The commonalities across the Irish Sea and the English Channel — severe disquiet over immigration, the continued rise of populism, and the spread of extremist discourse, especially online — reflect the similarities of the challenges. The question of how to accommodate plural identities is a pressing one.

As the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe wrestle with societal and national fragmentation, it is worth looking at how some of the most diverse states coped with difference in the past. And it would be hard to find a better example than the Habsburg Empire, or Austria-Hungary as it was known during the last phase of its existence. Of a total population of 51.4 million in 1910, 23% mainly used German, 19.6% Hungarian, 12.5% Czech and 9.7% Polish. The rest mainly used Italian, Croatian, Ruthenian, Romanian, Slovak and Slovene. It was a veritable Babel and reflected, roughly, the profound national divisions between the peoples who made up the empire. Yet thanks to a series of expedients the Habsburgs were able to muddle through — fortwursteln — without a catastrophic internal breakdown until defeat in the First World War.

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.

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How Britain ignored its ethnic conflict

By Aris Roussinos

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.

Under orders from the Dutch East India Company not to antagonise the locals on whom it depended for trade, van Riebeeck restricted himself to planting a protective bitter almond hedge along the borders of his besieged encampment while continuing to negotiate with the enemy. Thus was early laid the pattern of future South African race relations: an equilibrium of teeth-gritting mutual tolerance mitigated by social distance and punctuated by sporadic violent irruptions, conquests and subjugation.

Remarkably, a single South African constitutional order emerged 340 years after van Riebeeck’s almond hedge through the Act of Union of 1910, and after another 84 years, in 1994, a functioning modern democracy. It is the one we have now, an imperfect and in many ways still teeth-gritting order, but somehow hanging together, somehow prevailing over a society where race may be the driving narrative but economic self-advancement, the consuming passion.

There have indeed been episodic attempts at creating a multi-racial system, such as the qualified enfranchisement of mixed-race people in the Cape Colony. The segregationist viewpoint, however, has long held sway: from its mildest imperial form under the famed administrator Sir Theophilus Shepstone, who created reserves in the Natal Colony for native populations in the mid-19th century, to the ruthless segregation of the Boers, who even trekked from their homes in the Eastern Cape in the early 19th century to escape what they saw as the iniquitous egalitarianism of the British.

But the policy of separation, Apartheid, was only officially crafted in 1948. Race, from then on, was no less omnipresent than it was in the previous century; it was just more complex. After the resurgent Afrikaner middle class, driven by the new Afrikaner nationalism, seized power as the National Party, a class alliance between the poor Afrikaners and poor black population was off the cards. Instead, the Afrikaner nationalists created tribal statelets in which the black population were supposed to be grateful to exercise their vote but still forced to export their labour. The scheme foundered on the implacable reefs of economic implausibility and passive African resistance.

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Ramaphosa has slain the Rainbow Nation

By Brian Pottinger

More successful was the way the National Party turned the state into a vast affirmative action engine for the working-class white population, so successful that three generations later their confident descendants, now affluent, educated and cosmopolitan, overwhelmingly voted in a referendum in March 1992 to surrender political power to the black majority, one of the few occasions in history when a dominant minority voluntarily cedes power to a dispossessed majority.

It would be pleasing to report it all turned out well in the end. It did not, or at least not as well as it could and should have. Racism, like all addictions, continually reinvents itself. In South Africa’s case it was through a corrupt political elite under the flag of the African National Congress that after gaining power in 1994 simply reversed the racism, legislatively favouring their rich black cronies and their children over all comers in jobs, educational opportunities and contracts. Nothing has exacerbated the problem of race relations in South Africa, and driven high skills abroad, as much as this policy of systemically placing race and patronage above any conceivable consideration of merit. It could not work and so, unlike their Afrikaner predecessors, the ANC failed miserably in uplifting their impoverished compatriots through a growing economy. Reverse racism proved to be a zero-sum game.

