This is the ninth  essay in my series on cultural wars: its subject is nationalism and war.  The previous chapter traced the origins of national identities up to 1789, and the complex relations between the oldest European monarchy – the Papacy – and the aspirations of Italian nationalists for a politically autonomous state, freed of papal power as well as of the Hapsburg empire. In this chapter , we discuss nationalisms in the nineteenth century. The Hapsburg Empire as a multinational state was arguably the most affected of all European states by the fallout from the French revolution. The thesis advanced here is that the Hapsburg monarchy stands much better comparison than its detractors allowed for.  The Hapsburgs had to deal with the multiple nationalities of their peoples. That proved a very complex undertaking. They succeeded  to an extent, often by serendipity or as an unintended consequence of policy. But they were repeatedly confronted  by war. The Hapsburgs were on the winning side in 1814-15; were shaken by the nationalist revolutions of 1848; lost crucial wars in Italy in 1859, then in Germany in 1866. In 1870, Germany defeated France, which was reduced to the second rank as a great power. A fragile peace lasted until 1914, as the leading European states divided into hostile coalitions. Nationalism, I argue, was one reason why war came. The vital debate about why war broke out in 1914 will be postponed to the next chapter.

 Austria: Metternich and Castlereagh. .

The question confronting the Hapsburg dynasty over the near two hundred years between the accession of Maria Theresa in 1740 as ruler of the family’s crown lands, and the death of Emperor Franz-Josef in 1916, was how to reconcile war and their subject nations to the sovereignty of a family, whose eminence in the eyes of its rulers was ordained by God. Prior to 1789, the family faced the future boldly: survival in Europe’s competitive state system required modernization.  Attacked in 1740 by voracious neighbours, Maria Theresa appealed to “ the fidelity, arms and long-tried valour” of the Hungarian nobility; in return they offered their  “life and blood to our king Maria Theresa”, [1] and quickly reversed the fortunes of war. Maria Theresa’s gratitude remained undiminished until her death in 1780.

The lesson , though, was not lost on her, nor on her successors: the Hapsburg state’s unpreparedness pointed in the direction of bold reform policies. To survive and prosper in Europe’s competitive state system required the monarchy to build  a standing army,  a vigorous diplomacy,  to raise revenues, promote productivity in the labour force, and enhance the adhesion of its peoples to the Crown. Consequently, policies were introduced promoting imperial citizenship predicated on the  legal equality of rights and obligations for its subjects; the 1811 Civil Law Code extended these rights to women; the promotion of universal primary education in the local languages; the creation of an imperial bureaucracy; the establishment of an independent judiciary; the unravelling of feudal obligations which burdened the peasantry, and the promotion of free trade throughout the Empire.  Religious toleration was extended to    non-Catholics and to Jews, up to 35,000 of whom served in the Hapsburg armies during the Napoleonic wars.[2]  By freeing the Jews, the monarchy, writes A.J.P. Taylor, called into existence the most loyal of Austrians.[3] In his two volume Denkbuch für Fürst und Vaterland, [4] Joseph Rossi records the patriotic outburst of support in 1815 for the dynasty’s victory in the Napoleonic wars, recording that celebrations were held throughout the empire in  cities, towns “and the tiniest of villages”. [5]

Yet the historiography of the Hapsburgs records a dynasty losing confidence in face of the challenge from the French revolution. C.A. Macartney, the Anglo-Irish scholar, has given a date when the Hapsburgs became  less bold. On  January 28, 1790, Maria Theresa’s son, the Emperor Joseph died.[6] Faced with the clamour from France for social revolution, hostility to traditional religion and militant republicanism, the Hapsburgs retreated to a timid defense of dynasty, God and monarchy.  Macartney describes the long reign of Francis II, 1792-1835, as  politically barren, and that of his simpleton successor, Ferdinand, 1835-1848,  as nothing less than disastrous. These were the lost years, Macartney suggests, which could never be made good in the second half of the century. The monarchy opted for censorship,  repression, and bureaucracy, thereby leaving the Empire maximally vulnerable to the clamour for change in the revolutions of 1848.  The dominant political figure of these years was Prince Klemenz von Metternich, who took control of Austrian foreign policy, in October 1809, then stayed in high office for 39 long years until his ignominious flight from Vienna in March 1848.

There is however one point to make about the long reign of Francis II. Franz was very keen on theatre. He is said to have attended theatre nearly every evening. But he also appears to have understood that theatre was a great thermometer to check the public temperature. The great years of Viennese theatre came in his reign- the age of Grillparzer, or Raimund and Nestroy. Mozart had died a pauper in 1791, shortly after the first production of “The Magic Flute”.  Francis came to the throne the following year, the year that Beethoven arrived on the scene. Within the decade, Haydn was composing the great works of his old age-the Creation in 1798, the Four Seasons in 1801. Beethoven composed five of his symphonies in the years to 1809. Then came his seventh and ninth symphonies. These were the years that the diplomats were said to be dancing away while settling the great affairs of Europe in Vienna. Schubert appeared on the musical scene in 1814 and Strauss in 1819. Fanny Arnstein  (1758-1818)  had married the rich banker Nathan Adam von Arnstein, with whom she was ennobled in 1798. She brought the notion of an intellectual salon from Berlin to Vienna. During the Vienna Congress, she hosted in her varied Viennese palaces, such luminaries as Wellington, and Talleyrand, was actively engaged in charitable works and became  co-founder of the Gesellschaft für Musikfreunde.  Vienna had become through serendipity a centre of general neutrality where prominent Jews like the Arnsteins could shine in the multi-national climate of the Hapsburg capital. [7]

It is worth remembering that much of post-1789 history is written in terms of which side of the ledger we place ourselves: for or against the Revolution. Metternich tilted clearly to the critical side. Not surprisingly his  record remains highly controversial.[8] In the nineteenth century, his conservative critics maintained that he shunned timely reforms to nip the early signs of nationalism in the bud. Progressives  had no trouble in presenting him as hostile to the Revolution. In the twentieth century, when Europe became consumed by war,  criticism turned to partial praise of him as co-architect of  a European peace which lasted for  a century. His partner was the British Foreign secretary, Viscount Castlereagh. The U.S. Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, published his first book under the title, A World Restored: Metternich , Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822. The focus of Kissinger’s book is on the European structure of peace, not so much on Metternich’s domestic policies.  [9] The achievements of the two statesmen  remain, Kissinger argues,  “in the long period of peace they brought about”; the means they used to achieve it were twofold, the notion of equilibrium and the conference system which maintained it.[10]

These were much the terms in which Metternich appraised his own record. Two-thirds of the text of his eight volume memoirs is devoted to the years 1806-1815, the central period of the Napoleonic wars, while the years from 1815 on make up less than a tenth of the text. [11] It is worthwhile to sketch the paradox facing him, and the Hapsburg Empire: on the one hand, it was a fact that the French Revolution in its radical dimension opposed the dynastic principle. After all, it had been a Hapsburg princess, Marie-Antionette, who was convicted of high treason by the Revolutionary Tribunal, and executed in October 1793, after the abolition of the monarchy, on what is now the Place de la Concorde. She had been brought in a cart to the place of execution, her hair shorn, and in simple white clothes. Her body was initially thrown into a communal grave, until her remains were given a Christian burial on the restoration of the monarchy in 1815. The drama of her death speaks to the depth of the reaction to revolutionary excesses, the horror of social revolution, and the trepidation with which the Hapsburgs appealed to popular passions in their opposition to Napoleon’s armies. On the other hand, there was a strict limit to how far the Hapsburgs would go in conceding to the revolutionary spirit in seeking some modus vivendi with the new ideas. There was no precedent to learn from. The Empire was condemned to trial and error.

