The status of Habsburg studies in the United States could easily be described in one word: “flourishing.” Evidence for this assertion can be found in any issue of the Austrian History News Letter or its successor, the Austrian History Yearbook, or in the very fact that this conference is being held. Readily available are long lists of books and articles published by Americans on the history of the Habsburg monarchy, of dissertations completed and in progress, and of research projects contemplated and under way—all good signs of much scholarly activity.

Because of the various factors in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy which retarded the development of Slovak culture and science, Slovak historians have, on the whole, only during the past few decades begun to examine historical problems from a broad perspective. Consequently, it is by no mere accident that the problem to which part of the attention of this conference is being devoted—the Slovak political movement as a disintegrating force in the Habsburg monarchy—is relatively new to Slovak historiography. Until now it has not been examined from a broad perspective, if only because of the many different historical, political, social, and economic ingredients which were involved in turning nationalism into a significant disintegrating force. Slovak writers have, however, made various studies of the nationality problem—a problem which has ever since the eighteenth century been the most sensitive issue in Slovak history. Certain of these studies have thrown light on both the integrating and disintegrating: forces of the monarchy—two forces which are realy interdependent.

At this moment I understand how Ludwig August von Benedek must have felt in the late spring of 1866 when charged with a task for which he felt inadequate, because find myself in a similar situation. In no way can my remarks meet the standard set in the paper which Prof. Schroeder has presented to the conference. The reason for this difference partly to be found in the topic itself, for in a certain way. I think, Mr. Schroeder's assignment to examine the American literature was an easy one. He had to read a huge number studies published in the past years by American scholars specializing in research on the Habsburg monarchy; his task was to select and to organize. My task turned out to be completely different. When I tried to find studies of the Habsburg monarchy published in Western Europe after 1945, instead selecting from a plethora of material, I had to determine whether there actually was as little material available as there appeared to be. When, at my request, Dr. Friedrich Gottas, of the Historical Institute of the University of Salzburg, checked my findings through a careful search of bibliographies and periodicals, his research supported my theory that after 1945 the history of the Habsburg monarchy was not a favorite topic among historians in Western Europe. Given this circumstance, I thought it best to concentrate my informal observations on certain trends which in my opinion have been noticeable in Western European historiography since 1945.

On the eve of World War I the Ukrainian inhabitants of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy numbered some four million. They were divided among the Austrian provinces of Galicia (3,380,000) and Bukovina (300,000) and the Kingdom of Hungary (470,000).2 In each of these three territories the Ukrainians lived under quite different conditions; hence, a historian should treat each of the three groups as a separate entity. Since the Galician Ukrainians were not only the most numerous but also historically by far the most important, this paper will deal only with them.

The endless and frequently meaningless disputes involving the contribution of one or another nationality group to the maintenance or dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy have obscured the essential question: was the multinational empire viable? Different answers have been provided, usually on the basis of the historian's individual national prejudices, whether Hungarian, Yugoslav, Polish, Ruthenian, Italian, or Rumanian. The ranks of the disputants have been swelled by “volunteers” of non-East European origin ever ready to champion, on sentimental or ideological rather than historical grounds, whatever causes may have been appealing at a given time.

For this volume of the Yearbook a few minor changes have been made in the original plans as outlined in the preface. In order to include in a single volume all articles bearing on the nationality question in the Habsburg empire, Walter Goldinger's essay on “The Nationality Question in Austrian Education” is published in Pt. 3 of this volume rather than in Vol. IV, as originally announced. Moreover, the editorial staff concluded that a work of this nature should be provided with an index. Finding space for these two additions, however, has necessitated a departure from the original plan of including a lengthy summary outlining the various points of view expressed by the participants of the conference.

The problem with which this survey is concerned is the role played by the Rumanians of Transylvania as an integrating and disintegrating force in the Habsburg monarchy in the nineteenth century. This problem is unusually complex, since it can be examined from various points of view and at different stages in its historical development. On the basis of changing economic, political, and social factors, we may discern at least five such stages: (1) the first half of the century, during which Transylvania maintained the autonomy it had enjoyed since the promulgation of the Leopoldine Diploma in 1691; (2) the revolution of 1848–1849; (3) the period of absolutism of the 1850's, during which the Rumanians, who had failed to obtain territorial autonomy within the empire, were parceled out among various administrative units and continued to suffer national and social oppression at the hands of the dominant Magyar classes; (4) the so-called “liberal era” between 1860 and 1867, during which the court beguiled the Rumanians with promises that their national rights would at last be recognized in the monarchy generally and in Transylvania in particular; and (5) the period of dualism and the forced incorporation of Transylvania into Hungary.

