Konflikt und Kooperation Beyrau, D.; Eichwede, W.; Kunštát, M.
Osteuropa (Stuttgart),
01/2020, Letnik:
70, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Jan Křen gehörte zu jenen ostmitteleuropäischen Denkern, die mit der Macht der Ohnmächtigen die Spaltung Europas überwanden. Sein Metier war die historische Wahrheit. Er beschäftigte sich mit dem ...bürgerlichen Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus, den es nach der herrschenden Doktrin der Kommunistischen Partei nicht gab. Er arbeitete über die Vertreibung der Deutschen aus der Tschechoslowakei, die als unausweichlich zu rechtfertigen er sich weigerte. Und er stemmte sich gegen deterministische Geschichtsbilder, die die Zerstörung einer über Jahrhunderte währenden Gemeinschaft von Tschechen und Deutschen in Mitteleuropa als unausweichlich präsentierten. Jan Křen ist im April 2020 im Alter von 89 Jahren in Prag gestorben.
Jan Křen was among the eastern-central European thinkers who overcame the division of Europe with the power of the powerless. His main interest was historical truth. He studied civilian resistance against National Socialism, which according to the ruling doctrine of the Communist Party did not even exist. One topics of his research was the expulsion of the Germans from Czechoslovakia, which he refused to justify as being a matter of necessity. And he refused to conform to deterministic portrayals of history that presented the destruction of the centuries-old community of Czechs and Germans in central Europe as being a matter of inevitability. Jan Křen died in April 2020 in Prague, aged 89.
Over the last decade, the Chinese Communist Party has built an unprecedented surveillant assemblage in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) with the region's Uyghur Muslim minority as the ...chief target of augmented Party-state controls. This article interrogates the mechanics, logic and implications of Xinjiang's surveillance society. It demonstrates how Party-state monitoring comes not only in the form of physical monitoring and forced kinship but also automated, technology-driven tools such as GPS tracking, voice and facial recognition technologies, machine learning algorithms, and other software and hardware. The Chinese Party-state employs surveillance to delineate 'correct' thought and behaviour among its citizens, and then persuade (through coercion and inducement) self-alignment with Party and Han-defined norms. The results are fewer spaces for autonomous, bottom-up social mobilization by the Uyghurs and other minorities, the abolition of non-Han cultural, linguistic and religious practices, and the erosion of social trust in Xinjiang society.
Can staying minorities who evade ethnic cleansing affect political outcomes in resettled communities? After World War Two, three million ethnic Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia's ...Sudetenland, but some were allowed to stay, many of them left‐leaning antifascists. We study quasi‐experimental local variation in expulsion policies, a result of the surprising presence of the U.S. Army, which indirectly helped antifascist Germans stay. We find a long‐lasting footprint: Communist party support, party cells, and far‐left values are stronger today where antifascist Germans stayed in larger numbers. Postwar German Communist elites appear to be behind this effect along with the intergenerational transmission of values among active party members.
Contrary to expectations, economic interdependence has not tempered security conflict between China and the United States. In response to perceived domestic and external threats, the Chinese ...Communist Party's actions to ensure regime security have generated insecurity in other states, causing them to adopt measures to constrain Chinese firms. Security dilemma dynamics best explain the subsequent reactions from many advanced industrialized countries to the evolution of China's political economy into party-state capitalism. Party-state capitalism manifests in two signature ways: (1) expansion of party-state authority in firms through changes in corporate governance and state-led financial instruments; and (2) enforcement of political fealty among various economic actors. Together, these trends have blurred the distinction between state and private capital in China and resulted in backlash, including intensified investment reviews, campaigns to exclude Chinese firms from strategic sectors, and the creation of novel domestic and international institutions to address perceived threats from Chinese actors. The uniqueness of China's model has prompted significant reorganization of the rules governing capitalism, both nationally and globally.
