Aristocratic Redoubt: The Austro-Hungarian Foreign Office on the Eve of the First World War is a study of the nobility who served in the foreign office prior to World War I. Following the lead of historians who are reexamining pre-industrial elites in England and Germany, Godsey deals with such facets of aristocratic life as education, wealth, religion, and ethnicity. He contends that although the pre-war aristocracy has been stereotyped as frivolous and decadent, the Austro-Hungarian nobility, and thus the monarchy, in fact had great staying power. This work is a social history of the bureaucracy of the Ballhausplatz primarily in the decade leading up to 1914, though it provides a thorough overview of the service during the entire Dualist period.
In 2005, Austria celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of its liberation from the Nazi regime and the fiftieth anniversary of the State Treaty that ended the occupation and returned full sovereignty to the country. This volume of Contemporary Austrian Studies covers foreign policy in the twentieth century. It offers an up-to-date status report of Austria's foreign policy trajectories and diplomatic options. Eva Nowotny, the current Austrian ambassador to the United States, introduces the volume with an analysis of the art and practice of Austrian diplomacy in historical perspective. Ambassador Wolfgang Petritsch analyzes recent Balkans diplomacy as an EU emissary in the Bosnian and Kosovo crises. Historians G nther Kronenbitter, Alexander Lassner, G nter Bischof, Joanna Granville, and Martin Kofler provide historical case studies of pre-and post-World War I and World War II Austrian diplomacy, Austria's dealings with the Hungarian crisis of 1956, and its mediation between Kennedy and Khrushchev in the early 1960s. Political scientists Romain Kirt, Stefan Mayer, and Gunther Hauser analyze small states' foreign policymaking in a globalizing world, Austrian federal states' separate regional policy initiatives abroad and Austria's role vis-is current European security initiatives. Michael Gehler periodizes post-World War II Austrian foreign policy regimes and provides a valuable summary of both the available archival and printed diplomatic source collections. A "Historiography Roundtable" is dedicated to the Austrian Occupation decade. G nter Bischof reports on the state of occupation historiography; Oliver Rathkolb on the historical memory of the occupation; Michael Gehler on the context of the German question; and Wolfgang Mueller and Norman Naimark on Stalin's Cold War and Soviet policies towards Austria during those years. Review essays and book reviews on art theft, anti-Semitism, the Hungarian crisis of 1956, among other topics, complete the volume.
Count Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal (1854-1912) was the most important Austro-Hungarian diplomat in the period before the First World War. Volume Two of Solomon Wank's brilliant biography covers Aehrenthal's years as foreign minister from 1906 until his death in 1912. This includes the dramatic events of the Bosnian annexation crisis in 1908/09 when Aehrenthal brought Europe to the brink of war until he retreated from the precipice once he recognized the abyss.
The hundred years between the revolutions of 1848 and the population transfers of the mid-twentieth century saw the nationalization of culturally complex societies in East Central Europe. This fact has variously been explained in terms of modernization, state building and nation-building theories, each of which treats the process of nationalization as something inexorable, a necessary component of modernity. Although more recently social scientists gesture to the contingencies that may shape these larger developments, this structural approach makes scholars far less attentive to the "hard work" (ideological, political, social) undertaken by individuals and groups at every level of society who tried themselves to build "national" societies. The essays in this volume make us aware of how complex, multi-dimensional and often contradictory this nationalization process in East Central Europe actually was. The authors document attempts and failures by nationalist politicians, organizations, activists and regimes from 1848 through 1948 to give East-Central Europeans a strong sense of national self-identification. They remind us that only the use of dictatorial powers in the 20th century could actually transform the fantasy of nationalization into a reality, albeit a brutal one. Pieter M. Judson is Associate Professor and Chair of the History Department at Swarthmore College. His book Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience and National Identity 1848-1914 (Michigan, 1996) won the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American historical Association in 1997 and the Austrian Cultural institute's book prize in 1998. Marsha L. Rozenblit is the Harvey M. Meyerhoff Professor of Jewish History at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of The Jews of Vienna, 1867-1914: Assimilation and Identity (State University of New York Press, 1983) and Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (Oxford University Press, 2001).
