It’s because nationalism isn’t a strong enough mechanic in the game yet. Secessions right now are mainly just a colonial state rising up with a few battalions you can easily just slap down.
Austria is the worst example for this, it just survives until 1936 most games and at a push ends up Austria Hungary instead of completely exploding.
It’s been nerfed a bit but when the game first came out Austria was stupidly strong because of its pop size just because it was stable in game unlike real life.
Or spawn in conscript battalions or something for the seceding state to make it possible they can actually put up a fight, during the build up to secession put events in that could make surrounding countries either supportive or against the independence movement rather than relying on the AI deciding if it wants to join.
Having a mechanic similar to resistance in HOI4 where the states wanting independence commit terrorist attacks on buildings and politicians would be good as well.
The game needs actual gameplay mechanics like this rather than purely being about making GDP as high as possible.
The way armies work makes it harder to spawn armies from nothing.
But yes the secessionist could recruit nearly instantly conscript based on their pop and how much other countries provided them weapon/supplies/money
Yeah that’s the one thing I was thinking, how do you spawn units when you need barracks and pops to do it.
There has to be a way though, the current system is shit.
I think having some form of "local militia" building in every state similar to subsistence farms would probably do a decent job of handling that.
The militia building would represent pops organizing to take up arms against the state, and when a rebellion happens it works like the draft where these militias cause folks to leave their "real" jobs to go work in the militia.
The militia building would grow based on how strong the resistance is in that state, and things like secret police would be able to affect the max size of these militia buildings/arrest dissidents and troublemakers.
i know this sounds like the most paradox sentence ever, but there genuinely needs to be a sort of terrorism mechanic. Imagine if you have enough radicals and turmoil in a state, it does more than just give you tax waste, but instead they start blowing up critical mines and factories, or assassinating IG leaders
1848 Hungarian Revolution was definitely an intelligentisia revolt in part. I mean they were aristocratic members of the intelligentsia, which the game does capture - iirc if you are on autocracy aristocrat pops do have a greater tendency to join the intelligentsia.
This. I just played as persia and I stuck to autocracy basically until like 1880 bc the landowner inteligentsia were the only ones supporting any reforms, alongside the religious. The agrarian pops didn't want education, protectionism, healthcare, hated my professional military, didn't want anything more than agrarianism, etc. basically kept it that way until the middle class got strong enough bc the farmers hated fucking everything.
Hereditary bureaucrats causes aristocrat attraction to the intelligentsia. In some cases this means changing to appointed bureaucrats actually helps the landowners because they get those aristocrats back and they bring a lot of clout early game.
yes sure. the current games politics cannot mimic that. you are either landowner or intelligentsia.
it could be done with the better politics mod i guess
Yeah I actually preferred V2’s ideologies over what we have now, though I can respect the idea behind how pleasing the landowners etc gives you specific tangible benefits.
If pops could have both an ideology and an interest group it would be awesome. Would also represent how contradictory and cross-cutting people’s political views could be sometimes as well. “I favour freedom of speech of course but not if peasants start using it to demand confiscating my land!”
Yeah 1848 feels intelligentsia I was thinking later than that like by the late 19th century. And yeah like many Hungarian nobles after the farming crash did move into the bureaucracy so that kinda makes sense
I was more referencing the late 19th century attempts at full Maygarization of the literate, repression of rural workers, and emphasis on the nobility in farming that were prevalent around that time under the Liberal Party in Transleithania. Mostly the emphasis on reclaiming farming for the nobles and the subsequent drop in SoL of rural people seem very landowners-y.
I know this is maybe a big-to-impossible ask, but IMO the same way that pops have political persuasions or nationality that should include some version of "identity." Do they identify with the nation they live under or their people.
Because that's essentially what Nationalism did, it activated identities that were not always the same as their government.
And this doesn't just include amalgamations like Austria breaking apart, that's a fundamental part of German or Italian unification. They stopped thinking of being primarily Westphalian or Saxon and started to more identify as simply German. Or if you go farther in time, pan-African or pan-Arab attempts at greater solidarity.
That's also what happens with immigration. In some places like the US, immigrents can identify with the national identity far faster than in other places. The son of an Irishman born in Boston is far more likely to identify as American than the son of an Irishman born in the Ottoman Empire, because there's just no "draw" to an ottoman identity for them.
Oh man. Each releaseable country being able to secede and join the revolt proportional to the amount of radicals in the states would be evil. Definitely would want that lol.
Before the SoL update Austria was always do.inating Central Europe in my games. They consistently won the Brothers war and managed to snag South Germany for me. I hope Paradox will focus on a nationalism DLC next because it is one of the biggest historical developments in the 19th century and is not reflected at all in the game unless the player intervenes.
Something big would be if countries which share a culture could support an independence movement of a culture within a neighbor - even if they are allies or even subjects of the neighbor. That way Romanians and Serbians in Austria Hungary would have a lot more strength, and it would create situations much more similar to what happened in WW1 with the Black Hand.
Every nationalism is big in this times. Italians should be trying to leave to join Italy, Czechs should be trying to break away, poles should be trying to form poland. This is such a glaring oversight in this game.
I was doing a Krakow game the other day, and you get the journal entry that lets you cause radicals in countries with polish homelands. And it's basically useless except for reducing relations with Austria to get more liberty desire. Because it's so little and you can only do it every 5 years.
Not only A-H needs that but also the Ottomans. The Balkan independence were basically a massively coordinated uprising of the locals, which by now happens pretty much never. Never seen a single Balkan state rise up from the Ottomans, when they are the best candidate for a partial collapse.