The many friends, colleagues, and students of Prof. May were genuinely shocked when they learned of his untimely death on June 17, 1968. Certainly nobody who saw the commanding figure of this man preside with customary charm, wit, and vigor over a panel on Austrian history at the American Historical Association convention in Toronto in December, 1967, would have expected this tragic news.

The nationalities grouped together for discussion at this session—whether they be called “non-historic” or less assertive or weak—played a less crucial role in deciding the fate of the empire than the Poles, Czechs, or Yugoslavs. That is the impression confirmed by the papers presented here on three of them: the Ukrainians, poor, politically backward, relatively unorganized, and divided between the Austrian and Hungarian halves of the monarchy; the Slovaks, very much on the defensive, struggling to maintain their existence as a nationality against assimilation; and the Rumanians, trying to assert themselves politically and socially but against heavy odds.

Since the conference on the nationality problem in the Habsburg monarchy was held at Indiana University in April, 1966, two of the active participants whose scholarship and leadership were a source of inspiration to many students of Central European history have died. Each was an active scholar busily pursuing major research projects until the day of his death. Kent Roberts Greenfield passed away less than a week after he returned the corrected galley proof of the article on “The Italian Nationality Problem of the Austrian Empire” published in the second part of this third volume of the Yearbook. He was in the process of preparing an article on American publications in Italian history for the Rassegna storica del Risorgimento. Arthur J. May died the night before he was to tape a television show on the fiftieth anniversary of the U.S.S.R. He had practically completed the manuscript of his history of the University of Rochester and was getting ready to write his long-projected enlarged history of Vienna, based on a vast number of documents collected during numerous trips to that city.

One of the dangers at any conference is that the commentator, rather than doing his assigned task, will deliver still another (and lengthy) paper. In inviting me, the organizers of the conference must have felt they had taken the ultimate precaution against this danger, for they invited a commentator who is no specialist in the history of the Austrian empire. There were, of course, to have been two papers at this session that, at least linguistically, would have provided me some more familiar ground, and I regret for reasons both personal and professional that Professors Valsecchi and Greenfield were unable to present their papers.1 I shall merely allude to the Italian case in putting forth some general propositions which were stimulated by the three papers I have seen—those of Professors Ľudovít Holotík, Stephen Fischer-Galati, and Ivan Rudnytsky.

In 1713 Austria acquired the duchy of Milan, even then the richest part of Italy, and after 1748 it extended its ascendancy over all the states of the Italian peninsula. Not only did they accept Austrian hegemony without resistance, but the Italians played a part in the administration of the empire. At the court of Maria Theresa Italians did not find themselves in an alien environment. The Vienna of that age, to use Franco Valsecchi's happy phrase, delighted in “the melodious culture of Italy.” Viennese operas were composed to Italian libretti. Mozart was hardly less an Italian than a Germanic composer. The empire drew on its Italian-speaking subjects to fill important posts in the administrative and diplomatic services and courts of law. During the later years of Maria Theresa's reign, sons of the conservative Milanese patriciate, imbued with the ideas of the Enlightenment and led by Pietro Verri, Cesare Beccaria, and their associates of the Accademia dei Pugni, cooperated willingly and fruitfully in planning the reforms that Maria Theresa carried out, even though those reforms were undermining the autonomy of their country. The Enlightenment developed simultaneously in Italy and Austria, and for a period the leaders of that movement in Italy looked to Vienna rather than Paris as the citadel of their intellectual and reformist conceptions.

In the course of his survey of Italian nationalism in the Austrian empire—an account written with scrupulous fairness—Professor Greenfield makes, it seems to me, three particularly important points. First, though he finds these matters hard to measure, he suggests that irredentist sentiment was probably less intense, universal, or consistent than prior studies implied. Second, he notes that Austria protected herself from irredentism more through diplomatic than through domestic policy and that this approach was for some time fairly effective. Third, he finds that the Italian population became more anti-imperial as it felt itself threatened by the nationalism of Germans and Slavs and by what seemed to be Vienna's preferential treatment of them. The Italians in the Habsburg empire thus contributed to its disintegration primarily after the empire came to be conceived of as a system of competing nationalities in which concessions to any one of them became a source of grievance for some other national group. At the same time, an empire of declining international power found diplomacy an inadequate restraint on its increasingly independent Italian neighbor.