1 Hazzard, Shirley, The Transit of Venus (New York, 1990 [1980]), 195–96Google Scholar.

2 For the last few decades, Habsburg historians have emphasized the modernity and cohesion of the empire against an older view of its archaic, illiberal, dysfunctional, unviable non-modernity; see for example Cohen, Gary B., “Nationalist Politics and the Dynamics of State and Civil Society in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1867–1914,” Central European History 40, no. 2 (June 2007): 241–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and landmark, Pieter Judson’sThe Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, Mass., 2016)Google Scholar, that constructs a new “general narrative” from the most innovative new work, as well as important, John Deak’sForging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War (Stanford, 2015)Google Scholar. The anachronism paradigm, however, dies hard. In his own new history of the empire, Steven Beller writes that “The Monarchy was, despite all the changes and transformations, liberalization, nationalization and modernization, an anachronism, or at least that was true of the monarch who ruled it almost until its end”; and again on the book’s last page, “perhaps it was bound to disappear in any case, given its anachronistic structures and style.” Beller, Steven, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1815–1918 (Cambridge, Eng., 2018), 276, 286CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Quoted in MacMillan, Margaret, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (New York, 2001), 239Google Scholar.

4 For a survey of old and new work on the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and/in WWI, see Deak, John, “The Great War and the Forgotten Realm: The Habsburg Monarchy and the First World War,” Journal of Modern History 86, no. 2 (June 2014): 336–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar, as well as Deak, John and Gumz, Jonathan E., “How to Break a State: The Habsburg Monarchy’s Internal War, 1914–1918,” American Historical Review 122, no. 4 (October 2017): 1105–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and wide-ranging research by Tamara Scheer. Pieter Judson highlights the extent to which the successor states perpetuated rather than “solved” the empire’s multi-nationality, and introduced formal ethnic hierarchies, making them more like “little empires” than bastions of “self-determination.” See Judson, The Habsburg Empire. On the (global) political currency of “self-determination” in this moment, and the idea that it was in the end only intended for Europe but not elsewhere, see most famously Manela, Erez, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford, 2007)Google Scholar. For an important new account of regional resistance to the new order and the afterlives of the empire, see Reill, Dominique Kirchner, The Fiume Crisis: Living in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 2020, forthcoming)Google Scholar. On border-drawing and experts, see recently Prott, Volker, The Politics of Self-Determination: Remaking Territories and National Identities in Europe, 1917–1923 (Oxford, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and for the peace conference’s handling of sovereignty, see Smith, Leonard V., Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (Oxford, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Key works include: Pedersen, Susan, “Back to the League of Nations,” American Historical Review 112, no. 4 (October 2007): 1091–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Manela, The Wilsonian Moment; Pedersen, Susan, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clavin, Patricia, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920–1946 (Oxford, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lewis, Mark, The Birth of the New Justice: The Internationalization of Crime and Punishment, 1919–1950 (New York, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cabanes, Bruno, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–1924 (Cambridge, Eng., 2014)Google Scholar; Gorman, Daniel, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s (Cambridge, Eng., 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 On the entanglement of nationalism and internationalism more generally, see Sluga, Glenda, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mazower, Mark, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York, 2012)Google Scholar. Here that entanglement took on especially concrete and consequential dimensions.

7 For a fuller treatment of this larger point—namely, the co-implication of the interwar international order and the new order in central and eastern Europe—see Peter Becker and Natasha Wheatley, eds., Remaking Central Europe: The League of Nations and the Former Habsburg Lands (Oxford, forthcoming). For Patricia Clavin’s pioneering work in this area—in relation to both finance and food—see especially “The Austrian Hunger Crisis and the Genesis of International Organization after the First World War,” International Affairs 90, no. 2 (March 2014): 265–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 J. W. Headlam-Morley, Note on the Draft Austrian Treaty, May 26, 1919, The National Archives (UK), FO 608/19/10.

9 Indeed, 1918 traditionally represents the triumph of nationalist and nationalizing politics. As Pieter Judson has shown most forcefully, narratives of the empire’s collapse long took their general structure from nationalist claim-makers and state-builders themselves, who were eager to frame 1918 as a radical break with empire and a moment of national liberation. If an exciting new crop of work has turned to examine the lingering impact of Habsburg institutions and ways of thinking, it explores these legacies within and for the different “nation-states” that replaced the empire. See Judson, The Habsburg Empire, especially the Epilogue; and the essays collected in the volumes Embers of Empire: Continuity and Rupture in the Habsburg Successor States after 1918, eds. Miller, Paul and Morelon, Clare (New York, 2018)Google Scholar; and The Habsburg Civil Service and Beyond: Bureaucracy and Civil Servants from the Vormärz to the Inter-War Years, eds. Adlgasser, Franz and Lindström, Fredrik (Vienna, 2019)Google Scholar, as well as further forthcoming work by Iryna Vushko. Here I explore instead the legacies and implications for international institutions and projects.

