By their nature, ruling groups tend to be conservative, preserving the status quo rather than working to alter it. But few leaders have responded to demands for change with the kind of stolid passivity that seems to have characterized the bureaucratic statesmen of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in the last years of its existence. Eduard Taaffe's day-to-day Fortwursteln is one of the more famous characterizations of their “desperate but not serious” attitude toward policy-making. The leaders may have agreed in private to the necessity of far-reaching reforms in the Monarchy's institutional structure, but, faced with the practical difficulties of carrying out those reforms, they were inclined to make few experiments and to take few risks. If one looks at the last statesmen of the Monarchy who both occupied central positions of authority and possessed the willpower to attempt to carry through radical change, besides the hapless Emperor Karl, only a handful of figures emerges: Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal, who effected the Bosnian annexation; the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne; and Ottokar Czernin, Karl's foreign minister from 1916 to 1918.