One of the enduring issues in Central European history has been the question of Habsburg longevity, namely, explaining the Habsburg monarchy's ability to endure though confronted with powerful changes in social relations, economic organization, and national allegiances. Certainly, there have been many arguments about which factors are most salient in assessing the Habsburg monarchy's disintegration; some scholars favor an analysis of “inevitable” long-term decline, while others point to the stresses and strains of unsuccessful war. An emphasis on nationalism is common to most explanations and is legitimately attached to the monarchy's ultimate demise. In addition to being challenged by pressures associated with economic and political modernization, imperial longevity and its breakdown were linked to the degree to which the Habsburgs were successful in extending the control of Vienna (the center) over the provinces, both German and non-German (the periphery).

In 1826 Jan Herkel's Elementa universalis linguae slavonicae etc. was published in Buda. In it, the author, who was a Slovak by birth, demanded the establishment of a common Slav language as a prelude to the creation of some kind of Slav unit—a “unio in literatura inter omnes Slavos sive verus panslawismus.” To my knowledge, this was the first time that the expression “Pan-Slavism” was ever used. As the title of the book shows, the word had no political, but only a literary, meaning.

In the historiography of the Habsburg monarchy, the era of neoabsolutism, 1849–59, has generally been defined as either a period of reaction or one of missed opportunity when domestic policy was subordinated to the dynasty's great power interests. Historians commenting on this era have made important contributions, mostly in the area of foreign policy, state finance, economic developments, and constitutional theory, and have focused on what could or should have happened had the government chosen various reform agendas. None, however, have investigated the substantial developments then taking place in the alteration of state-society relations in the area of public opinion formation. Their interpretations have therefore missed and consequently masked the neoabsolutist state's pioneering efforts to create a wholly new relationship with the monarchy's disparate lands and peoples founded upon the rule of law under the Stadion Constitution, 4 March 1849, and then the Sylvester Patent, 31 December 1851.

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.

Paradox and Contradiction often characterized the formation and evolution of national identity in the Hungarian Kingdom. Starting in the mid nineteenth century, an explosion occurred in efforts to recover supposedly ancient “ethnic” memory as historians, linguists, and archeologists produced one great breakthrough after another, revolutionizing their conceptions of the past. At the same time, an equally strong forgetting of the complex multicultural and multiethnic reality of the region also transpired.1 The parallel processes of recovering and forgetting intensified after the end of World War I. By the 1930s and 1940s, Slovak historians had reconstructed their history on the foundations of the Great Moravian Empire, Romanian textbooks became dominated by the Daco-Roman continuity thesis, and Hungarian historical narratives were almost exclusively concerned with the history of the Magyars. While historians did occasionally write books that were not biased in favor of their respective ethnic-national groups, they remained marginalized and, most importantly, the mass of students learning history at the middle, high school, and university levels were only superficially introduced to the role other ethnic groups played in their history.

It has been said that Magyar nationalism was the chief disintegrating force in the Habsburg empire. This statement2 obviously refers to the period when integral nationalism was one of the major centrifugal force3 tearing the Dual Monarchy apart. As Hans Kohn has suggested, “Only nineteenth century nationalism stressed the Magyar character of the multiracial kingdom,” since previously the Holy Crown of St. Stephen rather than the Magyar nationality was the symbol of the Hungarian nation.4 Indeed, that often quoted admonition of the founder of the Hungarian state, “unius linguae uniusque moris regnum imbecille et fragile et,”5 can be interpreted in such a way as to place the emphasis on the a priori multinational character of the medieval Hungarian state and feudal nation. It is ironical that a recent school of Hungarian political writers has endeavored to use even the “idea of St.

Two Brothers Were born in Budapest before the turn of the century and grew up in that city speaking Hungarian. After they had left Hungary for good, they became assimilated in Austria and Germany. Later, one of them Attila Hörbiger, went on to become one of Nazi Germany's top movie stars, as did his wife Paula Wessely. During the Austrian Second Republic, the two brothers achieved cult figure status in the theater. Fifteen years ago, as Paul Hörbiger lay close to death, he expressed the wish to speak with Attila once again, after so many years, in Hungarian, the language of their childhood. In the final hour of Paul's life, that is what te brothers did.1 Regardless of the extent to which this story is, in fact, true, it can nevertheless serve as the leitmotiv for a discussion of ethnic and cultural identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, providing an indication of the way many Austrians dealt with their ethnic origins or cultural background.

From 1527 until 1606, there was nearly constant fighting on the long frontier in Hungary and Croatia that divided the Ottoman Empire from the Habsburg monarchy. The conflict began when Sultan Suleiman the Lawgiver invaded Hungary in 1526 and defeated King Louis II Jagellio, who died trying to escape. Thereafter, Hungary was claimed by Suleiman, by Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, and by the vojvod of Transylvania, Janós Szapolyai. Apart from the “Long” Turkish War of 1593–1606, major invasions from either side were infrequent. The Habsburg monarchy and the Ottoman Empire also agreed to several multiyear treaties of peace, starting in 1547. When a treaty had elapsed, both powers usually accepted truces in the interim. Yet the 1547 Treaty of Edirne reflected the priorities of distant capitals. Emperor Charles V had to have calm in Hungary in order to pursue his plans against the Protestant Schmalkaldic League in Germany; Suleiman needed quiet in the west, so as to march east against Shi'ite Iran, the Ottoman Empire's main enemy. But neither Charles nor Suleiman required more than a semblance of peace in Hungary. Hence, Ferdinand, like his new adversary, the paşa or governor-general of Buda, had to deal with border garrisons eager for booty and angry subjects demanding retaliation. The counterpart of imperial peace was Kleinkrieg in Hungary and Croatia.

