Chair in International Law, University of Edinburgh
ANTHONY PAGDEN
Distinguished Professor, University of California Los Angeles
BENJAMIN STRAUMANN
ERC Professor of History, University of Zurich
In the past few decades the understanding of the relationship between nations has undergone a radical transformation. The role of the traditional nation-state is diminishing, along with many of the traditional vocabularies which were once used to describe what has been called, ever since Jeremy Bentham coined the phrase in 1780, ‘international law’. The older boundaries between states are growing ever more fluid, new conceptions and new languages have emerged which are slowly coming to replace the image of a world of sovereign independent nation states which has dominated the study of international relations since the early nineteenth century. This redefinition of the international arena demands a new understanding of classical and contemporary questions in international and legal theory. It is the editors’ conviction that the best way to achieve this is by bridging the traditional divide between international legal theory, intellectual history, and legal and political history. The aim of the series, therefore, is to provide a forum for historical studies, from classical antiquity to the twenty-first century, that are theoretically informed and for philosophical work that is historically conscious, in the hope that a new vision of the rapidly evolving international world, its past and its possible future, may emerge.
PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED IN THIS SERIES
The Battle for International Law
South-North Perspectives on the Decolonization Era
Edited by Jochen von Bernstorff and Philipp Dann
Rewriting the History of the Law of Nations
How James Brown Scott Made Francisco de Vitoria the Founder of International Law
Paolo Amorosa
To Reform the World
International Organizations and the Making of Modern States
Guy Fiti Sinclair
The New Histories of International Criminal Law Retrials
Edited by Immi Tallgren and Thomas Skouteris
Sovereignty
A Contribution to the Theory of Public and International Law
Hermann Heller, edited and introduced by David Dyzenhaus
Law and the Political Economy of Hunger
Anna Chadwick
Remaking Central Europe
The League of Nations and the Former Habsburg Lands
Edited by PETER BECKER AND NATASHA WHEATLEY
3
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Acknowledgements
This volume has roots in a conference we organized in Vienna in 2015 under the title, ‘After Empire: The League of Nations and the Former Habsburg Lands’. We thank all those who participated in our conversations that December, as well as those who joined the project subsequently. The conference was co-sponsored by the Austrian Institute of Historical Research at the University of Vienna and the Laureate Research Program in International History at the University of Sydney, led by Professor Glenda Sluga. We are most grateful to both institutions for their financial and administrative support: their investment enabled and nurtured a collective project on this scale. We owe particular thanks to Glenda Sluga: not only for the generous funding from her Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship, but for her many-sided contributions to the conceptualization of this project, her intellectual companionship and moral support, and indeed her own pioneering work in linking (Central) European and international history.
We gratefully acknowledge the excellent and extensive editorial work done by Stephan Stockinger on many of the chapters, and the Austrian Institute of Historical Research for funding his work. We also extend warm thanks to Birgit Aubrunner, who did a marvellous job with the conference logistics, and to Petra Latschenberger, who heroically wrestled the citations into conformity.
Peter Becker Natasha Wheatley
Series Editors’ Preface
The years which followed the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 have recently come to be seen as beginning of a distinctly new epoch in the history of the West and arguably of the entire globe. A little over a century earlier, in 1815, the ‘Great Powers’ had gathered in Vienna to create what the Prussian diplomat Friedrich von Gentz had called optimistically the ‘Areopagus of Europe’. It ushered in what has come to be called the ‘Century of Vienna’ which brought a largely unprecedented degree of peace to Europe itself—even as it had unleashed an era of conquest and subjection across much of the rest of the globe. In 1914 this finally collapsed and with it went the belief that the European states could by themselves dominate most of the world. The League of Nations, which was created in 1919, although in no real sense a league, was intended to build not only a new European order, but also a truly ‘new international order’. A new set of institutions and new legal order, and new forms of international governance, were created to replace the older, chaotic, and always unstable ‘balance of powers’ and the ‘congress system’ which had previously kept the ‘Great Powers’ from entirely annihilating each other. One of the vanquished of the war was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and with its collapse went the entire political social and legal structure of Central and Eastern Europe.
The subsequent reconstruction of the area was, as Peter Becker and Natasha Wheatley explain here, a process which was heavily dependent upon the new institutions of international governance set up by the League of Nations. At the same time, however, it was both a challenge to them, and was challenged by them. The First World War had been a conflict between empires as much as between nationstates, and in some respects it had been a conflict over empire. The new areopagus of the globe certainly espoused new, more liberal objectives, than had any of its predecessors: ‘self-determination’ (for some); a committee for refugees; a health organization; a slavery commission; a commission for the study of the legal status of women; a series of ‘Minorities Treaties’ to secure the rights, religious, civil, and cultural, of all peoples; and it made a provision for a Permanent Court of International Justice. The Germans and the Italians complained bitterly that this was conducted under the aegis, and very largely on behalf, of some of the victorious allies, and as a means, in part at least, of allowing the British and the French in particular to expand their global influence. All of these aspects of the new order which the League sought to create had a lasting impact on the former Hapsburg lands. Most of the literature on the post-war settlements, however, has tended to overlook the experience of Central and Eastern Europe, which in the aftermath of the war went from
being, as the editors say, ‘a highly integrated economic and political region into a cluster of new states behind new walls’.
