<\/p>
Stephen Howe ( Empire: A Very Short Introduction <\/em> ) admits that nationalists in the Austro-Hungarian empire \u201cscorned it as the \u2018prison-house of nations,\u201d and that to the intellectuals of Vienna, the empire was \u201ca senile absurdity.\u201d <\/p>\n Still, \u201cthe very existence of those nationalist, cultural, and intellectual movements, able to express their damning criticisms with largely unrestricted freedom, hints at a more positive story.\u201d The empire\u2019s \u201cefforts at achieving peaceful coexistence through a pluralist, \u2018multicultural\u2019 policy (for instance sponsoring education in all the empire\u2019s languages) were stenuous, and in many ways ahead of their time.\u201d <\/p>\n He concludes that \u201cnone other of the great modern empires shared power more sidely among its constituent peoples, and none came closer to achieving something which was perhaps an impossibility, a contradiction in terms: sustaining a multinational empire which was also a democracy.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Stephen Howe ( Empire: A Very Short Introduction ) admits that nationalists in the Austro-Hungarian empire \u201cscorned it as the \u2018prison-house of nations,\u201d and that to the intellectuals of Vienna, the empire was \u201ca senile absurdity.\u201d Still, \u201cthe very existence of those nationalist, cultural, and intellectual movements, able to express their damning criticisms with largely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"yoast_head":"\n