Did the creation of Protestant churches in Germany during Luther's generation follow someone's intentions? Heiko Oberman, appealing to a medieval Luther, portrays the reformer as herald of a dawning apocalypse, a monk at war with the devil, who expected God to judge the world and rescue Christians with no help from human institutions, abilities, and processes. This Luther could not have intended the creation of a new church. Dorothea Wendebourg and Hans-Jürgen Goertz stress the diversity of early evangelical movements. Goertz argues that anticlericalism helped the early Reformation's gamut of spiritual, political, economic, and social trends to coalesce into moderate and radical groups, whereas Wendebourg suggests that the movements were only united in the judgment of the Counter Reformation.

During the government of Count Eduard Taaffe a series of social laws were enacted in Austria that set maximum hours in factories and mines, placed restrictions on the employment of women and young people, and introduced accident and sickness insurance. With this legislation, Austria obtained a unique position: no other country had both extensive protective labor legislation, including the ”normal workday,” and obligatory sickness and accident insurance for industrial workers on its law books in the early 1890s. Despite this progressive record, social policymaking in the Taaffe era has drawn surprisingly little attention. My article begins to fill this gap. The first section briefly examines the historiography of social legislation to demonstrate that the interpretations of the early development of Austrian social politics in the 1880s have been unduly determined by the ”Bismarckian paradigm.” The second section discusses the models that Austrian legislators in the 1880s used for their social policies. They were influenced not only by German social insurance but also by the Swiss Factory Act of 1877. Austrian politicians thus followed two quite distinct strategies in tackling the ”labor question”: they promoted both protective legislation, which infringed upon the employer's authority to organize production at his own discretion, and social insurance, which involved state interference with the lives of workers outside the workshop or factory. The third section examines the motives of Austrian politicians behind this twofold labor policy by looking into the background and procedures of legislation. The final section offers a tentative assessment of social politics during the Taaffe era.

Since the 1980s, the eastern part of the nineteenth-century Habsburg province of Galicia has served as a testing ground for constructivist theories of nationalism and national identity. Historians who used these theories developed a variety of tools to analyze the practices and discourses that had allegedly created national communities. Galicia presented these historians many opportunities to weigh the value of “constructivist” theories by offering a rich supply of local empirical material. The Greek-Catholic or “Ruthenian” part of the Galician population has proved to be an especially gratifying object of investigation for these scholars.

I hope I will meet with sympathy if I state here that my task as a discussant is a difficult one. Faced with four lengthy, excellent, and basically different essays, I am now expected—and within twenty minutes at that—to criticize, to laud, to summarize, and to incite further discussion. Let me therefore take the bull by the horns and challenge the very topic of this discussion. It is my contention that the subject of this debate is neither justified nor valid and that it is precisely because of the contradiction inherent in the topic that our four participants used widely divergent methods and arrived at widely divergent conclusions. I would argue that there were no dominant nationalities in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. There were only dominant classes, estates, institutions, interest groups, and professions. True, German and Magyar nationals formed the majority of these dominant strata of society, but the benefits they derived from their privileged position were not shared by the lower classes of their own nationality. If the Austrian Germans-but not the Magyars–generally enjoyed a relatively high living standard, this was due to their geographic position and their industry and not to legislation or to the allegedly dominant position the Germans as a whole occupied in the monarchy. While Profs. Barany, Hanak, and Whiteside were very much aware of the distinction between class privilege and national privilege, they could not, directed as they were by the title of their discourse, fully develop this distinction.

Since theCounter-Reformation, education in Catholic Europe was in the hands of the church. Over the course of the eighteenth century, various rulers attempted to break this monopoly by increasing secular control over schools. Their record was very uneven. In Habsburg lands, the first significant reforms occurred during the reign of Maria Theresa (1740–80), who stated that “education is, and shall remain for all time, a Politicum,” that is, the business of the state.

Observers of the Central European scene after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in 1918 were often disappointed by the vigorous national assertiveness of the Succession States, which seemed to expedite Hitler's aggressions and the Russian penetration of 1944–45. Retrospective assessments of the monarchy's historic role often cited economic unity, the centralized constitutions of both Austria and Hungary, the traditions of the bureaucracy, and the existence of strongly entrenched, pro-imperial classes as centripetal forces in a political complex which from Rudolf I's time often had yielded to particularism and administrative division.

The second Ottoman-Egyptian crisis from 1839 to 1841 was one of the most important chapters in the history of the Eastern question. At that time, the fragile structure of the Ottoman Empire trembled in its foundations under the pressure of the ambitious, powerful Egyptian governor, Mohammed Ali, who at the end of the 1830s controlled Egypt along with Sudan, Crete, a considerable part of the Arabian Peninsula, and even Syria. Although formally he was the sultan's subject administering some Ottoman provinces, in reality Mohammed Ali governed his dominions as an independent ruler, hence dividing the Ottoman Empire into two parts, one of them ruled from Constantinople and the other from Alexandria. The sultan's attempt to terminate the existence of this dual system ended in disaster; and in the midsummer of 1839, the empire found itself without its army, navy, and monarch, who died at the end of June.

In the 1920s newly enfranchised Austrian women crossed the line separating the private sphere of home and family and entered the arena of political participation. Catholic women, schooled in the experience of their church organizations, were no exception. But although they mobilized within the democratic framework and under the rights and privileges provided by the First Republic, their initial agenda consisted of a commitment to the primacy of woman's role as mother and homemaker, and saw involvement in the political arena merely as an expedient in defense of the domestic sphere. Furthermore, the Weltanschauung of Catholic women was initially hostile to parliamentary democracy, to the very system that allowed—or in their eyes made necessary—their political mobilization.