We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
Review of: Ante Matuško - Lovro Kunčević, Vrijeme harmonije. O razlozima društvene i političke stabilnosti Dubrovačke Republike, Zagreb; Dubrovnik: Hrvatska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti, Zavod za povijesne znanosti u Dubrovniku, 2020, 202 stranice
More...
The present study is systematic research of the party education system in Romania, with a case study of two of its exemplary higher education institutions, namely the “Ștefan Gheorghiu” and the “Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov” School of Social Sciences. Party education in Romania was founded and organized following the Soviet model, which served as a source of inspiration; an attempt was made to acquire a national element as well. The image of this system could be retraced after 1989, given the unrestricted access to the documents of the former Communist Party. Our aim is to present the image of the Romanian party education and to show the role played by the two institutions in the process of forming the Romanian Communist nomenclature. The two institutions were symbols of party education in the first two post-war decades. These higher education institutions were genuine bulwarks of communist proselytism and served as indoctrination vehicles of party members; finally, they were a springboard for those who wanted to reach the top of the political hierarchy. This paper is based on numerous documents found in the archives but also on the works of some authors who dealt with the history of Romanian communism.
More...
This article aims to refute the thesis launched by some Western authors that the Bulgarian foreign policy process continued to be controlled by Moscow even after the country left the Soviet sphere in the early 1990s. In view of this, the concept of the “Russian factor” in the foreign policy of post-socialist Bulgaria was introduced into scientific use in the context of reflections on its geopolitical “distance” from post-Soviet Russia and its integration into the Euro-Atlantic space. Citing examples from the diplomatic practice of Bulgarian-Russian relations, the author tries to prove that very soon after the end of the Cold War Sofia and Moscow took completely different political directions, as “Russian influence” was quickly neutralized by alternative ideas of Bulgarian pro- western spatial reorientation. In the 1990s, Bulgaria was already far from the definition of “the most faithful Soviet satellite”. This was a period in which the country was gradually entering a qualitatively new stage in its historical development, when the Russian Federation no longer had the role of “big brother” as in Soviet times, but was simply one of its many equal international partners.
More...
Review of: Andrzej Draguła - G. Zubrzycki, Spokojna rewolucja. Tożsamość narodowa, religia i sekularyzm w Quebecu, tłum. P. Dobrosielski, Nomos, Kraków 2020, 354 s.
More...
Discussions on the authority and responsibility of the European Union (EU) institutions are more than as it seems. As a supranational organization, democratization of the EU has long been discussed. Some researchers have argued that the EU's democracy deficit stems from its structural state. Opposing ideas claim that the EU is democratic enough. In this sense, both the inequality between the institutions and the difference between the structures of the institutions are the subject matter of the discussion. Decision making process is made through European Parliament (EP) in which the members are chosen by the EU states’ public. Despite the limited authorization of EP, this parliament is expected to be the voice of public. Recent Eurozone crisis and the results of the 2019 EP elections flared up the debate. This paper argues that there cannot be direct democracy in the union i.e. citizens cannot participate directly in the Community-decision making process and this does not cause a democratic deficit. The EU is not and cannot be- by nature- a state, therefore its democratization is unquestionable.
More...
Korea was a major battleground during the Cold War. Korean War represented a remarkable change in Asian politics of two superpowers (US and USSR) whose vital interests were not at stake in Asia. Moreover, the Korean War transformed Asia into the most important non-European area of the international system during the Cold War. After defeat of Japan in WWII, the US invaded Japan and reserved its right to determine the future of this country. The initial policy of the US in the first years of Japan’s invasion was the disarmament of this country and the evacuation of American forces from the country by insuring Japan would not become a menace again to family of peaceful and responsible nations of the world and to the US. However, Communist victory in China and the Korean War brought a “reverse discourse” in American occupation policy for Japan. Japan’s role during the Korean War and Tokyo’s active and passive support to the US and her allies turned Japan an ally to be won in the eyes of the US. The war revealed the strategic importance of Japan and sowed the seeds of the US-Japanese alliance, which has been at the center of the US security architecture called “hub and spoke” in East Asia. This study aims to analyze that the Korean War was a turning point for the US East Asian policy and therefore for the future of Japan.
More...
