How would a surviving Austria Hungary affect modern discourse on multiculturalism?

Most contemporary criticism on multiculturalism focuses on the effects of sudden and recent large-scale immigration, not on the type of multiculturalism which results out from different ethnicities living close to each other for hundreds or thousands of years. Austra-Hungary was more of the second type.

Yes, very few critics of contemporary mass immigration (mostly from the Muslim world) are against say, Switzerland.

In fact, many of these critics are Swiss. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Swiss_minaret_referendum

If anything, ethnic harmony is now the norm in Europe. From Switzerland to the Hungarians in Romania to the Aland Islands to the Russian Tatars.

In retrospect, the expulsion of Germans from Poland/Czechia after WW2 were a long-term negative for Poland/Czechia, since they'd probably get along just fine.
 
Everything depends in how Austria-Hungary would survive. Could it transform itself into giant monarchical Switzerland? If so, I think it might well be viable.

Granted that international migration will not be a feature in Austro-Hungariam ethnic diversity, internal migration across ethnic frontiers will be. There were huge communities of Czechs in Vienna, for instance. Especially as the empire urbanizes and industrializes, you are going to see increasingly large numbers of migrants from poorer areas of the empire in the cities of the richer areas of the empire. How will this be handled? The example of Vienna, at least, suggests populism is a plausible response. How will Czech cities handle large numbers of (say) Poles and Ukrainians, or Hungarian cities influxes of Romanians and Serbs?
 
QUOTE="Koprulu Mustafa Pasha, post: 18594605, member: 107797"]Because in Austria-Hungary, there is no attempt to create a Greater Austria or Greater Hungary within the state. If one tried the others could counter it.[/QUOTE]

There was a Kingdom of Hungary that tried just that.
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
Hate to break it to you but multiculturalism is still the norm across our world. A majority of the world's countries are multicultural or civic states. You live in the Western Hemisphere? You're living in a Civic State. You live in Sub-Saharan Africa? Civic State. Over one in 10 people in the world live in India, the World's largest democracy. What about Indonesia, The Philippines, and Iran in Asia? Civic States. Each has or is on track to have over 100 million people.
Civic states and multicultural states are not synonymous, and the fact that you think they are reveals your American-centric viewpoint. France is the textbook example of European civic state and it forcibly assimilated minorities far more successfully than any other country in Europe during the 19th and early 20th centuries. America itself assimilated white immigrants very successfully as well.
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
If anything, ethnic harmony is now the norm in Europe. From Switzerland to the Hungarians in Romania to the Aland Islands to the Russian Tatars.

In retrospect, the expulsion of Germans from Poland/Czechia after WW2 were a long-term negative for Poland/Czechia, since they'd probably get along just fine.
Purely wishful thinking. Poland had no choice but to expel the Germans in order to settle Poles from Kresy. If Czechoslovakia didn’t formally expel the Germans then Czech civilians and former partisans would have liquidated the Sudetenland Germans on their own, and the Czech police and military would have done nothing to stop them. If you think Hungarians in Romania and Tatars in Russia are in a state of “ethnic harmony” then your definition of ethnic harmony must simply be no continuous ethnic violence or institutional discrimination, which is a very low bar to set.
 
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The theme of too many discussions is a confidence that an ATL cannot do better than OTL, giving us a comfort that no matter how bad one may believe it to be it would not be better. And thus the trope of A-H collapse or the rise of a Hitler or the firestorm of Yugoslavian failure. While these are certainly signposts on the side of the road the path is not set to stone. The most popular PODs in the Great War are Germany goes East or Germany ends the war undefeated to mildly victorious, the former gives us a far stronger A-H and the latter keeps A-H as damaged at the end of war. And we have the German customs union often some greater portion of central and eastern Europe under German economic if not political dominance. Stealing from OTL the popular notion is to implode A-H the same and as I stated that is not what I think Germany wants, that is the failure, I think it is less likely than presumed.

Trope one is to control implode A-H, divide it into its more "German" half and its "Hungarian" half. I do not see a lot of love in Vienna or Berlin or Budapest, let alone Prague or elsewhere, that merely gets us more German dominance on the one hand and more Hungarian intransigence on the other. Trope two is to federalize the Empire, something I tend to believe would be obvious but I also think is less than ideal. We cement the divisions, align the pieces to explode in future, but it might be the best next step. Yet it is the next best step.

