Here are two strikingly different books that nonetheless lend themselves to a comparative review. The senior Hungarian historian Éva Somogyi presents us with a collection of seven related articles—six of these articles were previously published from 1994 onward (half of them revised for this edition), and one was published for the first time. The original publication of the young German Gerald Volkmer's work is his University of Mainz dissertation. Despite the differences among the authors and their works, these books are complementary. Indeed, Volkmer's extensive bibliography cites four of Somogyi's German language studies.

Somogyi is a section chief at the Historical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and editor of the Protokolle des Gemeinsamen Ministerrates. Since her early study on the path of the Austrian liberals to the Austro-Hungarian Compromise (Budapest, 1976), her research has deployed the insights derived from her editorial work and intimate knowledge of the Viennese archives to focus both on the central dualist institutions of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy as well as on the position of Hungarian officials within the imperial system. The first two studies in this volume fall into the first category; the others, into the second. The first, very methodical article lays the groundwork for the others by analyzing the Austro-Hungarian delegations, which Hungarians insisted did not constitute a central parliament and which many Austrians hoped would become a parliament. Technically the common ministers were responsible to the delegations, but the delegations only removed one minister, Agenor von Goluchowski, from office. The second institutional study in this volume concerns the Hungarian ministry in dualist Vienna, the Ministry in Proximity to the King, or, as Somogyi terms it, the Hoflager Ministry. The restoration of the laws of 1848 prescribed the restoration of this ministry too. It proved somewhat anachronistic and with time shrank in size. However, the ministry proved so useful as the home of the Hungarian delegation when it came to Vienna in alternate years that Cisleithania eventually established a seat in Budapest to serve this function.

The approach of Somogyi's other studies is biographical. Her focus is on the Hungarians who served in the Austro-Hungarian foreign service, either in the Vienna ministry or abroad. She argues that because the common foreign minister functioned as a sort of “common prime minister” and had to justify his budgetary requests before both delegations, he recruited more Hungarians after 1867. The Hungarians were valued for their insider knowledge of Hungarian politics but were not considered representatives of Hungarian interests. Still, Somogyi takes issue with the frequently echoed view of diplomat-memoirist Alexander von Musulin (Munich, 1924) that Austro-Hungarian diplomats were internationalists. The Hungarian diplomats were generally at home in both German and Hungarian culture but leaned toward the latter. Many wrote and published books in Hungarian (Kállay was an historian of the Serbs, and Dóczy wrote plays) and preferred to send their children to Hungarian schools. The analysis of these individuals reveals considerable variety in social origin and the ministry's growing emphasis on professionalism but indicates some breakdown in the diplomats' national neutrality in later years. Foreign Ministers Gustav von Kálnoky and Leopold von Berchtold were special cases. Despite the Hungarian familial origins of the former and Hungarian estates of the latter, their primary affiliation was Cisleithanian. He argues in conclusion that the “the dividedness of the political elite … conserved the traditional uncertainty of [the diplomats'] national consciousness” (206). Their activity as writers provided an outlet for their complex identity.

Gerald Volkmer's work is a very detailed exposition of diplomatic correspondence—between Vienna and Budapest on the one hand and Bucharest on the other—concerning the Romanian minority question in Transylvania and its impact on bilateral relations. He begins with an exemplary review of the Austrian-German and Romanian historiography on the topic but unfortunately neglects the admittedly less extensive American and Hungarian contributions to the historiography. For example, Volkmer notes the work of Keith Hitchins but not Richard Frucht's study on the Romanian Danube (Boulder/New York, 1982). Some of the Hungarian scholarship, including that of Somogyi and her husband, diplomatic historian Emil Palotás, are included in the extensive notes and bibliography. The documentation for this study derives from quite numerous Austro-Hungarian and Romanian source publications and extensive use of the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv (Politisches Archiv and Gesandtschafts- und Konsulatsarchiv) in Vienna as well as the Historical Archives in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Royal House archives in the National Archives in Bucharest. Much of this correspondence has been well known to historians, but Volkmer examines it in unprecedented detail and in the context of the evolution of domestic politics in Hungary and Romania. He demonstrates excellent facility in Romanian (though not Hungarian), bringing much of the Romanian discourse into the Western-language historiography for the first time. A novel element in his documentation are the reports of the Romanian consuls in Budapest—directed to their ministers in Bucharest, not to their ambassadors—which suggest more daylight existed between the Hungarian government and the Foreign Ministry than the Romanian ambassadors in Vienna perceived.

The detailed recounting and analysis of diplomatic correspondence makes this book difficult to follow at times. The reader must recall, and is often reminded of, the contingency of the events and the alternatives that the correspondents were describing. Fortunately, the author concludes each major section with a summary that traces the major trends and conclusions of the period under examination. He argues that Hungary influenced the formulation of Austro-Hungarian foreign policy through its governments, not the attitudes of Hungarian diplomats. Volkmer draws on Somogyi's general characterization of the monarchy's central institutions and policy formation, but he details in extenso the diplomats' professionalism and the multilateral origins of policy. The Transylvanian question came to dominate bilateral relations over time. Romania's perception of the value of the secret alliance with Austria-Hungary for its security vis-à-vis Bulgaria and Russia declined as the almost constant national agitation, and the changing situation in the Balkans undermined support for the alliance even on the part of the Hohenzollern king of Romania.

If the foil for Somogyi's biographical studies is the work of Alexander von Musulin, for Volkmer's book it is the recent study, Relatiile româno-austro-ungare, 1875–1900 (Bucharest, 2002), by the Romanian historian and now Director of the National Archives, Corneliu Mihail Lungu. Volkmer praises Lungu's publication of additional primary sources but deplores Lungu's “inadequate critical distance from the subject matter” (12) and presumption of Romanian rectitude. Volkmer aspires to a more neutral stance. He asserts that national elites “failed to mobilize the majority of the [Transylvanian] population for its struggle for national independence” (49) and they remained largely kaisertreu till the turn of the century. He describes disapprovingly the Bucharest politicians' practice of loudly demanding justice for the Romanians of Hungary while in opposition but then taking a more accommodating position toward Austria-Hungary once in power. The most striking instance of this behavior is the liberal politician Dimitrie Alexandru Sturdza who participated in the creation of the alliance with Austria-Hungary in 1883, helped build up the Liga culturală in Bucharest as a champion of the Transylvanian Romanians while out of power, then as prime minister after 1895 proceeded to reduce its funding and influence.

Volkmer follows his professor Winfried Baumgart in exhibiting a strong interest in the international legal framework for diplomacy: embassies and diplomatic representations, ambassadors and representatives, consulates, treaties, official correspondence often copied for governmental use, circulars intended for distribution to the embassies, and private notes from the embassy heads to foreign ministers. The role of individual officials receives special attention. This institutional focus is one commonality with Somogyi, and another is that, like her, Volkmer is interested in the biographies of individual diplomats. He characterizes them at length at their first mention and inserts informative biographical notes on even minor figures.

Both books uphold high standards in the presentation of names and citations in multiple languages with only occasional typographical and linguistic errors. Laudably, both present the extremely informative documentation in the form of footnotes, and Volkmer also provides a remarkable bibliography and convenient index of names (though not subjects) at the end. Historians of the Habsburg foreign service and diplomatic relations should take note of both these important works.