Kossuth proposed to transform the Habsburg Empire into a 'Danubian State', a federal republic with autonomous regions. He aimed to replace the centralized empire with a federation of five states: a German state, a state of Bohemia and Moravia, Galicia as a Polish state, and the state of historical Hungary Īnother idea came from Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth: 'True liberty is impossible without federalism'.

In his work titled Szózat a magyar és a szláv nemzetiség ügyében and published in Hungarian in 1843 and in German in 1844, he proposed not only social reforms but reforms of the state structure of the Empire and its nationality policy. The first program for the federalisation of the Habsburg Empire was developed by the Hungarian nobleman Wesselényi Miklós.