Rare is the book that helps to shift the paradigm upon which an entire field rests. Such a book is Pieter Judson's The Habsburg Empire: A New History. Building on insights and critical approaches that have been emerging and developing for the last twenty to thirty years, Judson offers a fresh framework—a new scaffolding for interpreting the Austrian Habsburg monarchy, especially since the early eighteenth century.

Much earlier historiography on the Habsburg Empire emphasized its supposed weaknesses, e.g., its economic backwardness vis-à-vis other more “modern” European states such as Germany, France, and Great Britain. According to this view, the empire had a difficult time maintaining and asserting itself as it struggled to cope with myriad internal problems and, in the nineteenth century in particular, growing ethnic conflicts, which ultimately tore the old state apart. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that this older view of the Austrian Habsburg Empire painted it as a teetering, tottering giant that met its inevitable collapse during and after World War I.

Judson's Austrian Empire, on the other hand, is a dynamic state that often adroitly managed its far-flung lands. It could and did help introduce measures that increased economic growth and infrastructure to many parts of Central Europe, for example. It also could be progressive in its educational policies and provide platforms for its citizens to identify with both their local cultures and the empire itself. According to Judson, the empire could be and was, in fact, a site of personal and political allegiance and even loyalty for much of the modern period. In turn, people throughout the empire expected it to help protect and guide them through numerous local and regional conflicts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Judson demonstrates in numerous contexts, Austrian citizens could be quite adept at both acknowledging the power and legitimacy of the empire and working it for their own political, cultural, and social gains.

Given that Judson has achieved a paradigmatic shift in the study of the Austrian Habsburg Empire, it is important to understand why the shift is so critical, what new areas of research his conclusions might open up, and why the book is significant not just for readers of Central European History but also for anyone interested in modern Europe studies. The shift Judson has so clearly laid out was a long time in coming and must now supplant older paradigms and historical assumptions. The mostly negative view of the Austrian Empire, as Judson himself so ably points out in the last chapter of his book, was, in many ways, a byproduct of World War I and the interwar period. The newly formed or expanded states of Central and Eastern Europe, which supposedly were formed on the basis of ethnic identity, claimed—or felt they had to claim—that they were new, democratic states that had thrown off the yoke of the repressive and backward Austrian Empire. Indeed, there was evidence for a narrative of nationalistic struggle against the empire, as Czechs, Hungarians, Slovenes, Croats, and many other ethnic groups built their own histories of how they, in their view, had painstakingly and often heroically emerged from the old behemoth that had not heard or addressed their many political or cultural claims. Of course, this historiography overemphasized the negative aspects of the Austrian Empire and often glossed over the many problems of the emerging states in the interwar period. A clear example of this type of historical claim came with the issue of “democracy.” The new states, generally speaking, made a direct association between their nationalistic foundations and the supposed introduction of democratic practices. In turn, the Austrian Empire had to be cast per se in the role of an anti-democratic state. This historiographical paradigm—the one Judson is combatting in his New History—left little room to view the positive political and cultural developments of the old regime on their own merits.

The historiographical situation did not improve much after World War II. Even as much work was being done on the internal structures of the empire and much was being learned about diplomacy, bureaucracy, the military, and cultural practices, a new and fresh interpretation of the Habsburg monarchy did not emerge. Much of the work of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s on the empire, while exhibiting the highest professional standards and providing a wealth of information, had the feel of reaching back across a historical abyss to study a place that was quite distant and distinct from the modern world. Judson does not explicitly discuss the post–World War II historiography—or, at least, he does not treat it as systematically as he does the interwar work. But the largely problematic frameworks for interpreting the Austrian Empire stayed mostly in place for several decades after World War II. In many respects, this was hardly surprising: much of the former empire had become part of the Soviet bloc, which pressed a neo-Marxist model of historical research. Moreover, the rump state of Austria now had to recover from the debacle of the Nazi period, in addition to dealing with all the residual problems of the interwar period. Indeed, the very question of Austrian identity and the country's place in the world was up for interpretation in the post-1945 period. One could well understand the scholarly temptation to retreat into the history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, even if much of the work seemed disconnected from modern or contemporary concerns. Judson's work strikes out in a new, revisionist direction by emphasizing the strengths and possibilities of the Austrian empire and reconnecting them to modern historiographical debates. He does so while still maintaining a critical attitude toward his subject matter and basing his work on first-class and nuanced scholarship. While reinterpreting the Austrian Empire, Judson does not romanticize it or attempt to gloss over its shortcomings.

As with any dramatic shift in analysis, Judson did not get to his New History alone. And now that he has provided the paradigm for a new approach to the Habsburg Empire, it is clear that this historiographical revolution was a long time in coming. In the introduction to his book, Judson notes how scholars such as David Good, Gary Cohen, and John Boyer, in fields such as economic development, educational practices, and urban politics, have, for several decades, been pointing the direction toward a more positive, nuanced, and synthetic interpretation of the Austrian Empire. In this regard, he also notes the influential and important work of several Austrian scholars, such as Gerald Stourzh, Emil Brix, Hannelore Burger, and Maria Kurz. One would hasten to add the newer work by a generation of young scholars, such as Tara Zahra, Daniel Unowsky, and Alison Frank Johnson. Judson's book helps throw into sharper relief the importance of a wide range of critical inquiries into the history of the Austrian Empire conducted by other scholars.

Judson's work also clearly has implications for current historiographical discussions and debates well beyond the study of the Austrian Empire. For example, by insisting that the Habsburg monarchy could be and often was modern and progressive in fashioning economic and educational policies, Judson argues that it is possible and legitimate for scholars to compare these aspects of the empire to similar developments in such places as Germany, France, and Great Britain. Far from being left behind, the Austrian monarchy, in Judson's view, was a place that can and should be analyzed alongside the nation-states that usually dominate the discussion of the modern European landscape. This is a fresh and bold perspective to bring to the table and needs to be taken seriously by scholars working beyond Central European history. Our master historical narrative of Europe should not dismiss the Habsburg Empire cavalierly, as has often been done in the past as the supposedly more modern and dynamic states of Europe came to dominate the continent. (Nowhere is this temptation greater than in the contrast between “backward” Austria and “dynamic” Germany in the late nineteenth century.)

At the same time, Judson's book opens up a whole host of lines of inquiry into specifically Austrian or Habsburg topics. As he emphasizes several times, he is trying to present an argument and therefore he must keep his focus on his main line of presentation: the centrality and importance of the evolving empire as it affected and interacted with its diverse populations in various areas of public life, such as economics, education, policy decisions, associational life, and party formations, to name only some of his chief areas of inquiry. Such an approach means that not all parts of the story can include all parts of the empire simultaneously. Otherwise, Judson would have had to write an encyclopedia or multivolume work to ensure that all areas of the empire received equal treatment, but the book would have broken down under its own weight and his central argument would have been lost. Nevertheless, Judson's work allows readers to contemplate many new possibilities for investigations of the Habsburg Empire. Here are two specific suggestions for more research. First, a more positive and balanced interpretation of the empire, as Judson has provided, allows us to return to an old issue of Austrian imperial historiography with fresh eyes: the role of religion. Much older work on religion in the Habsburg lands focused on notions of increasing secularism or the struggles between official, state-sponsored Catholicism, on the one hand, and Protestant and Jewish communities, on the other. Using Judson's approach, however, it would be important to investigate further the degree to which religion was or could have been used as part of imperial ideology: both to create more internal cohesiveness and loyalty, and sometimes as a tool to navigate the religious differences among various Austrian populations in order to create coherent imperial policy. Second, the study of empires such as Germany, France, and Great Britain has frequently emphasized the degree to which identifying an enemy, a rival, or a foreign state could help forge imperial identity.Footnote ¹ With Judson's more dynamic Austrian Habsburg Empire in place, one might examine more systematically the ways in which anti-Prussian or anti-French sentiment flowed in and around the making of imperial identity in the modern period.