Remaking Central Europe is the first sustained attempt to analyse the relationship between the League’s ‘new order’, and the emergence of the new states created in the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was, in more general terms, an encounter, sometimes consensual, sometimes conflictual, between a new brand of internationalism and emergent post-imperial nationalism. For much of its history, this encounter between the universalist ambitions of the League, and the ‘local particularisms’ of the states it sought to manage, constituted, as the editors say, not a ‘static opposition’ but rather a ‘dynamic historical process’. Yet that process was always, at some level, a fraught one, for it touched on the still amorphous notion of state sovereignty which, in the aftermath of the war became—and, it might be said, has remained ever since—the principal obstacle in the path of any attempt to create a truly international political order. The League’s claim to oversee the rights of minorities (discussed here by Börries Kuzmany), the attempt to control crime across borders (see the chapters by David Petruccelli and Martina Steer), the bid to create international health organizations (Sara Silverstein), and international scientific communities (Michael Burri), as well as the need to heal the crippled economies of the region (Nathan Marcus), all placed severe limitations on the self-declared sovereignty of the new states of central and eastern Europe, which were clearly critical to their status and their identity as states. Some of the same problems which arose out of this encounter between the local and international at the political and the legal level persist to this day, as the League’s structures of international control were replaced first by the brutal impositions of the Third Reich, followed by those of the Soviet Union, and now, at least in the imagination of the new ultranationalists, by the regulatory and monetary controls imposed by the European Union.
The chapters in Remaking Central Europe offer a rich and varied discussion of the emergence of the post-imperial world within Europe, and a series of detailed accounts of how the relationship between the national and the international, the local, and the universal, evolved in the aftermath of 1919. It is a relationship which still shapes and threatens the European order to this day.
Anthony Pagden
Table of Contents
Editors’ Biographies xi
List of Contributors xiii
List of Abbreviations xv
Introduction: Central Europe and the New International Order 1
Peter Becker and Natasha Wheatley
1. Habsburg Histories of Internationalism 17
Glenda Sluga
PART I REMAKING ACTORS AND NETWORKS
2. Clemens Pirquet: Early Twentieth-Century Scientific Networks, the Austrian Hunger Crisis, and the Making of the International Food Expert 39 Michael Burri
3. Reinventing International Health in East Central Europe: The League of Nations, State Sovereignty, and Universal Health 71 Sara Silverstein
4. Polycentric International Participation after the First World War: Experts from East Central Europe in and around the League of Nation’s Secretariat 99 Katja Castryck-Naumann
5. Austria, the League of Nations, and the Birth of Multilateral Financial Control 127 Nathan Marcus
6. Hungary and the League of Nations: A Forced Marriage 145 Zoltán Peterecz
7. On the Fraught Internationalism of Intellectuals: Alfons Dopsch, Austria, and the League’s Intellectual Cooperation Programme 167 Johannes Feichtinger
PART II REMAKING TERRITORIES AND BORDERS
8. Remaking Mobility: International Conferences and the Emergence of the Modern Passport System 193 Peter Becker
9. International Commerce in the Wake of Empire: Central European Economic Integration between National and Imperial Sovereignty 213 Madeleine Dungy
10. Fighting the Scourge of International Crime: The Internationalization of Policing and Criminal Law in Interwar Europe 241 David Petruccelli
11. Nation, Internationalism, and the Policies against Trafficking in Girls and Women after the Fall of the Habsburg Empire 259 Martina Steer
12. The League of Nations and the Optants’ Dispute in the Hungarian Borderlands: Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia 283 Antal Berkes
13. Non-Territorial National Autonomy in Interwar European Minority Protection and Its Habsburg Legacies 315 Börries Kuzmany
14. Beyond the League of Nations: Public Debates on International Relations in Czechoslovakia during the Interwar Period 343 Sarah Lemmen
Editors’ Biographies
Peter Becker is Professor of Austrian History in the Department of History at the University of Vienna. Before moving to Vienna, he held a professorship at the European University Institute in Florence, where he started his research on the history of modern state and governance especially of the Habsburg monarchy and on the cultural history of public administration. In Vienna, he developed a research focus on the engagement of the Habsburg monarchy and the successor states with the new international order. He is the editor of the open access yearbook Administory. Journal for the History of Public Administration, published with Sciendo since 2016.