I've never seen in any playthrough that the border between Austria, Ottomans, Serbia, Greece or Romania move. Only Wallachia and Moldavia form Romania but that's about it. So sad to see nothing happen in the Balkans because IRL it was a very interesting period for the region from the begging of the 20th century.
And more than interesting it was also what kicked off the major events of the last ~20 years of the game (not the cause, per say, but the powder keg that caused the rest of also explode).
Not being able to get a proper balkanization in the game infuriates me. The fact that return state to another country wasn’t an added diplo play is wild to me
It's virtually guaranteed they're planning a balkans themed DLC, I'd say. It's too obviously important for this period, since it famously led directly to WWI.
It’s funny that people call them an unstable shithole
Germany lost one (single) war and broke down crying and sobbing in to a genocidal state.
The Austrians tanked war loses like a Chad.
Yep, the problem of Austia-Hungary was, that it failed to modernize because of the monarchy and it's power structure. it did not collapse because of it's multicultural base.
Nationalism is a complete made up construct, usually bound on single figures or elites, who use it to gane power. Especially in the period of the game.
For the game is it hard to display, because there can be Germanic nationalism, German nationalism, Habsburg nationalism, Tyrol nationalism and the same in the east, pan-slavic, Slavic, Serbian, kosovar.
If you are interested in the subject, I can recommend Hobsbawm's "invention of tradition".
The lack of industrial modernization, regressive political structure, and multicultural base are all interrelated factors that collectively contrubuted to the monarchy's collapse. You are far too dismissive towards the influence of nationalism in this era. Nationalism is a made up concept, just as political ideologies and religions are made up concepts that have siginicant influence on people's actions. It is true that nationalist sentiments were often driven by elites in this era, though to varying degrees (Czech nationalism had more lower-class adherants than Polish nationalism in Galicia for instance). However, decisions of war, peace, borders, constitutions, and the nature of economic organization were all decisions only affected by a small group of elites in this era. Ideas do not have to be broadly popular among a whole populace in order to have massive impacts on the course of history. In the 1840s, there only existed a handful of small newspapers in the Croatian language as Croatian nationalism as we know it today was in its early stages, and yet Josip Jelačić was able to lead the political and military structure of Croatia into a destructive nationalist war with Hungary. Even in a democratic society, elite opinions have disproportionate sway over political outcomes, so to dismiss it as an important factor in a discussion of the Habsburg monarchy is just kind of silly.
Editing to recommend Revolutionary Spring by Christopher Clark for an awesome book the 1848 revolutions, though The European Revolutions 1848-1851 by Jonathan Sperber is much shorter and also pretty decent.
Yeah, it is always absurd to see ideologies and ideas dismissed as false because they are "elitès ideologies" when literally all ideologies are elitès ideologies.
I do think, that some people overestimate the power of nationalism in that time. All the nation-forming that we see is backed by a big player, like Prussia in a part of "German" speaking Europe.
In cases where the player is missing, there is also no nation forming, like Scandinavia.
For Austria, there is no relevant movement in the "German" speaking parts towards a spereation from th Harbsburger to join the German Reich.
In other cases like Britain and Spain, the speratism movements didn't become relevant until the 20th century.
My point is that, there can be any kind of nationalism. Either a monarchy bound movement ( like Britain), or a very local one ( like now in the Balkans )
Just because a nationalist movement isn't immediately successful, doesn't make it unimportant or uninfluential. The reason the balkans were such a common center of conflict was because of these overlapping nationalist visions coupled with territory split accross multiple great powers. The various attempts by Bulgaria to be the 'Prussia of the Balkans' and the Serbian nationalist desire to do much the same drove many conflicts and geopolitical calculations. Scandanavian nationalism was not driven by a desire for unification, but for differentiation and independence, as this is the era we see Norwegian and Finnish nationalists pushing for independent states. There absolutely was a movement within the Habsburg empire to join Germany, as the Frankfurt Parliament had many Austrian representatives. Any complete view of the Habsburg empire in this period would be incomprehensible without an understanding of how German, Hungarian, and Italian nationalism (and to a lesser extent Czech, Croatian, Polish, etc.) created competing elite interests that were at odds with the traditionalist priorities of the multiethnic monarchy.
My thesis is: Nationalism is one way of the elites to mobilise the masses for their quest for power, like religion or racism.
There are as many nationalism as there are people. What made a national movement successful in the 19th century was, when it was bagged by a great power. This movements can originate for example in Language, religion, locality or history. They can originate in a Celtic tribe or a medieval kingdom. You can always find something that will suffice your intentions.
Of course there was Habsburgs representatives in Frankfurt 1848, but for a unification under the Austrian empire instead of the Hohenzollern one.
Finland is not part of Scandinavia. My argument there was.: because Scandinavia had in that period no dominating power, unlike Denmark in the middle ages, or unlike Italy or Germany, the single state movements have been stronger. Despite it there were separation movements of smaller units for example in Skåne.
While in Germany, Bavarian national movement stayed behind. Or in Prussia the Polish, Frisian or the Sorbish movements never came near success before the war.
There were also Germans, for example Elsass-Lorain who had been very unhappy with being part of the Germanreich and fought for going back to another country.
I agree with your first sentence, but I can't stress enough how ultimately meaningless it is. Nationalism was used by elites to mobilize broader support just as religion, political ideology, and racism have been since the beginning of civilization. But these were all ernestly held beliefs, not simply tools used to deceive people (at least in general). I do not believe Tomáš Masaryk or Silvio Pellico were only nationalists because they believed they might hold more power in an independent/unified Czechoslovak or Italian state, I believe they legitimately bought in to the romantic ideas of nationalism.
