Book Reviews

Moscow? How central would the Navy have been? The book makes clear that the Navy was highly instrumental in the Korean War and could have been instrumental if plans to help the French at Dien Bien Phu had materialized. But these were comparative sideshows. More extensive and focused analysis of the Navy’s possible contribution to a Soviet war would have rounded out the book. Notwithstanding these concerns, this book should be read not only by aficionados of recent U.S. naval history but also by anyone with profound interest in how the United States reorganized itself militarily in the first decade after World War Two. Both professionals and general readers have reasons to applaud Barlow’s efforts. ✣✣✣

FranzCedeandChristianProsl,Anspruch und Wirklichkeit: Osterreichs¨ Außenpolitik seit 1945. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2015. 168 pp.

Reviewed by Peter Ruggenthaler, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research of War’s Consequences (Austria)

Apart from Michael Gehler’s comprehensive 2005 analysis, little scholarly attention has been devoted to the topic of Austria’s foreign policy, at least as far as accessible monographs are concerned. It is therefore all the more to be welcomed that with the work under review two of Austria’s former top diplomats not only propose to fill that gap with a concise survey of the genesis and development of Austria’s foreign policy from 1945 to today but to do so in an “easily comprehensible manner” (p. 5). Franz Cede headed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs International Law Office from 1993 to 1999, at a time when many of the articles of Austria’s State Treaty were becoming increasingly obsolete after the end of the Cold War. Before retiring from active service in 2011, Christian Prosl was Austria’s ambassador in Washington, having previously served in the same capacity in Berlin. In this slim volume of less than 170 pages—which subsequently appeared in En- glish translation, Ambition and Reality: Austria’s Foreign Policy Since 1945 (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2016)—the authors present an admirably non-partisan survey of Aus- tria’s foreign policy since 1945. They mince no words about one of Austria’s most cherished shibboleths in the field of foreign policy: neutrality: “Whether one wants to acknowledge it or not, Austria’s neutrality was reduced to a residual minimum by the country’s accession to the EU” in 1995. Accession marked the end of an “active policy of neutrality,” which is now eviscerated and “devoid of meaning” (pp. 12, 14, 35). No Austrian politician of any standing would be prepared to engage in such plain speaking. Any public discussion of the country’s foreign policy must be avoided at all cost, with many politicians “squinting mainly at the headlines of one of Austria’s print media” (p. 35). This is clearly a reference to the country’s most influential tabloid, the Kronen Zeitung, which is read by something like 40 percent of the population. Cede and Prosl raise the question of what might be considered to be a “unique feature”

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of Austria’s foreign policy (p. 35); they have to admit that they are at a loss for an answer. What the authors do praise are Austria’s peacekeeping missions in the Balkans (p. 14), its contributions to stabilizing the region, and its commitment to a European perspective for these countries. This, however, does not alter the fact that no overall strategy is discernible in Austria’s foreign policy. Austria’s role within the framework of the Common Foreign and Security Policy of the European Union (EU) is reactive rather than active. Although the authors are all in favor of giving Austria’s role clearer contours, they are also aware that caution is needed. A case in point is the 2010 designation of the Black Sea region as a focal point for Austria’s foreign policy (p. 109), a decision determined by economic considerations. The net result, however, was practically nil because of a lack of human resources and Austria’s insufficient presence in the region rather than because of more recent developments in the region. The picture of Austria that emerges from Cede and Prosl’s account is that of an “inland country largely without international ambitions” (p. 117), which has, despite two decades of EU membership, only insufficiently adapted to the fact that it is now itself part of Europe and therefore potentially capable of contributing to the EU’s foreign policy within reasonable limits. One gets the impression that “perpetual” neutrality, apparently a salient feature of Austrian identity, is “carved in stone.” For Cede and Prosl this is clearly not the case. “Austria’s rights and obligations as a neutral state become effective already in peace and not only in times of war” (p. 31). Why a new definition or a clear interpretation or reinterpretation of neutrality after the end of the Cold War continues to be so difficult is something that readers will gather only if they are prepared to read Cede and Prosl’s text between the lines. Again and again the authors come out in favor of adapting to the existing situation and of pursuing clear strategies, which they conclude have been woefully missing since the end of the Cold War. What the authors are implying here is that Austria would be able to leave much more of a mark if only there were a will to do so and clear visions to abide by. Given that Austria as a long-time, experienced mediator has few specific global interests to ply, “its diplomats could,” the authors conclude, “be instrumental in a non-partisan way in the resolution of conflicts” (p. 47). Because the book adheres to chronological order, it begins with the circumstances surrounding Austria’s declaration of neutrality in 1955. The authors emphasize that Austria’s neutrality is underpinned by an act of state rather than by a treaty based on international law. Austria did not have neutrality “forced” on it from outside but accepted it voluntarily as an obligation in the non-binding “Moscow Memorandum” of April 1955, when the Austrian government assured Soviet leaders that it would accept neutral status for the country after the conclusion of the State Treaty and the withdrawal of Allied troops from its territory. Neutrality was therefore, as the authors stress, an “initially required vehicle in the context of the State Treaty in order to restore Austria’s independence and sovereignty” (pp. 31–32). Subsequently it became a useful instrument in Austria’s foreign policy and the most important pillar of the country’s foreign and security policy.

