Metternich’s phobia was an understandable one. Austria, that is the remains of the Habsburg empire, was not a nation in the sense that France, England, Prussia, Spain, and even Alexander’s Russia were nations. It was a supranational community, artificially bound together by the authority of a dynasty that derived its mandate from a mixture of habit and medieval land-jurisprudence. Patriotism itself was a suspect virtue in Habsburg Austria.