Where Metternich was on firmer ground was in his opposition to Napoleon’s determination to  impose a French-led hegemony on Europe. Metternich sought to tame Napoleon by supporting his marriage into the Hapsburg dynasty in 1810; but Napoleon was not to be restrained. With his troops in Spain, the Emperor invaded Russia in 1812, a pivotal year for the history of Russia, and recorded in Tolstoy’s monumental novel, War and Peace. Returning from the rout of his armies, Napoleon then met Metternich at a famous meeting in Dresden in June 1813, but rejected the proposal that he should abandon his European conquests and retire behind France’s traditional frontiers. The result was the battle of Leipzig, dubbed “the battle of the nations”, involving 560,000 soldiers, and causing 133,000 casualties. This was the largest battle in Europe prior to the 1914-18 war, and announced Napoleon’s fall and banishment in 1814, and then definitively following the battle of Waterloo.  Metternich played a leading role in negotiations which resulted in the Treaty of Vienna. The Treaty, modified over time, structured the peace of Europe for a century.

Metternich’s guiding idea was to base Europe’s peace on an enduring balance of power. His British counterpart, Viscount Castlereagh, the Anglo-Irish plenipotentiary to Vienna, was of the same view. Together,  Metternich and Castlereagh blocked the imposition of harsh terms on France, believing that a treaty based on vengeance and retaliation would not serve the European interest. France was restored to her 1791 frontiers, and her colonies returned . Both statesmen supported ending the slave trade, [12] and backed repressive measures at home. But their alliance foundered on the crucial domain of foreign policy.  Metternich’s concept was that Austria, in alliance with Great Britain, would assure its status as a great power through acting as the focal point of a German and Italian confederation.  The Hapsburg Empire would be a multi-nation state, not a national state. That was the gripe that nineteenth century nationalists held against the Hapsburgs. The formula brought Metternich inevitably into conflict with Prussia and Piedmont, both straining to place themselves at the head of their respective national movements.

Castlereagh, for his part, faced a public opinion unfavourable to involvement in continental affairs, and with an already clearly defined national identity.  [13] Linda Colley in her book on British identity maintains that Great Britain had a Protestant identity: yes and no, must be the answer. The central fact about the Church of England is that it is a fudge, designed ab initio to keep the peace. It is neither Catholic nor Protestant; in style, it eschews logic, and ends up in a defensible position whereby we as humans should be reasonably reserved when we speak of God. The Church of England does not speak ex catedra, and remains interested but sceptical about others who do. True enough, the 1701 Act of Succession mandated a Protestant succession to the throne. But the Church of England, in the Elizabethan and subsequent prayer books, prayed for “the Holy Catholik Church”; there were many Protestant denominations;  and the Irish bishops swung unanimously behind the British monarchy in opposition to the apostate French revolutionaries. As Castlereagh made clear in his confidential state paper of May 5, 1820, what the British were agreed on was that they kept the discretion as to when or not they intervened in continental affairs. In the words of the state paper,  the allies had created “ an Union for the Government of the World, or for the superintendence of the internal affairs of other States…”,  pointing out the British public opinion would not agree to such a commitment. “Our Principle of action”, he stated, would be taken from the “Expediency of the Case”, and “the Maxims which a system of Government strongly popular and national in its Character, has imposed upon us”. “We shall be found in our place when actual Danger menaces the System of Europe, but this Country cannot and will not act upon abstract and speculative Principles of Precaution”. [14]

Austria and Great Britain drift apart.

British foreign, and domestic policy, were much influenced by developments in Ireland. According to the census of 1801, the population of England and Wales was recorded as 8 million, Scotland at 1.6 million and Ireland 5.2 million. [15] the Anglo-Irish aristocracy owned up to 50% of the land but  were divided by religious affiliation – Anglican, Presbyterian and Catholic. They were known in Irish history as the Ascendency, directly responsible for the beauty of Georgian Dublin and of Ireland’s grand country houses.

Two major figures of early nineteenth century Great Britain hailed from the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, Viscount Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellington. Castlereagh, at first sympathetic to the Anglo-Irish aristocracy’s support for a Dublin parliament, eventually lobbied for a union that would incorporate Ireland with Great Britain in a United Kingdom. He held that an  Ireland directly under the Crown in Westminster, would kill many birds with one stone: the island would be more secure  against French ambitions; Presbyterian aspirations to imitate the American colonies and declare independence, would be scuttled; and incorporation of Ireland into a United Kingdom would   serve as an answer to the Catholic question. [16] He reasoned that with Ireland subsumed into a larger polity, the Protestants would feel more “confident and liberal”, and the Catholics “would lower their expectations and moderate their demands.” [17]

The Union went ahead in 1801, but emancipation of the Catholics throughout the United Kingdom had to await the late 1820s, when the tide of public opinion turned against further delay. By this time, Hapsburg and British policies had diverged beyond repair. British foreign policy backed the national movements of independence in Latin America; welcomed Greek freedom from Turkish rule; and then turned to constitutional reform, which had been postponed by the circumstances of the Napoleonic wars. A coalition favouring a widening of the franchise emerged, composed of the Catholic Association, led by Ireland’s new national tribune, Daniel O’Connell; the Benthamites, in alliance with the Methodists; and most importantly the Whigs in the House of Lords. The Tories, led by Wellington, were opposed. The measure was finally implemented when Wellington was persuaded to back the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829.[18] This was followed in short order by the Great Reform Act of 1832.  The Act disenfranchised so-called “rotten boroughs”, where voters could be counted on one hand; created new constituencies to reflect the changing demographics of the country; and enlarged the electorate from about 400,000 to 650,00 voters. The new electorate were small business owners and householders who paid a yearly rent of £10 or more-scarcely a revolutionary measure.

Court politics, as much as Metternich’s conservatism, scotched similar minimalist reforms in the Hapsburg lands. Appointed by the Emperor Francis as state minister in 1826, Count Franz Anton von Kolowrat quickly established his dominance in domestic affairs of the empire as rival and counterpart to Metternich. For the following two decades, their competition held any reforms which Metternich entertained in check, until both were swept from office in the course of the revolution of 1848. Events took a very different path in the United Kingdom. In the more rumbunctious culture of British politics, working people, disappointed over the limits to reform in the 1832 Act, formed a Chartist movement in 1836 to further the cause of universal suffrage. The movement spawned a People’s Charter summarizing six demands: a vote for every male over 21 years old; the secret ballot; no property qualification for MPs; payment of MPs; equally-sized constituencies; annual parliamentary elections. Most of these demands had been achieved by 1918. In other words, by the 1840s at the latest, working class demands were already setting the agenda of British  politics.

Was growth of working class influence on British politics a challenge to British identity, as defined by Linda Colley? No. British identity had already cast deep roots since the fourteenth century; then came the break with Rome in the sixteenth century; a shared Scottish monarchy in the seventeenth; and the constant warfare with France in the subsequent century, when religious divides abated, support for Catholic emancipation waxed, and the anti-slavery movement gathered momentum. In Britain, experience showed that there was no need to overthrow, so much as to expand active membership in existing institutions,  whose founding document was the Bill of Rights of 1689. This document, in the lineage of the 1215 Magna Carta, settled the primacy of parliament over the monarch’s prerogatives, providing for the regular meeting of parliament, free elections to the Commons, free speech in parliamentary debates, and laid the basis for what later emerged as the United Kingdom’s constitutional monarchy. As the great Anglo-Irish historian, J.P.T. Bury argued, it was more accurate to speak of insular pride than of a nationalist movement in the United Kingdom. But the country did have a nationalist movement to contend with in Ireland.[19]