There is thus much room for the next generation of Habsburg scholars to explore in pursuit of testing Judson's conclusions and assertions about how the empire functioned and its citizens viewed and operated within it in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. He has done heroic work in this volume, but, as with any major synthetic and revisionist history, more can be done, of course—and Judson's claims, which will become the new standard of interpretation of the Habsburg Empire, can and will be supplemented, challenged, criticized, and revised in turn. That is the way good, healthy historiographical debates work, and that is the way in which Pieter Judson has written his magnum opus.

Pieter Judson has produced a fresh, insightful, synthetic history of the Habsburg monarchy from the late eighteenth century to 1918. It is a much needed book. Over the last thirty-five years, scholars in North America and the United Kingdom, as well as some in Austria and Germany, have produced a body of new research that not only puts forward a dynamic vision of Habsburg state development after the eighteenth century, but also challenges the methodological nationalism of most of the older historiography, which assumed that the nations or nationalities of the monarchy had existed as distinct ethnic groups before the emergence of modern nationalist politics.Footnote ² The recent research points to the work of nationalist activists in articulating modern national loyalties and cultivating national group solidarities. Up to now, however, the most readily available survey histories in German, English, French, or East-Central European languages have generally incorporated little of this new scholarship. Most have drawn on a long-established master narrative of belated and deficient modern political, social, and economic transformation and the rise of centrifugal nationalist forces, which caused an inexorable decline of the imperial polity after the 1860s and, ultimately, its collapse at the end of World War I.

Nationalist politicians and journalists from both within and outside the monarchy initially articulated the narrative of “deficit and decline” for the Habsburg monarchy before 1914. Scholars in the successor states produced fuller historical accounts during the 1920s and 1930s to justify the new states’ claims to independence or, in the Austrian Republic, to explain away the trauma of the monarchy's collapse. In our time, the nationalist historical vision that is widespread in Central and East-Central Europe has continued to make the narrative of the imperial polity's failings and its decline useful and, for many, indispensable. In the English-speaking world, R. W. Seton-Watson and Henry Wickham Steed began before 1918 to articulate similar views, and, in 1948, A. J. P. Taylor published what was perhaps the most rhetorically brilliant version of this narrative in any language.Footnote ³ For him the Habsburg monarchy had been trapped in the form of an early modern, absolutist, dynastic state that could not accommodate democratizing pressures and the rise of nationalist politics. The result was repeated political crises during the late nineteenth century and the frequent resort to bureaucratic impositions.

By contrast, Judson portrays a dynamic state that repeatedly took productive measures to modernize its institutions and functions. Most conventional survey histories of the monarchy offer description with little advanced analysis, and are bereft of social-science conceptualization. Judson's book benefits from the use of basic concepts of governmental and political development. His account emphasizes waves of innovation in governmental structures and policies, which, by the late nineteenth century, gave the monarchy multilayered administrative systems, elaborate frameworks of law and citizens’ rights, well-articulated structures of civil society, modern educational and social services, as well as advanced economic development. This suggests much more successful state-building in the Habsburg polity after 1780 than many earlier historians have allowed.

Judson departs further from the conventional master narrative when he argues for modern governmental institutions developing symbiotically with advancing ideas and practices of citizenship and civil society. He takes up an argument made in recent decades by a number of North American and West European historians: that the Habsburg state and the nationalist movements, whatever their frictions, were, in many ways, mutually constitutive.Footnote ⁴ Judson does not simply adopt the revisionist arguments about the development of governmental institutions and policies and the construction of nationalist loyalties, but instead pushes them further. He depicts how state institutions, administrative practices, and cultural programs “helped to shape local society” and, reciprocally, how local societies and local leaders “engaged with the Habsburg dynasty's efforts to build a unified and unifying imperial state” (4). Judson points to how local and regional political leaders, including most late nineteenth-century nationalists, worked within the state's institutions and laws, used them to some advantage, and maintained a basic loyalty to the state. This account takes seriously indeed the observation offered in 1902 by the Social Democratic leader and later president of the Austrian Republic, Karl Renner, that most nationalist activists engaged in a struggle for the Habsburg state, not against it.Footnote ⁵

Rejecting the master narrative of deficit and decline, Judson has boldly conceived his revisionist account. He offers a portrait of state leaders who were willing, through much of the period between 1780 and 1914, to innovate to meet the needs of government and society. He stresses that the citizenry participated in this process and looked to the state to meet their aspirations for justice, education, welfare, and some influence over policy-making. They expressed over and over again a basic loyalty to the Habsburg state and their sense of investment in it and its services, at least until the late years of World War I.

Judson's book is bold in yet another way. The revisionist scholarship of the last thirty-five years has challenged many elements of the old narrative, but significant gaps remain in the treatments of the developing government institutions and policies, civil society, and the changing relationship of government to the citizenry. Often, Judson must rely on telling examples of the creativity of government officials and politicians in changing institutions and policies in response to new conditions, and then extrapolate this to other areas of government and public life, for which the general results—but not all the contributing processes—are known. His eloquent insights extend the specific findings of the recent scholarship to draw out broader implications for the relationships between the state and citizens. This will surely stimulate debate and further research.

Though the discussion of evolving governmental and legal structures and political events dominates Judson's book, it also offers much insight about changing social and economic structures, civic values, and popular culture. The major developments in politics and state institutions are mostly familiar, and Judson admits that he generally follows a conventional periodization. This is particularly apparent in the treatment of the period from the 1780s to the 1830s. Judson finds new significance in the initiatives of this era, though, emphasizing the state's efforts to engage with various parts of society and the reciprocal actions coming from society. He makes much, for instance, of the many local celebrations that marked the return of Emperor Francis to Vienna after the defeat of Napoleon and of the engagement of middle-class civil society in those celebrations. For the era after 1815, Judson emphasizes the efforts of local noblemen and middle-class figures to follow through on the visions for change advocated by Joseph II and Leopold II, even when the government was more interested in control and stability. Judson's arguments for the mutually reinforcing efforts of the state and citizens to advance state-building are generally persuasive, but a greater discussion of the values and goals of the social actors, particularly for the decades before 1840, would have been beneficial.

The book's focus broadens when treating the period after the late 1830s. The narrative takes up the evolving nexus of state, citizenry, civil society, and changing social and economic structures, as the early modern corporate relations eroded. The rise of nationalist politics is integral to the narrative, but Judson portrays the nationalist movements as dependent factors that were contingent on broader political, social, and cultural developments. This follows the recent revisionist historical scholarship and the work of theoreticians such as Ernest Gellner, Rogers Brubaker, and Frederick Cooper.Footnote ⁶ As part of developing civil society, nationalist activists carried out the work of cultivating national loyalties and forming and disciplining national solidarities. Judson notes that those efforts were not universally successful across the monarchy's population, and, as late as the early twentieth century, the loyalties of some individuals were still ambiguous, mutable, or indifferent. In this regard, one has to wonder how this book will be received by Central European scholars who have been imbued with nationalist historiography and thus tend to see constructivist accounts of identification as challenges to the strength and authenticity of the national identity.Footnote ⁷

