The preservation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire by means of federalisation in the interests of the Slavic peoples: myth or missed opportunity?

Austrian (Austro-Hungarian since 1867) Empire was a country with a unique combination of different peoples under the auspices of the Habsburg monarchy. However, the existing model of the national-state structure did not reflect the requests of its ethno-poLiticaL system, mainly that for adequate political representation of the Slavic peoples. The desire of the monarchy to observe the supranational principle as weLL as the conservatism of the Vienna bureaucracy and the general inertia of Austrian political and administrative mechanism made it difficult to reform the state structure of the Empire. The author concludes that certain opportunities for this reform that would take into account the ethnic factor developed after the "Spring of Nations" in 1848 and Austria's defeat in the war with Prussia in 1866, when Vienna was excluded from the process of German unification and couLd address internal problems. However, the combination of subjective and objective factors together with the position of the main political actors in the process of transforming the structure of the Empire promoted Vienna's compromise with Hungary. This duaListic modeL strengthened and preserved the country for a whiLe, but the rejected demands of SLavic (mostLy Czech) Leaders for a deeper nationaL-territoriaL reform Limited the maneuver for the ImperiaL authorities and exacerbated the crisis that eventually led to the collapse of the Austrian Empire in 1918.

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