NEGOTIATING SOVEREIGNTY: CHALLENGES OF SECULARISM AND NATION BUILDING IN CENTRAL EASTERN EUROPE SINCE 1780

Why does the modern state, with its claim to sovereignty, care so much about secularization and (re)sacralization?

In order to address this question, the project examines the (pre)history of the conflict-ridden relationship between transnational institutions and the modern state and also the players who stood at the point of intersection of the two by analysing the shifts in relations between the state and one of the oldest transnational institutions in the world, the Catholic Church.The project examines the conflicts between church and state and the various processes involved in attempts to address these conflicts first and foremost by studying the history of the oaths of loyalty that the (chief) pastors of the Catholic Church were obliged to take and the tensions which arose because of these conflicts in the Habsburg Monarchy and its successor states between 1780 and 1990.

Oaths of loyalty to the state bear the marks of the changing relationships between the nation state and the transnational Catholic Church and were generated directly through the negotiations of sovereignty among these actors.

The project will offer a comprehensive interpretation of oaths of loyalty in the context of Josephinism, nation building, and communism and their transformations in the context of the shifting relationships of the national, state, and transnational loyalties.

Thus, it will provide much needed tools for a longue durée and comparative analysis of state-church relations in Central Eastern Europe.

It will also discuss patterns of continuity and discontinuity between the church policy of different regimes, the common and different features of the role of Catholicism in nation building, and the related change of function of the Catholic hierarchy among the peoples of the Habsburg Monarchy.

On the plane of global history, it will offer new insights into the roots and the prehistory of the conflicted relationship between transnational institutions and state sovereignty.