Natasha Wheatley is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Princeton University. Prior to joining the Princeton faculty, she completed her PhD at Columbia University and was an ARC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Sydney. Her article ‘Spectral Legal Personality in Interwar International Law’ received the 2018 Surrency Prize from the American Society for Legal History, and a volume titled Power and Time, edited together with Dan Edelstein and Stefanos Geroulanos, is published by Chicago University Press in 2020. She has held fellowships in Vienna, Cambridge, and elsewhere, and was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin for the 2019–20 academic year.
List of Contributors
Dr Antal Berkes
Lecturer in Public/International Law, Brunel Law School, Brunel University London
Dr Michael Burri
Lecturer, FMA, Temple University
Dr Katja Castryck-Naumann
Senior Researcher, Department ‘Entanglements and Globalization’, Leibniz-Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe, Leipzig
Professor Patricia Clavin
Professor of International History, Faculty of History, University of Oxford
Dr Madeleine Dungy
Visiting Lecturer, College of Humanities, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Dr Johannes Feichtinger
Senior Research Associate, Austrian Academy of Sciences
Dr Börries Kuzmany
Assistant Professor of Modern History of Central and Eastern Europe, Department of East European History, University of Vienna
Dr Sarah Lemmen
Assistant Professor, Department of Modern and Contemporary History, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Dr Nathan Marcus
Senior Lecturer, Department of General History, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Dr Zoltán Peterecz
Associate Professor, Institute of English and American Studies, Eszterházy Károly University
Dr David Petruccelli
Assistant Professor, Department of History, Dartmouth College
Dr Sara Silverstein
Assistant Professor, Department of History and Human Rights Institute, University of Connecticut
Dr Glenda Sluga
Professor of International History and Capitalism, Department of History and Civilization (HEC), European University Institute/ARC Laureate Fellow, University of Sydney
Dr Martina Steer
Adjunct Professor, History, University of Vienna
List of Abbreviations
AAAS Archive of the Austrian Academy of Sciences
ADMAE Archives Diplomatiques du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères
AIDP International Association of Penal Law (Association internationale de Droit Pénal)
ALoN Archive of the League of Nations
ARA American Relief Administration
AUV Archive of the University of Vienna
BoE Bank of England
CARA Council for At-Risk Academics
CEIP Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
ERC European Research Council
IAA International Association of Academies
ICC International Chamber of Commerce
ICHS International Committee of Historical Sciences
ICIC International Commission on Intellectual Cooperation
ICPC International Criminal Police Commission
IECI International Educational Cinematographic Institute
IFC International Financial Commission
IFLNS International Federation of League of Nations Societies
IIIC International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation
ILO International Labour Organization
IMF International Monetary Fund
IPU Inter-Parliamentary Union
IR International Relations
IRC International Research Council
KPIPE Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy
LNA League of Nations Archive Geneva
LNHO League of Nations Health Organization
LoN League of Nations
LRCS League of Red Cross Societies
LSE London School of Economics
MAT Mixed Arbitral Tribunals
NEM nutritional equivalent of milk
NGO non-governmental organization
OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
OIPH Office of International Public Health (originally Office International d’Hygiène Publique)
PCIJ Permanent Court of International Justice
POW Prisoner of War
xvi List of Abbreviations
RSDRP Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
SAP Structural Adjustment Program
SCF Save the Children Fund
SCIU Save the Children International Union
SHS Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes
TB tuberculosis
TNA FCO The National Archives/Foreign Commonwealth Office
UIA International Union of Academies
UIC International Union of Railways
UN United Nations
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
WHO World Health Organization
WTO World Trade Organization
Introduction
Central Europe and the New International Order
Peter Becker and Natasha Wheatley
Over the last two decades, the ‘new international order’ of 1919 has rapidly grown into an expansive new area of research across multiple disciplines and fields.1 With the League of Nations at its heart, the interwar settlement has been rediscovered as the foundational moment of our contemporary global order: its innovations in international organization, international law, national and social rights, colonial governance, state making, financial coordination, and humanitarianism shaped the world we know today.2 No longer preoccupied exclusively with the League as
1 For new overviews and handbooks in several languages see United Nations Library (ed), The League of Nations 1920–1946, Organization and Accomplishments: A retrospective of the First Organization for the Establishment of World Peace (United Nations 1996); Paul David, Histoire de la Société des Nations: l’esprit de Génève: vingt ans d’efforts pour la paix (Ed. Slatkine 1998); Marit Fosse, La Société des Nations: ou l’histoire d’une institution moderne oubliée (Edition Diva 2005); Ruth Beatrice Henig, The League of Nations (Haus Publishing Ltd 2010); Isabella Löhr, Völkerbund (Leibniz-Inst. f. Europ. Geschichte 2015); John Fox, The League of Nations: From Collective Security to Global Rearmament (United Nations 2012); Michel Marbeau, La Société des Nations: vers un monde multilatéral: 1919–1946 (Presses universitaires François-Rabelais 2017). For new research tools see Anigue H M van Ginneken, Historical Dictionary of the League of Nations (Scarecrow Press 2006); La Société des Nations: Bibliographie (Bibliothèque de l’ONUG [2010]); Commentaire sur le pacte de la Société des Nations (Bruylant 2015).
