What went wrong? If WWI didn't happen, could the Austro-Hungarian empire have held together...

You bit the caring hand of the Serene Habsburg Emperors and you are now atok forever, how does it feel bozgor?

They were always too power hungary.

Probably better than being a sheep molesting gipsy-cuman rapebaby.

>It's all the hungarians fault. The other ethnicities wanted to keep the empire together I swear.

A-U wasnt multicultural, thats not how it worked, they had a whole heap of bylaws and regulations reminiscent to HRE times, namely it worked out which people have a right to which language where, as in, in schools and in public, official or political use, and the hungarian side realy went out of their way to get all regions under hungarian controll to be 'hungarian speaking', and other than that you generaly werent supposed to use any other language than german and maybe latin in political/official speak any way, its just that by force it was a multilingual state and because of reasons people from one part of the little empire frequently moved to other parts, or were relocated systemically in what was a sort of centuries long attempt at human resource management, and this made a sort of 'imperial' culture emerge, down low you had the common people and they were all dressed in their funny all-terrain get up, 80% of them being pesants and just wearing whatever everyone wears in their village and speaking that exact dialect to the point no one understood them two hills over, then you had the middle class that tried oh so fucking hard to be austrian one way or another, or emulate hungarian nationalist trends on their own side, but realy they all amalgamated into a sort of bourgeois monoculture of students, clercs, officers and smalltime buisnismen, identical in prague as in vienna or sarajevo, and then you had the political elites, and these basicaly dressed in parade uniforms whenever out in public and were organised along military lines, political parties not being much of a thing

also the crown was allways good with all the priests, mullahs, and rabbis and they were likely on good terms with the crown, its not like any of them ''tollerated'' each other, the set up was kind of clear, no one even thought about religious problems, the big issue was nationalism

so it was multikulti in the sense that no one cared what color shoes the pesants wore if any

>Austria was willing to reform the Empire into a more parliamentary and multinational Empire

Hahaha, no. Austria at the time was quickly returning to absolutism and it's goal was to germanize everyone. They had no intentions of giving any sort of rights to anyone except for the top of the nobility. The most liberal-leaning Kaiser was Joseph II, who was like an Austrian Frederick the Great: proponent of reform but authoritarian. However, he was also the biggest advocate of germanization. After him, the new Kaisers cut back on the germanization but at the same time were reactionary af and cancelled all of his reforms.

Hungarians were only the first nation in the empire to resist germanization an to demand liberal reforms, nationality was not really an issue at that time, they asked for stuff such as voting rights for everyone including minorities, just not collective rights.

Was he a bad emperor? It seems like he fucked up everything during his life (lost all his wars, had to accept the dual monarchy, his personal life is a disaster) yet the empire managed to survive.

He is talking about Austria-Hungary (i.e. the period from 1867-1918) and for that timeframe it is correct that Hungarians were far more repressive towards "minorities" than the Austrians. E.g. at the end Austria had universal male suffrage as well as a rather federalized structure with each crown land having its own parliament, whereas Hungary had one of the restrictive voting rights in Europe that resulted in a gross underrepresentation of minorities in the parliament in Budapest. Same thing can be said about language and school policies.

As for the time before 1867, the Hungarian revolutionaries of 1848 were nationalists who did not accept the demands of the minorities resulting in their opposition. Already in 1844, Hungarian became the sole official language (previously it was Latin) without regards for minority languages.

Germanization in Hungary, that is German as the official language and the promotion of the German language in education remained a rather short episode during Joseph II reign that failed pretty quickly, and it's altogether not a fitting characterization of Habsburg rule in Hungary.

Others mentioned it but it really was the Hungarians. They literally balkanized the nation and created a breakaway country with their own parliament, laws, army and treasury. Dual monarchy really was two separate countries pretending to be a single one, much like the split between Eastern and Western Roman empire. How can you expect a state like that to hold up?

If he would've been born two hundred years earlier, he could have been great ruler. But he was a conservative who couldn't deal with the rapidly changing times, which cause his downfall. (and imo, if he would try reforming the empire properly, he could've saved it)

The army was not separated, Hungary did not have it's own army at the time. Also there was a common treasury supplying the army of AH, but neither Austria or Hungary were willing to give too much money for it, hence the shit army in ww1.

No. The empire was too conservative to support such an ethnically and culturally diverse empire.
If Franz Ferdinand survived? Maybe.

The army was separated between imperial (Austrian), royal (Hungarian) and common. They were independent of one another.

It was one of the only thing that Franz Joseph wouldn't give up, so the military's power remained in his hands.

Why does everyone cast blame on Hungary alone, like they were actively and purposefully undermining the empire. The dissolution of the monarchy was the result of several factors, one of which was the magyarization policies. But it still only contributed by at most 5% to the eventual dismantling.

Wtf I hate Hungarians now. Did they make Croats, Slovaks and other to learn their savage Fenno-Mongolian mumbo-jumbo with zillions of cases?

this,
he failed to see that this time "the change" won't just "go away", and that if the country doesn't modernize there won't be a country

even if empire had lost some of the territories after the war and was seriously weakened, if people wanted to remain in that empire, they would somehow managed,
but with nationalistic and anti-monarchy movements it was doomed to fall, can't have an empire if no one wants an empire (or a federation or whatever)

>Is this an example of a successful or failed multi-cultural and ethnic nation state?
Let's be honest here, only Hungarians actually got anything out of the union

Failed for sure. There's nothing wrong with multi-ethnic societies in principle, it's just when they are ethno-centric, which Austria-Hungary was.

