In the 1930s and 1940s, the final decades of his life, the British meteorologist and physicist Lewis Fry Richardson tried to devise a series of formulas for predicting the chances of war. He had already made a name for himself in weather forecasting by deriving the first numerical models for anticipating atmospheric turbulence. A Quaker and a committed pacifist—Richardson quit the British Meteorological Office in 1920, when it was absorbed into the Air Ministry—he thought that developing a scientific theory of war might make it easier to prevent. To do so, he needed to define his unit of study. Wars tend to break out within, between, and against states, but what is a state?
Scholars had not settled on a single definition. In 1919 Max Weber argued that the state is a thing that possesses a “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical violence.” Some years later the Austrian legal theorist Hans Kelsen wrote that the idea of the state in social relations is godlike—it lends order to the world and gives people a higher authority to fear and serve. In 1933 twenty North and South American nations met in Uruguay to sign the Montevideo Convention, which codified the legal definition of a state as a “person of international law” with its own permanent population, territory, government, and ability to enter into relations with other states.
Richardson drew up a list of “named nations” that had gone to battle against one another between 1820 and 1945 and immediately confronted fundamental questions about state evolution and identity. Was Germany the successor state of Prussia? Was the Russia of 1823 a different entity entirely from the Russia of 1923? Were the many nations that gained independence during that 125-year period new states or old states? Whatever states were, Richardson observed that at least in Europe they appeared to have “become larger and fewer since the Middle Ages.” His results, posthumously published in Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (1960), revealed that “belligerency” was a nearly universal aspect of the international system—Sweden was the only nation that had not engaged in war in that period—and that states with fewer frontiers had been less likely to go to war. In one reviewer’s summary, Richardson’s findings suggested that “warring nations bang against one another with no more plan or principle than molecules in an overheated gas.” Without some form of “world government” to rein them in, they would continue to collide.
Today Richardson is credited with one of the first formal lists of modern nation-states, and his statistical approach to the study of war has inspired generations of political scientists. In 1963 his successors in the field created the Correlates of War Project, the longest-running scholarly effort to compile quantitative data about the frequency of wars and the durability of nations, frontiers, and territories. In one of its datasets, which tracks the births and deaths of states between 1816 and 2016, the vanished kingdoms of Bavaria, Baden, and Württemberg, all killed off by the birth of modern Germany, appear alongside Austria-Hungary, Yugoslavia, the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, and South Vietnam. States that disappeared but were later resurrected are listed twice: the Dominican Republic, which died under US occupation from 1916 to 1924, gets two entries (there is no mention of the second US occupation, from 1965 to 1966), as do all nations that fell to the Germans during World War II. Such a dataset gives the impression that during the war these states simply dropped off the map, along with their citizens and territories. In the parlance of political scientists, they “exited the international system,” as if they were merely biding their time offstage. A more recent dataset from the University of Cambridge, the Mortality of States Index (named MOROS, after the Greek god of doom), considerably expands Richardson’s aperture, tracing the deaths of states from the First Egyptian Dynasty of 3100 BCE all the way up to 2021.
In her 2007 book State Death, the political scientist Tanisha Fazal observed that state “exits” from the world stage are more common than one might think. Of the 207 states that existed in 1816, sixty-six had died by 2000, most of them violently, from external conquest, revolution, civil war, or coup. (The Correlates of War dataset notably does not include Indigenous nations; if it did, Fazal writes, it would reflect “a much higher incidence of state death” in North America and Australia.) She found that after 1945, as the international community established a norm against wars of conquest, state death “declined dramatically”; the survival and longevity of states were linked to the strength of international law.
For Fazal, the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was an indicator that this norm was under threat. “Although violent state death has become an extremely rare event in recent years, it may become increasingly common in the future,” she warned. The consensus against conquest has weakened significantly. It did not restrain Russia from invading Ukraine in 2014 or 2022; it did not prevent President Donald Trump from threatening to take over Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal, nor from bombing Iran without congressional approval; it did not deter Israel from annexing more land in the West Bank or from proposing to do the same in Gaza. The decline of this norm signals the diminished standing of international law as a tool for peacemaking. It seems that we have entered a new and turbulent era of deadly quarrels—precisely the kind of crisis that Richardson hoped his work would help prevent, and one in which states will almost surely perish.
