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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.