Sovereignty, citizenship, and the new Liberal Order: US-Habsburg relations and the transformation of international politics, 1880--1924

The international political system changed fundamentally in the wake of World War I and the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. The rights and responsibilities of sovereignty were transformed: legitimacy went from being based on behavior---compliance with diplomatic norms---to being based on internal characteristics, including a democratic government, a racially homogeneous population, and a capitalist economy. The change was the result of the gradual breakdown of the diplomatic culture of the nineteenth-century Great Power System, the unregulated international movement of millions of individuals in the decades before World War I, the development of "scientific" understandings of racial identity and their adoption by certain government agencies, and the specific short-term circumstances of World War I. Key to these changes in sovereignty was the long-term relationship between the system's two most famously diverse states: the Habsburg Empire and the United States. Habsburg officials were committed to maintaining the diplomatic culture of the Great Power System, which reinforced sovereignty, and to managing their diverse population through political rather than racial citizenship categories. For the United States, the Wilson administration was interested in creating an international system that furthered American interests by re-making the constituent actors of the system in an idealized American image; it was also committed to creating an Anglo-Saxon American nation, where political citizenship was a function of a fundamental, immutable racial identity. At the Paris Peace Conference, Wilson's ideas triumphed, and a new Liberal Order began. This fundamental change in the international political system was made possible in large part because Wilson's rejection of nineteenth-century diplomatic norms effectively silenced advocates of Habsburg ideas. The Habsburg Empire was broken up into smaller nation-states, whose governments received mixed messages from the events of 1919. They were supposed to be inclusive and democratic, but they were also supposed to have homogeneous populations---a goal that often required undemocratic measures. When the two goals were in conflict, a homogeneous population was typically hailed as more important. Conflicts over nationalist efforts to create homogeneity have dominated the international political system since 1919 and continue on into the present.