The Moravian Society in the Era of the Nonterritorial Autonomy (1905–1918): Civic Emancipation and National Life as Two Sides of the Same Coin.

The Moravian Compromise of 1905 introduced important elements of nonterritorial autonomy (NTA) into the Austrian province of Moravia with a national separation of education, school administration, constituencies and parliamentary mandates. After the introductory passages that outline the basic aspects of the Moravian situation at the end of the 19th century, the first part of the article presents all four acts that constituted the Moravian Compromise and sketches their practical implementation. The second part examines public life and municipal politics in the Moravian ethnically mixed town of Olomouc in the period preceding the Compromise as well as following the installation of the NTA system. It shows that ordinary civic life was increasingly intertwined with public life, including national agitation, even in the last decades before the introduction of the nonterritorial national autonomy, as a direct consequence of the growing intensity of social emancipation and communication. In the third and final part of the study, we outline our understanding of the impact of national identity on the Moravian (and, especially, Olomouc) population and of the role of national identity in everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]