Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs is a highly remarkable collection of sixteen essays. Nine of them have already been published elsewhere and have been slightly revised, and the others stem from lectures given over the last twenty years. The essays were all drafted on different occasions and, as the author contends, are thus meant to stand separately. Yet taken together, they put forth an argument—and a brilliant one to be sure. Evans, who in previous works pointed out the forces of integration that turned the Habsburg monarchy into arguably the most modern state in eighteenth-century Europe, now tells a story of diversity and particularity that accounts for much of the structural problems of the monarchy in the period under consideration. But rather than dwelling on the centrifugal momentum of emerging nationalism, Evans explores the still vital sense of community and the missed opportunities to cope with the heritage of particularity.
And there were many missed opportunities. Most serious, as Evans argues, was the failure to react adequately to the vast enlargement of the monarchy after 1699. Rather than develop models of integration that would have taken account of the diversity of the newly acquired Hungarian territories, the monarchy provoked a violent reaction to its imperial approach and thereby strengthened the traditionalism of the Hungarian elites (chapter 1). After Maria Theresa had further alienated the Hungarian nobility at the Diet of 1764, Joseph II laid waste to the new forms of cooperation among reformist elites (chapters 2 and 8). The failure to strengthen established forms of power brokerage in Hungary resulted in the breakdown of compromise in 1848 (chapter 10). Similarly, the fruitful oligarchic symbiosis that characterized relations between Bohemia and the monarchy during the two centuries after 1620 eroded in the decades before 1848 (chapter 5). Whereas the years of bureaucratic absolutism after 1849 are presented as a belated yet serious attempt at integration (chapter 15), the Bohemian and Hungarian aristocratic elites missed their chance in the early 1860s at developing a common structure of government from below (chapters 11 and 14). Seen from this point of view, the Constitution of 1867 emerged as the beginning of the end. From that point on, the well-established sense of particularity fostered by the Enlightenment gave way to progressive alienation. During this time, however, the forces of nationalism destroyed the fine fabric of cultural interplay among the different peoples of the Habsburg monarchy that had been so strong in previous centuries.
The Habsburg monarchy, one is tempted to summarize, did stand a good chance to survive the challenges of modernity if only it had managed to draw on its early modern resources: its elites who were so highly interwoven (chapters 3, 4, and 6) and on their well-trained sense of compromise. This line of argument is captivating, although it is somewhat biased toward the aristocracy and outstanding intellectuals.
It is impossible here to do justice to every single chapter, each one testifying to the author's enviable knowledge and vast erudition and challenging deep-seated patterns of interpretation. The sixteen essays are linked by an all-too-modest preface, carefully placed cross-references, a select biography, and an index. Though different in scope and purpose, the essays are thus conceived as chapters of a coherent book. It is this ambiguity that not only opens up manifold perspectives but also finely corresponds with the structure of the Habsburg monarchy itself.