2 Key works include: Susan Pedersen, ‘Back to the League of Nations’ (2017) 112/4 American Historical Review 1091; Patricia Clavin, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920–1946 (Oxford University Press 2013); Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: SelfDetermination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford University Press 2007); Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford University Press 2015); Antony Anghie, ‘Colonialism and the Birth of International Institutions: Sovereignty, Economy, and the Mandate System of the League of Nations’ (2002) 34/3 New York University Journal of International Law and Politics 513; Megan Donaldson, ‘The League of Nations, Ethiopia, and the Making of States’ (2020) 11/1 Humanity 6; Mark Mazower, ‘Minorities and the League of Nations in Interwar Europe’ (1997) 126/2 Daedalus 47; Mark Lewis, The Birth of the New Justice: The Internationalization of Crime and Punishment, 1919–1950 (Oxford University Press 2014); Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–1924 (Cambridge University Press 2014); Daniel Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s (Cambridge University Press 2012); Keith Watenpaugh, ‘The League of Nations’ Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920–1927’ (2010) 115/5 American Historical Review 1315; Daniel Lacqua, ‘Transnational Intellectual Cooperation, the League of Nations, and the Problem of Order’ (2011) 6/2 Journal of Global History 223; Tomoko Akami, ‘A Quest to be Global: The League of Nations Health Organization and Inter-Colonial Regional Governing Agendas of the Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine 1910–25’ (2016) 38/1 International History Review 1; Madeleine Dungy, ‘Writing Multilateral Trade Rules in the League of Nations’ [2020, forthcoming] Contemporary
an organ of collective security or with the reasons ‘why the League failed’, this new literature instead explores its role in structuring policy-making across a wide variety of fields.
No region experienced the many-sided effects and implications of this new order more intimately than Central and Eastern Europe, which turned from a highly integrated economic and political region into a cluster of new states behind new walls.3 With the collapse of the imperial states that had structured the region for centuries in 1918, a new political, social, and legal order needed to be created,4 and this process unfolded in intimate dialogue with the new institutions of international governance set up by the Allied peacemakers to guarantee their post-war settlement. At the same time, Central and Eastern Europe became the key test case for those institutions: problems of financial collapse, national minorities, endemic disease, and humanitarian aid emerged as domains where the League’s identity and authority were defined and tested.
Remaking Central Europe presents the first study of this intricate and reciprocal relationship between the new international order of 1919 and the new regional order in Central and Eastern Europe.5 It analyses the co-implication of these two orders as both the Habsburg successor states and the League’s agencies sought to build their capacity, character, and power out of the rubble of collapsed empires and world war. Relations between the new states and the new international bodies
European History; Simon Jackson and Alanna O’Malley (eds), The Institution of International Order: From the League of Nations to the United Nations (Routledge 2018).
3 Cf. Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press 2018), chap. 1. This observation takes up the catchy title of the first chapter: ‘A World of Walls’ (27). See also Natasha Wheatley, ‘Central Europe as Ground Zero of the New International Order’ (2019) 78/4 Slavic Review 900.
4 Exciting new work on the refashioning of the region into ostensibly national states includes: Larry Wolff, Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe (Stanford University Press 2020); Dominique Kirchner Reill, The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire (Harvard University Press 2020); Steven Seegel, Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe (University of Chicago Press 2018); Volker Prott, The Politics of SelfDetermination: Remaking Territories and National Identities in Europe, 1917–1923 (Oxford University Press 2016); Marcus M. Payk and Roberta Pergher (eds), Beyond Versailles: Sovereignty, Legitimacy, and the Formation of New Polities After the Great War (Indiana University Press 2019). There were wellknown attempts to fashion the region into a new supranational bloc, for example the Briand plan for European integration under the umbrella of the League, explored in Jean-Luc Chabot, Aux origines intellectuelles de l’Union européenne: L’idée d’Europe unie de 1919 à 1939 (Presses Universitaires de Grenoble 2005); on Briand cf. Gérard Unger, Aristide Briand: Le ferme conciliateur (Fayard 2005). Another broadly discussed plan was put forward by Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi under the heading Paneuropean Union. See Anita Ziegerhofer, Botschafter Europas: Richard Nikolaus CoudenhoveKalergi und die Paneuropa-Bewegung in den zwanziger und dreißiger Jahren (Böhlau 2004).
