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The international conference entitled "The Collapse of Ottoman and Austria-Hungarian Empires: Patterns and Legacies," held on Jan. 16-17,2014, and organized by Prof. Hakan Yavuz (University of Utah), Dr. Tamara Scheer (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Social Science Histoiy) and Philipp Ther (University of Vienna), brought more than two dozen scholars to the former imperial capital of Vienna. While scholars discussed the processes of imperial disintegration and nation-state formation in the case of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, many scholarly contributions problematized the issue of imperial dissolution and questioned whether concepts like the "transition from empires to nationstates" were a historical reality or more of a narrative construct.
Prof. Philipp Ther of the Institute for East European History at the University of Vienna began the conference by saying "imperial decline" is an assertion usually made from the perspectives of nation-states, and highlighted the mutual regard between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. Prof. Yavuz underlined the way in which the ghost of empire takes tangible forms in our contemporary socio-political realities and asked participants to be wary of teleological constructs. Dr. Scheer noted that imperial identities were varied and multifaceted, despite our perceptions of them as fixed. The keynote address by Prof. Isa Blumi (Georgia State University) furthered these remarks with his theoretical problematization of phrases such as "imperial collapse" and "decline." Blumi addressed the way in which warfare, occupying regimes and revolutions shaped new local constituencies, and that although these changes created regional instability, they also solidified local political boundaries in counterintuitive ways.
Prof. Erik-Jan Zürcher (Leiden University) asked why the Ottoman Sultanate continued as a viable entity in the aftermath of World War I, while AustriaHungary saw the collapse of the imperial center, pointing to the existence of viable political alternatives as key. Prof. Justin McCarthy (University Of Louisville) focused on the long-term impact of the Ottoman defeat in the 1877-78 war with Russia. McCarthy argued that the defeat forced the Ottoman Empire to double military...