Certain events sometimes exert a decisive influence on the future direction of a person's life. In my case one of the more determinative occurred during a brief week spent in Vienna in early February 1957 For one thing, I discovered in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv highly significant documents in some cartons that had just been returned to Austria from Italy, by mistake as it turned out. The director of the Austrian archives, Gebhard Rath, put these records at my disposal. These papers, together with material of lesser import in the Archivio di Stato in Milan, provided the documentation for an article showing how Austrian officials had thwarted the efforts of an Italian scoundrel to extort money from them. More important than this discovery were my conversations with Professor Hugo Hantsch, of the University of Vienna, during the course of which I promised to supply as complete a list as possible of United States and Canadian writings on the history of the Habsburg monarchy, take the initiative in founding some kind of association for American scholars interested in Habsburg and Austrian history, and endeavor to help the Austrian professor obtain a grant from the Ford Foundation for a large international project on the history of the Habsburg monarchy from 1848 to 1918.

No one who has investigated the high culture of Vienna in the era of liberal ascendancy can fail to be impressed by the sturdy integration of its components. Not only were political, scientific, and aesthetic culture closely related to each other in principle and in practice, but the very social life and cultural forms of the elite sustained the synthesis achieved. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, this complex was breaking apart, with aesthetic culture often going its separate way from the liberal-rationalist political and academic culture with which it had been linked. The character of this union and its breakup will provide my theme.

Karl Renner's political life encompasses the history of Austria's empire and her two twentieth-century republics, making him the foremost leader of Austrian democratic politics. Renner was also the most innovative theoretician on the nationalities question which plagued the Habsburg monarchy and the twentieth-century world. He was chancellor of Austria's first republic, leader of the right-wing Social Democrats, and president of the post-World War II Second Republic. A study of his life and politics offers a perspective on the origins of the moderate, adaptive, political personality and on the tension between ideology and accommodation to the point where it is difficult to determine what core of principle remained.

In recent years, the personality and policies of Prince Felix zu Schwarzenberg have continued to attract the attention of historians. Was Schwarzenberg a Realpolitiker attempting a decisive turn from the policies of Prince Clemens von Metternich, as the traditional interpretation would have it? Or is the revisionist view more accurate: that Schwarzenberg was an old-fashioned conservative, whose policies had much more in common with those of Metternich than previous generations of historians have believed?

In the last decade historical writing on the Habsburg monarchy has begun to stress the contingent, constructed, and historically determined qualities of nineteenth-century nationalist ideologies. This reexamination of nationalism questions long-held assumptions about what it actually meant to define one's community identity in terms of belonging to a particular nation. It also suggests that as a historical process, the rise of nationalisms creates spaces where conflicts of a non-nationalist nature can be fought out within a community.

In contemporary discussions of the new, post-Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, Hungary is often given pride of place as the most “liberalized” society in the region. Although this perception is based on undeniable political and economic facts, it is also nourished by long-established historical traditions and myths. During the revolutions of 1848–49, Hungarians were also hailed by European opinion as the champions of liberty and heroic resistance to oppression. Over half a century later, in the wake of the political and military collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, Hungary once again staged a series of dramatic revolutions which earned it the reputation of being part of a political avant-garde. And in 1956, Hungarians yet again assumed the mantle of political idealism and revolutionary self-sacrifice in the face of foreign despotism.

In the 1920s newly enfranchised Austrian women crossed the line separating the private sphere of home and family and entered the arena of political participation. Catholic women, schooled in the experience of their church organizations, were no exception. But although they mobilized within the democratic framework and under the rights and privileges provided by the First Republic, their initial agenda consisted of a commitment to the primacy of woman's role as mother and homemaker, and saw involvement in the political arena merely as an expedient in defense of the domestic sphere. Furthermore, the Weltanschauung of Catholic women was initially hostile to parliamentary democracy, to the very system that allowed—or in their eyes made necessary—their political mobilization.