5 To our knowledge, the only publication that has examined more than one Central European state and its relation to the League of Nations deals with Czechoslovakia and Poland: Isabelle Davion, ‘Das System der kollektiven Sicherheit im Praxistest: Polen und die Tschechoslowakei im Völkerbund’ (2015) 63 Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 167. Her article does not engage, however, with the question of the political, cultural, and institutional legacies of Habsburg rule but focuses instead on the role of the League in appeasing border conflicts between the two states as a very peculiar kind of Habsburg legacy.
were constitutive and simultaneously riven with ambivalence, and illustrate a set of foundational historical conundrums for those engaged in the practice of international history. How have international frameworks and imperatives shaped nation- and state-building, and vice versa? How have these imperatives and frameworks dealt with the legal, cultural, institutional legacies of the empires from which the new states emerged? And how do regionally specific problems and experiences become abstracted into international benchmarks and precedents? As editors, our aim has been no less than to introduce a new research agenda. Together, the essays we have brought together frame the tension between the ostensible universalism of international orders and the specificity of local particularisms less as a static opposition than a dynamic historical process.
Four central interventions lie at the heart of Remaking Central Europe. The first concerns the legacies of empire. An influential stream of scholarship on the interwar international order has explored its imperial debts. Historians have revealed how key internationalist thinkers, as well as the central architects of the League of Nations and its mandate system, drew models and practices from the British Empire into the sphere of international organization.6 Yet the new order of 1919 arguably took shape on the ground most palpably in Central and Eastern Europe, where international organizations and actors worked in the shadow not of the British Empire, but the Austro-Hungarian one.7 Remaking Central Europe thus explores how one supranational order, built upon multinational dynastic rule, segued into another, founded upon the dual premise of national states and international oversight. It traces, for the first time, the interwar legacies of Habsburg imperial order—especially in the fields of law, administration, and science— in the landscape of an international order rather than in the successor states.8 International and transnational responses to the region’s challenges confronted the legacies of Habsburg rule across a range of planes and scales, including social and scientific networks, epistemic communities, legal concepts, fiscal structures,
6 These included figures like General Smuts, Alfred Zimmern, and Frederick Lugard. See for example Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton University Press 2013); Pedersen, The Guardians (n 2); Jeanne Morefield, ‘ “A Liberal in A Muddle”: Alfred Zimmern on Nationality and Commonwealth’ in David Long and Brian C. Schmidt (eds), Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations (SUNY Press 2004). More broadly, see also new work on empire and internationalism like Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro (eds), Internationalism, Imperialism and the Formation of the Contemporary World: The Pasts of the Present (Palgrave Macmillan 2017) and Sean Andrew Wempe, Revenants of a Fallen Empire. Colonial Germans, the League of Nations, and the Redefinition of Imperialism, 1919–1933 (Oxford University Press 2019).
7 See here also Slobodian, Globalists (n 3), which anchors the emergence of neoliberal, that is, ordoglobalist, economic thinking in the theoretical and political reflection of Viennese intellectuals after the end of the Great War.
8 On this aspect cf. Paul Miller and Claire Morelon (eds), Embers of Empire: Continuity and Rupture in the Habsburg Successor States after 1918 (Berghahn 2018); and in a more cultural vein, Magdalena Baran-Szołtys and Jagoda Wierzejska (eds), Continuities and Discontinuities of the Habsburg Legacy in East-Central European Discourses since 1918 (Vienna University Press 2020).
trans- and supranational political imaginaries, horizons of expectation, and spaces of experience.
We thus offer a new perspective not only on the League’s new order—one less beholden to Anglo-American lineages—but also on the afterlives of imperial rule in Central Europe. Rather than focus on Habsburg nostalgia, or on ethnic conflict, or the internal dynamics and memory politics of the successor states,9 we frame the question of imperial afterlives as one of supranational or transnational governance, spanning not only formal political structures but also civil society, professional disciplines, and political vocabularies.10 Our approach thus opens up a new, unsentimental, and non-provincial history of the empire’s disappearance that is closely engaged with current developments in the fields of international and transnational history.
In uncovering a new Central European nexus to the relationship between empire and international order, we do not present Habsburg rule in Europe as commensurable with (for example) British or French imperial rule in the wider world. These imperial histories—and their legacies—vary widely.11 What is commensurable, we suggest, is the process in which ideas and practices derived from the management of diversity in imperial settings and within a multi-national European state are transported into the domain of international law and order. We are especially interested in the particularity of these Habsburg ideas and practices and their subsequent international afterlives, for example regarding the management of ethnic, linguistic, and religious difference (from the empire’s ‘nationalities’ into interwar ‘minorities’) and the mechanisms and imaginary of multi-level government.
The second central intervention resides in our regional approach. 12 In highlighting the common legal, institutional, and cultural inheritance shared by
9 Cf. Mark Cornwall and John Paul Newman (eds), Sacrifice and Rebirth: The Legacy of the Last Habsburg War (Berghahn 2016).
