Austria is back on the political map – and Austrians are nervous about it

Summer has arrived early in Vienna and the city of Strauss and Schubert has never looked lovelier. The parks are full of students, basking in the sunshine. The elegant cafes along the Ringstrasse are full of debonair businessmen and businesswomen, making contacts, doing deals. You could almost be back in the Habsburg Empire a hundred years ago, when Vienna ruled over a Reich that stretched from Trieste to Transylvania. However despite its prosperous appearance, all is not well here in the Austrian capital. The bad news for the Viennese is that Austria has become important again.

Throughout the Cold War, surrounded on three sides by the Iron Curtain, Austria looked west, not east. However this was always a historical anomaly. Österreich means Eastern Empire, and Austria’s natural hinterland always lay eastward, not westward. Metternich, Austria’s greatest diplomat, used to say that the Balkans began in Vienna’s city limits. Defeat in the First World War stripped Österreich of its eastern territories, but although they’ve been lost to Austria for a century, now the Balkans are back.