The United States of Greater Austria

[Tacitus]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_...reater_Austria

The United States of Greater Austria (German: Vereinigte Staaten von Groß-Österreich) was a proposal, conceived by a group of scholars surrounding Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, that never came to pass. This specific proposal was conceived by the lawyer and politician Aurel Popovici in 1906 and aimed at federalizing Austria-Hungary to help resolve widespread ethnic and nationalist tensions.

Nationality conflict[edit]
As the twentieth century started to unfold, the greatest problem facing the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary was that it consisted of about a dozen distinctly different ethnic groups, of which only two, the Germans and Hungarians (who together accounted for about 44% of the total population), wielded any power or control. The other ethnic groups, which were not involved in the state affairs, included Italians, Romanians and Slavic peoples (Bosniaks, Croats, Czechs, Poles, Ruthenians, Serbs, Slovaks, Slovenes and Ukrainians). Among them, only Croats had limited autonomy in the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia. The idea of the Dual Monarchy system of 1867 had been to split the previous Austrian Empire into two realms, one German-dominated, the other Hungarian-dominated. However, after various demonstrations, uprisings and acts of terrorism, it became readily apparent that the notion of two ethnic groups dominating the other ten could not survive in perpetuum.

Franz Ferdinand had planned to redraw the map of Austria-Hungary radically, creating a number of ethnically and linguistically dominated semi-autonomous "states" which would all be part of a larger confederation renamed the United States of Greater Austria. Under this plan, language and cultural identification was encouraged, and the disproportionate balance of power would be corrected. The idea was set to encounter heavy opposition from the Hungarian part of the Dual Monarchy, since a direct result of the reform would have been a significant territorial loss for Hungary.

However, the Archduke was assassinated at Sarajevo in 1914, triggering the outbreak of the First World War. After the war, Austria-Hungary was dismantled and several new nation-states were created, and various Austro-Hungarian territories were ceded to neighbouring countries by the victorious Entente powers. However, many of the new national borders drawn immediately after World War I or afterwards approximately follow the proposed borders of the various states of the proposed United States of Greater Austria.

States proposed by Aurel Popovici[edit]
The idea came from Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth, who proposed to transform the Habsburg Empire into a "Danubian State", a federal state with autonomous regions.[1][2] The following territories were to become states of the federation after the reform. The majority ethnic group within each territory is also listed.



Proposed map of the United States of Greater Austria, by Popovici, 1906
Deutsch-Österreich: German-Austria (present-day Austria with the Italian province of South Tyrol, the Bohemian Forest and South Moravia regions—the southern part of the later Sudetenland—in of the present-day Czech Republic, as well as the Burgenland region in western Hungary including Ödenburg and Pressburg), ethnic German
Deutsch-Böhmen: German Bohemia (Sudetenland territory in northwestern Bohemia, present-day Czech Republic), ethnic German
Deutsch-Mähren: German Moravia (northeastern Sudetenland in Moravia and Austrian Silesia, present-day Czech Republic, later named Province of the Sudetenland), ethnic German
Böhmen: Bohemia proper (southern and central part of Bohemia and Moravia in the present-day Czech Republic), ethnic Czech
Slowakenland: roughly present-day Slovakia, ethnic Slovak
West-Galizien: West Galicia (the western part of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria in present-day Poland), ethnic Polish
Ost-Galizien: East Galicia (the eastern part of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria and the adjacent Bukovina lands, in present-day Ukraine and Poland), ethnic Ukrainian
Ungarn: Hungary (present-day Hungary with southern Slovakia and the northern Vojvodina region in present-day Serbia), ethnic Magyar
Seklerland: Székely Land (part of present-day Romania), ethnic Magyar
Siebenbürgen: Transylvania, the Banat and Bukovina (part of present-day Romania and Ukraine), ethnic Romanian
Trento: Trentino (part of present-day Italy), ethnic Italian
Triest: Trieste and Gorizia, parts of present-day Italy, western Istria, part of present-day Croatia and Slovenia), ethnic Italian and Slovenian
Krain: Carniola (roughly present-day Slovenia with the Slovene-speaking territory of southern Carinthia), ethnic Slovene
Kroatien: Croatia (present-day Croatia, Srem in present-day Serbia and Boka Kotorska in present-day Montenegro), ethnic Croatian and Serb
Woiwodina: Vojvodina (part of present-day Serbia and Croatia), ethnic Serb and Croatian.
In addition, a number of mostly German-speaking enclaves in eastern Transylvania, the Banat and other parts of Hungary, southern Slovenia, large cities (such as Prague, Budapest, Lviv, and others) and elsewhere were to have autonomy within the respective territory.

If implemented, could this have saved Austria-Hungary, or would it's collapse have been inevitable?

[noricum]

If they have had this idea a mere 100 years earlier, it might have worked. From about 1848 onwards it was all doomed to fail.