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Cede and Prosl highlight the constructive role Austria played in the forum of the United Nations (UN) during the Cold War: Kurt Waldheim as Secretary General; Vienna as one of the headquarters of the UN and as the seat of important international organizations such as the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE); the country’s excellent reputation for the teaching and the practice of international law, climaxing in the Vienna Conventions on Diplomatic Relations, on Consular Relations, and on the Law of Treaties; and, last but not least, the determined stand Austria habitually took on human rights issues, notably in Communist ruled neighboring countries (pp. 59ff). Topicsthat are dealt with more cursorily include Bruno Kreisky’s policy toward the Middle East; the long road Italy had to go until it recognized South Tyrol’s (Sudtirol)¨ autonomy; Austria’s accession to the EU; and the significant consequences of the 1989 dismantling of the Iron Curtain marking the borders Austria shared with the “East.” The civil war in neighboring Yugoslavia is treated in greater detail (pp. 80–85). The authors quite rightly focus on the extraordinary role played by Austria’s foreign minister at the time, Alois Mock, who was accused by some Western critics of having fomented the civil war by condoning separatist tendencies. The bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia, however, cannot by any means be laid at the doorstep of Austria’s foreign policy (or of Germany’s, for that matter). As opposed to the majority of politicians in the United States and in Western Europe, Mock had concluded early on that a peaceful solution within the Yugoslav confederation was no longer possible and that the only way out of the conflict was the recognition of the sovereignty of Slovenia and Croatia on the basis of all peoples’ right to self-determination. In the meantime, the Balkans have become one of the core areas of Austrian foreign policy. The tireless commitment to the advancement of Austria’s southern neighbors has not been in vain. Against persistent opposition by several member- states, Vienna ensured Croatia’s accession to the EU in 2013. Austrian diplomats such as Wolfgang Petritsch, Valentin Inzko, and others are among those whose advice on matters relating to the Balkans is regularly sought not only by the United States. OSCE and EU operations have played a major role in transforming the former crisis region into a zone of stability, a development to which Austria has made significant contributions. Given the priority accorded to brevity and readability, the account by Cede and Prosl at times may lead some readers to feel slightly shortchanged. Not all of the sketches of bilateral relations between Austria and specific countries are entirely adequate. Both the latest research and standard works remain largely unconsidered. The expectation of at least this reader of coming across telling anecdotes, which the authors’ distinguished careers must surely have given them ample access to, was disappointed. The book includes no footnotes. Occasionally, the focus could have been sharper. The Soviet Union, for instance, did not give its consent to Austria’s participation in the Marshall Plan in exchange for financial considerations (p. 23); the USSR was incapable of taking any action against a bilateral agreement—an agreement, in this case, between Austria

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and the United States. The Second Control Agreement, which the Allies entered into in 1946, created a situation where the Allies were entitled to veto only details in Austria’s constitutional legislation. What this brief overview of Austria’s foreign policy is especially to be commended for is the way it deals with the Cold War and Austria’s policy of neutrality up to its erosion at the end of the Cold War, a process that has not yet come full circle. While written above all with a general readership in mind, the book is at the same time a valuable resource for students and presumably of great interest even to diplomats in active service. ✣✣✣

Rina Lapidus, Young Jewish Poets Who Fell as Soviet Soldiers in the Second World War. New York: Routledge, 2014. 240 pp. $145.00.

Reviewed by Nahma Sandrow, City University of New York

This book can break your heart. Rina Lapidus commemorates the brief lives of fifteen Jewish poets under the age of 35 who served in the Soviet military during World War II and uses their individual stories to personify the mass deaths, Jewish and non-Jewish, of that dark time. The individual biographies vary. Whole-heartedly committed to the Bolshevik revolution or ambivalent, from somewhat observant homes or totally assimilated, from cultured backgrounds or virtually unschooled, urban or rural, poor or comfortable, married or still too young for much romantic or erotic experience—a few snapshots suggest the variety: Hennikh Shvedik, who began writing in the new autonomous Jewish region of Birobidzhan, translated Anton Chekhov into Yiddish, and marched as the “leader of song” at the head of his battalion; Aron Kopshtein, who triumphed over his miserable childhood as an impoverished orphan to publish six volumes of Ukrainian poetry; Jack Althausen, a widely popular poet, given to criticisms of the Soviet Union that would inevitably have led to his arrest if he had survived; Vladimir Avrushenko, a loyal Communist who defied his Nazi captors so fiercely that they tied his legs to two army tanks and tore him in half; Elena Shirman (the only woman), consumed by unrequited passion for a younger man; Leonid Rosenberg, conscripted right out of school, whose entire oeuvre when he died at nineteen consisted of one poem that had won him a Russian youth prize, plus his letters home to mother. All were dead by 1944 at the latest. Because the fifteen chapters are organized chronologically by year of birth, they seem to get younger and younger as the book progresses. But all of them “made a significant contribution to the development of Soviet poetry concerning ...war,”andallofthemhavebeenforgotten. The editor has made a valiant effort to do justice to each poet. The facts of their lives are difficult to trace, and publications from that chaotic period, especially minor publications, even more difficult. However, each chapter ends with many solid

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