Overall, Judson presents the development of government and political life between 1800 and the 1890s as a series of interactions between state and society. For the period from the Napoleonic wars to the early 1840s, when the imperial government offered few policy innovations, he focuses on pressures and initiatives coming from society. The growing crisis of the 1840s stemmed from the rising confrontation between state leaders and elements of civil society that had expected the principles of freedom, civil equality, and uniform laws and administration—which the state itself had already adumbrated before the Napoleonic wars—to make progress. The book delineates with some clarity the role of the nobility in developing the Polish and Hungarian nationalist causes before 1848; the work of the middle-class and lower-middle-class Czech nationalist pioneers and of the Ruthenian and Romanian nationalist activists in villages and small towns comes across less clearly. Judson takes pains to keep the various nationalist causes in perspective and reminds us that, in most crown lands, nationalist leaders in 1848–1849 did not speak for anything resembling broad popular movements. If he had drawn more from the work on the role of regime decay in triggering nineteenth- and early twentieth-century revolutions (by scholars such as John R. Gillis and Theda Skocpol), he might have explained more clearly the breakdown of Habsburg state authority in 1848.Footnote ⁸

New leaders responded after 1848 to the challenges and opportunities of economic and social change by returning to dynamism and innovation. Judson captures well the contradictory character of the government and its major policies in the 1850s, when Emperor Francis Joseph and his ministers used absolutist methods to revive the state as an engine for change in law, education, the economy, and culture. Judson notes the important shift in the discourse of governmental and social leaders from treating the monarchy as a union of historically distinct crown lands and regions to a “collection of ethnically different peoples” (240–41).

Many survey histories of the Habsburg monarchy have come to grief in their treatment of how constitutional government developed after the early 1860s, detailing successive administrative and policy initiatives and the changing array of political and social forces. Judson, who has done important original research on this era, offers here a lucid, masterful discussion of the major structural changes in government and politics, as well as the concurrent changes in everyday life and popular culture—without burdening the reader with a chronicle of successive Austrian and Hungarian ministries and party leaders. He emphasizes what was a “cultural turn” (269–70) in politics and government policy, which the state facilitated by encouraging the social and cultural development of the constituent nations after the 1860s. Yet, as national loyalties strengthened, they coexisted with commonalities based on citizens participating in larger economic networks, attending public schools, being subject to the Austrian or Hungarian administrative and legal systems, and serving in the Austro-Hungarian army.

After 1867 the distinct Austrian and Hungarian states each provided space for the development of civil society and political action by citizens. The autonomy of the urban and village communes and the crown-land diets in the Austrian half of the monarchy contributed much to this. Because of the lack of recent studies of crown-land administration comparable to the literature on the communes, Judson captures more persuasively the work and impact of the communes than that of the crown-land diets. State administration followed a different path in Hungary, with the determination of the Magyar political elites to create a nation-state and to preserve their own power with a strongly centralized governmental structure. Judson deals well with Hungary's different course in the early decades of the constitutional era, though he offers less material on Hungarian developments later on, especially with regard to how government administration evolved under the control of the central authorities and to the changing relations of governmental bodies to developing civil society.

Older survey histories focused on the repeated political crises in Austria and Hungary after the mid-1890s to demonstrate the deepening nationality conflicts, the radicalizing effects of mass politics, and the growing desperation of top state and party leaders. That master narrative prepared readers for the decision for war in 1914 as a sort of last gamble to surmount foreign and domestic challenges. Exhaustion of the military, state, and society after four years of war then led to the collapse of the monarchy and the victory of dissident nationalists in 1918. Judson, by contrast, follows the recent scholarship to show that, amid the domestic and foreign crises after the mid-1890s, state leaders and the bureaucracy made significant efforts to deal with the changing political forces in society and concede to some of their demands, and to initiate new public services to meet social needs. The expansion of parliamentary suffrage in Austria, the creation of new public services in Austria and Hungary, and the compromises on national rights and interests worked out for Moravia, Galicia, Bukovina, and the city of Budweis/Budějovice all demonstrated the state's continuing vitality and its ability to engage productively with political parties and social interests. In fairness, one must note that this interpretation works better for the Austrian half of the monarchy than it does for Hungary, where the political system and the ruling elites were much more resistant to structural changes and to concessions to popular elements. Yet, there, too, one can point to the state's slowly growing engagement with broader social interests. Future monographic research on civil society in Hungary—to complement the existing work on Austria—will help fill out a new narrative for Hungary after 1900.

The final chapter and the epilogue on World War I and its aftermath best fulfill the promise of Judson's project. Benefiting from excellent recent monographic studies, he weaves a vivid account of the vicissitudes of soldiers and civilians, the harsh military dictatorship, the persecution of Czechs and South Slavs for presumed disloyalty, economic breakdowns and growing food shortages, and, finally, the exhaustion of state and society in 1918. Judson reminds us, though, that the state, army, and society held together, at least through the first two years of the war. No other survey history of the monarchy matches the nuanced but clear and succinct treatment here of internal and external developments during the war years.

The new states that emerged out of the dissolution of the old empire at the end of the war inherited the monarchy's administrative systems, its law codes, and the structures of civil society, along with its industry, commerce, and transportation networks. Judson emphasizes that Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania were themselves multinational polities. Over the next two decades, as he points out, they often acted as new empires themselves, upholding inequalities among their constituent nationalities.

Whether or not readers agree with all of Judson's arguments, most will welcome the fresh thinking that he offers. In a historiographical article from 2014 on the treatment of the Habsburg monarchy in studies of World War I, John Deak lamented the often outmoded understandings of state and society in Austria-Hungary. Even some of the best recent studies of the war overlook research from the last thirty-five years on how the state developed between the 1860s and 1918. Deak argues that, as historians rethink the Great War, more serious attention to the new research on the Habsburg polity will lead to conversations that “can put the Habsburg Empire back into a meaningful role in modern European history—a place it has not occupied since the collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918.”Footnote ⁹ Scholars and general readers interested in gaining a new understanding of the place of the Habsburg Monarchy in the development of nineteenth-century Europe and of its general experience in World War I can do no better at this time than to read Pieter Judson's wonderful book.

Since at least the publication in 1978 of Edward Said's Orientalism, scholars have found it difficult to characterize the concept of empire as a positive force in the development of modern history.Footnote ¹⁰ In short, empire has become a dirty word. Cultural studies from the 1970s and 1980s nearly uniformly condemn the activities of the continent's major empires, often rightly, as the instigators of globally enacted institutionalized oppression, exploitation, and inefficiency. The term empire has become shorthand for a harmful political framework. More recent scholarship has nuanced this view and found ways to understand empire through a paradigm of negotiation—of give-and-take between rulers and subjects, which brought about profound change in each. Despite this scholarly shift, empire continues to take on a negative cast all too easily, not least since 1983, when Ronald Reagan memorably referred to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” The words flow together almost too well.

In The Habsburg Empire: A New History, Pieter M. Judson offers a new perspective on the role of empire in shaping Central Europe since the eighteenth century, and, in doing so, he offers a new narrative of the region's history. But, in making this argument, Judson also demonstrates how the concept of empire might be reenvisioned. Rather than view the Habsburg Empire as a historical anachronism—as an elephantine political system burdened with inefficiency and governing a hopelessly fragmented realm—Judson argues that the concept of empire carried value, often highly positive value, for Habsburg subjects right through to its final days. A central component of his thesis is that empire itself was a constantly shifting abstraction in addition to a political reality. It was an ideal evoked in different ways at different times to characterize diverse political principles. Judson's book recasts the Habsburg Empire as a constantly mutating entity—one in which the empire's relevance was continually rethought. It also offers an alternative to nation-based narratives of Habsburg history, while revealing anew the challenges involved in characterizing straightforwardly the empire's influence on this region.

