ABSTRACT
‘The House of Austria, a European dynasty’, the subtitle of Adam Wandruszka’s work, appears, at the end of this survey of the history of the Habsburgs, especially appropriate. Herein lay its grandeur and strength in an age when patriotism had not yet degenerated into disruptive nationalism, but also its weakness when the nation-state became the magic formula of political science and propaganda. The Habsburgs had never wanted to be identified with any one nation and seldom was a nation identified with them. There were perhaps two exceptions. The Castilians truly made the Casa de Austria a national dynasty but not to the extent of sacrificing Castilian national interests to those of the German branch of the Habsburgs. At the end of the nineteenth century, Francis Joseph perhaps went too far in favouring centralism and the German alliance, thereby clouding the image of the Habsburgs as sovereigns set apart, an image which the Habsburgs had always cultivated. Be that as it may, the destiny of the sovereign house remained prodigious. The Capetians had had only one vocation, to create French unity, the Habsburgs in the end had had four.