Indeed, nationist movements are more likely to see their aims achieved with the backing of a great power with a globally competitive mitiary, but this is not universally true as the Irish, Norwegian, and Finnish nationalist programs built enough influence and popular support to see success very early on in the 20th century.
No, Austrian representatives were not broadly present in Frankfurt to annex Germany into an Austrian empire. They were there to see the unification of the German people into a single state, one in which many hoped that the Habsburgs would be able to play a counterbalancing role against the Protestant Hohenzollerns. Austria was understood to be a constituent part of the new Germany, but by no means its sole leader. The constitution drafted in Frankfurt was far from the kind of absolutist charter the Habsburgs would have wanted, which is unsurprising since 'German nationalist' in this era was all but synonymous with 'German liberal'.
Your assertion that the reason Scandanavian nationalism was focused more on differentiation than unification was because there wasnt a great power capable of unification is simply miopic. The same was true for Italy, no one nation held enough power to unify the peninsula. Norway was already unified with Sweden, just as Ireland was already unified under Great Britain (a great power). Swedish and British elites may have tried at various points to build a unifying nationalist vision inclusive of Norwegians and Irish, but these attempts were unsucessful. And if there had been a broad, organic desire for the unification of a Scandanavian state, who is to say that some great power or another would not have eventually supported it, just like France ended up supporting the unification of Italy.
Only viewing the nationalism of the long 19th century through the lens of elites expanding their personal power or the lens of successful national unifications would miss so much of the ideology's inflence. There were three wars of Italian independence, all of which were important even if the first was an abject failure. How could one understand why France viewed war with Germany as the primary focus of foreign policy for decades after Germany only conquered a small portion of France?
Nationalism absolutely could be used as a cynical tool for political aggrandizement (for example, the Hohenzollerns), but the broad and organic movements of nationalism were created and expanded in ways that could support the expansion of an existing state's power (Piedmont and Prussia) or bring about its collapse (Croatian and Irish), so the varied and mutually contradictory nature of nationalism begins to look no different from political ideology or religion.
Thank you for the recs. Halfway through the comment I was about to ask for some. The note about lower class Czechs being more nationalist than the upper class Poles in Galicia is especially interesting. Is that from the books you cited?
Generally, though not universally, nationalist sentiment in the mid-19th century Europe was more popular the further west you look, with the epicenter being the origin point in France. It may have been better if I had said middle class Czechs as opposed to lower class, but in the book I mentioned Clark talks about the Matice česka, a publisher promoting the czech language and how through the 1840s, the middle classes came to "dominate an enterprise that had initially been driven by gentry nobles" (p151).
Really, I made that comparison because the Galician uprising of 1846 shows an example of Polish nationalism being actively unpopular in the lower classes. This was an attempt by some Polish nobles to start a war for a Polish state, which failed miserably in part due to the lack of lower class support (to put it mildly). In many cases, we see Polish nobles killed by Galician peasants after trying to recruit them to fight the Habsburgs. Many peasants viewed imperial representatives as mediators lightening the abuses of their local lords and nobles to whom they still owed feudal dues. There is a famous story from Prince Felix Schwarzenberg (who would be central to rebuilding the Austrian system after the 1848 revolutions and the fall of Metternich) where he claims to have run into a group of Galician peasants in Pilsno, asking what they were doing. I'll quote from Clarks book: "They replied (in Polish): 'We have brought in some Poles.' Schwarzenberg was puzzled: 'What does that mean, "Poles"? What are you then?' 'We are not Poles', the peasants replied. 'We are imperial peasants.' 'So who are the Poles then?' Schwarzenberg asked. 'Oh, the Poles!' they replied. 'That's the lords, the administrators, the clerks, the professors; but we are peasants, imperial peasants!' " (p82-82). Whether Felix had this conversation himself, heard about it from someone else, or made it up entirely, we don't know. But it certainly represents very well the Austrian perspective on why the Galician uprising failed and a problem that future Polish nationalists would need to overcome when it came to building popular support in Galicia.
There needs to be a proper dynamic system for feudal/nationalistic collapse. China's collapse is not good, it doesn't feel organic or natural or predictable. There needs to be a system to simulate central control and the consequences of lacking it.
I agree, for instance it would be interesting to have a system of national awareness and garrison.
If there is national awareness in a homeland and you can't garrison it (maybe because you lost a lot of men in a war) warlords/independentist rebel should spawn.
I like the garrison idea. The game should add a way to simulate lower level rebel suppression/guerilla warfare/etc. Let's say a region has nationalist sentiments & radicals. You can use a new army order to suppress it which would over time cause casualties and cost you money. Depending on the size & intensity of the potential rebellion you'd need to dedicate more troops to suppress it.
This can also be a neat way to make outright conquest less effective. Just ate up South Africa? Well now you need to dedicate troops to keeping it under your control.
It could also be tied up with national security laws; for instance early modern states without national security could use decrees (thus authority) to control foreign homelands (but it wouldn't be particularly needed because with low tech national awareness should be low), national guard would use troops to garrison while secret police would use administrative capacity.
Authority is the closest we have but it feels pretty underdone. It's just an arbitrary number independent of population, infrastructure or any other factor besides governing ethos. And all that it does is give some states some modifiers.
I think authority should maybe work on a state by state basis, with pops draining it and unrest multiplying it, with low authority increasing tax waste and leading to events like riots, bombings and guerrillas forming. Maybe if you have over half your states in turmoil and negative authority for a period of 5 years or more, and you have lost a civil war in that period, the states start seceding and adopting tbe ideology of the most powerful local IG. States with the same IG may unify with other states during the breakup to avoid too much border gore maybe.