Judson frames his book explicitly as a counterpoint to the nation-based narratives that have predominated in Central European studies. These typically are framed around the concept of an authentic national character—Czech, Hungarian, Polish, etc.—striving to express itself in the face of imperial forces imposed on it from afar. Rather than emphasize disparities among the different cultures of Habsburg Europe, Judson instead offers “an approach to imperial history from the point of view of shared institutions, practices, and cultures,” conceiving of empire as an “alternative source of symbolic and real power” (3–4) to the region's peoples. In pursuing this idea, Judson stresses the commonalities among the empire's societies, but, in doing so, he does not iron over the very real differences between, say, Trieste and Lviv. Rather, his book sustains two historical narratives simultaneously. One concerns the ways in which the imperial administration in Vienna sought to centralize its governance—to create and maintain a unified imperial state with consistent administrative practices across its territories. The motivations for this, as well as the precise forms it took, changed much over three hundred years, but their existence alone supports Judson's claim, as does the sustained energy and resources invested in realizing administrative standardization.

The second narrative concerns the ways that local communities engaged the imperial ideal both as myth and as political reality. Judson emphasizes that local and regional identities were often not created in opposition to the imperial ideal, but through recourse to it. In multiple examples, Judson demonstrates how institutions mentioned or referred to imperial concepts to justify their activities, drawing upon the empire's qualities to call forth a cherished symbolic authority. Judson thereby works against the commonplace idea that the empire's national identities were discrete, fixed, and “natural.” He states this most directly when he claims to understand “political nationalism in the Habsburg Empire as a product of imperial structures and regional traditions, not as sui generis expressions of transhistorical ethnic groups the way that nineteenth-century activists argued” (9). The picture he produces is one of national, regional, and imperial identities in a constant state of mutual redefinition, informing each other in complex ways, with empire as one factor involved in characterizing the whole. This framework goes a long way toward explaining why empire remained a productive idea, as well as an at least nominally viable political structure, for so long.

The book is arranged as a series of chronological investigations beginning with the Habsburg dynasty's origins in medieval Switzerland, but concentrating on the period beginning with the reign of Maria Theresa (1740–1780). In the eighteenth century, the Habsburgs developed a model of common imperial citizenship that implicitly promised legal equality to its subjects, even though the definition of subject and the reach of imperial citizenship were hardly universal. This created a belief—a kind of origin myth—that there were benefits to be had from a shared imperial framework, and this realization undergirds Judson's entire discussion. Judson also dissects, at multiple points, the supposition that the Habsburg Empire was somehow fundamentally more diverse, and therefore more fragmented, than other major European powers. He rightly points out, for example, that in the 1770s, no European state was centralized, compact, or unified. The different regions of Britain had different legal systems and Ireland a separate parliament. One might add that the cultural unification of France lagged behind its Renaissance-era monarchical centralization, and that regionalism played a role in fostering the class-based uprisings there in 1848. Judson attempts a more nuanced approach to European nationalism—one that recognizes nationalism's importance without giving it primary significance as the driver of historical change. Judson notes repeatedly that nationalist movements often did little to change daily life in the empire, at least in visible, obvious ways. And its political structure enabled the Habsburg Empire to pioneer new ideas about nationhood and new practices for governance—in other words, to be an incubator for new forms of political subjectivity.

The book further offers considerable insight into how the concept of nation itself changed over time. In the eighteenth century, it was more the idea of an elite community with privileged political rights, but, even then, that idea coexisted with a broader one in which nation referred to a generalized sense of related peoples. In the nineteenth century, the concept shifted, and the question of what bound a nation's members together was posed in diverse ways. One belief, prevalent in much Central European discourse, was that nation was rooted in the empire's different crownlands, with Bohemia and Hungary, for example, each defining distinct national spheres. That idea came to coexist with the nineteenth-century idea of linguistic nationalism. In nearly all cases, empire was redefined simultaneously with the redefinition of nation. Empire could connote a fatherland. It could refer to an ethnic formulation, with the region's German-speaking peoples serving as the protectors of the imperial ideal and as the putative unifiers of the region's many societies. It could also become a purely political concept—one exclusively associated with administrative structures. Judson successfully demonstrates how political ideology could be both difficult to define and yet very real in its effects on cultural identity.

As an art historian, I come to Judson's text with a somewhat different perspective on these questions—one in which the role of culture in shaping history prevails. I find that the view of empire that Judson espouses correlates well with the procedures of meaning-making that interest art historians. It is now commonplace to argue that a work of art's meanings are not fixed, that they are relational and shifting. The idea that nation and empire could likewise coexist as ever-changing political embodiments marries well with the intellectual frameworks an art historian might bring to this book. My one misgiving is that the book could have engaged more consistently the world of symbolism, of representations or materializations of the imperial ideal, in order to bolster its arguments. Judson has quite a bit to say about visual and material culture in the book's later chapters, for example, where he notes that, despite the burgeoning sense of nationalism in the empire's states, the nineteenth-century project of architectural and landscape modification that took place across the empire resulted in a surprising degree of architectural consistency. Far-flung capital cities adopted a neo-baroque architectural style for their public buildings and, even more striking, often painted them Schönbrunn yellow. That is an interesting moment in which historical conditions and cultural expression seem to have been at cross purposes to each other. Similar examples could be spotted in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Habsburg culture, but there Judson's engagement of the arts is more fleeting.

Judson's book will certainly give its readers much to ponder. Whether it will successfully change the narrative of a nation-based history that it tackles is another question. As a final point, I would like to draw attention to the institutional conditions in which historians (and art historians) conduct academic work. The fixed nationalist perspective against which this book argues—successfully, in my opinion—is, in part, the product of a late nineteenth-century academic project to create national histories for Europe's constituent states, something Judson discusses. That historical moment is also the one in which fundamental, discipline-based, ideological structures were born. Today we are in many ways the inheritors of intellectual frameworks formulated at that time. Most of the nations that comprised the Habsburg Empire have university systems whose departments are committed precisely to writing national histories and to defining the contours of a national culture, which can play out in everything from formulating academic missions to prioritizing research for funding. My suspicion is that some Central European scholars will be reluctant to adopt Judson's framework, since doing so would mean tampering with the notion of nation that undergirds their entire academic system. But that would be their loss. Judson's perspective has allowed him to see new alternatives for writing the region's history, and in doing so, he has perhaps helped his readers understand why empire has remained relevant for so long.

The stakes seemed high to Oskar Jaszi when he sat down to write his “new history” of the Habsburg Empire in 1929. The Habsburg Empire represented a monumental experiment. It was, he argued, an effort to “build up a kind of universal state, a ‘supranational’ monarchy, and fill it with the feeling of a common solidarity.” Had this experiment succeeded, “It would have meant more … than all other efforts of state-building ever recorded.” It would have “proved to the world that it is possible to replace the consciousness of national unity by a consciousness of a state community.”

We know how Jaszi's history ends, of course. The experiment “proved unsuccessful,” he laments, as the “centripetal forces of a supranational consciousness were more and more disintegrated by the centrifugal forces of national particularisms.” But this was only page three: it remained to assess whether the empire's ultimate demise was an organic inevitability, or the “consequence of factors depending on will and insight which could have been avoided.” The answer to this question would determine no less than the future of Europe. “The saving of that Continent, destroyed by the unbridled forces of nationalism, depends on whether or not we are compelled to accept national antagonisms as final necessities,” he argued.

