The Prison of Nations

By the standards of what was to come in Europe, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was not so bad – it was not a police state with concentration camps like the 20th century fascist and communist regimes. But in the 19th century its subject Italians, Serbs, Czechs and Slovaks could not see the future and insisted that they were living in the “Prison of Nations”.  The empire offered no real autonomy to its subject peoples. They could not set their own budgets, enjoy popular sovereignty or levy their own taxes. When it collapsed after World War I, Austro-Hungary seemed as irrelevant as any form of human organisation can be. In the novels and journalism of Stefan Zweig, Robert Musil and Karl Kraus it is a frivolous and doomed empire which everyone knows cannot last. Nothing could be further from our times.

But take a look now at the Eurozone. It isn’t a police state or anything like one, but the democratic rights of its peoples are vanishing.