It’s come to my attention that the differences between the former Austrian Empire, and the former Yugoslav state are superficial.
Both were multi-ethnic polities.
Both had large ethnic groups which dominated the others.
(Yugoslavia, Croats and Serbs, Austrian Empire, Austrians and Hungarians)
Both collapsed due to the centre trying to desperately hold onto the remaining power and refused to relinquish anymore to the other minorities.
Is this coincidence, or were the Serbian revolutionaries who wanted to destroy the Austrian Hungarian empire invariably influenced by the enemy who had annexed Bosnia?
Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke and Sophie to galvanize the pan-South-Slav movement and set their overthrow plans into action. There were a lot of Pan-Thisism and Pan-Thatism movements in those days that joined together various related nationalities in a wider family umbrella. I mean think of the history of the Ghost Dance movement in the American West that united many Indian tribes of very diverse origins and cultures. Jugo Slavija was hmm the only one of these “Pans” I can think of that actually achieved its political goal, albeit in a limited sense. It was only a subset of Pan-Slavism, and it was inherently unstable over time.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire, on the other hand, was assembled under no such meta-nationalist feelings. It was a survival of mediæval dynastic rule, in which the dynasty was everything but ethnicity counted for little. The Hungarians did successfully break out their own sub-empire through their nationalist movement, but beyond that, Pan-Turanism would have been a very long shot. Pan-South-Slavism, on a more modest and circumscribed scale, was temporarily feasible.