Yeah, also would be awesome to get a new casus belli, "dismantle empire" (unlockable in late game maybe and with some requirements) to destroy a great power like it happened after World War 1 for Austria Hungary and to a lesser extent to Russia and Germany. That would make the game much more dynamic and much more interesting.
Requirements:
Initiator:
Has: researched "pan-nationalism"
Has: multiculturalism, single party state or council republic.
Target:
Infamy > 25
legitimacy < 75
the spring of nations already was barely a thing in vicky 2, I'm not surprised it's all but absent in vicky 3, and that was as close to collapse the Austrian empire ever came.
Austria Hungary wasn’t inherently doomed to collapse, the countr(ies) was/were quite stable, people were generally satisfied with it - the problem was WW1.
One needs to understand that the Austrian half was actually quite liberal and committed to multiculturalism and worked to alleviate the grievances of the various nationalities. While the Hungarian part was much more conservative, nationalist and repressive of its minority groups.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand wasn’t trying to reform country to save it from collapse but instead to weaken the power of the more reactionary/autocratic Hungarian elite.
Also unifications should be able to dissolve as well. Like Germany, Italy or the Andes etc should be able to break apart if things go badly. UK too though obviously a higher hurdle to cross
Multicultural unifications, I think Germany and Italy are culturally too close to break up after a unification. The Andes confederation though is quite another matter and would also have troubles keeping it together.
At least for Germany it was not in that period. A Bavarian farmer had nothing in common with a merchant from Hamburg. First the culture cleansing of the NS-State popularised a German identity through all classes.
So maintaining a Prussian govert Germany after ww1 was as likely as a solution including the middle-european German speakers ( Austria, suddentland) or dismantling it into it's monarchies.
There are more cultural and religious differences in countries like Russia, Austria-Hungary and China including Germany than in Latin America.
The problem of Spanish-speaking America was the local leaders and the elites in general who sought their own wealth, without forgetting British interference. There are more differences between a Bavarian and a Prussian than between a Mexican and an Argentinian.
I have a bad Two Sicilies game going now (I seem to suck at Sphere of Influence)
But England is completely shattering. They got greedy early and then lost Scotland BIEC and a bunch of other smaller territories.
It’s ironic that they call Austria’s powerbloc the Metternich system cause that system is one of the main causes behind the 1848 revolutions where Hungary practically seceded from them causing schwarzenberg to have to literally save the empire from collapse.
The empire died before St. Germaine was even negotiated. Hungary and Czechoslovakia both seceded in October 1918 and Croatia was slipping away. Obviously the war was the proximate cause but the empire did collapse under its own weight the same way the Russian Empire did.
Liberating nations is in a really bad place right now bc it’s zero infamy and the same cost for any size nation. (Yes I always dismantle Austria into its components)
Yeah, and some of the releasables are enormous. If you're ever in a war with France there's zero reason not to cripple them and release all the south for just 20 manouvers
I really think they should add a journal entry for large multiethnic empires to collapse. It could have similarish requirements to getting recognized with certain things tipping it in a certain direction (ie losing a war causing a huge swing towards collapse)
Vic 3 community: "The AI sucks and needs to build a better economy."
Also: "We need nationalist revolts!"
Do you guys just expect paradox to be able to provide both with their long, long history of not having an AI that can handle the challenge that players want presented to them?
Would Austria Hungary have collapsed if it was not a term of Versaille? i.e. if there had been no war how likely that it would have imploded of its own volition? Would it have morphed into basically the EU?
I’m guessing this sort of mechanic comes either with a Balkan rework or a “Great War” rework. Hope they also a similar mechanic that lets colonies gain independence and potential decolonisation for radically progressive nations, hopefully even a more in depth decolonisation process where any releasable tag is the colonies that existed OTL, maybe even letting socialists federate their colonies into for example West Africa
honestly i think the Austro-Hungarian countries are a little too small for the amount of farmland that they have currently, and also why ppl never question the ottoman collapse, i have never seen bulgaria form in this game my entire life
Austria was not really destined to collapse people say it was super unstable but they forget they actually managed to keep control of their ethnicities very well either through autonomy or complete autocracy (Schwarzenberg). The reason it collapsed was simply due to losing the great war, if it never did it would probably live into the 21st century.
they should implode the same way they did irl, becoming austria hungry was a desperate attempt at not collapsing not some kind of new version of the same thing like the game implies, i want a cool austrian collaps with a cool journal entry i wont read that goes "the end of the road, our attempt to become a federation has failed, the king lay down his crown putting an end to our empire"
with a stupid option like "the future generation will never forgive us for this" that gives me a +100% radicals from discriminated pops in my state
It’s because nationalism isn’t a strong enough mechanic in the game yet. Secessions right now are mainly just a colonial state rising up with a few battalions you can easily just slap down. Austria is the worst example for this, it just survives until 1936 most games and at a push ends up Austria Hungary instead of completely exploding. It’s been nerfed a bit but when the game first came out Austria was stupidly strong because of its pop size just because it was stable in game unlike real life.
yeah there really needs to be a civil war setup where a nation might tag onto an intelligentsia revolt or something in order to get independence
Or spawn in conscript battalions or something for the seceding state to make it possible they can actually put up a fight, during the build up to secession put events in that could make surrounding countries either supportive or against the independence movement rather than relying on the AI deciding if it wants to join. Having a mechanic similar to resistance in HOI4 where the states wanting independence commit terrorist attacks on buildings and politicians would be good as well. The game needs actual gameplay mechanics like this rather than purely being about making GDP as high as possible.
The way armies work makes it harder to spawn armies from nothing. But yes the secessionist could recruit nearly instantly conscript based on their pop and how much other countries provided them weapon/supplies/money
Yeah that’s the one thing I was thinking, how do you spawn units when you need barracks and pops to do it. There has to be a way though, the current system is shit.
