“God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World”, by Walter Russell Mead

320 pages, Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN-13: 978-0375414039

God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World is Walter Russell Mead’s attempt to explain “the biggest geopolitical story of modern times: the birth, rise, triumph, defense and continuing growth of Anglo-American power despite continuing and always renewed opposition and conflict”. Ever since the Glorious Revolution in 1688, Britain and America have been on the winning side, from the war of the Spanish Succession to the Cold War, and Mead shows the ways in which the Anglo-American political and economic development of capitalism has spread throughout the world, without excuse or apology. He details the advantages the English-speaking world gained and the benefits this dominance bestowed on Britain and her colonies (especially the United States) in the form of economic and political freedom that did not arise fully formed, but instead developed in evolutionary steps that secured individual liberty as an essential trait to continued development and change over time. Most Britons don’t like being tied to modern America (Churchill and Thatcher excepted, of course), while most Americans can’t see what ancient Britain has to do with them, yet for outsiders the link between the English-speaking peoples was horribly clear from the start: only a few years after the American revolution the French were sending back horrified reports that New England really was new England in spirit.

In contrasting the Anglo-American system of constitutional democracy with the competing systems of government that challenged it, Mead finds many cultures unable to take advantage of their resources because of a failure to trust individuals with freedom from state control. Even today he finds that opponents of Western-led globalization fear that this freedom threatens their communities of faith and nationhood. Examining most governments today he finds they recognize they cannot withdraw completely from the electronic/information revolution which tempts their citizens with visions of Western material goods and freedom; this doesn’t stop them from attempting to limit the access and effects that the Western World threatens them with. Both Radical Islam and Socialists see inherent danger in freeing people from economic and social controls; many fear the disruption of the old ways and see moral dissolution and weakness in the Western Way of life. These outsiders have plenty of their own explanations for the Anglosphere’s success: some of them are unworthy – with anti-Semitism a constant theme – but most focus on the idea that the winners relied on perfidy and violence abroad and cruelty and inequality at home. In the old East Germany, officials had a list of terms to describe Britons: “paralytic sycophants”, “effete betrayers of humanity”, “carrion-eating servile imitators”, “arch-cowards and collaborators”, while today, a Muslim journalist observes, “We worship God by loathing America”.

For all of this celebrating of the Anglosphere’s apparent superiority, Mead eschews jingoism: having declared Britain and America to be triumphant in global power politics, he doesn’t shy from exposing the dark underbelly that can also be discovered: no Europeans, he points out, came on grand tours of England to buy objets d’art, and he quotes the British MP writing to his constituents as to how “I am surprised by your insolence in troubling me. You know what I very well know, that I bought you”. Mead also pinpoints an irony of Anglo-American success: after each victory they have a lousy record of predicting what will come next, nearly always declaring some version of a New World Order, only for a new evil to emerge. Often they seem blissfully unaware of the ire their success has caused. But there is lightheartedness here, too: it is difficult to think of another front-line foreign-affairs writer who would connect Occam’s razor to Hollywood and link the prophet Abraham to McDonald’s, or, indeed, spot the agenda of an international conference in the Walrus poem in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass: the walrus’s list of conversational subjects begins with trade in manufactured goods (shoes), goes on to services (sealing wax was used on legal documents), before touching on farm products (cabbages), political reform (kings), global warming (the boiling hot sea) and finally genetic modification (winged pigs). The final chapters do a great job of helping the Western reader see these threats through the eyes of the non-Western world, acknowledging the reality of their fears without necessarily agreeing with them. He forecasts that while the Anglosphere will continue to dominate global trade, it will find accommodation with non Western opponents until assimilation overwhelms their resistance – in other words, business as usual.