The aim of the article is to present and analyse the importance of Hong Kong in the political and economic strategy of the communist authorities in China under Xi Jinping. I am going to try to answer the question of whether China’s policy towards the Special Autonomous District has changed after the President of China came to power. I have decided to present this topic as a result of the discussions in the discourse on the future of Hong Kong in the era of Chinese expansionist policy. In the text, I analysed the main determinants of the relationship of both entities and the increasingly frequent attempts to undermine the autonomy that Hong Kong has enjoyed for over 20 years. During Xi Jinping’s rule, the new secretary general of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, aims to accelerate the process of unifying this area with mainland China, recognizing it as the first stage in gaining China’s position as a global superpower. The main thesis of the article assumes that from the beginning of Xi’s rule in power, the Chinese communists recognized Hong Kong as one of the most important problems in Beijing’s political strategy. Therefore, they took specific steps to strengthen control over the province. The authorities in Beijing believe that only strict control over the Hong Kong people will enable a strong influence for China in international events, strengthening its position in the time of a possible confrontation with the United States. The main research paradigm used in the text is the system analysis method.
More...
Foreign students and researchers in Germany became, after 1933, a tool of Nazi propaganda. Those receiving financial support from the Germans, such as the recipients of the Humboldt fellowships, were further compromised. This article aims to shed light on the role played by Humboldt fellowships in the political and ideological transfer between Nazi Germany and Romania. It aims to re-create the profile of the fellows and the influence of the fellowship on the Romanian fellows’ political and ideological development, in order to establish how they functioned as Nazi propaganda tools. Throughout the 1930s, the number of young Romanians going to study and carry out research in Nazi Germany increased considerably, while the financial support they received from the Germans became more significant—including a larger number of Humboldt fellowships. This shows not only that Nazi Germany had a special interest in developing its relations with Romania but also that Romania was embarked on a path of far-right radicalization, with students and youth becoming sympathizers of Nazi Germany and sometimes members of the Iron Guard. The Romanian Humboldt fellows were politically instrumentalized by the Third Reich: they were engaged in far-right political activism, were influenced in their professions and writings by the Nazi ideology, and sometimes they even went on to occupy various positions in the Romanian bureaucratic or diplomatic apparatus.
More...
This article analyses the use of Europeanizing discourses in the travel writing of Croat visitors to the Third Reich. Situating these visits in the context of transnational exchanges in Hitler’s new Europe and the war against the Soviet Union, it considers a number of specific case studies of travel between Croatia and Nazi Germany. It argues that the European discourse of writers, journalists, and youth activists in the Ustashaled Independent State of Croatia served a number of specific purposes. First, they created a space of normality in an extremely violent state, providing an illusion of stability. By bringing the sights, sounds, and pleasures of travel to the near abroad back to Croatia in the form of books, magazine articles, and mobile film reels, they also gave citizens a glimpse of the good life, consumption, and materiality. As such, these travelogues and accounts of journeys overseas also aimed to persuade intellectuals and members of the cultural elite who did not support the Ustasha regime of the various material and professional “club goods” that might accrue to them by becoming active supporters of the regime. Furthermore, they served to create an impression of mobility in a surveillance state in which even internal travel was extremely restricted. Finally, in depicting Nazi-led war in the East and the struggle against the “East within”—in the form of the campaign of genocide against Serbs, Jews, Roma and so-called “asocials”— to building European brotherhood, modernization, and becoming an essential member of the new Europe, they became a source of regime legitimation, thereby telling us important things about the subjectivity of both the state and ideological tourists in a time of terror, war, and occupation.
More...
Research on populism attributes great significance to mapping the distinctive discursive logic of populist reasoning (e.g., the trope of pitting corrupt elites against the people). This article aims to move beyond the primary focus on discursive structures to stress the role of symbols, objects, and different modalities of circulation in the political communication of populist ideas, using the case of Hungary. By tracing the history of one of the key symbols of nationalist populism—the image of “Greater Hungary”— from its emergence in the interwar period to its present-day use, the article shows how the meanings and material forms this symbol assumed in political communication that evolved under different political regimes. The analysis builds on extensive archival, ethnographic, and online data to highlight how the diversity of material forms and the conduits through which this image circulated have contributed to its endurance as a key political symbol. Symbols, like the Greater Hungary image, condense complex historical narratives into a powerful sign that can be easily objectified, reproduced, and diffused. Today’s differentiated consumer markets provide convenient conduits for this kind of material circulation. These symbols carry meaning in and of themselves as signs, and once they are turned into everyday objects, they facilitate the normalization of radical politics by increasing their salience and broad visibility.
More...
Despite a growing number of novel approaches to the far right and new explanatory models, one feature appears to persist in the scholarship: namely, a tendency to discuss the developments in Western Europe and in postsocialist countries separately. Bucking this trend, this article investigates the similarities between the activism of Italian and Polish far-right movements, focusing on the field of historical politics. More specifically, it investigates the ways in which the memories of World War II and accounts of victims of communism are mobilized in the two countries, as well as the question of “censorship” and “mainstreaming” of far-right historical narratives. Apart from comparing the developments in these countries, the article discusses various forms of cooperation between Polish and Italian far-right movements, which reveal their mutual influences but also the limits of transnational networking.
