Twentieth Century Politics and Society

Abstract

This talk connects the legal history of Habsburg Central Europe to the broader twentieth-century history of decolonization and international law. It tracks a series of debates about the nature of sovereignty from of the cradle of Habsburg constitutional law into the architecture of Europe’s interwar settlement. In the wake of imperial collapse in 1918, claim-makers, peacemakers, and jurists composed searching new accounts of the resurrection and continuity of historic states and their re-entry into the domain of international law. If sorting “old” states from “new” ones shaped the attribution of rights (especially to territory) and duties (especially reparations), then it also had repercussions for the frontiers of international legal knowledge and its conceptualization of the birth and death of states.