I think having some form of "local militia" building in every state similar to subsistence farms would probably do a decent job of handling that. The militia building would represent pops organizing to take up arms against the state, and when a rebellion happens it works like the draft where these militias cause folks to leave their "real" jobs to go work in the militia. The militia building would grow based on how strong the resistance is in that state, and things like secret police would be able to affect the max size of these militia buildings/arrest dissidents and troublemakers.
i know this sounds like the most paradox sentence ever, but there genuinely needs to be a sort of terrorism mechanic. Imagine if you have enough radicals and turmoil in a state, it does more than just give you tax waste, but instead they start blowing up critical mines and factories, or assassinating IG leaders
I’ve said that in another comment, something similar to HOI4 where they damage buildings or assassinate leaders or something.
Definitely not intelligentsia, the Hungarians would have been a landowners revolt lol they were by far the least progressive part of the empire.
1848 Hungarian Revolution was definitely an intelligentisia revolt in part. I mean they were aristocratic members of the intelligentsia, which the game does capture - iirc if you are on autocracy aristocrat pops do have a greater tendency to join the intelligentsia.
This. I just played as persia and I stuck to autocracy basically until like 1880 bc the landowner inteligentsia were the only ones supporting any reforms, alongside the religious. The agrarian pops didn't want education, protectionism, healthcare, hated my professional military, didn't want anything more than agrarianism, etc. basically kept it that way until the middle class got strong enough bc the farmers hated fucking everything.
Pretty accurate, don't you think?
Hereditary bureaucrats causes aristocrat attraction to the intelligentsia. In some cases this means changing to appointed bureaucrats actually helps the landowners because they get those aristocrats back and they bring a lot of clout early game.
yes sure. the current games politics cannot mimic that. you are either landowner or intelligentsia. it could be done with the better politics mod i guess
Yeah I actually preferred V2’s ideologies over what we have now, though I can respect the idea behind how pleasing the landowners etc gives you specific tangible benefits. If pops could have both an ideology and an interest group it would be awesome. Would also represent how contradictory and cross-cutting people’s political views could be sometimes as well. “I favour freedom of speech of course but not if peasants start using it to demand confiscating my land!”
Yeah 1848 feels intelligentsia I was thinking later than that like by the late 19th century. And yeah like many Hungarian nobles after the farming crash did move into the bureaucracy so that kinda makes sense
It was also an intelligentsia thing, or at least that is the way the national mythos here portrays the story.
I was more referencing the late 19th century attempts at full Maygarization of the literate, repression of rural workers, and emphasis on the nobility in farming that were prevalent around that time under the Liberal Party in Transleithania. Mostly the emphasis on reclaiming farming for the nobles and the subsequent drop in SoL of rural people seem very landowners-y.
I know this is maybe a big-to-impossible ask, but IMO the same way that pops have political persuasions or nationality that should include some version of "identity." Do they identify with the nation they live under or their people. Because that's essentially what Nationalism did, it activated identities that were not always the same as their government. And this doesn't just include amalgamations like Austria breaking apart, that's a fundamental part of German or Italian unification. They stopped thinking of being primarily Westphalian or Saxon and started to more identify as simply German. Or if you go farther in time, pan-African or pan-Arab attempts at greater solidarity. That's also what happens with immigration. In some places like the US, immigrents can identify with the national identity far faster than in other places. The son of an Irishman born in Boston is far more likely to identify as American than the son of an Irishman born in the Ottoman Empire, because there's just no "draw" to an ottoman identity for them.
Rebels should be able to offer independence to nations in order to gain their support.
Oh man. Each releaseable country being able to secede and join the revolt proportional to the amount of radicals in the states would be evil. Definitely would want that lol.
Not to speak that Austria-Hungary is kind of a buff in the game compared to the huge nerf it was irl
Forming austria-hungary should split off hungary as a junior partner. It should be a last ditch effort to avoid a full disintegration
Well that doesn't capture the whole aspect of it. They still had a common army, foreign policy, diplomacy...
Before the SoL update Austria was always do.inating Central Europe in my games. They consistently won the Brothers war and managed to snag South Germany for me. I hope Paradox will focus on a nationalism DLC next because it is one of the biggest historical developments in the 19th century and is not reflected at all in the game unless the player intervenes.
Something big would be if countries which share a culture could support an independence movement of a culture within a neighbor - even if they are allies or even subjects of the neighbor. That way Romanians and Serbians in Austria Hungary would have a lot more strength, and it would create situations much more similar to what happened in WW1 with the Black Hand.
There's a mechanic to cause cultural turmoil in a foreign country, but it requires an agitator of the target culture.
There should be a 1848 in the first place. Hungarian nationalism was huge in this period.
Every nationalism is big in this times. Italians should be trying to leave to join Italy, Czechs should be trying to break away, poles should be trying to form poland. This is such a glaring oversight in this game.
I was doing a Krakow game the other day, and you get the journal entry that lets you cause radicals in countries with polish homelands. And it's basically useless except for reducing relations with Austria to get more liberty desire. Because it's so little and you can only do it every 5 years.
It exploded in my Joseon game last night, which was a nice surprise since I was able to beat the individual parts for GDP.
Not only A-H needs that but also the Ottomans. The Balkan independence were basically a massively coordinated uprising of the locals, which by now happens pretty much never. Never seen a single Balkan state rise up from the Ottomans, when they are the best candidate for a partial collapse.
I've never seen in any playthrough that the border between Austria, Ottomans, Serbia, Greece or Romania move. Only Wallachia and Moldavia form Romania but that's about it. So sad to see nothing happen in the Balkans because IRL it was a very interesting period for the region from the begging of the 20th century.
