So You Think We Have Problems with Congress.

I'm reading Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers:  How Europe Went to War in 1914, and hoo boy, am I ever learning a lot. First, the 65 pages on Serbian history in the decades before the war were riveting; now I have started the long chapter on the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The Empire had two Parliaments. The Budapest Parliament consisted almost entirely of ethnic, Magyar-speaking Hungarians, and the eastern part of the empire had a policy of ruthless suppression of other languages and linguistic minorities. In the western Parliament, which met in Vienna, well, things were different:

Nowhere were the frictions generated by nationalist politics more in evidence than in the [western] parliament, which met from 1883 in a handsome neo-classical building on Vienna's Ringstrasse. In this 516-seat  legislature, the largest in Europe, the familiar spectrum of party-political ideological diversity was cross-cut by national affiliations producing a panoply of splinter groups and grouplets. Among the thirty-odd parties that held mandates after the 1907 elections, for example, were twenty-eight Czech Agrarians, eighteen Young Czechs (Radical nationalism), seventeen Czech Conservatives, seven Old Czechs (moderate nationalists), two Czech-Progressives (Realist tendency), one 'wild' (independent) Czech and nine Czech National Socialists. The Poles, the Germans, the Italians and even the Slovenes and the Ruthenes were similarly divided along ideological lines.

Since there was no official language in [the western region] (by contrast with the Kingdom of Hungary), there was no single official language of parliamentary procedure. German, Czech, Polish, Ruthenian, Croat, Serbian, Slovenian, Italian, Romanian and Russian were all permitted. But no interpreters were provided, and there was no facility for recording or monitoring the content of speeches that were not in German, unless the deputy in question himself chose to supply the house with translated text of his speech. Deputies from even the most insignificant factions could thus block unwelcome initiatives by delivering long speeches in a languages that only a handful of their colleagues understood. Whether they were actually addressing the issues raised by the current motions, or simply reciting long poems in their own national idiom, was difficult to ascertain. The Czechs in particular were renowned for the baroque extravagance of their filibustering. The [Vienna] parliament became a celebrated tourist attraction, especially in winter, when Viennese pleasure-seekers crowded into the heated visitors' galleries. By contrast with the city's theatres and opera houses, a Berlin journalist wrily observed, entry to parliamentary sessions was free.