“The Assassination of the Archduke: Sarajevo 1914 and the Romance That Changed the World”, by Greg King and Sue Woolmans

432 pages, St. Martin’s Press, ISBN-13: 978-1250000163

Two hundred years after his assassination, it is easy to forget that Franz Ferdinand wasn’t a Scottish indie rock band and was in fact the heir to the throne(s) of the House of Habsburg (that’s H-A-B-S-B-U-R-G and not H-A-P-S-B-U-R-G. Damnit). Since then, most histories of his murder at Sarajevo on June 28^th, 1914, have focused on the politics behind it and the catastrophic world war which resulted from it; the man himself is usually brushed off with a reference to his being heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and sometimes the fact that he had married morganatically (that is, unequally, in spite of the fact that she was from an old Czech noble family) and that his wife Sophie was also killed that day is mentioned. But who were Franz Ferdinand and Sophie? Most of the time they are brushed aside, as if the only important thing about them is that they were assassinated. Greg King and Sue Woolmans have given us an excellent dual biography of the Austrian Archduke and his Bohemian wife that lets us see them as real people: a man and woman from different backgrounds who met, fell in love, got married despite enormous difficulties, and had a happy family life with their three children until they were murdered on their 14^th wedding anniversary.

Franz Ferdinand originally had very little chance of ever becoming famous. He was the nephew of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary, one of several dozen Habsburg Archdukes. He was sickly as a child and eventually developed tuberculosis. Intelligent but shy and distrustful of others, it was difficult for him to mix in society or form close friendships. When the Emperor’s son, Crown Prince Rudolf, committed suicide in 1889, Franz Ferdinand was forced into a more prominent role, one which neither he nor his uncle cared for and perforce found himself expected to marry and have children who would one day rule the Empire. While half-heartedly going about the business of choosing one or another dreary Princess or Archduchess to be his wife he met Countess Sophie Chotek, a handsome woman with a quick mind and sparkling personality. She was his ideal partner a Cinderella to his Prince Charming, but her family was not considered good enough for a Hapsburg to marry. After long negotiations Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were allowed to marry with the stipulation that Sophie would never be Empress and their children would have no right to succeed to the throne.

Franz Ferdinand and Sophie’s married life was happy despite a long list of aggravations and petty humiliations visited upon them by the Hapsburg court. She was not allowed to sit near her husband or even attend official functions, and every foreign visit and important occasion was a nightmare of protocol. She and her husband put up with it all and they doted on their three charming children. Franz Ferdinand spent much of his time making plans for his succession to the throne as he realized that the Habsburg domains would have to undergo major reforms if they were to survive, and he understood that the increasing tension between the European powers was likely to explode into catastrophic war unless something was done to cool things down. Ironically, the trip he and Sophie made to Bosnia in June 1914 was undertaken partly in order to relieve some of the tensions there.

Greg King and Sue Woolmans have done a masterful job of recreating the lives of the Archduke and his Countess. I enjoyed reading about their early lives and the multiple hoops through which they had to jump before finally being allowed to marry. The details of their fateful trip to Sarajevo were familiar to me, but King and Woolmans have added some human touches – like Sophie’s stroking the cheek of a little girl who had given her a bouquet – that I had not read before. But I found the final chapters, which tell what happened to Franz Ferdinand and Sophie’s children, the most fascinating: Sophie, Max, and Ernst were orphaned on June 28^th, but at first their parents left them well provided for. War and revolution decimated their inheritance, and Max and Ernst ended up in Nazi concentration camps for a time in the 1930s. Managing to survive despite these difficulties, the three quietly lived out their lives with dignity, doing everything they could to honor their parents’ memories.

This is a highly readable, sympathetic account of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie’s lives. Their descendants collaborated with King and Woolmans to help them produce this book, which does much to counter the popular image of Franz Ferdinand as a humorless martinet and Sophie as a scheming nobody determined to become Empress. We will never know what might have happened had Franz Ferdinand and Sophie not gone to Sarajevo that day in June, 1914, but this book allows us to wonder whether the former Austria-Hungary, Europe, and the world might be better places now if that heavyset, awkward, but intelligent Archduke and his just as intelligent commoner wife had lived to rule a century ago.