10 On business elites over the cusp of 1918, see Mate Rigo, ‘The Long First World War and the Survival of Business Elites in East-Central Europe: Transylvania’s Industrial Boom and the Enrichment of Economic Elites’ (March 2917) 24/2 European Review of History/Revue europeenne d’histoire 250. The continued effect of previous borders in newly established or expanded states, like in Poland, could be seen as another instance of imperial afterlife, which was strongly felt especially in Poland. Cf. Béatrice von Hirschhausen and others (eds), Phantomgrenzen: Räume und Akteure in der Zeit neu denken (Wallstein 2015). For a fresh look at the changing role of civil society vis-à-vis international governance see Cecilia M. Lynch, Beyond Appeasement: Interpreting Interwar Peace Movements in World Politics (Cornell University Press 2018) esp. chaps. 1–3.
11 On a comparative history of European Empires cf. Jorn Leonhard and Ulrike von Hirschhausen (eds), Comparing Empires: Encounters and Transfers in the Long Nineteenth Century (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2011).
12 For a fine example of a differently structured regional approach, see Alan McPherson and Yannick Wehrli (eds), Beyond Geopolitics. New Histories of Latin America at the League of Nations (University of New Mexico Press 2015). Indeed, a regional approach to the League has been pursued mainly with regard to Latin America. See also Thomas Fischer, Die Souveränität der Schwachen: Lateinamerika und der Völkerbund, 1920–1936 (Franz Steiner Verlag 2012). Our volume thus ties Central European history into methodological trends shaping international and global history across other world regions. For a regional study of one domain of the League’s activity—namely, the mandates system—see Cyrus Schayegh and Andrew Arsan (eds), The Routledge Handbook of the History of the Middle East Mandates (Routledge 2015).
the successor states, our volume probes the possibility and plausibility of treating the domain of former Habsburg rule as a (more or less coherent) region. This optic allows us to transcend an older generation of scholarship that tended to focus on the relationship between a single (nation-)state and an international organization or question.13 Rather than pre-presume the uniqueness of each particular national predicament or perspective, this volume makes analytic space for the common issues and challenges that confronted the new states as they constructed both their internal architecture and external standing. It also carries forward the most sophisticated new work on the Habsburg Empire with the recovery of the institutions and interests that tied Central Europeans into a common cultural and political world.14
Some international innovations—like the minorities treaties—had a distinct regional hue from the outset; others—like the international management of national economies—became connected to the region’s particular problems as first Austria, then Hungary submitted to the fiscal oversight of the League in exchange for financial aid.15 Several key challenges besetting the new Central European states—especially epidemics and other health questions, trade, and international crime—blithely transgressed sovereign borders, and demanded regional responses. Those responses in turn ran up against and relied upon networks, relationships, and bodies of knowledge inherited from the era of Habsburg rule.
In thinking across these cases, Remaking Central Europe asks: to what extent can we consider this region a single site for questions of international order during this period? In presenting this regional coherence as a historical question, we propose a new tripartite analytical frame—national-regional-international that takes the mutual implication of these scales as a key point of departure.16
Our third (and related) intervention moves towards an integrated history of the interwar order in Europe. The regional perspective allows us to explore the
13 These country studies look increasingly at the interrelation between national politics, civil society, and the international order. See especially Carlo Moos, Ja zum Völkerbund Nein zur UNO: Die Volksabstimmungen von 1920 und 1986 in der Schweiz (Chronos; Editions Payot 2001); Helen McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations: Democracy, Citizenship and Internationalism, c. 1918–45 (Manchester University Press 2011); Elisabetta Tollardo, Fascist Italy and the League of Nations, 1922–1935 (Palgrave Macmillan 2016).
14 See especially Pieter Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Harvard University Press 2016); John Deak, Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War (Stanford University Press 2015).
15 See Clavin, Securing the World Economy (n 2) chap. 1; Nathan Marcus, Austrian Reconstruction and the Collapse of Global Finance, 1921–1931 (Harvard University Press 2018); Zoltán Peterecz, Jeremiah Smith, jr. and Hungary, 1924–1926: The United States, the League of Nations, and the Financial Reconstruction of Hungary (Versita 2013).
16 We thus take up the conceptual advances made by Sandrine Kott and look at the ‘régimes circulatoires’ structuring the exchange between the international, national, and local levels. In contrast with Kott’s approach, we collect a series of essays with the same regional and temporal focus, with the aforementioned analytical benefits. Sandrine Kott, ‘Les organisations internationales, terrains d’étude de la globalisation: Jalons pour une approche socio-historique’ (2011) 52 Critique internationale 9. More generally, see also Cyrus Schayegh’s exploration of ‘spatial layeredness’ or ‘transpatialization’ in The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World (Harvard University Press 2017).
entanglement of different areas of the League’s activity—often through the mobilization of policy specific networks of state and non-state actors. In drawing these various studies together, our volume exposes the connections between different regional challenges and their remedies, rather than tracing a single subject area like health or law or finance. By contrast, much of the new work on the international order pursues a singular institutional wing (like the International Labour Organization (ILO) or the mandates system) or a singular category (like humanitarianism, white slavery, or civil society support).17 The multi-author format is thus crucial to our conceptualization of the topic, because it enables us to transcend the limits of individual scholarly expertise and show how fiscal, national, social, health, intellectual, and political crises twisted and melted together in unpredictable ways, sometimes involving overlapping personnel. If this interconnectedness proved especially visible on the ground in Central Europe, then the regional approach suggests ways of writing histories that are not beholden to the League’s own categorization of different domains of governance and organization of knowledge. In this way, Remaking Central Europe has the potential to open up new methodological pathways for histories of international order in different times, places, and fields.