As Bury tells the story, the Act of Union of 1801 abolishing the Dublin parliament and giving Ireland representation at Westminster proved a bitter disappointment. The central question in Anglo-Irish affairs over the nineteenth century was whether Irish interests could be catered to in Westminster. Irish and English reformers co-operated, for instance, over Catholic emancipation and over abolition of the slave trade, but the history of the Chartist movement revealed the limits to their partnership. The Chartist movement reached its peak in the 1840s, but then fell apart over Daniel O’Connell’s decision to revive agitation for the repeal of the 1801 Act, and added a seventh demand to the six of the People’s Charter, to wit the political independence of Ireland. Support in Britain melted away, leaving O’Connell with  the Loyal National Repeal Association. In Bury’s words, “Two years later some young lawyers, the nucleus of what became a ‘Young Ireland’ party, independently founded The Nation, a weekly, which aimed ‘above all, to direct the popular mind and the sympathies of educated men of all parties to the great end of Nationality… which will not only raise our people from their poverty, by securing to them the blessings of a Domestic Legislature, but inflame and purify them with a lofty and heroic love of country — a Nationality of the spirit as well as of the letter’. (As one of them, John Pigot, wrote) … ‘this matter of nationality’ was…, ‘a sacred religion; and I mean the word in its highest sense’.”[20] In the course of events, Irish radicals took over. Their homeland was the United States. In the immediate conditions of the 1840s, they did not have the backing of  the Church hierarchy; they enjoyed no support among the hunger-stricken peasantry, and the government sent troops to Ireland. The ill-managed insurrection was quickly repressed.

Famine spread across Europe in 1847, but nowhere so terribly as in Ireland. One third of the island’s population was dependent on the potato as a staple crop. The crop failed repeatedly for a number of years. Irish landowners in Westminster were well aware of the disaster, as was the British government. What to do? Public works were set up; food was imported; relief works were organized; tariffs on corn  were abolished in order to lower prices. None of this amounted to much. Meanwhile, food was exported out of Ireland to Great Britain, rather than kept there and distributed; emigration from the island soared to the Americas, Australia and Great Britain. By the 1850s, the Irish population, at about 7 million in the early 1840s, was down to 6 million. The experience of this disaster poisoned relations within the United Kingdom over the coming seventy years.

The Great Famine confronted the British government with a major challenge: was the prime policy response to be state action or a freeing of  markets?  The answer came in the form of a state-imposed free market policy. The ideas had been written up in 1817 by David Ricardo, financier, MP, economist, and author of On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, one of the pivotal texts of the emerging science of economics. Ricardo demonstrates that trade between countries with differing cost structures is beneficial to both. His ideas entered the pantheon of the broad reform movement which swept the United Kingdom in the decades following the end of the Napoleonic wars. The answer to the high cost of food, and the regular outbreak of famines, Ricardo wrote, was for countries to buy from the cheapest source, and to pay for imports by selling products where it enjoyed a comparative advantage. This is the doctrine of Free Trade, adopted by the Anti-Corn Law League, which helped to found The Economist in 1843,-the weekly that came to be the voice of utilitarianism in the English-speaking world for the coming age- but it was the Great Famine which triggered the political manoeuvrings which led Sir Robert Peel, the Tory leader, in early 1846 to take the dramatic step to repeal protection of the corn markets. The measure split the Tory party, and helped to create the new British political landscape of Liberals, under the sobre leadership of William Ewart Gladstone, while the Tories regrouped under the flamboyant leadership of Benjamin Disraeli.

British reformers were nothing if not messianic. They had slain the dragon of slavery under the British flag; they had demonstrated that aristocratic privilege could be challenged; Free Trade held the answer to famine; Christianity taught the brotherhood of all peoples. Great Britain was widely admired at the time as the leading country in the world, setting the benchmark for all to follow. Metternich had subscribed to the idea, and expressed his aspiration to have been born English. But as Castlereagh had pointed out in his May 1820 memorandum, countries differed. They could not march in lockstep. To try was folly. In practice, Metternich remained pragmatic, and stuck to his Hapsburg script. One of the weaknesses of his delicate construct for post-1815 Europe was his reliance on Prussian co-operation.  But the Hohenzollerns were ambitious, and Protestant;  the Hapsburgs were Catholic and presided the German confederation. When Berlin set out to organize the German lands within a customs union, the better to protect local producers against British competition, Metternich understood that the measure was also designed as a power move to challenge Hapsburg  leadership in the confederation, and refused to join. But he thereby gave Berlin a freer hand in German lands.

The ideas behind the customs union had been elaborated by Friedrich List in his The National System of Political Economy. The book stands in stark contrast  to Ricardo’s treatise. Both books took the national economy as their subject; but they differed over concept and means.  Ricardo’s book was abstract; List’s was historical; Ricardo sought to counter famine; List sought to augment national  production capacity;  Ricardo argued free trade; List argued protection; Ricardo privileged  the universal good of all nations; List argued nation states should look first to their own security. “The system of protection, he argued, inasmuch as it forms the only means of placing those nations which are far behind in civilization on equal terms with the one predominating nation, appears to be the most efficient means of furthering the final union of nations, and hence also of promoting true freedom of trade”. [21] This debate between Ricardo and List fanned out into major differences between Great Britain and Germany in the course of the nineteenth century, and was a major reason why the allies of 1815 became the enemies of 1914.

At the time, Austria’s exclusion from the customs union was considered  as a fatal policy error, which handed Germany’s leadership to Prussia, and parked the Hapsburg empire as its client. This was not immediately the case. Austrian growth rates soon exceeded those in  the customs union. Banks were consolidated in order to raise the capital required for large scale industrial and transport investments. Jerome Blum concludes his study of transport and industry in pre-1848 (Vormärz) Austria thus:  ”The extension and the improvement of the road system and the establishment of railroad and steamboat lines opened new markets and offered new opportunities to Austrian entrepreneurs. Capital was increasingly invested in productive enterprises with a resulting large increase in output. This was notable in the textile industries and in paper-manufacturing. Heavy industry lagged, though this too , showed noteworthy increase in production in the Vormärz. Accompanying this industrial development was the appearance of an urban, industrial working class, including many women and children, which lived apparently on the margin of subsistence”.[22]  Class identity everywhere was moving to the fore  in European as in  British affairs.

Mid-century Europe and the 1848 revolutions.

The revolutions of 1848 placed national demands front and centre of European politics. The previous revolution of 1830 had seen  the consolidation of the Netherlands and Belgium, under a European neutrality commitment; in 1848, the Swiss Confederation agreed on a modern constitution which has endured to the present day.  Troubles were avoided in Great Britain, where a Chartist meeting in April wasted away in the face of a government prepared to face down disturbances, and a political culture long since accustomed to popular agitation for incremental legislative changes. Once disturbances spread to France in February 1848, they fanned out  like wildfire to the rest of the continent. The one common feature they shared was to challenge the dynastic principle as the foundation of authority. The U.S. chargé d’affaires to the Hapsburg Empire, William H. Stiles, reported prematurely that the events “fell like a bomb amid the states and kingdoms of the Continent”, and that “the various monarchs hastened to pay their subjects the constitutions which they owed them”. [23] A common pattern of events emerged: constituent assemblies voted constitutions; they were repressed by armed force; but there was no return to the status quo ante. In France, universal suffrage was retained, allowing for the election by referendum of Louis-Napoléon as Emperor in December 1851; in Germany, the March 1849 constitution, voted by the Paulskirche assembly, was rescinded but Prussia retained an elective assembly; the Hapsburgs revoked the constitution voted in Vienna, and crushed the Hungarian revolt by military means with Russian support. But seignorial rights were not restored in Austria, and Vienna proceeded to impose a centralized and uniform system of administration on the nationalities of the Empire. The national movements in Germany and Italy were momentarily defeated, the lesson their protagonists drew being  to ally in future with Prussia and Piedmont. What is more the vote at Paulskirche made clear that the majority in the German lands aspired to a German-only nation; they rejected inclusion of Austria, and the multi-national reality of the Hapsburg dynasty.

