Count, and later Prince Wenzel Anton Kaunitz-Rietberg was a leading statesman in the eighteenth-century Habsburg Monarchy for over fifty years, for some forty of which he was its Foreign Minister and the principal minister of the Crown. During his tenure in office he fundamentally transformed the foreign policy priorities of the Monarchy, was instrumental in professionalising and modernising both his own ministry as well as the administrative structure of the state as a whole, and played a leading role in the implementation of the ambitious reform programme of Habsburg enlightened absolutism. His career spanned the reign of five monarchs and three major cultural epochs, during which he contributed significantly to redefining the normative framework of aristocratic career-making in the state that he served. He was the longest-serving and most influential minister of any government in eighteenth-century Europe, and his position in time grew to such significance that historians have been tempted to call him ‘the third Head of State’ in the Habsburg Monarchy after Maria Theresia and Joseph II. Above all, he set the premises of the foreign policy of the Habsburg Monarchy from the War of the Austrian Succession to the French Revolution.

In traditional diplomatic histories the Central European state-complex of the Habsburgs is frequently simply referred to as ‘Austria’. However, in the eighteenth century the term ‘Austria’ had various meanings and different geographical radii, and the various lands of the House of Habsburg were still, in Evans's felicitous phrase, ‘a complex and subtly balanced organism, not a state but a mildly centripetal agglutination of bewilderingly heterogeneous elements’. Yet at the same time these lands did constitute a powerful ‘political geographic center’ that defined it as one of the great powers of Europe. The dynasty's titular sovereignty over the Holy Roman Empire made matters more complex still, for the imperial title and the territorial basis of Habsburg hereditary holdings were not conterminous. It is thus not surprising that for centuries the conduct of Habsburg foreign policy reflected these complexities.

The implementation of the Counter-Reformation had decisively shaped the Habsburg Monarchy in the seventeenth century. Trentine Catholicism became in many ways the integrating ideology of the highly pluralistic patrimony of the Habsburgs, and this involved not merely a set of confessional dogmas, but broader patterns of thought and culture inextricably intertwined with a social and political infrastructure which had grown out of the economic and social upheavals of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. If there is some dispute on whether we may apply the term “confessional state” to this polity, there is little doubt that confessional issues set the predominant tone of the culture and of society, and that the Catholic Church emerged as an institution of enormous power and influence. It is therefore not surprising that when this polity proved unequal to its tasks in the highly competitive world of proto-national states in the first half of the eighteenth century, confessional issues and the role of the Catholic Church would be in many ways central problems for the Habsburgs. In the ensuing reforms the relations between Church and State were fundamentally altered. Because of the degree of integration between political and confessional issues in the Counter-Reformation state, however, these reforms were not effected in discrete confessional spheres, but had broad social, economic and political consequences.

The modernization of the Habsburg Foreign Office under Kaunitz was only part of a larger trend towards more professional forms of government in the eighteenth century. The principal feature of this incipient professionalization was increased bureaucratization, and it was the growth of professional impersonal bureaucracies that in turn became the leading edge of confrontation with more traditional indirect forms of government. By the eighteenth century this struggle already had a venerable history, but no decisive results. Nowhere in Europe had the great early modern conflict between emerging royal absolutism and intermediate feudal social corporations resulted in a decisive victory for either side. Eighteenth-century governments remained condominiums between a crown, increasingly articulating the concept of the impersonal state under its supreme authority, and feudal corporations stubbornly clinging to the patrimonial ideals of indirect rule through autonomous local authorities.

In this extended political struggle of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Habsburg Monarchy remained in a rather peculiar position. A patrimonial conglomerate whose centrifugal particularisms were enhanced by constitutional, judicial, cultural and linguistic differences, it was legally bound together only by the Pragmatic Sanction which did little to enhance the authority of the crown over its subordinate social corporations. The great seventeenth-century victories of the crown were more confessional and cultural than political, and Habsburg Monarchs in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were not “absolute” by any stretch of the imagination.

