HAJO HOLBORN died in Bonn on June 20, 1969, the day after he had received the first Inter Nationes Prize in recognition of his services in increasing understanding between Germany and America. He was a former Chairman of the Conference Group for Central European History, and an active member of the Board of Editors of Central European History from the beginning. He was also the first historian born and trained outside the United States to be elected President of the American Historical Association, in 1967.

More than any other man of his generation Max Weber remains today influential as well as controversial. Neither intellectually nor politically are scholars done with the man and his work. However, his impact has not been steady over the five decades since his death. At various times Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Robert Michels, Vilfredo Pareto, and Sigmund Freud have attarcted more attention and approbation. Among these members of the “generation of 1890”—as H. S. Hughes has called them—Durkheim emerges, in the long run, as Weber's closest rival in sociology. In one respect his reception has outstripped Weber's: he was incorporated with less strain into stuctural functionalism, the only contemporary “school” in American sociology that may deserve the lable. It is indicative of this difference that the Parsonian or Durkheimian approach is often contrasted with the Weberian, usually as a juxtaposition of an integration versus a conflict model of society. However, the Weberian approach has not given rise to a comparable school, perhaps because its practitioners are concerned less than functionalists with a general systems theory.

One of the views most widely encountered in the literature on the Crimean War is that Austrian policy aimed at acquiring the Danubian Principalities in one form or another. Austria's purposes were not merely defensive, but expansionist. She wanted to replace the existing Russian protectorate by an exclusive protectorate of her own, to make herself the heir to the Ottoman Sultan's suzerain rights, and thereby pave the way to ultimate annexation. Or, if this proved impossible, she wanted at least to exercise an exclusive political influence in the Principalities, and to incorporate them permanently into her economic sphere and military system. The evidence for this view seems, on the surface, quite impressive. For Austria did force Russia to evacuate the Principalities by diplomatic ultimatum and military demonstration in the summer of 1854, and immediately moved in to occupy them herself. Her military commanders attempted to exclude the Turks from a share in the occupation, and failing this, tried to limit the Turkish role as much as possible. During the occupation, they interfered in matters of local administration and supported officials friendly to Austria against the wishes of the Turks and the local magnates. Austria also undertook the development of roads and a telegraph system, surveying, and other projects designed to aid her economic penetration of the territory. Her occupation was prolonged until 1857, and ended then only under heavy pressure from the Western Powers.

Our Topic is a complex one and therefore necessarily subject to certain limitations. They recommend themselves not only for practical reasons, namely the brief time at our disposal, but, more important, for logical ones as well. In the first place we want to discuss the issue precisely as stated, the problem of change in the balance of power, without injecting into it any value questions of whether such changes are to be welcomed or not from different ideological viewpoints.

Fifty years ago Germany and her allies were crushed in war. The armistice and peace that followed defeat were held to be ruinous for her by many both inside and outside Germany. One might have expected Germany's removal as a major power in the European balance. Perhaps the time has come to take another look, and to examine how factors that operated to remove from the scene Germany's Austro-Hungarian ally had the opposite effect of maintaining and even strengthening Germany's position.