Franz-Josef succeeded to the throne in February 1848. He was named after his grand-uncle, the Emperor Josef II, who was remembered as a reforming Emperor. Many prominent commentators on the life of Franz-Josef maintain that he was plain reactionary, and that he drifted from one challenge to another, until the ship of state met shipwreck in world war. The permanent challenge which he faced, and never mastered-the critique runs- derived from the Empire’s competing nationalisms, which matured as the Empire modernized, industrialization took hold, educational standards progressed, and mass politics developed.  The accusation is arguably best presented by Oscar Jasci in his book, The Dissolution of the Hapsburg Empire, which appeared in 1929. Jasci wrote with deep knowledge as  a distinguished participant in imperial politics, and then , after the fall, as  perceptive critic from his position as a professor in Oberlin College, Ohio. The  monarchy fell, Jasci concluded, because the Empire lacked “ a common state idea”,- a Staatsidee– capable of overcoming  “ the mutual hatred of the various nations”. [24] A.J.P. Taylor, in his classic study, The Hapsburg Monarchy, 1809-1918, pithily remarked  that Franz-Joseph was an Emperor without ideas, a trait that served him well and enabled him to survive so long. [25] Franz-Josef failed to perform a nationalistic transformation, Taylor wrote, like the Hohenzollern monarchy had done, and create an “Austrian idea”.

This critique is eminently challengeable. Not the least of objections must be that the Hohenzollern choice of Staatsidee, to champion a national-state, turned out to be disastrous. Vienna always championed the multinational Staatsidee; it could do no less. There was of course a highly conservative content of the Hapsburg world: at its heart, that content was religious, the divine right of kings, which Franz-Joseph’s tutors taught him as a child. [26] Yet almost the first thing that Franz-Joseph did as Emperor was to accept the constitution proposed, only to revoke it. Yet he accepted the defunct constitution’s principle of the equality of all constituent nations, and then spent his first decade of rule centralizing power in Vienna, to the accompaniment of much praise. But in 1859, the armies under his command were defeated by French and Piedmontese troops at Solferino, forcing him to search for a different constitutional formula. He briefly attempted an alliance in de-centralisation with aristocratic allies, but found he had to abandon that for an alliance with German liberals. This developed, after further military defeat at Königratz at the hands of Bismarck’s Prussia, into the 1867 Ausgleich in effect dividing the Empire into two halves under Hungarian and Austria-German control. The pact lasted until his death, and was accompanied by regular efforts to find similar accommodation with the other nationalities, especially but vainly with the  Czechs. In 1907, Franz-Josef out of exasperation at feuding between the nationalities personally took the initiative to introduce universal suffrage. This laid the gound for the successor states’ welfare provisions, much as the Lloyd George budget of 1911 laid the foundations of the british welfare state.

The conclusion must be that Franz-Josef’s  one constant endeavour after 1848 was to reconcile the dynasty with the Empire’s nationalities. This was most definitely within the dynastic tradition of Maria-Theresa. His efforts brought decades of peace, allowed for a considerable economic development of the Empire, and made Vienna the leading intellectual capital of the world. It would have to be added, that Hapsburg troops fought for the Empire until the very last moment, when confronted with economic collapse and defeat on the battlefield. The imperial Staatsidee was an imperial patriotism.

From his thirteenth year on, Franz-Josef always wore military uniform.  The army was the one institution  which lent itself most readily to the Hapsburg idea: the equality of all nations under the dynasty, but with a dominant language of German. The officers owed their fealty directly to the monarch, a person – not a reified God as nationalists would have it. Indeed, Arnold J.Mayer, in his Marxist interpretation of European society prior to 1914, has reluctantly to admit, the old pillars of authority continued to dominate. [27] These pillars continued to be largely agrarian, and controlled the “steel frame” of the ancient regime, forcing the new elements of manufacturing and finance to accommodate. In the UK, seven thousand families owned 80% of the land; in Prussia, land was heavily concentrated in the Juncker class; two dozen families in Austria-Hungary owned over 250,000 acres; 46 members of the Jewish nobility counted among the largest landowners. At the apex of society stood the European dynasties; only in Republican France and Switzerland were  national societies otherwise constituted. But as Mayer laments, even in France under the Third Republic, dukes, marquises, counts, and  barons occupied prominent social positions, owned large states and kept elegant mansions in the Faubourg St Honoré.

This is not to deny that Franz-Josef had to adapt to changes over the many years of his reign. In the longer run, the most serious threat to the Church as a prop of monarchy was the spread of ultramontanism, and a slow distancing between the Vatican and the Hapsburgs. In 1855, Franz-Josef returned powers to the Vatican over the nomination of bishops and over marriage to the Church, that Joseph II had confiscated; yet Pio Nono accused the Empire of breaching the Concordat over educational provisions  in 1868, and Pope Pius X prohibited in 1904 the use of imperial vetoes in papal elections. The aristocracy remained outwardly a pillar of the monarchy; yet as far back as Maria Theresa, the dynasty had introduced measures which  challenged their local powers; Jasci points out in his book that the Ausgleich in effect weakened the monarchy because it undermined the privileges of the Hungarian feudal classes at the expense of minority nationalities. A significant reinforcement of the monarchy came with the expansion of the administration, accompanying the development of a welfare state: in Hungary, for instance, the minor nobility found refuge in the expanding bureaucracy of the 1850s, as their feudal privileges disappeared, and then upped the barriers to entry by insisting on Hungarian as the dominant language. One of the prime reasons for the Ausgleich of 1867 was the realization that the Hungarians benefitted by membership of a larger entity. Not the least of those benefits was membership in a common security community. As Ferenc Deak, one of the architects of the Ausgleich recorded, Hungary was placed between the great powers, any one of which could obliterate it. Hence “for us Austria’s existence is just as necessary as our existence is to Austria”.[28]

Putting an imperial patriotism into practice was no easy task. One of the most ambitious of refomers was Max Vladimir von Beck,(1854-1943), the  Austrian Minister President in the years 1906-1908, who pushed through the Emperor’s programme for universal suffrage, and sought thereby to reconcile the German and Czeck populations of Bohemia by giving powers to local authorities. The reforms hugely expanded the electorate, and enabled the Christian Social and Social Democratic parties to introduce far ranging changes in insurance and old age provisions. His administration eventually became unstuck over Hungarian opposition, and court and personal rivalries. The authors of Deutsche Biographie, laud Beck as “one of the (Empire’s) last great statesmen”.[29] His comments on the politics of the Empire are worth bearing in mind: We had to deal, he was quoted as saying, “with 8 nationalities, 28 parliamentary groups, 2 distinct ideologies,(and) a complex relation to Hungary in order to rule Austria”. [30]

In retrospect, historians differ widely over whether collapse was or was not foreordained. Macartney, Jasci and Taylor think so; R.J.W.Evans considers that “the rule of the Hapsburgs was destroyed by its chief beneficiaries”, [31] so survival under the extreme conditions of war was unlikely.  Pieter M.Judson, by contrast, in his The Hapsburg Empire: A New History, considers that the Hapsburgs accomplished much more than purely national historiography allows for. [32] I would contest Judson’s affirmation that other nineteenth century states faced similar problems to the Empire: the politics of the Empire were of a different order of complexity to that of other nineteenth century states. But what Franz-Josef did achieve was remarkable.  Viktor Adler, recently elected leader of the Social Democrat Party, stated at the International Socialist congress held in Paris in 1889, that “Austria has perhaps the most liberal legislation in all Europe”. [33] Adler became leader of the party through to 1914 and beyond, and died on the day that the world war ended on November 11, 1918.  Otto Bauer – also an Austrian Social Democrat leader of Jewish origin- stated that he,  Adler had  “ pursued the struggle for democracy in the belief that democracy could restructure the old Austria..” but Bauer added, “in reality, it had to destroy it”.[34] Evidently, the key question of whether dynasty and democracy could be reconciled has not been settled.

