Pub Date : 2023-10-09DOI: 10.30965/18763308-50020009
Bogdan Popa
Abstract A growing body of work has investigated the travel of neo-Marxist theorists and theory to state socialist contexts such as Romania and China, but this scholarship has not focused on successful strategies of indigenization. While several explanations for this process have been proposed, this article advances the concept of “ideological fit” to illuminate how a new body of work is successfully popularized and integrated into national conversations. I explore the relationship between the indigenization of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory in Romania within the context of Cold War ideological conflict. This study compares the popularization strategies of a group of U.S. social scientists (Daniel Chirot and Katherine Verdery) with local attempts (Ilie Bădescu) to promote Wallerstein’s theory in Romanian academia. World-systems theory advanced a critique of global capitalism in the United States, whereas in Romania, it was integrated into and discussed as a contribution to anticolonial struggles around the world. As a result, Bădescu’s assertion that Romanian national poet Mihai Eminescu was an anticolonial thinker became generative in local sociology. I conclude by discussing how key theoretical elements of Wallerstein’s theory, which I call the “leftovers,” have been redeployed in new scholarship on decolonization and discuss the risks of such an approach.
越来越多的工作研究了新马克思主义理论家和理论在罗马尼亚和中国等国家社会主义背景下的传播，但这些学术研究并未关注本土化的成功策略。虽然对这一过程已经提出了几种解释，但本文提出了“意识形态契合”的概念，以阐明一个新的工作体系如何成功地推广并融入国家对话。我在冷战意识形态冲突的背景下探讨伊曼纽尔·沃勒斯坦的世界体系理论在罗马尼亚的本土化之间的关系。本研究比较了一组美国社会科学家(Daniel Chirot和Katherine Verdery)在罗马尼亚学术界推广沃勒斯坦理论的推广策略和当地的尝试(Ilie b descu)。世界体系理论在美国提出了对全球资本主义的批判，而在罗马尼亚，它被纳入并作为对世界各地反殖民斗争的贡献而被讨论。因此，布雷代斯库关于罗马尼亚民族诗人米哈伊·埃米内斯库是一位反殖民主义思想家的主张在当地社会学中产生了影响。最后，我讨论了沃勒斯坦理论的关键理论要素(我称之为“剩余物”)是如何在非殖民化的新学术研究中重新部署的，并讨论了这种方法的风险。
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Pub Date : 2023-10-09DOI: 10.30965/18763308-50020004
John Paul Newman
Abstract The article addresses some of the paradoxes of the interwar Czechoslovak Sokol Association. It shows how after 1918 Sokol historiography experienced a boom following national independence: a proliferation of accounts of the Sokol movement’s history to date told in largest part by the leadership of the association itself. These accounts re-narrated the history of the movement so that it became well-adjusted to the new culture of victory of the interwar state, positing throughout a separation between nation and empire and a struggle in which the former, aided by Sokol mobilization, was sure to emerge victorious. The article asks that we read this historiography ‘against the grain’, showing that the actual relationship of Sokol to late-Habsburg civil society was protean and shifting, and only re-cast as unswervingly adversarial in the post-1918 period. The second part of the article looks at the participation of Sokol members and leadership in the war in Slovakia (1919), presented in interwar historiography and commemoration as a culminating moment in Sokol’s participation in the national liberation of Czechs and Slovaks. In fact, there is a compelling case to be made that Sokol’s role in fighting and violence at this time also shows the ongoing contestation and conflict associated with the creation of Czechoslovakia. The article shows that re-narrating the history of the Habsburg period and the war itself to emphasize the voluntarist contribution of groups such as Sokol was an important part of establishing and maintaining the legitimacy of the interwar state.
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Pub Date : 2023-10-09DOI: 10.30965/18763308-50020008
György Péteri
Abstract Through a detailed analysis of Alexander Szalai’s career as a major transsystemic academic entrepreneur in the Kádár era, this paper has been written to discern and assess how such activities impacted the ways in which science and scholarship worked at both sides of the systemic divide (the “Iron Curtain”). The single most important finding is the emergence of transsystemic spaces (fields), the undoing of national and systemic boundaries. These transsystemic configurations tended to provide social (formal and informal) frameworks within which reputations are generated and distributed, reputational hierarchies are established and reproduced. For scholars in the East such transsystemic spaces brought with them a great deal of good news: they could mean increased freedom and/or an unbiased assessment and genuine acknowledgement for what one has accomplished. Transsystemic fields brought with them a whole array of new (kinds of) opportunities. Acting as a nod of networks that generated transsystemic spaces could yield increased reputation and power at home. As all structures in the social world, however, transsystemic spaces could enable as well as constrain, they could propel you to the skies and might also crush you. As any other resources constituting social capital in academia, the space spanning along transsystemic networks of scholars and scientists could also be weaponized for the wrong purposes: they could enable impostors to acquire a status and reputation way over and above the person’s actual accomplishments, due to imperfect information available in foreign environments. Time would, of course, always show who they really are – but before that happens, they could bring havoc upon their field back home by distorted reputational hierarchies, by skewed distribution of competitive power between rivaling intellectual tendencies or “schools” and, eventually, by “paradigmatic” streamlining and contra-selection. This is, in a nutshell, what the story of A. Szalai shows.
