The Tragic Death of the Habsburg Empire
James Kurth (MA 49:4, Fall 2007) - 03/26/08Notes
- Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York, 1994). I reviewed this book in my “‘If Men Were Angels . . . ’: Reflections on the World of Eric Hobsbawm,” The National Interest (Summer 1995), 3–12.
- Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (New York, 2006).
- In the famous film, Schindler’s List (1993), all of the scenes occurred in what had been territories within the Habsburg Empire (e.g., Krakow, Moravia, and Auschwitz), and virtually all of the persons depicted came from there.
- James Kurth, “Germany and the Reemergence of Mitteleuropa,” Current History (November 1995), 381–86.
- A comprehensive account of Vienna’s role in these achievements is given by Hilde Spiel, Vienna’s Golden Autumn, 1866–1938 (New York, 1987).
- Robert A. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–1918 (Berkeley, 1974).
- Rebecca West gave a vivid and memorable account of the assassination of the heir to the Habsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, on June 28, 1914 and of the July 1914 international crisis, which followed it in her Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia (New York, 1982; originally published 1941).
- Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York, 1989).
- Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Pandemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics (New York, 1993), 78–85.
- Richard M. Gamble, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (Wilmington, DE, 2003); James Kurth, “The Protestant Deformation,” The American Interest (Winter 2005), 4–16; Paul Gottfried, “The Invincible Wilsonian Matrix: Universal Human Rights Once Again,” Orbis (Spring 2007), 239–250. Wilson’s own Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, was greatly concerned about the dangerous consequences of self-determination and recorded his fears in his “Confidential Diaries”; “The phrase is simply loaded with dynamite. . . . It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives . . . what misery it will cause!” Quoted in Moynihan, Pandemonium, 83.
- James Kurth, “Partition Versus Union: Competing Traditions in American Foreign Policy,” Diplomacy and Statecraft (December 2004), 809–31.