“If a state died,” the legal and intellectual historian Natasha Wheatley asks, “would you know?”
After all, the moment a state “dies” can be indiscernible even to its leaders and officials. In The Life and Death of States, her first book, Wheatley describes how in October 1918, during the final moments of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Minister of War Rudolf Stöger-Steiner utterly failed to grasp the situation unfolding before him. A fateful telegram from Woodrow Wilson had just arrived, responding to the monarchy’s proposal to save itself by granting its nationalities self-determination. In his Fourteen Points speech earlier that year, Wilson had demanded that “the peoples of Austria-Hungary” be “accorded the freest opportunity to autonomous development,” and the monarchy’s desperate proposal evidently did not satisfy the president. Hans Kelsen, the minister’s legal adviser at the time, understood immediately that the monarchy would not survive. But his boss was slow on the uptake. “The old officer could not believe it possible that an empire of many centuries could simply vanish from the stage of history,” Kelsen recalled. And yet the hyphenated behemoth of Austria-Hungary was about to be wiped off the world map, and several new nations were to arise in its place. “There was no emperor now, clad in robes and crowns, the wearable vessels of age-old legitimacy accumulated over centuries and connected, somewhere in the deep mists of time, to divine sanction,” Wheatley writes. “How could states just end—and start?”
Kelsen set out to understand what the empire had been and to define the states that took its place. In a memo to delegates of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, he outlined the “international legal personality of German Austria,” arguing that the republic of Austria had never before existed and therefore could not be saddled with the old empire’s obligations. (What the state should be called was also the subject of debate; among the suggestions were the Alpine Republic, East Alpenland, and German Alpenland.) In that spirit, Austrian delegates at the conference “unblinkingly” told the other delegates that the republic of Austria was “not an old state but in fact a new one,” Wheatley writes; as far as they were concerned, no prior version of “Austria” had ever existed, “and certainly did not wage the war.”
Their Czech and Hungarian colleagues, by contrast, claimed to represent not new states but very old ones. They traced their respective histories back to the kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary, which were absorbed into the Habsburg Empire in 1526, after the young monarch they shared fell off his horse in battle and drowned. Nearly four hundred years of imperial domination had been a mere aberration, they asserted, in what Wheatley memorably describes as a “legal magic trick.” It was as if the legal identities of these states had been preserved in the waters where the king had perished, lying patiently until they could be resurfaced.
Wheatley, an Australian-born professor at Princeton University, has a penchant for metaphor and an inventive flair that make her legal histories come alive. For her the twentieth century was “a new global era of state mortality and natality.” Empire after empire collapsed, and as sovereign states emerged in their stead, no one quite understood which rights they held and whose debts they carried. The end of the Russian, Ottoman, and Prussian Empires, and the subsequent shriveling of the French and British ones, brought about “old states, new states, extinct states, reverting states, dismembered states, continuator states, states playing charades”: the three independent Baltic republics, Finland, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Israel, Burma, Ceylon, Pakistan, and Indonesia, to name only a few.
Central Europe is Wheatley’s “ground zero” for studying the twentieth-century international order. There, amid the ruins of an imperial giant that Robert Musil said had “perished from its inexpressibility,” it became clear to politicians and lawyers that no empire could claim to be immortal and that they had no shared words or laws to describe what happens when one dies. The Life and Death of States traces the birth of the modern state and contemporary international law to the turbulent years after World War I. Wheatley suggests that the story begins not, as previous generations of scholars have contended, in the post–World War II period of decolonization across Asia and Africa but “with the dissolution of Habsburg rule.”
She argues that the death of Austria-Hungary also marked the end of the idea that states were eternal and divinely ordained: “The king’s body had been exposed as mortal.” In search of a new source of authority, the legal theorists of the early twentieth century “passed his crown to international law instead.” Jurists assumed the power to define the world’s new borders and determine who owed what to whom. World War I taught many hard lessons, one of which, in Wheatley’s neat summary, was that “states came and went and law must stay.”
