The first program for the federalisation of the Habsburg Empire was developed by the Hungarian nobleman Wesselényi Miklós. In his work titled Szózat a magyar és a szláv nemzetiség ügyében and published in Hungarian in 1843 and in German in 1844, he proposed not only social reforms but reforms of the state structure of the Empire and its nationality policy. He aimed to replace the centralized empire with a federation of five states: a German state, a state of Bohemia and Moravia, Galicia as a Polish state, and the state of historical Hungary Another idea came from Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth: "True liberty is impossible without federalism". Kossuth proposed to transform the Habsburg Empire into a "Danubian State", a federal republic with autonomous regions. The Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 established the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. The Compromise partially re-established the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Hungary, separate from, and no longer subject to the Austrian Empire. However, the favoritism shown to the Magyars, the second largest ethnic group in the dual monarchy after the Germans, caused discontent on the part of other ethnic groups like the Slovaks and Romanians. As the twentieth century started to unfold, the greatest problem facing the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary was that it consisted of about a dozen distinctly different ethnic groups, of which only two, the Germans and Hungarians, wielded any power or control. The other ethnic groups, which were not involved in the state affairs, included Slavic and Romance peoples. Among them, only Croats had limited autonomy in the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia. In the Kingdom of Hungary, several ethnic minorities faced increased pressures of Magyarization. The idea of the Dual Monarchy system of 1867 had been to transform the previous Austrian Empire into a constitutional union, one German-dominated and one Hungarian-dominated part, having also common institutions. However, after various demonstrations, uprisings and acts of terrorism, it became readily apparent that the notion of two ethnic groups dominating the other ten could not survive in perpetuum. Franz Ferdinand had planned to redraw the map of Austria-Hungary radically, creating a number of ethnically and linguistically dominated semi-autonomous "states" which would all be part of a larger federation renamed the United States of Greater Austria. Under this plan, language and cultural identification was encouraged, and the disproportionate balance of power would be corrected. The idea was set to encounter heavy opposition from the Hungarian part of the Dual Monarchy, since a direct result of the reform would have been a significant territorial loss for Hungary. However, the Archduke was assassinated at Sarajevo in 1914, triggering the outbreak of the First World War. After the war, Austria-Hungary was dismantled and several new nation-states were created, and various Austro-Hungarian territories were ceded to neighbouring countries by the victorious Entente powers.
States proposed by Aurel Popovici
According to Popovici's plans, the following territories were to become states of the federation after the reform. The majority ethnic group within each territory is also listed.
Woiwodina: Vojvodina, mainly Serb and Croatian, with Magyar, Romanian, German and Slovak minorities.
In addition, a number of mostly German-speaking enclaves in eastern Transylvania, the Banat and other parts of Hungary, southern Slovenia, large cities and elsewhere were to have autonomy within the respective territory.
