The Great War and the Transformation of Central Europe: A Conversation with Tara Zahra and Pieter Judson

In this episode of the Review of Democracy Podcast,historians Tara Zahra and Pieter Judson discuss their book TheGreat War and the Transformation of Habsburg Central Europe (Oxford University Press, 2025), which presents an intriguing reinterpretation of the First World War and the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. Rather than treatingthe war as a mere endpoint or the Empire’s dissolution as inevitable, the conversation explores how wartime social and political transformations reshaped everyday life and reconfigured relations between state and society. The episode examines fears of democratisation and elite decision-making, the management of refugees and mass displacement, and the emergence of new welfare practices and administrative experiments, showing how these processes laid the foundations for the post-1918 order. By foregrounding shared experiences of scarcity,mobilisation, and repression across the Monarchy, the discussion examines what the Empire’s often improvised wartime policies reveal about processes ofdisintegration as well as unexpected capacities for adaptation.