This essay begins in a way that may seem self-indulgent and selfserving, but one that I hope readers will see as actually selfexamination and self-criticism, and more important, as a useful way to introduce a topic and idea whose meaning is not obvious from the title. For years I have been arguing that more attention should be paid to smaller states in international history, in particular not just their role in power politics and the so-called balance of power, but their roles and functions as intermediary bodies (a term defined later), as well. In three articles in historical and political science journals and a recent book I have particularly made the case for this in different ways.

The history of Central Europe at the end of the nineteenth century (as indeed at the end of the twentieth) is to a large extent the history of the furies of nationalism. The attempt to understand that fact has for a long time been dominated by understandings of nationalism and the mobilization of national identity that are rooted in conceptions of a particularly modern social and political crisis. In this paradigm the rise of nationalism is associated—as it was for many critical observers at the time—with the failure of liberal politics and the general breakdown of an elite-dominated, rational-liberal society in the face of mass politics and the clamor for cultural and political participation by the lower classes. Nationalism in this view is a rejection of the whole liberal paradigm—a turn to a militant, populist “politics in a new key,” to use Carl Schorske's evocative phrase; or, following another imagery, the revenge of the traditionalist, irrational “dark gods” against the rationalism, secular optimism, and elitism of Enlightenment society.

A reevaluation by historians of political life in late imperial Austria and the capacity of the state to accommodate modern modes of popular political engagement is long overdue. Over the last twenty years lively discussions have developed about the extent of political modernization in Germany and Russia during the last decades before World War I. A number of historians have argued that modes of government and popular politics changed much more significantly in those empires than was previously recognized. In the meantime an important new monographic literature has arisen on popular political action, government, and civil administration in the Habsburg monarchy that suggests that much the same may have taken place there, too.

The expositions staged by Hungarian liberals in the nineteenth century—the modest Pest industrial fairs of the 1840s; the agricultural hibitions of the counterrevolutionary 1850s; the Pest agricultural exhibition in 1865; the three provincial industrial exhibitions of the 1870s in Kecskemét, Szeged, and Székesfehérvár; the successful national exhibition in Budapest in 1885; and the lavish Millennium Exhibition of 1896—conformed to the wider European and American pattern of expositions. Between 1876 and 1916 some one hundred million Americans attended expositions; over 20 percent of the U.S. population attended Philadelphia's Centennial Exposition of 1876. Over forty-eight million people passed through the turnstiles of the Paris Exposition of 1900. The three million who attended the 1896 Hungarian Millennium Exhibition were well aware that they were participating in a distinct rite of industrial civilization. Although the Hungarian numbers were far smaller, it is wrong to assume that the Hungarian nationl fairs were copycat undertakings.

On the night of December 1,1908, the city of Vienna was lit up like a giant birthday cake in celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the reign of Emperor Francis Joseph I. This final night of the monarch's diamondjubilee was the culmination of an entire season of ceremonial occasionsranging from visits to Vienna by the German emperor William II to a seemingly endless series of fětes—everything from concerts by children's choirs to the most magnificent royal balls Vienna could muster. The streets of the imperial capital were filled with the myriad languages of the empire asmore than one million citizens crowded the Ringstraßre and its many side streets and alleys hoping for a glimpse of their emperor-king. That evening the streets of Prague were filled with thousands of angry Czechs, whose moodwas much different from that of the crowd in Vienna. In contrast to the Viennese festival of light, the Czech demonstrators were extinguishing the street lanterns of Prague, hoping that darkness would decrease the likelihood that they would be arrested. According to the Neue Freie Presse, the Old Town(staré město/Altstadt) district of Prague was experiencing a “schrecktlichstag.”

Film was a relatively new commercial-entertainment medium in the summer of 1930, and newerstill were the “talkies.” Unforeseen cultural difficulties accompanied the advent of sound films, to which spoken language gave an intrinsic national character. Language accentuated national differences in feeling and thought, and since audiences could no longer “naturalize” films, they could not adopt the imaginative content of sound films as their own “cultural territory.” American audiences mocked the nasal English accents in British films, while the British hissed American accents and Parisians greeted the first American ”talkie” with cries of “Speak French!” In Czechoslovakia, historical circumstances complicated popular reaction to sound films. With the founding of the state in 1918, Czechs had rejected their Austrian legacy and attempted to enforce a Czech character in all aspects of public life.

The end of World War I marked a turning point in European history: Europe was dismembered into nation-states from the former territories of the German Reich and the Danubian monarchy, creating a belt of borders stretching approximately twenty thousand kilometers. The dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy alone brought about destabilization not only to the region but to Europe as a whole.

The typical dictator of the interwar period was, like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, already a convinced fascist or authoritarian when he first came to power. This was not the case in Austria, where Engelbert Dollfuß, the semifascist dictator of 1934, was seemingly a genuine democrat when he was appointed chancellor in May 1932. Even his appointment was accidental. Had the Social Democrats accepted Ignaz Seipel's and Karl Buresch's overtures in 1931 to join the Christian Socials in a coalition government, Dollfuß might never have become chancellor. And had they not rejected a second effort by Buresch in April 1932 and demanded new elections, democratic government in Austria would have been strengthened rather than weakened.