We have German as the most likely lingua franca and the Catholic religion as both cultural and political commonality, socialism too can cut across ethnic or linguistic lines, there are ingredients to bind A-H together if given opportunity. So how do we stumble the ailing Empire into something more likely to hold it together long enough to make gravity pull it tighter together? And I struggle with it as I sketch out a different post-war. I have yet to settle on the "how."

We have Austrian banks and likely too German creditors seeking new places to invest, with A-H intact we see that money flowing towards eastern Europe. We see the customs union beginning the cycle of interdependence, materials and finished goods flow within this greater boundary, Germany might dominant but it cannot fully own the whole market. Economic migration begins to break down the national boundaries, especially within the A-H state but also within Germany, Germany is going to be pulled toward a multicultural flavor including the multitude of central and eastern cultures of Europe. As A-H continues to urbanize it should gain a distinct identity apart from Germany but also linked to it. These should be strong drivers to weld this thing together. We are building a "Europe".

I stress the economic because it has a far better insidious way of breaking down barriers and crafting assimilation, yet it does not generally work to oppress culture or language, rather it blurs them, lets them fade, but does not impose their loss. Albeit a lot is getting lost, the minority cultures, languages and identities are very truly under threat of disappearing. it might be like Gaelic in Ireland, the Irish are still Irish but quite easily blurred into English, American and British cultures, or the Sorbs, almost a museum of a people, still present but an island within the whole of Germany. A charge is that American culture bulldozes so much other culture, especially in Europe, and here the "German" cultures of Germany and Austria are going to be as flooding. And as threatening to the Anglo-French, the Russian/Soviet or the American spheres. And I admit it will be conflict as Europe evolves more solidly German, that upends the aspirations of the others to it in the big chair.

What I think is possible in this tormented path for A-H to not just survive but to then thrive, transformed into a more blurry melted pot, is a functional union of Europe. As the economic center gets stronger,[FN] A-H prospers, more of Europe turns towards the center and wants included, but a surviving Germany is going to retain its political independence. I think that inside A-H more of the minority population retains a political identity. The state will not be sacrificed to the union, political power will remain at the national, provincial and local levels, trade barriers might fall, but the sense of having a say in how things are run remain in the elected organs at home. The impact of A-H bridging the divide between giving power to its people and binding them together can be as I argued before the stepping stones to greater regional or global unity, states governing themselves but coordinating with others upon the expedient of trade, economics will glue the world together, politics will remain to let people feel heard, but blending together propels people to greater community.

That is my end post for the impact, the finish line to be aimed for, the construction is very much a complicated and uncertain one, but A-H offers more than just a bucket of hateful crabs clawing each other back in in vain struggles to escape the pot. Dystopia is easy, it shines a light on what we fear we are, to navigate towards something better hopefully illuminates our future, showing what we might be.

Footnote: I would predict that as strong as the Ruhr is and will remain, we will see the gravity stretch between Berlin and Vienna linked by Prague, enveloping Saxony and Silesia, there is room for a huge transnational zone not unlike Amsterdam, Brussels, Ruhr, but here that as well as Poland to the East will gravitate inward towards this not wholly German epicenter. Next up should be Italy pushing into this axis, also the Swedes and Finland. In most terms this should really wank out the former A-H, the future of Eastern Europe here will be unrecognizable compared to the inter-war era and post-war era of OTL. The Danube will not be sleepy but just as vital a line as the Rhine, maybe more so. The next big draw will be Russia, another potential shift orders of magnitude different. And then flowing towards the near East. The impacts continue to offer blank pages of possibility.
 
A europe with a much lesser WWI/avoided WWI as surviving AHs imply would be a europe that'd get it's immigration more from the Rusisan/Austrian empire so you'd end up with a whiter europe.

Maybe A-H might convince the french/brits to be more tolerant of local breton or irish identities but I doubt it'd fit the OP's challenge. ah well.
 
If you think Hungarians in Romania and Tatars in Russia are in a state of “ethnic harmony” then your definition of ethnic harmony must simply be no continuous ethnic violence or institutional discrimination, which is a very low bar to set.

I mean, yeah. That's a pretty high bar throughout most of history. That we've cleared this bar where it sounds like a "low bar" is a testament to the success of these modern political structures.
 
I've pondered this question many times for my own timeline, and many of the answers are complex and messy.

