Walter Russell Mead makes an odd remark:

One reason that nationalist groups all over Europe and the Middle East demanded states of their own is that the multinational states worked so poorly. The Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy (the best of the bunch, but still slow, corrupt and incompetent at many things), the Russian Empire: all were overwhelmed by the tasks of governing diverse populations in an age of rapid development and social change.

No, what they were overwhelmed by was the task of competing with more modernized states in the largest international conflict up to that point in history. Had they made different choices before and during 1914, all three of these empires could have avoided the conflagration that consumed them, and it is more than likely that they could have survived for quite a while had they not plunged into that war. Russian and Ottoman policies leading to their involvement in WWI contributed to the destruction of both empires, as Michael Reynolds has detailed very well in his Shattering Empires. As Reynolds says, the CUP “gambled and lost everything.” He then writes of Russian policy in this period:

Although it is impossible to know with certainty whether a less aggressive policy toward the Ottoman empire before the war would have caused Istanbul to maintain neutrality or whether Russia later might have induced Istanbul to leave the war, the outcome of tsarist foreign policy could not have been worse.

As for the claim that these states “worked so poorly,” I suppose it depends on what one means by “working.” Certainly, they were designed to “work” for the benefit of the empire’s institutions, their respective monarchies, and the maintenance of the government’s control over large territories. The far more significant reason for nationalist separatist movements in these empires was the nationalist conviction that each people should naturally have its own independent state. Once multinational dynastic states came to be seen as something merely imposed on subject peoples, and national independence was equated with liberation, it didn’t matter very much whether they “worked” well or not.

Like Joshua Keating, I’m skeptical that “identity wars” are something all that new in Africa and Asia. The persistence of politicizing ethnicity is worrisome, it can be very disruptive, and it’s certainly true that Kyrgyzstan is riven by some serious divisions, which Bakiyev and his former allies opportunistically stoked when he was overthrown. One sure way to encourage more of this phenomenon is to promote self-determination and separatist causes around the world. Unfortunately, that tends to be the default American response to many conflicts inside other states.