The House of Austria Today

From Charles Coulombe at The Catholic Herald:

The growth of the common cultus of Emperor Karl since his beatification in 2004 has also played its part. There are – not too surprisingly – 26 shrines to him in Austria. But there are eight in the Czech Republic, 16 in Hungary, three in Slovakia and two in Croatia. The Blessed said repeatedly during his last year of life that he was suffering so that his peoples might come back together. It is quite possible that shared devotion to him might well be contributing to that. 

And what of the House of Habsburg itself in all of this? Otto’s elder son, Karl, ably assisted by younger, Hungary-based brother Georg, is certainly keeping the flag flying through the Paneuropa Union, the Knightly Order of St George, and a host of cultural, political and religious activities throughout the former empire chronicled on his informative eponymous website. Their sisters are also plugging away at similar tasks. Cousin Michael, of the Hungarian branch of the family, is head of the group working for the beatification of Cardinal Mindszenty, while his son, Eduard, is Hungary’s envoy to the Holy See. It is now a large clan, scattered across the globe, but by and large an extremely hard-working one. 

The website of the Austrian branch of Paneuropa declares: “The soul of this continent is Christianity. Whoever takes it out of political action, makes Europe a soulless body.” The Europe they would like to see is one that even the hardest of Brexiteers might well like. But if such a vision is ever to come about, reunion of the Danubian countries would create an entity capable of challenging the secularist elements in Brussels and accomplishing it. As in the past nine centuries, the ties binding this region are not national, but religious, cultural and dynastic. It is fitting that the modern bearers of the name are working steadily in these fields. Anyone hoping for the best for Europe can only wish them success. (Read more.)

 From Warwick Knowledge Centre:

In the context of our research, the 'Habsburg Effect' refers to our empirical finding that, in the year 2006, people in Eastern Europe who lived in locations that belonged to the Habsburg Empire before it disappeared in 1918, gave very different answers in a survey on trust and corruption than respondents just across the long-gone Habsburg border, in formerly Ottoman and Russian areas. The key to our empirical identification is that we looked at people that lived very close to each other, just to "inside" and "outside" the Habsburg border and within the same state today. We did not compare people in, say, Slovakia (which was entirely under Habsburg rule) to people in, say, Belarus (which was entirely under Russian rule). If we found differences at this level, we would not have know whether they had come from the fact that Slovakia and Belarus are very different from each other generally, independent of their historic experience. 

Instead, we looked at people in Poland, Romania, Serbia, Montenegro and Ukraine. All these five countries historically had some areas that were under Habsburg rule and other areas that were under Prussian, Russian and/or Ottoman rule. People inside each of these five countries have shared the same institutions between 1918 and 2006, so if we found differences inside these countries between citizens to the left and right of the Habsburg border, they were likely to go back to pre-1918 differences. If so, we can associate them with differences between Habsburg rule and Prussian, Russian and/or Ottoman rule. (Read more.)

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