The fourth and final intervention focuses on the relationship between nationalism and internationalism, especially in relation to sovereignty, supranational governance, and European integration. Recent works of international history have sought to undo the traditional binary between nationalism and internationalism by arguing for their close historical and conceptual connection.18 Interwar Central Europe arguably offers an unparalleled testing ground for these claims.19 In the condensed span of a few short decades, the region experienced revolutionary nationalization and internationalization: in the same moment that the nation-state model triumphed over multinational empire, the Allies launched an unprecedented experiment in international organization that seemingly claimed the right to modify or check traditional sovereignty in various ways. By granting the nascent League of Nations the power to oversee the rights of minorities in the new states, the peace treaties enshrined this tension in the foundational moment of the new
17 To mention just a few contributions from a rich and inspiring literature: R.M. Douglas, Michael D. Callahan, and Elizabeth Bishop (eds), Imperialism on Trial: International Oversight of Colonial Rule in Historical Perspective (Lexington 2006); Clavin, Securing the World Economy (n 2); Sandrine Kontt and Joëlle Droux (eds), Globalizing Social Rights: The International Labour Organization and Beyond (Palgrave 2013); McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations (n 13) ; Daniel Maul, The International Labour Organization: 100 Years of Global Social Policy (de Gruyter 2019); Pedersen, The Guardians (n 2).
18 Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (University of Pennsylvania Press 2013); Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (Penguin 2012); Guy Fiti Sinclair, To Reform the World: International Organizations and the Making of Modern States (Oxford University Press 2017).
19 As we see so vividly in Quinn Slobodian’s analysis of economists’ desire to ‘encase’ inner-state policies in an international regulatory system. Slobodian, Globalists (n 3).
European order. The range of ways in which the functions of the state might be managed or even turned over to international organizations expanded still further when the League’s financial reconstruction of Austria and then Hungary became test cases with global resonance. The paradoxes involved in these dual imperatives surfaced in myriad ways across the various faces of the interwar settlement. As some actors toiled to construct new state borders, others simultaneously developed new techniques for transcending them. Perhaps more than any other region, interwar Central Europe compels us to view the twinned process of state-building/ nationalization and internationalization in the same historical frame.
Through this conceptualization of the topic, Remaking Central Europe seeks novel paths of connection between interwar Central Europe and other major historiographies, including global governance and European integration. In presenting new studies on episodes like the international management of the Austrian and Hungarian economies, for example, our study ties interwar Europe into the larger literature on global governance and financial supervision. The former Habsburg lands emerge as key workshops for international prerogatives and techniques that still structure relationships between many parts of the developing world and the international community, including peacekeeping, humanitarian intervention, international monetary loans, and regulatory oversight.
The same is true for European integration. As the European Union has grown institutionally and become pivotal to Europe’s economic future and its standing in world affairs, public and academic appetite for new interpretations of Europe’s collective past, present, and future have expanded rapidly. Historians have looked back to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the German customs union, or even the Holy Roman Empire in pursuit of enlightening precedents and pre-histories for contemporary European integration. Even for an understanding of the dynamics of disintegration under the spell of resurgent nationalism,20 it can be rewarding to cast a critical eye at the end of the Habsburg Empire and even at the beginning of the new international order in the 1920s. Remaking Central Europe channels this interest into the plastic and formative moment in which older techniques of supranational organization—namely, the rule of a multi-national state—directly confronted the modern techniques of transnational administration and regulation over multiple national-states that characterize European (and global) governance today. We thus provide a new, subtle space for thinking about the history of European integration between different forms of coercion and different forms of agency, without privileging either a simple history of imperial/international control, nor a whiggish account free from the frictions and paradoxes that characterized the period in question.
20 See Christian Karner and Monika Kopytowska (eds), National Identity and Europe in Times of Crisis: Doing and Undoing Europe (Emerald 2017); Ivan T. Berend, Against European Integration: The European Union and its Discontents (Routledge 2019).
A New
History of Internationalism and Governance in the Habsburg Lands
The League was derided already during its lifetime for not living up to its bold claims of stabilizing a new world order in which peace would prevail and armament races would be consigned to the past. As Susan Pedersen and others have argued, the failure of this utopian vision obscures our view of all that the League did transform. It actually relied already on the ‘solidarity of facts’ that Robert Schuman would later promote as the starting point of European integration in 1950.
