Constitutionalism, Nationalism & the Dismantling of Democracy. Part Three.
The 20th Century, with its’ wars, revolutions & collapsing empires, required a corresponding legal revolution to account for the plethora of new states, renewed states & altered states. But how was this to be accomplished or achieved while maintaining legal state integrity and sovereignty?
16 min readAug 23, 2024
‘Different conditions of knowledge exist for jurisprudence, than for history or politics,’ accordingly the disciplines understood a states ‘hour of birth and date of demise’ differently.
Austria, the country of Adolf Merkl’s birth, provided a paradigmatic example. Where a historian or politician perceived one and the same ‘Austria’ stretching back over over hundred’s of years, the jurist was forced to recognise not one entity but several.
‘My object of cognition, the Austrian state, has not simply altered itself in this century or even millennium — no, its juridical being has become a different one, its identity has been overturned.’
Natasha Wheatley, The Life & Death of States (1), and references therein from Adolf Merkl.