In my own timeline, the answer is still a failure of the A-H, but its successor states are eventually able to move beyond the spectre of authoritarianism and they have a calmer and more level-headed second half of the 20th century as a result. There is far less damage to minority communities (including Jewish ones) during the nastiest parts of the 20th century, but even with that lesser destruction, people thankfully take lessons from it and know what to avoid. In a sad irony of history, I quickly realised just how oddly "alien" everyday life would be in a post-A-H central Europe, where Christian churches and Jewish communities continued to coexist en masse on a daily basis, due to no holocaust or similar persecution. Already years ago, I explored this topic in this particular thread. Whenever I write some little narrative or idea in that timeline's setting, I keep reminding myself that Jewish citizens (in either an ethnic or religious sense) wouldn't be a rarity, they'd be a frequent sight, alongside all the other nationalities.

One cultural event that also occurs in around the 1960s/1970s in central Europe, and has shades of the OTL Maori Renaissance of New Zealand, is a Romani Renaissance. Given OTL central European history of much of the former Habsburg Empire, that particular ethnicity had it far rougher while transitioning into modernity, and in my timeline they gain a lot more serious respect and acceptance decades earlier.

Though post-A-H nationalism doesn't entirely go away, it becomes a lot more tempered than in OTL. People's focus on loyalties to their home regions contribute to defanging it somewhat. Without a longer-lasting and destructive fascist or communist occupation of these countries, many post-A-H countries gain independence sooner, get rid of autocracy sooner and get to learn the ropes of democracy sooner and for a much longer time, making them more stable countries and less likely to become victims of political whims. Going back to minorities, including religious ones, I often have to wonder what the experience of the Greek Catholic Church in central Europe would be, given that its members were persecuted and outright banned by communist governments in the central European puppets of the USSR. No joke, Greek Catholicism could only make an official comeback in the early 1990s. You might not guess the GCC had it so rough in the not too distant past, based on its current healthy state, but at one point, its persecutors were intent on driving it into extinction within the former countries of A-H.

Austria wasn't a multicultural nation: it was a state containing multiple cultures who saw themselves as their own nations under a loose common umbrella. HOW Austria builds a civic nationalism and gets people to identify as Habsburgs Non-Hyphanated first and foremost is an absolutely vital peice of information

Impossible to let them identify as Habsburgs. Citizens of the Habsburg monarchy, a monarchy they can have unironic and honest pride in, that's a little more plausible. Any sort of civic nationalism would be a complex thing to build, though, and Austria-Hungary would have to undergo a huge amount of reform to account for all its constituent nationalities and religious groups. It's hard to compare a continuing A-H to any contemporary OTL democratic country, with the possible exception of India (multiethnic and multicultural since time immemorial) or Canada (based on a lot of well-working multiculturalism, even if an imperfect one), but both of those examples had also developed in vastly different historical contexts.

I would be interesting to see how Austria-Hungary's nationalities evolve over time. As infrastructure improves and the costs of moving go down a lot more people are going to be moving from the country side to the cities, and from those cities to others. Most urban areas of the empire, even second rate ones, would probably end up becoming highly cosmopolitan despite the empire not being a major recipient of immigrants.

Trust me, the average towns and cities of Austria-Hungary were fairly cosmopolitan to begin with.
 
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Hmm, on a side note, how where muslims treated in the empire? And in the event of federalization, would Bosniaks get their own kingdom or lumped with Serbs/Croats?
 
Hmm, on a side note, how where muslims treated in the empire?

IIRC, (one reason) Franz Josef allowed women doctors in Austria-Hungary was to avoid awkwardness between Muslim women and male doctors who were not related to her. He may not have been pro-Muslim, but they were still his subjects, and so should be treated accordingly.
 
I've pondered this question many times for my own timeline, and many of the answers are complex and messy.

In my own timeline, the answer is still a failure of the A-H, but its successor states are eventually able to move beyond the spectre of authoritarianism and they have a calmer and more level-headed second half of the 20th century as a result. There is far less damage to minority communities (including Jewish ones) during the nastiest parts of the 20th century, but even with that lesser destruction, people thankfully take lessons from it and know what to avoid. In a sad irony of history, I quickly realised just how oddly "alien" everyday life would be in a post-A-H central Europe, where Christian churches and Jewish communities continued to coexist en masse on a daily basis, due to no holocaust or similar persecution. Already years ago, I explored this topic in this particular thread. Whenever I write some little narrative or idea in that timeline's setting, I keep reminding myself that Jewish citizens (in either an ethnic or religious sense) wouldn't be a rarity, they'd be a frequent site, alongside all the other nationalities.

