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The consequences of the rivalry between the winning and the losing powers of the First World War would become more acute at the end of the fourth decade of the 20th century in the context of the obvious revengeful tendencies of Germany and its acolytes to the expense of maintaining a climate of peace and international security. The Romanian diplomatic circles were forced to undergo endeavors and specific actions in order to obtain, from the powers which guaranteed the „Versailles system” increased guarantees for the protection of our independence and integrity in the new international context, actions which were doomed to fail given the peaceful and non-confrontational tendencies of France and England; thus, Romania had to elaborate a new approach in regard to economic and political-diplomatic relations.
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The present article describes the Entente's attempts to co-opt Romania and Bulgaria into its camp. Also highlighted are the Romanian-Bulgarian negotiations regarding certain Romanian territorial retrocessions in the Quadrilateral, as well as Romania's relations with the other Balkan states.
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This paper focuses on the study of the activity of German consular institutions on the territory of Soviet Ukraine during 1922–1938. German consular representatives operating in Ukrainian cities were career diplomats, who had higher education, a perfect command of foreign languages, and deep knowledge in the fields of history, geography, statistics, political economy, and international law. While operating in Ukraine, German consuls were taking their official duties seriously: normalization of bilateral trade and economic relations, the establishment of cultural ties, as well as protection and assistance to German citizens living within the consular district. One of the important aspects of consular activity was the performance of the “honorary spy” functions.
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The letters written by Theodore Daphnopates, a high Byzantine dignitary, and sent to Bulgarian Tsar Symeon (r. 893–927; d. May 27, 927) on behalf of the Byzantine Emperor Romanos I Lekapenos (r. 920–944; d. June 29, 948) in the final phase of the prolonged Byzantine-Bulgarian war of 913–927, are well known. Daphnopates’ correspondence has encouraged, and will probably continue to encourage, research activity due to its focus on both the aspects of Byzantine political ideology and concepts, and on the Bulgarian claims in the early 10th century. This text focuses on information concerning Byzantine civilians and their fate under the pressure of advancing enemy troops. Attention is paid to their capture and abduction. The main focus of this article is on the often overlooked or overtly neglected statements that Daphnopathes offers on enslavement, slave trafficking, and the efforts of the Byzantine authorities to bring at least some of their subjects back to the Empire through the familiar practice of exchanging prisoners of war.
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Maria Karolina (Maka) Cielecka i Guillaume Siemieński (Wilczek) w 1995 roku rozpoczęli życie na dyplomatycz - nych walizkach. Opu - ścili Kanadę, by miesz - kać kolejno w Holandii, Rosji, Słowacji, Turcji i wreszcie – od marca 2005 – w Gruzji. Guillau - me objął tam stanowisko szefa Human Dimension Office [Biura ds. Wymiaru Ludzkiego] Orga - nizacji Bezpieczeństwa i Współpracy w Europie (OBWE), z którego w czerwcu 2008 przeszedł do Misji Obserwacyjnej Organizacji Narodów Zjednoczonych w Gruzji (UNOMIG). Maka uczyła angielskiego, głównie dzieci uchodźców z Abchazji, jednocześnie ucząc się tkania gobeli - nów – sztuki charakterystycznej dla regionu.
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At the end of the Second World War and in its immediate aftermath, Joseph V. Stalin discussed the issue of Slovenian intellectuals with Edvard Kardelj (1944) and Boris Kidrič (1946); he saw them as a homogeneous social group as the intelligentsia in Russia had been before the formation of the Soviet regime and believed them to be problematic as well as useful to communists, particularly while fighting for patriotic aims. It seems that he detected this as a problem mostly due to the situation in Italy, with which Yugoslavia was in dispute over a border issue. In spite of criticising J. V. Stalin, Kardelj later thought that the problem highlighted by the Soviet leader indeed existed.
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The present paper aims to analyze the causes and development of the Peasant Uprising of 1888 in the Urziceni area. It consists of three parts, and in the first one we will make an X-ray of the situation of the Romanian peasants starting with 1864, when Cuza's agrarian reform took place. In the second part, the immediate causes that led to the outbreak of the uprising will be analyzed, the emphasis being on the opinion of contemporaries on this. In the last part of the paper, the evolution of the revolt in Urziceni and in the surrounding villages will be presented and analyzed.
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The unpublished testimony which is to appear in the “National Museum” renders, with serene detachment, a life started as a fairy tale and continued with a terrible adolescence marked by prison and horrible confinement.In an interwiev she gave twenty years ago, Măriuca Vulcănescu narrated the happy moments of her childhood emphasizing the loving figures of her parents and relatives. The atmosphere of the Vulcănescu family house in Bucharest and the Văcărescu manor in Văcărești, a place full of history and legends, are remembered with great delight. The main character of the interlocutions is Mircea Vulcănescu, important personality of the interwar period, whose destiny was broken at the age of only 48, in the communist Aiud prison. The personal dramas of Măriuca Vulcănescu starting with her arrest at the age of 18 and the sufferings during the Commnist era complete the portrait of a sensible lady who miraclously survived to a hostile destiny due to the moral values inherited from her family.
