The commonalities across the Irish Sea and the English Channel — severe disquiet over immigration, the continued rise of populism, and the spread of extremist discourse, especially online — reflect the similarities of the challenges. The question of how to accommodate plural identities is a pressing one.

As the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe wrestle with societal and national fragmentation, it is worth looking at how some of the most diverse states coped with difference in the past. And it would be hard to find a better example than the Habsburg Empire, or Austria-Hungary as it was known during the last phase of its existence. Of a total population of 51.4 million in 1910, 23% mainly used German, 19.6% Hungarian, 12.5% Czech and 9.7% Polish. The rest mainly used Italian, Croatian, Ruthenian, Romanian, Slovak and Slovene. It was a veritable Babel and reflected, roughly, the profound national divisions between the peoples who made up the empire. Yet thanks to a series of expedients the Habsburgs were able to muddle through — fortwursteln — without a catastrophic internal breakdown until defeat in the First World War.

Because of this long-term survival, some in the UK saw in Austria-Hungary a solution for their own problems of how to reconcile the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish. As the historian Alvin Jackson points out in his ground-breaking study of these issues, when Prime Minister William Gladstone tried to address the “Irish Question” in the late 19th century, he studied the “compromise” reached between the Habsburgs and the Hungarians very carefully. Arthur Griffith, who founded Sinn Féin in 1905, even hailed that agreement as the “resurrection” of Hungary which could serve as an example for a dual Anglo-Irish monarchy.

Both the United Kingdom and Austria-Hungary emerged out of early modern composite monarchies, polities where the crown ruled over territories which were governed in very different ways. In the British case, the solution was found in the establishment of a parliamentary union, in 1707 and then expanded upon in 1801, in which everybody was represented on an equal basis — according to the franchise of the time — at Westminster. England, Scotland and Ireland ceased to exist, politically; Wales had been abolished some time earlier. This arrangement facilitated the basis for the rise of one of the most powerful states the world has ever seen.

The Habsburgs took the opposite route. After various experiments of their own they settled on a “composite democracy” with a monarch at its head. In 1867, Emperor Franz Josef’s Ausgleich — “compromise” — divided the empire into two halves, both with parliamentary representation. Despite making up only 40% of the population of the “Hungarian” half, the Magyars lorded it over the “subject” Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs and Croats. The other half had no official name but had a plurality (about 37.5%) of German speakers mainly in Bohemia, Moravia and present-day Austria. Because the two parts were divided by the river Leitha, they were known as Cisleithania and Transleithania.

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Both the United Kingdom and the Habsburg Empire faced the onslaught of late 19th-century European politics: rising nationalism with the resulting identity politics over language, education and employment, and class conflict. Both saw demands for solutions based on partition, and both were subjected to the rigours of the First World War. But they coped very differently.

Austria-Hungary staggered from crisis to crisis as it tried to cope with what the historian Steven Beller calls a “witches’ brew” of competing demands and hatreds. Vienna sought to keep the lid on things through a series of “compromises” in Croatia, Moravia, and Bukovina and Galicia. Governance, as the veteran Prime Minister of Cisleithania Viscount Eduard Taaffe once remarked, was a matter of keeping the various groups in a state of “well-tempered discontent”. For example, the “compromise” with the Poles was at the expense of letting them dominate the Jews and Ruthenes of Galicia. Parliament was a zoo. The capital city, home to a huge immigrant population, especially Slavs from all parts of the Empire and Jews particularly from Galicia, also spawned a vicious xenophobic and antisemitic discourse. It was no wonder the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus referred to the empire as a “Laboratory for World Destruction”.

The United Kingdom performed far better at managing tensions between its territories. Most of the British Isles developed an ideological, rather than national, form of politics: the Conservatives, Liberals and later the Labour Party won support across three of the four nations. Only in Ireland, where differences between Catholics and Protestants continued to play a major role, did nationalism come to dominate. But, despite their best efforts to obstruct and disrupt parliament, Irish nationalists never managed to bring Westminster to the same state of confusion as Czech, Polish, Slovene, Italian and even German nationalists inflicted on the Reichsrat in Vienna.

