Introduction: Austria and Modernity

Summary

The Habsburg Monarchy in its last century was one of the largest European polities by area and population, and was, as we shall see, a major player, a ‘great power’, at least in theory, until its demise in 1918. Yet it is not often studied at the forefront of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European History.

There are several reasons for this. It was not a successful nation-state, unlike France, Germany or Britain, or, in various forms, Russia. In its nineteenth-century manifestation the ‘Monarchy’ was the archetypal Central European state, so it did not fare well as a subject during the Cold War, when there was no Central Europe, only binary ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ halves. There is also the consideration that after 1918 it no longer existed, and it is always an extra reach to study something that has no obvious and significant successor, as is the case with the Habsburg Monarchy. There is even some reason to think that neither students nor professors are particularly attracted to study a subject with such an atavistic, ‘feudal’ moniker. In a world where democracies and republics are the norm (even when the most successful democracies tend to be constitutional monarchies), and empires, such as the Habsburg Monarchy was, are frowned upon, getting anyone to pay attention to a Monarchy named after an aged, and by now rather obscure, dynasty is always going to be a hard sell.

The fact that the very identity of the subject is the cause of all sorts of confusion cannot help either. The history of the lands ruled by the Habsburg dynasty (from 1780, Habsburg-Lorraine) is such a long and convoluted one that it is best to call them by its ruling agent, hence the rather anodyne title of ‘the Habsburg Monarchy’ used by both Charles W. Ingrao, the author of the first volume, covering the early modern period of 1618–1815, and by myself in the sequel for the more ‘modern’ period of 1815–1918. Yet that territory and that history are also often named ‘Austria’ and ‘Austrian’, partly because the Habsburg dynasty had adopted the name of the House of Austria centuries before, when its main territory had indeed been in what is now part of the Austrian Republic, and partly because that is what contemporaries called this political entity for most of its premodern and modern career.