If, as Meinig has suggested, the essential significance of colonization is that it produces a radical change and a totally new geography, there can be few regions in Europe which illustrate the process more vividly than the middle Danube plains, lying astride the modern borders of Hungary, Yugoslavia and Romania. Over four centuries the varied strategic and economic potentials of these countries have been viewed by successive individuals and state administrations from different standpoints with the result that each, whether peasant or feudal magnate, imperial official or socialist planner, has left his interpretation as one of a series of veneers or imprints on earlier cultural strata. Historically, the primary guiding consideration in formation of policy was strategic, as has generally been the case; yet beneath this politico-administrative structural level were numerous economic and social frameworks of action which in many ways achieved more enduring tangible expression in community and landscape alike. Within the concept of these two organizational levels, this paper will trace the emergence of the region from sparsely settled wilderness to dynamic multi-national agrarian complex in the period from the early sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century.

As one of the original partitioning powers of the eighteenth century, Austria shared equally with Russia and Prussia in the responsibility for destroying the independent Polish kingdom. Maria Theresa may have felt troubled by this violation of sovereignty, but, to paraphrase Frederick the Great, she (and her successors) still took. The fact that conscience did not prevail over reason of state, even in the case of such a pious empress, set the pattern for the future relations between Habsburg Austria and its Polish subjects. As they had in 1772, Austrian interests took precedence over Polish ones and, until 1866, the demarcation between ruler and ruled was clear.

The complex of events linked to the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 often has been characterized as a turning point in East Central, indeed even European history, an argument which probably can be disputed only on semantic or philosophical grounds. For example, the late Hugo Hantsch once stated in private conversation that he firmly believed that the abortive Ottoman assault upon Austria's capital fundamentally determined the future of the Habsburg empire. Assuming that this judgment is valid, the purpose here is to refine, extend—and correct a bit—certain conclusions drawn in two earlier books, one in English and the other in German, concerning the subject in question. These observations are occasioned by the avalanche of writings evoked by the tercentennial celebration of the sieges in Vienna and elsewhere and by personal discussions of the author with the Hungarian historians, László Benczédi and Géza Perjes. It is convenient to treat the topic under three headings: the antecedents of the Ottoman offensive, the significance of the events per se, including the delicate question of Polish participation, and the consequences of the allied victory and the subsequent campaigns in Hungary.

Austria's Eastern policy in the eighteenth century long neglected by most historians of the Monarchy, has at last been given due attention in the publications of Karl Roider. Working from a systematic analysis of the rich holdings of a number of Viennese archives, Roider has produced a coherent picture of Austrian-Ottoman relations in this period and, perhaps for the first time, a plausible account of the Austro-Turkish war of 1788–1790. A return to this subject in these pages is not intended to dispute Roider's facts: he has marshalled them carefully and accurately. It is rather to take notice of additional materials, dealing with the history of the largely silent objects of the conflict, the Balkan peoples, which may lead to a modification of his conclusions.

It was said that Count Kaunitz, the Austrian chancellor under the enlightened despots Maria Theresa and Joseph II, settled Belgian and Italian affairs every morning while putting on his stockings. The thick volume of correspondence between Vienna and Milan in the second half of the eighteenth century and the wide reform program which the Austrian rulers launched in Lombardy during those years demonstrate, however, that this Italian dominion was much more important to the Habsburgs than the ironic anecdote implied. Indeed, research over the last fifteen years on the reform policy of the enlightened despots in Lombardy has shown that this province was highly significant for the Viennese rulers, who made considerable efforts to integrate it into their empire. Lombardy had both strategic and economic value for the Viennese authorities; strategically, it served as the northern gateway to Italy, thus helping the Habsburgs to maintain their influence in the Italian peninsula. Economically, Lombardy possessed a highly developed agriculture, which provided Vienna with a rich source of revenues.

