On October 24th, 2024, Professor Natasha Wheatley, an associate professor of history at Princeton University, presented a talk on her recent book, The Life and Death of States:Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty. The event, hosted by the Institute of European Studies at UC Berkeley in collaboration with the Austrian Studies program and the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, attracted approximately thirty attendees.
Introducing Wheatley, John Connelly, co-Director of the Austrian Studies Program, praised her book for its rigorous research and elegant prose: he described it as both a tribute to the scholarly profession and a groundbreaking exploration of how states emerge and re-emerge over time. Using Austria and the modern states that succeeded the Habsburg Empire as a case-study, Wheatley investigates evolving concepts of sovereignty and the impact of legal theory on state formation.
Wheatley began her talk by framing modern history as a shift from a world of empires to a world of states. To illustrate this transition, she cited the pluralistic nature of the Habsburg Empire—an empire of languages, feudal patrimonies, and varied geographical territories—which dissolved in 1918 after World War I. Central and Eastern European legal theorists, she explained, sought to reconcile this multiplicity and justify new states’ claims to sovereignty.
Wheatley focused on two scholars, Georg Jellinek and Hans Kelsen, who informed her historical analysis of statehood. While Jellinek worked on defining the modern state, Kelsen argued that legal frameworks could transform a lived reality of multiplicity into a single legal entity. According to Wheatley, these ideas represented a departure from French and English legal philosophy, which, at the time, lacked an approach to accommodate the multiplicity defining these emergent states. This shift allowed identities that were not fully sovereign under the empire to form legitimate, autonomous states, such as the various former territories of the Habsburg Empire.
In Wheatley’s analysis, these new conceptions of modern statehood led to relativizing the “newness” of states like Hungary and Czechoslovakia in comparison to established European nations. She highlighted the Hungarian delegation’s argument at the 1918 Paris Conference, which asserted that Hungary was not a new state but one that had preceded and outlasted the Habsburg Empire.
Finally, Wheatley touched on the broader implications of her work, suggesting that nations eclipsed by empires could retain a claim to sovereignty post-empire. Using historical examples from Pakistan, India, and Aboriginal Australia, Wheatley demonstrated how her framework could be applied globally.