How the demise of the Habsburg Empire postwar sovereignty and new diplomatic frontiers shaped
the nature of citizenship identity and belonging across Europe This book is a collective
portrait of twenty-one key statesmen who came of age during the Habsburg Empire. They include
the cofounder of Austro-Marxism and the Austrian republic’s first foreign minister the
cofounder of the European Union after the Second World War the founder of the Communist Party
of Czechoslovakia and Mussolini’s ambassador to Vienna. Some survived the First World War and
the resulting geographical divisions in their homelands and some went on to serve in politics
and governments throughout Europe. Taken together the stories of these men offer readers a
window on broad issues of European history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries—chiefly how an imperial heritage a shared vision of statehood and nationalism and
a commitment to peaceful conflict resolution helped establish enduring loyalty and unity
despite the geographical fault lines resulting from the war. As Iryna Vushko explains their
stories also offer an increasingly nuanced understanding of the achievements and failures of
the Habsburg Empire.