The idea that states can perish in much the same way that their inhabitants do—frequently, inevitably, and irrevocably—marked an important turn in political and legal thought. If the state was not an eternal body, then it was vulnerable to attack and illness, to unexplained and unanticipated collapse. (And the mortality of the state could warrant the imposition of extreme measures to protect it at all costs. “If there is a genuine national crisis, there must be a strong case for saying that the person whose life most urgently needs to be saved is the person of the state,” Quentin Skinner observed in a lecture to the British Academy.) Just as a human being dies when the brain can no longer function, a state dies when its governing institutions lose control over its physical territory.
Some states, like the Khmer Rouge’s Democratic Republic of Kampuchea and the Kingdom of Iran, die in violent conflagrations, while others, like the Soviet Union, go out with relatively little bloodshed. Some have died by their own hand, committing what the political scientist Douglas Lemke calls “suicide under duress,” in order to avoid the casualties of violent takeover. This was the case for Czechoslovakia upon the approach of German troops in 1938, and for the short-lived breakaway state of Nagaland, which agreed to formally become a part of India in 1975.
In How States Die, Lemke, who teaches at Penn State, argues that states can die in eight different ways, through various forms of conquest, dissolution, unification, or absorption. Scholars including Richardson and Fazal have tended to focus on the deaths of sovereign states; Lemke encourages political scientists to include the experiences of peoples and nations that do not appear in the Yearbook of the United Nations.
His book is most convincing when it departs from statistical analysis and disciplinary jargon to tell the stories of those vanished states. We read of the Kingdom of Sikkim, which ruled over a portion of the eastern Himalayas from 1642, only to die when its palace guards could not fend off the Indian Army in 1975. After a referendum that foreign correspondents were banned from covering, and that took place under heavy military presence, Sikkim became India’s twenty-second state. Lemke lingers over the fate of Katanga, which declared independence from Congo upon the death of the Belgian colony there in 1960. Katanga was a mineral-rich dictatorial state that was propped up by Belgium, until the territory was invaded by UN forces in 1961 and, two years later, forcibly absorbed into the newly established Republic of the Congo. An estimated 110,000 people were killed during the conflict, and tens of thousands fled. The end of Katanga ushered in a period of instability in the region, with severe consequences for Congo and its neighbors.
In Lemke’s telling, there was no respite in the twentieth century from the “global mass phenomenon” of state mortality that Wheatley describes. Outside the developed world, Lemke suggests, the reintroduction of the norm against conquest after World War II had little to no effect on the longevity of sovereign states, which continued to die at roughly the same rate as before, primarily as a result of attacks from nonstate actors. (The norm against conquest, he notes, offered no protection against internal takeover.) For example, the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia died in 1991, when Tigrayan forces took Addis Ababa. Somalia perished that same year, when rebel groups overthrew the ruling dictatorship. Lemke argues that many non-Western developing states never meaningfully benefited from the norm against conquest, so its violation across the globe represents little more than a continuation of the status quo.
Though the Somali government lost control over its people and territory in 1991, the US never broke off diplomatic relations with the country, and its death was not registered in the Correlates of War. It became what Lemke calls a “zombie state,” a nation that has perished by all measures yet nevertheless continues to exist under international law. Somalia—like Bohemia and Hungary before it—had effectively turned into one of the globe’s “slumbering states, or residual states, ever ripe for new life,” as Wheatley describes them. It may have lost control over its physical territory, but as the Czechs and Hungarians argued in 1919, it never relinquished its right to the land. The case of Somalia, which was reestablished in 2012 yet still does not control much of its own territory, illustrates why state death is fundamentally unlike the death that awaits us all: there is always a distant chance that a state may one day be resurrected.
When states “exit” the international system, or fail to appear in the UN Yearbook, or are excised from the Correlates of War, they may still live on in various forms, both in law and in life. Governments in exile may continue to represent their people at a geographical remove and often enjoy some form of diplomatic recognition while doing so. During World War I, Czech leaders who had fled their country campaigned for diplomatic recognition in Paris and London, and in 1918 Czechoslovakia formally proclaimed independence from Austria-Hungary, claiming that, over the long centuries of imperial rule, it had never surrendered its sovereign rights. The state had voluntarily joined the Habsburg Empire in 1526, they argued, and it remained entitled to withdraw its consent.
