The main factor which destroyed the Habsburg Monarchy was the problem of nationality and its dissolution was hastened, but not caused, by World War I. Oscar Jászi spent twenty years studying the dangers that threatened this monarchy but his practical plans for averting these dangers were not given a hearing until it was too late. This book was the culmination of Mr. Jászi’s theoretical and practical activity and was enthusiastically received when first published in 1929. “It is not only effective and dramatic narrative, it is also political science of the first order.”—Harold J. Laski “The work is a liberal education in Central European politics.”—Henry C. Alsberg, The Nation “There have been many books written on the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but there is none which goes so deeply into the causes...in this pitiless yet pitiful analysis, rigorously buttressed with statistics, the tragedy is described without bitterness but with deep feeling.”—The Manchester Guardian

Is there a natural tendency toward the political integration of states that are united in culture but divided in politics? Disjoined Partners arrives at a largely negative response. In an application of political science techniques to a subject traditionally in the domain of history, Peter J. Katzenstein analyzes Austro-German relations since 1815 in six chronologically arranged case studies. Asking why these partners remain disjoined, Katzenstein finds the answer in the persistence of Austria’s political autonomy. In an appendix, the author illustrates how this type of analysis could be extended to include an examination of the unification of Germany and of Italy in the middle of the nineteenth century and of the fragmentation of Sweden-Norway and England-Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth. His study sheds new light on the reasons for the continued political autonomy of nation-states. Disjoined Partners derives from the author's dissertation, which was awarded the Charles Sumner Prize at Harvard and the American Political Science Association’s Helen Dwight Reid Award for the best dissertation of the year in the field of international relations, law, and politics. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.

Often the liberal movement has been viewed through the lens of its later German nationalism. This presents only one facet of a wide-ranging, all-encompassing project to regenerate the Habsburg Monarchy. By analysing its various nuances, this volume provides a new, more positive interpretation of Austro-German liberalism.