It was certainly the most delicate of the 19th century European empires. Its attempts to Germanize its subjects was not what you saw in Prussia/later the German

It was certainly the most delicate of the 19th century European empires. Its attempts to Germanize its subjects was not what you saw in Prussia/later the German Empire, or as bad as Russification in the Russian Empire. I see some similarities between Austria-Hungary and Poland-Lithuania. I think their Catholicism is what permitted the tolerance you saw, because it was tolerance of the authentic sort, not the liberal ersatz: they were both Catholic confessional states that tolerated a variety of religious belief pragmatically, but the parameters were openly and decidedly Catholic. And because Catholicism acknowledges that forced conversion is not only impossible, but immoral, as well as counter to the common good, when accommodation of other religions occurs, it occurs genuinely and according to a clear, realistic, and substantive position. Liberalism, OTOH, simply pretends to be an impossibly big "neutral" tent, but it practices its jihad in secret. No religion is allowed to dominate or function as the organizing principle of the realm, it claims. But liberalism is itself a worldview rooted in a distinctive anthropology, and it is the worldview that reigns. The result is that: 1) Liberal doctrines become these organizing principles, which are sold as "neutral" and therefore beyond discussion and disagreement, something that leads to their imposition and the undermining of other worldviews. A supposed pragmatic doctrine forces other worldviews into the private sphere, and itself is elevated into an ideology that denies it is one. In a Catholic confessional state, no one is pretending to be "neutral", and so someone of another worldview can accept the Catholic terms of the polity on pragmatic grounds without ever being duped or coerced into thinking these are anything but Catholic terms. They are asserted as true, yes, but toleration is identical to acknowledging and accepting the existence of theoretical disagreement, even if there are pragmatic limits. 2) The public sphere becomes anemic and restricted to "pragmatic" things like economics, which vulgarizes the culture, elevating consumption into the religion of consumerism. This vulgarization not only produces a vulgar public culture for the polity, but it necessarily spreads into the private sphere and suffocates the dynamism, richness, and higher ends offered by other, more substantive worldviews, hence negating the very tolerance that it purported to have. The net effect is decadence.