It is true that in Austro-Hungary, the political scene of the last decades before the war were increasingly dominated by the struggle for national rights among the empire's eleven official nationalities – German, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Romanians, Ruthenians, Poles and Italians. Yet before 1914, radical nationalists seeking full separation from the empire were still in a small minority and the roots of Austro-Hungary’s political turbulence went less deep than appearances suggested.