A Cheer for the Habsburgs

Stephen Howe ( Empire: A Very Short Introduction ) admits that nationalists in the Austro-Hungarian empire “scorned it as the ‘prison-house of nations,” and that to the intellectuals of Vienna, the empire was “a senile absurdity.”

Still, “the very existence of those nationalist, cultural, and intellectual movements, able to express their damning criticisms with largely unrestricted freedom, hints at a more positive story.” The empire’s “efforts at achieving peaceful coexistence through a pluralist, ‘multicultural’ policy (for instance sponsoring education in all the empire’s languages) were stenuous, and in many ways ahead of their time.”

He concludes that “none other of the great modern empires shared power more sidely among its constituent peoples, and none came closer to achieving something which was perhaps an impossibility, a contradiction in terms: sustaining a multinational empire which was also a democracy.”