"Tous ces personnages ne s’emparent si fortement de notre attention que parce que ce sont les signes de cette grande histoire…qui raconte la marche de la société des hommes et cherche ses destinées futures dans ses destinées passées" (Prosper de Barante, Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne, 1824-1828).

"The empires of our time were short lived, but they have altered the world forever ; their passing away is their least significant feature" (V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men, 1980).

"Rome, London, Carthage are only more durable clouds ; they all of them change and finally perish. How often we regard as essentially different from one another things that differ only in the sense of plus and minus" (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher, Notebook D, Number 77, 1773-1775).

INTRODUCTION

Today’s European Union has been cast in popular discourse either as a postmodern, Venusian superpower destined to “run the twenty-first century,” [1] or as the geopolitical canary in the collective coalmine of Western decadence and demographic decline. [2] The French diplomat Jacques-Alain de Sédouy has acknowledged the diverging perceptions of a continent alleged to be “entering into a post-historical paradise” or “already have one foot in the grave.” [3] To take either position, as so many commentators have, is to make the mistake of subscribing to Francis Fukuyama’s infamous conceptualization of an “end of history,” for the past is impossible to transcend, and entire civilizations are not so easily written off. More realistic analysts like Robert Kagan have aptly observed a twenty-first century “return of history” and an “end of dreams,” [4] and the European mandarins working tirelessly on their project of pan-European integration would do well to abandon notions of post-historicity, and instead to take heed of increasing global multipolarity, mounting instability in the post-Soviet world, and profound changes to Europe’s demographic landscape. Such developments may present serious, if not existential, threats, but fortunately the study of history allows for the heuristic acquisition of wisdom necessary to address these and other geopolitical concerns, the better to avoid the catastrophic pitfalls anticipated by many. As Benedetto Croce put it, “all history is contemporary history,” [5] and the uses of its study are manifold.

In a Europe where politics is “fundamentally a matter of culture and identity,” [6] it is vitally important to plumb the depths of history, a longue durée approach representing the key to anticipating future developments. Yet with a topic of such complexity and diversity, the overall picture may come to resemble Horace’s “sick man’s dream,” “shaped so that neither foot nor head can be assigned to a single shape.” [7] The appropriate lens must be employed. The following pages examine European integration through an imperial, and specifically Habsburgean, prism. An introductory treatment of the twin concepts of European imperium and pan-continental integration is followed by a consideration of the complex legacies of the multinational, multiethnic, multiconfessional Austro-Hungarian Empire, a much-maligned polity that bequeathed much to Europe and left behind an even bigger geopolitical and moral void, one that must be reckoned with to this day.

As Europe and its policymakers engage in a never-ending search for limits and form, the legacy of the Habsburg Empire continues to be felt, and the nationalistic movements unleashed in the nineteenth century that put paid to that same entity in the twentieth century still influence political developments within and beyond the European Union. By meditating upon European and Habsburg imperium, it is possible to determine broader trends in what has seemed to be the willfully ahistorical process of European integration. Just as the Enlightenment philosophes “demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials,” [8] so too have European mandarins sought to obviate the past, only to strive directly towards it (as I hope to demonstrate below). “We enter the future walking backwards,” Paul Valéry rightly claimed ; [9] my aim to is show one altogether relevant manifestation of this phenomenon. The ideal place to begin, then, is ab ovo, with ancient Rome and its imperishable legacy.

LIMES

The Limes Romanus can still be found, in varying states of preservation, along the erstwhile borders of ancient Rome’s vast imperium, in regions once called Britannia Secunda, Germania Superior, Raetia, and Tripolitania. Some of the limes, like Northumbria’s Hadrianic Wall or its Rhenish counterpart, are sufficiently prominent to have been accorded Unesco World Heritage status. Others are sand-swept ruins half-buried in Maghreban deserts, or simple stone markers concealed in dense Central European forests. Originally designed to regulate frontier intercourse, [10] the more imposing of these structures constituted Rome’s first line of military defense, while the less substantial limes were purely symbolic barriers ; each type served to differentiate the Pax Romana from a barbarian world out of which “two-legged animals” emerged to confront Rome “like the irrational and uncontrolled confronts reason.” [11] The Triestan writer Claudio Magris, musing on these sites, suggested that

"On this side of the line was the Empire, the idea and the universal dominion of Rome ; on the other were the barbarians, whom the Empire was beginning to fear, and no longer aimed to conquer and assimilate, but merely to keep at bay…Our history, our culture, our Europe are the daughters of that Limes. Those stones tell of the urge to frontiers, of the need and ability to give oneself limits and form." [12]

For the tourist or the archaeologist, these sites are picturesque examples of the past’s continuing intrusion on the present, reminiscent of the haunting landscape paintings of François de Nomé (1593-1630), which mingle Baroque cityscapes and Classical ruins, or the scythe-wielding skeleton of Time in the tiny church of Merthyr Issui in Partrishow, Wales, painted with an ox blood mixture that has inexorably rotted through subsequent whitewash. [13]

Yet the limes are not merely of aesthetic or antiquarian interest. The Roman “urge to frontiers” has always been, and to this day remains, a matter of intense modern European geopolitical concern. Sites connected with the Roman limes, such as the massive sandstone Porta Nigra that looms over the late Roman capital-outpost city of Trier, like the cultural tradition they represent, serve as symbolic historical reminders whose message likewise looms over European political developments. These ruins of the Roman world were to prove quite eloquent during the Empire’s long afterlife. Michel de Montaigne would write that the barbarian world “in hatred of its long domination, had first destroyed and broken in pieces the various parts of this wondrous body” of Rome, only to discover that, “even though prostrate and dead, its disfigured remains still filled them with fear and hate.” [14] Montaigne’s contemporary, Joachim du Bellay, likewise would in his 1557 poem Antiquités de Rome describe the city as a “speaking corpse.” [15] The voice of this ancient cadaver was heard for centuries, as evidenced by repeated efforts to restore the “lost, lamented civitas romanum. [16] ” One of those strongly influenced by this Roman inheritance was the shadowy eighth century Spanish chronicler Isidore Pacensis who, describing the aftermath of the 732 Battle of Poitiers that pitted the Austrasian majordomo Charles Martel against the Umayyad governor Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi, wrote of “prospiciunt Europenses Arabum temtoria ordinata (Europeans observing the orderly Arab encampment)” after the decisive Frankish victory. [17] This, the very first reference to “Europeans” in recorded history, is undoubtedly significant, for, as Gherardo Ortalli observed, “We seem to be witnessing a struggle between two worlds, two civilizations, with Europe on one side, taking up arms in defence of its identity.” [18] Poitiers, and Isidore Pacensis’ account of the battle, represented a watershed moment, though “despite the associations it still arouses in the collective imagination [it] was little more than a skirmish against forces that had already exhausted their capacity for expansion or perhaps simply pillaging raiders.” [19] It was perhaps misleading, then, for Edward Gibbon to write of the “nations of Asia, Africa, and Europe” advancing towards Poitiers “with equal ardour to an encounter which would change the history of the whole world,” though not at all misleading for him to remark on the perceptions of the victors : “joyful tidings…soon diffused over the Catholic world.” [20]

Yet for Isidore of Pacensis and his contemporaries, Poitiers was an opportunity for post-Roman revanchist civilizational line drawing, and the neologism “Europenses,” emerging from the battle’s narrative, “had introduced a holistic concept that transcended (definitionally, at least) the [era’s] savage particularisms.” [21] A new empire, indeed a universalistic, Catholic (in both senses of the word), Holy Roman Empire, was now possible. The rise of Charlemagne – called “the lighthouse of Europe” and “the highest pinnacle” of “Pater Europe” in the Carmen de Carolo Magno (799) [22] – would solidify the notion of Europeans (the appellation is now appropriate) as “daughters of the limes.” Connections between imperial predecessor and descendant were made, often subtly. In the Belgian city of Liège, in the Trésor de la Cathédrale Saint-Paul, one can still find Roman sculptural fragments set into the sarcophagus of Richaire, the city’s first bishop, an evocative example of the widespread spoliation of ancient artifacts for use in Carolingian burials. (Indeed Charlemagne and Louis the Pious were similarly interred in Roman sarcophagi.) More obvious manifestations of this appeal to antiquity are evident in the Ottonian Empire’s political obsession with Rome ; the diplomat Liudprand of Cremona would famously disparage the real contemporary Romans, the Romaioi or Byzantines (inheritors of the Eastern Roman Empire), in his Relatio de legatione Constantinopolitana ad Nicephorum Phocam (Account of the Embassy to Constantinople), and would “place Otto in the line of Constantine and Justinian, appointed by God to establish peace in the world.” [23] Otto subsequently styled himself “imperator sanctus,” or “holy emperor,” and his grandson Otto III would pursue “the renewal of the Roman Empire ;” Henry II’s mantle was “embroidered with the stars of heaven in imitation of Byzantine imperial claims to cosmic authority. [24] ” The formation of the idiosyncratic Holy Roman Empire, with the Habsburg family so often at its head, was the result of this historical process.

Ancient Rome and the Habsburg Empire would come to be mentioned in the same breath by Gregor von Rezzori, who wrote of the “Habsburg – and hence ancient Roman – Empire,” [25] and the universalistic impulses of the Austrian and Spanish branches of the family could only be compared the their imperial predecessors. Charles V would adopt the personal motto “plus ultra,” and his son Philip would issue coins reading “orbis non sufficit.” [26] Only the Romans had conceived of such ambitions, and only the Habsburgs (who ruled the first empire upon which the sun never set) could manage such a pretense. When the Holy Roman Empire was abolished by Napoleon in 1806, and when the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed after the First World War, there was “left in the new Europe a material and above all a moral gap which has not yet been filled.” [27] But the “daughters of the limes” had received a monumental bequest, and a host of complications, from this extinct empire.

THE DIMENSION OF EMPIRE

The very concept of ancient imperial legacies manifested in today’s purportedly postmodern Europe may at first seem anachronistic, but “the past,” wrote the poet Cyprian Kamil Norwid, “it is today, but somewhat removed,” [28] and so it remains. For Europe, the ever-present past, imperial or otherwise, constitutes a blessing and a burden ; nostalgia and escapism appear in equal proportion. Those involved in the project to forge an ever closer union of European nations, while prone to revel in the unprecedented nature of their work, nevertheless appeal to the usable past to provide another layer of political legitimacy, and allude to the specter of historical enormities to justify further integration. The unimplemented Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe (rejected by French and Dutch referenda), and its successor, the Treaty of Lisbon (rejected once, but not twice, by Ireland), both invoked “the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe” as a basis for the pan-European project, and the idealistic eighteenth century proposals of the Abbé Charles de Saint-Pierre and Emmanuel Kant (for a league of European states and an eternal peace congress, respectively) are frequently cited as inspirations for the modern EU. Although the EU itself has institutional roots no deeper than the time of Arthur Salter and Jean Monnet, its goal of eliminating forever the armed camp of Europe is often presented as an effort to live up to the ideals of the Enlightenment philosophes who envisioned a pan-Continental “great republic” where nations would be extrêmement lié (extremely intertwined), indeed a bewunderswurtiges Ganze (marvelous whole). [29] The EU’s dogged pursuit of this “great republic” brings to mind the famous dictum of Adam Czartoryski, who stated in an 1803 memorandum to his master Czar Alexander I that “if we wish to progress we must have an object we have not yet attained. And in order to always progress we must be capable of conceiving an object which will never be obtained.” [30] It may fairly be said that for the mandarins of Brussels, whose “ever closer union” is predicated on such an idea of progress, the object is some species of European imperium. References to the progressive Enlightenment, however, consciously or subconsciously mask this object, though such a goal was bound to become apparent sooner or later.