Moreover, unlike the Habsburg Empire, which collapsed in 1918, the UK emerged from four years of conflict in the First World War as a victor, losing only the Irish Free State in its aftermath. Six of the nine counties of Ulster remained in the United Kingdom. Partition was traumatic to be sure, but remained a largely contained event which did not affect the rest of Europe much. In fact, the separation of the 26 counties was made possible by the British victory over Germany, because it was hard to envisage how a separate state on the western flank would present an immediate military challenge.

Despite the relative success of the British model, when compared with its European alternatives, the demand for national recognition grew throughout the late 20th century. In Northern Ireland, the introduction of a devolved parliament in 1920 facilitated discrimination against the Catholic population. After the end of the Cold War, and the apparent passing of strategic threats to the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Tony Blair introduced devolution in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. There were now representative bodies across the Irish Sea, on the other side of the Wye River, and beyond the Tweed, which dealt with matters not “reserved” to Westminster. Some, such as the Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland, George Roberston, predicted that “Devolution will kill Nationalism stone dead”.

The British Ausgleich was also lopsided. It gave expression to the nationalism of only three of the four nations. England had no separate parliamentary assembly, and politically was defined by being non-devolved. All of England’s laws were voted on by representatives from all four nations, but the country had no say in the laws passed by the devolved assemblies. The largest nation seemed to be left out.

The UK, then, in the 20th century seemed to draw on the experience of the Habsburg Empire — but its legacy is disputed. The failure of the successor states, whether fascist or communist, put things in perspective. As they stewed in the Soviet Bloc, many Central European intellectuals developed a nostalgia for a framework which had allowed them to coexist in relative freedom. Shortly after the end of communism, the renowned Hungarian historian István Deák argued in his 1990 book, Beyond Nationalism, that the “Habsburg Experiment” in supranational organisation should be revisited. “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that we can find here a positive lesson while the post-1918 history of central and east central European nation-states can only show us what to avoid.” The historian Solomon Wank, by contrast, pointed out in 1997 that the empire had simply “stoked the fires of national rivalry” which ultimately consumed it.

Either way, it is not obvious what the UK now can learn from the Habsburgs today. First, because they had little useful to say about immigration, one of the main preoccupations of the recent riots. Indeed, the mayor of Vienna Dr Karl Lueger famously exploited antisemitic hatred of Jewish migrants for personal political gain. Secondly, as we have seen, because the Austro-Hungarian leadership aggravated national differences, as much as they mitigated them.

What the UK can do is learn from the mistakes of the Habsburgs. State indulgence of nationalism before 1914 simply increased the chaos. Likewise, the introduction of devolution in the UK, far from “killing” the demand for separation “stone dead”, actually whetted appetites. In Scotland, the establishment of the assembly in Edinburgh increased calls for separation from the United Kingdom so much that London was forced to concede a referendum in 2014 which at one point it feared to lose. In Wales, interest in independence, though still weak, grew after the introduction of devolution. In Northern Ireland the devolved institutions may have helped bring some form of peace, but they also facilitate continuous squabbling between the two communities. We therefore have enough, and perhaps too much, devolution — we do not need any more compromises.

The UK Union is based on the assumption that we have four nations whose members are English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish, but also — if they want to be — British as well. If the UK followed the Austro-Hungarian example any further, the result might be the “resurrection” of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and even England — but it would also be the death of Britain.

Romy Schneider bewitches in the title role and there is enough gold braid and white plumage on display to dazzle and tickle even die-hard republicans into momentary monarchism. Tears prick the viewers’ eyes as great flocks of pigeons swirl around black and gold banners in St Mark’s Square, Venice — Austrian sovereign territory until 1866. They do so in perfect sync with the rhythm of Die Kaiserhymne — the Empire’s official anthem, whose tune was somewhat vulgarly pinched by Germany in 1922.

Oddly, paying virtual homage to a deceased Austro-German Royal couple helps citizens of a small central European republic feel comfortable in their own skins today.

Elizabeth (Erzsébet in Hungarian) was one of the most striking personalities of 19th century Europe: famed for her ankle length hair, 18-and-a-half-inch waist and ability to converse with searing intellectual precision in seven languages.

