Abstract
Andrej Rahten’s biography of the ‘uncrowned Duke of Carniola’ forms a perfect companion volume to Pavlina Bobič’s recent study on Slovene Catholics during the First World War. Ivan Šusteršič (1863–1925) was the leader of the Catholic Pan-Slovenian People’s Party and served as governor (Landeshauptmann) of the autonomous administration of the Austrian province (‘crownland’) of Carniola from 1911 to 1918. (Apart from the Landeshauptmann, there was also an imperial governor, or Statthalter, who ran the local branches of the central administration.) Šusteršič came from a family of ‘black and yellow’, i.e. firmly pro-Habsburg civil servants whose diverse ethnic allegiances will gladden the heart of ‘constructivist’ interpreters of nationalism: one of his brothers, a naval officer, ended up as a Croatian; another, a tax official, professed German nationality and later on became a citizen of Italy. Ivan, a lawyer, was one of the few laymen within the leadership of the Slovene Catholic movement, but rose to the top of the party thanks to the support of successive bishops of Ljubljana.
Slovenes formed an overwhelming majority (94 per cent) of Carniola’s population. In 1904 Šusteršič’s party finally managed to win an overall majority in the diet. Šusteršič strove to integrate representatives of the Slovene minorities of the neighbouring crownlands into his party, after 1910 even adding to it a partnership with the Croatian States Rights Party. In the long run, though, the more conservative instincts of Šusteršič and his Carniolan clique of ‘beati possidentes’ clashed with the more radical approach of, say, Styrian and Carinthian Slovenes, as well as with the Christian Social undercurrent in his own backyard; both of these resented Šusteršič’s conservative approach and occasional collusion with governments in Vienna. These differences came into the open once the First World War opened an alternative vision of Yugoslav unity. Šusteršič’s links with the Croatians did not produce any results as Croatia belonged to the Hungarian ‘half’ of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Hungarians consistently vetoed any tendencies towards ‘trialism’, i.e. a Yugoslavia within the framework of the Habsburg monarchy.
In the spring of 1917 a declaration in favour of a Yugoslav solution received tens of thousands of signatures from Slovenes. In the autumn of the same year, Šusteršič was voted out of office as the leader of his party, his place being taken by Anton Korošec, a priest from neighbouring Styria. To some extent his former achievements had come to haunt him: the more nationalist Slovenes from outside Carniola he had integrated into the Pan-Slovenes – and Bishop Jeglič, who for once sided with Šusteršič’s critics in 1917. Yet, as Jeglič was the first to admit, Šusteršič’s defeat was far from being a foregone conclusion: among the backbone of the party, the Carniolan clergy, a majority were clearly unhappy with their bishop’s decision, even more so as the outcome of the war was far from certain in the winter of 1917–18. A few months later, though, Jeglič’s stand was vindicated by the collapse of the monarchy.
Šusteršič himself was forced to go into temporary exile in October 1918. He did not accept his banishment graciously. In 1920 he was supposed to have schemed with the Italians to destabilize the newly founded Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. When he returned to Ljubljana in 1923, he unsuccessfully tried to found a party of his own that was supported by Serb centralists, of all people. Andrej Rahten deserves thanks for skilfully investigating the different shades of grey in a political landscape that has too often been painted in the stark contrasts of simply black and white. The disintegration of the Habsburg monarchy proved to be a complex game where almost everyone kept hedging their bets until almost the very end.