It was on July 17, 2007 that European Commission President José Manuel Barroso made reference to the EU as “the first non-imperial empire.” “Sometimes I like to compare the EU as a creation to the organization of empire,” Barroso expounded, before concluding that the EU possesses “the dimension of empire.” [31] It is unsurprising that this commentary was poorly received ; sovereign European nations are not mere provincial satrapies within a pan-European empire. Yet one of the reasons that hackles were so quick to be raised over Barroso’s imperial rhetoric was that it contained an undeniable element of truth. Hugo Engelmann noted in his 1962 article “The European Empire : From Charlemagne to the Common Market” that “a comparison of the appropriate maps shows that the area of Charlemagne’s empire around 814 A.D., and that of the six countries presently belonging to the European Common Market are nearly identical,” and that “Such a high degree of similarity cannot be dismissed as a freakish circumstance.” [32] The EU’s subsequent waves of expansion – as a result of which the Flag of Europe flies throughout East-Central and Southeastern Europe, well beyond its initial (Carolingian) heartland of Western Europe – have produced something like a “non-imperial empire.” Jan Zielonka has described the end result of this sporadic process of expansion and integration as a sort of “neo-medieval empire,” marked by the presence of soft borders, multiple cultural identities, blurred distinctions between the European center and periphery, and overlapping institutions (military and civilian). [33]

This approach will be welcome to some ; the nebulousness of an increasingly neo-medieval Europe could mitigate concerns about the nature of Europe’s precise relationship with problematic bordering states like Turkey, or could serve to temper Talal Asad’s concern that “If Europe cannot be articulated in terms of complex space and complex time that allow for multiple ways of life (and not merely multiple identities) to flourish, it may be fated to be no more than the common market of an imperial civilization, always anxious about (Muslim) exiles within its gates and (Muslim) barbarians beyond.Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular : Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford : Stanford University Press (2003), p. 180.” To others, such a political environment would prove overly deleterious to nationalism and sovereignty, which, after all, is precisely the point ; “the political integration of modern Europe can only be achieved,” Thomas Hüglin has posited, “as a noncentralized integration which will also require considerable dismantling of the European nation states.” [34] Summa summarum, this neo-medieval, “non-imperial” empire is the Czartoryskian object of a long-term EU strategy. It is a gross simplification, then, to view the EU as a simple federal superstate. As Zielonka reasons, the EU is in fact more akin to a new Holy Roman Empire than to a United States of Europe. The study of the legacy of the Habsurg Empire is more appropriate then ever, even more so given how the quasi-imperial EU’s predecessor has been characterized :

"The Empire was situated between East and West…The Empire was actually multinational, but supranational in its conception of the state and in the mentality of its ruling elite. The Empire was developing and prospering, and declining and disintegrating at the same time. The Empire was acknowledged as a great power even in the last hours before its dissolution ; it straddled the margin between existence and nonexistence." [35]

Today’s EU, having spread eastward, likewise occupies a liminal position between east and west, and with member states caught between what Zielonka has called the “competing universalistic claims” [36] of Brussels and Washington, D.C. (and one could throw in Moscow for good measure). It is composed of nations, but its mandarins have supranational aims. It is a zone of enormous prosperity, but concerns about decadence and waning international influence weigh upon its decision-makers. Euroskeptics fulminate against it, much of the populace ignores it, and as a result it straddles much of the same geopolitical line as the Habsburg Empire. The “non-imperial empire” of the modern EU should be analyzed in conjunction with its (admittedly imperfect) Habsburg historical analogy.

SYMBOLIC POLITICS

Any reference to “empire” in today’s Europe, however, is immediately seized upon by the press and public as a gross overstep of the appropriate bounds of what had heretofore been a common economic market, though it has increasingly taken on the task of “assert[ing] economic and political control over that unstable and impoverished neighborhood” to the south and east, the better to create a broader “zone of prosperity” (necessitating political as well economic approaches). [37] One is unsurprised to find this quasi-imperial evolution disturbing to some actors within the European sphere. Although the EU may have ostensibly “abandoned any allusion to symbolic forms of European representation such as the term constitution, the flag, or a European anthem” [38] so as to better maintain the sort of fluid, increasingly neo-medieval political system Zielonka described, this has not prevented sharp symbolic disputes from arising over power relationships between the center and the periphery. For instance, on December 4, 2008, the French Green Party MEP Daniel Cohn-Bendit arrived at Prague Castle, hoping to meet with Czech President Václav Klaus in anticipation of his host’s upcoming EU presidency. Knowing beforehand that the only flag fluttering above the medieval castle was that of the Czech presidency, Cohn-Bendit dropped the star-ringed Flag of Europe in front of Klaus, “which he [Cohn-Bendit] observed sarcastically was so much in evidence around the palace,” [39] before launching into a harangue about European climate change initiatives.

The ensuing diplomatic mayhem is instructive. Klaus retorted : “You are not on the barricades in Paris here. I thought that such manners ended for us 19 years ago [i.e. after the fall of communism],” but Hans-Gert Pöttering, the president of the EU Parliament, standing nearby and doubtless reveling in the scene’s lèse majesté, insisted that “anyone from the members of the Parliament can ask you what he likes.” [40] This gave Irish MEP Brian Crowley, bitter about Klaus’ opposition to the Lisbon Treaty, an opening to declaim : “all his life my father fought against the British domination [of Ireland]” and “that is why I dare to say that the Irish wish for the Lisbon Treaty. It was an insult, Mr. President, to me and the Irish people what you said during your state visit to Ireland.” [41] (It is perhaps surprising that Prague did not witness another of its famous defenestrations at this point.) Marion van Renterghem’s account of this clash in Le Monde ended with the following joke : “The little European flag was left on the Czech president’s table. Without undue speculation, one can imagine that it is not still there.” [42] Afterwards, France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy expressed his dismay over the absence of the Flag of Europe over the Czech Castle : “This is not the way the symbols of the EU should be treated.” [43]

This minor tiff, hardly of world-historical importance, nonetheless speaks to the centrality of historical and symbolic politics in the supposed European “paradis posthistorique.” [44] The disputants appealed to symbols like the European flag and the sanctity of Prague Castle, to the legacy of communist or British oppression, and to the 1848 barricades of Paris, while avoiding any substantive discussion of the Lisbon Treaty or the envisioned climate change legislation. Even more troublingly, Klaus had concluded that “the manner that Daniel Cohn-Bendit spoke to me was exactly like the Soviets,” [45] leading Euroskeptic British commentators like Christopher Booker to draw broader conclusions : “it explains why, last week, the European Council told the Irish that they must hold their referendum again, on the understanding that this time they will get it right. That is the way one-party states behave – as President Klaus, who lived under one for the first 50 years of his life, knows only too well.” (The Irish have since acquiesced by way of referendum.) A less Europhobic observer would still be forced to admit that even a “neo-medieval,” “non-imperial” institution like the EU still has what Barroso called “the dimension of empire,” necessarily creating friction with at least some of its loosely-affiliated member states. Nations along an empire’s borders have been known to act self-interestedly and restively, after all.

This quintessential “urge to frontiers” and “need and ability to give oneself limits and form” possessed by the EU as well as its properly imperialistic forebears has led to other quite striking controversies arising from the “blurred distinctions” of European neo-medievalism. The EU has, for example, funded a program known as INTERREG, designed “to strengthen economic and social cohesion in the EU…by promoting cross-border, trans-national, and interregional co-operation.” [46] This has entailed splitting Europe into four cardinal direction regions that heed no national boundaries. Not content with such broad regions, INTERREG further elaborated on the scheme, introducing the notion of micro-regions like the “Northern Periphery region” (including northwest Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Greenland and Iceland), [47] or the “Espace Manche.” [48] Imagine the horror of the British populace, then, when confronted with reports that

"The new European plan splits England into three zones that are joined with areas in other countries. The “Manche” region covers part of southern England and northern France while the Atlantic region includes western parts of England, Portugal, Spain and Wales. The North Sea region includes eastern England, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and parts of Germany. A copy of the map, which makes no reference to England or Britain, has even renamed the English Channel the “Channel Sea.” Each zone will have a “transnational regional assembly,” although they will not have extensive powers. However, the zones are regarded as symbolically important by other countries." [49]

That some EU officials added that such an endeavor served the “underlying the goal of a united Europe” to “permanently overcome old borders” certainly would not have reassured concerned British nationalists. [50] Without placing overmuch emphasis on the sometimes-feverish imaginations of British Euroskeptics, one can still find much of interest in these INTERREG attempts to create new economic spaces out of old cultural ones. It is part of a broader European project that seeks, not always successfully, to recreate the continent by harnessing the past to meet present needs. And it is a project that has led, for instance, the arch-conservative British journalist Peter Hitchens to a conclusion not dissimilar to that of the very different-minded Barroso, namely that in light of the results of the recent Irish Lisbon Treaty referendum, the European Union stands a good chance of becoming “the strangest empire the world has ever seen.” [51]

L’ESPRIT DE CLOCHER

The pan-European integration project must acknowledge certain realities, not the least of which is the unpopularity of the very concept of imperialism. There exists a “double imposition for most European states : the need to repudiate their imperial past while clinging resolutely to the belief that there can be no alternative to the essentially European liberal democratic State.” [52] Talk of “neo-medievalism,” however apposite, is unlikely to help overcome either imposition. Fortunately for European policymakers and analysts, there is a valuable trick to achieve both ends, one that has already been mentioned above : the placing of considerable emphasis on the era of Enlightenment. After all, as the great French medievalist Jacques Le Goff declared, “To make themselves the master of memory and forgetfulness is one of the great preoccupations of the classes, groups and individuals who have dominated and continue to dominate historical societies.” [53] The EU is by no means immune to this impulse, which, put less charitably in another context by Bernard Lewis, makes it seem that “We live in a time when great efforts have been made, and continue to be made, to falsify the record of the past and to make history a tool of propaganda ; when governments, religious movements, political parties, and sectional groups of every kind are busy rewriting history as they would wish it to have been, as they would like their followers to believe that it was.” [54]

This manipulation of the past is on display in the essentially teleological reading of Europe’s humanist and Enlightenment legacy that has been afforded pride of place in the mythology of continental unification. The “humanist inheritance of Europe” has been invoked in EU treaties, while the Slovene EU presidency organized a 2008 conference in Ljubljana entitled “Europe, World and Humanity in the 21st Century,” which focused on the question “What message can the Europe of today send to the world about understanding global issues, given its own humanistic tradition ?” Meanwhile, Abbé Charles de Saint-Pierre and Emmanuel Kant are treated as founding fathers of pan-European integration. Perhaps the most revealing expression of this notion was a 2007-8 exhibition held at the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, entitled “The Grand Atelier : Pathways of Art in Europe (5th-18th century).” Organized by Europalia Europa, “The Grand Atelier” presented a narrative in fourteen galleries of the formation of a continent-wide European cultural zone from ancient Rome through Charlemagne and on to the era of humanism and Enlightenment, thereby laying the groundwork for a future economic and political entity. The resultant “republic of the arts” speaks to the Enlightenment “great republic,” the “marvelous whole” of Europe wherein, as Edmund Burke would write, “No European can be a complete exile in any part of Europe.” [55]

This era, in which “Europeanism” (“tied to values of progress, liberty, and freedom” [56] ) is supposed to have come to fruition, continues to cast a spell on modern European elites and sympathetic analysts, and it is not hard to see why. As Peter Gay put it,

"In the century of the Enlightenment, educated Europeans awoke to a new sense of life. They experienced an expansive sense of power over nature and themselves : the pitiless cycles of epidemics, famines, risky life and early death, devastating war and uneasy peace – the treadmill of human existence – seemed to be yielding at last to the application of critical intelligence. Fear of change, up to that time nearly universal, was giving way to fear of stagnation ; the word innovation, traditionally an effective term of abuse, became a word of praise…for the first time in history, confidence was the companion of realism rather than a symptom of the Utopian imagination." [57]

The ideal model, in other words, for a similarly bold conquest of history on the part of the European mandarins. Modern historians have been happy to play handmaid to this project. J.M. Headley, in his 2008 book The Europeanization of the World : On the Origins of Human Rights and Democracy, extolled : “Something distinctively new, a new confidence, a new civility long maturing, a new civilization capable of contending with the most ancient and established had in the meantime come into being ; its leadership, from Leibniz to Metternich, from Gibbon to Burke, recognized it as a single country, Europe ; a single civilization, European.” [58] A single cultural space, a single economic space, indeed a single country and civilization – political integration (neo-medieval or otherwise) would seem predestined when viewed through the purposive lens of this bequeathal of humanist and Enlightenment values to modern Europe. Another modern dix-huitièmiste, Robert Darnton, has written that the euro’s “value will fluctuate erratically, whereas the values of the Enlightenment are deeply rooted in the past” and “To make contact with their common past, Europeans must therefore take a great leap backward over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and reconsider the European dimension of life in the eighteenth century.” [59] In other words, Europeans must, “make themselves the master of memory and forgetfulness,” the better to obviate what Darnton sees as the “destructive force” of nationalism. [60] Better yet, striving towards the siècle des Lumières, and thus “the smiling complaisance of that contented age,” [61] to borrow Carl Becker’s phrase, allows modern-day innovators to partake of that decidedly Enlightened “doctrine of progress, of perfectibility” that “became an essential article of faith in the new religion of humanity,” allowing the philosophes to imagine that the future “would be infinitely better than the present or the past,” [62] thereby handily avoiding very real concerns about European decadence and exorcising the continent’s imperial demons.

