Acceso usuarios
Sarka Lellkova
The boycott of parliamentary assemblies was used in the Habsburg monarchy by minorities as a ‘weapon of last resort’. The German liberals applied this method to the Bohemian Diet in December 1886, because the Czech majority refused to debate a German motion on the administrative division of Bohemia into Czech- and German-speaking parts and on the repeal of language ordinances bringing equal rights to both languages in contacts between the people and government offices.
The press commented on the whole event according to national and political orientation. The Czech newspapers described the behaviour of the Germans as unjustified; the Germans reproached the Czechs with lack of attention to their grievances. The Vienna government considered the struggle to be a bilateral problem of the two nations.
Eye-witnesses to the scene in the Bohemian Diet depicted the atmosphere in different colours from the newspapers. Neither the members of the majority nor those of the minority expressed feelings of particular resentment toward the other nation. The real reason for the German decision to boycott the proceedings seems to have lain with the internal development of the German Liberal Party, governed by intra-party rivalries.
