Conservatives in the East

This chapter deals with two statesmen from the empire’s east, Leon Biliński and Mykola Wassilko, who belonged to the older generation, defined themselves as conservatives, and continued in politics after 1918 in Poland and Ukraine. The empire’s legacy in its former eastern borderland was as important as in its center (now Austria) and its German-Slavic frontier (after 1918, Czechoslovakia). While continuities between the empire and republican Austria and Czechoslovakia have received some attention in the literature, the empire’s “afterlife” in Poland is a less familiar topic, and its afterlife in Ukraine is less familiar still, perhaps to some extent owing to the counter-intuitiveness of the connection. By shifting focus to the east, this chapter reveals how the same ideologies and political landmarks in the empire’s history (for example, liberalism, conservatism, and 1848 and 1867) had different repercussions for territories outside of Vienna—in particular, the eastern borderland. It is an analysis of the ways in which the empire’s conservatives incorporated imperial practices in their new states, or under conditions of statelessness, in Europe’s east, after the dust, and borders, had settled.