As it happens, Darnton’s suggestion of an ideological “great leap backward” in time – the better to avoid the effects of several centuries of apparently unhelpful history – is a recurring theme in European affairs. The historian Garrett Mattingly observed in his magisterial Renaissance Diplomacy (1955) : “The enthusiasm of the humanists for Greece and Rome, their attempt to restore a direct connection with antiquity by a backward leap across the ‘dark centuries’, meant, in the end, a rejection of the greater part of the usable European past.” [63] “Having rejected their own tradition,” Mattingly continued, “all they had to work with was the remote experience of the ancient world,” [64] with the curious result that, exempli gratia, a scholar of such standing as the Dutch humanist jurist Hugo Grotius wrote “six chapters on treaties and illustrated each point with profuse examples, none of them less than fifteen hundred years old.” [65] The effect of this “backward leap” was perverse :

"In the rise of national feeling which was beginning to divide European society, the imitation of classical patriotism was already supplying one element : the worship of a special fatherland which the humanists drew from their favorite reading was replacing the sense of belonging to an ecumenical community. As the Bible became the common property of the people of Europe, it was open to any group of them, national or religious, to imagine themselves, like the ancient Jews, divinely authorized to any lengths of guile or violence in the pursuit of their peculiar ends." [66]

Crucially, the modern enthusiasm for the era of Enlightenment is meant to have precisely the opposite effect, namely to exalt and even resurrect the “ecumenical community” of the siècle des Lumières.

Robert Darnton has praised the “cosmopolitanism” of the Enlightenment thinkers, separating as it did the “persons of quality from the unwashed masses, whose mental horizons did not extend beyond the territory that could be viewed from the tower of their church ; hence l’esprit de clocher (the bell-tower spirit) and campanilismo (bell tower-ism).” [67] It may very well be the case that, as Norman Hampson wrote, “the gentlemen of Europe formed more of a social club in the eighteenth century than at any time before or since,” [68] or that the “republic of letters” seemed to pave the way for a broader European “great republic.” Such a state of affairs is no doubt appealing for contemporary Europhiles, given that modern “European identity is a ‘sinking’ spiritual good, which gets diffused from elites to masses and not vice versa,” and that “the only group which may parade today as axiomatic Europeans without too much ridicule and megalomania is a proto class of commissioners, members of European civil servants, lawyers, journalists and lobbyists.” [69] But this view certainly fails to take into account the steely reality of eighteenth century politics. This was an era in which, as Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu put it, “the object of war is victory ; that of victory, conquest, and that of conquest, preservation ;” [70] an era, as Pieter van Geyl pointed out, “when the movement away from universality [could] be observed most strikingly ;” [71] and an era when, because of Candide’s warring “Bulgars” and “Abars,” the entire continent could be branded as an “armed camp.” [72] Meanwhile Baron Bielfeld cautioned that “[i]n matters of politics one must not be deceived by speculative ideas which the common people form of justice, equity, moderation, candor, and other virtues of nations and their leaders. In the end everything is reduced to force,” and Jean-Jacques Rousseau lamented, “this pretended brotherhood of the nations of Europe seems nothing but a term of derision to express ironically their mutual animosity.” [73] The philosophes themselves were less sanguine about their era than many twenty-first century historians and policymakers would be in retrospect. Charles Pinot Duclos acknowledged in his 1750 Considérations sur les mœurs de ce siècle that those “who live a hundred miles from the capital, are a century away from it in their modes of thinking and acting” (though as we have seen even the mightiest of soldiers and diplomats in the capital likewise failed to act as if Enlightenment Europe represented some kind of “marvelous whole”), and in 1771 Voltaire could still write that “more than half the habitable world is still populated by two-footed animals [a common classical term for barbarians] who live in horrible conditions approximating the state of nature.” [74] And even in the “general chorus of pacifist consensus” on the part of the philosophes, thinkers like the Scotsman Adam Ferguson continued to argue that “Mankind not only find in their condition the sources of variance and dissention ; they appear to have in their minds the seeds of animosity, and to embrace the occasions of mutual opposition, with alacrity and pleasure.” [75] Any idealization of Enlightenment “cosmopolitanism” (and attendant castigation of campanilismo), let alone any attempt to build upon its suspect foundations, should take into account the unpleasant realities of state practice.

The French scholar Pierre Saint-Amand has forcefully argued that much of the Enlightenment’s “naive optimism,” and its “glossing over [of] human complexity,” “deserves to be repudiated,” since the attempt to “create a distance between man’s past and his future” is an “irresponsible concept.” [76] If Enlightenment philosophy tended towards the simplistic, many of the references made to it by modern politicians (striving as they are towards something of a historical chimera) also involve a certain amount of naivety or disingenuousness. Invocations of one of the least callow of the Enlightenment luminaries, Adam Smith, often involve this ahistorical inclination. Smith’s biographer, James Buchan, notes United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s attribution of the phrase “the helping hand” to the great philosopher-economist, employed in an effort to cast the author of The Wealth of Nations as a “precocious Leftist,” [77] a proto-social democrat. Yet the concept of “the helping hand” “does not occur even once in Adam Smith’s writings,” and “Brown’s passion for arranging ‘the different members of a great society,’ with his baby bonds and tax credits and windfall taxes and enterprise summer-camps and gap years and garden flagpoles, has done more to erect what Smith called ‘systems of preference and restraint’ than any British finance minister of modern times. [78]

The allure of a fictitious (but convenient) Adam Smith was also on display in José Manuel Barroso’s 2006 speech “The Scottish enlightenment and the challenges for Europe in the 21st century : climate change and energy,” during which the President of the European Commission appealed to the lessons of The Wealth of Nations in proposing a dirigiste emissions trading scheme designed so that Europe could “reduce our greenhouse gas emissions” “as if guided by Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand,’” [79] a decidedly curious application of the principle of free markets. All told, these occasional misprisions about the nature of the Enlightenment era speak revealingly to a willingness on the part of European mandarins to manipulate the past in the service of present goals, the better to, in Virgil’s words, “graft tradition onto peace.” [80]

A backward leap over the usable past and towards a historically suspect goal is nevertheless not without its drawbacks. Steelier observers of the Enlightenment’s legacy, like the Austrian Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, acknowledged Europe’s “cosmopolitan interests” but still concluded that “the political independence of any legally recognized government, that is to say the liberty it must enjoy to adopt, in its internal affairs as well in its relations with other states, whatever system it judges most suitable in the interests of its own preservation, security, and tranquility, without damaging the rights of others.” [81] Metternich, however, was a hated realist representative of those dark centuries Darnton and likeminded analysts abhor, and as a result his attempt to reconcile sovereignty with nationalism, and to balance political legitimacy with “peaceful and enlightened relations,” [82] is ignored publicly in favor of a vague vision of a marvelous European whole – “a symptom of the Utopian imagination” after all. Of course Metternich, who guided the Habsburg Empire through some of its most trying hours, also worked on behalf of an “ecumenical community,” that of the Austrian Empire, founded upon millennia of imperial tradition and buttressed with appeals to natural law. The imprint of the empire of Metternich’s masters is still felt in Europe, as are that empire’s failures to adequately address the rise of nationalism within its borders. There are lessons buried in the narrative of the Habsburg Empire’s rise, decline, and fall, lessons invaluable for European policymakers going forward. It is not enough to leap backwards over the past ; in fact it is impossible, given the imperial inheritance Zielonka and others have observed. Still, the ahistorical aspects of Enlightenment thought, and the fetish for that period evident in the words and actions of so many modern Europeans, has managed to color contemporary discourse on Europe, its forms and limits, and its future.

OLD FORMS, NEW IDEAS

It was the Comte de la Blache who warned his French revolutionary colleagues in 1789 : “We should not forget that the French are not a people who have just emerged from the depths of the words to form an original association,” [83] a statement even more true today with the passing of time. Yet this weighty burden of the European past has prompted twentieth and twenty-first century European to ape their Enlightenment predecessors in trying to eliminate the hated “treadmill of human existence.” The very origin of the EU, in fact, lies in the aftermath of the great continental conflagration of the First World War, and the efforts of Jean Monnet and Arthur Salter to avoid future geopolitical catastrophes. This was a period in which the architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, dit Le Corbusier would propose in his books Towards a New Architecture (1924) and The City of the Future (1925) that the “dirty, unplanned cities of the past” should be replaced by the “radiant city” of the future ; [84] in which the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928) would take aspirational international law to the next level by proclaiming “a frank renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy” and requiring that “the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means ; [85] and in which Winston Churchill could envision a “mass of Europe” that “once united, once federalised or partly federalised, once continentally self-conscious, would constitute an organism beyond compare.” [86] These utopian impulses were explainable by the First World War, a “tornado [that] wrecked civilized Old Europe and the world it then ruled,” [87] and further justified by the sort of rhetoric coming out of an unstable post-war Germany obsessed with the distant (and recent) past. In his Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, Gregor von Rezzori described a disturbingly retrospective

"German yearning, the yearning for the Reich, the sunken Roman Empire of the German Nation, of Charlemagne, or Karl the Great, as he is known in German, the empire over which Emperor Barbarossa fell asleep so profoundly in the Kyffhäuser mountains that his beard grew through the stone tabletop he leaned on…to restore this Reich, to reunite it afresh, to revive it in all its mystical power and glory…yes indeed ! That was what German-speaking youth wanted a century ago, and it is still their dream and longing." [88]

The deep history of Europe’s legacy of conflict, expansionism, and imperialism – which turned the continent into a veritable geopolitical bear garden – made the utopian escapism of the increasingly parlous inter-war period altogether attractive. Fascistic appeals to the Carolingian and Holy Roman empires made the topic of imperium in modern Europe somewhat radioactive, and the implications of such a notion for proudly nationalistic EU member states mooted any open consideration of Europe’s imperial inheritance.

