In the past twenty-five years, historians of the Habsburg Monarchy quietly created a revolution that overturned the most important certainties in their field and forced scholars to revise their fundamental presumptions about society and politics in Austria-Hungary. Two historians whose books contributed to the revolution, Laurence Cole and Daniel Unowsky, have combined forces to produce a collection of essays that explores the character and quality of popular allegiances in the Habsburg Monarchy. The book examines the elasticity and situational nature of loyalty to state and nation among the citizens of Austria-Hungary, documenting the diverse ways in which dynasts and nationalists exploited each other's popularity to produce mutually reinforcing loyalties among those citizens. My one complaint about this otherwise splendid volume is that the book's title implies that patriotic commitment somehow remained in short supply, when in fact this collection proves the opposite to have been the case.

The essays in this volume demolish imagined oppositions between nationalist commitment on the one hand and loyalty to the state or dynasty on the other. The idea that nationalism and patriotism had been mutually exclusive was largely a product of nationalist triumphalism in the successor states. Sociologist Oskar Jászi (by no means a triumphalist!) framed this opposition memorably for scholars in terms of “centrifugal” and “centripetal” forces. Jászi viewed nationalism as the primary centrifugal force tearing the Monarchy apart, and he ranged dynasty, church, army, and bureaucracy against it as beleaguered centripetal forces desperately trying to hold it together. For more than half a century this dichotomy constituted the foundation for historical studies of Austria-Hungary. Each author in this volume demonstrates several complex ways in which nationalist movements and dynastic loyalty actually reinforced each other and even depended on each other for coherence and popular appeal. Some authors examine institutional mechanisms through which the state sought to inspire popular loyalty, while most examine the ways in which state and nationalists attempted to attach popular significance to symbols and historic figures.

Ernst Bruckmüller surveys both the patriotic and nationalist myths that appeared in grade-school readers in several regions of the Monarchy, offering a sophisticated analysis of their content while simultaneously explaining the process by which school boards chose textbooks and authors produced them. Laurence Cole analyzes popular patriotism among Austrian military veterans, revealing the effective ideological links between the state and a social movement that mobilized thousands of men for charitable, social, and patriotic purposes. Cole's study of veterans' associations in the Trentino region of Tyrol demonstrates the ways in which veterans asserted their own importance to local society precisely as representatives of the Imperial order. Italian-speaking veterans of the Trentino, according to Cole, largely rejected the activism of local Italian nationalist associations even as they asserted their right to organize specifically Italian-speaking clubs separate from German-language veterans' associations in other parts of the Tyrol. Nancy Wingfield analyzes the different political agendas to which various parties attempted to link Habsburg Emperor Joseph II. Was he liberator of an en-serfed peasantry or emancipator of the Jews, or an alleged proponent of German nationalism in the Bohemian lands? Hugh Agnew ably traces the changing meanings for Bohemian political parties between 1867 and 1914 of the idea of crowning Franz Josef King of Bohemia. Alice Freifeld perceptively explores Empress Elizabeth's role as Queen of Hungary. From her dress to her residences and her choice of society, Elizabeth signaled to the public her sympathy for the Hungarian nation. This made her an extremely useful figure to her husband as he sought to reconcile Hungary to Habsburg rule in the 1850s and to negotiate the Compromise of 1867. This also made her a useful symbol for Hungarian nationalists to exploit as well. Daniel Unowsky's essay on Franz Josef's state visit to Galicia in 1880 elucidates the ways in which nationalist movements and the Imperial court used and exploited each other to build popularity for their causes. In this particular case, Polish and Ruthene activists attempted to use the Emperor's visit to legitimize their rival nationalist projects. Using his own participation in ceremonies planned by each group, the Emperor appears to have made himself into an indispensable symbolic focus of both Polish and Ruthene nationalism. Sarah Kent's essay examines protests by law students in Zagreb during a state visit by Franz Josef to the Croatian capital in 1895. During the course of the King's visit, the students gathered to set a Hungarian flag on fire while shouting, “Long live the Croatian King!” Afterward they sent a laurel wreath to Franz Josef with an inscription commemorating his visit and protesting against the “tyranny” of the Magyars. Of course, Franz Josef was not only King of Croatia, but also King of Hungary, and the detested viceroy of Croatia, Count Karl Khuen-Héderváry, was also his most loyal servant.

Two other excellent essays approach these questions from radically different positions. Alon Rachamimov examines legendary Jewish loyalty to the state through the example of writer Avigdor Hameiri (1890-1970). Going well beyond traditional tropes about the loyalty of Habsburg Jews, Rachamimov interrogates the character and quality of that loyalty over time, making loyalty into a multi-dimensional and situational attribute. Christiane Wolf's essay provides a helpful comparison of the ways that Queen Victoria of England, Wilhelm II of Germany, and Franz Joseph each represented constitutional monarchy. Noting that the elevation of the people's feelings for their ruler made Franz Josef a critical condition of society's stability, she also questions, however, whether this function could have been transferred to another Habsburg.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, nationalist movements in Austria-Hungary often made patriotism or devotion to the dynasty into a forum for nationalist competition. Even when Czech nationalists withdrew from the celebrations of Franz Josef's sixtieth jubilee in Vienna in 1908, for example, they nevertheless competed with German nationalists in Bohemia to raise money for the Emperor's charities or to demonstrate Czech loyalty during Imperial visits. This is a critical phenomenon that historians miss as long as they view the history of the Monarchy in terms of an opposition between nationalist commitment and loyalty to the state. The essays in this volume offer scholars several fine theoretical alternatives for pursuing new narratives about Austro-Hungarian society.