Was Austria-Hungary an empire?

Pieter Judson's answer is no. Instead, he argues that the Austrian component of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy was characterized by an "institutionalized pluralism" in which the state guaranteed the rights of its various linguistic minorities. Those minorities, far from forming nascent nations yearning for their own states, were actually quite loyal to the monarchy. That Austria had eleven distinct language-groups within its borders does mean that it ruled over eleven distinct nations. To assume so is to accept the nationalist fantasy that everyone is a member of a nation on the basis of the language that they speak. The presence of so many bilingual peasants in Austria belied nationalists' claims that nations were well-defined groups.

In short, the history of Austro-Hungary in the nineteenth century should not be seen as a struggle of a multitude of nations yearning for independence from the Viennese yoke.

(Swarthmore College has made Judson's lecture available online as part of a growing collection of faculty lectures. He's in the process of a writing a new book on Hapsburg Central Europe from 1780 to 1948.)