The United Kingdom was the other multi-national polity where the verdict of the historians is that Irish independence, too, was inevitable. What can definitely be said is that extreme positions were easy to take up as far as Irish affairs were concerned.  Following the Great Famine, Young Ireland had morphed into the Fenian movement in the United States, preaching violence to achieve Irish independence. Gladstone’s biographers tell  the story of his felling trees in 1868 on his wife’s estate at Hawarden Castle, in Flintshire, when a message from the Queen came, telling him that he was to become Prime Minister: “my mission, he is quoted as saying, is to pacify Ireland”. He subsequently disestablished the Church of Ireland, the sister church of the Church of England, with the support of Irish Catholics, Scottish Presbyterians and English Non-Conformists. He then passed the Land Acts, in effect converting Ireland by the first decade of the twentieth century, into a peasant economy. He also became an ardent champion  to the cause of Home Rule in the early 1880s, thereby  splitting the Liberal party. In 1885, following a further Reform Act which widened the Irish electorate from 220,000 to 500,000, Charles Parnell led a disciplined Irish Home Rule Party, as the UK’s third party by size. Gladstone decided to collaborate with Parnell, but failed to push through his two successive Home Rule bills. Irish nationalists then took up the cause of the Boers in the war of 1899-1902. [35]Its outcome, however, was the restoration of responsible government in the Orange River Colony and the Transvaal in 1907, which led many to believe that a similar deal might be affected in Anglo-Irish affairs. [36] As Robert Ensor wrote in his magisterial England, 1870-1914, the reigning Liberal party became attracted to the idea that the success could be duplicated in Ireland. John Redmond, the new leader of Parnell’s nationalists, writes Ensor, “led a unified party…; his dignified eloquence expressed a generous and conciliatory temper; and unlike Parnell, he had, apart from Irish grievance, a warm admiration for England and Englishmen. Had their hand been extended to him as it was to the Boer leader (Botha), he would have grasped it in the same spirit.”[37]

Modern historians point out that hand was held out, but insincerely.   Ronald Fanning maintains that the Liberal government of 1912-14 was pretending but not willing Ireland’s political autonomy.[38]  Feigning action was not the only problem. F.S.L.Lyons, the biographer of Parnell, writes that he, Parnell,  “never came remotely in reach” of finding a solution to Ulster Protestantism; [39] Tim Pat Coogan argues that independence was the long delayed revenge for the famine and all the ills inflicted by the English on Ireland; [40] Perhaps the last word in favour of the thesis of the inevitability of Irish independence goes to Cardinal Newman, who considered that “the gross ill treatment of the Irish over the centuries had burnt into the national heart a deep hatred of England”.[41]

In order to prove inevitability, historians have to show why alternatives did not occur.  Here is not the place to do so, if only for reasons of space and time. The simple point to make is that there were alternatives, and they are credible enough to be seriously examined, not dismissed. Adolph Fischhof (1816-1893), of Jewish descent, successful doctor, prominent publicist and ardent supporter of a reformed Hapsburg Empire, proposed a model of a monarchical Switzerland, where the nationality problem would be resolved by extreme de-centralisation to the level of local administrations. His Staatsidee for Austria was a federal monarchy, where all nationalities would be treated “in harmony with the conditions of its existence”.[42] This is a good description of the task towards which Franz-Josef was chained, nolens volens. Lord Acton, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge,  was the other champion of the multi-national state, the UK: in his article “On Nationality” in 1862- a thinly veiled attack on the Liberal Party support for Italian unity, he argued the case for the superiority of a multi-national state. A constitution, he argued, had to grow from a root, and pass the test of Judeo-Christian origin.[43]

The harrowing case of  Lady Lucy Cavendish may be cited in illustration: in May 1882, Gladstone sent his son-in-law, Lord Frederick Cavendish, as Chief Secretary at Dublin Castle. The day of his inauguration he, and his companion, were knifed by two Fenians in the  infamous Phoenix Park murders. Gladstone’s daughter-in-law tells the story in her diary which was published after her death in 1925. “Uncle William, she writes, took me in his arms, and his first words were, “Father, forgive them,  for they know not what they do.” Then he said to me, “Be assured it will not be in vain” and across all my agony there fell a bright right of hope and I saw in a vision Ireland at peace and my darling’s life-blood accepted as a sacrifice for Christ’s sake to help to bring this to pass”. [44] The victorious strand of Irish nationalism, Sinn Fein, did not share Lady Lucy’s deep Christian faith;  the roots of its thinking-Jacobin, racist, absolutist, at best agnostic- exemplified what Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the French Revolution,  discussed as “the Versatility of Evil”-[45] where “the very same vice assumes a new body’.[46] We shall see more of this phenomenon in succeeding chapters.

Nationalism becomes more than an idea.

Nationalism is not evil per se, as its detractors said in the nineteenth century, and then, as advocated in the inter-war years by progressive converts to the cause of doing away with nationalism. It is, though, a godsend to political inventiveness. It is a compound noun, replete with many meanings, and lends itself therefore to prolix embellishment. Dynasties, revolutionaries affirm, must be replaced as the source of authority by the people.  Who are the people? seems a reasonable question to ask. Answers come there many. All those who speak one language; who occupy the same territory; who claim the same ethnicity; who follow  the same religion; who share the same statehood. None of these criteria readily coincide. Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872), the chief inspirer of the Italian Risorgimento, wrote that  nationality was “ the totality of citizens speaking the same language”. [47] Mazzini founded the Young Italy, then the Young Europe movement, which held that once all nations were independent, a Confederal Europe would emerge, and peace would reign. His edited and unedited works comprise twenty volumes. [48] Lajor Kossuth (1802-1894), for short while governor of Hungary in 1849, wrote that “confraternity (among the nationalities of the Empire) can only be brought about with the cement of constitutionality”.[49] This proved true enough, but very difficult to implement. As governor of Hungary, Kossuth proved incapable of compromise. He was ejected by military force, and continued to insist on his maximalist demands from the sidelines. He opposed the 1867 Ausgleich. His published  works,- incomplete as of 2018- amount to 15 volumes. The delegates at Paulskirche were equally verbose: known as “the professors’ parliament”,  the  delegates eventually agreed to a constitution, minus Austria, and without the backing of Germany’s own dynasts. Their failure- predictable because dynasts still held power-  prompted emigration to Wisconsin of many political activists, while those who stayed home came to accept that words and written constitutions did not suffice to achieve national unity.

The years 1848 to 1870 saw nationalism move into the realm of practical politics. First off the mark was Louis Napoleon, who  definitely had a Staatsidee -the promotion of the national cause in Europe. This led him into support for Italy, against Austria, with its possessions in Venice and Lombardy, and its imperial backing of  the papacy. Had Napoleon thought in power terms, he would have done everything to prop up Austria; but he did the opposite. Count Otto von Bismarck spotted the error. In a famous speech in 1862, Bismarck, recently in sole charge of Prussian diplomacy, stated his philosophy:  “The great questions of the time will not be resolved by speeches and majority decisions – that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849 – but by iron and blood”. [50] He then proceeded to demonstrate his mastery of Machiavellian statecraft through a series of limited wars against Denmark, Austria and France. The German liberals flocked to his banner, abandoning constitutionalism, and at Königgratz in 1866, the Prussian armies delivered a crushing blow to the Austrians . The defeat finally settled the competition for leadership in the German lands. Franz-Josef entertained the idea that with the Hungarian Ausgleich in 1867, he might be able to reverse Austria’s abasement. This proved a vain aspiration.

