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The important, interesting, or just downright quirky news from TOL’s coverage region. Today: Chechen activist released early; a new online dictionary for Kosovo; Eurasia more at peace; less-known tourist gems; and in bed with Stalin.
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Today’s regional news: Prague mayor in danger; Tajikistan and WHO; Serbian solidarity; Stati vs. Kazakhstan; and a Georgian success.
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As invisible foreign invaders spark panic around the globe, it’s easy for democrats to get distracted from the all-too-human threats we know so well.
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The article provides an analysis of the mobilization strategies of far-right movements from the Czech Republic and Germany based on the content they provide via hyperlinks on their websites. Vertical and reticular characteristics of the hyperlinked pages have been analyzed, two aspects which form central parts of the mobilization strategies of social movements. The vertical level refers to territorial relations, while the reticular level refers to relations with other actors. The analyses confirmed that the movements focused on the vertical level to their countries of origin. With respect to reticular characteristics the type of hyperlinked content neither differs significantly throughout countries, nor throughout segments of the far-right movement. Additionally, the analysis of the type of hyperlinked content provides insight into the general mobilization strategies employed.
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The Maria Kopp Institute for Demography and Families together with the Research Institute for Hungarian Communities Abroad conducted a survey among the Hungarian minorities in Subcarpathia (Ukraine), South-Slovakia (formerly Upper Hungary), Vojvodina (Serbia) and Transylvania(Romania), collecting 2576 valid responses. The aim of the questionnaire was to study the attitudes to relationships, marriage as well as to plans and facts about childbearing. The sample was representative for sexes, and other basic demographic variables as well; 50,4% of the respondents were men and 49,6% were women in the study. The survey results showed that the start of the first marriage is two years earlier than the so called ‘ideal age’ for marriage (women 25, men 28) for both sexes. The relationships (marriage or cohabitation) are more stable in the 35–45 age group than among younger couples. According to our respondents the most important preconditions for childbearing are right partner and the appropriate housing. It has been again verified that it is important for mothers to reconcile family needs and work responsibilities. The results show that the attitudes abroad are very similar to those inside Hungary.
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My article deals with the (mostly medieval) German architectural heritage in present-day Estonia and with the history of monument preservation in the Baltic region in connection with the Baltic German identity. The central area of interest for me are the representations and constructions of this heritage in the texts written about monument preservation. With the Enlightenment and Romanticism of the late eighteenth century, the first Baltic German scholars—literati began to show interest in old houses and works of art. The University of Dorpat (Tartu) was re-established in the early nineteenth century, but local affairs were not included in its teaching curriculum. Because of this, many Baltic Germans felt compelled to research the regional history and historical monuments themselves. During the nineteenth century, numerous learned societies were established, some of which focused specifically on cultural heritage, for example the Gesellschaft für Geschichte und Altertumskunde der Ostseeprovinzen Russlands (Society for the History and Archaeology of the Baltic Sea Provinces of Russia), which was founded in 1834 and was based in Riga. In a situation where the Russian state and the Estonian and Latvian populations were also undergoing a process of cultural and national awakening, material heritage became a key element in the development of a Baltic German identity. With a shared patriotic agenda, the learned societies gave new impulses to monument preservation and, around 1900, they published a number of popularizing texts.
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Research on Jews who converted to Christianity before and during the Holocaust has been scarce until recently, although since the 1980s survivors’ testimonies began to mention such experiences more often. This article offers a first general overview of 97 testimonies found in the Fortunoff Video Archive of Holocaust Testimonies that describe the experience of conversion of Holocaust survivors. Based on the information provided by these testimonies it 1) analyses the attitudes of Christian and Jewish institutions and individuals towards converts and 2) explores the way in which the experience of conversion impacted the sense of belonging and Jewish identity of the survivors.
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On 27 December 2019 the parliament of Montenegro passed a new Law on Religious Freedom. This law replaces an older law regarding the same topic from 1977. There is a broad consensus that the old law is outdated and needs to be revised. However, the new one is (among other aspects) mainly criticized for its articles 62-64, which refer to the ownership of holy assets. It declares that all religious sites and land currently possessed by religious communities and built from common funds of the citizens before 1918 on the territory of present- day Montenegro, shall pass into the ownership of the Montenegrin state, if religious communities cannot give evidence that they were the legal owners of the assets within one year from the promulgation of the Law. This legal norm is highly contested by the oppositional pro-Serbian Democratic Front (DF), the Serbian Orthodox Church (SOC), and its supporters, who claim that this law would take away holy places from the SOC and would be discriminatory against the Serbs in Montenegro, which manifests in regular demonstrations, blockades, and even threats of bloodshed in Montenegro if the law is implemented. There was also an incident inside the parliament where MPs of the DF rushed to the parliament speaker and stated that they would be ready to die for their church. After this, police intervened and arrested 18 MPs of the DF. Additionally, the opposition leader Andrija Mandić stated that the government would have to “count on the worst,” if the parliament would adopt that law and that he would “invite all [his] war friends from 1991 to 1999.” Although after some violent conflicts with injuries on both sides, peaceful walks and protests were announced and organized by the SOC, the situation is tense and reaches international importance as well.