In reality the situation is far more complex. Today’s EU is a product of both imperial precedent and utopian forward planning. Jean Monnet, who first conceived of the current pan-European institution, possessed a marked “detestation of the nation state,” and, in the words of Christopher Booker and Richard North, his “shining dream was of that supranational government of the future, run by technocrats, rising above all the messy complications of nationalism and democracy.” [89] In such a system, history is relevant, but must be carefully managed. The INTERREG redrawing of the regions of Europe springs to mind, as does the 2005 two hundredth anniversary reenactment of the Battle of Trafalgar off Portsmouth (“held between a blue and a red team, rather than Britain versus France” [90] ), or the 2003 alteration of the Andalusian village of Sedella’s heraldic crest to remove the depiction of the chained Moorish King Boabdil (“after 500 years in chains, now it is time to free him,” the Socialist mayor Francisco Galvez said at the time). [91] Le Goff was typically perspicacious in his description of the abiding urge for societies to master forgetfulness.

History can be over-managed, however, and policymakers can lose sight of the lessons and warnings of the past. The Habsburg Empire, with its universalistic ambitions, its strategic constraints, and its internal vulnerabilities, provides many such lessons and warnings. It is entirely understandable for European elites to stress the “marvelous whole” of the Enlightenment, but attention must likewise be paid to the Habsburgs, who themselves intermingled “archaicizing factors” with “legitimizing principles [that] contained a strong modernizing element.” [92] As a result historians have described the Austrian Empire’s “Machiavellian-Roman law concept of the ‘progressive’ state” that “concentrated power to serve the public good ;” the Austrians, it turns out, referred to their own “good Enlightenment” in contrast to the “bad Enlightenment” that spawned Jacobinism and, as it happens, the very nationalism the EU now seeks to restrain or suppress (albeit as quietly as possible). [93]

Ultimately, modern Europe is a product of both geopolitical reality and ideological aspiration. The legacy of the Roman limes has demanded a continual search for form and limits, and prompted countless efforts to reclaim the civitas romanum, most successfully by the Habsburg dynasty. Hindered by the “destructive” nationalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this process is again underway, as acknowledged (perhaps accidentally) by Commission President José Manuel Barroso. Despite the utopian, posthistorical rhetoric of European mandarins and Europhiles, history continues to weigh upon the integration project, and to understand the possibilities and pitfalls of such an endeavor it is incumbent on the analyst or actor to take into account relevant imperial legacies. It is now possible to turn to the Habsburg Empire in more detail, in an effort to demonstrate the truth of the Hungarian poet Mihály Babits’ claim that

"The old idea shall wear a thousand coats,

and the old form shall reappear

as the suit of a new idea." [94]

MODERN PATHOLOGIES

The French diplomat Théodore Chevignard de Chavigny, writing in 1739, had already put his finger on what was to become the standard criticism of the Habsburg Empire : “composed mostly of usurped lands,” its peoples were “weary of the yoke of servitude.” [95] By the time of the French Revolution, the Franco-Austrian rivalry was such that the Gallic Revolutionary Foreign Ministry’s “enemies list” provided for the mere “observation” of Russia and the “ruination” of Holland, but marked Austria for “extermination” (“à exterminer”). [96] The self-confident Revolutionaries, pursuing the enlightened goal of eliminating the forces of reaction, could hardly suffer the Habsburg exemplar of stability and monarchical legitimacy. One Jacobin pamphleteer, Lavicomterie de Saint-Samson, put it best in his 1793 Les crimes des empereurs d’Allemagne depuis Lothaire I jusqu’à Léopold II, wherein he even invoked the ancient Turkish threat as a harbinger of things to come :

"The republicans, the French are going to avenge on your person [Austrian Emperor Francis II] the violated rights of man ; you will see them approach the gates of Vienna, more terrible than the Turks, who were only slaves, and force you to expiate all the evil that your infernal race has done to the universe…We will be free, as will all people, and the globe will shake off and break all its chains on your cadaver." [97]

Lavicomterie paid the Habsburgs something of a backhanded compliment with respect to their dynastic longevity when fulminating that “if there was ever on earth a dynasty fatal to and destructive of the human race, it was without contradiction the infamous house of Austria, [which] can establish its nobility on four hundred years of crimes and continual abuses.” [98]

Why was it that Austria was singled out as the target of this exterminatory revolutionary fervor ? It was not simply that Enlightenment values (in theory so cherished by the French Revolution) had wholly bypassed the reactionary Habsburg Empire, which Lavicomterie insisted “violated the rights of man.” Aspects of the Enlightenment had in fact taken root in the Empire ; in fact the Enlightenment political economist Freiherr von Sonnenfels, a professor at the University of Vienna, became a trusted advisor to the Habsburgs, [99] while Wenzel Anton Kaunitz pursued “uncompromisingly liberal” policies under the direction of the Emperor Joseph II (1741-1790), [100] the consummately enlightened monarch on the throne in that anna mirabilis (or horribilis), 1789. Indeed, under the Josephine reforms, tolerance laws were enacted which eliminated anti-Semitic sumptuary discrimination ; censorship was eased (leading to pamphlets on subjects like the one entitled Why is Emperor Joseph Not Loved by His People ?) ; monasteries were closed in favor of medical facilities ; and parks like the Prater and Augarten were opened to the masses. [101] Pompeo Batoni’s 1769 imperial portrait – which depicts Joseph II next to a desk creaking with treatises by Montesquieu and other similarly enlightened thinkers – only reinforces this liberal image, though the painting nonetheless features St. Peter’s Church looming solidly in the background.

For the transnational ideology of the Revolution, and the historical bouleversement it sought, these Josephine reforms, and the “good Enlightenment” they emerged from, were immaterial. It was the firmly Catholic nature of the Habsburg regime, reinforced by its role as the nec plus ultra of Europe, and above all the ideology of imperial universality that made it so hated by its Jacobin rival, just as it had been by the Bourbons before it, and as it would be by an equally universalistic Napoleon Bonaparte. Yet these antipathetic attitudes were hardly isolated to the times of the ancien régime, the French Revolution, or the French Empire. In 1891, Betrand Auerbach queried : “How could such a badly adapted body reveal a healthy and robust personality ? Why didn’t the incoherent configuration of this State condemn the incoherence of its history ?” [102] The philosopher Alfred Fouillée, writing twelve years later, simply dismissed the Habsburg Empire as a “bigarrure,” or medley, of peoples. [103] By this time, Glenda Sluga writes,

"Scholars, experts and politicians within the empire and within the entente reinvented Austria-Hungary as an unambiguously Oriental space by definition, tainted both by backwardness and medieval despotism endemic to the “East,” and by cultural and moral excesses symptomatic of modern pathologies and multi-national or multicultural states." [104]

(The Habsburgs themselves provided fodder for this view ; in 1886 Prince Rudolf would exalt “supremacy in the European Orient” above all other strategic goals, and Archduke Wilhelm would spend the inter-war years engaging in a quixotic quest to become king of Ukraine. [105] ) Caught between east and west, between Rome and Byzantium, between the universality of its own vision and the ire of its jealous neighbors, the Habsburg Empire had to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of geopolitical threats and domestic instability. The downfall of the monarchy after the First World War provided something of an answer for Auerbach’s incredulous inquiry, but, mutatis mutandis, the Habsburg notion of universality remains of critical importance to European geopolitics today, and certainly must be grappled with in order to better understand later attempts at pan-European imperium. After all, it has been said, “if the Austrian Empire had to disappear after an existence of many centuries, it ought to be recreated in the very interest of Europe and humanity,” [106] and Europe’s present neo-medieval aspect is in many ways the result.

THE PHANTOM

The sheer otherness of the Habsburg Empire, so crucial in its identity and the cause of so much revulsion by its enemies, was the product of its position in Central Europe, and a broader consideration of that region is vital in understanding the entire continent past, present, and future. Until quite recently, the very term “Central Europe” “was used almost exclusively by elderly survivors of Austria-Hungary and was dismissed by most people as a remnant, a sentimental leftover from the nostalgic days of [Austro-Hungarian Emperor] Francis Joseph,” [107] and in a 1985 article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, François Bondy described Mitteleuropa as “no more than a phantom.” [108] Others have been less conclusive : a 2006 conference at the Viennese Diplomatische Akademie posed the question “Does Central Europe Still Exist ?”, following up on an influential 1986 article by Timothy Garton Ash, “Does Central Europe Exist ?” [109] Yet “Central Europe” is a time-honored formulation, described by the Czech writer Milan Kundera as “not a state,” but “a culture and a fate ;” [110] it was another consummate Central European, the Pole Aleksander Wat, who approvingly cited Napoleon’s comment to Goethe, “Politik ist das Schiksal,” or “Politics is fate.” [111] Fate, as it happens, is precisely that which increasingly concerns European politicians and observers.

Central Europe’s existence was the natural by-product of a situation wherein, according to Norman Davies, “open geography combined with the ethnic kaleidoscope to form a political arena where national states were inevitably small and weak, while dynastic empires were large and strong.” [112] These empires actually met at the Silesian town of Mysłowice, home of the so-called Dreikaiserreichsecke, or “Corner of Three Empires,” bordering on the lands of the Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns, and Romanovs. The strategic importance of such a space, occupied as it was by an “ethnic kaleidoscope,” was apparent for centuries. It was Sir Halford Mackinder, the “father of geopolitics” who coined the famous, if bizarrely phrased, maxim : “Who rules Eastern Europe, commands the Heartland, who rules the Heartland, commands the World-Island, who commands the World-Island, commands the World,” [113] and though he used the traditional term “Eastern Europe” in his formula, Mackinder would commission Joseph Partsch to provide the volume Central Europe for “The Regions of Europe” series. In this work, Partsch encouraged solidarity in the “lands between,” pleading that

"Central Europe has been the battlefield of all nations long enough to resist a recurrence of [previous] sufferings…May the great monument on the battlefield of Leipzig, where the criminal effort to enslave a whole continent [by Napoleon] was defeated, …remain…a warning to all ambitious tyrants in the future and an admonition to the peoples of Central Europe to remain united, to keep peace, and to command peace." [114]

This vision was and remains appealing to Central European policymakers. The importance of the European “Heartland” was not lost on Prussian strategic thinkers like Friedrich Naumann, whose Mitteleuropa of 1915 called for a German-dominated “league of states” or “superstate” (he seemed unable to decide upon which), [115] and the circumstances of the First World War provided for a renewed interest in this pivotal region. One should not lose sight of the fact that, according to Egon Schwarz, “the Holy Roman Empire, the arising Habsburg Monarchy, the up-and-coming Prussia, the fight for the unity of Germany : they were all ‘Central Europe.’ Frederick the Great, Prince Eugene of Savoy, Leibniz, Metternich, Friedrich List, Bismarck are all said to have had the ‘Central European’ vision.” [116] Above all, however, the Habsburgs embodied political power in this European fulcrum.

While the Cold War years of “captive nation” status led many, like François Bondy, to discount the idea of “Central Europe,” the events of 1989 revitalized the concept as well as the region, leading to political developments like the 1991 summit that produced the Visegrád Group (an alliance of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia), the 1992 Central European Free Trade Agreement, as well as developments in the cultural sphere, typified by the treatment of the “Central European question” by writers like Milan Kundera and Czesław Miłosz. This political and cultural renaissance gives the region led many to describe it as “new,” but centuries-old legacies continue to inform and occasionally dominate public discourse, something which has been insufficiently accounted for Brussels policymakers who view themselves (incorrectly, given the neo-medieval nature of their project) as being engaged in a post-modern process. The existence of an Austrian “Projekt Mitteleuropa,” wherein formerly Habsburg lands, particularly in the western Balkans or the post-Soviet “near-abroad,” are pushed to the forefront of the EU accession wait-list, points to the importance of seemingly anachronistic historical ties.