Correct in that it was dominated in practice by Gemans and Hungarians. The issue is that many Austrian Germans were willing to go ahead with federalization while Hungarians weren't.

Really what killed the empire was its horrific performance in World War I. Before that most of its citizens (especially Jews) were loyal.

Even during the war, the entire thing held together surprisingly well. It took 2 years of food shortages and complete and utter military defeat to break it apart completely.

I think AH gets way, way too much crap for its WW1 performance. It seems to me that for some reason Anglos have a hateboner for AH despite AH not doing anything to them.

Just stop to consider that AH endured the entire clusterfuck of WW1 despite not being ready for something like that at all. Consider that Russia fell apart completely before AH. Consider that France was at the edge of a collapse and mutiny and just barely pulled through. Consider that when shit got real for the actual people of AH who had actual stakes in the game (Italian invasion) they fought ferociously and defended their territory.

The way I see it AH would've had its reforms under Franz Ferdinand and the Monarchy would not only endure but thrive. Unlike other countries around it AH was clean from start to finish morally. It had no colonies and didn't want any. It was never a militaristic state. It only waged war against Serbia because they believed the Serbs were behind the assasination, and their stance was logical.

AH was thrown to the dogs at the hands of Germany. AH didn't want a world war or had any of that idiotic arrogance the Brits and Germans had. AH did the same thing the US would do if a foreign agent killed the president. Basically the death of AH was nothing but an unmitigated tragedy and the Slavs in it ended up getting FUCKED by communism.

wtf I love Austria-Hungary now!

All multicultural states are doomed to failure. Think about it. What is a multicultural state? It's an internal empire; multiple nations of people under one central authority. If they had unity in values or ways of life, it wouldn't be multicultural by definition.

A state whose enshrined feature is it's division is a doomed state, waiting for a black swan to destroy it. It's like calling a cracked window a "multiglass viewport." It's just a weak spot waiting for something to shatter it.

It's bullshit, people who parrot this mantra are always forgetting that UK exists as a multicultural state (English+Scottish+Welsh+Irish), and so does Switzerland (German+Italian+French). Neither the UK nor Switzerland is falling apart. Why? Because they didn't lose a fucking world war and that's really the answer for why Austria-Hungary disintegrated. It got forcibly balkanized from outside by the French and the Brits and random previously irrelevant nationalists like Masaryk were proclaimed heads of new states created by the French.
If they don't lose WW1, they don't fall apart, it is that simple.

good post except
>A-U wasnt multicultural
define multicultural in this case. the more I think of it, the less "multicultural" makes any sense at all. Makes me suspect the words origins are a type of newspeak, probably with some political agenda and therefore aren't helpful to people trying to understand the world.

yes

When it comes to magyarization I kind of understand the arguments of both sides.

What are some of the best books about the last 50 years or so of the AH empire? Preferably written by professional historians.

this is not true
austrians set up inner custom borders, controlled foreign policy and could ultimately rule by the decrees of the emperor

its rather the short sighted austrian view how an empire should work where austria and czechens focus on industry, hungary on agriculture and the rest is for whatever resources it has to fuel the other 2.

this is another slavshit bullshit, the 1867 law had a minority law by eötvös, only after his death the forced language rules started to happen

the whole issue is due to the mental illness that is called panslavism, how great was that right, dumb savages

Bam Oida!

... SELF-TANNER 1938

>There's nothing wrong with multi-ethnic societies in principle
Name one where it wasn't a source of friction.

I guess the IRA and Scottish independence didn't almost rip it apart in living memory, then.

There's another growing movement again for separation depending on how Brevity shakes out.

lmaoing at buttmad Magyar ITT
all you can do is cry now

I beg anybody that reads this to hit me up with ANY pdf that concerns the general cultural and political(the ideology of the state, not individual ministers because that's boring as fuck) history of the Empire because all the books I found on the subject were not available for free and I'm not paying for a report of what I might not care about.

i fucking hate austria for being so incompetent at germanizing slavs i would rather talk in german than be a poor balkanite

I would also like some good books on these topics.

Switzerland

>the more I think of it, the less "multicultural" makes any sense at all

thats because it dosent make sense, its supposed to mean something that 1980is western intellectuals saw as a good idea, but it dosent exist anywhere because thats not how humans function and thats not how cultures interact and mix, which they do, constantly, but thats not multiculturalism, thats life, multiculturalism is a failed ideological semantic contraption used to sweep things under the rug for some 30+ years now

it should be important to note that most, not all, but most 'multikulti' areas of the world got that way because different people did nasty agressive, exploitative and genocidal shit to each other over and over for generations, and maybe did some trading in the meanwhile, and thats how you get places where 'different cultures coexist for centuries'

switzerland wasnt a very peacefull country for a long long time, why do you think they were the so many swiss mercenaries

Get out commie

Tough men who want to earn a living?

>I'm not paying for a report of what I might not care about.
You fucking faggot, you leper hugging cunt, you shit eating penis fondler, do you refuse to pay for food that you didn't enjoy too?

Where were you born?

It's been more peaceful than the rest of Europe for a solid 200 years.

How shitty was the Balkans under AH rule?

You should, stockholm-syndrome wagecuck

>every single region formerly under Austrian government is invariably more developed than their sovereign or Russian counterparts

Pretty shitty if you're a braindead anti-imperialist

thats because austria was a shithole that couldn't control slavlands and free market has won in these parts

But the free market prevailed in the other parts just as much and they're still less developed? Huh?