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

• Max Weber Programme for Postdoctoral Studies

The Max Weber Programme's June Lecture will feature a discussion by Professor Natasha Wheatley (Princeton University).

This lecture will present Central Europe as a crucible for modern statehood. Focused on the Habsburg lands before and after World War One, it shows how the Habsburg Empire’s sovereign plurality, and then its dissolution into a series of successor states, turned Central Europe into a laboratory for modern sovereignty as well as modern legal thought. The imperatives and imaginaries of Habsburg imperial governance had unexpected afterlives in the interwar international order and beyond, as scholars and theorists debated the ambiguous survival, (dis)continuity, and demise of sovereign right. These ideas echoed through global debates about decolonisation that followed World War Two, suggesting new ways of connecting sovereign transformations in Central Europe to those in the wider world across the twentieth century. 

Speaker: Natasha Wheatley is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Princeton University. She works on modern European and international history, with broad interests in intellectual and legal history, Central Europe, and the history of international law. Her first book, The Life and Death of States was published by Princeton University Press in 2023. She is the co-editor of Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History (Chicago 2020) and Remaking Central Europe: The League of Nations and the Former Habsburg Lands (Oxford 2020). She has held fellowships in Berlin, Vienna, Cambridge, and Sydney, and her writing has appeared in Past & Present, Law and History Review, History and Theory, Slavic Review, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times.