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.]

The Carniolan Society for Agriculture and Useful Arts, often somewhat loosely called the Carniolan Farming Society, worked between the years 1767 and 1787 in the Habsburg duchy of Carniola on the southern border of Holy Roman Empire, which now forms the central western part of Slovenia with its capital Ljubljana (Laibach), northeastern Italy with the city of Duino, and a part of Croatian Istria with the city of Pazin. The official name of the Society (referred to as Society or Carniolan Society in this article) was Kaiserlich Königliche Gesellschaft des Ackerbaues und nützlicher Künste im Herzogthume Krain. It published two important periodicals: the Sammlung nützlicher Unterrichte (Collection of useful instructions) and a weekly magazine titled Wöchentliches Kundschaftsblatt des Herzogthum Krain (Weekly news of the Duchy of Carniola). Both publications promoted intellectual and scientific developments of the time and reflected a progressive spirit of Enlightenment and rationalism, characteristic of the eighteenth century in Europe.

At the turn of August and September of 1914, Galician Ukrainian volunteers formed the Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen (Ukrains′ki Sichovi Stril′tsi or Ukrainische Sitschower Schützen) as a unit separate from the simultaneously created Polish Legions. Sich referred to the historical headquarters of the Zaporozhian Cossacks located on the Dnieper River. In photographs, however, the Sich Riflemen look like ordinary Austrian-Hungarian soldiers. There is nothing specifically “Cossack” about their appearance. In 1914, Sich simply stood for the military or paramilitary activity of young Ukrainian males. Every soldier in the Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen was now, by definition, a Sich man, a Cossack. The Cossack characteristics suggested by the term “Sich” had become inextricably linked with alleged Ukrainian martial valor.

It is fitting that a story about charitable donations and their provenance should begin with a gesture of gift giving. In 1849 a group of Habsburg subjects came together with the intention of raising money to purchase a gift for Josip Jelačić, general of the Habsburg army and Ban (Governor) of Civil Croatia. Jelačić was identified as one of the notional “saviors” of the Habsburg Empire, whose actions in the field had helped quell the revolutionary and military perils of the previous months. The proposed gift was a suitable symbol of imperial honor and military prowess: a ceremonial sabre designed especially for the Ban. Jelačić was apparently moved by the gesture but had a more practical idea: better to use the money raised for his gift to help those less fortunate (and less celebrated) than himself, it should be put toward a fund to support soldiers who had served in his units and militias and who had been injured in fighting—and also to the families of those that had been killed. To this end, a committee was already operating, based in Vienna, but collecting funds through the Ban's Council (Bansko Vijeće) in Zagreb. This would become a mobilization of Habsburg society whose impetus rested on precisely the same values of dynastic loyalty and respect for the Habsburg military as the ceremonial sabre, except that many more people would have a chance to show their devotion and support to the “heroes” of 1848–49.

It is generally acknowledged that museums were an essential part of the national project in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe—and some retain this function even today. Classic works in nationalism studies, such as Eric Hobsbawm's, have highlighted the role they played in the birth of modern nations. Subsequent studies that focused on specific national contexts help us better understand the mechanisms by which museums contributed to the invention of national traditions as well as to the formation of historical consciousness, historical memory, and the functioning of modern states. As these and other scholars of museum history also demonstrate, museum founders, directors, curators, and the broader public were driven by agendas and aspirations other than nation-building within these larger processes. Analyzing how these agendas mixed with the aims of the national project in a specific locality in the making of museums can generate new insights into the formation of modern subjectivities in this period.

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.”

This study analyzes the phenomenon of church paintings as subversive visual representations of Fascism and as an act of systematic rebellion against Fascist “ideological marking of space.” Slovene Expressionist painter and sculptor Tone Kralj's (1900−75) paintings functioned as ideological markers of national territory. He painted churches along the ethnic border as it was imagined by the Slovene community, delineating it with visual symbols of anti-Fascism and anti-Nazism. Kralj's undertaking can thus be interpreted as an instance of systematic “subversive coverage” of an ethnically exposed borderland with church paintings. Even today, his artistic “delineation” of the then-disputed ethnic border is a marking phenomenon that cannot be found anywhere else in Europe. If one of the most important authorities on Fascist ideology in Italy, Emilio Gentile, considers Fascist ideology to be a form of political religion and a modern manifestation of the sacralization of politics, then Tone Kralj's church paintings could be regarded as an instance of systematic introduction of the political and ideological into the religious context. Perhaps the most ingenious feature of Kralj's ecclesiastical art is his fusion of Catholicism with the Slovene national idea for the purpose of ideologically marking and promoting anti-Fascism and anti-Nazism as well as Slovene nationalism and Slovene irredentism in the Julian March.

The German national community living in the Czech lands enjoyed a prosperous history throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one that, despite some tensions with the majority Czech population, featured cross-cultural cooperation in the economic, political, and social arenas. The Nazi German occupation and World War II, as well as the postwar expulsion of the Germans, turned neighbors into enemies and divided ethnic communities across the Czech lands. The expulsion of three million Germans in 1945–46 bore consequences not only for those who were subject to expulsion, but also for those who received permission from the Czechoslovak state to remain behind. The status and stature of this remnant minority group shifted throughout the postwar period, but its significance as a bearer of German cultural life never waned. The state's immediate reaction to the quarter million Germans who remained behind was one of forced assimilation. Many thousands of Germans succumbed to the pressures of forced assimilation in the late 1940s and 1950s when the Czechoslovak state presented them with no other option than to become Czechs. Methods of forced assimilation included the stripping away of minority rights, such as linguistic and educational rights and the right to form independent cultural organizations, as well as the collective conferral of Czechoslovak citizenship upon the entire German population in 1953. Despite these pressures, a significant cohort of Germans who steadfastly clung to German national identification found means to resist the state's assimilative methods and succeeded in supporting German cultural life and identity into the 1960s.

Over the last three decades, a steady stream of histories of the Habsburg monarchy and/or its ruling dynasty has appeared, reflecting the renewed interest in the region after the collapse of the Soviet bloc in central and east-central Europe. These histories—among which English-language publications predominate—fall into three broad categories. Firstly, there are those, such as Martyn Rady's recent contribution to Oxford University Press's Very Short Introduction series, that take a “from-the-beginning-to-the-end” approach in chronological terms. French historian Jean Bérenger's classical overview of the history of the Habsburg lands since 1273, first published in 1990 and subsequently translated into German and English, probably constitutes the most substantial contribution in this vein (that is to say, for the period after 1989 that is under discussion here).