In the coda to this volume, effectively a judicious review in itself, Robert Evans notes how in 1913 Henry Wickham Steed accorded primacy to the Habsburg dynasty as the real essence or driving force for understanding the “Hapsburg monarchy.” Steed's book of the same name otherwise receives no attention here; yet these stimulating essays take up Steed's focal point, as well as pursuing the recent trend in late Habsburg historiography of analyzing the empire's modernizing dynamic and the emergence of a “Habsburg civil society” alongside the burgeoning national contexts. Most of the nine chapters analyze either the propagation of Habsburg patriotism (through ritual and pageantry, through education or the military) or its reception in the regional grassroots communities. Most interesting is when they also probe the line between imperial and national identification or, more precisely, how national and dynastic loyalties might fuse together and where they chafed against each other. What emerges is a variegated landscape that, by exploring the fluidity of these loyalties, is path-breaking in explaining both the monarchy's perpetual vitality (what even Steed called its “crises of growth”) and also why, in the Great War, those multiple entwined loyalties could be strained and snapped.

Although all the essays are extensions of past or current research, their juxtaposition in this volume is fruitful, steering historians toward fresh lines of comparative enquiry. In this regard, Ernst Bruckmüller's study of school textbooks is particularly intriguing for what it reveals about the dual stimulation of imperial and national patriotism. Charles Jelavich may already have tested this for the South Slavs (South Slav Nationalisms: Textbooks and Yugoslav Union before 1914, Columbus, 1990), but Bruckmüller argues convincingly for more microhistory of the regional schools' curricula and their influence. Equally enticing for its broader extrapolation is Laurence Cole's chapter on patriotism among military veteran groups in the Trentino; the veterans are revealed as key mediators of the “Austrian idea” in Trentine society, their imperial and Catholic loyalties meshing with regional traditions while creating friction with local Italian nationalists.

How the parameters of these fused imperial-national commitments might steadily shift in the late nineteenth century as the monarchy modernized is also implied in Daniel Unowsky's meticulous study of three conflicting celebrations in Galicia. In the face of Emperor Francis Joseph's Galician tour of 1880, the demarcations of various Polish and Ruthene loyalties were clearly set out. Although Polish conservatives venerated the living Emperor, Ruthene activists focused attention on his long-dead predecessor, Joseph II. Just as Francis Joseph's image was variable and nationally exploitable in different corners of the monarchy (suggesting that his biographers need to blend a range of national-social viewpoints when evaluating his impact), so the person of Joseph II was appropriated to support the diverse agendas of national or social groups. Besides the Ruthenes, it was, as Nancy Wingfield confirms, the German liberals who particularly championed him, the “German-centralizer” finding special favor in the Bohemian lands. There, moreover, the living Francis Joseph was a divisive figure; if his pandering to the Czechs was enough to alienate radical Germans, in the eyes of many Czechs he never recovered from postponing his Bohemian coronation. Hugh Agnew's important contribution on the emperor and shifting Czech loyalties concludes that for many Czechs the Bohemian crown, the symbol of their statehood, became divorced from the Habsburgs, and national and dynastic loyalties thereby increasingly detached. It is a theory that merits deeper analysis in a Croatian context. Here, Sarah Kent's essay is disappointing, although she too reveals some fusion of imperial-national loyalties in Zagreb and a dynastic patriotism that (as in Galicia) was appropriated by certain groups to attack those viewed as national “outsiders.” The dynasty might well try to foster its own supranational state loyalty—as this volume suggests, quite imaginatively and successfully—but increasingly in the era of mass politics it could not control the patriotic reception.

Among the essays there are inevitably a number of lacunae. Alice Freifeld's lively piece on Empress Elisabeth indicates well a particular dynastic-national confluence in Hungary, but something of the underlying friction also deserves treatment. The volume would benefit too from taking its theories to a logical conclusion, examining how dual imperial-national loyalties were finally challenged in World War I (Alon Rachamimov's reprinted chapter comes closest but is an inadequate substitute). At that time, although Czech loyalist petitions to the emperor slowly began to dry up, the Slovene “declaration movement” of 1917–1918 still for a time evinced a fusion of Habsburg and Yugoslav loyalties. It was not enough, however, to save the dynasty. For some, the Habsburgs, in contrast to their prewar performance, had become increasingly partisan, identified with a rigid German-Magyar course; for others, they became irrelevant as amidst the wartime misery the nationalist cause was gradually privileged over the dynastic. This process of disintegrating loyalties, coupled with the suggestive leads in this excellent volume, requires further research.