Austrian chancellor Metternich's Europeanism is often disputed. It has been claimed that he strove only to strengthen Austrian power within the German Confederation and to establish Austrian hegemony in Central Europe, with European interests and the Concert of only secondary concern. The objective of this article is to analyze Metternich's opinions and acts during selected European crises and events between 1840 and 1848, arguing that his approach to resolving them or dealing with their consequences shows that during this period his primary objective was to maintain European peace. He wanted to achieve this by demonstrating the moral consensus of, ideally, all the great powers by abating tense nationalist sentiments, calling for the observance of international agreements and the respect of rights, adopting preventive measures, and warning against or drawing attention to possible negative consequences of the crises for peace in Europe. Metternich's attempt at preserving European peace at all costs was mainly a result of his personal experience of revolution and almost a quarter century of warfare with France. By the 1840s, however, Metternich's style of peace management was rejected as anachronistic, resulting in several military conflicts in subsequent years. Considering the events of the last century that led to European integration, however, his Europeanism deserves a more forgiving evaluation.

Situated in the very heart of Europe, German-Austria, pitiful remainder of the once glorious and powerful Habsburg empire, was in the immediate postwar period subject to influences from both the East and the West: from distant Russia, swept by revolution and civil war and anxious to spread the gospel of Bolshevism beyond her uncertain borders, and from the victorious democratic and capitalist West, especially France and Great Britain. The Entente seemed determined to protect Austria and Central Europe from the two chief dangers which loomed on the horizon: the thrust into neighboring Austria of the newly established Soviet Hungarian Republic—the second Soviet regime in the world—and Anschluss with the new German Republic—a union which would strengthen and aggrandize the Reich at a time when weakening the German colossus and preventing its resurgence seemed to the Western Powers to be imperative.

Among the many difficult problems which Minister-president Kasimir Felix Badeni's government (1895–97) bequeathed to all the regimes which followed it the most serious arose from the fact that, as a consequence of the confusion caused by his policies, the tradition that the imperial-royal government in Austria had to collaborate with parliament broke down. The filibustering tactics practiced in the representative bodies of the Austrian half of the empire during the brief period of the Badeni ministry, though they were certainly not unprecedented, nevertheless, assumed a proportion and form hitherto unknown. The obstructionists succeeded in destroying the most fundamental principle of parliamentarianism—the idea that the will of the majority must prevail in the legislative body—and in overthrowing the only constitutional system which had existed in Austria since the laws dealing with ministerial responsibility and imperial representation were passed in 1867. Any government selected by the sovereign without formal consideration of the political opinions of the members of parliament in the long run could operate effectively only if a majority of the members of that body at least tolerated it—provided, of course, that the state was not to surrender to a barely concealed absolutism. Apart from the political tensions which a resort to absolutism would have engendered in Austria and the fact that it would have endangered the rather tenuous relations which Austria had with Hungary, paragraphs 10 and 14 of the law on imperial representation were so worded as to create an effective legal barrier against such a hazardous step in the direction of absolutism.1

Insofar as its present organizational structure is concerned, the Finanz- und Hofkammerarchiv is a new archive established in 1945. Before that year the only connection between the two archives, which had previously been administered separately, lay in the continuity of the records housed in both repositories. During the course of the years the documents stored in the two archives remained unchanged in type even though they were written in offices that bore different names. What led to their amalgamation shortly after the end of World War II was the uninterrupted continuity of the records in both archives.

In discussing the Austrian State Treaty it is necessary to start with an explanation of terminology. Why “State Treaty?” Generally speaking, any treaty concluded between independent states or nations is a “Staatsvertrag,” as the German term goes. Then why is the Austrian treaty of 1955 known as the “State Treaty?” The origins of the term are to be found in Austrian legal terminology after World War I. In 1919 the Austrian government championed the legal thesis, developed by the distinguished legal theorist Hans Kelsen, that the Austrian Republic had not been in a state of war with the Allied and Associated Powers since it had not been in existence while the war was being fought; consequently, the Austrian Republic refused to be the legal successor of the defunct Austro-Hungarian empire.

The idea that the South Slavs constituted a single ethnic whole has long received considerable support in Croat intellectual circles. Ljudevit Gaj's Illyrian movement of the 1830s and 1840s, which represented the initial stage of the Croat national awakening, recognized this idea and attempted to construct a common culture for all South Slavs under the neutral Illyrian name. Given the increased pressure of Magyarization in the first half of the nineteenth century, the linguistic and regional particularisms of the Croats resulting from the breakup of Croat lands in the medieval and early modern periods, and the presence of a considerable Serb minority in the Croat lands, the Illyrian idea became a necessity. It enabled the “awakeners” to overcome the particularisms that complicated the creation of a national consciousness among the Croats and deeply implanted in this consciousness the commonality of the South Slavs. Illyrianism eventually became a political force that found expression in the revolutions of 1848–49, but it was largely rejected by the Slovene intelligentsia and the Serbs of the Serbian principality and the Vojvodina. It remained a force and retained its significance only in the Croat lands.