With the topic "Challenges of Nation-Building through the Empire: Constitutional Law, Imperial Court of Jurisprudence, and Lessons for Modern Minority Protection in Austria" Professor Jürgen Pirker represents the University of Graz at the Conference "Age of Empires I: Europe and its Empires 1814-1914" organized by the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences of the Széchenyi István University.
By the decades before the First World War, European powers had become masters of vast areas of the world, often at the expense of previously dominant empires. For European governments, economic and political elites, it was natural to continue to expand, to deepen their domination of the territories under their influence. This aspiration also played a role in the perspective of nation-building, both culturally and politically, often involving the idea of empire and the alignment of these aspirations with the vision of the future of the nation. For the European states of the 19th century, the process of expansion and globalisation brought a series of challenges. How to run empires that had grown large? What are the governance, legal, economic and cultural implications for each state in this competitive era?
These are the questions that were answered at the conference entitled Age of Empires I - Europe and its Empires 1814-1914, organized by the Department of Legal History of the Deák Ferenc Faculty of Law and Political Sciences of the Széchenyi István University.