This book explores the interrelated campaigns of agricultural collectivization in the USSR and in the communist dictatorships established in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. Despite the profound, ...long-term societal impact of collectivization, the subject has remained relatively underresearched. The volume combines detailed studies of collectivization in individual Eastern European states with issueoriented comparative perspectives at regional level. Based on novel primary sources, it proposes a reappraisal of the theoretical underpinnings and research agenda of studies on collectivization in Eastern Europe.The contributions provide up-to-date overviews of recent research in the field and promote new approaches to the topic, combining historical comparisons with studies of transnational transfers and entanglements.
The tumultuous history of the Balkans has been subject to a plethora of conflicting interpretations, both local and external. In an attempt to help overcome the stereotypes that still pervade Balkan ...history, Battling over the Balkans concentrates on a set of five principal controversies from the precommunist period with which the region’s history and historiography must contend: (1) the pre-1914 Ottoman and Eastern Christian Orthodox legacies; (2) the post-1918 struggles for state-building; (3) the range of European economic and cultural influence across the interwar period, as opposed to diplomatic or political intervention; (4) the role of violence and paramilitary forces in challenging the interwar political regimes in the region; and (5) the fate of ethnic minorities into and after World War II, particularly Jews, Muslims and Roma. In an attempt to give a voice to eminent local authors, the chapters provide samples of new regional scholarship exploring these contested issues—most of them translated into English for the first time—and are prefaced with historiographical overviews addressing the state of the debate on these specific controversies. These translations help bridge the language barriers that often separate scholarly traditions within Southeast Europe, as well as scholars in Southeast Europe and English-speaking academia. It is hoped that the volume will enable readers to identify common patterns and influences that characterize the writing of history in the region, and will stimulate new transnational and comparative approaches to the history of the Balkans.
Winner of the 2019 CEU Award for Outstanding Research The book explores the making of Romanian nation-state citizenship (1750-1918) as a series of acts of emancipation of subordinated groups (Greeks, ...Gypsies/Roma, Armenians, Jews, Muslims, peasants, women, and Dobrudjans). Its innovative interdisciplinary approach to citizenship in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Balkans appeals to a diverse readership.
This book—the first of a three-volume overview of comparative and transnational historiography in Europe—focuses on the complex engagement of various comparative methodological approaches with ...different transnational and supranational frameworks. It considers scales from universal history to meso-regional (i.e. Balkans, Central Europe, etc.) perspectives. In the form of a reader, it displays 18 historical studies written between 1900 and 1943. The collection starts with the French and German methodological discussions around the turn of the twentieth century, stemming from the effort to integrate history with other emerging social sciences on a comparative methodological basis. The volume then turns to the question of structural and institutional comparisons, revisiting various historiographical ventures that tried to sketch out a broader (regional or European-level) interpretative framework to assess the legal systems, patterns of agrarian production, and the common ethnographic and sociocultural features.
In the third part, a number of texts are presented, which put forward a supra-national research framework as an antidote to national exclusivism. While in Western Europe the most obvious such framework was pan-European, in East Central Europe the agenda of comparison was linked usually to a meso-regional framework.
The studies are accompanied by short contextual introductions including biographical information on the respective authors.
The subject matter of the volume is part of larger research agenda on the process of land collectivization in the former communist camp, focusing on state, identity and property. The main innovation ...of the volume is to apply recent interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the collectivization process, asking what types of new peasant-state relations it formed and how it transformed notions of self, persons, and things (such as land). The project conceived of changes in the system of ownership as causing changes in the identity and attitude of people; similarly, it regarded the study of personal identities as essential for understanding changes in the system of ownership. This perspective is rare in the area-studies approaches to the topic.
This article advances an interdisciplinary and multifactorial socio-cultural approach to the fascistization of the Ustaša in interwar Yugoslavia, leading to terrorism and racial cleansing. It ...concentrates on the life-trajectories of Mijo Babić and Zvonimir Pospišil, two nationalist activists notoriously known as the first Ustaša terrorists. Drawing on the previously unknown political memoirs of Pospišil and Babić, the article argues that the two activists bridged several phases of cumulative radicalization in the Ustaša organization, from the adoption of political violence at the grass-root level in the 1920s to international terrorism in the 1930s and then state-sponsored genocide in the first half of the 1940s. The article points out that Ustaša underwent most forms of political radicalization to terrorism identified by McCauley and Moskalenko, but it also adds to their typology a case of radicalization to mass violence in the regime phase. Ustaša's trajectory thus illustrates a rare process of transition from the radicalization of an oppositional, non-state group to mass radicalization leading to racial genocidal policies under a fascist-totalitarian regime. It is hoped that the biographical approach to radicalization advanced by the article contributes to a better understanding of politically motivated terrorism and mass violence in post-1918 Europe.
Demokratie in Rumänien Iordachi, Constantin
Osteuropa (Stuttgart),
10/2019, Letnik:
69, Številka:
6-8
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Rumänien gilt oft als Sonderfall. Demokratie sei dort besonders schwach verankert, heißt es. Ein genauerer Blick offenbart jedoch, dass es in der Geschichte Rumäniens durchaus liberale Ansätze gab. ...Rumänien bewegte sich in den vergangenen 200 Jahren im Strom der europäischen Ereignisse – von der Einführung der konstitutionellen Monarchie im 19. Jahrhundert bis zur Massendemokratie im 20. Jahrhundert. In Rumänien wurden noch 1937 freie Wahlen abgehalten, als in den meisten anderen Staaten Ostmitteleuropas bereits Diktaturen herrschten. Danach bestimmten Diktaturen das Schicksal des Landes. Doch die demokratische Tradition ist nicht verlorengegangen. In den vergangenen zehn Jahren hat die Demokratie in Rumänien einen bemerkenswerten Aufschwung erlebt und allen Anfeindungen getrotzt.
Romania is often seen as being a special case, where democracy has particularly shallow roots. However, on closer inspection, it emerges that there have by all means been liberal tendencies in Romania’s history. Over the past 200 years, Romania has moved with the flow of events in Europe – from the introduction of the constitutional monarchy in the 19th century to the mass democracy of the 20th. Free elections were still being held in Romania in 1937, when dictatorships dominated in most of the other states of central-eastern Europe. After that, the fate of the country was determined by various dictators. However, the democratic tradition has not been lost. Over the past ten years, democracy in Romania has experienced a notable upturn and has defied all attempts to quell it.
In the beginning of April this year, the Hungarian Parliament passed two amendments to the existing educational law, which in their particular formulation targeted specifically the renowned Central ...European University in Budapest and sought to undermine the legal basis of its existence in Hungary. In four contributions leading academics and a PhD student of the History Department of the Central European University place the latest events in context, provide insights into the institutional set-up and the development of the History Department, and explain why this institution is special and worth fighting for.
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