One cultural event that also occurs in around the 1960s/1970s in central Europe, and has shades of the OTL Maori Renaissance of New Zealand, is a Romani Renaissance. Given OTL central European history of much of the former Habsburg Empire, that particular ethnicity had it far rougher while transitioning into modernity, and in my timeline they gain a lot more serious respect and acceptance decades earlier.

Though post-A-H nationalism doesn't entirely go away, it becomes a lot more tempered than in OTL. People's focus on loyalties to their home regions contribute to defanging it somewhat. Without a longer-lasting and destructive fascist or communist occupation of these countries, many post-A-H countries gain independence sooner, get rid of autocracy sooner and get to learn the ropes of democracy sooner and for a much longer time, making them more stable countries and less likely to become victims of political whims. Going back to minorities, including religious ones, I often have to wonder what the experience of the Greek Catholic Church in central Europe would be, given that its members were persecuted and outright banned by communist governments in the central European puppets of the USSR. No joke, Greek Catholicism could only make an official comeback in the early 1990s. You might not guess the GCC had it so rough in the not too distant past, based on its current healthy state, but at one point, its persecutors were intent on driving it into extinction within the former countries of A-H.



Impossible to let them identify as Habsburgs. Citizens of the Habsburg monarchy, a monarchy they can have unironic and honest pride in, that's a little more plausible. Any sort of civic nationalism would be a complex thing to build, though, and Austria-Hungary would have to undergo a huge amount of reform to account for all its constituent nationalities and religious groups. It's hard to compare a continuing A-H to any contemporary OTL democratic country, with the possible exception of India (multiethnic and multicultural since time immemorial) or Canada (based on a lot of well-working multiculturalism, even if an imperfect one), but both of those examples had also developed in vastly different historical contexts.



Trust me, the average towns and cities of Austria-Hungary were fairly cosmopolitan to begin with.

There are some very informed and brilliant thinkers in this forum, the compliant I often find for myself is the trains of thought do not go far enough into the difference, the truly different the world can become. That said we only have our on history to give firm guides and it does sober us. So I do not know if any ATL is better or worse, but I know it will not be the same. And we like any writers will see some darlings killed.

I agree, nationalism will be less fully drawn back from in this world, and things like antisemitism are not so easily discredited, indeed without a WWII we might see more racism, "racial" concepts and selective abortion may be very acceptable. Evil and ugliness is not simply washed from the history. But I am not a fan of thinking we need a Holocaust to move beyond hate. Minority culture is just as threatened by assimilation in even the most cosmopolitan A-H, or Europe, or world. So I would say there are Czech language newspapers in Vienna, Polish radio in the Ruhr, and German television in Transylvania, not unlike modern Europe, street side over coffee will be a mixture of language.

To your point I have vaguely and conservatively estimated a population in Germany of around 105 million, if that is 1.24% Jewish, that is 1.3 million Jews in Imperial Germany. Still a small minority but far more relevant for their influence. So first I think the survival of the Jewish population is a major impact. As one moves East the tapestry becomes more blended, Christianity is not so dominant. My best guess is that the Jewish continue to secularize, they likely look more and more German majority, they might even be the secularizing force in European culture shifting the paradigm to a religious neutral vantage. They are an oddly disperse ethnicity that can move Eastern culture westward, pulling it into the cities. The stereotype of the Jewish shopkeeper will not fade but I think the relevance of will blur to insignificance. For me the lines between Jewish as a religion and Jewish as an ethnicity and Jewish as a culture may blur and be more distinct, modern Israel has evolved a strong secular culture, influences from the Jewish quarter ill seep in, so that Kosher food becomes ordinary despite being a small populace, a small practicing populace, but an easy thing for a mass market food brand to simply do. Some average Dane might buy the Kosher milk imported from East Prussia because it tastes good barely thinking of religion, but touched by Jewish religion and culture. Amplify that as we move into A-H. And next the Romani are another minority that sort of pops up all over continental Europe. I think we see some similar things occurring as their culture reawakens, by the 1960s or so we might truly see a more tolerant if not rather more inclusive mindset, giving voice to the heretofore hidden cultures of Europe may become vogue as you imply. A cross border cultural minority should offer some genuine softening of the notions of what it means to be from any particular place.

