Thursday, 25 February 2021

Peter Becker and Natasha Wheatley (eds): Remaking Central Europe: The League of Nations and the Former Habsburg Lands. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2021. ISBN: 9780198854685

 

A key study of the 1919 new international order in Central Europe, showing how the former Habsburg lands served as a key crucible for international order and supranational governance between the two World Wars

Analyzes the afterlife of the Habsburg empire in international history, offering new insights and directions for Central European history beyond the history of nation-states

A pioneering regional approach to international history, examining differences between national, regional, and international orders to reveal new problems and histories


Description

Over the last two decades, the "new international order" of 1919 has grown into an expansive new area of research across multiple disciplines. With the League of Nations at its heart, the interwar settlement's innovations in international organizations, international law, and many other areas shaped the world we know today.


This book presents the first study of the relationship between this new international order and the new regional order in Central and Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Habsburg empire. An analysis of the co-implication of these two orders is grounded in four key scholarly interventions: understanding the legacies of empire in international organizations; examining regionalism in the work of interwar international institutions; creating an integrated history of the interwar order in Europe; and testing recent claims of the conceptual connection between nationalism and internationalism.


With chapters covering international health, international financial oversight, human trafficking, minority rights, scientific networks, technical expertise, passports, commercial treaties, borders and citizenship, and international policing, this book pioneers a regional approach to international order, and explores the origins of today's global governance in the wake of imperial collapse.


Table of Contents

Introduction: Central Europe and the New International Order of 1919, Peter Becker and Natasha Wheatley

1. Habsburg Histories of Internationalism, Glenda Sluga

Part One: Remaking Actors and Networks

2. Clemens Pirquet: Early Twentieth-Century Scientific Networks, the Austrian Hunger Crisis, and the Making of the International Food Expert, Michael Burri

3. Reinventing International Health in East Central Europe: The League of Nations, State Sovereignty, and Universal Health, Sara Silverstein

4. The Polycentric Remaking of International Participation after World War I: (Post-)Imperial Agents from Eastern Europe in and around the League of Nations' Secretariat, Katja Naumann

5. Austria, the League of Nations, and the Birth of Multilateral Financial Control, Nathan Marcus

6. Hungary and the League of Nations: A Forced Marriage, Zoltan Peterecz

7. On the Fraught Internationalism of Intellectuals: Alfons Dopsch, Austria, and the League's Intellectual Cooperation Program, Johannes Feichtinger

Part Two: Remaking Territories and Borders

8. Remaking Mobility: International Conferences and the Emergence of the Modern Passport System, Peter Becker

9. International Commerce in the Wake of Empire: Central European Economic Integration between National and Imperial Sovereignty, Madeleine Lynch Dungy

10. Fighting the Scourge of International Crime: The Internationalisation of Policing and Criminal Law in Interwar Europe, David Petruccelli

11. Nation, Internationalism, and the Policies against Trafficking in Girls and Women after the Fall of the Habsburg Empire, Martina Steer

12. The League of Nations and the Optants Disputes of the Hungarian Borderlands: Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, Antal Berkes

13. Non-Territorial Autonomy in Interwar European Minority Protection and Its Habsburg Legacies, Börries Kuzmany

14. Beyond the League of Nations: Public Debates on International Relations in Czechoslovakia during the Interwar Period, Sarah Lemmen

An Epilogue to the Making and Unmaking of Central Europe and Global Order, Patricia Clavin


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.


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.



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