The Right to a State. Statehood Arguments and Practices in Central Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Deadline for submissions: January 31, 2016
Contact: stred@mua.cas.cz
Publication languages: Czech, English, German
Since the time of Thomas Hobbes, European politics has pondered the sense, purpose, and normative standards of statehood. At the turn of the 20th century, European stateless nationalist movements expanded their catalog of arguments which they used to legitimize their claims for their own state, while the destructive First World War gave way to possibilities of achieving this goal. Expanding the natural rights argument boradened the hitherto existing legimitization of arguments legitimizing statehood. The disintegration of European empires allowed many nationalist movements to realize their statehood projects during the interwar period. However, like the multinational empires, in many cases they, too, had to come to terms with the complex ethnic and linguistic structure of Central Europe. After the Sekond World War borders were stabilized, but on the other hand new transnational formations were formed that could have, but did not have to, complement the existing constitutional projects. European integration in the second half of the 20th century and its antithesis – the limiting of state sovereignty in order to foster the greater cohesion of the Eastern Bloc – made the interwar and postwar concepts of statehood face new challenges that in many cases have not disappeared and are still relevant.
The forthcoming issue of the Střed/Centre journal will be devoted to the questions connected to the transformations of Central European statehood in its realized and unrealized forms.
The specific topics of the contributions may include, but are not limited to, the following thematic areas:
- The destruction of multinational formations in the 19th century: the process of democratization and the transformation of the concept of statehood in the modern era.
- The principle of law for self-determination, its intellectual concepts and actual application in Central Europe.
- Unrealized projects of state formations during the First and Second World Wars. The causes and consequences of unsuccessful projects.
- Transnational concepts of statehood in the second half of the 20th century and their changing relationship to the concept of a nation state.
