I find mrryself in general agreement with the main thesis and observations of Professor Peter Sugar's thoughtful and thought-provoking essay. Thus I hlave to confine myself to some reflections that may throw additional light on a complex problem, on the solution of which the fate of central and central-eastern Europe depencded and the nionisolution of which was mainly responsible for bringing about the two great iEuropean ways of the twentieth century. (1) I believe Professor Sugar is too pessimistic about the possibility of transforming the Habsburg Empire in the nineteenth century in a way that would have satisfied, more or less (and the emphasis is on "more or less") the nationalities of the multinational empire. Such a transformation would have brought the eighteenth-century dynastic state (the state of the Hatsmacht) into line with the growth of nationalism, and it would have pointed the wvay toward the emergence of supranational forms of political integration, which the need for economic cooperation and the requirements of security render essential in the second half of the twentieth century. That no such attempt was made in the eighteenth century does not speak against the statesmanship of the Habsburgs. The problem did not arise before the French Revolution. In fact, the Austrian lands and Tuscany were (for that time!) relatively well ruled by the Habsburgs. Even Switzerland found it possible to create a modern state-and to use for the first time officially the name "Swiss nation"-only in 1848. Until then, certainly until the H-elvetic Republic imposed by France, Switzerland resembled the ramshackle Holy Roman Empire much more than a modern state and accepted as "natural" the subjection of some of its territorial components to others (Unter-tancnlcndcer) within the very loose confederation. The concept of equality of language, ethnic group, and class was introduced into Switzerland forcibly by the French Revolution. The opportunity for a timely transformation of the Habsburg Empire came, as it did for Switzerland, in 1848. It came in both cases after a civil war or a sequence of revolutions and counterrevolutions, of ideological conflicts, which threatened to destroy the framework of the