Becker , Peter Wheatley , Natasha Remaking Central Europe: The League of Nations and the Former Habsburg Lands (review)

Abstract

SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 776 peasant assemblies that always drove toward unanimous decision-making, the Soviet public sphere tolerated no dissident voices. Whereas Jeffrey Brooks’s analogous study, When Russia Learned to Read (Princeton, NJ, 1985), can be tested quantitatively (literacy rates in late imperial Russia were steadily rising), no means can be devised to quantify the contributions of public speaking to the development of Russia’s civil society. It is hard to agree with the judgment that the Bolsheviks ‘achieved a synthesis of […] authority and democracy’ (p. 293). Nevertheless, this study significantly advances our understanding of late imperial Russian political history. Department of History Jonathan Daly University of Illinois at Chicago Becker, Peter and Wheatley, Natasha (eds). Remaking Central Europe: The League of Nations and the Former Habsburg Lands. The History and Theory of International Law. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2020. xvi + 396 pp. Notes. Index. £80.00. In a speech to the Robert-Bosch-Stiftung in 1991, the German-born American historian Fritz Stern recalled how in April 1979 he was walking alongside ‘bombed-out squares and half-decrepit mansions’ close to one of the crossing points between West and East Berlin with the French public intellectual Raymond Aron when the latter suddenly turned to him and said: ‘It could have been Germany’s century’ (Fritz Stern, Verspielte Größe, Munich, 1996, p. 11). In some ways, this is also the starting point for the fine collection of essays under review here, except in this case the reader is invited to imagine that the century could have belonged to post-Habsburg Austria, or more specifically, to 1920s-era Vienna. This radical suggestion is based on the claim that, as a state whose finances, borders and even independent existence were controlled by the victorious Allies from 1919, Austria stood at the junction of competing but overlapping trends in world politics: the imperial, the national, the regional and the internationally-minded. As ‘Global Austria’ (Weltösterreich), an imagined ‘inter-national’ or ‘supranational ’ cultural and economic space already present in the minds of some Central European intellectuals before 1914, it also drew several of its near neighbours (and erstwhile dominions) into the same trajectory, notably Hungary and Czechoslovakia. In the first chapter, Glenda Sluga introduces a little-known fact: in 1927 governments in the region launched a deliberate campaign to move the headquarters of the League of Nations from Geneva to Vienna. This project REVIEWS 777 ‘lost its traction only once the League of Nations had taken the decision to build the Palais des Nations on Lake Geneva’ in 1929 (p. 31). Beyond the League itself, the Austrian capital hosted a variety of congresses in the early 1920s, including the 1922 International Postal Union Conference and the 1926 PanEuropa Congress. Its police chief, Johannes Schober, who also served twice as Chancellor of the Austrian republic, became the founding president of Interpol, or, as it was then known, the International Criminal Police Commission, in 1923 (p. 11). More generally, the hunger problems that the city suffered in the immediate post-war period made it a central meeting point for experts from across the world in the fields of nutrition, paediatric medicine and finance. In part, these developments mark a profound political shift in Austria as it was ‘reduced’ from empire to small nation, but they also reflect the continued influence of what Sluga calls ‘Habsburg-induced cultural internationalism’ (pp. 24, 28). One example of this would be the cosmopolitan idealism of the writer Robert Musil, whose world vision straddled the passage of Central Europe from site of great power rivalries to global war to mid twentiethcentury liberal internationalism. As Sarah Lemmen shows in her impressive essay on the foreign policy of the inter-war Czechoslovak Republic, the shadow of Vienna’s imperial past could also be seen in attempts to make Prague the new capital of the post-Habsburg lands after 1918, in other words the region’s ‘mainplayer’,throughitsdevelopmentofnewinternationalpolitical,economic, diplomatic and cultural networks extending well beyond Europe (p. 351). In 1920, President Tomáš Masaryk even enticed the Orientalist Alois Musil (a second cousin of Robert) to move from Vienna, where he had established an Oriental Institute...