The Making of a Cold Warrior: Karl Gruber and Austrian Foreign Policy, 1945–1953

In the years 1945 to 1953, Karl Gruber exerted an influence over Austrian foreign policy at times resembling the dominant influence of a Kaunitz or a Metternich. But as a diplomatist Gruber did not come close to the finesse and shrewd sense of power that his two great predecessors possessed. Moreover, Gruber had to maneuver in less predictable domestic and international terrain. During his tenure in the Ballhausplatz, foreign policy wassubject to domestic partisan struggle as well as parliamentary control and public opinion. Furthermore, Austria no longer figured as a great power and was locked into the monumental Cold War struggle between East and West on the frontline of the superpower tensions. Gruber operated in an extremely hostile international environment. Instead of the traditional well-balanced nineteenth-century “concert of powers,” which had profited so much from Austrian professional statesmanship, the inexperienced Gruber faced the United States and the Soviet Union, which were in almost total control of international politics. The two superpowers were engaged in a gigantic ideological struggle, each striving for a preponderance of power. A small nation such as Austria was buffeted to and fro between the conflicts in Central Europe and could hardly escape the pull of the global “empires” fashioned at the time. The United States and the Soviet Union confronted each other in spiraling arms races (nuclear and conventional) and rigid alliance systems in an uneasy truce called the Cold War. In this context of a tight bilateral international system, even England and France—the former great powers reduced to the status of middling powers after the ignominious loss of their great colonial empires—had a difficult time holding on to their traditional influence in the international arena. Small powers like Austria were largely impotent, unless they fashioned for themselves some room to maneuver between the superpower blocs.