What if: the Austro-Hungarian empire federalises

In OTL the Austro-Hungarian empire disolved due to ethnic tension. Much of this ethnic tension was motivated by priviliges for Germans and Hungarians.

What if another solution was presented to the Austrio-Hungarian question? What if the empire was federalised? Federalisation instead of seccesion.

How would the empire be federalised? Should each commune have a census and belong to the majority ethnic group? Or should ethnic federal states be carved out on a different basis? Which basis? How would the map look like?

What effects would federalisation have on the economy of the empire? During WW2 a problem for the Austro-Hungarian empire was that the train systems of diferent regions did not fit each other, something that decreased the transportation effiancy.

Was federalism ever a possible soulution for the Austro Hungarian empire?

Something to dig into:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_of_Greater_Austria
http://euromaidanpress.com/2017/10/...-is-hungary-aiming-to-grab-a-part-of-ukraine/
http://trianon-dilemma.blogspot.no/2011/01/communique.html
AH had too many overlapping nationalities for clean nationality based administrative divisions to be drawn up. I think the only viable federalization would be to divide it up along existing administrative divisions (crown lands in Cisleithania [perhaps some should be broken down further], counties in Hungary). It would probably still step on a lot of toes, but it would probably be less jarring than creating entirely new, often entirely arbitrary, boundaries on the basis that people who don't speak the same language inevitably want to kill each other.
 
Not really. And one religion majority was true in A-H as well, with 76.6% of population being Catholics (90.9% in Cisleithania). And one group of languages (Indo-European) was also spoken by 80,43% of the total population of A-H. Kind of unifying factors as well?
I'd say that India has much larger problems than historical A-H, but people are not living in fear of the imminent collapse of the Indian state.
And religion was for long time something which was part of glue which held Monarchy together. As to same group of languages, maybe I am mistaken but per my Indian colleges intelligibility between many of Indo-Aryan languages is huge. I was led to believe something like among Slavic languages while German and especially Hungarian are not intelligible among them or with Slavic and Romanian languages used in Monarchy. There are of course loan words. Actually a lot of them.
But of course this could be solved, especially if smaller nation would be given choice of choosing second language.

Not as stable as Sweden in the 1980s, but surely stable enough to stay together without a catalysmic world war to tear it apart by force.
I agree with you. But it would be interesting.
Hungarian Kingdom had population app. 20.8 millions, with app. numbers of nationalities.
Hungarians 10.1 mil
Germans 1.9 mil
Croats, Serbs, Slovens 2.9 mil
Ruthenians 0.42 mil
Romanians 3.2 mil
Slovaks 1.9 mil

With 413 deputies in Hungarian parliament it would be indeed interesting. Of course with increasing rights of smaller nationalities these nationalities would loose their need to vote strictly for national party. See today Slovakia, where strictly Hungarian party didn't made it into Parliament while Hungarian/ Slovak party did and actually is part of coalition.

Such is the sad flaw of representative parliamentarism.
Ethnic unrest and violence on a war next door tends to raise tensions in the neighbouring areas as well.
And considering the later gerrymandering of voter districts and the 2009 language law, I'd say the Hungarian minority was not entirely wrong to feel worried about the breakup of Czechoslovakia.
I agree with flaws. To second. Hungarians had bigger right to worry in 90-ties when Slovak National Party in its hard core nationalistic form was part of Meciar government or directly from Meciar, who was using "Hungarian card" to distract voters from his economic, political and foreign relations "success". They were curbing or trying to curb rights of Hungarians very openly

To language law 2009 (which wasn't really such but novelization of existing law, I know there were protests against form of it. As an example law request to have information on goods in stores, menus in restaurants etc written in state language (Slovak), on other side minorities got right to speak in government offices in minority languages if population of minority exceed 20%. So interestingly the law was getting some flak from nationalists too. According to OBSE responds to international norms, to international agreements about national minorities and and with European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. I am not sure if there was other novelization after. But with Slovak Hungarian politician Bela Bugar now as part of Government I guess some changes would be made. He was just few week ago before recent crisis boasting his party brought Hungarians in Slovakia even more rights. (As a side note, few hours ago I check his facebook page and I saw huge unity of Slovaks and Hungarians alike cursing Bugar for his recent decision to support reconstructed SMER-Most-SNS coalition government.
Hey and btw Hungarian and Slovak National Party in one government! In 90-ties, when at the time Slovak National Party's leader, drunkard Slota was responding to Budapest (often too nationalistic attacks) by his famous and often parodied "I will get in the tank and march on Budapest", probably nobody would bet a single Slovak Krona on that. And for 1 krona, you couldn't even buy newspapers in mid 90-ties, if I remember correctly. ;)

So yes, without war and increasing voting rights nationalities could achieve something like Slovakia did with one minority. ;)
 
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