More...
This article presents the history of for-profit mobility from communist Poland, that is, transnational labor migrations and the movement of cross-border petty traders. On the basis of primary research in archives and new scholarship on the history of communist Poland, it presents the scale and dynamics of cross-border movements since the partial opening of the borders in the mid-1950s to the final erosion of the communist regime in 1989. It analyzes the main factors and patterns of the expansion of mobility in both its legal and irregular streams, including the relevant policies of the Polish government and the governments of migrants’ destination countries, the mechanisms of the gray and black markets, especially of hard currencies, and the development and diffusion of social practices of migration. It argues that for-profit mobility was a large part of the second economy as well as a form of disengagement from the communist state and its first economy, a way of selective opting out of socialism. Analyzing the relations between its expansion and the evolution of the communist regime, the article claims that for-profit mobility produced un-communist social spaces and was an important factor eroding the regime’s legitimacy and control over its subjects, thus paving the way to the post-1989 stage of Poland’s transformation.
More...
The article analyzes the biographies of the regional leaders of the Solidarity union and examines the process by which activists were recruited into the social movement and subsequently rose through its ranks. Though there exists an abundant body of research on Solidarity, the recruitment process for the trade union’s middle management has never been analyzed. Such an examination of the regional leadership is important given the significant diversity that existed in the selection process. Activists were selected in regions where strikes occurred (Gdańsk and Wałęsa) and in ones where there were no strikes. This article attempts to identify these regional leaders and their role in Solidarity. It poses questions about the social movement’s center of power. Did the regional leadership represent a grassroots social movement, or were they merely carrying out orders from the center? The subject of this analysis is a group of thirty-nine chairmen comprising the regional leadership of Solidarity. The article employs classical historical analysis methods combined with elicited sources (interviews conducted with selected leaders). It presents a prosopographical analysis based on statistical, historical, and sociological data. The questions posed in the article involve such issues as the Solidarity recruitment process, the social backgrounds of the leaders, their individual personality traits and biographical features, and the goals and motivations that led them to join the movement. The analysis reveals the qualities shared by the majority of the regional leadership of Solidarity.
More...
The article aims at contributing to the social history of the Solidarity movement by tracing the collective biography of its elected representatives. It will focus on the life trajectories of the 900 delegates to the First National Congress of Delegates. The convention, held in Autumn 1981, is commonly perceived as a focal moment in the history of Solidarity and plays a crucial role in almost every academic narrative on the anticommunist opposition. Often seen as a first genuine Polish parliament since pre-war times, its main task was to forge the political and economic programme thus furthering the revolution. The projected research will draw on genuine methodology, combining prosopographical and oral history approach. The research will address mainly the following issues: what social strata the elites came from, what was their cultural and educational background, what motives/causes/expectations drove them to engage with Solidarity, to what generations did they belong, how did they embrace the character of political transformation of 1989, and to what extent and how did they get involved in the political, economic, and social life of post-communist Poland. In general, the paper seeks to shed a new light on our understanding of Solidarity’s social roots—for instead examining to what extent the contesting, revolutionary elites were a product of the Stalinist social advancement. It also tries to depict the level of continuity between the elites of 1981 and post-1989—thus testing the common theories whether the Third Republic is (or is not) rooted in the legacy of Solidarity.
More...
The article deals with the membership of the most important Czech political party, ANO (meaning “yes” in Czech), led by Andrej Babiš, in the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE). Our goals are to reconstruct how Babiš’s party joined ALDE and to discuss the ideological differences between ANO and ALDE. The paper shows that ALDE’s offer of membership in 2014 was motivated by a pragmatic need to bolster its own position in the European Parliament; ANO, meanwhile, needed to anchor itself in European politics. Andrej Babiš’s technocratic and illiberal view was not apparent at the beginning, but more importantly, this did not matter to ALDE. ALDE’s Czech “point of contact,” ANO’s foreign policy expert and the leader of its party group in the European Parliament, Pavel Telička, made ANO’s membership credible. However, as a Euro-optimist, Telička was not compatible with ANO’s flexible ideological character in the long term and the party group split up. A comparison of the parties’ European Parliament election manifestos and positions on crucial controversial European issues clearly reveals a deep division between ALDE and ANO—and their fundamentally opposed ideological positions. We describe the findings as a new hyper-pragmatic trend in the creation of Europarties, which weakens their ideological cohesion.