Eighty-seven years later, what Jaszi called one of “the most fundamental problems of present Europe” is yet to be resolved: that of uniting “national individualities of very divergent ideals and traditions in such a way that each of them can continue its own particular life, while at the same time limiting its national sovereignty enough to make a peaceful and effective international cooperation possible.”Footnote ¹¹

Jaszi might well recognize the Europe of the Brexit, of Viktor Orbán, and of refugee camps and barbed wire fences. But he might not recognize Pieter Judson's Habsburg Empire, in which a “feeling of solidarity” and loyalty toward the supranational state persisted into the final years of World War I. Judson does not claim to have saved Europe with his new history of the Habsburg Empire. But he may finally save the Habsburg Empire from its outdated reputation as a failed political experiment. Even the empire's collapse was not absolute, in Judson's account: imperial institutions and practices lived on in the “little Empires” that replaced the Dual Monarchy in 1918, Judson argues, “given the way they administered their populations, legitimated themselves, and conceptualized cultural difference” (388).

Judson's monumental work is based on several decades of creative scholarship that challenge the “decline and fall” paradigm. This paradigm, Judson reminds us, was itself partly a creation of those who had the most to lose from the social and political transformations that reshaped the Habsburg Empire around the turn of the twentieth century. It is hardly surprising that aristocrats and other elites lamented the rise of mass politics and mass society, which posed serious social challenges to their own authority. “We historians can examine the state of the empire critically without endorsing the rump perspective of an increasingly anachronistic elite as the most apt or even the only way to understand this period,” Judson insists (384).

After 1918, the fatalism of these depressed aristocrats was ironically reinforced by their own nationalist enemies. Interwar nationalists legitimated their new states by defining them in opposition to the evil qualities of the empire (even as they adapted and perpetuated imperial institutions, practices, and laws): “The empires’ multinational character, their so-called authoritarian center-periphery structural relations, their alleged failure to develop a popular shared identity, their supposed suppression of nationalist feeling—all of these are nationalist definitions of the characteristics of empires,” Judson reminds us (451).

By extension, Judson's Habsburg Empire suggests that scholars might want to rethink the very category of “empire.” Jane Burbank and Fred Cooper, for example, have defined empires as “polities that maintain distinction and hierarchy.” While the nation-state “proclaims the commonality of its people … the concept of empire presumes that different peoples within the polity will be governed differently.”Footnote ¹² Judson's Habsburg Empire fits uneasily into this model. Increasingly, he argues, imperial institutions did recognize difference, but simultaneously insisted on the legal equality of citizens.

If the everyday reality sometimes fell short of legal promises, this was no less the case in nation-states like France or Germany (or in the Habsburg successor states), which officially declared the equality of co-nationals but tacitly or officially perpetuated hierarchies based on gender, race, or religion. One could argue that the Habsburg Empire was not an empire at all (at least according to Burbank and Cooper's definition). But I think it is more productive to recognize, as Judson does, that the way we define empires in opposition to nation-states is itself a product of anti-imperial nationalism.

The point of this exercise (and of Judson's book) is not to rehabilitate or romanticize the Habsburg Empire as a multinational paradise (an accusation often made against revisionists). It is rather to recognize the extent to which the binary between empire and nation-state is itself a historical artifact. Looking closely at the history of nationalism within the Habsburg Empire reveals a very different relationship, Judson argues—one in which nation and empire were mutually constructed categories that “depended on each other for their coherence” (8).

The great achievement of Judson's New History is not simply to counter the old view of the monarchy as “anachronistic and anarchic,” however. This is much more than a history by negation. Judson advances a powerful and provocative argument for the success of the Austrian ideal of “unity and diversity” by focusing, for once, as much on unity as on diversity, and on forms of diversity other than nationality and language. He transforms the empire of flying inkwells into an empire of engaged and loyal citizens, bound by common institutions and, increasingly, by an ideal of “imperial citizenship” rooted in equality before the law. Rather than rejecting “empire,” Judson makes it the central category of the book, demonstrating that modern empires could be just as adept as nation-states at using new technologies (railroads, telegraphs), print culture, shared institutions, and mass politics to forge imagined communities.

Judson finds manifestations of imperial loyalties and engaged citizens in all corners of the empire, and in many different kinds of sources. He makes a genuine attempt to give serious attention to both Hungary and Austria, and to provincial villages as well as imperial capitals. From the Carpathians to the Adriatic, for example, festivals commemorated Emperor Francis's return at the end of the Napoleonic wars, lighting up villages in celebrations that relied on shared imperial rituals and slogans. Judson traces the evolution of imperial citizenship across multiple regimes and revolutions, as it expanded to include peasants, workers, and women. He often finds surprising evidence of creative reform and political activity in periods typically characterized as repressive or politically stagnant (such as the Metternich era or the 1850s). In the process, he not only challenges the binary between nation and empire, but also disrupts oppositions between absolutism and liberalism and between liberalism and nationalism that often frame histories of nineteenth-century Europe.

This is not coincidental, as The Habsburg Empire consistently places the monarchy in a European framework. This does not mean constantly insisting that the empire was as “modern,” as “liberal,” as “democratic,” or even as illiberal as West European states. Rather, Judson firmly situates the Habsburg Empire within, rather than hopelessly outside or behind, the major currents of modern European history. In Judson's own words, he wants to show “just how similar the Habsburg Monarchy was to other European states while highlighting moments when it pioneered new ideas about nationhood and new practices of governance” (12).

One point at which vectors of similarity and difference converged is in the emergence of civilizing projects within the Habsburg Empire's own frontiers. Here Judson takes up a question that has been central to recent scholarship on Europe: how did Austria-Hungary find a place for itself in a world increasingly shaped by global, imperial competition? As early as 1853, Ottoman scholar Joseph Hammer Purgstall insisted that Austria-Hungary differentiated itself from other empires (like Britain and Russia) by virtue of its allegedly “peaceful” process of expansion, and predicted that its multilingual character would give it an edge in a globalizing world. Decades later, the organizers of the Vienna World Fair (1873), the founders of the German university in Czernowitz, the authors of the ethnographic Kronprinzenwerk, and the colonial administrators of Bosnia-Herzegovina continued to legitimate Habsburg civilizing projects in terms of the empire's multinational character, as well as its alleged expertise and experience managing diverse populations.

For future students of the empire, this book will be a new starting point. Its publication therefore offers an ideal occasion to reflect on where the historiography of the Habsburg monarchy stands, as well as where the field might go from here. It would clearly be worth delving further into a comparative and relational study of the empire's colonial practices on its eastern and southern frontiers. Alison Frank Johnson's pioneering study of Austria-Hungary's aspirations as a global maritime empire will add greatly to our understanding of how the empire positioned itself internationally.Footnote ¹³ The history of emigration suggests that imperial reformers and civil servants were deeply concerned about how the loss of millions of citizens would affect the empire's status in the world.

Other promising directions for recent research have emerged in fields that explore the construction of imperial institutions and cultures and their persistence or transformation across the divide of 1918: material culture, economic and trade relations, scientific networks, and environmental practices; the impact of the Habsburg empire's legal and political structures on the emergence of international institutions and legal traditions; the history of migration within and across imperial borders, by workers and refugees, Jews, and Roma. And we may find further clues to help us understand Europe today in histories of race and racism, anarchists and terrorists, anti-internationalists and protectionists, security states and military rule. If anything brought down Judson's Habsburg Empire, it was the state's betrayal of its own ideals during World War I, when the rule of law was largely replaced by the arbitrary rule of a military dictatorship, and the social promises made by the state to its citizens were broken. Solving the problems of 1916 will not save Europe in 2016, but it may help us better understand how faith in a multinational polity erodes.

