Constitutional Developments of the Habsburg Empire in the Last Decades before its Fall

In the aftermath of the Polish-Hungarian Conference held in Cracow in 2007 there has been published the present volume. It is exponential of the cooperation between the legal historians of the Cracow and Pecs Universities. The participants of the Conference discussed at length the topics concerned with the constitutional developments in the Austro-Hungarian empire in the final era of its existence. A series of articles published in the volume are illustrative of the Rechtsstaat tendencies as detectable in the functioning of the Austro-Hungarian administration and the judiciary, and also in the field of Church-State relationships. Against that background there is also discussed the liberalism of the Austro-Hungarian regime in the area of emigration as well as the grass-roots initiative of the Poles in laying the foundations of Polonia restituta at the time when World War I had not yet come to its end. Last but not least, some authors present fairly-individual topics such as the role of the fidei-comissuni in promoting the preservation of cultural legacy in the Hungarian part of the empire, or the survival of Hungarian serfdom tradition in the area of Poland controlled post-war Spisz and Orawa.