She was happiest mingling unchaperoned in the company of gypsies and circus entertainers — whose acrobatics she could cheerfully rival — but her flexibility was mental and diplomatic as much as physical. She championed the “Dualist” compromise of 1867, granting Hungary, though “inseparable and indivisible” from Austria, complete internal self-government and parity in common imperial affairs.

The enduring “Cult of Sissi” is distinctively Erzsébet’s own, yet also reveals something deeper, a glimpse of the so-called “Habsburg shadow”: the lasting effect of the Austrian, and latterly Austro-Hungarian, Empire on the now splintered territories it once comprised.

Last year was the 100th anniversary of the Empire’s final dissolution via the Treaty of Trianon, which fixed the lasting borders of the successor states. The coincidence spurred a minor flurry of books on the dynasty’s dénouement, of which Martin Rady’s huge — but gripping — The Habsburgs: The Rise and Fall of a World Power (Penguin) stands out.

As the title suggests, the volume is equally about the early as late phases of the Habsburg story. Yet, probing the Dual Monarchy’s pre-history alerts us to enduring traits which enabled the later Habsburgs to hold together their “rag bag” of heterogenous territories, in defiance of powerful romantic and liberal nationalist movements.

In 1848, in the face of a radical uprising in Vienna, and a nationalist one in Hungary, it looked to many observers as if the Habsburg Empire was finished. Yet, after restoring order with Russian help, in cultural and intellectual terms it thrived for another seven decades.

For Rady the unquestionable key to the dynasty’s might was its mystique. It was imbued with an aura of sacral legitimacy which not only held the loyalty of subjects but imbued the family’s members with a driving sense of vocation: “they conceived of their power as both something they had been predestined for and part of the divine order in which the world was arranged.” The self-concept was manifested through intense Eucharistic and Marian piety — well beyond that of other royal households.

Domestic super-piety put something numinous at the heart of the “Holy Roman Empire”, over which the family presided almost continuously between 1438 and its dissolution in 1806. It also meant that, whatever the personal moral failings of its leaders, the “odour of sanctity” clung persistently to the Austrian polity, and even more to the imperial personage.

Franz Joseph’s long reign (he ruled from 1848 to 1916) and the literature through which perception of its later decades is refracted, including the retrospective novels of Joseph Roth and Jaroslav Hašek, tend to anchor it in our minds as something tragic — an age of elegant uniforms and doomed politics.

For contemporaries, their own lived experience was different. Presentations of the royal house in popular literature had a sense of “sacred drama” about them. The personal sorrows of Franz Joseph, who lost both wife and son before their time, together with the burdens of ruling “were likened to Christ’s Crown of Thorns, confirming the emperor as not only the ruler of peoples but also their redeemer.”

Ethnic fragmentation was contained because the emperor “became the almost exclusive focus of loyalty and symbol of an idea that transcended nation.” Unlike in today’s culture war and Brexit battles, national-separatist ambitions were more pronounced among the intelligentsia than urban-worker and rural-labourer population bases.

In 1908, honouring the 60^th anniversary of the Emperor’s accession, “hundreds of thousands of Galician Poles and Ruthenes bought cheap transparencies of the emperor, putting them in their windows so that at night the streets … shone with identical portraits of Franz Joseph.” Translucence and transcendence momentarily coalesced.

As Rady points out, Franz Joseph’s recovery of the older Habsburg genius for “revolution from above” also served to forestall political radicalism, with timely social reform staving off dislocating socialist revolution after 1848.

The later Habsburgs, though devoutly Catholic, were, for the period, surprisingly unsectarian. As John Van der Kiste notes in The End of the Habsburgs: The Decline and Fall of the Austrian Monarchy (Fonthill) when the emperor travelled within his dominions, “he not only visited Protestant and Orthodox churches but attended services in them”. His interfaith encounters extended to synagogues and, after the occupation (later annexation) of Bosnia, mosques as well.

Franz Joseph occasionally made off-colour remarks about Jews in private but was a zealous defender of their civil rights — a reminder that the policing of language is not an invariable guarantee of social progress. Full emancipation of Jews in both halves of the empire came as an integral part of the emperor’s constitutional reform programme of 1867. Later he blocked the entry into office of vicious anti-Semite Karl Luger as elected Mayor of Vienna for two whole years from 1895.

