Over the past few decades, Austria's specific position among other European countries has been seen from ever-changing viewpoints. In the 1970s and early 1980s, neutrality and corporatism, more than any other factors, created an academic and political interest in contemporary Austria. Neutrality and corporatism were seen as qualities linked to Austria due to its geopolitical status as well as its status as a smaller country.

In his classic analysis of state building by the Austrian Habsburgs in early modern Central Europe, R. J. W. Evans argues that the dynasty's eventual success in asserting its will over a conglomerate of separate, coherent territories with time-honored claims to political liberties followed the sometimes troubled trajectory of crown-aristocratic relations. The cultural impetus for political centralization was the mix of reform within the Catholic Church and counterreform measures taken against powerful Protestant subjects among the nobles and civic elites. By the 1650s the ability of Habsburg officials in Vienna to govern effectively the dynasty's various holdings rested firmly on a dyarchy of the ruling house and regional nobles who shared a common baroque Catholic faith and an investment in a system of court patronage that fostered collaboration rather than resistance in the far-flung empire.

Sarajevo entered the twentieth century larger, more developed, and more European than it had been when Austro-Hungarian troops took control of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878. The cityscape acquired a Western-oriented face superimposed on its previous profile as a classical Ottoman town. Underlying this physical transformation were major changes in demography, political organization, cultural life, and social practices in the city. Taken together these changes may be characterized broadly as “modernization” or “Westernization,” but they reached Sarajevo mediated through the filters of Habsburg and Viennese experience and often mixed unpredictably with local culture and traditions. By 1900 Sarajevo was in two overlapping cultural orbits: a largely traditional world centered in Istanbul and increasingly dominant influences emanating from Vienna.

Archduke Francis Ferdinand's aversion to Foreign Minister Baron (after 1909 Count) Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal is well known. The heir to the throne's biographers cite policy differences with regard to Hungary and Italy, and the worsening of relations with Russia after the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in October 1908 as the reasons for this antipathy. These policy differences certainly existed. However, the recently published private correspondence between the two men from the time when Aehrenthal was foreign minister (1906–12) provides clues to other causes of their estrangement.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the rapid urbanization of Europe sparked a set of complex, often contradictory reactions to life in the large modern city. Europe's urban population grew sixfold from 1800 to 1910 as a result of overall population growth and considerable migration to cities, with the greatest expansion occurring in the latter half of this period. Adapting to the needs of industrial capitalism and the development of the nation-state, “central place” cities such as Vienna and Paris began building projects that destroyed old neighborhoods and tore down medieval walls to allow new construction. Growth of this magnitude created the sensation of constant change and instability. For many citizens the big city came to represent modernity itself, characterized by flux and spectacle.

The scholarly record leaves no doubt that Austrian citizens played a major role in the criminal activities of the Third Reich. Even before the Anschluss, former Austrian citizens held prominent positions within Germany's Nazi hierarchy. Afterward, they played a key—and disproportionately large—role in the death of millions of people, among them Jews, Slavs, Roma, Sinti, homosexuals, and political dissidents of all stripes. Even the millions of Austrians who committed no crimes nonetheless supported Hitler's New World Order, either actively or passively. Hence, in recounting or analyzing the crimes of the Nazi period, no substantive distinction can be made between German citizens and those formerly Austrian citizens who came from the Ostmark.