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National scholarly conference
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Alongside the rise and decline of the Islamic State, the violent extremist threat in Bosnia & Herzegovina (BiH) has largely been seen through the lens of Salafi-jihadism and the phenomenon of foreign terrorist fighters departing to, and now returning from, battlefields in Syria and Iraq. Yet, a series of recent surveys in BiH finds that ethnonationalist extremism is viewed by citizens as nearly three times a greater threat than religious extremism; that those with greater trust in political and religious leaders also demonstrate greater sympathy for violence; and that political leaders, in particular, bear the greatest responsibility for stimulating inter-ethnic tensions.
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The “national” operations of the NKVD during the Great Terror remain one of the hottest debates in Soviet history. The sharp gap between the Bolsheviks’ previous national policy encourages historians to advance various explanations about what happened. Some scholars believe that “national” operations were based on an ethnization of the image of the enemy, and as a result, the ethnic aspect allegedly received a priority over the social aspect in the punitive policy of Stalinism. Other historians believe the main reason for the “national” operations of the NKVD was the authorities’ desire to eliminate any ties of Soviet citizens with the “hostile capitalist environment.” The article presents directives and internal statistics of the NKVD, found in the Central Archive of the FSB of the Russian Federation and previously unknown to researchers. The authors discuss the thesis of the ethnic component of the Great Terror, using the example of the “German” operation in Kazakhstan. The “national” operations were ambivalent. Under conditions of such “landscapes” as industry, transport, and the army, total terror was aimed at “nationals” with practically no selection of victims. However, in the countryside, in the “outback” of the USSR, in places of compact residences of “hostile” ethnic “contingents,” the state security bodies actively selected their victims. Thus, in the Kazakh SSR, the Germans deported to Kazakhstan in 1931–1936 and who were extremely dissatisfied with their living conditions became the main target group of the “German” operation. Germans who voluntarily moved to Kazakhstan before 1917 suffered much less.
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Yugoslavian dissolution has had an effect of increasing segregation between the main ethnic groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which led to the outbreak of civil war between Croats, Serbs, and Muslims from 1992 to 1995. The Dayton vision of Bosnia and Herzegovina's operation has importance for the foundation of our research objective. This paper is focused on the High Representative's reports, between 2006 and 2007. Our research objective is to identify to what extent the Dayton Agreement sets out the steps to be taken to establish a climate of peace and post-conflict recovery. However, the Dayton Agreement limited the capac¬ity of international bodies to lead Bosnia and Herzegovina to reach the objectives established at the beginning. As a consequence, Bosnia and Herzegovina emerge as a territorially frag¬mented, politically, ethnically and religiously fragmented state with non-functional institu¬tions dominated by disagreements between the three ethnic groups and corruption.
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Nearly 300,000 Urdu-speaking Muslims, coming mostly from India’s Bihar, live today in Bangladesh, half of them in the makeshift camps maintained by the Bangladeshi government. After the division of the Subcontinent in 1947 they migrated to East Bengal (from 1955 known as East Pakistan), despite stronger cultural and linguistic ties (they were Urdu, not Bengali, speakers) connecting them with West Pakistan. In 1971, after East Pakistan became independent and Bangladesh was formed, these so-called ‘Biharis’ were placed by the authorities of the newly formed republic in the camps, from which they were supposed—and they hoped—to be relocated to Pakistan. However, over the next 20 years, only a small number of these people has actually been transferred. The rest of them are still inhabiting slum-like camps in former East Bengal, deprived of any citizenship and all related rights (to work, education, health care, insurance, etc.). The governments of Pakistan and Bangladesh consistently refuse to take responsibility for their fate, incapable of making any steps that would eventually solve the complex problem of these people, also known as ‘stranded Pakistanis.’ The article explains historical and political factors that were responsible for the fate of ‘Biharis’ and presents their current legal situation in Bangladesh.
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Social mobility can be both horizontal and vertical. The latter is characterised by movement from a lower social class to a higher one, and with it a change in social status. Upward social mobility appears in different guises; it can pertain to education, occupation, cultural capital, income, etc. Until recently, the phenomenon of upward social mobility concerned a small number of emigrant Poles, with “migrants of success” composing only a small minority of a much larger number of Polish migrants in previous years. The accession of Poland to the European Union in 2004, and then to Schengen Zone in 2007, opened new opportunities. This article (based on my ethnological fieldwork) presents different ways that Poles who emigrated to Berlin between 1980 and 2016 managed to enact upward social mobility and the changing characteristics of this migration pattern.
