Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Simon Winder

the Habsburgs had gone from being a pan-European power in the 1850s to a local one, frightened of its neighbours. It is perhaps an implausible image, but Austria-Hungary and Germany in global terms had in a generation become the Babes in the Wood, clinging to each other, surrounded by colossal powers operating in a global, not a European framework. In a world in which America and Russia were both deliriously expanding and where colonies were seen as the currency of economic, masculine assertion, Austria-Hungary and Germany hardly counted, with even Belgium a more convincing Imperial power. Of course, these were Babes backed up by Škoda and Krupp, but in both Vienna and Berlin there were acute anxieties that their styling themselves ‘Empires’ seemed increasingly sarcastic, given their now relatively small, boxed-in landmasses. It is strange that the term ‘World War’ in 1914 did not really apply to the Central Powers, who essentially fought a war merely around the rim of their European borders. This sense of encirclement, decline, of an agenda shifting against them had a powerful impact on Vienna, Budapest and Berlin’s ever more irrational world-view.