“Twilight of Empire: The Tragedy at Mayerling and the End of the Habsburgs”, by Greg King and Penny Wilson

352 pages, St. Martin’s Press, ISBN-13: 978-1250083029

Mayerling. The mere mention of this benighted place is redolent of forbidden love, joint suicide and…Omar Sharif and Catherine Deneuve (?), doomed lovers who died in each other’s arms when their love was denied by a cruel and uncaring Imperial Court. The truth, however, is much more prosaic and the lovers a lot tawdrier, as told in Twilight of Empire: The Tragedy at Mayerling and the End of the Habsburgs by Greg King and Penny Wilson. The Empire referred to in the book’s title is the Habsburg Empire, by 1889 a mere shadow of its original self after the rule of Emperor Franz Joseph, who had been on the throne since 1848. Comprising Austria and its unwilling partner, Hungary, the two countries fought like cats-in-a-bag over everything political, religious and societal. By 1889, Franz Joseph and his heir, Rudolf, were at odds over damn near everything, with the father refusing to share any power or responsibility with his son, whom he regarded as weak and easily led…and that description of the Crown Prince was largely true: his defective personality was the result of bad parenting, drug addiction, severe inbreeding in the Hapsburg/Wittelsbach gene pools (his parents were first cousins, fer Chrissake), and the effects of the gonorrhea he acquired through indiscriminate sexual adventures. Countess Mary Vetsera, his 17 year old inamorata, was a vain, silly girl from a disreputable family, whose mother was basically pimping out her young daughter to eligible noblemen. Throw in Rudolf’s attempt at gaining the Hungarian throne in a coup (which failed) and Mary’s possible pregnancy, and you have all the angst necessary for a bad ending.

Twilight of Empire details Crown Prince Rudolf’s miserable childhood and early adult years as he was deprived of contact with either parent and forced through an unimaginative and harsh education and grew up to be intelligent but flighty. He lent his support to politicians and editors attempting to liberalize the Dual Monarchy’s increasingly scoliotic government but gained nothing but enmity and distrust from his Paleolithic father. He spent most of his time in a series of love affairs with women from all classes of Society – eventually including one Mary Vetsera, a pretty young teenager who nowadays would be labeled a juvenile delinquent. Her ambitious mother and family, anxious to be admitted into Viennese High Society, encouraged her brazen affair with the Crown Prince…which ultimately led to the events of late January 1889 when Rudolf found himself embroiled in political intrigues that bordered on high treason. He was called on the carpet by his father and berated for his disloyalty and for his carryings on with Mary…that, along with the general hopelessness of his life in general, caused Rudolf to take Mary to his hunting lodge at Mayerling (hopelessness here being a relative term; as heir to the Habsburg throne, his life was still so much better than the majority of his would-be subjects, gonorrhea or no). We read about the immediate aftermath of the murder-suicide as the Imperial Court scrambled to make sense of and cover up the most sensational aspects of what had happened, while rumors swirled throughout Vienna and the rest of Europe, and King and Wilson do a superb job of analyzing the available material (many official records dealing with Mayerling have been destroyed) and coming up with a plausible explanation for what really happened on the night of January 29^th, 1889.

Twilight of Empire makes it amply clear that Mayerling was not a fairy tale gone awry. The events leading up to it and the subsequent actions taken by the Court and Government were for the most part tawdry, causing controversy and confusion that has lasted for more than a century. None of the principal actors (excepting Crown Princess Stephanie and Rudolf’s sisters Gisela and Marie Valerie) behaved with any real dignity or honor, and as the Epilogue makes clear, most of the people involved in some way with Mayerling went on to lead unpleasant and difficult lives. The tragedy at Mayerling has gone down in history as either a story of thwarted romance or as a darker tale of political vengeance. King and Wilson get to the facts of the case, blowing the romantic aspects completely out of the water. They are very good writers and their book is a gripping read (just don't be too disappointed if you’re a romantic).