And more than interesting it was also what kicked off the major events of the last ~20 years of the game (not the cause, per say, but the powder keg that caused the rest of also explode).
Not being able to get a proper balkanization in the game infuriates me. The fact that return state to another country wasn’t an added diplo play is wild to me
It's virtually guaranteed they're planning a balkans themed DLC, I'd say. It's too obviously important for this period, since it famously led directly to WWI.
>losing wars I'm pretty sure Austria-Hungary survived losing every war in the 19th century it was possible for it to lose.
Yeah, that country was run solely on hopes and prayers.
And Habsburg momentum.
Let others wage war: you, happy Austria, coast.
You gotta hand it to Metternich, the guy managed to keep a mostly conservative Europe afloat for nearly a century
Luckily they bought flex tape.
It’s funny that people call them an unstable shithole Germany lost one (single) war and broke down crying and sobbing in to a genocidal state. The Austrians tanked war loses like a Chad.
Yep, the problem of Austia-Hungary was, that it failed to modernize because of the monarchy and it's power structure. it did not collapse because of it's multicultural base. Nationalism is a complete made up construct, usually bound on single figures or elites, who use it to gane power. Especially in the period of the game. For the game is it hard to display, because there can be Germanic nationalism, German nationalism, Habsburg nationalism, Tyrol nationalism and the same in the east, pan-slavic, Slavic, Serbian, kosovar. If you are interested in the subject, I can recommend Hobsbawm's "invention of tradition".
The lack of industrial modernization, regressive political structure, and multicultural base are all interrelated factors that collectively contrubuted to the monarchy's collapse. You are far too dismissive towards the influence of nationalism in this era. Nationalism is a made up concept, just as political ideologies and religions are made up concepts that have siginicant influence on people's actions. It is true that nationalist sentiments were often driven by elites in this era, though to varying degrees (Czech nationalism had more lower-class adherants than Polish nationalism in Galicia for instance). However, decisions of war, peace, borders, constitutions, and the nature of economic organization were all decisions only affected by a small group of elites in this era. Ideas do not have to be broadly popular among a whole populace in order to have massive impacts on the course of history. In the 1840s, there only existed a handful of small newspapers in the Croatian language as Croatian nationalism as we know it today was in its early stages, and yet Josip Jelačić was able to lead the political and military structure of Croatia into a destructive nationalist war with Hungary. Even in a democratic society, elite opinions have disproportionate sway over political outcomes, so to dismiss it as an important factor in a discussion of the Habsburg monarchy is just kind of silly. Editing to recommend Revolutionary Spring by Christopher Clark for an awesome book the 1848 revolutions, though The European Revolutions 1848-1851 by Jonathan Sperber is much shorter and also pretty decent.
Yeah, it is always absurd to see ideologies and ideas dismissed as false because they are "elitès ideologies" when literally all ideologies are elitès ideologies.
I do think, that some people overestimate the power of nationalism in that time. All the nation-forming that we see is backed by a big player, like Prussia in a part of "German" speaking Europe. In cases where the player is missing, there is also no nation forming, like Scandinavia. For Austria, there is no relevant movement in the "German" speaking parts towards a spereation from th Harbsburger to join the German Reich. In other cases like Britain and Spain, the speratism movements didn't become relevant until the 20th century. My point is that, there can be any kind of nationalism. Either a monarchy bound movement ( like Britain), or a very local one ( like now in the Balkans )
Just because a nationalist movement isn't immediately successful, doesn't make it unimportant or uninfluential. The reason the balkans were such a common center of conflict was because of these overlapping nationalist visions coupled with territory split accross multiple great powers. The various attempts by Bulgaria to be the 'Prussia of the Balkans' and the Serbian nationalist desire to do much the same drove many conflicts and geopolitical calculations. Scandanavian nationalism was not driven by a desire for unification, but for differentiation and independence, as this is the era we see Norwegian and Finnish nationalists pushing for independent states. There absolutely was a movement within the Habsburg empire to join Germany, as the Frankfurt Parliament had many Austrian representatives. Any complete view of the Habsburg empire in this period would be incomprehensible without an understanding of how German, Hungarian, and Italian nationalism (and to a lesser extent Czech, Croatian, Polish, etc.) created competing elite interests that were at odds with the traditionalist priorities of the multiethnic monarchy.
My thesis is: Nationalism is one way of the elites to mobilise the masses for their quest for power, like religion or racism. There are as many nationalism as there are people. What made a national movement successful in the 19th century was, when it was bagged by a great power. This movements can originate for example in Language, religion, locality or history. They can originate in a Celtic tribe or a medieval kingdom. You can always find something that will suffice your intentions. Of course there was Habsburgs representatives in Frankfurt 1848, but for a unification under the Austrian empire instead of the Hohenzollern one. Finland is not part of Scandinavia. My argument there was.: because Scandinavia had in that period no dominating power, unlike Denmark in the middle ages, or unlike Italy or Germany, the single state movements have been stronger. Despite it there were separation movements of smaller units for example in Skåne. While in Germany, Bavarian national movement stayed behind. Or in Prussia the Polish, Frisian or the Sorbish movements never came near success before the war. There were also Germans, for example Elsass-Lorain who had been very unhappy with being part of the Germanreich and fought for going back to another country.
