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Austria's Corporative Constitution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Arnold J. Zurcher
Arnold J. Zurcher
Affiliation:
New York University
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Extract

As a feature of a reformed May Day celebration, the cabinet of Chancellor Englebert Dollfuss, on May 1 last, decreed a new constitution for Austria. The rather lengthy document, consisting of 182 articles and covering some 32 pages in the official Bundesgesetzblatt, is mainly the work of Dr. Otto Ender, former chancellor, who, on July 18, 1933, joined the Dollfuss cabinet as minister for constitutional and administrative reform. It had been approved on April 30 at the final session of the lower house of the republican parliament, the Nationalrat. Owing to the cabinet's cancellation of the mandates of 72 Social Democratic deputies and of two other deputies who had manifested National Socialist sympathies, only 91 of those who had been elected to the Nationalrat in 1930 were eligible to attend the session.

Type
Foreign Governments and Politics
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , August 1934 , pp. 664 - 670
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1934

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References

1 For details of the session, see New York Times, May 1, 1934, and Central European Observer (Prague), Vol. 12, p. 154 (May 4, 1934)Google Scholar.

2 All direct citations to the new constitution in this note are to the provisions as they appear in the official Bundesgesetzblatt für die Republik Österreich, No. 70 (April 30, 1934), pp. 437–468. With the adoption of the new constitution, the name of this official publication has been changed to Bundesgesetzblatt für den Bundesstaat Österreich, and the text of the constitution is reprinted, May 1, 1934, as the first number of the publication under the new rubric. Some of the more important provisions of the new constitution appear in the New York Times for May 1, 1934, and summaries of the piincipal provisions are to be found in the London Times for the same date and in Current History for June, 1934, pp. 355–357Google Scholar.

3 Art. 46.

4 Art. 47.

5 Art. 48.

6 Arts. 47, 48.

7 Art. 49.

8 Arts. 44, 61.

9 Arts. 59, 61.

10 Art. 50.

11 Art. 61.

12 Art. 62.

13 Art. 65.

14 Art. 63.

15 Art. 69.

16 Art. 52.

17 Art. 73.

18 Art. 82.

19 Art. 79.

20 Art. 148.

21 Art. 148.

22 Chaps. III and VI.

23 Art. 170.

24 Arts. 113, 140.

25 Art. 111.

26 Arts. 114, 138.

27 Art. 30.

28 Art. 27.

29 Art. 31.

30 See description of the most recent plans for transforming Italy into a corporative state in New York Times, May 10, 1934.

31 Some corporative ideas were included in the constitutional revision of 1929, but nothing was ever done to put them into effect. See para. 16 of constitutional law of December 7, 1929, amending constitution of October 1, 1920, Bundesgesetzblatt für die Republik Österreich, No. 93 (Dec. 10, 1929), p. 1326. See also para. 15 of transitional constitutional law of December 7, 1929, ibid., no. 93 (Dec. 10, 1929), p. 1336. A consideration of these ideas occurs in Graham, M. W., “Constitutional Crisis in Austria,” in this Review, Vol. 24, p. 154 (Feb., 1930)Google Scholar.

32 See New York Times, May 1, 1934.

33 For terms of the enabling act, see Art. 3 of the constitutional law of April 30, 1934, concerning ”emergency measures within the scope of the constitution,” Bundesgesetzblatt für die Republik Österreich, No. 72 (April 30, 1934), p. 477Google Scholar. The foregoing article was in type at the time when the political situation was made still more hazardous by the assassination of Chancellor Dollfuss.