While many post-communist European party systems have experienced the rise of anti-establishment parties, not all have been equally vulnerable to challengers attacking both cultural and economic ...liberalism. This article borrows insights from scholarship on Latin American politics and develops a critical juncture approach to understanding the linkages between economic liberalization and political illiberalism in 15 post-communist democracies during the 1990-2020 period. It argues that contingent political dynamics during post-communist junctures shaped ensuing legacies by conditioning the long-term programmatic positions and variable electoral performance of “traditional” leftist parties. This path-dependent process culminated in variable electoral viability of illiberal parties with incentives for ideological differentiation and organizational capacities to adopt those economic positions that were most likely to be electorally rewarded. By focusing on variable incentives, resources, and constraints, the article challenges previous scholarship and advances and tests a novel theoretical framework based on a probabilistic approach to critical juncture analysis.
El colapso de la Unión Soviética en 1991 tuvo un impacto inmediato en el sistema mundial. En el propio territorio ruso, produjo importantes dislocaciones en todas las esferas de la vida social, que ...fueron siendo superadas, lentamente, a lo largo de las tres últimas décadas. El sistema Putin viene reescribiendo la historia con una visión que busca conectar los momentos gloriosos prerrevolucionarios con los soviéticos.
After Mao Zedong died, Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues sought to prevent “the overconcentration of power” by introducing fixed terms of office, term limits, and a mandatory retirement age; ...delegating authority from the Communist Party to government agencies; and holding regular meetings of Party institutions. All these moves were designed to decentralize authority, regularize political life and check dictatorial power. The centerpiece of the institutionalization project was the practice of regular peaceful leadership succession followed by Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. Regular premortem leadership succession was a rare achievement in a communist system and the most important source of China’s “authoritarian resilience.” Yet today, Xi Jinping is taking China back to a personalistic dictatorship after decades of institutionalized collective leadership. He has clearly signaled his intention to remain in office after his normal two terms end in 2022. This article analyzes the reasons why the institutional rules and precedents laid down since Deng Xiaoping’s time failed to prevent the emergence of another strongman leader like Mao Zedong.
This article analyzes the Chinese Communist Party's "Core Socialist Values" (shèhuì zhŭyì héxīn jiàzhíguān) to show how each of these twelve values is defined, both independently and in relation to ...others. Using a Gramscian analytical approach, the article examines how a Chinese "integral state" is being prepared to ensure that consensus to the state's proscribed values is not undermined by competing discourses. Consideration is given to how civil society becomes the ground for building consensus, reinforced by coercive strategies emanating from the Chinese state. In conclusion, the paper argues that the Core Socialist Values campaign represents a shift in focus under the current Xi Jinping Administration to emphasize the superstructure over the economic base, with the objective of creating citizens of and for the People's Republic of China.
TWO GREAT LOSSES Anderson, Perry
New Left review,
01/2023
139
Journal Article
Recenzirano
An obituary for Tom Nairn and Mike Davis is presented. A natural polymath, Tom won a privileged education, first in an art college, then studying philosophy at two universities in Britain--Edinburgh ...and Oxford--thereafter spending time at the apex of higher education in Italy, the Scuola Normale in Pisa, where he acquired fluent Italian. Mike became a political activist in the civil-rights movement of the sixties. Subsequently a full-time organizer for SDS, he briefly joined the Communist Party, keeping himself alive driving trucks and buses.
In the reform era, management of information by the Chinese Communist Party has been continuously moving away from explicit, crude tactics of the past toward more subtle and orderly mechanisms of the ...present. This study examines one facet of this transformation in the online sphere: digital persuasion. Drawing on three emerging trends in online persuasion, including official digital revamping of state media, expansion of government Weibo, and official promotion of patriotic bloggers, the authors explain how online persuasion is taking on an increasingly participatory form under President Xi. Specifically, the conceptualization of 'authoritarian participatory persuasion 2.0' includes direct co-production of persuasion, with netizens called to repost, share and create content, as well as the indirect participation, whereby netizens are invited to partake in the life of the top leader, Xi Jinping, and to consume exclusive practical tips provided by the state. The participatory digital persuasion, whereas intended to facilitate public complicity with the regime, has also opened up spaces for satire and 'incivility' unmasking and challenging the state's covert propaganda practices.
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