“We also got the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian empire – Europe’s first truly internationalist empire of tolerance and melting pots – to be replaced by the crummy and oppressive European Union.”
If the A-H empire was so great, why did hundreds of thousand emigrate to other countries? The fact is, it was neither tolerant or a melting pot.
A lot of that migration was for economic reasons - people looking for a better life.
The fact is, it was neither tolerant or a melting pot.
It sort of was. Look at a Vienna phonebook and you'll find names coming from a dozen nationalities or more, so it was a melting pot.
And it probably was more tolerant than what came later. Of course people had complaints. The various nationalities weren't masters in their own countries, and they didn't like that, but compared to what came later, they weren't severely oppressed either.
The empire passed a law saying that government workers in Bohemia had to know both Czech and German. That outraged the Germans and didn't satisfy the Czechs, but it was something relatively novel for the time, something that other empires wouldn't do.
It wasn't an entirely bad thing that Poles and Ukrainians lived under the Austrian flag. Populations were mixed and if one nationality or the other got the upper hand the underdogs would complain more loudly than if they had the distant, relatively detached Austrians to complain about.
Same thing with Serbs, Croats and Bosnians. After the empire fell, they hated each other more than they ever hated the Austrians or Hungarians. I'm not saying Austria-Hungary was paradise or a model for the US today, but compared to some other empires, it wasn't that bad.