French voices had been raised against Napoleon’s policies. Adolph de Bourqueney, the veteran French diplomat, warned Napoleon III that “We have played too much with the empty pompous words of nationalism.  The only serious nationalism which we have brought to light is that of Germany. Without a single afterthought, we have restored to German opinion its antipathy for France”. [51] Adolphe Thiers, French statesman and historian charged in 1867 in the National Assembly that Napoleon had allowed the consolidation  of Germany, and the establishment of a major power, “young, active, bold and devoured by ambition. Hundreds of years of French strategy to keep Germany divided had been overturned. “There is not, he thundered, a single mistake left to make”. There was, and Napoleon made it. Bismarck tricked the Emperor into declaring war over a Hohenzollern claim to the succession of the Spanish crown, thereby seeming to encircling France. This was a figment: Spain was impoverished; its population was three-quarters illiterate; it had no industry to speak of;  its politics were dramatically unstable. France went to war;  the result was defeat at Sedan in 1870, and the crowning of King William I as Emperor of Germany at Versailles in January 1871. All paths in Europe from henceforth led to Berlin, not to Paris nor to Vienna.

As Benjamin Disraeli said in the House of Commons: “This war represents the German revolution, a greater political event than the French revolution of last century. I don’t say a greater, or as great a social event. What its social consequences may be are in the future. Not a single principle in the management of our foreign affairs, accepted by all statesmen for guidance up to six months ago, any longer exists. There is not a diplomatic tradition which has not been swept away. You have a new world, new influences at work, new and unknown objects and dangers with which to cope, at present involved in that obscurity incident to novelty in such affairs. We used to have discussions in this House about the balance of power. Lord Palmerston, eminently a practical man, trimmed the ship of State and shaped its policy with a view to preserve an equilibrium in Europe. [ . . . ] But what has really come to pass? The balance of power has been entirely destroyed, and the country which suffers most, and feels the effects of this great change most, is England.” [52]

This was Disraelian hyperbole: without any doubt, the country most effected by defeat at Sedan, followed by William’s coronation at Versailles, was France. Bismarck insisted that he would only negotiate peace with an elected government. A new constitution had been proclaimed and elections were duly held in February 1871, but civil war broke out the next month.  Thiers was elected President and signed the peace Treaty in Frankfurt in May. France had to pay 5 billion francs indemnity, which it did in very short time. The funds flooded into the Berlin markets, flattened interest rates, fostered a boom drawing many wealthy families into its orbit, followed by a crash, and an outbreak of anti-semitism. This outbreak is generally dated as the first modern expression of anti-semitism in its materialist guise of Jews as manipulators of high finance, rather than as authors of Christ’s crucifixion. Anti-semitism spread fast, helped in France by a determination to win back Alsace and Lorraine, taken by Germany; a rage to undo the sleight of defeat; and a thirst to avenge outrage at France’s abasement. A series of military laws were passed between 1872 to 1875, raising the length of military service to five years, making France the most militarized society in Europe. Defeat in 1870, in short, poisoned the well of French nationalism.

The results were soon to be seen. In the early 1880s, calls for a “nationalism of revenge” curdled into shouts of the Jews as the guilty cause of French decline. Paul Déroulede created a League of Patriots, which blossomed into fully fledged anti-semitism in its later years. Edouard Drumont, monarchist and Catholic, wrote a best seller, La France Juive, stating that “the religious question only plays a secondary role compared to the question of race, which prevails over all others”.[53] As an indication of the size of his audience, the shortened 1888 edition was re-published 200 times up to 1914. [54] By 1888,  French politics had become dominated by the comic-tragic figure of General Boulanger, who sought a conflict with Bismarck.  His moment in the spotlight faded fast, only to be replaced by a major financial scandal, over the building of the Panama Canal, which revealed the close association of Jewish financiers with state entities involved in the project.[55] The scandal soon merged into an even greater scandal, the Dreyfus affair, where an army captain, of Jewish origin, was wrongfully blamed for betraying French state secrets to the German enemy. French society divided into two camps, which structured French politics for most of the following century. The Dreyfusards gathered behind the banner of Emile Zola, author of the letter to the President, Felix Faure,  “J’accuse”, which excoriated the “abominable”, “criminal”, “iniquitous“ “witchhunt”  against Jews. [56] The key figure for the anti-Dreyfusards was  Charles Maurras, founder of Action Française, champion of an “integral nationalism”, and author of Enquete sur la Monarchie. Maurras argued for strong executive power, fashioned out of a marriage between “monarchy” and “integral nationalism”, beset by its perennial enemies-Protestants, Jews, Freemasons, and “méteques”-half-casts. These ideas indubitably form part of the intellectual ancestry of the Vichy regime, of 1940-1944 France. [57] The two Frances nonetheless came together in 1914, in the words of President Raymond Poincaré,  under a national banner of “l’union sacrée”. Opposition to the common enemy sufficed to overcome internal enmities. This was not to prove the case in 1940.

If French ideas focused like a laser on Germany, German ideas about their place in the world were much more geared to the United Kingdom. German historiography admired the way that the English had reconciled freedom with hierarchy, and conservatism with nationhood. There were dissident voices, to be sure, when American or French examples could be cited as more worthy of praise. Karl von Rottech, for instance, (1775-1840), wrote disparagingly of Cromwell, and  the 1689 Bill of Rights in his Allgemeine Geschichte;  was critical of the 1815 Vienna settlement, and excoriated the inequalities accompanying British industrialization. His Geschichte eventually reached eleven volumes  and went through 25 editions between its initial publication in 1813 and  1866.  By contrast, Leopold von Ranke,(1795-1886), writing rather later, considered England in altogether more positive light: he married a lady of Anglo-Irish stock, held an inborn reverence for tradition, was personally pious, and considered England a natural ally of Prussia. History, he considered,  should be written “the way it happened”; primary sources should be used always; primacy went to foreign over domestic policy; and “every age is next to God” was his way of stating that there is no progress in human affairs. As Charles McClelland records, German historians from the pro-parliamentary left to the moderate right agreed well into the 1850s in their praise for England.[58]  Ranke’s six volume monument to the history of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries appeared between 1859-1867. In it, he recorded the debt Europe owed to England in opposing the hegemonial ambitions of France. This was probably the high-water mark of Anglophilic writing among German historians.

The waters became more muddied in coming decades. Bismarck’s methods seemed to prove that Realpolitik was more fruitful than constitutionalism; and  German liberals were disappointed by the lack of evident support for unification emanating from England. What England did export to Germany was Darwinism, popularized by the likes of Karl Vogt,  who introduced Darwin’s ideas to a German-speaking audience in a series of 16 lectures delivered in Switzerland in the course of 1863. [59] Vogt  rubbished the dualist idea of body and soul, prevalent in Christendom;  humanity, he demonstrated,  was part of the animal kingdom. At the top of his human pile sat the Germanic peoples, and at the bottom, the blacks[60] -a categorization with a long life left in it. He was joined by Ernst Haeckel, a prolific scholar who popularized Darwin’s work in Germany, and whose book, Naturliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, published in 1868 went through 9 editions by 1909, and was translated into 25 languages. By this time, the notion of nation was drenched in racial analogy. Julian Langbehn (1851-1907) in his best seller, Rembrandt as Teacher, for instance, exalted the Germanic race, among which he included the Dutch and the English. Langbehn’s Darwinism soon spilled over into anti-semitism: .  “A Jew, wrote Langbehn,  can no more become a German than a plum can turn into an apple”. [61] His book went through at least thirty-seven editions.[62]  Racial analogies inevitably brought with them the idea that a no holds-barred rivalry was the human lot. Indeed, failure to act in the fierce struggle for life was a dereliction of duty: states had to militarise or perish. Racial theories proliferated, backed by “geopolitics” an expansive theory developed by an Englishman, Halford Mackinder and later by Karl Haushofer, author of the concept of Lebensraum, and teacher of Rudolph Hess and Adolph Hitler. Lebensraum taught that a race needed space to prosper. National boundaries were there to be breached.