The dread price for this neglect was upon the ANC in May this year when it lost its majority in Parliament and was forced into a so-called Government of National Unity (GNU), although it is in fact a grand alliance representing two-thirds of the electorate, gathered in an uneasy partnership of the ruling party, liberals, mavericks and traditionalists. Another quarter is represented by the left-behind racist, nativist and anti-constitutionalist rump gathered in the two main opposition parties, the recently sprung Zulu-based Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK) and the Economic Freedom Fighters, the latter a diminished Gucci revolutionary movement now competing with the real deal guys in MK, those who actually do revolution.

The founding principle of our very fine Constitution, enshrined in Chapter One, is that of non-racialism, a notion that has been knocking around South Africa for decades. It embodies the liberal democratic ideal that a person’s worth and life opportunities should be determined by their character, not their colour, and that state institutions should reflect that self-evident truth. Non-racism is the mantra of the political elites, endlessly espoused by the luminaries of the ruling party and the liberal elements of the Opposition.

It has, however, scant basis in current South African reality. Considerations of racial identity infuse all hiring, investing and policy decisions. It is rare that a contentious point of public policy is not turned into a racial bun-fight; the appointment of a deserving white person to high office is not met with catcalls of “anti-transformation”; the announcement of a national sporting team not assailed for “lack of representivity”; an incautious word or action not maliciously turned into a racial cause célèbre by politicians. Is this a temporary malaise? Unlikely: racial preferment is now so embedded in the national psyche that it is hard to see its early demise. Where once the modest demand by black South Africans was equality of opportunity it is now the unattainable equality of outcomes. It is a worn plaint, universally replicated.

In May, the South African electorate voted overwhelmingly on racial lines. African National Congress support came 98% from Africans, Umkhonto we Sizwe 99.4% and the Economic Freedom Fighters 97.6%. The exception was the liberal Democratic Alliance which, although majority white, had a better spread of other races and thus qualifies as the only major South African party that is “non-racial”. As the DA has always battled to attract more than a fifth of the voters and as only 4.2% of African voters supported it in May, the prospects for a change anytime soon seem to be receding. The sobering lesson of the last three and a half centuries, and in particular the last three decades, is that non-racialism is, and always was, a non-starter.

And yet, and yet, the society and the nation shambles forward, often precariously, sometimes purposely and occasionally wondrously.

Partly this is due to the institutional foundations that help hold it together: an excellent constitution and impeccable Constitutional Court; a still largely competent high court system to which South Africa’s squabbling political elites turn with refreshing readiness to resolve their spats. There is also a vituperative and watchful media and many civil activist groups. These entities survive the rolling crises that periodically sweep the country like wild fires in the dry season.

Again, despite all the lip-service to non-racialism, and the failed attempts by the Left and the commercial advertisers to force an image of beery non-racial bonhomie, South Africans, although diverse, remain unrepentantly different. Unlike the United Kingdom, for example, where the establishment talks of diversity but savagely penalises any mention of difference, South Africans are quite happy to talk about their ethnicity, culture, clan, family name, tribe, likes, dislikes, prejudices and stereotypes, as long as one does not resort to pejorative colonial expressions of race or be condescending. Foreign visitors are often struck by how politely ordinary South Africans treat each other in their daily encounters, seemingly able to look beyond a fraught history, difference and a lived legacy of considerable inequality.

Indeed, South Africans have gone to the extent of recognising 11 official languages, one effectively extinct. They have created a Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Rights Commission, a Council of Traditional Leaders, an Equity Court and a Human Rights Commission. All of this is to protect difference and mediate conflict arising from our differences.

The Government of National Unity forced on the ANC mirrors this existent political, social and racial pluralism. It is not a non-racial alliance but a wary coalition of ethnic parties united in the common objective of enriching themselves and their groups and, along the way, hopefully and eventually, all of South Africa. It holds out the possibility of a fresh beginning after all the romantic hogwash about a Rainbow Nation.

Herein the irony: as a riven South Africa grapples to forge a set of national values that yet recognise historic, social and cultural differences, however imperfectly, the political elites in so many developed world countries, United Kingdom included, have done little in recent decades but deny, traduce or belittle the worth or even existence of such values.