Poland's medieval and Renaissance capital and a mainspring of humanist learning in east central Europe, Cracow, suffered from neglect and decay after the Baltic-oriented Vasa dynasty transferred the court to Warsaw at the end of the sixteenth century. The first partition of Poland established the new border with Austria along the Vistula River, at the very gates of Cracow. Deprived of its hinterland, the city lost both suppliers and markets, and its commerce dried up. Local nobles and patricians abandoned the city for the more glittering and bustling life at the court of Stanisław August in Warsaw. Russian troops seized Cracow toward the end of the Kościuszko Insurrection and then ceded it to Austria in Poland's third partition. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, its population had shrunk to barely ten thousand. Ensuing Germanization was halted only when Cracow was joined in 1809 to the short-lived Duchy of Warsaw.

Throughout history, Mediterranean cultures have tried to appropriate, with words or weapons, the sea that surrounds them. Sometimes called the “Inner Sea,” “Superior Sea,” or “Great Sea,” the Mediterranean was designated by the Greeks—as the Odyssey testifies—as theirs, “Our Sea.” In the 1920s, Mussolini revived the Latin mare nostrum to justify the “Italian-ness” of the Mediterranean (and, by extension, of the Adriatic Sea and its immediate eastern coastline, Dalmatia), an act that marked a new step in a long-term process that placed the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas at the core of national identity politics. Yugoslav ascriptions of the adjective “Yugoslav,” or even “Slavic,” to the Adriatic Sea during the interwar period proceeded from the same desire: to appropriate a space in order to articulate a national discourse.

Between 1857 and 1900 the Jewish population of Vienna grew from 6,000 to more than 146,000 as a result of the mass migration of Jews from the eastern provinces of the Austro-Hungarian empire to the capital. The largest source of the migration was Galicia, with a vast Jewish population that increased from 448,973 in 1857 to 811,183 at the turn of the century. In 1857 alone, at the outset of the migrations, some 2,000 persons left Galicia, marking the first gradual decline in the high proportion of Jews living in the part of the empire which lay within the eastern European pale of Jewish settlement. Arriving at an estimated rate of 20,000 to 30,000 per decade, these Galician Jews flowed into Vienna's second district, Leopoldstadt, and produced a shift both in the ethnic demography of the city and in that of the empire. Expansion of the Jewish population of Vienna from 1.3 percent of the population in 1857 to 12 percent by 1890 profoundly influenced the social, cultural, and political life of the Austrian capital.

Before a single Austro-Hungarian soldier boarded the train for transport to his deployment area at the outbreak of World War I, the military plans put into motion, or rather not put into motion, by Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, the chief of the Habsburg General Staff (1906–11 and 1912–17), had sealed the fate of the initial campaigns on the Russian and Balkan fronts.

Theidea behind this article came from a riddle. A 1907 guidebook to the Austro-Hungarian pilgrimage site of Mariazell carried the following enigmatic line: “The traveler who, while visiting Mariazell, wishes to combine the pleasant and the useful—for whom the pilgrimage should be at the same time an excursion into the mountains—will find a series of pretty promenades that lead him only a short way out of town and require absolutely no exertion.” The author most likely thought the meaning of this somewhat banal passage was completely clear. But the historian must wonder what exactly was “pleasant” and what was “useful” for the traveler to Mariazell. Was it pleasant to contemplate the majesty of God and the clemency of the Virgin Mary and useful to exercise one's body in the fresh, mountain air—even without exertion? Or was it useful to demonstrate one's piety and devotion via pilgrimage and dutiful time spent in mass, but pleasant to stroll through the temple of nature, admiring local flora and fauna along the way? Both of these interpretations are as truthful as they are possible, and their coexistence exemplifies a quintessential duality of religious tourism in the nineteenth century. Mariazell was both a “place of mercy” (Gnadenort), and an “alpine pearl”; its attraction stemmed from a hybrid of sanctity and sanctuary that was exploited by the citizens and residents of Mariazell whose livelihood depended on attracting a constant flow of outsiders.

The literature dealing with Magyar nationalism is extensive. The general impression created by its manifestations during the last roughly two and a half centuries has been that it had been aggressive and disrespectful of the rights of other nations living in the lands of historical Hungary, occasionally even bordering on the criminal. This evaluation did not originate with R. W. Seton-Watson, but was certainly disseminated widely by the works he published under the pen names of Viator and Scotus Viator.2 While some of the judgments passed on Magyar nationalism were exaggerated and even unjustified, the correctness of the general picture cannot be denied. The actions of Hungary's politicians and the views expressed by the country's publicists and literary figures support the negative evaluation of some of the most crucial manifestations of Magyar nationalism. The following pages are presented not in an attempt to excuse the general tone and occasional excesses of Hungarian nationalism, but to try to answer only one question: why did Magyar nationalism take the forms that it did?