Strong states in the jungle of world affairs made their own law. That was the teaching in a nutshell of Heinrich von Treitschke,(1834-1896)-historian, pundit, national liberal, professor, first Anglophile, then  Anglophobe. A crucial influence on his intellectual development was Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann, who, disillusioned about the aborted 1848 revolution, declared in the Frankfurt Assembly that “the path of power is the only one that will satisfy and appease the fermenting to freedom-for it is not solely freedom that the German is thinking of, it is rather power, which has hieterto been refused him , and after which he hankers”. [63] Prussia as Germany’s national unifier was the cause to which he devoted his life and scholarly career, and through which he established for Germany a sense of national mission.

It was the events of 1866-70, when Bismarck demonstrated that national unity could come only by the practice of Realpolitik, that Treitschke became convinced of the inherent flaws of the English parliamentary model.  [64] In 1874, Treitschke took up a professorship in Berlin, where he lived until his death in 1896. His “Politics” lectures were crammed to the rafters: “Here thousands of young men, writes Andreas Dorpalen,  who were later to attend to the public affairs of the country, administer its laws, and educate its young were taught disdain of commercial occupations…and contempt for the lower classes. Here they are also told of the inferiority of Jews and non-Germans, the ineffectiveness of parliaments and political parties, and the salutary effects of war and aggressiveness”. “It is scarcely possible, writes Paul Kennedy, to go through the memoirs of the Wihelmine Right without encountering some reference to the impact which Treitschke had made upon their formative thoughts”. [65] The people he influenced included the likes of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, architect of Germany’s high seas fleet, and Bernard von Bülow, Chancellor of Germany from 1900-1909.

Treitschke died in 1896. By that time, the foundations for the Franco-Russian alliance had been laid. The “yellow” press was expanding fast, along with the size of the reading public. War scares occurred with great frequency: in the UK, foreign plots to land ashore; German scares of being surrounded by enemies; French cries for revenge.  Much  happened in the years before the outbreak of the Great War: the Boer war, the Russian defeat at the hands of Japan, Anglo-German naval  rivalry, the éntente cordiale, Austria-Hungary’s absorption of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Balkan wars, the assassination at Sarajevo of the heir to the Hapsburg throne. So it was a tribute to Treitschke’s impact on German opinion, when a group of Oxford professors wrote a book in 1914, Why We Are at War: Great Britain’s Case. [66] They identified Treitschke as the main source of what they termed in their Chapter VI as The New German Theory of the State. “The idealization of the state as power results in the idealization of war”, the authors wrote. He used his pulpit, their accusation ran,  to  instill in Germany a hatred of England; to preach a pagan doctrine that glorifies war;  and to encourage “the worship of brute force disguised as Heldentum (heroism) and of vicious cunning disguised as political morality..”. “The war in which England is now engaged with Germany is fundamentally a war, the professors declared, between two different principles—that of raison d’état, and that of the rule of law…” Germany’s glorification of the power-state allowed no room for a comity of nations to flourish. All states, as it were, spent their time beggaring each other.

Did nationalism cause the war? The Oxford professors consider that German nationalism à la Treitschke most definitely did. Friedrich Meinecke, writing in the 1920s, pointed out the quiet hypocrisy of the professors  claiming that England was innocent of power politics. He quotes the above sentence , and comments that the professors presented England as “a piece of furniture without veneer, as the massive wood of absolute legality and fidelity to treaties”. [67] But he goes on to argue that it might be interesting to listen to what hypocrites have to say: “All the weakness of Treitschke’s doctrine of power…are due to the fact that he was too eager to interpret natural things and processes as being moral, and altogether used the predicate “ moral” too lavishly”. [68]

Another way of saying this is to maintain that Treitschke, believing Christian that he was, nonetheless was sufficiently tarred by the brush of neo-Darwinism to consider that there was an internal morality to the dictates of Nature. The Protestant Christian in him, Meinecke points out, considered that humanity was fallen, but also that there is a terrifying logic to Machiavelli’s logic. Which did he prioritize: the law of Nature, of raw politics or the Judeo-Christian law, tending the other cheek? “The justice of war, Meinecke quotes him as saying,  is based quite simply on the consciousness of a moral necessity”.[69] Treitschke opted for Nature.

War, Treitschke finds himself saying,  justifies itself. It does not, but it is  central to European history. That is the contention of this chapter.  War, not nationalism, is what shaped the Hapsburg Empire’s fate. Metternich rightly considered that the most important years of his position at the summit of European diplomacy were the war years of 1809 to 1815. That was when he sought to create a sustainable European political system. He did so, with the help of Viscount Castlereagh. But the edifice was fragile. In 1848, Franz-Josef came to the throne with the support of Russian bayonets. The main lesson taken by German and Italian national idealists in the 1848 revolutions was that power politics not words and constitutions would bring about the national unifications. England went its own way, in the words of Lord Derby, keeping itself on terms of goodwill “with all surrounding nations, but not to entangle itself with any single or monopolising alliance with any one of them; above all to endeavour not to interfere needlessly and vexatiously with the internal affairs of any foreign country” [70]. Continental affairs went another. German primacy in Europe was assured by victory at Sedan, and the crushing, defeat of France. Peace was kept for nearly fifty years, during which the Hapsburg dynasty experimented its way to reconciling dynasty to nations. They succeeded to a great extent. But Europe divided into competing coalitions, hinging around the enmity of France and Germany. The assassination of Ferdinand, Franz-Josef’s unloved successor, at Sarajevo, was one match that ignited the Great War. Another was the German High Command’s decision to invade Belgium. Yet another was David Lloyd George’s decision to  support the cause for war in the name of international law and the rights of small nations. War, not nationalism,  made the European political weather.

[1] Quoted in Pieter M.Judson, The Hapsburg Empire; A New History Cambridge,  Mass, Harvard University Press, 2016. p. 25.

[2] Judson, p.69.

[3] A.J.P. Taylor,  The Hapsburg Monarchy, 1809-1918, Penguin Books, 1948, p.19.

[4] Joseph Rossi,Denkbuch für  Fürst und Vaterland, Wien, Wallishauser 1814-15, 1815.

[5] Quoted from Judson, p. 98.

[6] C.A. Macartney, The Hapsburg Empire, 1790-1918, London, MacMillan 1968; cited in R.J.W.Evans, Remembering the Fall of the Hapsburg Monarchy One Hundred Years on: Three Master Interpretations, Austrian History Yearbook, 51, Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp.269-291.

[7] See Chapter Four, Vienna’s Bourgeoisie, in A History of Hapsburg Jews: 1670-1918, William O. McCagg, Jr. Bloomington, Indian University Press, 1992. pp. 48-64.

[8]  Enno Krahe, ed., The Metternich Controversy, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971; Alan Sked“Metternich“. History Today. Vol 33, Issue 6, June 1983.

[9] Dr. Henry A. Kissinger,  A World Restored: Metternich , Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822.New York, Grosset and Dunlap, 1964.

[10] Ibid p.323.

[11] Wolfram Siemann, Metternich : Strategist and Visionary, Cambridge, Mass, The Harvard University Press, 2019. P. 203.

[12] Jerome Reich, “The Slave Trade at the Congress of Vienna: A Study in English Public Opinion”, The Journal of Negro History, Vol 53 , No 2. April 1968.pp. 129-143.

[13] Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837, 1992 Yale University Press, revised edition 2009.

[14] Harold Temperley, Lillian M.Penson, Document 6: “The State Paper of May 5 1820; or the Foundation of British foreign policy”, The Foundations of British Foreign Policy, 1792-1902, London, Cambridge University Press, 1939. pp.48-63.

[15] B.R.Mitchell, Abstract of British Historical Staistics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1962.

