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Review of: Tomas Vaitelė - Rec.: Anna Mikonis-Railienė, Renata Šukaitytė, Mantas Martišius, Renata Stonytė, Politinis lūžis ekrane: (po)komunistinė transformacija Lietuvos dokumentiniame kine, videokronikoje ir televizijoje, Vilnius: Vilniaus universiteto leidykla, 2020.
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Review of: Shalva Dzebisashvili - Georgien Zwischen Eigenstaatlichkeit Und Russischer Okkupation: Die Wurzeln Des Konflikts Vom 18. Jh. Bis 1924 (Klostermann Rotereihe) (German Edition) (German) Paperback – September 1, 2019
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We live in the time of globalization, which, whether viewed positively or negatively, is our reality and should be not only accepted but also studied. It is an exciting and challenging time for researchers in the humanities, as it is difficult to define any sphere of life as purely national; there is an important European and global dimension to most contemporary economic, social, political, cultural, and language matters. In this respect, the conference “Towards a European Society? Transgressing Disciplinary Boundaries in European Studies Research,” organized by the Centre for European and International Studies Research of the University of Portsmouth and held there from 28–30 June, was of great interest and importance.
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The article considers the phenomenon of divided ethnic groups and their political consolidation across the state borders on the example of Circassians in Turkey and Russia. The reason for the Circassian division was a series of refugee waves from the Russian Empire in the mid-nineteenth century. The Turkish Circassian diaspora is the largest outside the homeland accounting for about 2.5 million people. Those Circassians who stayed in the North Caucasus (about 700 000), mostly inhabit four subjects of the Russian Federation. The parts of divided Circassians in Russia and Turkey with their organizations make attempts for consolidation and cultural cooperation through state boundaries, which have legal, cultural, informational and international consequences. While the Russian Circassian organizations are currently showing a more loyal attitude towards the federal center, the mobilization of KAFFED and Turkish Circassians in general is intensifying both in international issues and in the internal political struggle in Turkey.
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The frozen conflict in Transnistria ranks among a series of interethnic clashes which broke out at the periphery of the Soviet Union in light of its dismemberment. However, Transnistria`s case, compared to other frozen conflicts in the ex-Soviet space, stands out due to the absence of interethnic animosities prior to 1989. The systemic changes caused the eruption of the conflict, and the intergroup rivalry did not necessarily derive from ethnic belonging; it was the following war in March 1992 that yielded the idea of the “Transnistrian identity”. This article re-examines how identity was created and manipulated in the MASSR, Transnistria`s political ancestor. The creation of the MASSR in 1924, with the aim to regain Bessarabia from Romania, and to spread communism outside de Soviet borders, was accompanied by a series of policies that promoted a new, local identity. These policies had taken various forms and lasted until the Soviet Union reoccupied Bessarabia in 1940. Their reinvestigation serves as opportunity of reassessing the MASSR as the prototype for identity fabrication in Transnistria. In the context of the current frozen conflict, such approach on the MASSR as a historical precedent throws fresh light on the emergence of the new “Transnistrian identity”.
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Review of: Andrzej Draguła - G. Zubrzycki, Spokojna rewolucja. Tożsamość narodowa, religia i sekularyzm w Quebecu, tłum. P. Dobrosielski, Nomos, Kraków 2020, 354 s.
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A conversation with Serhii Plokhy, Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University and director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Interviewer: Adam Reichardt
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Recent years have seen a rise in prominence – at both national and European levels – of anti-gender movements and parties. While actors using this rhetoric can be found across most EU member states, anti-gender rhetoric represents government policy in a few East-Central European countries, bringing these objections to the European level. In this article, we analyse and interpret this ECE-led state opposition to ‘gender’ by examining the diversification of the meaning of this term at EU level, including a shift from a structural to an individualist one, which we argue lends empirical credibility to the anti-gender rhetoric of right-wing populist parties. Based on interviews with EU stakeholders in the European Commission, European Parliament and EU-level civil society, as well as on the analysis of European Commission documents and Council Conclusions, we track the use of the term ‘gender’ and the definition which has been attached to it. We conclude that these changes result at least in part from feminist taboos and neoliberal tendencies within feminist theory arriving to the EU polity. We believe that the shifts around the concept of gender on the progressive side shed light on the popularity of the anti-gender discourse and of the right-wing itself.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The tradition of equestrian monuments is over 2,500 years old. The origins of such monuments date back to ancient Greece and Rome, and their numerous manifestations can be found today not only in Europe but on all continents. These monuments are not accidental – they perform a specific social function which is indicated both by the symbolism of a horse and rider, as well as by the figure of the rider himself. By analysing equestrian statues, the author of the paper attempts to answer the question: What is the function and social significance of equestrian statues as figures of power and how has this significance changed over time? Four main periods of power, manifested in equestrian statues, have been distinguished: 1) the ancient period of absolute power, 2) the medieval period of divine power, 3) the modern period of absolute power, 4) the modern period of democratic power.