Much has been made in recent years about the vitality of parliamentary institutions in early modern Europe and of the existence of considerably more cooperation between monarchs and their estates than one had previously thought. While this trend constitutes a significant revision in the thinking of western European historians, it has long been accepted by those who have studied the Habsburg monarchy. Over the last few years specialists on the seventeenth-century monarchy such as R. J. W. Evans, Jean Bérenger, and John Spielman have reemphasized the existence of a consensual, symbiotic relationship between the dynasty and its corporate bodies, especially those of the Erblande.

In 1771, for the second year, famine wracked the once-fair Czech crownlands, and death continued to reap its sombre crop of souls among urban dwellers and peasants alike, victims of starvation, disease and violence. Maria Theresa and Joseph II acted with all the resources of their Gesamtmonarchie to end the human misery in Bohemia; in doing so, these co-rulers taxed almost to the limit the ingenuity and strength of their bureaucratic state. Among the state officials upon whom the empress and the emperor depended were Prince Wenzel von Kaunitz, Counts Philipp Blümegen, Ludwig and Karl von Zinzendorf, Leopold von Kollowrat, and Karl von Hatzfeld. While Hatzfeld's career began during an earlier period of crisis, when the empire was at war for its very existence, it was the Bohemian Famine of 1770–1772 which brought Hatzfeld real power in the Beamtenstaat for a brief term as supreme chancellor of the United Bohemian-Austrian Court Chancellery. Unfortunately, after only six months (June–December 1771), Hatzfeld was dismissed from that office because he was unable to reverse the course of the catastrophe by bureaucratic initiatives alone. Until now most historians of Theresian and Josephinian Austria have overlooked the contributions of this Bohemian aristocrat and servant to the House of Habsburg.

“Alles flieβt”—All things flow! Thus did the German-Austrian historian Richard Charmatz invoke Heraclitus to convey the sense of flux which characterized Austrian intellectual life before World War I. The sense of chronic, pervasive instability in late nineteenth-century Austrian society was the result of problems released by the solvents of liberal ideology, military defeat (in 1859 and 1866) and industrialization. In Danubian Europe, the discontents of modernity were experienced most acutely by the Germans, socially and culturally the most advanced of the nationalities of the Habsburg Monarchy. After 1848, the traditionally secure position of educated Germandom was threatened by the emergence of rival nationalisms, the growth of popular social protest, and the disintegration of a preindustrial value system. A culture accustomed to denying the Lebensfähigkeit of its neighbors was suddenly challenged by the need to demonstrate its own worth and capacity to survive. The Austro-German community reacted in a variety of ways; the result was a complex and extraordinarily rich cultural matrix which conditioned, on the one hand, the origins of psychoanalysis, logical positivism, musical atonality, and the philosophy of Wittgenstein, and nourished, on the other, the ideologies of Austro-Marxism, Christian Socialism, Zionism, and National Socialism. At the turn of the century, the capital of the backward “China of Europe” witnessed the birth of many of the major forces of contemporary history; cultural fecundity was the reflex of fear of decline and possible extinction.

The development of national academies of art richly served the interests of both artists and politicians. They found not only personal and group identity but prestige, support, self-advertisement, and advancement in these institutions, dedicated to promoting the arts, useful industry, and the general welfare. During the early modern rise of nationalism, such benefits contributed to the rapid growth and proliferation of state academies of art, many of which had begun in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as casual associations of artists interested in working to elevate their profession.

History becomes most fascinating when cosmic ideas clash. The lull between the two world wars in Europe was such a time. Old systems were dying and new ones struggling for birth. Life-and-death contests between cosmologies moved to front stage.

Not surprisingly, Vienna continued to be a fulcrum of change then as it was prior to the war as Carl Schorske has depicted it. Here the mass society had emerged during the fin de siécle and here those movements, Catholic and Marxist especially, wrestled for dominance. But the Vienna of the 1920s was no longer the capital of the Habsburg empire of fifty million subjects, rather it was the overlarge head of a truncated remnant counting seven million inhabitants. Nonetheless, it was the scene of the classic post-war ideological drama.

Growing scholarly and popular appreciation of achievements in the arts, letters and technology of early twentieth-century Europe reflects an increasing conviction that these achievements laid the groundwork for Western culture and sensibility in our century. Continuing interest in early twentieth-century European social and political problems also testifies to an appreciation that these problems very much resemble, and have in some instances conditioned, the development of comparable problems today.

Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg signed an agreement with Germany on 11 July 1936, wherein his chief accomplishment was to secure Hitler's recognition of Austria's full sovereignty. The Germans, however, viewed the Abkommen from a different angle: they saw it as the first step down the road to an eventual annexation of Austria. The Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, in his acceptance of the agreement, seemed ready to abandon Austria as a disagreeable but necessary sacrifice to closer alignment with Germany. Not many would disagree with the aphorism that “The Berlin-Rome axis was the spit on which Austria was roasted.”

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.

The importance of turn-of-the-century Vienna for modern Western civilization is such that it is difficult for any educated person to be unaware of the political and cultural changes taking place in that city at that time. Against a background of social and political disintegration, the intellectual and cultural elite of Vienna—and particularly its younger members—revolted against the rationalistic, legalistic, and moralistic liberalism of nineteenth-century Europe. Parliamentary politics in Vienna yielded to mass politics, increasingly strident in tone and negative in its goal. At the same time rationalist views of human nature were giving way before the psychoanalytic theories of the Viennese Sigmund Freud. Aestheticism became a refuge from life for many of the city's young intellectuals. Its literary men turned inward to study the psychology of the individual or uphold the goal of art for art's sake. The home of Mozart, Beethoven, and the Strausses gave birth at the turn of the century to the first works of Schoenberg. Academic formalism in painting came under attack from the Viennese Secession. And the city of the monumental historical eclecticism of the Ringstrasse gave rise to architectural critics who sought a new architecture expressing modern, not by-gone, life. The very phrase “turn-of-the-century Vienna” conjures up the names of a disparate group of famous—or infamous—giants of modern culture and politics: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Kokoschka, Klimt, Schoenberg, Mahler, Lueger, even the young Hitler.

Ambiguity and ambivalence may be legitimate tools for diplomats and politicians, but not for historians. On the surface, Canada's Austrian policy between the 1938 Anschluβ and its 1959 accession to the 1955 Austrian State Treaty was equivocal and obscure. Canada appeared indecisive or vacillating on the subject of Austria after 1938 and again after 1945. In 1948 Canada stoutly announced that it had never recognized the Anschluβ nor been at war with Austria. What did this sudden declaration, unique within the Commonwealth, mean? Why did Canada then wait until 1956 to name an ambassador to Austria and until 1959 to sign the State Treaty? A fog hangs over the subject and opinions differ radically. Experts wander aimlessly through vague statements and interpretations, no longer even agreed on when, before or after World War II, Canada and Austria first entered into official diplomatic relations with each other.

Austria at the turn of the century was a country in which change was more commonly tolerated than encouraged. Its late economic growth coming at the end of the 1880s signalled the transition from an agrarian to a more industrially based society. This type of change after a long period of semi-depression dating from the crash of 1873 was looked upon with favor and encouraged by the state, banks, and entrepreneurs. It obviously meant increased prosperity and fit in well with the progressivistic attitude of the times, but less obviously meant the growth of urban blight and social disruption.

In a 1975 article in the Austrian History Yearbook, “The Migration of Galician Jews to Vienna, 1857–1880,” Anson Rabinbach asserted that the rapid growth of the Jewish community of Vienna in the second half of the nineteenth century was caused by the massive immigration of Jews from Galicia. He argued that the largest wave of Galician Jewish migration to the Austrian capital occurred between 1857 and 1869. After 1880, he observed, Jewish migration from Galicia declined markedly. Only one of the three people who commented on this article, Scott M. Eddie, pointed out the absence of substantive proof and the existence of logical inconsistencies in Rabinbach's arguments. Moreover, Eddie raised the important question, never addressed by Rabinbach, of the significance of Bohemian and Moravian migration in the expansion of the Jewish population of Vienna in the decades before World War I. Eddie wondered: “Why didn't greater geographical proximity and cultural similarities cause them (Bohemian and Moravian Jews) to be the principal source of Jewish influx into Vienna.”