10 Reill, The Fiume Crisis.

11 Endemic disease across the region was one factor driving the transnational health collaborations of the League’s newborn Health Organization (forerunner to the WHO), under the pioneering direction of the Polish bacteriologist and epidemiologist Dr. Ludwik Rajchman. See Sara Silverstein, “Reinventing International Health in East Central Europe: The League of Nations, State Sovereignty, and Universal Health,” in Becker and Wheatley, eds., Remaking Central Europe. Meanwhile, the collapse of the empire left many people without a nationality, which combined with the Russian refugee crisis to produce mass statelessness in the region, with consequences for the conceptualization and governance of statelessness, citizenship, and refugees. See Siegelberg, Mira L., Statelessness: A Modern History (Cambridge, Mass., 2019)Google Scholar. Crime and capital are discussed below.

12 Riedl spearheaded the 1927 Draft Convention on the Treatment of Foreigners, debated at the League of Nations. Madeleine Dungy, “International Commerce in the Wake of Empire: Central European Economic Integration between National and Imperial Sovereignty,” in Becker and Wheatley, eds., Remaking Central Europe. On business elites over the cusp of 1918, see Rigó, Máté, “The Long First World War and the Survival of Business Elites in East-Central Europe: Transylvania’s Industrial Boom and the Enrichment of Economic Elites,” European Review of History/Revue européenne d’histoire 24, no. 2 (March 2017): 250–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Austria, Slobodian writes, had become a “prototypical case of a small state in the storms of globalization,” prefiguring the predicament of many post-imperial countries around the world. Slobodian, Quinn, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, Mass., 2018), 51, 43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Slobodian, Globalists, 10.

15 On the protracted, messy end of the war in east central Europe, see Gerwarth, Robert, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End (New York, 2016)Google Scholar; Eichenberg, Julia and Newman, John Paul, “Aftershocks: Violence in Dissolving Empires after the First World War,” Contemporary European History 19, no. 3 (August 2010): 183–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Newman, John Paul, “Post-imperial and Post-war Violence in the South Slav Lands, 1917–1923,” Contemporary European History 19, no. 3 (August 2010): 249–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 This trans-border crime included theft, counterfeiting, and speculation. On counterfeiting, see Petruccelli, David, “Banknotes from the Underground: Counterfeiting and the International Order in Interwar Europe,” Journal of Contemporary History 51, no. 3 (June 2015): 507–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Internationale Kriminalpolizeiliche Kommission, Der Internationale Polizeikongreß in Wien (3. bis 7. September 1923): Stenographisches Protokoll der Verhandlungen (Vienna, 1923), 16Google Scholar; cited in David Petruccelli, “Fighting the Scourge of International Crime: The Internationalization of Policing and Criminal Law in Interwar Europe,” in Becker and Wheatley, eds., Remaking Central Europe.

18 Petruccelli, “Fighting the Scourge of International Crime.”

19 Antony Anghie famously showed how the interwar mandate system helped transform imperial rule into apparently objective measures and logics of “development” that would subsequently be implemented and tracked by international organizations. Anghie, Antony, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge, Eng., 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the legacies of Ottoman (quasi-) sovereignty for the mandate system, see important forthcoming work by Aimee Genell. Indeed, the entanglement of Habsburg and Ottoman afterlives in the interwar international order is a dynamic frontier for current research.

20 On the intertwining of empire and international order, see for example Mazower, Mark, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Baughan, Emily and Everill, Bronwen, “Empire and Humanitarianism: A Preface,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40, no. 5 (December 2012): 727–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the special issue that follows.

21 The subsequent admission of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Albania and Iraq to the League of Nations was made contingent on unilateral declarations regarding the protection of minorities. For foundational research on the minorities treaties, see Fink, Carole, “Minority Rights as an International Question,” Contemporary European History 9, no. 3 (November 2000): 385–400CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Fink, Carole, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection (Cambridge, Eng., 2004)Google Scholar. For important new work on some of the effects of interwar minorities treaties on the ground, see Karch, Brendan, “A Jewish ‘Nature Preserve’: League of Nations Minority Protections in Nazi Upper Silesia,” Central European History 46, no. 1 (March 2013): 124–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Still valuable here is Macartney, C. A., National States and National Minorities (New York, 1934)Google Scholar.

