The Life and Death of States - by Natasha Wheatley (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Canonical theorists of sovereignty (Hobbes, Rousseau, and others) put the monopoly of power at the center of their definitions. These thinkers abstracted from western European experiences to universal norms. In the wake of their transformative contributions, states that did not fit the model appeared to be underdeveloped or deviant. Labels such as "provisional" or "irregular" rendered them irrelevant to theorizing and, worse, political problems that needed to be solved. One early "anomaly," says historian Natasha Wheatley, was the Habsburg Empire. Layered as it was with imperial, national, and regional sovereignty, its trajectory was not one of progress toward a unitary state. Instead, it encompassed compound polities, or states bundled together under experimental constitutional orders. Wheatley's aim in this book is to theorize from Central Europe to see how sovereignty can be produced in a complex world. In reconstructing this political and legal history, Wheatley treats Austria-Hungary as a crucible for modern legal theory. The serial remaking and eventual unmaking of imperial sovereigny in Central Europe showed how old-world dynastic conceptions of sovereignty were translated into abstract categories of modern legal thought. In so doing, she uncovers the irresolvable tensions and strategic silences in modern political theory: the presumed unity and timelessness of states. Eschewing explanations of "failure," she instead uncovers how the Central European experience crystallized legal questions that would arise again in the era of global decolonization, connecting the story of the end of empire to the birth of new nations throughout the twentieth century. In this respect, the work serves not only as a history of Central Europe but also a "prehistory" of the era of decolonization"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"The Life and Death of States is a carefully researched and beautifully written work, a book in which ideas matter, and a welcome contribution to the field. . . . It is a pleasure to read a book that plants its flag on the fundamental importance of legal concepts and arguments as revolutionary, historically meaningful ideas. In The Life and Death of States, Natasha Wheatley has taken on a demanding and timely challenge. She has met it with admirable diligence and poise, and she offers readers of international law a valuable gift: a vivid account of their predecessors, to whom many have given little thought until recently."---Ville Kari, European Journal of International Law

"[Natasha Wheatley] has a penchant for metaphor and an inventive flair that make her legal histories come alive. . . . Wheatley has accomplished something far more consequential. She traces the legal history of statehood and self-determination to a new origin point in Central Europe, to the ashes of the Habsburg Empire--the 'ghost in the machine' of international law. Her book is an impressive account of the challenges that legal thinkers of Hans Kelsen's generation faced in describing the cataclysmic changes of their time."---Linda Kinstler, New York Review of Books

"Winner of the ICON-S Book Prize, International Society of Public Law"

"Winner of the Felicia Krishna Hensel Book Award, International Studies Association"

"Wheatley masterfully and lucidly guides the reader through a convoluted but consequential run of constitutional writs and debates (as well as their elaborate historiography); makes sense of the struggles over rights the empire generated; confronts some of the more outré bubbles of legal thought; and shows in well-curated and deeply researched detail how the complexities of the empire generated not only a path-breaking legal jurisprudence in abstract terms but also a more realistic appreciation of the world of sovereign states than the notion of the unitary state as the paragon of sovereignty could offer. All this is accomplished with reflexive candor and a dose of black humor that is a delight and, above all, entirely suited to it subject."---Micahel Geyer, Journal of Modern History

"The Life and Death of States is a dazzling history of the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the creation of the modern state system, and an extraordinary combination of legal history, philosophy, and much more. . . . [R]ichly rewarding and deeply thought-provoking."---Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy

"Brilliant"---Quinn Slobodian, H-Diplo

"It's rare to read a work of history that is not only full of facts and stories and brimming with ideas, but also instils in the reader a strong desire for more of all three while setting off a series of ultrabright flares that light up whole landscapes of thought and experience in wide, overlapping circles. Natasha Wheatley's The Life & Death of States does all of that."---Holly Case, H-Diplo

"Path-breaking and field-defining. . . . It is a testament to Wheatley that she catalogues and engages with the many directions the theorization of sovereignty took in the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian empire and its immediate aftermath. Reconstructing this rich intellectual world, she pierces the sovereign state's static and immutable image in order to reveal the remarkable political fluidity and theoretical ingenuity involved in its construction."---Adom Getachew, H-Diplo

"Shortlisted for the Laura Shannon Prize, Nanovic Institute for European Studies"

"Honorable Mention for the Morris D. Forkosch Book Prize, Journal of the History of Ideas"

"Honorable Mention for the Robert L Jervis and Paul W Schroeder Best Book Award, International History and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association"

"[The Life and Death of States] combines several aspects excellently, including primary source analysis and the reinterpretation of secondary sources, legal debates and political disputes. . . . Wheatley's insightful underlining of the importance of socio-political crises for debates on the ontology and epistemology of statehood is a powerful reminder of the historically specific origins of the modern international order of states are in fact quite recent."---Lauri von Pfaler, International Affairs

"[A]n impressive and extremely ambitious narrative of the constitutional vicissitudes of a post-1848 Habsburg Empire."---Carl Landauer, Journal of the History of International Law

"Monumental. . . . Wheatley's narrative recovers a world where international law was not a dead letter but a blueprint for a multinational and pluralistic world."---Yosef Malka, BR!NK

"A richly rewarding book. . . . Wheatley gracefully unpacks the complicated constitutional issues faced by inhabitants of the Habsburg monarchy."-- "History Today"

"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 New Statesman Book of the Year"

"A really fascinating read."---Justin Kempf, Democracy Paradox

About the Author

Natasha Wheatley is associate 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.