LikeRobert A. Kann, I too am a historian by profession. Despite the close links between their subject and disciplines such as sociology land political science, historians on the whole avoid attempting to analyze contemporary politics. This lecture will therefore concentrate on the first twenty-five years of the Second Republic. Yet I am well aware that in the Kreisky era (notably as a result of the reforms introduced by Hertha Firnberg and Christian Broda) Austria's progress toward Western Europe took on a new character, and the country underwent what was, for the time being at least, its final major modernization. But it was an analysis of the wholly different steps taken toward the West between 1945 and 1970 that laid the foundation on which the single-party Social Democratic (SPÖ) government of the 1970s was able to build. It therefore seems legitimate to focus upon that first half of the history of the Second Republic, and to see the turning point marked by the student movement of 1968 and the election results of 1970 as a natural cutoff point for this discussion. Broadly speaking, the main concerns of the new state in its first two and a half decades were to provide a framework of order for the very disparate elements that it had inherited and to deal with the immense problems now confronting it. NaCenter for Austrian Studiestional Socialism, by its policies and the effects of all-out war, had left behind a country in ruins in every sense—not only materially through the destruction of housing, infrastructure, and industrial plant, but also intellectually and culturally. Most of the leading figures in Austria's cultural and intellectual life had been driven into exile or murdered.

TheOldAustrofascists returned from the concentration camps and from their time of suffering and brought back with them some democratic convictions. That was the “Austrian miracle,” as Leopold Figl used to say. Those on the Left who had emigrated remained mostly wherever they were, for safety's sake. Only a few returned to their homeland, where, in the beginning, they were not very welcome. In the distressful postwar situation, the politicians, all of whose reputations had become somewhat tarnished since 1934, remembered an aging Social Democrat who was beyond suspicion, a politician who in 1918 had already founded a “Republic of German-Austria’ and who, because of his consistent call for the annexation (Anschluβ) of Austria by Germany, had lived through the Nazi period unmolested in Gloggnitz. That is how Karl Renner first became federal chancellor and later was elected president of Austria. Under pressure from the Allies he discarded his pet idea of Anschluβ, became an Austrian in his old age, and was eventually honored with a monument by Alfred Hrdlička that all of Austria mocked because it was created by a “Communist,” and because it portrayed the sovereign [Landesvater] the way he really looked.

Luck, Opportunism, and persistence made the Habsburgs the predominant ruling house of Europe by 1527. The extent of the lands under their control awed both their neighbors and themselves. Emperor Ferdinand I, who, as Archduke Ferdinand I, added the venerable crowns of Bohemia and Hungary to his family's titles, later attributed his good fortune and that of his line as a whole to their staunch support of Catholicism.

Since theCounter-Reformation, education in Catholic Europe was in the hands of the church. Over the course of the eighteenth century, various rulers attempted to break this monopoly by increasing secular control over schools. Their record was very uneven. In Habsburg lands, the first significant reforms occurred during the reign of Maria Theresa (1740–80), who stated that “education is, and shall remain for all time, a Politicum,” that is, the business of the state.

Early on in volume 3 of his massive political memoirs, German Liberal party leader Ernst von Plener offhandedly introduces the reader to a I new word that had entered Austrian political discourse in the 1880s. The word is Nationalbesitzstand, or “national property,” and Plener calls it “ a word taken from our party's rhetoric.” Most historians remember Plener as the quintessential Austrian centralist, a Liberal party leader of the bureaucratic mold whose annoyance with German nationalist agitation was equaled only by his discomfort with the public demands forced on him by constituent politics. And yet in the late 1880s and early 1890s we find the sober Plener increasingly resorting to an aggressively nationalist rhetoric organized around this concept of Nationalbesitzstand, a rhetoric often invoked by the very radical nationalists, populists, and anti-Semites he scorned. In this article I explore the growing use of such rhetoric by Liberals like Plener in the 1880s as a way to suggest some new approaches to understanding the development of German nationalism among nineteenth-century Austrians. In particular I consider how the concept of Nationalbesitzstand mediated a transformation in the rhetoric employed by self-identified Germans in the monarchy to justify their privileged position vis-à-vis other national groups. Where formerly German nationalists had rejected arguments based on empirical data like population or land ownership statistics to legitimize their political claims, in the 1880s and 1890s they began to embrace such arguments.

In the years 1945 to 1953, Karl Gruber exerted an influence over Austrian foreign policy at times resembling the dominant influence of a Kaunitz or a Metternich. But as a diplomatist Gruber did not come close to the finesse and shrewd sense of power that his two great predecessors possessed. Moreover, Gruber had to maneuver in less predictable domestic and international terrain. During his tenure in the Ballhausplatz, foreign policy wassubject to domestic partisan struggle as well as parliamentary control and public opinion. Furthermore, Austria no longer figured as a great power and was locked into the monumental Cold War struggle between East and West on the frontline of the superpower tensions. Gruber operated in an extremely hostile international environment. Instead of the traditional well-balanced nineteenth-century “concert of powers,” which had profited so much from Austrian professional statesmanship, the inexperienced Gruber faced the United States and the Soviet Union, which were in almost total control of international politics. The two superpowers were engaged in a gigantic ideological struggle, each striving for a preponderance of power. A small nation such as Austria was buffeted to and fro between the conflicts in Central Europe and could hardly escape the pull of the global “empires” fashioned at the time. The United States and the Soviet Union confronted each other in spiraling arms races (nuclear and conventional) and rigid alliance systems in an uneasy truce called the Cold War. In this context of a tight bilateral international system, even England and France—the former great powers reduced to the status of middling powers after the ignominious loss of their great colonial empires—had a difficult time holding on to their traditional influence in the international arena. Small powers like Austria were largely impotent, unless they fashioned for themselves some room to maneuver between the superpower blocs.

In literature on diplomacy, the term Ostpolitik refers to the new foreign policy of the Federal Republic of Germany introduced in 1966. The policy, was initiated by the grand coalition of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Christian Social Union (CSU), and the Social Democratic party (SPD) and was continued after 1969 by the SPD and Free Democratic party (FDP) coalition. The policy aimed at reconciling Germany with Poland and the Soviet Union. Willy Brandt, the SPD foreign minister from 1966 to 1969 and chancellor from 1969 until 1974, and Walter Scheel, FDP foreign minister from 1969 to 1974, were the architects of this new “selective Détente.” From the beginning, Brandt's Ostpolitik was “controlled” by the Nixon administration, especially by Kissinger. The United States feared that Brandt and Scheel would go too far without taking account of Washington's geo-political point of view.