Remaking Central Europe: The League of Nations and the Former Habsburg Lands

417 Pages·2021·28.447 MB·English

by  Peter Becker, Natasha Wheatley

THE HISTORY AND THEORY OF
INTERNATIONAL LAW
Remaking Central Europe
THE HISTORY AND THEORY OF
INTERNATIONAL LAW
General Editors
NEHAL BHUTA
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-fi rst
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
1
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-s ponsored 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 col-
lective 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 ar-
guably 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 subjec-
tion 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-H ungarian 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 in-
stitutions 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 nation-
states, 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-d etermination’ (for some); a committee for refugees; a health or-
ganization; 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 cul-
tural, 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 ex-
pand 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-w ar settlements, however, has tended to overlook the experi-
ence of Central and Eastern Europe, which in the aftermath of the war went from
viii Series Editors’ Preface
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 relation-
ship 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-i mperial 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—a nd, 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 mi-
norities (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 sov-
ereignty 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-i mperial 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-C entury 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