Austria in its present form was created in September 1919, after the end of the First World War and the dissolution of Austria-Hungary. Giles MacDonogh (The Wine and Food of Austria:1992, p.9) ‘describes a collection of diplomats and high-ranking military officers gathered in the small French town of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Having wound up the German and Ottoman Empires, their job that morning was to reallocate the former possessions of the Habsburg Monarchy. As representatives of one of the losers in the 1914-1918 war, the Austrian plenipotentiaries had little choice but to sign away their history with their territories in Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Romania, Italy and Poland. Before the ink was dry on the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the delegates had reduced the sprawling bulk of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to a few territories scattered among the eastern outcrops of the Alps, and a handful of more arable provinces situated along the meandering River Danube and now [Slovakia’s capital] city of Bratislava.’

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