By the spring of 1927 democratic institutions seemed to have secured a relatively firm footing in Austria. That appearance was deceptive. The same year saw the beginning of the deterioration of Austrian democracy.

The achievement of a secure democratic political environment by 1927 appeared grounded in reality. Within eight years after the Austrian Social Democrats had quashed the threat of a Communist-inspired Soviet republic in Austria, the bourgeois-dominated democratic government had succeeded in building up a reliable police force, gendarmerie, and army adequate to protect it against any internal threats. Rent as it was by the endless power struggles of its leaders, the Heimwehr was still only a relatively weak force on the political horizon. The National Socialist Party, split into quarreling factions, amounted to little more than a noisy opposition group. With the marked improvement in the Austrian economy by the mid-1920s, Austrian anti-Semitism had noticeably declined by the end of 1926. Perhaps most important of all, the foreign financial assistance assured by the Geneva Protocol of 1922 and the subsequent economic stabilization measures under-taken by the government did much to put the country's financial house in good order.

For a Long time, scholars of witch-hunting presented Enlightenment political reforms as a kind of ”cure” for the “craze” of witchcraft, but despite these efforts, relatively little attention was truly paid to the end of witch-hunting. Without were formulated, historians attributed changes in state policy to an emerging skepticism and rationalism within the judicial and political elites of Europe.1 At times, scholars focus upon specific, local trials in which a loss of confidence emerged among those hearing witchcraft cases, but somewhat more frequently, they examine specific regions in which, they claim, scientific values and attitudes fostered skepticism among the elites formulating policies on the crime of witchcraft.2 Although there is an undeniable validity to both approaches, their conclusions are not without controversy. Several scholars have pointed out that judicial skepticism toward the crime of witchcraft emerged even before widespread intellectual change, and they have noted that the centralization of judicial administrations led to a decrease in the number and intensity of trials well in advance of enlightened thinking.

Karl Renner's political life encompasses the history of Austria's empire and her two twentieth-century republics, making him the foremost leader of Austrian democratic politics. Renner was also the most innovative theoretician on the nationalities question which plagued the Habsburg monarchy and the twentieth-century world. He was chancellor of Austria's first republic, leader of the right-wing Social Democrats, and president of the post-World War II Second Republic. A study of his life and politics offers a perspective on the origins of the moderate, adaptive, political personality and on the tension between ideology and accommodation to the point where it is difficult to determine what core of principle remained.

The first peasant movement in Eastern Europe to declare its formal independence from other parties grew up in Austrian Galicia. Founded in 1895, the Polish Peasant party (Stronnictwo Ludowe) was characterized by an approach to the problem of Polish nationalism unique to the peasantry. Like many other agrarian groups, the Polish peasants privileged peasant culture and values above upper-class and urban traditions as the true source of national strength. Yet the dynamics of this budding peasant nationalism, its sources and leadership bases, have yet to be fully explored.

Read any textbook account of interwar Europe, and “indifference to nation” is not likely to figure as a heading. On the contrary, the talk will be of untrammeled nationalist rivalries leading the continent to ruin. In the territories of Eastern and South Eastern Europe that had once been part of the polyglot Habsburg and Ottoman empires, we will be reminded, nationalist hatred and border conflicts paved the way to World War I. And in the aftermath of that war, the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler took glorification of the national community to new heights, unleashing colonial and continental wars of conquest and annihilation. Small wonder that when many Europeans looked back from the rubble of 1945, what they saw was far too much commitment to nation, not too little. Indeed, the aspiration of many idealists in 1945 was precisely to supersede the nationalist rivalries and affiliations that they saw as so detrimental to peaceful coexistence and to create some kind of supranational European loyalty and structure instead.

Whilecontextualization is basic to all historical analysis, modern Austrian intellectual history exhibits a particular preference for strong contextual accounts of cultural development. Since the 1970s, the literature on fin-de-siècle Vienna as a birthplace of modernism—associated with scholars such as Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, William Johnston, William McGrath, and above all Carl Schorske—has endorsed the view, famously expressed by the poet Friedrich Hebbel, that Austria was the “little world where the big world holds its tryouts.” Vienna's cultural efflorescence, it is argued, was exemplary not only for its magnitude and innovation, but also for the close affiliations of its participants. “No one who has studied the high culture of Vienna in the period of liberal ascendancy,” Carl Schorske remarked programmatically, “can fail to be impressed by the sturdy integration of its components.”

