The Life and Death of States
eBook - ePub

The Life and Death of States

Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty

  1. 416 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Life and Death of States

Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty

About this book

An intellectual history of sovereignty that reveals how the Habsburg Empire became a crucible for our contemporary world order

Sprawled across the heartlands of Europe, the Habsburg Empire resisted all the standard theories of singular sovereignty. The 1848 revolutions sparked decades of heady constitutional experimentation that pushed the very concept of “the state” to its limits. This intricate multinational polity became a hothouse for public law and legal philosophy and spawned ideas that still shape our understanding of the sovereign state today. The Life and Death of States traces the history of sovereignty over one hundred tumultuous years, explaining how a regime of nation-states theoretically equal under international law emerged from the ashes of a dynastic empire.

Natasha Wheatley shows how a new sort of experimentation began when the First World War brought the Habsburg Empire crashing down: the making of new states. Habsburg lands then became a laboratory for postimperial sovereignty and a new international order, and the results would echo through global debates about decolonization for decades to come. Wheatley explores how the Central European experience opens a unique perspective on a pivotal legal fiction—the supposed juridical immortality of states.

A sweeping work of intellectual history, The Life and Death of States offers a penetrating and original analysis of the relationship between sovereignty and time, illustrating how the many deaths and precarious lives of the region’s states expose the tension between the law’s need for continuity and history’s volatility.

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Yes, you can access The Life and Death of States by Natasha Wheatley in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & 19th Century History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Acknowledgments
  7. Maps
  8. Introduction: Making a World of States
  9. Chapter 1. Constitution as Archive: Drafting the Empire, 1848–1860s
  10. Chapter 2. The Secret Science of Dual Sovereignty: 1867 and After
  11. Chapter 3. Fictional States: Lands and Nations
  12. Chapter 4. Pure Theory: Jellinek and Kelsen Reinvent Legal Philosophy
  13. Chapter 5. What Is a New State? 1919 in the History of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
  14. Chapter 6. State Birth at the Frontier of Knowledge: Reimagining International Law from Postimperial Vienna
  15. Chapter 7. Sovereignty in Sequence: Law, Time, and Decolonization
  16. Conclusion: The Temporal Life of States
  17. Notes
  18. Index