23 Western intervention on behalf of Christians in the Ottoman realm is here the most prominent precedent, now recovered as a revealing origin point for the deep implication of empire and humanitarian intervention. See Rodogno, Davide, Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815–1914 (Princeton, 2011)Google Scholar; Bass, Gary J., Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (New York, 2008)Google Scholar; Samuel Moyn, “Spectacular Wrongs,” The Nation, September 24, 2008 at www.thenation.com/article/spectacular-wrongs-gary-basss-freedoms-battle/ (accessed October 9, 2019). Historicizing our understanding of rights as qualifiers of sovereignty, Sam Moyn has argued that the notion that rights could be wielded by international law against sovereignty, that the state was prime rights-violator rather than prime rights-defender, is of radically contemporary vintage. Moyn, Samuel, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass., 2010)Google Scholar.

24 Mazower, Mark, “Minorities and the League of Nations in Interwar Europe,” Daedalus 126, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 47–63Google Scholar; and Mazower, , “The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933–1950,” The Historical Journal 47, no. 2 (June 2004): 379–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On oversight as surveillance, leading towards measurement and indicators, see Cowan, Jane K., “Before Audit Culture: A Genealogy of International Oversight of Rights,” in The Gloss of Harmony: The Politics of Policy Making in Multilateral Organizations, ed. Müller, Birgit (London, 2013): 103–33Google Scholar. Some contemporaries saw human rights as a universalization of minority rights. For new scholarship in this area, see Kurz, Nathan, “Jewish Memory and the Human Right to Petition, 1933–1953,” in The Institution of International Order: From the League of Nations to the United Nations, eds. Jackson, Simon and O’Malley, Alanna (Abingdon, Eng., 2018), 90–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Cowan, Jane K., “Who’s Afraid of Violent Language?: Honour, Sovereignty, and Claims-Making in the League of Nations,” Anthropological Theory 3, no. 3 (September 2003): 271–291CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wheatley, Natasha, “New Subjects in International Law and Order,” in Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History, eds. Clavin, Patricia and Sluga, Glenda (Cambridge, Eng., 2017), 265–286Google Scholar.

26 See Wheatley, Natasha, “Spectral Legal Personality in Interwar International Law: On New Ways of Not Being a State,” Law and History Review 35, no. 3 (August 2017): 753–787CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 The “world’s first intergovernmental organization responsible for economic and financial cooperation.” Clavin, “The Austrian Hunger Crisis,” 274.

28 Clavin, “The Austrian Hunger Crisis,” 278; Clavin, Securing the World Economy; Marcus, Nathan, Austrian Reconstruction and the Collapse of Global Finance, 1921–1931 (Cambridge, Mass., 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and see Martin below. See, earlier, Pauly, Louis W., “The League of Nations and the Foreshadowing of the International Monetary Fund.” Essays in International Finance, no. 201 (Princeton, 1996), 1–52Google Scholar.

29 Clavin argues that the Austrian Hungerkatastrophe was the “founding moment in the institutionalization of ideas and practices regarding international economic and financial support,” creating and defining the League’s Economic and Financial Organization. Clavin, “The Austrian Hunger Crisis,” 266.

30 Healy, Maureen, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge, Eng., 2004)Google Scholar.

31 Clavin, “The Austrian Hunger Crisis,” 276.

32 The Ottoman Public Debt Administration, established in Cairo in the 1870s, and the Chinese Maritime Customs Service were among the most frequent allusions.

33 Jamie Martin, “Empire and the Origins of International Financial Governance: The Case of Interwar Europe and its Legacies,” paper presented at Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University, September 25, 2018 (on file with author). See Jamie Martin, Governing Global Capitalism in the Era of Total War (Cambridge, Mass., forthcoming). Note Nathan Marcus’ far more optimistic/positive emplotment of this episode: he argues that “accusations of financial colonialism or foreign dictatorship in interwar Austria are entirely misplaced,” and that the League’s intervention pioneered a genuinely new form of multilateral control that aimed to overcome the self-interest of creditors. See Marcus, Austrian Reconstruction.

34 Natasha Wheatley, The Temporal Life of States: Sovereignty at the Eclipse of Empire (forthcoming).

35 See Case, Holly, “The Quiet Revolution: Consuls and the International System in the Nineteenth Century,” in Snyder, Timothy and Younger, Katherine eds., The Balkans as Europe, 1821–1914 (Rochester, 2018), 110–38Google Scholar.