On January 13, 1843, the executive committee of the Hungarian Industrial Association (Országos Iparegyesület) held its weekly meeting in Pest. The Industrial Association, a voluntary association dedicated to the spread of useful knowledge and the promotion of industry, had been founded fourteen months earlier. More than twenty men were present at the meeting, most of them untitled nobles, yet four counts, two master artisans (both button makers), and a Jewish merchant were present as well. Records suggest that this was a busy meeting, in which the executive committee passed a dozen resolutions on topics ranging from the printing of the association's bylaws to its plans to establish a library and launch a newspaper. Among other matters, the committee acknowledged receipt of a fifty-florin contribution from the Pest Jewish community and welcomed as a branch association a society dedicated to promoting industry and agriculture among Hungarian Jews.

In his great 1848 historical drama, Ein Bruderzwist im Hause Habsburg, the Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer has Emperor Matthias utter the words that have often been applied to understanding the whole history of the Habsburg monarchy:

Das ist der Fluch von unserm edeln Haus:
Auf halben Wegen und zu halber Tat
Mit halben Mitteln zauderhaft zu streben.
[That is the curse of our noble house:
Striving hesitatingly on half ways
to half action with half means.]

Growing scholarly and popular appreciation of achievements in the arts, letters and technology of early twentieth-century Europe reflects an increasing conviction that these achievements laid the groundwork for Western culture and sensibility in our century. Continuing interest in early twentieth-century European social and political problems also testifies to an appreciation that these problems very much resemble, and have in some instances conditioned, the development of comparable problems today.

The fundamental fact in the nationality issue in Croatia in the nineteenth century is that by 1914 the majority of the most influential political leaders of the Croats assumed that the indefinite survival of an independent united Croatia, based on the national principle alone, was a political and international impossibility. Once having accepted this premise, which was based on careful consideration of the conditions of their historical past and their position in Europe, the Croatian leaders were compelled to seek a solution to their political future which was in conflict with the major trend of the nineteenth century, namely, the political unification of ethnically homogeneous people into a sovereign state. Although there was a strong nationalist movement in Croatia, which aimed at the creation of an independent state, it could not deal with the realities of the Croatian position. Practical considerations thus left the Croatians with two alternatives: they could either remain within the framework of the Habsburg empire, in union with Vienna or Budapest or both; or they could join with the Serbs and Slovenes in a federal South Slav state. The story of nineteenth-century nationalism in Croatia centers on the vacillation between these two possibilities. The aim at all times was to find the combination which would best protect the Croatian national individuality, since Croatia alone did not have the necessary prerequisites for a completely independent national existence.2

This article examines Austrian perceptions of the people and landscape of Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1878 to 1908. It traces Austrians’ fantasies about and encounters with Bosnian Muslims, whom they often categorized as “Turks.” Following the Congress of Berlin, Austrians claimed to be doing the civilizing work of “Europe” in Bosnia. The article investigates the meanings of border and borderlands between the Habsburg Empire and Ottoman Bosnia, focusing in particular on crossings of the Sava River. Drawing on the writings of soldiers, administrators, journalists and travel writers, the essay considers a number of mental maps, imagined geographies of what Habsburg authors thought they knew about the land and people they occupied. It contributes to a growing scholarship on the Habsburg-Ottoman borderlands.

The historian of the seventeenth century who bewails the absence of a creditable biography of Louis XIV or of William III underlines a significant development of historical writing in the twentieth century. Overpowered by those who deny that biography can be history and convinced that the masses have never secured their due share of attention in early modern times, the scholar uneasily plots an investigation of underground discontent in the gilds of Colbert's day or resolutely pens an essay that destroys once and for all the idea that the workers of France admired Napoleon. Meanwhile, in classes which race from Petrarch to Waterloo, the scholar turned teacher admits that there actually were an age of absolutism and an age of enlightened despotism, for the royal touch is inescapable.

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.

In a memorandum presented to the Hungarian-Czechoslovak Boundary Commission on 23 February 1922 by the inhabitants of the southern Slovak town of Viškovce (Hungarian: Ipolyvisk), the twenty-five signatories requested “humbly for consideration and well-meaning settlement of the following concern.” The municipality was bordered on three sides by the Ipeľ (Hungarian: Ipoly) River, but had been cut off from the only usable road by the border, making communication extremely difficult. In winter and at high water in the spring and autumn, the place was “completely cut off from the outside world.” For three years, they had observed how provisional boundaries were continuously redrawn, and bore the brunt of these changes. The inhabitants said that all alternative routes had become inaccessible during that time and the center of Šahy (Hungarian: Ipolyság), which was just ten kilometers away, had become extremely difficult to reach even in urgent cases. Thus, they requested that the only existing road “be opened to us as quickly as possible and our traffic given back to us.”

In consolidating his hold over the Austrian, Hungarian, and Bohemian territories which he acquired between 1521 and 1526, Ferdinand I (1521–1564) enjoyed one especially notable success: the suppression in 1547 of a Bohemian uprising during Emperor Charles V's (1519–1556) campaign against the Protestant Schmalkaldic League in Germany. Relying on the promise of the Schmalkaldian leader Elector John Frederick of Saxony to protect them, the Bohemian estates formed a league in 1547 which challenged, among other things, Ferdinand's rights to summon the diet, to have his son crowned during his lifetime, and to oversee the administration of his treasury.

The breakup of the Habsburg monarchy was perhaps the most exceptional change made in the political geography of the European world of our times. It would be too much to say that the shot fired at Sarajevo destroyed the Austro-Hungarian empire. But it is hardly an exaggeration to suggest that the young assassin was a living embodiment of the principle of nationalism in the South Slavic lands and that the shot which he fired was a deliberate blow at the political-geographic structure of the Habsburg monarchy. Those competent to discuss the question are almost unanimous in their verdict: the dissolution of the empire was brought on by a combination of external forces and an internal disintegration. The internal disintegration actually impelled the state to expose itself to the external forces. The works of scholars from many countries and disciplines2 who have carefullyanalyzed the structure and function of the Habsburg empire have been scrutinized with the view of studying the regions which formed this empire, their different characteristics and associations, and their connections with each other and to the state in order to ascertain to what extent the area of the empire constituted a state in the modern sense and to note any weaknesses in its morphology and physiology that helped to account for its collapse. The contribution of political geography to this critical evaluation of nationalism as a disintegrating force of the Habsburg empire lies in an analysis of the major problems of the internal situation of that empire.