Anthropologists in Central Europe and the Balkans have long recognized the abiding cultural impact of the regions’ long-defunct empire, and particularly that of the Habsburgs. The “imprint left by those centuries of foreign domination” [117] on the borderlands of Europe has been shown to exhibit “the transformative and inventive potential of the old imperial devices in the environment of modernity.” [118] One is hardly surprised to find persistent ideological carryovers, in the form of historically derived affinities and enmities, or more mundane practices like the “elements of the Austrian lifestyle, such as gestures or manners of greeting” [119] that are still discernable in regions long since dissevered from Habsburg domination, thereby “casting in stone” customs like “epistolary forms and address, greeting, and leave taking.” [120] This imperial cultural bequest is, however, insufficiently accounted for when it comes to analyzing European geopolitics generally and the European integration project specifically. Since, as Ernest Gellner has recognized, “nations are not inscribed into the nature of things,” but rather represent the “crystallization of new units” out of cultures heretofore “shading into each other, overlapping, intertwined,” [121] the study of the Habsburg imperial precedent is vital in understanding a European Union which is increasingly taking on a neo-medieval aspect.

This inheritance is not merely a historical curiosity ; given the bureaucratic accretion of power in Brussels and the revanchist policies of a Kremlin bolstered by European energy dependence, the characteristically Central European sense of being the product of larger historical forces, and presently caught “in between” present forces (hence “Zwischen-Europa”), is of sizeable contemporary relevance. Mitteleuropean writers have for centuries drawn on this marginal status. The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz announced in his Harvard lecture series that he hailed from “the very borderline between Rome and Byzantium,” [122] between West and East, between Catholic and Orthodox Christianity. Miłosz’s poetic counterparts in Hungary, for example Endre Ady and Árpád Tőzsér, referred to their nation as Europe’s “ferry-land” and “the waist of a sand-timer,” respectively. [123] The Hungarian literary historian Csaba Kiss has acknowledged that it “has not been easy to remain upright in Europe’s waist and to hold on tight, while innovations, armies, cultural goods, infections and messianic ideals rushed through one bulb of the timer to the other.” [124] Yet the challenges unique to the lands between have also provided unique advantages. The Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal once bragged that

"In our old Austria, orient and occident still permeated each other, giving to one another, taking from one another. How much still belonged to us, Byzantium as well as Spain. For two thousand years we were the Eastern March of the Roman Empire, for a thousand years the elastic frontier of Christendom. Even the Roman, the Latin, we did not have to acquire or conquer ; it is a part of us." [125]

This unique admixture of Rome and Byzantium, mentioned by both Miłosz and Hofmannsthal, is worth noting, especially as the EU – a distinctly Western European phenomenon, originating in the Carolingian homeland of France, Germany, and the Low Countries – has expanded into and seeks to further incorporate the countries of Central Europe and the lands of the “Byzantine Commonwealth” (the Balkans, Romania, and the region of the middle Danube). There is, after all, a subtle, but undeniable, Byzantine aspect to the region.

The Ottonian successors to Charlemagne, as we have seen, set themselves up as rivals and successors to Constantinople, imitating “Byzantine claims to cosmic authority.” [126] There is a certain symbolic-historical rhyme between the crest of the Byzantine House of Palaiologos, featuring a double-headed eagle (symbolizing a vision simultaneous eastward and westward, as well as a bifurcated dynastic line) and the Austro-Habsburg double-headed eagle (likewise appropriate for an empire straddling east and west, and with a Spanish and Austrian line). It was in the medieval Hungarian court of Saint Stephen (of whom more below) that “the traditions of Eastern and Western Christianity, and the influences of the Byzantine and the German empires, met and were fairly evenly balanced.” [127] It was through the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the great multicultural polities of Central Europe, that “the cultural border between the Latin and Byzantine world ran.” [128] Indeed the renowned Byzantinist Warren Treadgold has described all of Eastern Europe as “the heir of Byzantium,” [129] a fact often overlooked but nonetheless capable of informing numerous socio-political attitudes. Some, like Kjell Engelbrekt in his 2002 article “Multiple Asymmetries : The European Union’s Neo-Byzantine Approach to Eastern Enlargement,” have gone even further, comparing the EU itself to Byzantium. After all, “as in the case of Byzantium and its Balkan hinterland…a mission civilisatrice is a key component to the overall EU approach,” [130] though this was the case with the Habsburgs as well as the Byzantines. Meanwhile, the role of Moscow, the self-styled Third Rome and successor to Constantinople, exists as another competing magisterium in Central Europe, a matter of critical and increasing importance in the region. The sense of being in between Rome and Byzantium, and the resultant cultural uniqueness such a location confers, is vital in putting Central European politics in context, and explains why Mitteleuropean policymakers, self-styled “true Europeans,” [131] still situate themselves liminally, on Europe’s ideological and geopolitical frontiers.

Some, like Egon Schwarz, insist that, with respect to “Central Europe,” “at the time of Italo Svevo, Stefan Zweig and other contemporary advocates of the idea, it might still have had an aura of historical feasibility and durability. Most of those who use the term today know that these possibilities have disappeared and that they must restrict the meaning to the sphere of cultural, artistic effort and emotional content.” [132] Yet, pace Schwarz, in Central Europe history has always been, in Miłosz’s words, “intense, spasmodic, full of surprises, indeed practically an active participant in the story,” [133] and seemingly out of place historical concepts have proven perpetually relevant. This pivotal region is again caught between competing geopolitical magisteria, between Brussels and Washington, or between Brussels and Moscow. Issues of energy dependence, or international security, manifest themselves in calls for an “energy NATO” or debates about cooperation in US missile defense. These and other debates invariably invoke history, and thus the idea of Central Europe has far more impact than its mere “emotional content.” The marginality that has always been a part of this region’s historical identity continues to affect the future of the European continent. Indeed, recent talk of “old” and “new” Europe has brought these issues to the fore.

As early as 1926 Louis Eisenmann, in his seminal paper “The Imperial Idea in the History of Europe,” had made the observation that “Austria-Hungary has disappeared, and we have all heard those sarcastic and vehement complaints about the Balkanisation of Europe. But surely we have also seen, scarcely three years after the fall of the Monarchy, the formation of the Little Entente and the first contours of a new community of nations in the ancient Habsburg dominions.” [134] This community, Eisenmann held, would play a leading role in “the inevitable march of the new Central Europe towards a supra-national organisation, in which, by a just balance of economic interests and by mutual respect for the rights of national minorities, those principles of order and justice which are the essence of the Imperial Idea will be realised in a surer and more complete form than under the ancient order which has now passed away.” [135] A sense that this region has a subtle but unmistakable role in a new European order has not dissipated over time.

When in 2003 then-United States Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed France and Germany as “old Europe,” adding that the continent’s “center of gravity is shifting to the east,” he managed to ignite an oil well of Western European insecurity over the region’s waning geopolitical influence. [136] Former French President Jacques Chirac may have retorted that such a statement “has no sense” and that “it’s a lack of culture to imagine that,” [137] but offended Western European policymakers might have acknowledged that the twin concepts of “old” and “new” Europe are hardly of recent provenance. No less a luminary than François-Marie Arouet, dit Voltaire, in his 1754 Essai sur les moeurs, had picked out “half of Dalmatia, the north of Poland, the shores of the Don, the fertile country of the Ukraine” as the regions wherein his contemporaries could “seek new lands in a new universe at the limits of the old one” – lands as ripe for Enlightenment cultivation as Dacia and Germania had seemed to the Romans. In a more pessimistic vein, Voltaire’s fellow philosophe Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm, had the previous year penned Le Petit Prophète de Boehmischbroda, in which a Bohemian violinist, Gabriel Joannes Nepomucenus Franciscus de Paula Waldstorch, “tenderhearted by nature,” “wept at the fate” of those nations to the west, for

"far off peoples will see the masterpieces of your fathers ; and they will see them in their theaters and will admire them without making mention of you ; for your glory will be passed, and you will be in relation to your fathers what the Greeks of today are in relation to the ancient ones, that is, a barbarous and stupid people." [138]

Western Europe’s centuries-old fascination with the lands to the east, typically manifesting itself in a combination of anthropological curiosity, prejudicial condescension, and geopolitical interest, then merged with attendant sense of its own antiquity and decadence (real or imagined), has in part motivated the modern European Union (EU) in its halting steps towards pan-Continental imperium. It should be added that Rumsfeld’s formulation of a “new Europe” was itself not original. The phrase came to the forefront of European diplomacy during the First World War, during which R.W. Seton-Watson founded the journal The New Europe (1916), and about which the British diplomat Harold Nicolson rhapsodized, writing that through “long and fervent study of The New Europe” “the thought of the new Serbia, the new Greece, the new Bohemia, the new Poland…made our hearts sing hymns at heaven’s gate.” [139] This realization, spurred on by the creation or recreation of nations enabled by the Paris Conference of 1919, went some way to counteract prior characterizations of Central and Eastern Europe as merely, in Honoré de Balzac’s opinion, “a link between Europe and Asia, between civilization and barbarism,” [140] or in the words of the historian William Sloane (channeling Tacitus, but writing in 1914), an “ethnological museum” [141] writ large, whose study properly begins with the Scythians. The twenty-first century, like the twentieth, can benefit from such a “long and fervent study.”

The Habsburg Empire, “situated between East and West,” was the first polity to attempt to reconcile these various impulses, and although it was branded by its rivals as having been infected by the “medieval despotism endemic to the ‘East,’” it set a precedent that would eventually be followed by the “non-imperial empire” of the EU. Straddling the European divide between Occident and Orient, “old” and “new,” and employing both archaicizing and liberal political techniques, the Habsburg Empire, with its strategic position and its enduring pretensions of universality, continues to play a key role in determining the fate of Europe.

A.E.I.O.U.

The German polymath Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, in Notebook E of his famous Sudelbücher, or “Waste Books,” bemusedly posed the rhetorical question : “Ménage says that on the keystone of the gate of the royal palace in Vienna there were inscribed the vowels A.E.I.O.U., and few knew what they meant. They are the initial letters of Austriacorum Est Imperare Orbi Universo. Is that true ?” [142] Lichtenberg was partially correct. It is true that the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III, Duke of Styria (1415-1493) had ordered “A.E.I.O.U.” to be inscribed on almost every available surface – architectural, literary, or numismatic. And it is likewise true that the exact meaning of the acronym remained obscure for some time – the court librarian Peter Lambecius advanced some forty possible variants, one of which was that offered by Lichtenberg. It was on the emperor’s deathbed that the meaning of the vowels was revealed : Alles Erdreich Ist Österreich Untertan, “The Whole World Is Subject To Austria.” [143]

This concept of Habsburg universal dominion was buttressed not solely by military conquest, but more importantly by prudent dynastic alliances and perspicacious diplomacy. It was during Frederick III’s reign that the couplet that was to become the Habsburg motto was penned :

"Bella gerunt alii, Tu felix Austriae nube ;

Nam quae Mars aliis, dat tibi regna Venus"

[Where others fight wars, you, Happy Austria, marry ;

What Mars gives to others, Venus gives to you]

More than half a millennium before Robert Kagan’s “paradise and power,” [144] “Venus and Mars” formulation of Western geopolitics, the Habsburgs had already mastered the art of Venusian soft power.