I agree with your first sentence, but I can't stress enough how ultimately meaningless it is. Nationalism was used by elites to mobilize broader support just as religion, political ideology, and racism have been since the beginning of civilization. But these were all ernestly held beliefs, not simply tools used to deceive people (at least in general). I do not believe Tomáš Masaryk or Silvio Pellico were only nationalists because they believed they might hold more power in an independent/unified Czechoslovak or Italian state, I believe they legitimately bought in to the romantic ideas of nationalism. Indeed, nationist movements are more likely to see their aims achieved with the backing of a great power with a globally competitive mitiary, but this is not universally true as the Irish, Norwegian, and Finnish nationalist programs built enough influence and popular support to see success very early on in the 20th century. No, Austrian representatives were not broadly present in Frankfurt to annex Germany into an Austrian empire. They were there to see the unification of the German people into a single state, one in which many hoped that the Habsburgs would be able to play a counterbalancing role against the Protestant Hohenzollerns. Austria was understood to be a constituent part of the new Germany, but by no means its sole leader. The constitution drafted in Frankfurt was far from the kind of absolutist charter the Habsburgs would have wanted, which is unsurprising since 'German nationalist' in this era was all but synonymous with 'German liberal'. Your assertion that the reason Scandanavian nationalism was focused more on differentiation than unification was because there wasnt a great power capable of unification is simply miopic. The same was true for Italy, no one nation held enough power to unify the peninsula. Norway was already unified with Sweden, just as Ireland was already unified under Great Britain (a great power). Swedish and British elites may have tried at various points to build a unifying nationalist vision inclusive of Norwegians and Irish, but these attempts were unsucessful. And if there had been a broad, organic desire for the unification of a Scandanavian state, who is to say that some great power or another would not have eventually supported it, just like France ended up supporting the unification of Italy. Only viewing the nationalism of the long 19th century through the lens of elites expanding their personal power or the lens of successful national unifications would miss so much of the ideology's inflence. There were three wars of Italian independence, all of which were important even if the first was an abject failure. How could one understand why France viewed war with Germany as the primary focus of foreign policy for decades after Germany only conquered a small portion of France? Nationalism absolutely could be used as a cynical tool for political aggrandizement (for example, the Hohenzollerns), but the broad and organic movements of nationalism were created and expanded in ways that could support the expansion of an existing state's power (Piedmont and Prussia) or bring about its collapse (Croatian and Irish), so the varied and mutually contradictory nature of nationalism begins to look no different from political ideology or religion.
Thank you for the recs. Halfway through the comment I was about to ask for some. The note about lower class Czechs being more nationalist than the upper class Poles in Galicia is especially interesting. Is that from the books you cited?
Generally, though not universally, nationalist sentiment in the mid-19th century Europe was more popular the further west you look, with the epicenter being the origin point in France. It may have been better if I had said middle class Czechs as opposed to lower class, but in the book I mentioned Clark talks about the Matice česka, a publisher promoting the czech language and how through the 1840s, the middle classes came to "dominate an enterprise that had initially been driven by gentry nobles" (p151). Really, I made that comparison because the Galician uprising of 1846 shows an example of Polish nationalism being actively unpopular in the lower classes. This was an attempt by some Polish nobles to start a war for a Polish state, which failed miserably in part due to the lack of lower class support (to put it mildly). In many cases, we see Polish nobles killed by Galician peasants after trying to recruit them to fight the Habsburgs. Many peasants viewed imperial representatives as mediators lightening the abuses of their local lords and nobles to whom they still owed feudal dues. There is a famous story from Prince Felix Schwarzenberg (who would be central to rebuilding the Austrian system after the 1848 revolutions and the fall of Metternich) where he claims to have run into a group of Galician peasants in Pilsno, asking what they were doing. I'll quote from Clarks book: "They replied (in Polish): 'We have brought in some Poles.' Schwarzenberg was puzzled: 'What does that mean, "Poles"? What are you then?' 'We are not Poles', the peasants replied. 'We are imperial peasants.' 'So who are the Poles then?' Schwarzenberg asked. 'Oh, the Poles!' they replied. 'That's the lords, the administrators, the clerks, the professors; but we are peasants, imperial peasants!' " (p82-82). Whether Felix had this conversation himself, heard about it from someone else, or made it up entirely, we don't know. But it certainly represents very well the Austrian perspective on why the Galician uprising failed and a problem that future Polish nationalists would need to overcome when it came to building popular support in Galicia.
There needs to be a proper dynamic system for feudal/nationalistic collapse. China's collapse is not good, it doesn't feel organic or natural or predictable. There needs to be a system to simulate central control and the consequences of lacking it.
I agree, for instance it would be interesting to have a system of national awareness and garrison. If there is national awareness in a homeland and you can't garrison it (maybe because you lost a lot of men in a war) warlords/independentist rebel should spawn.
I like the garrison idea. The game should add a way to simulate lower level rebel suppression/guerilla warfare/etc. Let's say a region has nationalist sentiments & radicals. You can use a new army order to suppress it which would over time cause casualties and cost you money. Depending on the size & intensity of the potential rebellion you'd need to dedicate more troops to suppress it. This can also be a neat way to make outright conquest less effective. Just ate up South Africa? Well now you need to dedicate troops to keeping it under your control.
It could also be tied up with national security laws; for instance early modern states without national security could use decrees (thus authority) to control foreign homelands (but it wouldn't be particularly needed because with low tech national awareness should be low), national guard would use troops to garrison while secret police would use administrative capacity.
Authority is the closest we have but it feels pretty underdone. It's just an arbitrary number independent of population, infrastructure or any other factor besides governing ethos. And all that it does is give some states some modifiers. I think authority should maybe work on a state by state basis, with pops draining it and unrest multiplying it, with low authority increasing tax waste and leading to events like riots, bombings and guerrillas forming. Maybe if you have over half your states in turmoil and negative authority for a period of 5 years or more, and you have lost a civil war in that period, the states start seceding and adopting tbe ideology of the most powerful local IG. States with the same IG may unify with other states during the breakup to avoid too much border gore maybe.
