Compromise killed off the Habsburgs Too much devolution always leads to collapse

Because of this long-term survival, some in the UK saw in Austria-Hungary a solution for their own problems of how to reconcile the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish. As the historian Alvin Jackson points out in his ground-breaking study of these issues, when Prime Minister William Gladstone tried to address the “Irish Question” in the late 19th century, he studied the “compromise” reached between the Habsburgs and the Hungarians very carefully. Arthur Griffith, who founded Sinn Féin in 1905, even hailed that agreement as the “resurrection” of Hungary which could serve as an example for a dual Anglo-Irish monarchy.

Both the United Kingdom and Austria-Hungary emerged out of early modern composite monarchies, polities where the crown ruled over territories which were governed in very different ways. In the British case, the solution was found in the establishment of a parliamentary union, in 1707 and then expanded upon in 1801, in which everybody was represented on an equal basis — according to the franchise of the time — at Westminster. England, Scotland and Ireland ceased to exist, politically; Wales had been abolished some time earlier. This arrangement facilitated the basis for the rise of one of the most powerful states the world has ever seen.

The Habsburgs took the opposite route. After various experiments of their own they settled on a “composite democracy” with a monarch at its head. In 1867, Emperor Franz Josef’s Ausgleich — “compromise” — divided the empire into two halves, both with parliamentary representation. Despite making up only 40% of the population of the “Hungarian” half, the Magyars lorded it over the “subject” Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs and Croats. The other half had no official name but had a plurality (about 37.5%) of German speakers mainly in Bohemia, Moravia and present-day Austria. Because the two parts were divided by the river Leitha, they were known as Cisleithania and Transleithania.

Both the United Kingdom and the Habsburg Empire faced the onslaught of late 19th-century European politics: rising nationalism with the resulting identity politics over language, education and employment, and class conflict. Both saw demands for solutions based on partition, and both were subjected to the rigours of the First World War. But they coped very differently.

Austria-Hungary staggered from crisis to crisis as it tried to cope with what the historian Steven Beller calls a “witches’ brew” of competing demands and hatreds. Vienna sought to keep the lid on things through a series of “compromises” in Croatia, Moravia, and Bukovina and Galicia. Governance, as the veteran Prime Minister of Cisleithania Viscount Eduard Taaffe once remarked, was a matter of keeping the various groups in a state of “well-tempered discontent”. For example, the “compromise” with the Poles was at the expense of letting them dominate the Jews and Ruthenes of Galicia. Parliament was a zoo. The capital city, home to a huge immigrant population, especially Slavs from all parts of the Empire and Jews particularly from Galicia, also spawned a vicious xenophobic and antisemitic discourse. It was no wonder the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus referred to the empire as a “Laboratory for World Destruction”.

The United Kingdom performed far better at managing tensions between its territories. Most of the British Isles developed an ideological, rather than national, form of politics: the Conservatives, Liberals and later the Labour Party won support across three of the four nations. Only in Ireland, where differences between Catholics and Protestants continued to play a major role, did nationalism come to dominate. But, despite their best efforts to obstruct and disrupt parliament, Irish nationalists never managed to bring Westminster to the same state of confusion as Czech, Polish, Slovene, Italian and even German nationalists inflicted on the Reichsrat in Vienna.

Moreover, unlike the Habsburg Empire, which collapsed in 1918, the UK emerged from four years of conflict in the First World War as a victor, losing only the Irish Free State in its aftermath. Six of the nine counties of Ulster remained in the United Kingdom. Partition was traumatic to be sure, but remained a largely contained event which did not affect the rest of Europe much. In fact, the separation of the 26 counties was made possible by the British victory over Germany, because it was hard to envisage how a separate state on the western flank would present an immediate military challenge.

Despite the relative success of the British model, when compared with its European alternatives, the demand for national recognition grew throughout the late 20th century. In Northern Ireland, the introduction of a devolved parliament in 1920 facilitated discrimination against the Catholic population. After the end of the Cold War, and the apparent passing of strategic threats to the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Tony Blair introduced devolution in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. There were now representative bodies across the Irish Sea, on the other side of the Wye River, and beyond the Tweed, which dealt with matters not “reserved” to Westminster. Some, such as the Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland, George Roberston, predicted that “Devolution will kill Nationalism stone dead”.

The British Ausgleich was also lopsided. It gave expression to the nationalism of only three of the four nations. England had no separate parliamentary assembly, and politically was defined by being non-devolved. All of England’s laws were voted on by representatives from all four nations, but the country had no say in the laws passed by the devolved assemblies. The largest nation seemed to be left out.

The UK, then, in the 20th century seemed to draw on the experience of the Habsburg Empire — but its legacy is disputed. The failure of the successor states, whether fascist or communist, put things in perspective. As they stewed in the Soviet Bloc, many Central European intellectuals developed a nostalgia for a framework which had allowed them to coexist in relative freedom. Shortly after the end of communism, the renowned Hungarian historian István Deák argued in his 1990 book, Beyond Nationalism, that the “Habsburg Experiment” in supranational organisation should be revisited. “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that we can find here a positive lesson while the post-1918 history of central and east central European nation-states can only show us what to avoid.” The historian Solomon Wank, by contrast, pointed out in 1997 that the empire had simply “stoked the fires of national rivalry” which ultimately consumed it.

Either way, it is not obvious what the UK now can learn from the Habsburgs today. First, because they had little useful to say about immigration, one of the main preoccupations of the recent riots. Indeed, the mayor of Vienna Dr Karl Lueger famously exploited antisemitic hatred of Jewish migrants for personal political gain. Secondly, as we have seen, because the Austro-Hungarian leadership aggravated national differences, as much as they mitigated them.

What the UK can do is learn from the mistakes of the Habsburgs. State indulgence of nationalism before 1914 simply increased the chaos. Likewise, the introduction of devolution in the UK, far from “killing” the demand for separation “stone dead”, actually whetted appetites. In Scotland, the establishment of the assembly in Edinburgh increased calls for separation from the United Kingdom so much that London was forced to concede a referendum in 2014 which at one point it feared to lose. In Wales, interest in independence, though still weak, grew after the introduction of devolution. In Northern Ireland the devolved institutions may have helped bring some form of peace, but they also facilitate continuous squabbling between the two communities. We therefore have enough, and perhaps too much, devolution — we do not need any more compromises.

The UK Union is based on the assumption that we have four nations whose members are English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish, but also — if they want to be — British as well. If the UK followed the Austro-Hungarian example any further, the result might be the “resurrection” of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and even England — but it would also be the death of Britain.