Habsburg Histories of Internationalism
This chapter explores points of ideological and institutional intersection in the Habsburg and Austrian past in the context of a new historiography of internationalism and studies of the League of Nations. Drawing from the expanding historiography of international ideas and institutions, on the one hand, and the uncollected evidence of people and politics of the Habsburg empire-cum-Austrian republic, on the other, its intention is to gauge the political, cultural, and economic significance of strands of the ‘new internationalism’ in the history of the Habsburg empire, and its afterlife. This is nowhere more obvious than in the persistent invocations, through the first half of the twentieth century, of the affinities between the post-First World War history of internationalism and Austria’s prewar experience with diversity and multi-nationality, and the persistent political and cultural ambitions attached to the specific idea of Weltösterreich.