Call for Papers:

“The Long Legal Memory of The Congress of Vienna 1814/1815”

A Multi-Session Workshop for the

2013 Meeting of the American Society for Legal History

Organized for the 2013 Meeting of the American Society for Legal History,
this multi-session workshop will look forward to the year 2014 as the
shared bicentennial of the Congress of Vienna 1814/1815 and the centennial
of the beginning of the First World War (1914).  In global perspective, it
will examine the geopolitical and geo-economic consequences of the collapse
of the First French Empire on, for example, jurisprudence, theories and
practices of supranational cooperation, international law, commerce and
trade during times of war, rules of warfare, nation-state
constitutionalism, human rights and rights to resistance and the
construction and operation of supranational legal fictions more generally
to include “race,” gender, class, the corporation and/or the “State.”  The
workshop also investigates how the long legal memory of Congress of Vienna
has been awakened, re-imagined and invoked in times of conflict and
conflict resolution, with particular attention to the impact of enactments
and ruptures of international law.

Themes for papers or panels may include, but are not limited to the ways in
which 1914 shattered vestiges of the legally inscribed geopolitical,
domestic and/or social hierarchies that followed the agreements of the
Congress of Vienna in 1814/1815.  In no small measure, centennial memory of
the Napoleonic years and the post-conflict resolutions was forestalled and
delayed by the outbreak of the First World War.  As a result, it occurred
during the tumultuous interwar years and papers might address the ways in
which the delayed flowering of historical memory contributed to the
development of legal propaganda and hyper-legalism in the interwar years
between 1919-1938.  How were the appropriation of Napoleonic systems and/or
the arrangements of Vienna by fascist regimes used to justify the
unjustifiable, to shape the legal inscription of geopolitical arrangements
and/or pseudo-international law?  How did the opposing historical
narratives of Hannah Arendt and others ultimately shape post-War
arrangements, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the United
Nations, etc.?  How, for example, did Henry Kissinger’s historical
understanding of the Napoleonic Wars and the ‘congresses’ that began even
before the formal end of conflict, as expressed in his A World Restored:
 Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1815-1822 (1954) shape
U.S. foreign policy, especially with regard to Germany, Japan, the Soviet
Union and China, as well as international legal relations, diplomacy and
the global order through the Nixon administration into our own time?

Proposals are invited for individual papers of twenty minutes or panels of
three papers offering new research and perspectives addressing the long
legal memory of the Napoleonic experience and the Congress of Vienna
covering themes, including but not limited to, domestic and international
legal transformation, supranational organization, colonial law; foreign
relations; alteration of social, economic and political ideologies; and the
lasting impact of the Congress of Vienna in the world at large.  Papers and
panels that take a critical legal studies approach are especially welcome.

 Panel proposal should include 300-word abstracts and CVs for three papers,
a title and 300-word panel explanation.  Scholars interest to offer
individual papers are asked to please provide a 300-word abstract and
current CV.  Scholars interested in serving as chairs or commentators are
welcome to write.  Submission must be emailed to mc3068@columbia.edu, no
later 10 February 2013.  The 2013 ASLH Meeting is scheduled for 7-10
November 2013 in Miami, Florida.

Margaret Crosby-Arnold
Visiting Scholar
Department of History
Columbia University

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