The four reviews of Pieter Judson's The Habsburg Empire: A New History agree on a number of important issues. First, all the reviewers recognize that the book is an innovative approach to the empire that emphasizes its strengths and even dynamism in the modern era, especially in the period from 1780 onward. Further, they are in substantial agreement that Judson's work will set up a new historiographical framework for future scholarship on the Habsburg Empire and thus is fundamental reading for anyone interested in the field. Moreover, the reviews maintain that Judson's book will cause historians and other scholars to think hard about some basic analytical categories. For example, as Zahra and Cohen point out, the scholarly assumption emanating from the late nineteenth century was that nationalism and empire were binary opposites that worked against each other. Zahra and I emphasize how this supposed opposition was used in the era after World War I as a narrative of explanation for the demise of the old empire and as a historiographical justification for the foundation and maintenance of the various successor states in Central Europe. As Judson shows, however, and as the reviewers note, empire and nation, imperial citizenship and nationalistic identity were often concepts that grew out of the same political culture in the Austrian lands. Cohen does an excellent job of discussing how Judson analyzes these concepts and tensions as they were articulated in various historical eras from the late eighteenth century through to World War I.

Cohen and Zahra, following Judson's arguments, also highlight how many of the practices of the Austrian Empire—legal codes and notions of citizenship, the balancing of “nationalist” concerns and the way it dealt with cultural differences—persisted in the successor states formed after World War I. As Zahra puts it: “Even the empire's collapse was not absolute….” And she and Cohen draw our attention as well to one of the highlights of Judson's book: his treatment of the Austrian Empire during World War I, through which the state, the military, and society largely held together for the first two years—before things began to unravel. This was a testament to the strength of the Habsburg Empire and the loyalty it could still generate into the war years.

All of the reviewers agree that Judson's book will open up new perspectives on the study of the Habsburg Empire, and that it helps to provide categories for comparing it to other European states. Yonan goes even further, suggesting that Judson's work might cause scholars to reconsider how they use the term empire in the first place and what it might mean analytically. At a minimum, The Habsburg Monarchy: A New History will provide European historians opportunities to think critically and creatively about the ways the Habsburg Empire, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was not so very different from Great Britain, France, and Germany. All these lands sought to create a sense of identity that went beyond the local, regional, or “national” level. All of them searched for policies, organizations, and structures to help nurture a sense of common citizenship and loyalty toward the state. These dynamic and ongoing processes were not settled easily or completely anywhere in Europe; one thinks, for example, of the recent stress in the United Kingdom between English and Scottish interests over the last several years. In addition, one might fruitfully compare Judson's insights and perspectives on the Habsburg Empire with newer work being done on modern Spain, Italy, and the Ottoman Empire, all of which need to be brought more centrally into an overarching history of Europe in the contemporary era.

The reviewers also recognize that Judson's innovative study will serve to stimulate new research into various aspects of the Habsburg Empire. Zahra hopes for more work on political and imperial questions in the southern and eastern regions of the Habsburg lands and on questions of emigration, “material culture, economic and trade relations, scientific networks, and environmental practices.” She also stresses the need for work, like some of her own studies, that goes across 1918 and the end of the World War I era to search for continuities and historical structures that persisted from the imperial period into the 1920s and 1930s. I think that new work on religious culture as a part of imperial ideology and on the search for the “enemy other” in power politics might also be fruitful lines of inquiry to take up in light of Judson's new paradigm.

The review by Michael Yonan raises at least two important issues about the book that the other reviewers did not emphasize. First, he discusses at some length the early eighteenth-century setting for Judson's study. He points out that, in many ways, the foundational idea or myth of the empire was rooted in early eighteenth-century notions of imperial citizenship and the legal equality of Austrian subjects. Although these ideas and ideals obviously evolved greatly over the course of the next two centuries—and hardly applied to all the people of the Habsburg lands in the 1720s, 1730s, and 1740s—it is crucial to note that this is the starting point for Judson's study. Gary Cohen, in his review, remarks in depth on the relationship among the state, empire, civic culture, and citizenship from the era of the late eighteenth century onward; Zahra and I concentrate most of our remarks on the state of the empire and on historiographical questions and debates about it in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It would be fascinating to see what early modern scholars, whose orientation might be quite different from that of the four reviewers here, might make of Judson's study. He has undoubtedly done a good job of setting up his account by looking at the reign of Maria Theresa and the political culture of the early eighteenth century, but the strength of the book is still his analysis of the period from 1780 to World War I, and his discussion of what happened thereafter in the former lands of the Habsburg Empire.

Second, Yonan takes up the issues of art and architecture, and the political and cultural symbolism they carry. This is another important point and crucial insight about the representation of empire and its ability to create feelings of commonality and even loyalty. As Yonan points out, Judson is well aware of the power and usefulness of artistic creation for what one might call the “project of empire.” But Judson could have employed even more examples of this type of activity from different chronological eras. Such analysis would almost certainly strengthen the central theses of A New History. At the same time, and to be fair, there is only so much work one book can do and Judson does cover a lot of terrain in his new study. Yonan's question here about the multilayered ways that art and empire might have worked together in Austria can therefore be pursued in greater detail by a new generation of scholars. Judson has certainly pointed them in the right direction and provided them with an interpretative framework against which they can test their ideas about the arts, architecture, material culture, and the empire as a whole.

Yonan also adds to the historiographical debates likely to emerge from Judson's book by pointing out that the narrative of nations and nationalism, which Cohen, Zahra, and I also treat, owes something to the specific formation of academic disciplines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is almost certainly right that a piece of the puzzle as to why nationalism and the nation-state have been so dominant in our interpretations of modern European history is because the academy was setting itself up along national lines beginning in the second half of the nineteenth. Therefore, a dynamic and supranational model of historical analysis, such as Judson's book, might run up against some of the old academic structures that are still in place in Europe today. Research on and funding of topics, even to this day, often fall along the lines of the contemporary nation-state—though there are, thankfully, exceptions to this rule—so younger scholars might have to overcome some institutional obstacles to pursue the type of further work suggested by The Habsburg Empire: A New History. One possibility is to go study with Judson directly in Florence, Italy, at the European University Institute—a place that should help nurture historical narratives that see empire and nation, citizenship and political culture, in dynamic and historical terms and not as fixed opposites, and that should promote broad geographical perspectives on the past.

Finally, one wishes, after reading Pieter Judson's important new book and the reviews of it in this forum, that one had a definitive answer to Oskar Jaszi's questions, which Tara Zahra so eloquently addresses, about centripetal and centrifugal forces, about empire and “nations,” about will, insight, and action, on the one hand, and “organic inevitabilities,” on the other. One wants to be optimistic and hope that capable, flexible, dynamic, and thoughtful individuals and forces will emerge in the region in the challenging circumstances of 2016. One wishes, in other words, that Judson's book could indeed help save Europe.

Despite our differing research interests, Bowman, Yonan, Zahra, and I all agree about the great value and significance of Pieter Judson's synthesis of the history of the Habsburg Empire after the late eighteenth century. Such agreement says much about Judson's achievement. We agree about the convincing case he makes for the dynamism of the state and of its relationship to its citizens over the long nineteenth century, and on the mutual dependence of the imperial state and the developing national solidarities. Zahra properly emphasizes the significance of Judson's arguments that nation and empire were mutually constructed categories that “depended on each other for their coherence” rather than simply having developed as antithetical entities. Viewed this way, the national movements and the imperial state during the nineteenth century were, in important ways, mutually constitutive. Even after 1918, most of the successor states preserved important elements of the old imperial polity under the guise of nation-states—including, for all but the Republic of Austria and Trianon Hungary, the reality of trying to govern diverse populations and territories with unified institutions.