Maybe Franz Joseph was influenced by the late medieval chroniclers who constructed elaborate lineages linking the Habsburgs back to the Kings of the Old Testament and even to Noah. Certainly, the very real affection the Empire’s Jews felt towards him is attested to in surviving silver Torah scroll holders, capped with the Habsburg double-eagle, produced in significant numbers during his reign.

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The self-confidence which derived from the givenness of public Catholicism, tempered by enlightened toleration, gave the monarchy an expansive, even benignly protective attitude to religious minorities — albeit that many Austro-German clerics harboured unpleasant anti-Semitic views.

Paradoxically, Habsburg governance managed to be formally confessional but practically pluralist. Public offices and Catholic churches in the Empire might alike be painted deep yellow on royal orders, but there was no expectation that the occupants of the former should be attendees of the latter. In 1914 Hungary was led to war by its staunchly Calvinist Prime Minister Count István Tisza.

This construct was fragile and known to be so. Continuity depended on the public’s personal identification with a beloved, long-reigning monarch, and freedom from external, especially military, shock. It also required other states esteeming Austria-Hungary’s role in ensuring the “balance of power” in Europe.

During the 1890s and 1900s foreign policy pressures and strains on the state’s internal constitutional geometry came together in concerning ways. Nationalist movements demanded concessions from the centres of power; neighbouring countries (especially Romania and Serbia) encouraged dissident irredentist sentiment amongst their kin communities. Threats to internal stability and territorial integrity thus intersected and reinforced each other. The pressure was considerable and the fabric decidedly frayed.

The problems were made worse because Budapest consistently blocked Vienna’s contemplated concessions to non-Magyars. Meeting Czech aspirations for internal self-government might have released tension and so strengthened the empire as a whole — but at the cost of weakening the Magyar’s special place as the privileged partner of the Austro-Germans within the constitutional order. The situation was precarious.

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Yet the dissolution of Austro-Hungary at the end of the Great War was a far more contingent process than often realised. It was not inevitable, even after Franz Joseph’s death in 1916 and his succession by great-nephew Karl. As late as 1917, the Western Allies talked of Austria-Hungary’s political restructuring and of limited border revision, not of outright destruction. Even Woodrow Wilson, later a champion of “national self-determination”, at first regarded a reformed and reconstituted Habsburg state as an attractive idea. Both Wilson and Lloyd George feared that a “Balkanised” cluster of smaller states would be vulnerable to being picked off individually by an expansionist Berlin — as in fact happened.

Austria-Hungary’s failure to survive in any recognisable form, in contrast to its co-belligerents Germany and Turkey, is intellectual territory over which historians are yet to sign a comprehensive peace treaty. Explanations are nearly as various as the persons offering them.

Claims that tension between imperial structure and national self-conciousness made Austria-Hungary’s continuance axiomatically impossible, not just unlikely, need to be handled with care. The persistent cohesive stability of the Monarchy’s multi-national battlegroups at the end of the war is, as Rady points out, an overlooked index suggesting ethnic differences may not have been as insurmountable as historians have often supposed.

“When in early November 1918 the Italian army took the surrender of around four hundred thousand Habsburg troops, it discovered that they included more than eighty thousand Czechs and Slovaks, sixty thousand South Slavs (mostly Croats), twenty-five thousand Transylvanian Romanians, and even seven thousand Italians from Istria and the Tyrol. It was the final irony that as the Habsburg Empire dissolved into national states, its army retained its multinational character.”

And so a demoralised Emperor Karl “relinquished his involvement in public affairs” on 11 November 1918 — although he never formally abdicated. Shortly afterwards, Austrian socialist leader Karl Renner visited him in the Schönbrunn Palace to bid him farewell, famously closing their conversation with the words “Herr Habsburg, the taxi is waiting.”

The Habsburg Empire’s afterlife is more than a matter of cinema and sentiment. The “Habsburg shadow” is oft invoked by historical geographers to explain the greater economic and educational development of those regions in Romania, Ukraine and Serbia which once formed part of Austria-Hungary relative to those which did not. It’s a stubbornly enduring, though utterly benign, imperial legacy still evident after a century of turbulence and totalitarianism.