14. John Bew, Castlereagh, Enlightenment, War and Tyranny, London, Quercas, 2012, p. 127.

[17] Castlereagh to Sir Laurence Parsons 28 November 1798, Memoirs and Correspondance of Viscount Castlereagh, 2^nd Marquess of Londonderry, ed. Charles William (Stewart) Vane, 3^rdMarquess of Londonderry, London, John Murray, 1848-53 in 12 vols. vol. 11, pp.32-35.

[18] The Duke of Wellington’s speech on Catholic Emancipation: 2 April 1829

Hansard XXI [N-S.], 41-58.

[19]  J. P. T. Bury, “Nationalities and Nationalism,” in J. P. T. Bury, ed. The New Cambridge Modern History Vol. 10 (1830–70)” (1960) pp. 213–245

[20] Cited in Bury, p.216.

[21] Friedrich List, National System of Political Economy, London, Longmans, Green and Company, 1909. pp.102-3.

[22] Jerome Blum, Transportation and Industry in Austria, 1815-1848. The Journal of Modern History, Vol 15.No 1 Mar 1943.pp 24-38.

[23] Cited by Mike Rapport, 1848: Year of Revolution, London, Hachette, UK, 2008.

[24] Oscar Jasci, The Dissolution of the Hapsburg Empire, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1929, p. 451.

[25] A.J.P.Taylor, The Hapsburg Monarchy, 1809-1918, Penguin Books, 1948, p.189.

[26] Anatol Murad, Franz-Josef I of Austria and his Empire, Twayne Publishers, 1968, p.6.

[27] Arno J.Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War, Croom Helm, 1981.

[28] Quoted from  M. Konyi (ed) Speeches of Ference Deak Vol VI,  Budapest, 1898, p.153, in Leslie C. Tihany, The Austro-(Hungarian Compromise, 1867-1918: A Half Century of Diagnosis: Fifty Years of Post-Mortem, Central European History, Volume 2, Issue 2, June 1969. p.118

[29] Beck, Max Wladimir Freiherr von, österreichischer Staatsmann,

https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd118654373.html

[30] Quoted in Rudolph Sieghart, Die Letzten Jahnzehnte einer Grossmacht: Probleme des Hapsburger-Reicheses, Verlag Ullstein, Berlin 1932. pp.120 ff.

[31] R.J.W. Evans, Remembering the Fall of the Hapsburg Monarchy One Hundred Years on: Three Master Interpretations, Austrian History Yearbook, 51, Cambridge University Press, 2020. p.271.

[32] Pieter M.Judson, The Hapsburg Empire; A New History Cambridge,  Mass, Harvard University Press, 2016

[33] Cited in Viktor Adler, Aufsätze, Reden under Briefe, Hrsg von Parteivortstand der Sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterpartei Deutschösterreichs, XI Hefte, in 5 Bänden. Wien  Wr. Volksbuchhandlung,1922-29.

[34] Cited in Hans Mommsen,  in : Viktor Adler und die Erste Republik Österreich. In Isabella Ackerl (Hrsg), Österreich November 1918. Die Entstehung der Ersten Republik. Protokoll des Symposiums in Wien am 24. und 25. Oktober 1978. Verlag für Geschichte und Politik. Wien 1986. p. .23.

[35] R.F.Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600-1972, London, Penguin,1989, p.448.

[36] Nicholas Mansergh, South Africa 1906-61: The Price of Magnanimity, London,  Allen and Unwin, 1972, pp.97-99.

[37] R.C.K. Ensor, England, 1870-1914, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1936, pp.418-419.

[38] Ronan Fanning, Fatal Path : British Government and Irish Revolution 1910-1922. London, Faber & Faber, 2013.

[39] F.S.L.Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, Dublin, Gill and MacMillan, 1977, p.647.

[40] Tim Pat Coogan, The Famine Plot: England’s Role In Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy, New York, St Martin’s Griffin, 2012.

[41] Ian Ker John Henry Newman, Oxford University Prtess, 2009, pp. 727-29.

[42] Adolph Fischhof, Österreich und die Bürgschaften seines Bestandes, Wien, Wallnhaussersche Buchhandlung, 1869.

[43] Lord Acton, “Nationality”, Home and Foreign Review, I, 1862,https://www.panarchy.org/acton/nationality.html ;   Timothy Lang, Lord Acton and “The Insanity of Nationality”, Journal of the History of Ideas, Jan 2002. Vol.63.No.1.pp.129-149; Hector J.Massey, “Lord Actons Theory of Nationality,” The Review of Politics, Volume 31, Issue 4, October 1969, pp.495-508.

[44] The Diary of Lady Frederick Cavendish,ed. By John Bailey, Vol.II, New York, Frederick A Stokes Company Publishers, London, Hazell, Watson and Viney, 1927. p.318.

[45] Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody, London, Minerva, 1992. p. 603.

[46] Ibid. Quoted from Reflections, p.604.

[47] Scritti editi ed inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini, vol. III, Imola 1907, p.64.Cited by J. P. T. Bury in “Nationalities and Nationalism,”ed. The New Cambridge Modern History Vol. 10 (1830–70)” (1960) p.224.

[48] Giuseppe Mazzini, Scritti editi e inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini, 20 vol., a cura di Aurelio Saffi and Ernesto Nathan,   Roma 1861-1904.

[49] Lujos Kossuth, https://www.habsburger.net/en/ludwig-kossuth-aus-einer-rede-gehalten-am-3-maerz-1848-vor-dem-reichstag-pressburg.

[50] Cited  by Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life, Oxford, Oxford University Press, p2011. p. 465.

[51] Cited in John M. Knapp, Behind the Diplomatic Curtain: Adolphe de Bourqueney and French Foreign Policy, 1816-1869, Akron, 2001, p.270.

[52] Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, Ser. III, vol. cciv, February-March 1871, speech of February 9, 1871, pp. 81-82. Cited in William Flavelle Moneypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, new rev. ed. in 2 vols., vol. 2, 1860-1881. London: John Murray, 1929, pp. 473-74

[53] Cited in Pierre-André Taguieff, La Judéo-phobie des Modernes : Des Lumières au Jihad, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2008. P. 146.

[54] Michel Winock, Édouard Drumont et Cie. : Antisémitisme et fascisme en France, Paris, Seuil,  1982,p.117.

[55] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, Harvest Books, 1973. pp. 95-97.

[56] Emile Zola,“J’accuse..! Lettre à M.Felix Faure, Président de la République »   L’Aurore, 13 Janvier, 1898.

[57] For a discussion, Paul Mazgai, The Origins of the French Radical Right: A Historiographical Essay, French Historical Studies, 1987. 15. No.2. pp.287-315.   

[58] Charles E.McClelland, The German Historians and England: A study in Nineteenth-Century Views, Cambridge University Press, 1971.p.106.

[59] Karl Vogt, Vorlesungen über den Menschen, seine Stellung in der Schöpfung der Geschichte der Erde, Giesen 1863. 2 Volumes.

[60] Karl Vogt, Vorlesungen über den Menschen, seine Stellung in der Schöpfung der Geschichte der Erde, Giesen 1863. 2 Volumes. The chapter on Germanic peoples and blacks is in Volume 1, the seventh lecture, pp. 166-214.

[61] Cited in Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1974.  p.141.

[62] Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 236.

[63] Quoted in Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’Etat and its Place in Modern History, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1957, pp.395-96.

[64] Jonathan Bruce Kilgour,  Heinrich von Treitschke: Creating a German national mission., The University of Montana, Graduate Student theses. 2004. p.21.

[65] Paul Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860-1914, London, Ashfield Press, 1987, p.395.

[66] Why We Are at War: Great Britain’s Case., by members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History, London, Oxford University Press, 1914.

[67] Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’Etat and its place in modern History, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1962. p. 397.

[68] Ibid. p. 408.

[69] Ibid Quoted by Meinecke. p. 408.

[70] The House of Lords, Ministerial Statement. The Earl of Derby Monday July 6, 1866. p. 786.