It is a true fact, as they say in Cork, that a majority of Austrians came to believe they were a nation only in the mid-1970s.
Much of the work of convincing them that this was the case was done by Bruno Kreisky, longtime leader of the Socialist Party and chancellor of the country. An exhibition devoted to his political career in the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna reveals much to the inquisitive visitor about contemporary Austria and the role he played in constructing it. As with all political identities the process was selective, so much so that critics say habitual amnesia is a national characteristic.
This weekend's European Council in the magnificent setting of the Hofburg palace from which the Habsburgs ruled a central European empire for many centuries is an appropriate moment to reflect on such matters. An EU member-state since 1994, accession has disappointed many Austrians, largely because of how its political class sold the deal during the referendum campaign, promising more growth and continuity than has been possible.
In fact membership seems certain to shake up its political and economic systems with more competition. For many decades it has been based on a corporatism involving the two main parties extending into every corner of Austrian life. Its critics say this is stultifying and inefficient, but it has brought prosperity and nearly full employment.
Much depends on elections next year, especially on whether the far-right Freedom party, led by Jorg Haider, continues its relative decline in popularity and wins a provincial governorship. His departure would free political space for an alternative coalition on the left or right.
As with all small states, handling the EU Presidency since July effectively has been a question of considerable national pride. A final judgment on it must await the outcome of this council, but it has been competently if cautiously managed, with several significant achievements, such as an EU agreement on transalpine transport and free trade with Switzerland.
The summit's main agenda items, a row over future EU financing as it prepares to enlarge towards central and eastern Europe, which must be resolved by the succeeding German presidency, reveal much about Austria's own identity.
Stripped of its multinational empire containing 56 million people after the end of the first World War, the small Austrian successor-state had no meaning or political identity for most of its six million population. Many of them believed union with Germany made best sense.
A senior Irish politician inquired recently whether they speak Austrian here; well, they speak German, with what might be described as a Cork accent, and have had a luminous and wonderful culture for a thousand years.
But competition between the Habsburg and Prussian empires last century, emerging nationalisms in the constituent parts of the empire (including Hungary, the Czech lands, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, Poland, Croatia and Bosnia) and then the wartime alliance with Germany convinced them that a merger would be in their best interests.
In the event Hitler (born in the Austrian town of Linz) accomplished such a union with the annexation of Austria in 1938. He was welcomed initially by perhaps half the population, many of whom co-operated with Nazism enthusiastically or, like Kurt Waldheim, loyally; but it must be remembered, too, that in a continuation of Austria's civil war of 1933-34, some 70,000 people were arrested by the Gestapo and taken to concentration camps.
Austrians soon discovered that it was an occupation. Leaders of all parties agreed in wartime prisons that an independent state was the only way to express their political identity. They were given the opportunity to do so in 1943 when the allies declared in Moscow that Austria had been the first victim of Hitler's aggression, but that its future would depend on its contribution to its own liberation.
Austria did not become fully independent until the State Treaty of 1955, which guaranteed its perpetual neutrality. Thus political identity has been founded on the twin pillars of victimhood and neutrality. Both of them assumed mythological status in the Kreisky years, disguising shared responsibility for Nazism in their highly consociational democracy and an actual westernisation (in many ways Americanisation) and quiet (often xenophobic) provincialism behind the veil of the moralistic and even-handed international activism for which Kreisky was so well known. Officially Austria became not-German in the same way that Ireland became not-Britain; German was referred to as the "language of instruction" in schools.
The end of the Cold War and EU membership offer Austrians remarkable opportunities to revisit their long past in more confident and secure fashion, but ones they have been reluctant to take up enthusiastically. The Salzburg-based writer, Karl-Markus Gauss, recalls an issue of Karl Krauss's satirical journal, The Torch, in which the spokesmen of pan-Germanism all have Slavic names.
The loudest voices against EU enlargement are often similarly named, especially in Vienna, where they predominate, recalling its remarkable growth from 500,000 to two million people, many of them migrants from the then imperial peripheries, in the years 1850-1914. Official Austria has got the enlargement negotiations started well during its Presidency; but based on fears of job losses in politically influential border areas, it is suspected of duplicitous delaying tactics in Budapest, Prague and Bratislava.
An army officer told me he is astonished at the failure to seize an opportunity to rediscover the geopolitical space of Habsburg times, now that, in the words of the Austro-Marxist, Otto Bauer, the EU holds out the promise that federalism is democracy's answer to empire.
Likewise, official Austria is divided on whether neutrality makes sense any more when Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic are preparing to join NATO next year. Austria's army is quietly preparing for NATO membership.
Karl Kraus defined diplomacy as civil servants telling lies to journalists and then believing them when they see them in print. There is much of that going on in Vienna this weekend.
