‘The Life & Death of States’ and ‘Vienna’ reviews

 New books by Natasha Wheatley and Richard Cockett show how, for all its apparent anachronism, the Hapsburg Empire and its capital shaped the modern world.

In 1867 the Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph announced that he was dividing his inheritance into two parts. For more than a decade he ruled it as a single Austrian Empire, despite it being a collection of dozens of historical kingdoms, duchies and crownlands amassed by his family over the centuries. The largest was the Kingdom of Hungary, whose staunchly patriotic elite always resented rule from Vienna. It was now to be given de facto sovereignty, tied to the other half of the monarchy through a shared monarch (emperor in one half, king in the other) and common ministries of foreign affairs and defence. To the outside world they will still appear the same. And yet citizenship was not one of their shared characteristics.

Instead, Franz Joseph's subjects would be citizens of Hungary or 'the states and lands represented in the Imperial Council'. State delegates sent to sign the treaty establishing the Universal Postal Union in 1874 preferred to sign the name 'Austria' rather than this word salad. He was joined by the Hungarian delegation, who signed for their more clearly defined 'Hungary'. But weren't these two meant to be united at the international level?

This is what the organizers of the 1902 International Chinese Conference in Brussels were probably asking themselves when three different diplomatically accredited delegations arrived from a vast state with its capital in Vienna, which apparently could not decide what it was . One came from Austria, another from Hungary, the third from Austria-Hungary. All three appeared at the conference as separate signatories.

Even experts on monarchy have described this strange political entity as a 'state of states', a 'monarchical federal state', a 'de facto union of two constitutionally and administratively independent states' or an 'evolutionary state'. As described. -one of a number of separate states in the course of history' (the original German Allmaalige Einswächsen Vershidener Staten im Lauf der Geschichte also does not pass the tongue).

At the time and long after its collapse in 1918, the Habsburg-ruled Central European empire colloquially known as Austria-Hungary was viewed by foreign observers with a mixture of incredulity and disgust. Words like 'ramshackle', 'anachronism' and 'monstrosity' usually come to mind when trying to understand what it means, or perhaps when deciding that it would be better to erase it from the map altogether, in order to try to understand it. There should be no headache in doing it. Someone bad.

As Natasha Wheatley describes constitutional confusion in her The Life and Death of States shows, Austrian (and Hungarian) citizens were no less confused about their country than foreign observers. Indeed, as she argues with passion and erudition, an entire discipline of constitutional or public law emerged in the monarchy as an attempt to understand its complex structure as it developed over the centuries.

His insights and arguments were relevant not only to Central Europe, but to the entire world. The conclusions and insights drawn from his debates about sovereignty and the state resonated around the world during the 20th century, as empires and their colonies, dependencies and vassals were transformed into sovereign nation-states.

Despite its seemingly anachronistic character, Hungarian citizens and the 'Kingdom and lands represented in the Imperial Council' were in the lead in almost everything. The subtitle of Richard Cockett's Vienna does not shy away from the claim that the city created the modern world. Economists, artists, philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, psychologists, and – as Wheatley shows – lawyers educated in Austria-Hungary revolutionized countless fields.

When the monarchy collapsed, many of those brightest minds made their way abroad. Figures like Freud, Hayek, and Wittgenstein are among the most famous examples, but countless lesser-known people shaped the world. The Viennese were behind innovations in management theory, marketing, shopping malls, modernist architecture, the science of sex and much more. Perhaps no group of Viennese exiles was as influential as the Austrian School of Economics, whose theories inspired the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s and beyond.

Vienna is exactly the kind of readable but informative history one would expect from the editor of the Economist. The life and death of states is certainly not for the faint of heart. But it is an extremely rewarding book so packed with insights that it takes as much time to digest as it does to read. The two books are very different in both style and tone, but share a similar insight: Austria-Hungary and its great imperial capital Vienna have shaped the modern world more than any of us may realize.

Both books give their own explanations as to why this happened. Wheatley beautifully highlights the complex constitutional issues faced by the inhabitants of the Habsburg Monarchy and how they rejected a fundamentally constructivist approach to the nature of sovereignty and the state. Coquet provides a panoramic portrait of Viennese culture and society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, looking at the hopes and anxieties that ultimately inspired the intellectual revolutions the Viennese unleashed around the world. Austria-Hungary may indeed have been a chronologically dilapidated monstrosity, but it was an inspiring one.