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This paper presents an overview of the research topics that have appeared in Polish humanities since 1989 concerning the second half of the 19th c. history of the nations and countries which went on to create the Yugoslavian state after 1918. The period we chose is 1848 to 1908.
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This study, written in connection with the Year of Hungarian families abroad, examines family-friendly businesses. In the framework of the thematic program year, the Research Institute for Hungarian Communities Abroad conducted a multidirectional research in the major four neighbouring regions: Southern-Slovakia, Vojvodina, Transcarpathia and Transylvania. In this research, we focused on the behaviour of family-friendly businesses. Since 2014 annually published research has emphasized business developments and their impact on families and children in the Hungarian cross-border regions. The interview study presented here was based on a similar idea, with the objective of gaining direct knowledge about Hungarian companies in the Carpathian Basin, especially whose leaders undertook to make their business family-friendly. It summarizes the economic situation in each region during the current period, in order to get an overall comparative picture of all mentioned areas, and to be able to interpret and manage the local difficulties, or benefits obtained by the entrepreneurs, who form a heterogeneous and innovative group considering family-friendly initiatives.
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The rise of racist phenomena both globally and locally is perceived ever more as a crucial issue in the present socio-political context. This has led to the substantial growth of intellectual considerations on the phenomena, even in local contexts where racisms have rarely been analysed. The article critically analyses the central issues of the dominant epistemology of most existing research and reductionist understandings of racisms, their historical developments and persistence in liberaldemocratic capitalistic societies organised as nation states. By reflecting on the genesis and fundamental coordinates of the dominant epistemology and utilising the insights of alternative epistemologies, a framework is established for a more nuanced understanding of racisms that mirrors the complexity of these phenomena.
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The border shifts and population exchanges between Central and East European states agreed at the 1945 Potsdam Conference continue to reverberate in the culture and politics of those countries. Focusing on Poland, this article proposes the term “border trouble” to interpret the politicized split in memory that has run through Polish culture since the end of the Second World War. Border trouble is a form of cultural trauma that transcends binaries of perpetrator/victim and oppressor/oppressed; it is also a tool for analyzing the ways in which spatial imagination, memory, and identity interact in visual and literary narratives. A close analysis of four recent feature films demonstrates the emergence of a visual grammar of cosmopolitan memory and identity in relation to borderland spaces. Wojciech Smarzowski’s Róża (“Rose,” 2011) and Agnieszka Holland’s Pokot (“Spoor,” 2017) are both set in territories that were transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945. Wołyń (“Volhynia,” released internationally as “Hatred,” 2016) and W ciemności (“In Darkness,” 2011), also directed by Smarzowski and Holland respectively, are set in regions that were under Polish administration before the war but were transferred to Soviet Ukraine in 1945. All four productions break new ground in the memorialization of the post-war legacy in Poland. They deconstruct hitherto dominant discourses of simultaneity and ethnic homogeneity, engaging in Poland’s wars of symbols as a third voice: anti-nationalist, but also refusing to essentialize cosmopolitan identity. They show the evolution of border trouble in response to contemporary political and cultural developments.
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Controversies over social memory form an important aspect of reality in the postcommunist countries of Eastern Europe. On the one hand, there are debates about coming to terms with the communist past and the Second World War that preceded it (because important parts of the memory of the war were “frozen” during the communist era), and, on the other hand, and intimately connected to that, are discussions about the constant influence of communism on the current situation. This article presents some of the main trends in research on collective memory in the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe and reveals similarities and differences in the process of memorialization of communism in the countries of the region. Although there are works devoted to a comparative analysis of memory usage and its various interpretations in the political sphere in the countries of Eastern Europe, there are still many issues concerning daily practices (economic, religious, and cultural) associated with varying interpretations of the war and the communist past which needs further elaboration and analysis.
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The free movement of persons in the EU has been thought of as reflecting an ideal of supranational solidarity within the single market. However, over the past decade, it has become a source of political contention among European peoples. Much attention has been paid to Western European, anti-EU sentiment regarding Central Eastern European migration. Yet euroskeptic populism has recently risen within the eastern EU as well. Despite this phenomenon, less attention has been given to discursive views of the free movement of persons in the eastern expansion countries. This contribution takes issue with transactionalist and utilitarian approaches to identity formation. It argues that resilient national identity shapes the perception of national interests regarding the market-based citizenship promoted by the EU institutions. Through qualitative analysis of the high-circulation popular Polish press, this study finds that when viewed through national identity–based interest perceptions, the free movement of persons is not framed in terms of “actual” economic benefits or opportunities. Instead, it is framed as a dubious benefit of EU integration, in relation to many obligations of EU membership. In contrast, the press discourse examined here frames intra-Union migration as the continuing unfortunate necessity of emigration. Thus, national identity conceptions may influence the eastern EU press narrative, causing it to frame the free movement of persons negatively, in terms of perceived interests.
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