Historical Journal, Vol. 43 , 1990.
Original scientific paper
CROATIAN ATTORNEYS AND THE POLITICS OF PROFESSION: THE DILEMMA OF PROFESSIONALIZATION, 1884—1894
Sarah A. Kent
Abstract
At the end of the nineteenth century, the free professions in Western Europe and the United States were more or less established as exclusive, autonomous, and self-regulating occupations whose interests were defended by powerful professional associations. Although the beginning of similar developments can also be seen in late nineteenth-century Croatia, the consensus that existed among attorneys in the early 1880s became increasingly fragile and more or less disappeared by the mid-1890s.
The principle problem in professionalization was political. The Croatian government headed by Ban Khuen-Héderváry from 1883 to 1903 sought to maintain the dualistic empire, which brough the government into direct conflict with nationalists who wanted to expand Croatian’s autonomy. Since a relatively large number of attorneys were in the political opposition, the government had no interest in creating an autonomous profession; by maintaining the neoabsolutistic regulation of attorneys, however, the state retained direct or indirect control over every aspect of professional training and practice. The so-called attorneys' committees might have developed into an association that defended the interests of all attorneys, but, once the government had placed the committees firmly under the most conservative members of the National Party, the profession fragmented along party lines. Politics increasingly overshadowed professional issues, and by the mid-1890s the profession, a victim of Khuen’s policy of divide and conquer, was unable to reach consensus even on the practical problems confronting all attorneys.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
326647
URI
Publication date:
1.3.1991.
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