The Life and Death of States by Natasha Wheatley;

Author:Natasha Wheatley;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2023-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

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The challenge of coding imperial order into constitutional law had driven the development of a number of conceptual propositions and ritualized contrasts, including the distinction between historical and natural/ethnic rights, the capacity of historical law and rights to survive in theory while not in fact, the tight co-implication of rights and their subject, the capacity of states to preserve their legal personality within imperial polities, and their capacity to carry rights with them between different legal orders. Together these components reflected a deeper set of precepts about the relationship between law, time, and sovereignty. Law recorded history, archived its path and sequence, and triumphed over it, preserving juridical forms and subjects through political storm after political storm. This legal imaginary remained the conceptual horizon within which many protagonists and commentators understood the cataclysm of imperial collapse in 1918. A library of usable legal stories, it allowed contemporaries to connect an extremely fluid and unfamiliar political situation to structures of legitimacy and right that stretched back across the centuries, even to 1526. It was a way of conceptually mastering the nature and magnitude of a new international order in Central Europe. Strikingly, it also furnished resources for understanding the dissolution of that order. Narratives for the building and the dismantling of interwar Europe could be sourced from the songbook of imperial law.

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