In 1929, when Oscar Jászi published his study on The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, he began his discussion by remarking: “When the task of describing the mass-psychological process of the disintegration of the Habsburg Monarchy and of the failure of the conscious elaboration of a common will was tendered me, I was hesitant for a long time in accepting it… I clearly felt that such an undertaking would mean the work of many years and the energies of a man equally qualified as a historian, a sociologist, and an economist. How could one dare to do such a work in a comparatively short time without being an expert in all these fields?” The task has by no means become easier during the forty years that have elapsed since the publication of Jászi's manuscript. In addition to political tracts written during the course of various events or for the deliberate purpose of influencing these events, treatises permeated with resentments rooted in conflicts between the nationalities, and writings dominated by political interpretations in propaganda tracts, a large number of scholarly monographs have been written during the past decades which endeavor to examine all details connected with the causes and process of the collapse of the Central Powers and the reorganization of Central Europe in 1918. The opening of the archives has recently intensifiedthe interest in questions dealing with the disintegration of the monarchy. The bibliographies of the past two years indicate that in the near future the scholarly literature dealing with this problem will be enriched by the publication of many detailed and thorough studies based on new documentary evidence.

On April 14, 1918, Charles I, the last ruler of the Austro-Hungarian empire, dismissed his foreign minister Count Ottokar Czernin. The immediate circumstances of Czernin's fall from power have been known for many years, and the recently opened documentary collections in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv in Vienna add little of substance to what is already known. Since neither the Czernin nor the Habsburg families have opened their private papers to the scrutiny of scholars, our information is still based on contemporary accounts of high government and court officials. From the evidence at hand we know little more than that Czernin had often treated Charles in a high-handed manner and that the foreign minister's refusal to assume full blame for the Sixtus Affair so angered the emperor that he accepted his minister's resignation. Thus, according to the consensus of his contemporaries, the reasons for Czernin's dismissal were emotional: the wounded pride and momentary anger of Emperor Charles. Certainly few would contend that these factors were unimportant; the emperor had often rendered similar imprudent judgments earlier in his brief reign. Still, one should be cautious about accepting this reason as the only one without searching for other more complex causes.

Situated in the very heart of Europe, German-Austria, pitiful remainder of the once glorious and powerful Habsburg empire, was in the immediate postwar period subject to influences from both the East and the West: from distant Russia, swept by revolution and civil war and anxious to spread the gospel of Bolshevism beyond her uncertain borders, and from the victorious democratic and capitalist West, especially France and Great Britain. The Entente seemed determined to protect Austria and Central Europe from the two chief dangers which loomed on the horizon: the thrust into neighboring Austria of the newly established Soviet Hungarian Republic—the second Soviet regime in the world—and Anschluss with the new German Republic—a union which would strengthen and aggrandize the Reich at a time when weakening the German colossus and preventing its resurgence seemed to the Western Powers to be imperative.

Both in their scholarly writings and at conferences such as those at Indiana University in 1966 and Bratislava in 1967, historians have expressed the opinion, which has been unanimously accepted, that the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian empire must be mainly ascribed to the centrifugal role of the non-German and non-Magyar nationalities in that empire. Relegated to the rank of second-class subjects of the Habsburg emperor by the privileged classes of the dominant German and Magyar nations, the Slavic and Latin nationalities enjoyed fewer political privileges than the Germans and Hungarians, suffered from discriminations that impeded the growth of their cultural potentialities, and were subjected to various economic measures that handicapped the development of their economies. Historians are also agreed that the lack of economic unity of the Dual Monarchy was another important reason for the collapse. Furthermore, the majority of specialists on Habsburg history attribute a considerable portion of the blame for the dissolution of the Habsburg realm to the nationality policies pursued by the government in the Transleithanian half of the monarchy. The repression of the non-Magyar nationalities by the privileged classes in Hungary stimulated the growth of national liberation movements among the oppressed nationalities and prompted them to intensify their struggle, first, for equal rights, then for national autonomy, and, finally, for self-determination.

That Austria's monolithic refusal to tolerate religious minorities within its borders in an age of increasingly general religious permissiveness would not for long outlive Empress Maria Theresa must have been apparent to all but the most obtuse contemporary observers. Throughout the period of his coregency (1765–1780), Joseph II had made it plain on more than one occasion that while, unlike Frederick the Great, he did not believe that all his subjects might attain their salvation in whatever way seemed best to them, he was, nevertheless, aware that many of them would persist in assuring their damnation in spite of the best efforts of Church and crown to save them. And he was unwilling to let the obduracy of a minority of his subjects cause the state to lose their wealth, their services, and their loyalty. Dominated by such radical ideas on the place of religious minorities in a state, Joseph, State Chancellor Prince Wenzel Kaunitz, and Franz Joseph Heinke, once Kaunitz's man but now independently charged with drawing up policy guidelines for a subsequent reorganization of Church-state relations, were as early as 1769 discussing not the advisability of tolerating non-Catholic religions but ways and means of implementing such toleration.

