelly

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On November 27, 1905, leading members of the Czech and German communities in Moravia agreed to a political compromise that divided power in the provincial diet between Czechs, Germans, and members of the landowning and ecclesiastical aristocracy. Over the next few years, the Moravian agreement was used as a model for political compromises in Bukovina (1910) and Galicia (1914). For decades historians hailed the Moravian compromise and its successors as evidence that the feuding nations of the late Habsburg monarchy could indeed find sufficient common ground to live together in peace. Although in the past decade scholars generally have taken a more cautious approach to the results of these compromises, much of this work betrays a sense of disappointment over a missed opportunity. Somehow, the Czech-German compromise in Moravia might have become a model for ethnic cooperation, proof that the monarchy's contentious national communities could work out their differences and live together, or at least a sign that political compromises of this sort have the potential to provide the basis for broader settlements of national conflicts in East Central Europe.