The shadow has other forms. Karl, beatified by Pope John-Paul II in 2004, was unsuccessful in attempts to regain either the Austrian or Hungarian thrones prior to his untimely death from lung failure in Madeira in 1922. Yet during the Second World War, Churchill seems seriously to have considered installing his son Crown Prince Otto (1912-2011) as constitutional monarch of a truncated post-war Germany — or so Van der Kiste asserts.

Churchill even despatched Admiral Mountbatten to Canada in 1943 to sound out Otto’s mother — the formidable dowager Empress Zita — at her home in Ontario. Presumably Churchill held that historic sacral monarchy was a serviceable bulwark against demagoguery, and constitutional monarchy is effective, not because of the (negligible) explicit power the monarch wields but because of the great metaphysical legitimacy his/her presence implicitly withholds from others.

Otto himself was sentenced to death in absentia by the Nazis in 1938 for opposing the Anschluss. He spent most of the war in America encouraging pro-Habsburg partisans from afar — but not till after he had helped 15,000 anti-Nazi compatriots, many Jewish, flee to safety in allied and neutral countries.

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Helping refugees became a signature trait. On 19 August 1989 he organised a cross border “pan-European picnic” on the Austro-Hungarian frontier. Ostensibly an exercise in cultural diplomacy it was actually a crafty ruse to allow 600 East German refugees (trapped in Hungary for months) to stampede through the border gate specially opened for the event.

Dumbstruck officials looked on helpless. So began the mass movement of people between the two Germanys by multiple routes which precipitated the fall of the Berlin Wall that November.

During Hungary’s own democratic transition of 1989-90 it was, strangely, the Left-Liberal Alliance of Free Democrats — SZDSZ — who advocated Otto becoming Hungary’s new head of state by parliamentary vote. “We could do a lot worse,” eminent Hungarian political historian Domokos Kosáry observed at the time.

Ironically, the future MDF (Conservative) PM József Antall worked to dissuade Otto from accepting the invitation — something Otto later regretted. It is tempting to speculate that, in line with Churchill’s thinking, Otto’s presence might have forestalled the populist currents which dominate Hungary today.

The EU accession of the “Visegrad” states in 2004 had more than a passing whiff of separated children returning to the Holy Roman Empire. That was not least because Otto, President of the Pan-European Movement and a long serving Christian Democrat MEP representing Bavaria, was quietly influential in the process. His impressive personal contacts in the German government and Brussels bureaucracy smoothed the way. Yet, as Rady notes, for all his enthusiasm for the European Project, “Otto never satisfactorily explained how to build a single political community out of different national communities.”

It is very hard to hold a geographically extensive, trans-national polity together even when it is blessed with time-honoured “legitimating structures of meaning” — faith, monarchy, civic ritual — as Austria-Hungary’s demise indicates.

Without such things on hand to provide unifying symbolic nuclei the task looks impossible. Just ask residents of the former Yugoslavia. Perhaps, if they are serious about the project, European leaders could do worse than give some attention to Rady and Van der Kiste. Failing that, they should at least watch the Sissi trilogy.

A second knock follows; the friar repeats the question. The herald replies with the achievements and honours of the deceased. Once again the friar says “We don’t know him”. After this comes a third knock, and a third demand for identification. This time the herald simply states the given name of the deceased, followed by the words “a mortal, sinful, human being”. The friars of the Kapuzinerkirche then open the door and admit the coffin.

The symbolism is obvious. Be ye ever so mighty, you will face God’s judgment as surely as anyone else, and all your wealth and power and grandeur will avail you nothing. Even for those who do not believe in God, or who view the ceremony cynically as a bit of slick PR by the rich and mighty to sweeten the pill of their dominance for the downtrodden masses, it is surely an impressive moment.

It beautifully illustrates the same point as the old joke about the mourner at a rich man’s funeral, who asks the priest “How much did he leave?” and receives the unbeatably laconic reply “All of it”. The Book of Common Prayer puts it this way: “We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out”.