After World War II, legal thinkers from the Global South marshaled the same logic to make the case for independence from colonial powers. In 1955 twenty-nine nations from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East convened in Bandung, Indonesia, to assert the right of formerly colonized nations to self-determination and equal standing under international law. These nations claimed to be awakening from a long imperial slumber. In 1966 A.Z. Phizo, an independence leader from Nagaland, argued that during India’s long period of British occupation, the Naga people had never surrendered their historic rights and therefore their state was not a legal possession of India. “We shared our house with the British and when they vacated, the whole house became ours once more,” he wrote from exile in London.
In 1958 the Algerian National Liberation Front formed a provisional government in exile and sought diplomatic recognition. Its representatives wanted Algeria and its government to be recognized not as a new state but rather as “ancient institutions which had been resuscitated,” as a communiqué from the Provisional Government put it that year. The end of French occupation meant “the legal resurrection of a pre-existing State.” The period of French domination, the Algerian diplomat and minister Mohammed Bedjaoui wrote in 1961, had never extinguished the “sovereign rights of the Algerian people.” In a 1960 opinion delivered at the International Court of Justice, the Argentine judge Lucio Moreno Quintana argued that the end of British rule in India did not mean that the Indian state had emerged for the first time but rather that it “was recovering an independence (sovereignty) lost long since.”
In 1968 the Sixth Committee of the United Nations, the General Assembly’s legal arm, met to address postcolonial state succession. For the first time the “new” independent states made up the majority of the General Assembly. The representative from Tanzania, as summarized in the official record, told his colleagues that “the colonial powers, before leaving, had imposed on the country treaties which were not in the national interest and which could not be regarded as agreements conducted between two equals,” and asked the committee to consider possible resolutions to the “trail of disputes and divisions” they had left behind. That all these debates took place in the halls of the UN, which had been established just two decades earlier, speaks to the fact that international law was by then the ultimate arbiter of the sovereign rights of states. Just as diplomats had to climb up to what Wheatley describes as “the hilltop of international law” to fully understand questions of state birth and death, so too did postcolonial leaders turn to law to grasp which “rights and duties” were carried over “from a fallen state to the new one.”
Part of the appeal of international law is its commitment to the fiction that it can rewind the clock and restore states to the same status that they would have enjoyed had they not been subjected to colonial rule. But in law as in life, there is no way to truly undo the harm done, no legal magic tricks powerful enough to erase centuries of subjugation. Sovereignty did not suddenly sever these states from their colonizers; in some cases their economies and governments only became more entangled.
Today the legal arguments first advanced by the Czech and Hungarian delegates at Versailles have been adopted by Indigenous peoples around the world, who say that they do not need to prove their right to sovereignty because they never lost it. In 2017 the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia argued, in a bid for constitutional reform and recognition, that their “ancient sovereignty” had never been “ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.” The Australian Native Title Act of 1993 grants Indigenous peoples the right to sue the state for compensation for “any loss, diminution, [or] impairment” of their rights to land and water. As of 2022 there were 38,200 unprocessed claims filed under the act in New South Wales alone. In South Africa, Indigenous leaders have invoked their claim to the land to protest the construction of Amazon’s regional headquarters in an area they consider sacred. In Canada, ongoing land claims could mean that the government owes some 76 billion Canadian dollars to Indigenous peoples.
Understanding the deaths of states is necessary for understanding their turbulent rebirths. Though Lemke has contributed to the statistical study of sovereignty that Richardson inaugurated, Wheatley has accomplished something far more consequential. She traces the legal history of statehood and self-determination to a new origin point in Central Europe, to the ashes of the Habsburg Empire—the “ghost in the machine” of international law. Her book is an impressive account of the challenges that legal thinkers of Hans Kelsen’s generation faced in describing the cataclysmic changes of their time. She describes her book as “an intellectual history of not having the words,” referring to their struggle—and she finds the words where they faltered.
English (US) · 