“A.E.I.O.U.” likewise appealed to the post-World War II historian Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, who crafted a new meaning : Austriae Europae Imago, Onus, Unio (Austria is Europe’s image, burden, and unification). [145] Though not the acronym of Frederick III five centuries before, Rosenstock-Huessy’s invention brilliantly captures Habsburg realities. For centuries Austria held itself out as Europe’s exemplar, its very image, heroically keeping the voracious Ottomans at bay. One rather jingoistic example of this is to be found in the semi-official Österreichbuch (Austria-book) of 1948, in its discussion of the successful 1683 defense of Vienna against the Turkish army of Kara Mustafa, which featured the following psalmody : “[Austria is the] shining mirror of the Occident, of Europe. Unifying Europe’s contradictions into a many-voiced, polyphonic concert. This is the miracle of that victory.” [146] The Monarchical Order of the Golden Fleece, meanwhile, operated as a powerful symbol of “the Habsburgs’ legend of themselves…the line of civilization that ran from Greek myths through modern monarch.” [147] The dynasty fashioned itself as the embodiment of Europe’s past, present, and future. That Austria was likewise Europe’s burden is another truth identified by Rosenstock-Huessy. Pan-European conflicts, whether the Thirty Years War, the War of the Austrian Succession, or the First World War, originated in Austria’s continuous lapses in conducting its “polyphonic concert.” It was for this reason that Henry Kissinger could say with reason that the “principle cause of conflicts in the past 150 years has been the existence of a no-man’s land between the German and Russian peoples,” [148] a land traditionally occupied by the Habsburg Empire. And as for Austria as Europe’s unification, it is necessary to examine a distinct theme running through the centuries, that of a “Greater Austria,” indeed a “Global Austria,” which gradually gave way to the vision of a never-achieved federal “United States of Austria,” and finally to a drive towards of pan-European integration.

It was in Robert Musil’s novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities) that the concept of a “Greater Austria” received the closest, albeit oftentimes withering, attention. We have Musil to thank for the popular term for the Austrian Empire, “Kakania,” which is derived from “the label of kaiserlich-königlich (Imperial Royal) or kaiserlich und königlich (Imperial and Royal), abbreviated ‘k.k.’ or ‘k.&k.,’” [149] with a not-so-subtle scatological reference, as well as an allusion to Cockagne (the imaginary land of idleness and luxury), thrown in to boot. The idea of Kakania sprang from the sense that “the Austro-Hungarian state was so oddly put together that it must seem almost hopeless to explain it to anyone who has not experienced it himself.” [150] This novel, which revolves around the efforts to throw a Jubilee celebration for the Emperor Franz Joseph I, features a certain Count Leinsdorf, who, “stirred by great and aching hopes,” felt that

"the nations of Europe were helplessly adrift in the whirlpool of materialistic democracy. What hovered before him was an inspiring symbol that would serve both as a warning and as a sign to return to the fold. It was clear to him that something had to be done to put Austria in the vanguard, so that this “splendorous rally of the Austrian spirit” would prove a “milestone” for the whole world and enable it to find its true being again, and all of this was connected with the possession of an eighty-eight-year-old Emperor of Peace." [151]

At a crucial junction in The Man Without Qualities, another luminary of the Jubilee campaign, Diotima, experiences something of a revelation :

Suddenly [Diotima] came out with the pronouncement that the True Austria was the whole world. The world, she explained, would find no peace until its nations learned to live together on a higher plane, like the Austrian peoples in their Fatherland. A Greater Austria, a Global Austria – that was the idea His Grace had inspired in her at this happy moment – the crowning idea the Parallel Campaign had been missing all along. [152]

Musil, in his notoriously sardonic manner, brilliantly exposed the universalist strain in Austrian thought, present since the days of Frederick III.

The concept of a Greater Austria, embodied in the acronym A.E.I.O.U., was a reasonable mechanism for coming to grips ideologically with a polity whose rulers described themselves as “Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, of Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia, Lodomeria, and Illyria ; King of Jerusalem, etc. ; Archduke of Austria ; Grand Duke of Tuscany and Cracow ; Dule of Lotharingia, of Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, and Bukovina ; Grand Duke of Transylvania ; Margrave of Moravia ; Duke of Upper Silesia and of Lower Silesia, of Modena, Parma and Piacenza, and Guastalla, of Auschwitz and Sator, of Teschen, Friaul, Ragusa, and Zara ; Princely Count of Habsburg and Tyrol, of Kyburg, Görz, and Gradiska ; Duke of Trient and Brixen ; Margrave of Upper and Lower Lausitz and in Istria ; Count of Hohenembs, Feldkirch, Bregenz, Sonnenberg, etc. ; Lord of Trieste, of Cattaro, and above the Wendish March ; Great Vojvod of the Vojvodina of Serbia, etc. etc.” [153] This ethnic admixture had allowed the writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal to note that in the empire “orient and occident,” or “Rome and Byzantium,” “still permeated each other,” creating an exemplar of Western civilization and indeed all of Christendom, the very definition of Habsburg universality. One is reminded of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who spoke of the “need of universal unity” and a “great need of mankind for a universal and world-wide union” the likes of which Christ rejected when confronted by Satan in the wilderness. [154] Such was the goal of the Habsburgs.

The aftermath of the 1848 nationalistic revolutions (the “Spring of Nations”) required that the Habsburgs recognize some kind of parity with their Magyar subjects to the east (hence the 1867 settlement allowing for an Austro-Hungarian “Dual Monarchy”), indicating some of the fundamental challenges of imperial universality in an age of post-Napoleonic nationalism. Still, the official title of the Dual Monarchy – “The Kingdoms and Lands Represented in the Imperial Council and the Lands of the Crown of St. Stephen” – suggests the advice of the historical St. Stephen, first king of Hungary (r. 1001-1038), who insisted that “a country unified in language and customs is fragile and weak.” [155] The usefulness of imperial diversity was defended by the Hungarian novelist Zsigismond Kemény, who claimed : “the function of Hungary was to defend the multi-national nature of the Habsburg Empire, splitting Germanism and Slavism and preventing either from becoming supreme.” [156] In lieu of federalism, this novel arrangement between nations, proto-nations, and various ethnies enabled a “state so oddly put together” to last for centuries not in spite of, but in some ways because of, its own contradictions.

As cracks began to appear in this unique union of nations (and particularly between Austria and Hungary), Austrian thinkers sought innovative solutions. The leftist Otto Bauer (1881-1938), keen as any Kakanian to exploit rather than avoid the inherent contradictions of the Habsburg imperium, insisted that in fact “the inner conflicts of the country will provide the Crown with another instrument of power which it will have to exploit if it does not wish to suffer the fate of the House of Bernadotte. It can not be the organ of two wills and yet still intend to rule over Hungary and Austria.” [157] New circumstances required a new kind of unification, however, one not dependent solely on precedential legitimacy. Bauer argued that the monarchy

"must take steps to ensure that Hungary and Austria have a common will, and that it constructs a single realm [Reich]. Hungary’s inward fragmentation offers her the possibility to achieve this goal. She will dispatch her armies to Hungary to recapture it for her realm, but she will inscribe on her banners : Uncorrupted, universal and equal suffrage ! Right of coalition for the agricultural laborer ! National autonomy ! She will counterpose the idea of an independent Hungarian nation-state [Nationalstaat] the idea of the United States of Great Austria, the idea of a federative state [Bundesstaat], in which each nation will administer independently its own national affairs, and all the nations will unite in one state for the preservation of their common interests. Inevitably and unavoidably, the idea of a federative state of nationalities [Nationalitätenbundesstaat] will become an instrument of the Crown [Werkzeug der Crone], whose realm is being destroyed by the decay of Dualism." [158]

It is typically Austrian that even the staunchest socialist could argue for political liberalization and federal reform while operating under the assumption that the end product would be instrumentalized by the Crown. As an attempt to combat the sort of mindset on display in the writings of the Jacobin Lavicomterie a century before Bauer’s time, it was a noble, if ultimately unsuccessful, effort. Still, Bauer’s idealistic conceptualization of a future Nationalitätenbundesstaat represents a forebear of the pan-European integration product later in the twentieth century, and a worthy attempt at reconciling ethno-nationalistic contradictions and tensions. And it was not only on the left that such pragmatic nationalist accommodations were proposed ; in 1906 the ethnic Romanian pundit Aurel Popovici proposed a “United States of Greater Austria,” composed of “fifteen nationality states…to form the monarchical federal empire” and complete with ethnic German enclaves, designed in the hopes of staving off the inevitable fragmentation of the empire. [159] The failure of these efforts, and the world-upending events of 1914, would to leave a geopolitical and moral void the rest of Europe would be forced to address.

SPECIALISTS IN MELANCHOLY

The First World War, whose mustard gas-laden winds blew away the royal chaff of the Romanovs, Hohenzollerns, and Habsburgs, put an end to any notions of imperial reform. The arch-ironist Karl Kraus observed that “many of those who were full of enthusiasm on 1 August 1914 and also had butter hoped there would be even more butter on 1 August, 1917. They can still remember the enthusiasm,” but when the war was over the region was irrevocably altered, and the enthusiasm for what turned into attempted European civilizational suicide was nothing more than a bitter recollection. The memory of Kakania remained, as one would expect in a land where for many, as Musil put it, “the present period follows upon the battle of Mohács or Lietzen as the roast the soup.” [160] Thus arose the twentieth century variant on Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord’s comment that “those who did not experience the eighteenth century before the French Revolution know not the sweetness of life.” It is little wonder that the collapse of Austro-Hungary in 1918 left many hopelessly adrift in a sea of nostalgia, most prominently the journalist and novelist Joseph Roth, who throughout his entire oeuvre, and particularly in his novels Radetzkymarsch (The Radetzky March) and Die Kapuzinergruft (The Emperor’s Tomb), played the minor chords of Habsburg nostalgia to the greatest effect.

It was in 1913 that the future writer, then known as Moses Joseph Roth, arrived in Vienna, having made the long journey from his hometown of Brody in Galicia (now within Ukraine’s borders). Roth described a town not unlike Brody in his 1929 short story “Strawberries” as being “on a great and sparsely inhabited plain” which “stretched forever” to the east. [161] This sense of being on the very limits of the Austrian empire, and indeed on the frontier of Europe itself, made a lasting impression on the future writer. Taking up residence at Rembrandtstraße 35 in Vienna’s Leopoldstadt district, a place described by Veza Canetti in The Yellow Street as inhabited by “cripples, somnambulists, lunatics, the desperate and the smug” [162] (perhaps something of a comfort, since in “Strawberries” Roth described the small Galician town as “home to about ten thousand people,” and “three thousand of them were insane, if not dangerously so” [163] ), Roth began his studies at the University of Vienna. “Living in this building,” Claudio Magris has written, “it cannot have been difficult to become a specialist in melancholy, the dominant note of Vienna and Mitteleuropa as a whole.” [164] Rembrandtstraße 35, now more poignant still, positioned as it is in the shadow of a Second World War-era concrete monstrosity of an anti-aircraft tower, was the fitting starting point of a career centered on Habsburg nostalgia, in which a man who once styled himself as Die Rote Roth (Red Roth) turned schwarz-gelbe (yellow and black, the colors of the Habsburgs).