During the nineteenth century, history developed into an independent discipline with important cultural and intellectual functions in both the academic world, as well as in society at large. Specific circumstances contributed to the rise in importance of this discipline: On the one hand, the emergence of an educated bourgeoisie and rising nationalist movements influenced the study of history; whereas on the other hand, public demands for assurances of continuity, as well as conservative efforts for restoration, also played an important role in history's growth in importance. Historicism, which began to establish itself in late-eighteenth-century Germany, had its forerunners in research approaches that grew out of the late Enlightenment. Concepts of cultural science [Kulturwissenschaft] developed by scholars of the late Enlightenment paved the way for the rise of the historical discipline during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Was there a sense in which there existed a single, integrated society under the Habsburg monarchy–what we might call “Habsburg society,” or even “Austro-Hungarian society,” in the same way we talk of “American,” “French,” or “German” society? Anyone seeking to answer this question stands in a long, continuous line of historical and sociological discussion that reaches back at least to the era before the 1848 revolutions, when Victor Freiherr von Andrian-Werburg diagnosed with great clarity the emergence of different, language-based nations in the Austrian Empire. Andrian-Werburg spoke of a process of separation and felt that an awakening of “Austrian” national feeling was lacking. Naturally, Robert A. Kann also occupies a prominent position within this historical debate. Unfortunately, the present writer cannot claim to have been closely acquainted with Kann. Nor did I belong, unlike Karlheinz Mack, Horst Haselsteiner, and Arnold Suppan, to the circle of his card partners– Kann was a passionate and skillful player of Tarock, a card game popular in Central Europe. I can only recall one brief meeting, when Kann once came to our Institute of Economic and Social History in Vienna to look for some statistical works on the theme that he was researching. At the time, it seemed remarkable to me that such a great scholar, who was then at a fairly advanced age, should still be seeking out original, basic information. That was a typical mistake for an academic greenhorn to make, for I had yet to realize that, for certain historical problems, it is sometimes necessary to go back to the same sources to ask new questions of them and to analyze them with new methods. But let us turn back to our subject for today.

These stanzas are from an 1842 poem titled “Origin of the Bora,” which recounted the mythical genesis of the strong northeasterly winds that since time immemorial have plagued Adriatic sailors. In the poem, the Bora was no mere weather pattern, but instead the reincarnation of the Slavic nation searching for its slain heroes, the Uskoci pirates made famous in the writings of the seventeenth-century Venetian philosopher Paolo Sarpi and twenty-first-century historian Wendy Bracewell. In typical nineteenth-century Romantic style, the “Origin of the Bora” revealed how the winds (the soul of the sisters of the Uskoci, the Dalmatian womenfolk) blew upon the waters frantically searching for the corpses of their menfolk whom the Venetians and Germans had slain. These winds were relentless—they would never stop their frenzied quest—until the Uskoci heroes were returned home and their spirits were once again able to wield their swords along the “Illyrian contradas.” In the meantime, the poem warned, “Woe to any German or Venetian boat that advances … Their sails will fall in a heartbeat,/ And with the opposition of the wind they will be done for.”

During the nineteenth century, most European countries transformed into integrated nation-states, based on the principle of nationalism. Probably the only major European exception to this rule was the Habsburg Empire. Created in 1804 to replace an early modern composite state, the Austrian Empire had to cope with the long historical traditions of its numerous and highly diverse Crownlands. This diversity prevented an effective integration of the Empire, leading, on the one hand, to the introduction of home rule in Hungary and a restricted form in Galicia and in Croatia-Slavonia and, on the other hand, to the maintenance of a large space of action for the other Crownlands.

The theories on foreign policy and international relations which have emerged in the last decade stress the interaction between foreign policy and internal social structure. Contemporary analysis of this interaction has benefited from refined social science methods and concepts developed since the end of the Second World War, but awareness of the connection between foreign policy and internal policy is not new. For instance, as long ago as the eve of the First World War Rudolf Goldscheid wrote that “nothing is more Utopian than the belief that substantial alterations in internal policy can be realized without simultaneous corresponding changes in foreign [policy] and vice versa.” The interaction between Austro-Hungarian foreign policy and the nationality problem in the monarchy from 1867 until 1914 is a striking example of Goldscheid's general thesis.

Although the literature on nation building is truly vast, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the formation of regional identities. This is in large part because those who specialize in regionalism have argued that state and region form an essentially contradictory relationship. This article analyzes one example of how a hitherto indistinct geographical entity was fashioned into a federal province and how its political elite complied with a constant need to popularize and entrench the concept of the region. The new regional identity was thus designed to counteract two challenges to its very existence as a federal province: one from the former mother state, Hungary, and the other from Austria, where consideration was given to dividing the newly created entity between two neighboring federal provinces. The outcome of this attempt was the creation of a regional identity, albeit one mostly defined in negative terms.