Recorded November 19, 2018.

This public lecture is presented by Mark Cornwall, Professor of European History, University of Southampton.

This year marks the centenary of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a monarchy whose disappearance from the European map transformed the history of the twentieth century. At a time when the UK is planning to exit from another multi-national European body, this talk will revisit the reasons why different peoples decided to exit the Habsburg Empire and create independent states at the end of the First World War. What expectations guided the idealists who created the new Czechoslovak and Yugoslav states? Certainly, in the years that followed, the hopes of many were quickly deflated as new borders and identities sprang up. It leads us to ask, in retrospect, to what extent the Habsburg Empire can be considered a ‘prison of peoples.’ Or should we follow those like the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig who viewed the Habsburg Empire with great nostalgia, a cosmopolitan experiment with much to teach us?

This lecture is part of the 1918 and the New Europe lecture series.

Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/