As Yonan points out, Judson's vision of the imperial state and the nations as “ever-changing political embodiments” has a kinship with the focus of art historians and scholars in cultural studies on continuous processes of meaning-making. As with so much in Judson's re-envisioning of the Habsburg Empire's history, his dynamic view of the imperial polity, its relations to the citizenry, and the various political solidarities in the Habsburg territories raises many questions about processes of development in the political culture and institutions of the empire and its peoples. In fact, such a dynamic, interdependent view of the developing state, the citizenry, and popular political solidarities challenges historians to reconsider the processes of political development in modern Central European history more broadly. The role of religion and religious institutions in political life and their relationship to the Habsburg state, as Bowman points out, represents one of many issues that need revisiting. Given the primacy of nation and of essentialist views of national identity in the historical understandings of many Central European scholars, Yonan is correct to expect some resistance to Judson's reenvisioning of relationships among the imperial polity, its citizens, and the nationalities, and to his underlying constructivist notion of national loyalties and solidarities. Any instinctive resistance to the constructivist account would be to the disadvantage of historians of the individual national movements, however, since a dynamic depiction of empire and nations—and of their mutual dependence—offers the possibility of new levels of understanding for the development of the national movements and for the complex and often contradictory character of nationalist politics within the Habsburg realm.

As the disciplinary odd one out in this discussion, I am happy to see that my impressions of Judson's book correlate closely with those of Bowman, Cohen, and Zahra. In particular, I found interesting that there is a clear consensus that the historiography of the Habsburg Empire is rooted in the anti-imperial rhetoric of the pre–World War I era, a point made by Judson and supported in the comments of all four reviewers. I might add that the situation in the field of history is roughly comparable to that in art history, which saw the rise of disciplinary methods and nationally based structures of art interpretation around this time—indeed slightly earlier. Matthew Rampley has published an excellent study of this phenomenon in art historiography.Footnote ¹⁴

There are three comments I would like to make, one to each of the other contributors. Bowman mentions areas for future research, namely, the role of religion in promoting cohesiveness in the empire and the formation of a collective “Other” to create a sense of unity. Both would be fascinating lines of investigation, and both could make use of visual and material culture. In my field, the eighteenth century, one could address the former by investigating Maria Theresa's systematic, multiyear program to outfit and beautify Catholic churches in Hungary with works of art, which was done precisely in order to strengthen Catholic devotion in areas where Protestantism was gaining (or was perceived to be gaining) a foothold. A study of the Austrian Empire and Otherness would demonstrate, I predict, that the empire never had a single great, oppositional “villain,” but instead shifted its focus over time to different nations and cultures.

I like very much Zahra's note that empire and nation-state are not just historical situations, but that the binary opposition between them is itself a historical artifact. This is a rich observation, I think, and one that once again would find abundant support in the realm of art. As a historical artifact with a distinct history, the binary required articulation in cultural products. One way this could be addressed would be to look at shifts in Habsburg monarchical representation not as statements about changing tastes and styles, but rather as exemplifications of different understandings of empire. Juxtaposing those with representations of other kinds of political leaders might unmask the mythical opposition between nation and empire within different modes of representation.

I learned much from reading Cohen's erudite and learned commentary. It was encouraging to discover that my final comment about a potential resistance to Judson's ideas among nationally motivated academics is accurate, since Cohen notes that Judson's prior work has sometimes met with skeptical responses from Central European reviewers precisely because it argues for a positive vision of imperial political culture. More skepticism will surely come as Judson's book articulates so clearly a shift away from nationalist narratives that are so treasured in European academia today. But being an outsider sometimes can be a great advantage to scholarly work. Working away from a given scholarly community, and therefore viewing it from a distance, can enable aspects of its history to be clearer than they are to those within. Judson was trained in the United States, and the insights he gained from studying Central Europe from afar may explain why four American scholars found this study so compelling.

What struck me about these four responses to Judson's new history of the Habsburg Empire is the extent to which we agree. We all highlighted (and none of us questioned) his perspective on the modernity of the empire. We were convinced by his portrayal of imperial institutions as dynamic and resilient—capable of winning the loyalties of a diverse population across decades of rapid change. We applauded his fundamental challenge to the nation-based paradigm in Habsburg historiography. This includes his bold interrogation of the opposition between nations and empires, as well as between nationalists and the Habsburg state. We are also all US-based scholars. It will be interesting to see if this consensus extends across the Atlantic, particularly to places where longstanding nationalist traditions rested on (and constituted) a much more negative assessment of the empire.

I also suspect that those outside the Habsburg field may be more resistant to Judson's study, but am eager to see if Judson's book finally propels the revisionist perspective on the monarchy into textbooks, lectures, and surveys of European history. It is generally harder to convince students and colleagues in other fields that there was not an ethnic foundation for nations in the empire (or in any other context, for that matter). Outside of academic circles, radical constructivism generally rubs against memory, popular histories, and a deep “common sense” belief in the ethnic or biological basis of nations and races.

As Michael Yonan points out, the book also questions the assumption that all empires are evil empires. Judson's Habsburg Empire is no paradise, but it holds up well against the “small empires” that replaced it in East Central Europe, particularly in its handling of a diverse population. If and when they engage with the book, will scholars in other fields reject this conclusion, see in the Habsburg Empire a different kind or type of empire, or reevaluate the meaning of the term empire more broadly? Historians of other German-speaking lands may be most receptive to Judson's new history. It invites renewed reflection on the long nineteenth century (including periods that have been neglected, such as the Vormärz), on the relationship of German-speakers to non-German-speaking people and to the concept of empire, and on the many and changing varieties of Germanness and German culture.

For those of us in the field, there are many exciting avenues to develop, several of which have already been mentioned—from Austria-Hungary's relationship to its neighbors and the world, to the environment, material culture, science, religion, and capitalism. In addition, I wonder if broad acceptance of The New History might liberate us: free from the impulse to prove that the empire was not backward and doomed, we might be able to reexamine some of the darker threads of the empire's history. These include antisemitism, Roma exclusion, poverty and inequality, restrictions on mobility, hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, and class, and, finally, violent and exclusive forms of mass politics. These dark threads, as much as the emergence of the rule of law and an engaged and loyal citizenship, reflect the Habsburg Empire's place among (rather than outside) modern European states.

Let me start by expressing my gratitude to the four scholars who took part in this forum. I am privileged to enjoy the careful attention that each of these insightful colleagues gave to the book. And I am extremely pleased that they see in it an innovative and useful contribution to our growing field. All authors will no doubt recognize my own keen awareness of the book's shortcomings. Even bearing in mind that I sought to offer one of several possible narratives of the history of the empire, there is still a lot of material that could have been included that I regret not having included. Some omissions derived from my own linguistic shortcomings—particularly the minimal attention paid to important events in the Kingdom of Croatia after 1867 and to Transylvania during the same period. Other omissions derived from my desire to reorient our debates away from more familiar events and toward others that traditionally receive less attention. Still other omissions resulted from the fact that we are only now beginning to research them seriously (such as the budget politics of the individual crownlands in Cisleithania).

I do want to revisit briefly three of the many important points that the four reviewers raise in their essays. The first is an observation prominent in Cohen's and Zahra's essays, that my book attempts to recast our understanding of the relationship between empire and nation. Second is the national constitution of fields of scholarship and art, raised especially by Yonan in his commentary, but reiterated by the others in their replies. Third, I want to say just a bit more about the possible further areas of research and reconceptualization raised by each of the four reviewers.