International collaboration in the provision of common goods21 such as health care, environment, infrastructure, education, research, and security was restructured around the League of Nations after the war.22 Rather than focus solely on the more familiar story of cooperation between states, we turn to the less studied question of how expert and civil society networks were redrawn under the influence of the new political situation. Our focus on the successor states of the Habsburg Empire provides a penetrating lens for a thorough discussion of continuities and changes in the ways in which these networks collaborated with governments and with supranational agencies. Did the Habsburg monarchy leave a legacy not just in the legal underpinnings of state action and personal transactions but also with respect to the networks of governance? This question has the potential to open a Pandora’s box of studies on regional identity from a governance perspective.
Our exploration of the interaction between expert and civil society networks and international agencies offers the opportunity to look not just at the resilience of networks of governance in the provision of common goods at the state level. It also helps identify continuities and ruptures in a single state’s networking with international agencies. This is one of the legacies that extended across a range of planes and scales, including social and scientific networks, epistemic communities, legal concepts, fiscal structures, trans- and supranational political imaginaries, horizons of expectation, and spaces of experience.
Interestingly, the Habsburg Monarchy was comparatively disengaged from many international initiatives.23 This does not mean that expert groups and civil society organizations in the Habsburg monarchy refrained from international networking. On the contrary, we only need to think of the peace movement, the philanthropic networks and their fight against the white slave trade, and the
21 See Adrienne Héritier (ed), Common Goods: Reinventing European and International Governance (Rowman & Littlefield 2002).
22 See, for example, Anna-Katharina Wöbse, Weltnaturschutz: Umweltdipomatie in Völkerbund und Vereinten Nationen, 1920–1950 (Campus Verlag 2011).
23 See Peter Becker, ‘Von Listen und anderen Stolpersteinen auf dem Weg zur Globalisierung: Die Habsburgermonarchie und der Internationalismus des ‘langen’ 19. Jahrhunderts’ in Barbara HaiderWilson, William Godsey, and Wolfgang Mueller (eds), International History in Theory and Practice (ÖAW 2017).
internationally well-connected medical profession.24 The Habsburg Monarchy and the Austrian republic provided formal support for these international activities only in rare instances, such as the creation of the forerunner of today’s Interpol in the 1920s under the auspices of Johann Schober, president of the Vienna police and federal chancellor.25 Looking at the ways in which the successor states positioned themselves towards the involvement of their expert communities and civil society organizations with the League of Nations also casts light on the legacy of the Habsburg Monarchy in this field.
When the League’s agencies started to generate tools to respond to the main challenges of the interwar period, they also turned to the toolbox of the Habsburg empire. This was the case particularly in developing strategies to govern the minority problem. The experience of the Habsburg Monarchy in dealing with nationality rights had a strong impact on this discussion, which translated nationality rights into minority rights.26
In examining the resilience of institutional, legal, cultural, and social practices in the successor states of the Habsburg Empire through the lens of the League of Nations, we do not ignore the enormous ruptures brought about by war and by the peace treaties of 1919–20. The frequently discussed schisms of the war years— including the assault on civil society during wartime emergency measures, the rapid expansion of the state in the economic field, the radicalization of nationalist sentiments, and the breakup of a political, economic, financial, and cultural space—were aggravated by the region’s experience of a new world of walls, where borders suddenly impeded the flow of goods and people.27 This constellation of developments and their challenges provides the backdrop against which Remaking Central Europe traces continuities from the Habsburg Monarchy into the successor states. We have organized this discussion into two major sub-sections: ‘Remaking Actors and Networks’ and ‘Remaking Territories and Borders’.
Part I, ‘Remaking Actors and Networks’, analyses various actors and networks circulating through the ‘multiverse’ of the League.28 Operating at the intersection of state and civil society, these transnational networks of governance bore the imprint of the Habsburg Empire, and often reacted against it. They were communities of expertise that had to adapt to a new landscape of sovereign states, often ‘rescaling’ their projects in ways that allow us to explore different forms of
24 For the fate of these networks into the interwar era, see the chapters of Michael Burri, Sara Silverstein, Katja Castryck, and Martina Steer in this volume.
25 See the chapter of David Petruccelli in this volume; as well as Jens Jäger, Verfolgung durch Verwaltung: Internationales Verbrechen und internationale Polizeikooperation, 1880–1933 (UVK Verlagsgesellschaft mbH 2006); Mathieu Deflem, Policing World Society: Historical Foundations of International Police Cooperation (Oxford University Press 2002).
26 See the chapter of Börries Kuzmany in this volume, as well as Natasha Wheatley, ‘Making Nations into Legal Persons between Imperial and International Law: Scenes from a Central European History of Group Rights’ (2018) 28 Duke Journal of Comparative and International Law 481.
27 See the chapters of Peter Becker and Madeleine Dungy in this book.
28 For the League as a ‘multiverse,’ see Clavin, Securing the World Economy (n 2).