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In mid-September 1979, negotiations on the normalization of relations between the two countries were started in Moscow after China, with its declaration of April 3, 1979 that it would no longer renew the Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance when it expired on April 11, 1980, cleared the air for a comprehensive reformulation of the mutual relationship. However, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan prompted the Chinese to let the negotiations rest since the beginning of January 1980. In addition to the negotiations on border shipping, which have been held in 21 sessions since 1951 and the border negotiations that have been taking place with major interruptions since October 20, 1969, this was the third negotiating table at which the Russians and Chinese sat without significant agreements being reached that go beyond purely technical questions. The following interview with Chang Chan-teh, who is directly responsible for border issues and border incidents in the Heilongjiang provincial government, is therefore to be regarded as a remarkable and revealing contemporary document summarizing the Chinese position on the border question and the first of its kind in years is.
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The article examines the termination of the diplomatic relations between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria in April 1941 and the expulsion of Yugoslav diplomatic personnel from Sofia. The first part of the article gives a brief overview of the events that ultimately resulted in two neighboring Balkan countries taking the opposite sides in the new world conflict, while the second part analyzes the causes and consequences of the closure of the Yugoslav legation in Sofia. The work is based on unpublished archival material from the archives in Serbia and Bulgaria, published sources and literature.
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The paper deals with the place of production of the Fojnica Chronicle, as the manuscript makes no mention of where it originated or who wrote it. Judging by the year of the final event it entered, it originated after 1669. Since the origin and authorship of some mediaeval charters has been determined through palaeographic characteristics of the texts, the same approach is being applied to the Fojnica Chronicle. First, a description is given of all the letters in the Fojnica Chronicle in the context of their placement on an imaginary four-line grid, and then the letters are brought into connection with Berčić’s western Cyrillic types and the graphs of some Franciscan writers. With respect to the place of its preservation, the Fojnica Chronicle bears the greatest similarity to Berčić’s Bosanica. However, there are approximately the same number of similarities between the Bosnian and the Split-Poljica type of Bosanica. One can also conclude that Berčić’s division is relatively unreliable because of to its breadth, or rather its classification of the same letters into different types and different letters into the same type. It was, hence, impossible to determine that the graphs of Franciscan writers were the graphs of a micro-environment, and therefore, the production of the Fojnica Chronicle could not be brought into connection with any of them. It is evident that our region used a whole series of transitional graphic systems which exceeded assumed geographic borders. It is, therefore, impossible to position 17th and 18th century manuscripts in a determined geographic area based on palaeographic characteristics.
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Poland’s foreign policy in the years 1926–1933 has always been of interest to Polish histo- rians, journalists and politicians. While Poland’s internal issues in the interwar period have already been relatively uniformly and objectively reconstructed and evaluated, the foreign policy of the pre-September governments remains a topic of numerous debates and polemics. Already during the World War II, attempts were made to analyze some of the issues of Polish foreign policy of the interwar period. The politicians of the national camp criticized Marshal Józef Piłsudski’s rule, whereas his adherents (the “San- ation”) defended Polish policy of the interwar period.In communist Poland, only selected directions in foreign policy were explored in scientific literature due to restrictions on the freedom of speech, and none of the published works covered the entire realm of Polish diplomacy. The only exception were synthetic monographs describing the entire history of Poland, where Polish foreign policy was addressed in more or less detail. The works of Henryk Batowski, char- acterized by rich factography and synthetic form, are among the few monographs published at the end of communist rule in Poland. They were, however, written in a period when the freedom of publication was restricted.The collapse of the communist system in 1989 opened the door for unfettered research and the publica- tion of research findings. Due to length constraints, the author of this article had to focus on the studies that contributed most to this publication. For instance, the works of W. Materski, a renowned expert on eastern issues, provide valuable information on Polish-Soviet relations.The article discusses the period between the coup d’état carried out in Poland by Piłsudski on 12 May 1926 and the signing of the Polish-German declaration of non-aggression between Poland and Germany on 26 January 1934. The May Coup did not bring any change in Polish foreign policy, but it took place during a period of important changes in the balance of power in Europe, when the security system created by the Treaty of Versailles and the first alliances of the post-war years began to erode. On the other hand, the Polish-German declaration of non-aggression was a turning point in Polish foreign policy, marking a further cooling of Polish-French relations and a departure from the policy of rapprochement with the Soviet Union.
