Forging a Multinational State

Recent studies of the Habsburg empire have attempted to rescue the state from a narrative of what John Deak calls here ‘eternal decline’. The inability of the empire to withstand the strains of total war in the latter years of the First World War, as well as its replacement at war’s end by nation-states, has led to successive generations of historians to depict it as an anachronistic tower of political and cultural Babel. Historians, especially since 1918, have sought out long-term causes of the Habsburg monarchy’s demise, and also long-term roots of the new nation-states themselves. Indeed, scholars unwilling to allow that modern states can be organised and unified by any other means than a powerful centripetal and unitary national core have long patronised the polyglot, ‘multi-national’ empire. Deak attributes this condescension to Hegel and his disciples, with their insistence on nationhood as the highest plane of political development. But this interpretation quite obviously owes much to the First World War: not only because the conflict caused the demise of the Habsburg empire and its approach to state formation, but also because it normalised the nation-state as the first cause of state formation in the modern period

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