Why Did Multinational Empires Become Harder to Govern?

Geoffrey Chen

The Making of the Modern World: Thirty Lectures on Nineteenth-Century European History · Article 26

Looking backwards from a map of later nation-states, it is tempting to treat the Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian empires as political fossils. Once national consciousness awakened, the argument runs, their dissolution was only a matter of time. Yet this retrospective story misses an awkward fact: these empires endured, and during much of the nineteenth century they became better at taxing, conscripting, educating, communicating and administering justice. Many inhabitants did not define themselves by nationality alone. They could feel attachments to dynasty, faith, town, province and language community at the same time.

The fundamental difficulty was therefore not simply ‘too much diversity’. It was the encounter between diversity and a more intrusive modern state. The deeper an imperial government reached into society, the more often it had to decide whose language entered a school, who qualified for public employment, which province paid what taxes and which population received representation. Railways, newspapers and literacy helped Vienna, Istanbul and St Petersburg to govern; they also helped political organisers in Prague, Budapest, Zagreb and countless smaller places to challenge how they were governed. State capacity and society’s capacity to resist grew together.

Diversity was normal, not an imperial defect

Early modern empires rarely expected every subject to speak one language or live under identical laws. Provincial privileges, religious jurisdictions, guilds, estates and indirect government created overlapping layers of authority. Multilingual life was especially common in borderlands, where the language used at home, affiliation in worship and loyalty to a ruler did not necessarily coincide. Imperial arrangements could preserve ambiguous identities that a nation-state found difficult to classify. They also offered extensive markets, military protection and careers across regions.

This flexibility should not be confused with equality. Nobles, provinces and recognised religious communities possessed unequal rights; peasants carried heavy obligations; Jews, Roma and other groups faced legal and social discrimination. One reason older empires accommodated difference was that they did not promise uniform citizenship. Nineteenth-century reform introduced equality into political language, making inherited inequalities harder to justify while raising expectations that imperial institutions often could not satisfy.

The revolutions of 1848 revealed strength as well as weakness

Revolution broke out in Vienna, Budapest, Prague and other imperial cities in 1848. Liberals demanded constitutions, peasants cared about manorial burdens, and national movements sought language rights, autonomy or independence. These aims did not form a single programme. Hungarian revolutionaries opposed central power in Vienna but did not fully accept the demands of Croats, Romanians and Slovaks within the Kingdom of Hungary. The dynasty exploited such divisions and recovered with the help of its army and Russian intervention.

Restoration did not simply return the old order. The abolition of peasant obligations transformed rural society, while administrative centralisation continued. The evidence shows genuine institutional resilience. One persuasive interpretation is that this resilience increasingly depended upon an imperial government promising order, development and equality simultaneously, although those promises frequently pulled policy in different directions.

The Compromise of 1867 succeeded—and remained incomplete

Austrian defeats in 1859 and 1866 weakened the monarchy. In 1867 Emperor Franz Joseph reached the Compromise with Hungarian elites and created Austria-Hungary. Austria and Hungary received separate governments and parliaments while sharing a monarch, foreign affairs, war policy and parts of their finances. The settlement reconciled one of the dynasty’s most powerful opponents, provided a framework for decades of economic growth and proved that an empire could reconstruct itself through negotiation.

Its limits were equally important. Czechs received no position comparable to that of the Magyars; Croatia obtained a narrower settlement; and Budapest promoted Magyar linguistic and political dominance within a highly diverse Hungarian kingdom. Dualism converted one constitutional conflict into a privileged bilateral bargain. It was not programmed to fail, but it supplied no general principle through which every nationality could make an equal claim.

Schools and offices turned language into material power

When government appeared mainly to collect taxes or fight wars, multilingual practice could rely on translation and local custom. Mass schooling, professional courts, postal systems, railways and statistical administration demanded standards. In what language would children study? Which language would universities and civil-service examinations use? How would place names be written, and which testimony would a court accept? Answers affected social mobility, not merely cultural pride.

