Habsburg Monarchy and Austrian Empire

Voitsberg District district border sign

From the middle ages until the early nineteenth century, what would become the Austrian state – the Habsburg monarchy – was a large collection of formally separate feudal entities in a personal union under a single monarch of the house of Habsburg (Habsburg-Lorraine from 1780) rather than a single unified state. These entities were until the mid-eighteenth century absolute monarchies with no written constitution and no modern concept of the rule of law.^[9][10] Some of these entities lay within the Holy Roman Empire (the Erblande, the Lands of the Bohemian Crown, 1714–97 the Austrian Netherlands) while others lay outside it (the Kingdoms of Hungary and Croatia; from 1711 Transylvania; from 1772 Galicia and Lodomeria, among others). The modern state of Salzburg and parts of the surrounding states at this time belonged to the Prince-Archbishopric of Salzburg and numerous small enclaves belonging to other ecclesiastical principalities existed within the Erblande.

The states were ruled by the monarch, usually the emperor himself^{[note 2]} or a vassal of the emperor, supported by their personal advisors and the estates of the realm. The precise nature of the relationship between ruler and estates was different from region to region. Regional administrators were appointed by and answerable to the monarch.

The first step towards modern bureaucracy was taken by Empress Maria Theresa, who in 1753 imposed a system of 'circles'/districts (Kreise)^{[note 3]} and 'circle'/district offices (Kreisämter) throughout most of her realms. The 'circles' of Upper and Lower Austria and Styria were largely based on the pre-existing quarters of those realms. A major break with tradition, the system was unpopular at first; "in some provinces considerable resistance had to be overcome." The district offices never became fully operational in the Kingdom of Hungary^[11] or the Austrian Netherlands.

In 1804, in response to the declaration of the First French Empire and the ongoing Napoleonic Wars, Holy Roman Emperor Francis II declared himself Francis I, Emperor of Austria and unified the Habsburg realms into the Austrian Empire, while also remaining Holy Roman Emperor. The formerly separate realms became crownlands of this new Empire; those which were part of the Holy Roman Empire remained part of both. Francis dissolved the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. As a result of the German mediatisations and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, culminating in the 1815 Congress of Vienna, various territories, including Salzburg (until 1849 a 'circle' of Upper Austria), had become part of the new Empire, while other areas such as the Southern Netherlands and Further Austria (excluding Vorarlberg) had been lost.

Following the first wave of the revolutions of 1848, Emperor Ferdinand I and his minister of the interior, Franz Xaver von Pillersdorf, enacted Austria's first formal constitution. The constitution completely abolished the estates and called for a separation of executive and judicial authority, immediately crippling most existing regional institutions and leaving district offices as the backbone of the empire's administration. With Ferdinand having been forced to abdicate by a second wave of revolutions, his successor Franz Joseph I swiftly went to work transforming Austria from a constitutional monarchy back into an absolute one but kept relying on district offices at first. In fact, he strengthened the system.

His March Constitution retained the separation of judiciary and executive. It prescribed a partition of the empire into judicial venues, with courts to be headed by professional judges, and a separate partition into administrative districts, to be headed by professional civil servants. An 1849 Imperial Resolution fleshed out the details.^[1] The districts started functioning in 1850, many of them already in their present-day borders.

The March Constitution was never fully implemented and formally scrapped in 1851.^[12] Officially returning to full autocracy, the Emperor abolished the separation of powers. In 1853 Administrative districts were merged with judicial venues; district administrative authorities with district courts.^[13] During this period the Kreise were subdivided into Bezirke (or Amtsbezirke, 'office districts'), each with a Bezirksamt ('district office'). These were typically smaller than the modern districts; for example, Lower Austria, which is today divided into 24 districts, was divided into 70 Amtsbezirke.^[11][14] The crownlands of Carinthia, Carniola (now mostly part of Slovenia), Salzburg, Upper and Lower Silesia (now divided between the Czech Republic and Poland) and Bukovina (now divided between Romania and Ukraine) were not divided into Kreise^[13] but directly into Amtsbezirke. Vorarlberg was administered with Tyrol as Kreis Bregenz.^[15] This administrative structure did not apply to Lombardy–Venetia, Hungary (which at the time excluded Transylvania and the Voivodeship of Serbia and Banat of Temeschwar, which did use the system), or the Military Frontier; Croatia and Slavonia used the term Comitatus (contemporary German: Comitat, modern Komitat; Croatian: županija) in place of Kreis. Intellectuals aside, few objections were raised; the bulk of the population was still living and working on manorial lands and was still used to the lord of the manor being head of some form of manorial court.