We see that in the Ruhr Poles, not an insignificant population who in many ways were assimilating into German culture. I am uncertain what influences they brought, but I like to think they brought something of Poland to the Ruhr. As one can tell I think Poles will migrate, partly as I think Poland remains under industrialized, thus its rural population more easily move to German or A-H cities, not unlike today, and they give a glimpse at how migration might work. What I can conjecture on is that they will feed political Catholicism, a political dynamic that will reach over borders. So will we see the Catholic populace share a socially conservative yet also oddly liberal agenda between the two power centers of Berlin and Vienna? Zentrum aligned with the SDP and often both Liberal factions, later merging with the Lutheran/Protestant conservatives to give us the CDU. If the domestic parties across Europe see a similar consolidation of conservative politics rooted in Ruhr Catholic Zentrum, how much different is the political debate? How much stronger the Catholic views over the Protestant? And that opens doors into Italian and Spanish political as well as cultural views, potentially e-aligning conservative Catholic French politics towards the otherwise Central Powers, at some distant point? A-H will be one of most diverse political systems going, but it has the ability to become the conservative underbelly of Europe, unifying the other Catholic nations in ways Germany could or cannot. My point is it will be different and full of weird turns I think get glossed by how our history ended.

Without Communist persecution we might see a secular and atheist Europe. Depending upon what happens with the Muslim minorities in A-H we have more strange turns to take. A-H had a history of opposition to the Muslim encouragement, it defined the Hapsburgs as defenders of Christian Europe. We know Germany formed a bond to Ottoman Turkey and less obviously to Islamic culture. A surviving A-H might invigorate the connections between Europe and the Middle East, potentially surviving the war, Muslim minorities might find lucrative opportunity in both Europe and the Islamic world, creating unexpected bridges not just for the religions but yet more. There is too much to unpack from just how different an A-H can be or can impact the rest of Europe. To call it cosmopolitan is tipping the iceberg. For me it is the dysfunction in A-H that should offer the most opportunity, there are a lot of diverse folks who are going to make this work, the failures will be abundant, but holding it all together is the same force that pulls Europe together now, trying to make it work outside your nation, your culture and your language seems to bind Europeans a little more than it tears them apart. Nine steps backwards but ten steps forwards. That one step gain is all we can hope for and not an insignificant reward.

Sorry mine are more philosophy than concrete but I think it might not just be "the more things change, the more they stay the same," a thing I lean on to keep my ATL "real", at bottom my suspicion is that it will get unfamiliar fast. So I explore the loose ends to see what might be likely but too weird. Thank you for indulging the delving beyond the map into the realm of dragons.
 
Austria wasn't a multicultural nation: it was a state containing multiple cultures who saw themselves as their own nations under a loose common umbrella. HOW Austria builds a civic nationalism and gets people to identify as Habsburgs Non-Hyphanated first and foremost is an absolutely vital peice of information
Assimilated German-speaking Jews were the only subjects who were primarily loyal to the state rather than some national group, and they could end up forming a dependable group of military officers and administrators who could be expected not to try and secede as part of a new or existing nation-state (Czechs, Poles, Romanians, etc.). Jewish men could become officers

The way we think about autonomy could change, many nationality theorists in the Empire favored a national personal autonomy approach that attached rights to individuals, rather than territories. Each citizen would pay taxes to an educational-cultural association for their respective language, with each language association comprised of imperial and provincial branches that would fund schools, theaters, libraries, etc. for the people in their areas.

This could allow Yiddish to survive in an institutionalized form without a Yiddish-speaking majority province in the Empire, and ease the situation of enclaves like German and Hungarian speakers in Transylvania, or Italians in border areas. There was a large amount of intra-imperial Jewish migration in the years before WW1, and a growing cultural divide between wealthier, more secular assimilated German-speakers and more recent and religiously observant Yiddish-speakers from Galicia.

There were several ennobled Jewish families as early as the 1830s, and Jewish subjects gained equal rights in the 1870s. Famous figures like the mathematician John von Neumann and Ludwig von Mises would grouped together in a pantheon of "Danubian" scientists and intellectuals along with Carel Capek, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Karl Kautsky, etc.
 
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