Foreign Policy and the National Question in the Habsburg Empire: A Memorandum of Kálnoky

Although all governments in the past have been strongly influenced in the conduct of foreign policy by domestic considerations arising from the political, economic, and social compositions of their populations and the ethnic divisions within their state, in no European country has the intertwining and interaction between internal controversy and foreign diplomacy been so significant and so fateful for Europe as in the Habsburg monarchy in the last fifty years of its existence. By the close of the nineteenth century not only were the component nationalities in the process of shifting their prime loyalties from the symbol of Habsburg unity, the emperor, to their own leaders and parties, but the majority of them had been able to secure the sympathy, if not the outright assistance, of foreign governments. For instance, the Eomanians and Italians of the monarchy could look to strongly nationalistic governments in Bucharest and Rome whose irredentist propensities were scarcely concealed; the Habsburg South Slavs could hope for future encouragement from Serbia, despite the fact that under the Obrenović dynasty the Serbian government had close ties with Vienna. Among the great powers Russia, although herself a conservative empire opposed to the breakup of the Habsburg state, nevertheless offered a great deal of attraction for some Czechs, South Slavs, and Ruthenes. Even the nationally-minded citizens of the German empire, the monarchy's closest ally, were deeply concerned about the relative position of their German brethren within Austria.