Venue: Theater Auditorium of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), Sonnenfelsgasse 19, 1010 Vienna
Natasha Wheatley's bold and fascinating new book The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty rediscovers the multinational Habsburg polity as a hothouse for ideas that still shape our understanding of the sovereign state. Mapping the history of nesting nationalities in an intricate dynastic empire, the book explains how a regime of self-contained nation-states theoretically equal under international law emerged from the ashes of the Habsburg polity. Wheatley sheds rich light on how the Habsburg Monarchy was turned inside out, how its constitutional and legal arrangements were mapped onto the globe after its demise. Apart from tracing the Empire's afterlife up to the decolonisation movements of the twentieth century, Wheatley offers riveting insights on the chronopolitics of sovereignty: In the context of the Habsburg polity, Central European jurists pioneered the crucial legal fiction of the supposed immortality of states, their capacity to hibernate and to re-emerge for a fresh lease of life.
The event is moderated by Jannis Panagiotidis, RECET's Scientific Director.
Natasha Wheatley is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Princeton University. She is an historian of modern European and international history with broad interests in legal and intellectual history. She completed her PhD at Columbia in 2016, and prior to joining the Princeton faculty she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sydney.
Peter Becker teaches Austrian history at the university of Vienna. His research focuses on the history of state and governance, on the biologization of the Social in the long 20th Century, and on Central Europe's intricate relation with the League of Nations. He has more recently edited a volume together with Natasha Wheatley on this research focus: Remaking Central Europe: The League of Nations and the Former Habsburg Lands, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2020.
Franz L. Fillafer is a historian of Central Europe who is particularly interested in its global settings and significance. His most recent book is Aufklärung habsburgisch: Staatsbildung, Wissenskultur und Geschichtspolitik in Zentraleuropa, 1750–1850 (2nd ed. Göttingen: Wallstein 2022).
Eva-Maria Muschik is a historian and Assistant Professor at the University of Vienna. She is the author of Building States: The United Nations, Development, and Decolonization, 1945–1965 (Columbia University Press, 2022), which examines the role of UN personnel in the transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states.
Renáta Uitz is a professor of comparative constitutional law at CEU Vienna and a co-director of the CEU Democracy Institute at Budapest. Her major research interests lie in transition to and from constitutional democracy, the protection of individual autonomy and religious liberty. Her current work focuses on illiberal constitutional practices in the European Union and the normalization of illiberal constitutionalism around the world.
This event is a cooperation with the CEU Democracy Institute and the Institute for Culture Studies and Theatre History of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