On April 11, 1848, František Palacký—the “Bohemian of Slavic stock,” as he described himself—wrote his famous reply to the Committee of Fifty at the Frankfurt National Assembly. In explaining why an Austrian Slav could not participate in a German parliament, he stressed the need for Austria's separate existence and also warned that the splitting up of the Austrian empire into a group of small republics would result in the establishment of a universal Russian monarchy. “Truly,” he exclaimed, “if the Austrian empire had not already been long in existence, we would have to hurry and create it in the interest of Europe and in the interest of humanity itself.” Yet, he went on to ask, why did this state, which nature and history had given the task of shielding Europe, appear so helpless in the face of storm and crisis? Why? Because for all too long Austria, in her disastrous blindness, had failed to admit the very legal and moral grounds for its existence: the fundamental principle of complete equality of rights and consideration for its nationalities. Palacky singled out the person he held responsible for this failure: Metternich! “Metternich,” he wrote, “did not fall just because he was the worst foe of freedom but also because he was the most irreconcilable enemy of all Slavic nationalities in Austria.”2

On March 22 and 25,1854, on the eve of the outbreak of the Crimean War, a select group of Austrian ministers of state presided over by Emperor Francis Joseph met to reach some basic decisions on Austrian policy. Students of Crimean War diplomacy have paid considerable attention to these ministerial conferences, using the protocols and other documents bearing on them. The most thorough analysis, and for later historiography the most influential, is that of Franz Eckhart. This essay proposes another look at these conferences in the belief that an interpretation different from the traditional one sheds more light on the nature of the debate, the decisions made and postponed, and the fundamental nature of Austria's dilemma. It also suggests in some ways a more favorable view of the policy of Austrian Foreign Minister Karl Ferdinand von Buol-Schauenstein than the usual condemnation of it as a rash and aggressive policy of va banque, or a constant vacillation between East and West without program or goal, or both.

For most of the nineteenth century prior to the American Civil War relations between the United States and Austria were characterized by rancor and ill feeling. As Protestants with strong nativist sentiments and republicans anxious to spread their political institutions to other nations, Americans generally regarded Catholic Austria and its conservative monarchy with great suspicion and distrust. An attempt by an Austrian Catholic missionary society in the 1820's to foster Catholicism in America led to sharp recriminations against the government in Vienna, which some even accused of supporting conspiracies against the United States. In 1848, when revolution swept the Habsburg empire, Americans almost unanimously supported the revolutionaries, condemning an Austria which the North American Review called a “conglomeration of dissimilar races having no principle of unity but despotism.” Secretary of State John M. Clayton ordered A. Dudley Mann to Hungary to welcome the country into the family of nations as soon as her independence was assured. When the Hungarian revolutionary leader Lajos Kossuth toured the United States, he met a hero's welcome wherever he went. In response, Austria pursued an unfriendly policy of her own towards the United States, even briefly breaking off diplomatic relations.

Historians have generally stressed Prince Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck's desire to prevent a two-front war during the late 1880's. They have agreed that the German chancellor viewed France as Germany's inexorable enemy and that he feared a possible Franco-Russian coalition against Germany. Scholars have been less certain, however, about the chancellor's plans for German actions in the event of a widespread European war. In case of a Russian attack would he have aided his Austrian ally immediately? Would he have attacked France first? Did he intend to avoid a two-front war by abandoning Austria-Hungary? In other words, how would Bismarck have met a crisis somewhat similar to the one which led Europe into a far-ranging war in 1914? A previously unpublished dispatch, the complete text of which is included at the end of this paper, provides clues to Bismarck's ideas about future European-wide wars.

On June 24, 1911, the first Austro-Hungarian dreadnought, the 20,000 ton Viribus unitis, slid down the ways of the stabilimento tecnico firm in Trieste. Towed for completion to Pola, the chief naval base of the monarchy, it joined the fleet on October 6, 1912, as the flagship of the imperial and royal navy.

The destruction of the Habsburg monarchy forced the Austrian Germans to make a wholly unforeseen and, with few exceptions, a heretofore unthinkable decision about their destiny. The rump Austria of 1919 was too weak to command the allegiance of all its citizens. Many Austrians, despairing of mastering the economic and political problems in Vienna, searched for an easier solution: the realization of the forbidden but still anticipated unification with their conationals in the German Republic. For it seemed in retrospect that only their Habsburg loyalties had separated them from the main channel of the Germanic stream. Often Austrian civic virtues seemed to them to have been bought at some rummage sale of political ideas—the symbols of imperial order, the loyalties of political Catholicism, a collection of Francis Joseph's virtues—hardly the raw material from which to build patriotism in postwar Austria.

Since the end of World War II historians in Romania have given considerable attention to various aspects of the history of the Habsburg monarchy. Needless to say, their researches have been more limited than those of their Czechoslovak and Hungarian colleagues, since they have been preoccupied especially with the internal history of Old Romania, which has little connection with the history of the monarchy. Nevertheless, in tracing the development of the Principalities of Moldaviaand Walachia and, after 1859, of united Romania, they have touched on a number of problems—commercial, diplomatic, and cultural—common to both countries. Their greatestcontribution to the study of the Habsburg monarchy has beentheir work on the history of Transylvania and, to a lesserextent, the Banat, both of which, except for a brief periodduring the Revolution of 1848–1849, were under Austrian administrationup to 1867 and after the Ausgleich incorporatedinto Hungary.