Austro Hungary in three sentences

Christopher Hitchens in the March Atlantic:

In his essay on Malinowski, Ernest Gellner wrote of how the borderline and marginal peoples of Austria-Hungary needed three things from their benign, whiskered old monarch. The required insurance against mutual fratricide, protection of local and eccentric cultures and guarantees against the ambitions of Germany and Russia. By giving way first to micro and then to macro anti-Semitism, not only did this fair approximation of a civilization lose its best minds; it lost its collective min, and thus managed to invite the two worst possible fates by beckoning on first a German and then a Russian imperium.”