One of the great benefits of formal Christian liturgies, especially those that have not been cackhandedly modernised by well-meaning barbarians, is that they regularly confront the churchgoer with three absolutely fundamental truths of the human condition, namely the fact of our sinfulness, the certainty of our death, and the universal need for mercy and forgiveness. Which is why I think that, to aid national unity and reconciliation in post-Brexit Britain, as a New Year’s resolution we should oblige MPs to attend church on a regular basis.

I have it all planned out. There would, of course, be exemptions for MPs who are members of other faiths. But as for everyone else, from the Prime Minister down to the lowliest backbencher, once a week or so they would be herded over the road to Westminster Abbey, with the Serjeant-at-Arms close behind to make sure no one sneaks off for a cheeky cigarette on College Green.

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It would be an ecumenical service, to avoid any sectarian quibbling. The main thing would be to have an old-fashioned full-blooded confession of sin, with lots of kneeling, alongside some well-chosen Bible readings focused on the universality of the Fall, the inevitability of judgment and the dangers of power. The story of the Pharisee and the Publican would get a run-out once every three or four weeks, to make sure that it haunted the dreams of the inveterate moral show-offs who litter the green benches.

Maybe we could also have a recurring role for Romans 3: “As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.” Ideally the service would be led by one of those tall, severe clergymen with a resonant and faintly intimidating voice, although they are in short supply nowadays. Possibly we could tempt Richard Chartres out of retirement.

I am being a little bit facetious. But if you truly want to address political, cultural and social polarisation, and to start healing the divides exposed and exacerbated by the Brexit convulsions, you could do a lot worse than getting our elites back into church.

At its best, Christian worship is a great leveller. Walk into the main Sunday service at any church in London, and you will almost certainly find more ethnic diversity than in practically any other setting you care to mention. I dare say this diminishes a little as you move further out from the centre, but these days even the most suburban parishes will generally have a more varied racial mix than, say, the Liberal Democrat membership. I attend Catholic Mass in Folkestone, a mid-sized seaside town in Kent, and the congregation is significantly more ethnically diverse than the town itself.

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The same applies to class, certainly in the Catholic Church. In many places the social mix in Catholic parishes still bears the mark of the history of the faith in England, with observance kept alive by a small number of upper-class recusants and their loyal dependants, and mostly abandoned by the rising middle and commercial classes, then reinforced in the last couple of centuries by working-class Irish immigration and converts from the intelligentsia.

One of the great things about church is that you don’t get to choose who is there with you. The person next to you may be a fiery Marxist or a staid Tory; they could be a repentant murderer, or a blameless widow who has never missed a Sunday service in seventy years. They could be an immigrant who only arrived at Heathrow three weeks ago, or the second son of a Duke whose family came over with the Conqueror; they could be a brilliant intellectual or someone with profound learning difficulties.

All the same, you pray the same prayers. In churches with traditional liturgy, you turn to them and you offer them Christ’s peace. You kneel together and you ask for the same mercy from the same God. In the Catholic Mass the Confiteor, the confession, is addressed not simply to God but also to our “brothers and sisters”.

And just as in church there is no escaping human equality before God, there is no escaping from human frailty and the reality of our own wrongdoing. “We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts”, says the Church of England’s General Confession, “and there is no health in us.” “I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof”, pray Catholics before receiving Communion. To the non-churchgoer this all perhaps sounds a little excessive and gloomy, even masochistic. But it’s not really: it’s an honest reckoning with the extent of our wrongdoing and the depth and persistence of our imperfections.

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For politicians in particular — to return to my modest proposal — it is very important to be conscious of their temptations and flaws. Power does funny things to people, and it is no bad thing to have some humility thrust upon you. One of the most striking and inspiring stories from early Christianity is of Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, refusing to celebrate Mass for the Emperor Theodosius until the latter repented of an atrocity which his troops had carried out. It is a fantastic example of the Church standing up to worldly might, and one might wish Ambrose’s example had been followed more consistently by other bishops in later eras.

A common jibe against Christianity is that it is a way for The Man to control the masses. Maybe getting politicians to kneel before God and admit their weakness might mean Christianity helping the masses to control The Man.