That's very interesting. I knew that there were
de facto two separate power-structures in Austria-Hungary and I knew that the Hungarians were reluctant to go to war but I didn't know that the Hungarians were anti-expansionist or that Austria-Hungary opposed ethnic-nationalist states like Serbia… but given the troubles that such states posed to Austria-Hungary and the problems of other nationalities within the Kingdom of Hungary that the Hungarians faced, it makes perfect sense. Thank you for the explanation.
If the Balkan peninsula were sorted out not by the compromises brokered by Britain but by Austro-Russian
diktat, the entire situation would be radically different. With the Austro-Russian intervention happening in 1876, the
Augsleich was new, recent, not very ingrained and quite possibly reversible by force from Cisleithania (to the extent of taking in further autonomous Hungary-esque 'kingdoms' within the Habsburg empire, I mean, not to the extent of undoing Hungarian autonomy or taking any territory from the Kingdom of Hungary), so the Habsburg empire's policy could have gone very differently.
Yes; Bismarck was a gambler at first, but by the time Germany was united he was much more pragmatic in foreign policy than his successors. A particularly lovely quotation of his is this gem:
"An English attack would only be thinkable if we found ourselves at war with Russia and France, or did anything so utterly absurd as to fall upon Holland or Belgium or block the Baltic by blocking the sound."
The irony…