Cisleithania

Following the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, Franz Joseph was forced to assent to the December Constitution, a set of five of Basic Laws that restored constitutional monarchy in Cisleithania. One of these Basic Laws, in particular, restored the separation of judiciary and executive.^[16] Pursuant to this stipulation, the merger of administrative and judicial districts was reversed the following year;^[4] the law in question established the districts in essentially their modern form. No attempt was made this time to impose the scheme on Hungary. The Kingdom of Hungary was now a separate country, fully independent in every respect save defense and international relations, and neither needed nor wanted to copy civil administration policies enacted in Vienna.

No significant changes were made between the 1868 restoration and the 1918 collapse of the Habsburg monarchy. Vienna was growing significantly during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, absorbing dozens of suburbs. Three districts disappeared between 1891 and 1918 due to their domains being incorporated into the imperial capital wholesale. Two other districts lost parts of their territories to Vienna. Eleven new districts were carved out of existing districts between 1891 and 1918 due to general population growth.

First Republic

Following the collapse of the monarchy, the 1920 constitution of the First Austrian Republic retained the district system.^[17]

At least one of the principal framers, Karl Renner, had suggested to endow districts with county-like elected councils and some degree of legislative authority, but could not gain consensus for this idea.

The 1920 constitution characterizes Austria as a federal republic and its provinces as quasi-sovereign federated states.

A 1925 constitutional reform, a broad revision of general devolutionary tendency, transformed districts from divisions of the national executive into divisions of the new "state" executives.^[18][19] The replanting had virtually no practical consequences; enforcing national law and handling applications to the national government remain every district's main activities. Province governments have the authority to redraw district boundaries but can neither create nor dissolve districts, nor change how they work, without the assent of the cabinet.^[20]

In 1921, Hungary ceded the German-speaking part in the western region to Austria, this was created a new province and became Burgenland. While part of the Kingdom of Hungary, the rural border region had been partitioned into seven wards (Oberstuhlrichterämter), clusters of small towns and villages headed by a magistrate who served as both the district judge and the supervisor of the local administrators. Austria simply transformed the seven wards into seven new districts. The region also included two royal free cities, Eisenstadt and Rust; these were made into statutory cities, thus also becoming districts.

Land Österreich

With the March 1938 annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany, Austria initially became a state (Land) of the German Reich. In May, Vienna was expanded to create Greater Vienna (Groß-Wien), absorbing another four districts. Two weakly populated rural districts were discontinued as well.

In October, Burgenland was dissolved, its northern half being attached to Lower Austria and its southern half to Styria.^[21]

Between May 1939 and March 1940, Austria was dissolved. Its eight remaining provinces became seven Reichsgaue, answerable not to Vienna but directly to Berlin. Several statutory cities lost their special status and were incorporated into the respectively adjacent rural districts; the city of Krems on the other hand was promoted to district status. The districts otherwise remained intact, but they were now German Kreise instead of Austrian Bezirke.

Second Republic

Reborn with the downfall of Nazi Germany in 1945, the Republic of Austria immediately restored the administrative structure torn down between 1938 and 1940, putting the districts back in place. The only exception were the districts that had been absorbed into Vienna.

Austria had been divided into four occupation zones and jointly occupied by the United States, Soviet Union, United Kingdom, and France. Lower Austria, the region surrounding Vienna, was part of the Soviet zone. The capital itself was considered too valuable to be left to any one power and was, just like Berlin, separately divided into four sectors. In drafting their plans, the allies worked from the city's pre-1938 borders.

The Nazi expansion of Vienna, however, had made some sense. A number of rural areas incorporated into Greater Vienna were inimical. Most of Lower Austria had been leaning conservative to nationalist for a century; Vienna had been a bastion of Social Democracy for decades. The bureaucracy steering Vienna, a city of industry and finance, was sociologically distant from the agricultural countryside. Some of the suburbs affected, however, had long had much closer ties to the capital than to the rest of their former province, both socially and in terms of infrastructure. Permanently ejecting these suburbs from Vienna would have been inadvisable. Reaffirming the Nazi border changes either entirely or in part, on the other hand, would have led to demarcation discrepancies between Austrian and allied administrative divisions. Disputes regarding communal debt added to the problem.

Hotly contested between the Social Democrats dominating Vienna and the People's Party ruling Lower Austria, the question was not resolved until 1954. One of the traditional districts annexed by the city in 1938 was restored. Parts of several other traditional districts annexed were united to form a second new district.

In 1964, the city of Wels was elevated to statutory city status.

Two other new districts were established in 1969 and 1982, respectively.

Effective January 1, 2012, Styria merged the districts of Judenburg and Knittelfeld to form the Murtal district. The merger was part of program aimed at streamlining the regional bureaucracy. On January 1, 2013, three more mergers followed: Bruck an der Mur was merged with Mürzzuschlag, Hartberg with Fürstenfeld, and Feldbach with Radkersburg.^[22]

Effective January 1, 2017, Lower Austria split the district of Wien-Umgebung into parts which were merged with the districts of Bruck an der Leitha, Korneuburg, St. Pölten and Tulln.