ABSTRACT
Geographically, the scope of Chapters 4 and 5 is confined to the Prussian and Habsburg Monarchies and the European provinces of the Russian Empire. We shall call them the ‘eastern empires’ for convenience. Thematically, our remit is political developments and political conflict. For our purposes politics may be defined as being about power: personal power, state power and the power of intermediary bodies, what we might today call interest groups. Of course, politics can also be about socioeconomic power, but that lies to a considerable extent outside our brief. We are therefore not concerned with ‘society’ as such or even with ‘social power’ itself, but rather with the interface between the state and the holders of social power, or those aspiring to it; in short, the political life of the state. This is distinct from the state as consumer and entrepreneur, or the state as patron of culture. Instead, our focus is the relationship of the state both to its politically significant component parts and to the other European states with which it was in constant competition. Foreign policy and war, political unrest and political reform: these are our centres of attention. The ordering principle here will be the primacy of foreign policy. 1 We shall see how the foreign-political needs of the state was the single most decisive factor in the transformation – or survival – of the political, governmental, military and ultimately social structures of all three eastern empires. For the most part, then, this chapter is concerned with politics at the highest level: it is self-consciously ‘history from above’. By and large, the three states were not threatened by mass popular movements from below during our period; what matters is what the Austrian, Prussian and Russian governments did, or what was done to them by other governments.
