[InABunkerUnderSF]

In reality the Habsburg empire was doomed by multiculturalism.

[Wallace T.]

The Hapsburg Empire was a patchwork of nationalities mostly living in contiguous geographic areas: Magyars in Hungary, Germans in Austria and the Sudetenland, Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia, etc. There were certain ethnic overlaps, such as German and Jewish minorities in Magyar and Slavic areas, Italians, Germans, and Slavs intermixed in Istria and the Tyrol; Magyars in parts of Serbia, etc. However, it was neither a melting pot nor multicultural in the post-1960 sense of separate ethnicities in the same geographic space.

The Hapsburg concept of a multiethnic empire failed due to the rise of nationalism, the same force that deprived it of political connections with southern Germany, with which the German portion of the empire was culturally and religiously tied. However, the multiethnic empire worked for centuries examples being the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, India in certain periods, and the Russian Empire.

Whatever bad can be said about the Hapsburg Empire, what followed its collapse was worse. The successor countries were mostly authoritarian regimes, some of which sided with the Nazis during World War II. Just because you were now ruled mostly by your co-ethnics did not mean any increase of freedom. After the fall of the Axis powers, almost the entire area of the Hapsburg Empire became subject to Communist tyranny until 1990. The Hapsburgs did not impoverish the subjects, did not massively execute or imprison dissidents, nor barred overseas emigration.