The office which Kaunitz assumed in May 1753 was a relatively new one. The creation of a specific ministry, charged with the conduct of “foreign affairs and confidential dynastic matters,” had occurred only in February 1742. Of course, ministries in the modern sense did not exist in eighteenth-century Austria. The monarch remained the final instance of executive as well as legislative authority. Ministers were simply heads of specific departments of the central government's administrative machinery. The German title, Court Chancellor (Hofkanzler), is therefore a much more accurate description of a minister's functions. In the Habsburg Monarchy of the eighteenth century there were numerous such Court Chancellors responsible for a variety of executive departments, all with different regional jurisdictions: Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, Transylvania or the Holy Roman Empire. The creation of a Court Chancellery (Hofkanzlei) in 1742 whose agenda brought together the private affairs of the dynasty, or “Haus” – in this case the House of Habsburg – with the conduct of all diplomatic relations (which in eighteenth-century German were called “Staatssachen”), thus eventually saddled the ministry with the colourful name of “House, Court and State Chancellery” (Haus-, Hof- und Staatskanzlei). Almost from the beginning this unwieldy title was abbreviated to Chancellery of State (Staatskanzlei), and the minister himself was generally referred to as Chancellor of State (Staatskanzler).

More explicitly ministerial forms of government emerged in the eighteenth century as part of the general trend towards professionalism and bureaucratization from the previously more conciliar forms of decision-making.

At the heart of the structural changes of the Habsburg central and local administration under Maria Theresia lay an economic, or more precisely, a fiscal imperative. Governments in the ancien régime often seemed in a state of permanent penury, leading a hand-to-mouth existence from one financial crisis to another. Waging costly foreign policies motivated by baroque dynastic self-images and mercantilist concepts of international rivalry, governments found that their expenditures were regularly in excess of revenues. The more dramatically dynastic pretensions surpassed the capacity of the respective societies to uphold them – as was the case in the Habsburg conglomerate under Charles VI – the more drastic these fiscal crises became. Since the full mobilization of the state's economic resources in a modern fashion was beyond dynastic governments still encumbered by various feudal contracts and obligations, their prime recourse was to taxes and loans, the raising of which was subject to its own unique difficulties. Securing adequate revenues in the face of these limitations was therefore an ever-present concern. In short, social and political conditions dictated a sort of fiscal obsession.

It did not escape the attention of early modern governments and economists that these fiscal anxieties were ultimately dependent on the strength of the overall economy as much as on their ability to tap these resources. Mercantilists had developed a considerable body of economic theory designed to promote the expansion of the state's commercial and industrial base within a broader ideal of autarky.

The Habsburg military establishment lay at the very center of the reform impetus and the debates surrounding it throughout the reign of Maria Theresia. Military defeats were the most obvious symptoms of the Habsburg commonwealth's relative weakness and backwardness in the three decades from the early 1730s to the early 1760s, and there is little doubt that the major impulse for political as well as military change came from a determination to redress this perceived inferiority. The political, social and particularly fiscal ramifications of creating a military establishment equal to the difficult international challenges which confronted the Monarchy were the key issues over which bitter differences of opinion prevailed. These differences, in turn, were based on differing diagnoses of the military failures of the two major wars in the Empress's reign. The military reforms of Maria Theresia thus fall into two very distinct periods. The first period covers the reforms undertaken in response to the failures of the War of the Austrian Succession, and includes the test of the mettle of the reformed army in the Seven Years War. The failure to achieve victory in this war, for which the diplomatic framework established by Kaunitz seemed to hold out so much promise, led to the second period of army reform. The premises of this reform period then dominated Habsburg military thinking well into the era of the French Revolution.

Ever since the term “enlightened absolutism” was coined by Wilhelm Roscher over a century ago, historians have disagreed bitterly on the validity of this concept as a meaningful description of that critical transition phase when the traditional corporate society of medieval and early modern Europe was being displaced by the emerging modern unitary state. Disagreements have ranged from the internal contradiction implicit in the very label of “enlightened absolutism” or even more, “enlightened despotism,” through questioning the motives of the monarchs and governments purportedly engaged in such an enterprise, to wondering what kind of truth the very idea had for those eighteenth-century thinkers who accorded it any truth at all. These disagreements notwithstanding, there is broad agreement that a larger dynamic of reform and change characterized many states of Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century, particularly in those which perceived their relative underdevelopment as the principal impediment to international competitiveness. Indeed, some historians have even argued that the perception of backwardness was the very precondition of the emergence of reforming regimes we have come to call enlightened absolutist.

Inevitably, such debates tend to focus on individual monarchs, for even when detailed research invariably reveals that most of them were hardly as absolute as one might think from the use of the term, they were certainly the fulcrum of the policy decision-making process.