MANY years ago, Tom Nairn – famous for his book After Britain – pointed out that those who would understand Britain’s territorial politics should pay close attention to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Austria-Hungary was one of the early casualties of the 20th century, destroyed by the unbearable pressures of the First World War. In the decades following its demise, it was seen, especially by British historians, as a collapsed soufflé of an empire; worn out, pompous, incapable of reform, and doomed to fail sooner or later.

More recent historians have revised that assessment. Following the near dissolution of the Empire in the 1848 revolutions, unsuccessful experiments in both authoritarian reaction, and a humiliating military defeat by Prussia, the Austro-Hungarian state did reform itself. We are not talking Blairite, half-baked reforms, either, but a complete remaking of the empire – of the kind that the most committed British “Nations and Regions” federalists have long proposed.

The Fundamental Laws of 1867, together forming a written constitution for the empire, provided a basis for a confederal division of power between its Austrian and Hungarian parts. Each part had full autonomy over its own affairs, with its own Government responsible to its own Parliament.

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Uniting them was the Emperor, supported by just three common ministries, responsible for defence, foreign affairs, and joint finance. There was a customs union between the two parts, and cooperation on things like railways and telegraphs, but all this had to be jointly approved by “Delegations” elected by the two Parliaments.

The part referred to as Austria was technically known as Cisleithania: the lands on the near-side of the Leitha river. Even more technically, it was known as The Kingdoms and Lands Represented in the Imperial Council – the Imperial Council being the Parliament of the whole Empire with the exception of Hungary.

Cisleithania included 15 “crown lands”, each of which had its own Landtag, or regional assembly, with limited legislative powers. National groups in the crown lands – like the Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia, or the Poles in Galicia – did not possess the same degree of near-total autonomy as the Hungarians enjoyed, but they did nevertheless have substantial control over their own cultural, educational and local affairs.

It was a complex system, but after a fashion it worked.

The Austro-Hungarian empire, during the period from 1867 to 1914, was for all its faults a recognisably modern, effective, liberal-parliamentary state. It was able to bring about impressive economic growth and to translate that into tangible benefits for its people; in many ways, for example, it was ahead of the United Kingdom in social legislation, such as national insurance.

The point here is not to paint a rosy picture of the Austro-Hungarian empire. It is rather to use it as a mirror to reflect on the United Kingdom and to the prospect of the dissolution of the British-Imperial state.

I have in the past used Austria-Hungary as an example of how the United Kingdom – if someone really wanted to “save the Union” – could remodel the state as a genuine federation.

It is absurd that we have to draw on models from 150 years ago, but there we are: Britain is, constitutionally speaking, about a century and a half behind central Europe.

Here, I want to make a different point: that even states that do manage to successfully reform themselves can fail. They can be swept up in a convulsion that runs out of their control. Events like the First World War, or a pandemic, happen. Demands expand beyond the capacity of the state to meet them. The legitimacy of the state evaporates. Before you know it, empires have fallen and new countries are born – sometimes in unexpected ways – out of the wreckage.

The Austro-Hungarian empire, when it broke, did not break in half. Cisleithania did not stay together. Even some of the states that emerged from it, like Czechslovakia and Yugoslavia, did not stay together.

Today, there are more than a dozen European countries whose present borders overlap what was once Austria-Hungary. Some of those were just geographical names on the map in 1914, whose existence as independent states no-one could reasonably foresee.

What fragments would emerge from the dissolution of the United Kingdom?

A Northern Independence Party has already been formed, campaigning for an independent Northumbria: a modern restoration of the old Anglo-Saxon kingdom. This might be far-fetched, in the same way as an independent Slovakia was once far-fetched.

Nevertheless, the fact that independence is no longer of interest only to Ireland, Scotland and Wales, but also to a peripheral English region, reveals a much deeper risk to the English core of the British state than previously anticipated. Unless England can rediscover a sense of its own nationhood, and can begin to imagine post-British futures, there is a chance that the end of Britain would also be the end of England.