Roth echoed Musil’s aforementioned sentiments regarding the uniqueness of Kakania (although the term itself Roth rejected as crass), in The Emperor’s Tomb (1938) :

“Under this Monarchy,” replied Count Chojnicki, who was the eldest of us, “nothing is remarkable. Without our administrative idiots” – he liked strong expressions – “there would indeed, even outwardly, be nothing at all remarkable. By which I mean that what passes for remarkable in Austro-Hungary is merely the obvious. I should also like to add that only in this crazy Europe of nation states and nationalisms does the obvious seem remarkable. Admittedly it is the Slovenes, the Poles and Galicians from Ruthenia, the kaftan-clad Jews from Borsylaw, the horse traders from the Bacska, the Moslems from Sarajevo, the chestnut roasters from Mostar who sing out national anthem, ‘Gott erhalte’…Austria’s essence is not to be central, but peripheral. Austria is not to be found in the Alps, where you can find edelweiss, chamois and gentians but never a trace of the double eagle. The body politic of Austria is nourished and constantly replenished from the Crown Lands.” [165]

Roth, himself a transplant from the crown lands, spoke through the fictional Count Chojnicki. In the same book, when Hungarian nationalist Baron Kovacs insists that the “Hungarians suffer most of all under this Dual Monarchy,” he is promptly put in his place : “The Hungarians, my dear Kovacs, oppress all of the following peoples : Slovaks, Rumanians, Croats, Serbs, Ruthenians, Bosnians, Swabians from the Bacska and the Saxons of Transylvania.” [166] Roth never flinched at the existence of nationalisms and ethnic rivalries, and acknowledged “pernicious weaknesses in [the Empire’s] major guardians,” [167] but nevertheless asserted that it had been Habsburg imperium that had prevented these from descending into chaos. The mournful tone of Roth’s entire body of work is indicative of a man who had lived through the fall of the old order in 1918 (having served on the frontlines in Ukraine), and could foresee the chaos of the next world conflict. Roth’s fellow-traveler in nostalgia, Stefan Zweig, described the inter-war years as a time when “we were befuddling ourselves with Utopias” [168] while another war loomed, but the author of The Radetzky March, with his Baroque sensibilities, could only bemoan the long-lost order of the past. No longer would “His Royal and Imperial Apostolic Majesty” be treated to the multinational acclaim of “Hurrah, Vivat and Niech Zyje,” [169] as Roth described in his novella Die Büste des Kaisers (The Bust of the Emperor) (1935), which details the abject melancholia of the Galician Count Franz Xaver Morstin, an aristocrat of mixed Italian, Polish, and Austrian descent. In this work, Roth’s Morstin delivers a monarchist monologue for the ages :

“The pursuit of so-called national virtues, which are still more dubious than personal values, is fatuous. That is why I hate nations and nation-states. My former home, the monarchy, alone was different, it was a large house with many doors and many rooms for many different kinds of people. This house has been divided, broken up, ruined. I have no business with what is there now. I am used to living in a house, not in cabins.” [170]

This lost Baroque order, which provided “a large house with many doors” for a multitude of peoples, was seen as opposed by twentieth century disorder, and thus became the focus of many of Roth’s generation. Hermann Broch – as fascinated and dismayed by the decay of the Habsburg Empire as Roth – described Europe’s precipice in his poem “1913.” “And the past arises once again,” Broch wrote,

"the snug order of earthly symbols

in which – oh, mighty Church – the vastness of

infinity is reflected,

the reflection of the cosmos in the repose of the triad,

in its harmonies and resolutions.

Just this was the dignity of Europe,

controlled movement, intimation of wholeness,

progression following the lines of a music

which – O Christianity of Sebastian Bach – looks upward

with this world’s eyes ; imprinting the transcendent,

forging ties between above and below

a reality of freedom and urbane order

extending in measured movements from symbol to symbol -

the Western cosmos." [171]

But for Broch (who, like Roth, was a Jew inexorably drawn to a Roman Catholicism that buttressed Habsburg legitimacy) the “ties between above and below” – whether between heaven and earth or ruler and subject, were soon to be threatened by Europe’s attempts at civilizational suicide and the resultant dissolution of centuries of precedent and order :

"Elysium and Tartarus collide and become

indistinguishable.

Europe, farewell ; the good tradition is ended." [172]

Roth was inclined to agree, and beset by melancholy he inexorably drank himself to death. His comrades struck upon the clever (though ultimately unsuccessful) notion that an imperial intervention would have a salubrious effect, and so it came that Otto von Habsburg, the son of the last ruler of Austro-Hungary, received a reverential Roth at his residence, admonishing his quondam subject : “Roth, I, as your Emperor, order you to cease drinking.” [173] This meeting between the Habsburgs’ greatest nostalgist and the emperor-manqué was a historic occasion, and poignantly evinces the lingering authority of the defunct monarchy.

Otto himself would later renounce his claim to the throne, only to passionately campaign for European unity and integration within the forum of the European Economic Community and later the European Union (as a member of the European Parliament), as well as by presiding over the International Paneuropean Union for several decades. Otto would make regular returns to the public spotlight during European crises occurring within his family’s crown lands ; he urged European nations to recognize Croatia after the collapse of Yugoslavia, and even traveled to Sarajevo despite nationalist Serbian assassination threats, pleading for his fellow Europeans to “pray for this circle of tragedies to close.” [174] More recently, during the democratic Orange Revolution in Ukraine in late 2004, he “pronounced that the future of Europe would be decided in Kiev and Lviv,” [175] the latter city having significantly been located in Habsburg Galicia, and therefore within his supposed moral-political purview. Thus did Austro-nostalgia give way to practical action on behalf of different universalist goals – liberal reform and pan-European integration – all in an effort to recreate Europe in something of the image of the Habsburg Empire. Joseph Roth may have suffered from nostalgic melancholy, lamenting the loss of the order the ancien régime provided and despairing of the rise of anti-Semitism in his beloved Central Europe, but his idol Otto took a broader reading of A.E.I.O.U., one that could survive the traumas of the twentieth century. One should also take note of Count Richard Coudenhove Kalergi (born in Tokyo to a Japanese mother and Austrian diplomat father), who would, like Otto, take a more proactive approach, presenting in his Pan Europa (1922) a vision of European integration that inspired European intellectuals like Karl Tucholsky to conclude : “We no longer live in the individual fortresses of the Middle Ages. We live in a house and the name of that house is Europe.” [176] Although Ghislain de Diesbach was correct in noting that the fall of the Habsburgs “left in the new Europe a material and above all a moral gap which has not yet been filled,” [177] it seems that Roth’s “large house with many doors and many rooms” would nonetheless prove an enduring image.

The specific idea that the “whole world is subject to Austria,” or that there is such a thing as a “Global Austria,” is of course a non-starter. Thomas Bernhard, that notorious Austrian playwright and Nestbeschmutzer, described his homeland in the most uncharitable terms : “Our country sat heavily in Europe’s gut, completely undigestible, like an ‘ill-advisedly swallowed clubfoot’…a hotel of ambivalence, the bordello of Europe, enjoying an excellent reputation, especially overseas.” [178] This is an extreme view, but it is undeniable that post-Habsburg facets of Austrian history have hindered its continental influence. Austria was hammered by successive world wars, Anschluss, the partially successful Nazi effort to reduce cosmopolitan Vienna to provincial status, and years of internationally orchestrated post-war occupation. The burdens of this past are nothing if not persistent. The 1986 election of Kurt Waldheim, whose National Socialist past became the subject of international attention and intense domestic debate, was likewise to have considerable consequences for Austria’s post-Cold War geopolitical position. The historian Edward Timms has argued that the

"election of Waldheim as President thus discredited Austria abroad and resulted in a diplomatic vacuum in Vienna. This vacuum became all the more acute as a result of the collapse of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe during the autumn of 1989. These events provided an unprecedented opportunity for the reactivation of the Austrian dream of Vienna as a central point within an increasingly united Europe. The effect of the Waldheim affair, however, was to inhibit Austrian diplomacy. While the West German President, Richard von Weizsäcker, was undertaking his historic visit to President Vaclav Havel in Prague, the President of Austria remained immured in the Hofburg." [179] Austria, racked by domestic controversy, would have been an ideal interlocutor between East and West during this vital historical juncture, but the legacies of the mid-twentieth century represented a then-insuperable stumbling block. Still, all was not lost, as the Habsburg past retained something of its magnetism.

The city of Vienna, as a center of commerce, diplomacy, non-governmental organizations, and tourism, has made a concerted effort to reach back to its Austro-Hungarian past, presenting itself as a Weltstadt (“World City”), modeled on its 1900 heyday, thereby invoking a powerful lieu de mémoire. [180] According to the anthropologist Matti Bunzl, this notion of Weltstadt “not only evokes connotations of worldliness and internationalism but suggests that the city functions as a nexus for transnational concerns,” [181] whether with respect to bridging the gap between western and eastern Europe or providing a forum for the UN, OPEC, the OSCE, or other international organizations. Elisabeth Lichtenberger has also picked up on Austrian rhetoric of representing a “unique position as a European melting pot.” [182] Now, this idea of a “nexus of transnational concerns” is used in furtherance of different universalizing goals, but the instinct is the same as it was under the Habsburgs, and the wellspring is the same ; indeed the old imperial Hofburg palace’s special relationship with the United Nations is almost enough to remind one of the fictional Diotima’s rhetoric of a “Global Austria.”

Such a role is not without its potential difficulties. Austria’s relationship with its former crown lands to the east enabled “Austrian banks like Erste, Raiffeisen and Bank Austria…[to come] to the region after communism fell, eager to profit from the heady appetite for consumption and credit ;” as a result, “today, Austria’s loans to the east amount to 70 percent of its gross domestic product.” [183] Stress tests have given Central Bank officials cause to insist that “Austrian banks have enough capital to survive a ‘drastic’ eastern European recession,” [184] but Vienna’s, and Austria’s, role as a bridge between east and west remains a source of risks as well as opportunities, as evidenced by the ongoing economic crisis, as well as the continuing imbroglio over the Russian energy company Surgutneftegaz’s unsolicited purchase of a 21 percent stake in the Hungarian oil firm MOL from Austria’s OMV, a transaction that has raised hackles in some Central European circles and is opposed by the current Hungarian government. [185] Vladimir Socor of the Jamestown Foundation has characterized the proposed deal as an “Austrian backdoor for Russian takeover of Hungary’s energy sector,” [186] further proof that hoary notions of Mitteleuropean geopolitics have not disappeared entirely.

The aforementioned sites of historical memory (e.g. the Viennese Weltstadt), and the uses to which they have been put (e.g. in fostering a sense of Austria as a political and economic bridge between east and west) present a positive image of integration and universality, notwithstanding the occasional geopolitical complications, but it cannot be said that political symbolism in Austria is necessarily irenic, particularly given Austria traditional self-identification as Europe’s bulwark against threats from the south. It is to Austria’s role with respect to Europe’s “Turkey question” that we now turn.

THE BULWARK

When it comes to Austrian-Turkish relations within the context of the EU, we are confronted with the concrete legacies of centuries past, the repercussions of which are being felt throughout Europe and indeed the world. It is worthwhile to keep in mind the 1948 Österreichbuch’s treatment of the Austrian victory over the besieging Turks in 1683, wherein Austria was described as the “shining mirror of the Occident.” As the exemplar of the West, Austro-Hungary viewed itself as a bulwark against Turkish incursions. The sense of being a bridge between east and west only applied to Christendom ; when it came to relations with the Ottomans, the Turkish threat became a veritable raison d’être. From the several sieges of Vienna to the conquests of the Habsburg military hero Prince Eugenio von Savoy, the greatest moments of Austrian triumph, when the “many-voiced, polyphonic concert” of the multi-national empire achieved its greatest victories, were over the Ottoman nemesis and in defense or advancement of the Ostmark (eastern border). It was, after all, the song Prinz Eugenius Der Edle Ritter, celebrating the fog-bound victory over Mustafa Pasha’s army at Belgrade, that Habsburg soldier’s would chant in battle formation for generations to come. The victorious prince himself, basking in the imperial favor gained by his victories at Zenta and Belgrade, was to decorate his palaces (most notably the gorgeous Belvedere complex) with “allegorical reminders of battle,” including “helmet-crested putti, warriors and weapons in stone and stucco, reliefs of Venus bestowing arms upon Aeneas” and the de rigueur “Turkish soldiers duly fettered in stone.” [187] Lieux de mémoires dealing with these events are still scattered over modern Vienna, from Turkish cannonballs set into apartment facades to the war monument at Kahlenberg. From this point on, Karl Roider has observed,

"the duty of the Habsburgs to defend Christianity was increasingly emphasized in public ordinances and official statements. In the eighteenth century, when Charles VI called upon his lands to recognize the Pragmatic Sanction, he stressed that its acceptance was essential because “Against the ever present Turkish might one can do nothing else than maintain a powerful central control over the patriarchal kingdoms and lands.” [188]

Such a mindset was ingrained in the imperial psyche ; in the twentieth century novel The Man Without Qualities Robert Musil mused over the fact that “monarchs on their accession still take an oath to make war on Turks or other infidels.” [189] Indeed the Turkish threat overshadowed all others. A bronze medal struck around 1530 by the Emperor Charles V, and currently held by the British Museum, expresses this state of affairs quite dramatically : Charles’ bust, supported by an angel, is haunted by the profile of the self-proclaimed “Lord of Europe,” the Sultan Suleiman. [190] The lack of a commensurate crusading impulse on the part of the Habsburg Empire’s chief continental European rival, France (whose kings, like Francis I, relished the Turks’ ability to “erode the power of [Charles V] and involve him in crippling expense” [191] ) only reinforced Austro-Hungary’s sense of being the frontline of Europe’s battle with the “infidels” to the southeast. France might host the Barbary corsair Barbarossa and his fleet in the port of Toulon between 1543 and 1544, [192] but the Habsburgs would never make such accommodations.

