John Deak. Forging a Multinational State

Scholars of state-building have taken various approaches to account for the difference among varieties of modern state forms. Much of this work has to do with the emergence of the modern state in conjunction with the rise of absolutism in the early modern period (or its absence). In the case of the Habsburgs, questions about state formation have often been tied to enduring narratives involving imperial decline, as historians attempt to locate the germs of twentieth-century Habsburg collapse in a failure to craft, reform, and govern the Habsburg state as a modern entity. Dynastic openness or resistance to reform, Habsburg practices of governance, the development of bureaucratic structures, and the back-and-forth of coercive and participatory politics all shaped the Habsburg narrative of state-building and its challenges. John Deak’s important and very welcome new book, Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War, directly takes on the stale narrative of Habsburg decline by locating his revisionist take in the bureaucratic apparatus of the state.

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