World War I marks one of the great watersheds of modern history.

The world-historic transformation from the ancien regime of royal or princely rulers to the new democratic-republican age of popularly elected or chosen rulers may be also characterized as that from Austria and the Austrian way to that of America and the American way. This is true for several reasons. First, Austria initiated the war, and America brought it to a close. Austria lost, and America won. Austria was ruled by a monarch-Emperor Franz Joseph-and America by a democratically elected president-Professor Woodrow Wilson. More importantly, however, World War I was not a traditional war fought over limited territorial objectives, but an ideological one; and Austria and America respectively were (and were perceived as such by the contending parties) the two countries that most clearly embodied the ideas in conflict with each other.

World War I began as an old-fashioned territorial dispute. However, with the early involvement and the ultimate official entry into the war by the United States in April 1917, the war took on a new ideological dimension. The United States had been founded as a republic, and the democratic principle, inherent in the idea of a republic, had only recently been carried to victory as the result of the violent defeat and devastation of the secessionist Confederacy by the centralist Union government. At the time of World War I, this triumphant ideology of an expansionist democratic republicanism had found its very personification in then U.S. President Wilson. Under Wilson's administration, the European war became an ideological mission-to make the world safe for democracy and free of dynastic rulers. When in March 1917 the U.S.- allied Czar Nicholas n was forced to abdicate and a new democratic-republican government was established in Russia under Kerensky, Wilson was elated.

With the Czar gone, the war had finally become a purely ideological conflict: of good against evil. Wilson and his closest foreign policy advisors, George D. Herron and Colonel House, disliked the Germany of the Kaiser, the aristocracy, and the military elite. But they hated Austria. As Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn has characterized the views of Wilson and the American Left, II Austria was far more wicked than Germany. It existed in contradiction of the Mazzinian principle of the national state, it had inherited many traditions as well as symbols from the Holy Roman Empire (double-headed eagle, black-gold colors, etc.); its dynasty had once ruled over Spain (another bite noire); it had led the Counter-Reformation, headed the Holy Alliance, fought against the Risorgimento, suppressed the Magyar rebellion under Kossuth (who had a monument in New York City), and morally supported the monarchical experiment in Mexico. Habsburg-the very name evoked memories of Roman Catholicism, of the Armada, the Inquisition, Metternich, Lafayette jailed at Olmiitz, and Silvio Pellico in Briinn's Spielberg fortress. Such a state had to be shattered, such a dynasty had to disappear."

As an increasingly ideologically motivated conflict, the war quickly degenerated into a total war. Everywhere, the entire national economy was militarized (war socialism),3 and the time-honored distinction between combatants and noncombatants and military and civilian life fell by the wayside. For this reason, World War I resulted in many more civilian casualties-victims of starvation and disease-than of soldiers killed on the battlefields. Moreover, due to the ideological character of the war, at its end no compromise peace but only total surrender, humiliation, and punishment was possible. Germany had to give up her monarchy, and Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France as before the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. The new German republic was burdened with heavy long-term reparations. Germany was demilitarized, the German Saarland was occupied by the French, and in the East large territories had to be ceded to Poland (West Prussia and Silesia). However, Germany was not dismembered and destroyed. Wilson had reserved this fate for Austria. With the deposition of the Habsburgs the entire Au~trian-Hungarian Empire was dismembered. As the crowning achievement of Wilson's foreign policy, two new and artificial states: Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, were carved out of the former Empire. Austria herself, for centuries one of Europe's great powers, was reduced in size to its small German-speaking heartland; and, as another of Wilson's legacies, tiny Austria was forced to surrender its entirely German province of Southern Tyrolia--extending to the Brenner Pass--to Italy.

Since 1918 Austria has disappeared from the map of international power politics. Instead, the United States has emerged as the world's leadingpower. The American age-the pax Americana-had begun. The principle of democratic republicanism had triumphed. It was to triumph again with the end of World War IT, and once more, or so it seemed, with the collapse of the Soviet Empire in the late 1980s and early 19905. For some contemporary observers, the ''End of History" has arrived. The American idea of universal and global democracy has finally come into its own. Meanwhile, Habsburg-Austria and the prototypical pre-democratic Austrian experience assumed no more than historical interest. To be sure, it was not that Austria had not achieved any recognition. Even democratic intellectuals and artists from any field of intellectual and cultural endeavor could not ignore the enormous level of productivity of Austro-Hungarian and in particular Viennese culture. Indeed, the list of great names associated with late nineteenth and early twentieth century Vienna is seemingly endless.5 However, rarely has this enormous . intellectual and cultural productivity been brought in a systematic connection with the pre-democratic tradition of the Habsburg monarchy. Instead, if it has not been considered a mere coincidence, the productivity of Austrian-Viennese culture has been presented "politically correctly" as proof of the positive synergistic effects of a multiethnic society and of multiculturalism.

However, at the end of the twentieth century increasing evidence is accumulating that rather than marking the end of history, the American system is itself in a deep crisis. Since the late 1960s or early 1970s, real wage incomes in the United States and in Western Europe have stagnated or even fallen. In Western Europe in particular, unemployment rates have been steadily edging upward and are currently exceeding ten percent. The public debt has risen everywhere to astronomical heights, in many cases exceeding a countrr's annual Gross Domestic Product. Similarly, the social security systems everywhere are on or near the verge of bankruptcy. Further, the collapse of the Soviet Empire represented not so much a triumph of democracy as the bankruptcy of the idea of socialism, and it therefore also contained an indictment against the American (Western) system of democratic-rather than dictatorial-socialism. Moreover, throughout the Western hemisphere national, ethnic and cultural divisiveness, separatism and secessionism are on the rise. Wilson's multicultural democratic creations, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, have broken apart. In the U.S.; less than a century of full-blown democracy has resulted in steadily increasing moral degeneration, family and social disintegration, and cultural decay in the form of continually rising rates of divorce, illegitimacy, abortion, and crime. As a result of an ever-expanding list of nondiscrimination-"affirmative action" -laws and nondiscriminatory, multicultural, egalitarian immigration policies, every nook and cranny of American society is affected by government management and forced integration; accordingly, social strife and racial, ethnic, and moral-cultural tension and hostility have increased dramatically.