Language conflict should consequently not be dismissed as ancestral hatred. Much of it arose from new institutions and new opportunities. One community saw mother-tongue schooling as equal treatment; another feared that the same school implied a territorial claim. Officials called a common administrative language efficient, while minorities experienced assimilation. Censuses also pressed bilingual, local or situational identities into fixed boxes, turning descriptive categories into political numbers.

Mass politics offered peaceful channels and sharpened competition

Constitutions, newspapers, associations and elections enabled more people to state grievances publicly. Parliamentary bargaining sometimes produced language compromises, provincial autonomy and coalition government. Democratisation did not inherently destroy empires. Yet constituencies, budgets and posts could readily be counted by nationality. If majority rule meant that one community would always win, a permanent minority had little reason to regard the state as its own.

Activists also helped make the nations they claimed to represent. Teachers, clergy, lawyers, journalists and folklorists selected standard languages, wrote histories and built cultural organisations. This does not mean nations were invented from nothing. It means that political boundaries and mass loyalties did not arrive intact from antiquity: government policy, organised persuasion and everyday choices made identities more definite and more competitive.

Economic modernisation did not dissolve national politics

Imperial cities and rail networks created cross-national interdependence. Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Trieste and Lviv were centres of commerce, study and culture with frequently mixed populations. A common market conferred practical benefits upon firms and workers. It does not follow that prosperity automatically produced a common loyalty. Uneven development, rural migration and competition for new middle-class occupations could instead strengthen national mobilisation.

The same railway investment might be celebrated as imperial integration and condemned as favouritism towards one province. Once an economic grievance was expressed nationally, compromise became harder: an argument over taxes, wages or administrative resources could be experienced as a verdict upon the standing of an entire people.

Russification and Ottoman reform exposed a shared paradox

These empires were not interchangeable. Russian autocracy, the status of Orthodoxy and policies of Russification differed profoundly from Habsburg parliamentary life. Ottoman traditions of religious community, the Tanzimat reforms and European intervention created yet another setting. All three nevertheless encountered a related paradox. To withstand foreign rivalry and separatism, central governments sought a more uniform, direct state. In doing so, they disturbed local rights and helped opponents imagine themselves as a common group.

Ottoman reforms promised greater legal equality among subjects but unsettled established hierarchies and foreign ‘protector’ relationships. Russian officials extended the Russian language and administrative uniformity in the hope of consolidating empire, but could make Polish, Finnish, Ukrainian and other differences more politically meaningful. The effect of policy did not reliably correspond to its intention.

Connection to intellectual history: could liberty, nation and empire coexist?

Nineteenth-century liberalism advocated legal equality and representative government; nationalism asserted that peoples should govern themselves. Together they could be emancipatory, but they left unresolved the identity of ‘the people’. In regions of mixed settlement, drawing a border could not provide every nationality with culturally pure territory. If legitimate government required one culture, a diverse society appeared to face only assimilation, partition or expulsion.

Contemporaries therefore explored federalism, personal language rights, provincial autonomy and forms of supranational citizenship. These were not solutions projected backwards by modern observers but genuine, if incompletely realised, alternatives discussed at the time. Their existence reminds us that the nation-state was not the only imaginable modern polity, just as empire was not the only means of accommodating difference.

War destroyed the room for compromise

Before 1914, multinational empires contained severe fractures but also functioning courts, parliaments, markets and local settlements. Repression and national antagonism were real. So were ordinary cooperation, intermarriage, multiple loyalties and demands for reform rather than separation. The outcome in 1918 does not prove that imperial subjects had all been waiting for independent states.

Total war changed the conditions. Requisitioning, casualties, hunger, military rule and suspicions of disloyalty discredited moderate arrangements, while enemy powers supported separatist causes. As dynasties failed to provide protection and supplies, national councils could present sovereignty as a safer future. New borders nevertheless left large minorities on their wrong side, demonstrating that the imperial problem had not received a tidy national solution.

Multinational empires thus became harder to govern not because diversity obeyed a natural law and inevitably defeated empire. Their difficulty arose as modern states brought classification, resources and participation into everyday life without constructing shared institutions equal and credible enough to manage them. Their failure reveals the limits of imperial domination, but it also carries a warning for nation-states: diversity becomes a crisis when power makes people surrender complex identities in order to gain security and a political voice.

Sources and further reading

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