The development of Great Britain and Austria-Hungary, two leading but quite different powers, throws a powerful light on the dynamics of nationalism in Europe before 1914. At home Britain made more of its citizens feel a part of the nation by passing consecutive voting rights bills that gave solid middle-class males the right to vote in 1832, all middle-class males and the best-paid male workers the right in the Second Reform Bill of 1867, and finally every adult male through the Third Reform Bill of 1884. Moreover, extensive social welfare measures, slow to come to Great Britain, were passed in a spectacular rush between 1906 and 1914. The ruling Liberal Party substantially raised taxes on the rich as part of the so-called People’s Budget to pay for national health insurance, unemployment benefits, old-age pensions, and a host of other social measures. The state was integrating the urban masses socially as well as politically.

On the eve of World War I, however, the unanswered question of Ireland brought Great Britain to the brink of civil war. The terrible Irish famine of the 1840s and early 1850s had fueled an Irish revolutionary movement. The English slowly granted concessions but refused to give Ireland self-government. In 1910 Irish nationalists in the British Parliament supported the Liberals in their battle for the People’s Budget. In 1913 Liberals accordingly gave them enough support to pass a bill granting Ireland self-government, or home rule.

The Irish Catholic majority in the southern counties ardently desired home rule. Irish Protestants in the northern counties of Ulster, however, vowed to resist it, fearing they would fall under the control of the majority Catholics. Unable to resolve the conflict as World War I started in August 1914, the British government postponed indefinitely the whole question of Irish home rule.

The dilemma of conflicting nationalisms in Ireland helps one appreciate how desperate the situation in the Austro-Hungarian Empire had become by the early twentieth century. Following the savage defeat of the Hungarian republic (see “The Austrian Habsburgs” in Chapter 18), Hungary was ruled as a conquered territory, and Emperor Franz Joseph (r. 1848–1916) and his bureaucracy tried hard to centralize the state and Germanize the language and culture of the different nationalities.

Following its defeat by Prussia in 1866, a weakened Austria was forced to establish the so-called dual monarchy. The empire was divided in two, and the nationalistic Magyars gained virtual independence for Hungary. The two states were joined only by a shared monarch and common ministries for finance, defense, and foreign affairs. Still, the disintegrating force of competing nationalisms continued unabated, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire was progressively weakened and eventually destroyed by the conflicting national aspirations of its different ethnic groups. It was these ethnic conflicts in the Balkans, the “powder keg of Europe,” that touched off the Great War in 1914 (see Chapter 28).