The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty

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Natasha Wheatley

The Life and Death of States

Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty

Natasha Wheatley

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English

Princeton University Pres
13 June 2023

Politics & government; Political science & theory

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 decolonisation 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.

By: Natasha Wheatley
Imprint: Princeton University Pres
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9780691244075
ISBN 10: 0691244073
Pages: 424
Publication Date: 13 June 2023
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , General/trade , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Natasha Wheatley is assistant professor of history at Princeton University. She is the coeditor of Remaking Central Europe: The League of Nations and the Former Habsburg Lands and Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History. Her writing has appeared in Past & Present and the London Review of Books.

Reviews for The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty

"""A New Statesman Book of the Year"" ""A really fascinating read.""---Justin Kempf, Democracy Paradox ""A valuable contribution to the extensive, and growing, historiography concerning the origins of the modern state. While others have concentrated on non-Western or Western European countries to reach their conclusions about the evolution of modern politics, Wheatley’s case study breaks new ground in its analysis of an especially difficult case, the Austrian Empire after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867."" * Choice * ""A richly rewarding book. . . . Wheatley gracefully unpacks the complicated constitutional issues faced by inhabitants of the Habsburg monarchy."" * History Today *"