Comments

Extract

In the course of his survey of Italian nationalism in the Austrian empire—an account written with scrupulous fairness—Professor Greenfield makes, it seems to me, three particularly important points. First, though he finds these matters hard to measure, he suggests that irredentist sentiment was probably less intense, universal, or consistent than prior studies implied. Second, he notes that Austria protected herself from irredentism more through diplomatic than through domestic policy and that this approach was for some time fairly effective. Third, he finds that the Italian population became more anti-imperial as it felt itself threatened by the nationalism of Germans and Slavs and by what seemed to be Vienna's preferential treatment of them. The Italians in the Habsburg empire thus contributed to its disintegration primarily after the empire came to be conceived of as a system of competing nationalities in which concessions to any one of them became a source of grievance for some other national group. At the same time, an empire of declining international power found diplomacy an inadequate restraint on its increasingly independent Italian neighbor.