I well remember as a child in Bucharest being taught by a reputable high school teacher that to speak kindly of Romanian-Magyar sympathizers was tantamount to asking for a failing grade. From elementary school on I can recall only the most disparaging remarks by my teachers about my Hungarian neighbors, and I challenge my friend Istvan Deak to say that sympathizers of the Romanians were ever more kindly treated in the lyceums of Budapest or Debrecen. Fortunately, we are sufficiently sophisticated today to realize that the writing of history is a matter of dates. I am, nevertheless, bewildered by the thought that the same Romanian schoolboy studying the revolutions of 1848 in classrooms of 1940, 1952, and 1976 has been and is being taught that the villains of yesterday are the heroes of today.

The general congress, designed either to end wars or to prevent them, dominated the diplomacy of peacemaking in eighteenthcentury Europe. When writing about these peace conferences historians understandably have focused their attention on those that achieved success. Equally important, however, were those that failed. They revealed, more clearly than the successful congresses, the difficulties governments faced in judging military and diplomatic conditions, the vicissitudes of negotiation, and the frustrations of policy making. One of these futile congresses was the Congress of Nemirov, which was convened in southern Poland in 1737 for the purpose of ending the Austro-Russian-Turkish war begun the year before. Hopefully, examination of the conference from the Austrian point of view will offer insight into the general policy of one of the participants, the results it expected to achieve, the problems its plenipotentiaries encountered both in preparing for and attending the sessions, and the question of why the congress disbanded without resolving the differences between the belligerents.

The Serbs occupied a unique position among the nations living in the Habsburg empire in the eighteenth century. They were the only Orthodox Christians who had full religious equality, and collectively they enjoyed the advantages of a privileged and autonomous group. Beginning in the early part of the eighteenth century, when it gradually became apparent that the Serbs would be integrated into the monarchy as permanent residents rather than as temporary refugees and allies, the special status of the Serbs posed difficult problems for the Habsburg government. The Magyar authorities, the central government offices in Vienna, and the Serbs themselves became involved in recurrent struggles within the bureaucracy as each faction continually maneuvered to gain advantages for its position.

The consensus on the moral aspect of the Papal election of 1829 expressed in the above statements represents an unusual agreement between two men who seldom agreed about anything, least of all about the conclave of 1829, which had been a battleground for their conflicting interests. This battle between two old rivals, their last conflict, as it turned out, adds interest to an event that was in itself important for the course of Restoration history. Although Chateaubriand's role has been studied, primarily from the viewpoint of literary rather than of diplomatic history, Metternich's part has been strangely ignored. Since it was the Austrian chancellor rather than the French ambassador who won this particular encounter, Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich deserves greater attention from historians than he has received. Consequently, this article is devoted primarily to the Austrian side of the struggle to elect a Pope in 1829.

Most World War I belligerents, including Austria-Hungary and Germany, experienced severe copper shortages because of insufficient domestic ore deposits and the extensive use of the copper alloys, brass and bronze, in the munitions industry. Both Germany and the Dual Monarchy, their foreign sources of copper limited because of the British blockade, were forced to use substitute metals and to curtail the use of copper even in the armaments industry. In 1913 Austria-Hungary's domestic production amounted to only 4,052 tons of pure copper. Austrian industrial demands were met only with the importation of 36,500 tons of the metal. Consequently, when the Allied blockade cut off most of her copper imports at the same time that military needs sharply increased demand, Austria-Hungary faced a dilemma. Moreover, before Austria-Hungary was able to develop substitutes for copper, brass, and bronze, domestic supplies had been seriously reduced.

European historians and statesmen of the postwar period have little inclination to admire the statesmen of the period between the two world wars. In history books one reads again and again of the mediocrity, if not inadequacy, of those who presided over European affairs at that time. This judgment may apply to most of the statesmen of Great Britain and France and also to the majority of those in the Weimar Republic and its sister republic, Austria. When Hermann Bahr prepared the young priest, Ignaz Seipel, for a political career, he warned him of the “shortage” of “literate politicians” in Austria. And yet one should not too quickly generalize this phenomenon of mediocrity.

The Austrian scholar and social theorist Othmar Spann (1878–1950) was a major figure in the “conservative revolution” that fired the imagination of many Central European intellectuals after World War I. Born in the Habsburg monarchy as it was disintegrating under the pressures of nationalism and industrialization, Spann seemed destined for a conventional academic career until war, revolution, and economic collapse destroyed the social and ideological foundations of the old order in 1918. A series of lectures delivered at the University of Vienna soon after the war quickly made Spann a major spokesman for the “war generation”—young men whose roughhewn idealism found few outlets in the grim world of postwar Central Europe.

Until recently students of fascism have paid relatively little attention to Austria. This neglect is unfortunate since the country's geographic position exposed it to the crosscurrents of both Italian and German forms of fascism and made Austria a kind of microcosm of European fascism. The struggle between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy for control of the small Alpine Republic was reflected in Austria in the conflict between the pro-Italian Heimwehr and the pro-German Austrian National Socialist Party.