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The author provides an overview of the United States' policy towards the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Croatia, and representatives of Serbs in Croatia between 1989 and 1995. The author utilizes various types of diplomatic sources and analyzes them through the lens of post-structuralist approaches to the history of international relations. In the text, the author explores how perceptions of the Balkan region and the people of the former Yugoslavia, American self-conception, and paradigms of international relations shaped the actions of American diplomats such as James Baker, Warren Zimmermann, and Peter Galbraith towards the conflict between Croats and Serbs.
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Review of: Markus Krzoska, Paweł Zajas: Kontinuität und Umbruch. Deutsch-polnische Beziehungen nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (WBG Deutsch-Polnische Geschichte, Bd. 5.) wbg academic. Darmstadt 2021. 269 S., Ill., Kt. ISBN 978-3-534-24766-0. (€ 39,95.)
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After the formation of the independent states of the Caucasus, the issue of demarcation of the territorial borders arose with all intensity. The lack of ability to compromise between the parties led to the Armenian-Georgian armed conflict, although even this war did not resolve the problem of border disputes. Lore was declared a neutral zone, while Akhalkalaki remained part of Georgia. From October 1920, the difficulties caused by the aggressive policy of Turkey were added to the existing problems between the republics of the Caucasus. The Armenia-Turkey conflict entered a new phase. The territory of the neutral zone of Lore was threatened. This led to ratifying the treaty on 13 November 1919, based on which, parts of the Georgian Army took Lore. The represented paper aims to demonstrate the legitimacy of the introduction of an army into the region and the baselessness of the project elaborated in political circles of Armenia for the access to the sea (the Khatisian’s project), based on documents kept in the Central State Archives of Armenia (these documents were previously held in secret funds. Today they are available for researchers) and scientific literature data.
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Many significant documentary materials can be found among the Georgian historical sources on interrelations between Georgia and Turk Seljuk State. The historical sources which are discussed in the represented work consider the interrelations between the Georgians and Seljuk Turks within the XI century. Among the historical sources which are discussed in this work the earliest is the document dated by the year 1029 in which the Georgian king Bagrat IV delivers the details of the fight against the Turkish sultan. The details of the invasion of Turk Seljuks in 1057 can be found in the old historical writings. They are also described in one of such writings which are named also as the deed, delivered by Bagrat IV to Shio Mghvimeli Lavra. This deed concerns the serious damages caused by the wars inspired by the Turk Seljuks fighting against Georgia, the facts of ruining the estates of the Lavra and also, how the king of Georgia delivered some estates to the Lavra as donations. Two historical scripts were found in the historical regions of Georgia: in Javakheti (known as the script of Mirashkhan) and in the inside part of the region of Kartli (in Georgian: Shida Kartli) known as the script of Trekhvi. Both of them consider the battles headed by Turkish warrior Alf Arslan aiming to occupy the Kartli region which represents quite a large part of Georgia. The XI century hagiographical piece of work “The life of Giorgi Mtatsmindeli” gives us the description of circumstances of life in Georgia in the 60-ies of the XI century; one of the most important and interesting issue of the mentioned work is the description of the hard times for the town Akhalkalaki which became absolutely devastated during the above mentioned times, by Alf-Arslan, the sultan of Turk Seljuks. In the process of studying the interrelations between Georgia and Seljuks State the historical work of the XI century “Historical Review of Georgia” (in Georgian “matiane kartlisa”) is of great historical importance. The author of this work apparently is familiar with the political circumstances of those times in Georgia, namely of the 40-ies - 70-ies of the XI century. The important historical events of the Turk Seljuks times are described and discussed. The last source which is discussed in the represented paper is the work which is titled as “Description of the Georgian Kingdom” (in Geo: “aghtsera sameposa sakartvelosa”) is written by Georgian historian of those times, Vakhushti Batonishvili. The author discussing the interrelations of Georgia and Turk Seljuks points out the dates and the interesting facts which were taking place in those times. The mentioned historical work is unique because of its historical importance, namely, giving the historical events in details and supported by real facts and sources. The authors of the mentioned sources (except Vakhushti Batonishvili) were the contemporaries’ of the described events. This makes the preserved historical facts to be more believable. The Georgian historians not only described the historical facts but quite often they analyzed those events as well and gave them the appropriate evaluation.
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With the break-up of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of its federation systems (Warsaw Pact, CSTO), the bipolar world system came to an end. In between – the western borders of Europe slowly but surely moved eastwards. After the change of regime, Hungary quickly recognised that Croatia could be a key partner in the pursuit of its geopolitical interests, as evidenced by the fact that it was one of the first countries to recognise its independence. The experience of historical coexistence from a common past was a significant factor in this. Over the past thirty years, Croatian-Hungarian relations have been balanced. They have been able to find appropriate solutions to common challenges that have arisen. The situation of national minorities is satisfactory. The Hungarian government’s approach to European domestic policy differs from that of Croatia. We insist more strongly on preserving our nation-state competences within the Union. The aim of this study is to present the developments of the last thirty years.
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