First, with regard to empire and nation, it is long past time to recognize the degree to which we inherited specifically binary formulations of these terms, around which so much—often good—scholarship was built in the past, by men and women who had personally experienced the empire and its aftermath. We cannot afford to continue to anchor our broader narratives in the presumptions upon which those binary formulations rest. Oscar Jászi, who was indeed one of the most perceptive observers of the empire, crucially formulated an influential historical approach to Austria-Hungary in terms of the social institutions and groups that had either supported the monarchy (the so-called centripetal forces) or that had weakened it (the centrifugal forces). This made sense in the 1920s, when Jászi published his highly insightful study. The recent collapse of the monarchy was the shocking event that seemed to have radically transformed the developmental trajectory of the region. Explaining that collapse stood at the center of historical investigation. Which institutions and social groups, he asked, had hastened the collapse, and which had failed to save it?

In fact, scholarship of the last decades has only made clearer the highly situational and interconnected nature of the relationships of these institutions and social groups to empire. The question may not be any longer (as it was in nationalist circles in the 1920s and 1930s) whether someone or some institution had supported or undermined empire. Underlying that question was the fundamental presumption that popular nationalism had corroded imperial institutions—largely because self-proclaimed nation-states had formally replaced the empire. Many historians have, however, demonstrated that several institutions, parties, movements, and social groups had, in some situations, participated actively in supporting both concepts of empire and nationhood.

One can take, for example, the rank and file of the military. For years historians (along with Jászi) viewed the army—especially the officer corps—as an especially strong source of support for empire, even if they doubted whether ordinary soldiers had supported it. This presumption dovetailed well with the post-1918 idea—developed more scientifically during the Cold War—that imperial legitimacy often rested on the threat of force. In the 1980s, István Deák's close social study of the elite officer corps confirmed its proud and complex tradition of anti-nationalist and pro-dynastic identification.Footnote ¹⁵ Yet, more recent research by Laurence Cole, Christa Hämmerle, Tamara Scheer, and Rok Stergar (among others) has also shown that rank-and-file soldiers often developed simultaneously nationalist and pro-empire loyalties as a result of their quotidian experiences in training, service, and, later, in veterans’ organizations.Footnote ¹⁶ These loyalties depended on each other for their coherence and resulted, in part, from the men's personal experience of the conventions and laws that governed language use in individual regiments. These practices apparently instilled in conscripts both a sense of pride in and knowledge of the greater empire, as well as a sense of regional, linguistic, and, often, nationalist pride. These forms of identification cannot easily be unraveled and arrayed against each other. In fact, they depended on each other for meaning, and they often helped to constitute each other. This is one powerful example that suggests the degree to which ideas of nationalist and imperial loyalties had to develop in tandem with each other and did not necessarily represent clear alternatives in real life situations. Other examples from the fields of bureaucracy, education, statistics, law, and artistic production demonstrate a similarly intimate entanglement between ideas of nationhood and empire.

Second, as Michael Yonan points out, the reason why nationalist paradigms for understanding the history of this region have survived so powerfully is, in part, a product of the ways in which academic and artistic fields under the empire were constituted in nationalist terms. Although the work of several historians of science and the disciplines (Mitchel Ash, Deborah Coen, Johannes Feichtinger, and Jan Surman, among others) shows us how Central European scholars often moved between regions and even languages when they studied or were appointed to university positions, the fields they studied nevertheless developed largely in national—or nationalist—terms.Footnote ¹⁷ This does not mean that these fields differed in content all that much from each other. After all, knowledge was diffused across the empire through broad transnational networks, and translation was a critical and increasingly expensive industry in Austria-Hungary. It does help us to understand, however, just why after 1918 the history of the empire became incidental to the histories of nations. I would also suggest that the increasing regional (often understood as national) political federalization of the empire contributed enormously to this trend, particularly in the cases of Czech-, German-, Hungarian-, and Polish-language fields of scholarship. The Settlement of 1867, the unofficial status of autonomy bestowed on Polish nationalists in Galicia, the division of Prague University, and later the Moravian compromise all strengthened a gradual nationalization of scholarship, especially given the laser-like attention nationalists paid to educational institutions.Footnote ¹⁸ At the same time (and here Yonan rightly points to the work of Matthew Rampley), artists and scholars continued to inhabit a common imperial world.

Perhaps ironically, it was often Austrian scholars among European ones who, when they turned their attentions to the empire (which did not often happen before the 1980s), were more likely to place empire and its institutions—rather than nations—at the center of their studies. But above all, as the four reviewers in this forum point out in different ways, the engagement of outsiders with this field has helped to transform it substantially. My recent experiences discussing these issues with scholars in Austria, Britain, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine suggest that, nowadays, even nation-based scholarship is situated increasingly in local settings and framed in terms of local and regional histories rather than in terms of national ones. Often their focus on these local settings enables scholars to escape the stifling power of the nation-state paradigm. Despite the influence exerted by national historical schools today, I am highly optimistic about the possibilities for framing historical studies in other terms, whether local, regional, or transnational.

Third, each of us has a not-so-secret list of desiderata for the field. My experience writing this book brought me face-to-face with several challenges I could not begin to solve by myself. On the one hand was the problem of post-settlement Hungary, a problem partially of language for me. In writing this book I came to understand just how “Austro-centric” we historians of the empire often are when we try to conceptualize its post-1867 history broadly. Hungary cannot remain an afterthought or an exception. As we consider the relative strengths and weaknesses of the empire, we cannot gloss over examples from Hungary simply because its rulers proclaimed it to be a nation-state. On the other hand, despite the sometimes radical differences between the Cisleithanian and Transleithanian regimes, their constitutions, and their civil and judicial systems, we need to remain attentive to the networks of cross-border exchange between the two. Very few Hungarians—especially of the so-called minority language groups—may have had the vote by 1900, but that does not mean that they were not keenly aware of political developments among nationalists in Cisleithania. This, in turn, leads us to another subject from which many of us shy away, but which ought to be discussed more fully: to what extent can Austria-Hungary be considered a single state? Raising this question could help us to think of the state in more nuanced terms, and, in particular, to see the ways in which local people used institutions of self-government and administration to achieve their own ends. This is an important argument of the book, but one that would benefit from further research.

As the centenary anniversary of October 1918 approaches, I also hope for further developments in the following three areas of scholarship about the Habsburg Monarchy during World War I: first, we need far more research into the character and local workings of the militarized regime, and especially its complex relationship to the local bureaucracy. After all, this is where dictatorship and Rechtsstaat met, so to speak, in daily life-and-death decisions—decisions that frequently influenced the degree to which the state either maintained or lost local legitimacy. Several American and European scholars are currently pursuing this topic, and it will be critical to explaining the reasons for and character of the empire's collapse.Footnote ¹⁹ Second, I want to reiterate Yonan's call for a closer examination of shifts in dynastic representation not merely as shifts in style or taste, but rather as a way to understand shifts in popular conceptualizations of empire. Third, I fully endorse Bowman's suggestion that our analyses of empire ought to produce more comparative work that puts the Habsburg Monarchy into direct conversation with the examples of the Spanish, Italian, and Ottoman empires.

Cohen and Zahra both point to the different possible ways in which the book may be received among European and American scholars. I cannot predict fully how the book will be received in Central Europe, but I can attest to the important role scholars from Canada and the United States have played in reorienting the ways in which we approach the history of the Habsburg Monarchy.Footnote ²⁰ Both Cohen and Zahra—among others—have published pathbreaking and provocative works that challenged the cherished beliefs of nationalist scholarship and opened up possibilities to see this history from some different angles, to ask different questions, to create fresh analyses. In a world where identity politics is too often the scholarly weapon of choice, it seems to me important to listen to outsiders whenever we can.