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This text is a multi-faceted analysis – economic, symbolic, and ideological – of the destruction of monuments commemorating white historical figures such as Josephine de Beauharnais and Victor Schœlcher in the summer of 2020 in French overseas departments. Violence, racism, the logics of repentance, and revolutionary elements indicate the existence of a significant crisis in the Fifth Republic and, perhaps, announce a new order. The text also contains the hypothesis that acts of vandalism are part of the global tendency to reject the colonial past.
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In 1965, at the 9th Congress of the Romanian Communist Party, Nicolae Ceauşescu was appointed General Secretary. He was the youngest party leader among brotherly socialist countries. He immediately got the attention of the public opinion, affirming that the role of the nation was not over. He proclaimed the nation the foundation for the future socialist society. It was the beginning of Ceauşescu’s regime, a period dominated by the overrepresentation of the socialist nation within official and public discourse. One particular trait of Ceauşescu’s understanding of the nation was its homogeneity. It was this homogeneity that shaped his perspective about social progress in Romania and, later, caused much harm to the social fabric of the country. The article explores the beginning of this theory of a homogenous society as the ideal endpoint of the social revolution as it had been envisioned by the party officials. The theory affected not only the Romanian society but the Communist Party as well. It was designed to remove differences between villagers and city dwellers, between workers and intellectuals and, eventually, between party members and the rest of the people. It was this homogeneity that gave the unmistakable stifling air of the last decade of the Romanian socialist regime.
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The Irish conflict was generally perceived as intractable, rooted in the question of identity. Given the stringent ‘positions’ framed by identities, no solution seemed possible. When attention was paid to addressing the interests underlying the conflict, the identity issue faded away. The popular perception of an identity crisis notwithstanding, the Ukrainian conflict is also rooted in socio-economic and geo-political interests. Drawing lessons from Ulster, a solution in Ukraine is possible. However, Ukraine should remain careful about not copying the consociationalist outcome of Ulster, for a power-sharing arrangement will establish a false sense of a divided society in East Ukraine.
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The article presents the emergence and development of national ideologies in Bosnia and Herzegovina in historical course from the fall under the Ottoman Empire to the acquisition of state independence as a formative factor of social and political relations. Being a space of contact and influence of two religions and three confessions, Bosnia and Herzegovina had been a crossroads of national interests and the interests of the great powers in the past. Such a political context influenced the formation of national ideologies. With comparison of goals, the constant opposition of Serbian and Croatian national ideology as well as national concepts of Muslims/Bosniaks was obvious. Through analytical insight in national ideologies the characteristics of these ideologies - the appropriative Serbian, resentimental Croatian with expansionistic elements and the defensive nature of Bosniak ideology was determined. These findings of characters and goals of three national ideologies explained the continuity of national conflicts and divisions in Bosnian society. The opposition of national ideas and goals both in the past and today (long-lasting structure) had a decisive impact on social and political relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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Odavno me zanimalo pitanje, kako su današnja Bosna i Hercegovina, ili kratko rečeno Bosna, isprva posve, kasnije znatnim dijelom katoličke zemlje, izgubile svoj katolički karakter. To je pitanje još do danas ostalo u mnogim pojedinostima nerazjašnjeno. Nije dosta upirati prstom samo na izvjesne krupne činjenice kao na pr. na pojavu patarenske „Bosanske crkve“, islamizaciju naroda i doseljenje pravoslavnih masa u mnoge bosanske krajeve. Ni jedan od ta dva važna historijska fakta nije još dovoljno, a kamo li potpuno osvijetljen. Ali ni sve tri te činjenice zajedno još ne mogu da u cijelosti objasne nazadovanje katolicizma u Bosni; pogotovo ne mogu, ako se na pr. islamizacija, koja je laganim tempom trajala više stoljeća, svede tek na jedno kraće historijsko razdoblje na pr. od prvoga pada izvjesnih dijelova Bosne u turske ruke do vremena Gazi Husrevbega.
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