The Austro-Hungarian Empire was humane, tolerant, and an early multinational state

Evidence

And we must also briefly reconsider what used to be thought of as the “Marxist” interpretation: The Trial as the representation of the ramshackle bureaucracy of an Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of collapse. There is much truth to this interpretation also, except for the suggestion that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was in any way a nightmare. On the contrary, besides being the last of the old archaic empires, it was also the first multinational and multiethnic state: comfortably inefficient when compared with Prussia, humane and tolerant when juxtaposed with the czars; finally not a bad arrangement at all, and an intriguing model in our own postnational period, still riven by nationalisms. The K.-and-K. structure plays a part in Kafka, but not exactly in the way in which the “bureaucracy-as-nightmare” interpretation (the Empire as a foretaste of Auschwitz) wants to suggest. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 672

Categorization

• XREF: This rehabilitated portrait of a polyglot, tolerant multiethnic state resonates with the reader’s goal of mapping their own position in the world system — a model of postnational coexistence. — connects to: Vienna simultaneously hosted Hitler’s antisemitism model and Austro-Marxist socialism — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 203
• SEED: Article angle: ‘The Habsburg Empire as Precedent for Postnational Politics’ — how a comfortably inefficient multiethnic state looks newly attractive against today’s resurgent nationalisms.