Introduction

This book presents a portrait of a particular milieu—the overlapping political and intellectual circles from the late Habsburg Empire and interwar Europe—in order to examine broader issues of European history in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. It covers the Austrian part of what after 1867 became the federative Austro-Hungarian Empire, and several states of interwar Europe, including Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Italy, Yugoslavia, post-1918 Ukraine, and the post-1922 Soviet Union. The focus here is the transfer of institutional models and practices across 1918, from the empire to interwar Europe and beyond. This book explores how a cluster of ideas rooted in the nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire —conservatism, liberalism, nationalism, Christian socialism, Austro-Marxism, federalism, and internationalism—continued to shape European politics and society in the twentieth century. To the usual story of Europe from the fall of its last empires to 1945 and beyond, it proposes an alternate narrative, one that highlights the connections between the fin-de- siècle and post–Second World War eras and yields a new chronology of twentieth-century Europe. The First World War represented a landmark moment, especially in military, territorial, and human terms, but its political effects were not as radical as those of the Second World War. The Habsburg epoch in European history, that is, may be understood to have come to an end not in 1918 but between 1938 and 1945.