Popular culture reflected these geopolitical attitudes. The Habsburg populace could acknowledge that, in the words of the historian John Hale, “Europeans burned, tortured and maimed,” but they recoiled in horror at the perception that “only the Turks impaled, ramming a pointed stake up the anus and out between the collar bones regardless of age or sex, and leaving it stuck in the ground with its skewered victim as a warning. Views by German artists of the siege of Vienna in 1529 and later Imperial-Turkish wars peppered the landscape with such writhing figures.” [193] The trope of the “Savage Turk”, regardless of its accuracy, came to appear on an artistic plane higher than such crude woodcuts. In Albrecht Dürer’s 1508 painting Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand (now in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum), for instance, one finds the Roman emperor Hadrian, depicted in the midst of his enormities, turbaned and clad in eastern robes. The Ottoman Empire had by this time become a metonym for savagery. It was only after the victories of Prince Eugenio that the Empire could view the Turkish threat as something other than existential (though costly campaigns like Joseph II’s 1787-1791 offensive campaign in the Balkans continued to sap crown resources at a time when Europe stood at the brink of continent-wide revolution). Some level of Austrian-Turkish cultural syncretism was possible by this time, particularly in music – Wolfgang Amadée Mozart’s operas Zaide and The Abduction from the Seraglio feature Turkish themes, and the compositions of Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck, Joseph Martin Kraus, Franz Xaver Süßmayr (as well as later work by Ludwig von Beethoven and Johann Strauss) all feature Turkish melodies and arrangements. Yet this last development hardly outweighs the centuries of distrust and the hardening sense of otherness felt on the Habsburg side of the constantly shifting Balkan border.

This sanguineous historical legacy (and in particular the year 1683) had considerable staying power after the fall of the Habsburgs, with pan-European consequences. The Austrian pre-Nazi era Chancellor-Dictator, Engelbert Dolfuss, “applauded the [1683] liberation of Vienna in terms of his corporative, authoritarian Catholicism, with which he opposed both Nazism and Bolshevism,” yet a few years later, “in a National-Socialist commemorative bronze, the banner of the vanquished Turks bore not the Crescent but the Star of David.” [194] A few years later still, the 1948 Österreichbuch appealed to this legacy as part of the post-World War Two national rebirth. The 1983 tricentenary celebrations of the event made some effort at not offending Turks or Austrians of Turkish descent, but the Turkish Janissary horsetail insignias that hung from lampposts, the crescents affixed to sites associated with the fighting, and the transformation of the Künstlerhaus into a Turkish tent, together could not mask the clearly jingoistic elements of the proceedings. [195]

References to this legacy remain ready on the Central European tongue. Claudio Magris has noted that the Turks, “repulsed three hundred years ago,” have returned in the form of the Gastarbeiter, or immigrant workers, who “undergo poverty and humiliation but gradually put down roots in a land which they conquer by means of their humble toil.” [196] Magris also observed, at the Viennese Museum of the Twentieth Century, an exhibition of Turkish photography, one work of which featured the caption “Our forefathers rode on horseback here, and we sweep the streets,” while adding that “the fault is ours, not the Austrians.” [197] It was Magris’ conclusion that Austria’s, and indeed Europe’s, “future will depend in part on our ability to prevent the priming of this time-bomb of hatred, and the possibility that new Battles of Vienna will transform brothers into foreigners and enemies.” [198] The fact that Magris, a cosmopolitan Triestan scholar with an unmatched understanding of Mitteleuropean culture, could even envision future “Battles of Vienna” shows the hold that the Imperial-Turkish conflict continues to have on the region.

Given this seemingly ineradicable historical imprint, it is of considerable interest that one of Austria’s few major foreign policy achievement of the last decade concerned EU relations with modern Turkey. In 2005, under the British EU presidency (strongly disposed towards Turkish EU accession), the Austrian government managed to bring negotiations to a halt with demands that Ankara only be offered an alternative to EU membership. This was driven by domestic considerations ; after all, according to a poll conducted by the Austria Press Agency, some 73% of Austrians opposed Turkish EU membership (as opposed to an average of 54% of fellow Europeans feeling similarly). [199] Some Austrians directly “refer[red] to the historical memory of Ottoman armies laying siege to Vienna” to explain this antipathy, while the majority (three-quarters in some polls) simply “insisted that Turkey is not a European country.” [200]

As anywhere in Europe, these issues are intertwined with contemporary concerns about immigration, integration, and the political economy, but the vociferousness of Austrian opposition to Turkey’s EU ambitions, and its concomitant support for the accession of former Crown Lands like Slovenia, Croatia, and Albania (as part of Projekt Mitteleuropa), are indicative of a long-held diplomatic posture. As domestic support grows for Austria’s right-wing Freedom Party (FPÖ), whose platform calls for tightening immigration controls and a referendum on any Turkish EU accession, many, like political scientist Peter Filzmeier, fret that the FPÖ’s base is “mostly men in their 30s with extremely far-right views, and they are really scary.” [201] Yet what the FPÖ and its leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, have done is tap into ancient negative sentiments, at least with respect to the Turkey issue. After all, as Max Riedlsperger has argued, politicians like Strache are, like his predecessor Jorg Haider, not necessarily “neo-Nazi but rather a flexible, opportunistic, and extremely ambitious political chameleon with a strong populist appeal…able to achieve extraordinary political success by telling many Austrians what they want to hear.” [202] The xenophobic and jingoistic message of the FPÖ, rooted in distant as well as more recent Austrian history, is not merely a matter of Austrian domestic politics. The last time the FPÖ rose to domestic prominence, in 1999, EU neighbors responded with open animosity towards Austria, even going so far as to freeze various bilateral contracts. Thus Vienna’s anti-Turkish stance may have ramifications for the EU’s voisinage, given debates over pressing issues such as the Lisbon Treaty or foreign policy coordination.

With Turkey’s European orientation increasingly more hesitant, Austria’s diplomatic gambit appears to have been successful (though whether this obstruction was actually in Europe’s long-term interests is another matter). While some, like Ann Thomson, have argued that “the inclusion of the Ottomans in the European diplomatic game” during the early modern period caused Europeans to implicitly “reject…the radical otherness of representations [of Turkey] as a state uniquely fanatical and despotic, which has no place in Europe,” [203] the legacies of centuries of animosity and distrust in Austria have produced an entirely different, though certainly debatable, interpretation of modern Turkey’s role in Europe. One EU figure who embraced such this quintessentially Austrian vision was the Dutch European Commissioner Fritz Bolkestein, who in a 2004 speech opined that, if Turkey succeeds in joining the institution, and if Bernard Lewis was correct in hypothesizing a coming Islamization of Europe, “the liberation of Vienna in 1683 would have been in vain.” [204] This controversial speech was described by one of Bolkestein’s aides, Derk-Jan Eppink, in the following way :

"We decided that the title for the speech should be : The Multinational Union. The more we thought about it, the more we came to see the similarities between the Habsburg Monarchy and the European Union. The Habsburg Empire also contained a wide variety of different nationalities, which were conquered and absorbed at a speed with which the political institutions of the monarchy were unable to cope. In particular, the eight million German-speakers feared being overwhelmed by the 20 million Slavs within the Empire’s new boundaries. This would certainly have been the case of the Slavic peoples had been granted the same voting rights as the Austrians and the Hungarians – and so the Austrians and Hungarians made sure that these voting rights were never granted, creating still greater internal pressures within the Empire as a result…The proposed membership of Turkey threatened to put the European Union in exactly the same position." [205]

There is a colorable case to be made that Bolkestein’s pursuit of an alternative arrangement with Turkey as a buffer state – a position that stems from the above-noted deep-seated historical tendencies – would in actuality be in keeping with the neo-medieval European Union paradigm outlined by Jan Zielonka (e.g. soft borders and sophisticated arrangements within the European voisinage).

Regardless of whether one agrees with Strache, Bolkestein, and Eppink or not, it is apparent that the life and afterlife of the Habsburg Empire continue to impact modern developments in Europe and along its borders. Kakanian notions of universality, the pioneering development of the notion of a federative state of nationalities, the bequeathal of a powerful nostalgia that spurred a renewed search for European order, stability, and continuity (as Joseph Roth put it, “living in a house, not in cabins”), the visionary efforts of figures like Otto von Habsburg, and the resulting ingrained mentalities, all combine to speak to the lasting influence of the Habsburg phenomenon.

It was one of the last great archdukes of the Habsburg realm, Stefan, who acknowledged that “nationalism was inevitable…but the destruction of empires is not. Making a state for every nation would not liberate national minorities…[but] would make of Europe an unseemly assemblage of weak states dependent on stronger ones to survive.” [206] The imperial void would have to be filled somehow, and today’s neo-medieval, “non-imperial” imperialism is a consequence of this geopolitical abhorrence of a vacuum. Furthermore, the failures of the Empire are as instructive as their successes ; Oszkár Jászi has claimed that the “Habsburgs’ dream collapsed because it could not offer true solidarity to their nations with the support of the educational system of the citizens. The more educated Habsburgs had admitted the crucial importance of this problem but they could not solve it…Beyond the army there was no real citizenship education.” [207] This may shed some light on recent moves towards unified European defense (given that, as Richard North has opined, military integration “is just another mechanism though which the EU can achieve political integration” [208] ), as well as the promotion of a “new school history book for the European Union,” [209] which together represent a colorable, if perhaps subconscious, attempt on the part of EU policymakers to build on Habsburg legacies while avoiding infamous Habsburg missteps.

Austro-Hungary may have been consigned to the ash-heap of history, but lessons like these are invaluable in reconciling Europe’s destinées passées with its destinées futures. The legacy of the Habsburg Empire, that state “so oddly put together,” which left its indelible mark on the continent and yet so often failed to live up to its motto of Viribis unitis (“with united strength”), still serves to validate Robert Musil’s characteristically Austrian dictum that “in all the history of mankind no sentence has ever been completely crossed out or quite completed.” [210] It is a maxim European policymakers and analysts should bear in mind in the coming years when confronted with issues arising from the quandaries of political existence in that peculiar region between Rome and Byzantium, where Elysium and Tartarus are forever fated to collide, or when confronted with the gradual creation of another entirely unconventional empire.

Matthew Omolesky

Ljubljana, Slovenia/Columbus, Ohio

2008-2009

* Matthew Omolesky is a researcher at The Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law, and a former researcher-in-residence at the Institut za Civilizacijo in Kulturo in Ljubljana. He is currently at work on a history of universal jurisdiction. For more on symbolic and historical politics in contemporary western and eastern Europe, see Matthew Omolesky’s other Europe2020 articles : “Between the Seas : Międzymorze and the Nature of Polish-Ukrainian Relations,” “From ‘Pax Belgica’ to ‘Eigen Volk Eerst’ : The Causes and Consequences of the Rise, Decline, and Fall of the Belgian Unitary State,” and “The Doubtful Limit : Slovenia and Croatia EU/NATO Accession.”