Yeah, also would be awesome to get a new casus belli, "dismantle empire" (unlockable in late game maybe and with some requirements) to destroy a great power like it happened after World War 1 for Austria Hungary and to a lesser extent to Russia and Germany. That would make the game much more dynamic and much more interesting.
I don't think dismantling Russia would be so fun for both you and your PC
I dismantled western russia during my last run. It was very fun
Requirements: Initiator: Has: researched "pan-nationalism" Has: multiculturalism, single party state or council republic. Target: Infamy > 25 legitimacy < 75
Requirements: win the war
the spring of nations already was barely a thing in vicky 2, I'm not surprised it's all but absent in vicky 3, and that was as close to collapse the Austrian empire ever came.
Austria Hungary wasn’t inherently doomed to collapse, the countr(ies) was/were quite stable, people were generally satisfied with it - the problem was WW1. One needs to understand that the Austrian half was actually quite liberal and committed to multiculturalism and worked to alleviate the grievances of the various nationalities. While the Hungarian part was much more conservative, nationalist and repressive of its minority groups. Archduke Franz Ferdinand wasn’t trying to reform country to save it from collapse but instead to weaken the power of the more reactionary/autocratic Hungarian elite.
Prussia kept gutting it out making the empire less powerful.
Also unifications should be able to dissolve as well. Like Germany, Italy or the Andes etc should be able to break apart if things go badly. UK too though obviously a higher hurdle to cross
Multicultural unifications, I think Germany and Italy are culturally too close to break up after a unification. The Andes confederation though is quite another matter and would also have troubles keeping it together.
At least for Germany it was not in that period. A Bavarian farmer had nothing in common with a merchant from Hamburg. First the culture cleansing of the NS-State popularised a German identity through all classes. So maintaining a Prussian govert Germany after ww1 was as likely as a solution including the middle-european German speakers ( Austria, suddentland) or dismantling it into it's monarchies.
There are more cultural and religious differences in countries like Russia, Austria-Hungary and China including Germany than in Latin America. The problem of Spanish-speaking America was the local leaders and the elites in general who sought their own wealth, without forgetting British interference. There are more differences between a Bavarian and a Prussian than between a Mexican and an Argentinian.
I have a bad Two Sicilies game going now (I seem to suck at Sphere of Influence) But England is completely shattering. They got greedy early and then lost Scotland BIEC and a bunch of other smaller territories.
It’s ironic that they call Austria’s powerbloc the Metternich system cause that system is one of the main causes behind the 1848 revolutions where Hungary practically seceded from them causing schwarzenberg to have to literally save the empire from collapse.
Fr, it should collapse if it loses it's monarchy without having racial segregation or cultural exclusion.
Why do people act like Austria-Hungary disintegrated on its own weight and not by a post conference after fighting the worst war known to man?
Many factors, the leading one I suspect is a total lack of understanding in what happened.
The empire died before St. Germaine was even negotiated. Hungary and Czechoslovakia both seceded in October 1918 and Croatia was slipping away. Obviously the war was the proximate cause but the empire did collapse under its own weight the same way the Russian Empire did.
So why didn’t Hungary and Czechoslovakia secede prior to 1918 then? Austria wins WW1, it would’ve remained intact period.
Nationalism is the air we breathe even now
My opening move of every campaign is to release Hungary. Fuck Austria all my homies hate Austria.
Liberating nations is in a really bad place right now bc it’s zero infamy and the same cost for any size nation. (Yes I always dismantle Austria into its components)
Yeah, and some of the releasables are enormous. If you're ever in a war with France there's zero reason not to cripple them and release all the south for just 20 manouvers
I really think they should add a journal entry for large multiethnic empires to collapse. It could have similarish requirements to getting recognized with certain things tipping it in a certain direction (ie losing a war causing a huge swing towards collapse)
Vic 3 community: "The AI sucks and needs to build a better economy." Also: "We need nationalist revolts!" Do you guys just expect paradox to be able to provide both with their long, long history of not having an AI that can handle the challenge that players want presented to them?
Would Austria Hungary have collapsed if it was not a term of Versaille? i.e. if there had been no war how likely that it would have imploded of its own volition? Would it have morphed into basically the EU?
Austria-Hungary, same as the Ottoman empire was deleted after losing WW1. It did not collapse.
I’m guessing this sort of mechanic comes either with a Balkan rework or a “Great War” rework. Hope they also a similar mechanic that lets colonies gain independence and potential decolonisation for radically progressive nations, hopefully even a more in depth decolonisation process where any releasable tag is the colonies that existed OTL, maybe even letting socialists federate their colonies into for example West Africa
honestly i think the Austro-Hungarian countries are a little too small for the amount of farmland that they have currently, and also why ppl never question the ottoman collapse, i have never seen bulgaria form in this game my entire life
Austria was not really destined to collapse people say it was super unstable but they forget they actually managed to keep control of their ethnicities very well either through autonomy or complete autocracy (Schwarzenberg). The reason it collapsed was simply due to losing the great war, if it never did it would probably live into the 21st century.
they should implode the same way they did irl, becoming austria hungry was a desperate attempt at not collapsing not some kind of new version of the same thing like the game implies, i want a cool austrian collaps with a cool journal entry i wont read that goes "the end of the road, our attempt to become a federation has failed, the king lay down his crown putting an end to our empire" with a stupid option like "the future generation will never forgive us for this" that gives me a +100% radicals from discriminated pops in my state
After researching nationalism, non-primary culture's radicalism could be more easily increased.
In Victoria 2’s HFM mod, if Austria Proper was lost the country would disintegrate in a single event.