This book will be the first to deeply analyze the Swedish court and monarchy through a longue duree perspective to show the crucial role of the court in maintaining a relationship between the monarchy and nobility throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sweden offered a different type of monarchy in comparison to the more often studied French and British monarchies. Sweden's court system successfully managed several coups and upheavals and maintained strong royal power throughout many transitions. Studying the Swedish model offers insights into how courts functioned in European principalities in general by providing a resilient and flexible framework for royal authority in tandem with the nobility. Based on extensive research conducted in the Swedish National Archives, the Palace Archives, and the Royal Library, the book presents some never-before published case studies and materials that drive the impact of court studies on many different areas of research, including gender studies, political science, and art history.
Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of figures -- Acknowledgements -- List of abbreviations -- Introduction -- PART I: Spa life -- 1 Shrines-springs-spas -- 2 Therapy versus pleasure -- 3 Spa society -- 4 Making money out of pleasure -- PART II: Business of Europe -- 5 Royalty at spas -- 6 Era of congresses -- 7 Looking after Europe -- 8 Secret diplomacy -- 9 Puppets and puppeteers: Summer of 1870 in Ems -- 10 Bismarck's cures -- 11 Rapprochements -- 12 The flight from spas and the end of an era: 1914-1919 -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index
Austria 1867-1955 connects the political history of German-speaking provinces of the Habsburg Empire before 1914 (Vienna and the Alpine Lands) with the history of the Austrian Republic that emerged in 1918. John W. Boyer presents the case of modern Austria as a fascinating example of democratic nation-building. The construction of an Austrian political nation began in 1867 under Habsburg Imperial auspices, with the German-speaking bourgeois Liberals defining the concept of a political people (Volk) and giving that Volk a constitution and a liberal legal and parliamentary order to protect their rights against the Crown. The decades that followed saw the administrative and judicial institutions of the Liberal state solidified, but in the 1880s and 1890s the membership of the Volk exploded to include new social and economic strata from the lower bourgeoisie and the working classes. Ethnic identity was not the final structuring principle of everyday politics, as it was in the Czech lands. Rather social class, occupational culture, and religion became more prominent variables in the sortition of civic interests, exemplified by the emergence of two great ideological parties, Christian Socialism and Social Democracy in Vienna in the 1890s. The war crisis of 1914/1918 exploded the Empire, with the Crown self-destructing in the face of military defeat, chronic domestic unrest, and bitter national partisanship. But this crisis also accelerated the emergence of new structures of democratic self-governance in the German-speaking Austrian lands, enshrined in the republican Constitution of 1920. Initial attempts to make this new project of democratic nation-building work failed in the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in the catastrophe of the 1938 Nazi occupation. After 1945 the surviving legatees of the Revolution of 1918 reassembled under the four-power Allied occupation, which fashioned a shared political culture which proved sufficiently flexible to accommodate intense partisanship, resulting, by the 1970s, in a successful republican system, organized under the aegis of elite democratic and corporatist negotiating structures, in which the Catholics and Socialists learned to embrace the skills of collective but shared self-governance.
The United Kingdom is weakening, and this book helps to explain why. Alvin Jackson examines the UK in the light of the experience of similar union states elsewhere, offering the first sustained comparative study across the long nineteenth century and beyond. The UK was not in fact the only self-styled 'united kingdom' of the time: Jackson argues strikingly and originally that Britain exported the idea of union through the advocacy or encouragement of other multinational united kingdoms at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The work is distinctive in its geographical breadth. Jackson draws together the histories of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England and explores the links between them and Sweden-Norway, the United Netherlands, Austria-Hungary and the United Canadas - and many other polities across the globe. United Kingdoms looks too at the institutions and agencies affecting the condition of union - from monarchy, aristocracy, and religion through to class, money, and violence. Jackson offers new overarching arguments about the origins, survival, and fall of all union states, and in doing so, sheds new light on the particular history, condition, and fate of the UK.
The untold story of how Germany's top aristocrats contributed to Hitler's secret diplomacy during the Third Reich, providing a direct line to their influential contacts and relations across Europe, especially in Britain.