More...
Since the 1990s, the literature on External Democracy Promotion (EDP) expanded exponentially. Despite widely supported conclusions on EDP (in)effectiveness in fostering democratization and preventing democratic backsliding are still lacking, the literature has generated sophisticated explanations of these processes. Among them, Levitsky and Way’s (L&W’s) linkage and leverage theory stands out as one of the most influential. According to Tolstrup, however, their underestimation of domestic agency constitutes a crucial lacuna, which he proposes to fill through the concept of “Gatekeeping Elite” that underlines a significant impact of local actors on the linkage dimension and, consequently, on EDP (in)effectiveness. I believe that Tolstrup’s intuition can be further developed, expanding even more the explanatory power of L&W’s theory. I claim that domestic actors may exert a crucial influence also on the leverage dimension, thanks to “diversionary behaviours” that local elites may use to change external actors’ interests and preferences, persuading them to limit their democratizing pressures and thus reduce their own vulnerability to EDP processes. To assess the plausibility of this claim, I perform a congruence analysis on the recent and crucial case of autocratization in Serbia (EU candidate country), which is not fully explained by the aforementioned models.
More...
Across Eastern Europe how the past is remembered has become a crucial factor for understanding present-day political developments within and between states. In this introduction, we first present the articles that form part of this special section through a discussion of the various methods used by the authors to demonstrate the potential ways into studying collective memory. We then define the regional characteristics of Eastern Europe’s mnemonic politics and the reasons for their oftentimes conflictual character. Thereafter we consider three thematic arenas that situate the individual contributions to this special section within the wider scholarly debate. First, we examine the institutional and structural conditions that shape the circulation of memory and lead to conflictive constellations of remembering; second, we discuss how different regime types and cultural rules influence the framing of historical episodes, paying attention to supranational integration and the role of technological change; third, we consider the different types of actors that shape the present recall of the past, including political elites, social movements, and society at large. We conclude by identifying several promising avenues for further research.
More...
With reference to the Hungarian minority’s overarching concern over its declining population in Slovakia, this article reveals how different elements of the past are activated, remembered, and renegotiated to ensure the minority’s cultural survival. Using elite interviews, party documents, and a detailed analysis of two local newspaper archives in Hungarian, I unpack how memory and politics interact in the post-EU accession period. First, I uncover how political and civil society actors use acts of commemoration as a conduit to circulate certain narratives of the Hungarian minority identity. Through remembering historic Hungarian leaders and events, elites affirm and construct the minority identity, thus enabling its cultural reproduction. The Habsburg and Austro-Hungarian Monarchy period is referred to most frequently with the celebration of national heroes. Events spanning the twentieth century are generally mourned as painful and detrimental for the Hungarian minority. While the acts of commemoration are “soft” measures to ensure cultural survival, Hungarian political actors also desire “hard” guarantees through institutional measures, best encapsulated by their desire for autonomy arrangements. However, the Slovak nation’s own past of claiming autonomy and their eventual secession from Czechoslovakia in 1939 conditions the cultural rules around language and the appropriate vocabulary that Hungarian elites can use. Consequently, Hungarian minority elites appropriate the past strategically in two ways. They readjust their tactics through using different vocabulary to claim autonomy and second, they pursue policy reforms across areas such as education and regional development, thus making the de facto possibility of autonomy more palatable to their Slovak counterparts.
More...
The rise of historical memory, which began in the 1970s and 1980s, has made the past an increasingly important soft-power resource. At its initial stage, the rise of memory contributed to the decay of self-congratulatory national narratives and to the formation of a “cosmopolitan” memory centered on the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity and informed by the notion of state repentance for the wrongdoings of the past. Laws criminalizing the denial of these crimes, which were adopted in “old” continental democracies in the 1980s and 1990s, were a characteristic expression of this democratic culture of memory. However, with the rise of national populism and the formation of the authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and Poland in the 2000s and 2010s, the politics of memory has taken a significantly different turn. National populists are remarkably persistent in whitewashing their countries’ history and using it to promote nationalist mobilization. This process has manifested itself in the formation of new types of memory laws, which shift the blame for historical injustices to other countries (the 1998 Polish, the 2000 Czech, the 2010 Lithuanian, the June 2010 Hungarian, and the 2014 Latvian statutes) and, in some cases, openly protect the memory of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity (the 2005 Turkish, the 2014 Russian, the 2015 Ukrainian, the 2006 and the 2018 Polish enactments). The article examines Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian legislation regarding the past that demonstrates the current linkage between populism and memory.
More...
