Nationalism is not the default state of things. Greeks, Latins, Syriac speakers, Jews, Gauls, Berbers, Egyptians, Germans etc. fought under Rome and became Roman citizens - maintaining their languages and customs to some degree (while taking on many Roman ones too - including especially Latin). In the modern US Texans and Californians, New Yorkers and New Jersey...ers don't always love each other but they see each other as parts of the same political entity.

In the Austr(o-Hungar)ian empire, nationalist movements existed within the auspices of the empire itself. While the Czech national revival for example, with the matice ceska etc, sought to reassert Czech's status after the Germanization policies of the 17th century Germanized the upper classes, this was cultural. Politically, the Austro-Slavist movement sought to coordinate all Slavic nations they could into a unified block within the empire.. Such ideas of unity as opposed to separate political nationalisms continued with even independent Czechoslovakia's first president Masaryk writing a book in general support of a similar idea "New Europe: Slavic Perspective". Poland's Pilsudski's Intermarium is also similar in its wide ranging goal to unify many peoples.

When Hungarians gained "equal status" it was not that Germans had been above other peoples and the Hungarians were now too (although the Hungarians did initiate a grand campaign to turn everyone in their transleithanian half into Hungarian speakers through required education in Hungarian). If you look at the cisleithanian Imperial Council's House of Lords you will see many non-German names. Czech politicians had a big role here with parties like the Czech agrarian party or the czech national social party or the young czech party etc. having a total of 83 seats in the 1911 elections. The German national union however had little support in e.g. Vienna and instead was able to win 100 seats from areas experiencing ethnic strife. Polish equivilents 70, Ukrainians 28 etc. But these parties believed in greatly varying things. The Czech national social party supported zionism and Czech independence from Austria Hungary. The Czech Social democratic party with its 25 votes was allied with the other social democratic parties.

Trialism was the name of this - creating a 3rd pole to weaken the Hungarian position in the dualist monarchy. Why was this a popular consideration and position even among the non-Slavs and the government? With the Ausgleich of 1867, the new Hungarian government quickly followed up with a nationality law the next year which resulted in all languages besides Hungarian (yes, even German) being replaced from schools. There is some difficulty assigning causation and meaning to such things as there was a huge number of migrants into the cities but also out of the country. Of emigrants, Hungarians, half the population, only made up a quarter. But if we look at the population of Budapest it goes from 402,000 to 1,110,000 in the 30 years from 1880, while the city had been majority German speaking as recently as 1850, that was only 9% in 1910.

The officer corps by the great war was about 80% German speaking (less so in the reserves) but less for ethnic reasons than ones of culture. Nationalist sentiment was encouraged and career military men tended to gravitate to the German spectrum. The soldiers themselves had to learn about 100 German orders. Hungarians in the Landwehr would speak Hungarian (sometimes Croatian) while other units would have their own regiment languages. The 100th regiment from Krakau was split into German, Czech and Polish speaking thirds, for example. Schmidl's paper discusses the capacity/potential of the army to help create a shared identity similar to how the French army did so in the 19th century. [French of course was spoken by only 1/8 of the population by the revolution!

Many ethnicities and languages existed. Many people tried to assert themselves or turn others into their own group. Many missed the empire when it passed away (although the great literature of cosmopolitan Austro-Hungarian nostalgia from after the break up is primarily in German, though there are some Polish and Hungarian novels too.) Were the majority of subjects of Venice followers of some Venetian identity? Would a farmer in Egypt, Cyprus or southern Italy consider themselves a Byzantine? Did it even matter? Such beliefs were not essential. Faith in the emperor was enough. Many small peoples especially supported the empire in the face of their regions traditional elites.

The Jews of Galacia, the Ukrainians (Ruthenians) against their Polish landlords, the Croatians against the Hungarians, the Romanians against the Hungarians... When protesting things, they would display their loyalty as an argument!

The Austrian Germans were Germans but didn't assign their loyalties to Germany instead! A separate Austrian identity only started developing after the war (and really after WWII) (although there are some signs). In 1938, in the Anschluss, the Austrian official Schuschnigg explained why the army would not defend against the Nazis by saying that "under no circumstances should any German blood be spilt" by which German meant Austrian too.

To sum up - there was no national identity because that didn't matter to supporters of the state. The closest equivalent would be German speaking servants of the emperor - but not considering Germanness to be the most important aspect (hence the Austrian currents against a greater Germany.) Just like in earlier days, Polish or Irish officers could pledge allegiance to a sovereign and fight in his armies, why should his ethnicity matter? As the language of bureaucracy and cultural inertia, German won out. But you didn't have to be German as proved by Svetozar Boroevic. Why should such identity even matter if you speak German, Hungarian and Polish as a butcher, laborer or officer? Multilingualism was common.

Julius Kornis - ungarische Kulturideale 1777-1848 (which largely deals with policies afterwards to make everyone follow those ideals - the author was a postwar minister of education in Hungary)

Birgitt Morgenbrod - Erzherzog Franz Ferdinnand und Conrad von Hötzendorf : Strategien zur Stabilisierung der Donaumonarchie

John Deak - Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War

Laurence Cole, Daniel Unowsky, eds. The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegiances, and State Patriotism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy. Austrian and Habsburg Studies

Cohen, Gary B. The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague

Jeremy King - Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848-1948

Laurence Cole and Daniel Unowsky - The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegiances, and State Patriotism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy

Erwin A. Schmidl: Die k.u.k. Armee: Integrierendes Element eines zerfallenden Staates?

Weber - Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870-1914

Winfried Garscha - Für eine neue Chronologie der österreichischen Nationsgenese

Istvan Deak - Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps 1848-1918

Tara Zahra - Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948

Laszlo Peter - The Dualist Character of the 1867 Hungarian Settlemen