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Pub Date : 2023-10-09DOI: 10.30965/18763308-50020002
Lucija Balikić, Vojtěch Pojar
Abstract This article examines how mass gymnastics in East Central Europe became increasingly entangled with eugenics. It traces the proliferation of eugenic discourses alongside the medicalization of gymnastics within Sokol, a mass nationalist voluntary association. In this context, the bodies of gymnasts became crucial sites of knowledge production and ideological projection. The article introduces the “politics of plastic nationhood,” a concept that foregrounds the fierce debates within Sokol over strategies to shape the imagined body of the nation though physical exercise. It also highlights key actors in these discussions, including medical doctors, physical anthropologists, and gymnastics trainers. The article shows that four major themes shaped these biopolitical disputes: health, diversity, gender, and ability. Focusing specifically on Sokol associations in interwar Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and their prewar predecessors, the article outlines a chronology of the politics of plastic nationhood, which emerged in the Habsburg Empire and reached their zenith in the successor states. After imperial collapse, in particular, Sokol eugenicists sought to merge the diverse Slavic populations of the new states into a single “national body.” Owing to their perceived failure to achieve national unity, starting in the mid-1930s onward, eugenicists turned to rigid racial hierarchies, statism, and authoritarian politics.
摘要本文考察了东中欧的大众体操是如何日益与优生学纠缠在一起的。它追溯了在Sokol(一个大规模民族主义自愿协会)内部，优生学话语与体操医学化的扩散。在这种背景下，体操运动员的身体成为知识生产和意识形态投射的重要场所。文章介绍了“塑料国家政治”(politics of plastic nationhood)，这一概念突显了索科尔内部围绕通过体育锻炼塑造国民想象中的身体的战略展开的激烈辩论。它还强调了这些讨论中的关键角色，包括医生、体质人类学家和体操教练。这篇文章表明，四个主要主题塑造了这些生物政治争端:健康、多样性、性别和能力。本文特别关注两次世界大战之间的捷克斯洛伐克和南斯拉夫及其战前前身的Sokol协会，概述了塑料国家政治的年表，这种政治出现在哈布斯堡帝国，并在继承国达到顶峰。特别是在帝国崩溃后，索科尔优生学家试图将新国家的不同斯拉夫人口合并为一个单一的“国家实体”。从20世纪30年代中期开始，优生学家们意识到他们无法实现国家统一，于是转向了严格的种族等级制度、国家主义和威权政治。
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Pub Date : 2023-10-09DOI: 10.30965/18763308-50020005
Vladana Putnik Prica
Abstract The interwar period is considered to be the “golden age” of the Sokol movement in Yugoslavia, when the organization enjoyed the support of the state and much of the population. One of the key elements in the process of shaping the visual identity of the Yugoslav Sokol was its purpose-built architecture, namely Sokolski dom (Sokol hall or center) and Sletište (Sokol stadium). It is estimated that there were around 280 such structures built in Yugoslavia, and a number of them are considered highlights of Yugoslav architecture. The stylistic variety of these structures demonstrated the different approaches to and interpretations and overall understanding of how Sokol’s visual identity should be shaped and, more importantly, how Yugoslavism could be visually communicated through Sokol architecture. This article explores the different methods and approaches to Sokol architecture in the context of the country’s post-imperial transition following the end of the Great War. It demonstrates how the relationship between Sokol societies and the state was reflected in Sokol architecture.
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Pub Date : 2023-10-09DOI: 10.30965/18763308-50020007
Gyula Hegedüs
Abstract This article explores economic relations between the United Kingdom and Hungary between 1944 and 1956. After the Second World War, the UK attempted to maintain some of its influence in Soviet-occupied Hungary by resuming trade relations with the country as early as 1946. Financial discussions around settling Hungary’s debts began a year later, but they ended abruptly in December 1949. British-Hungarian trade and financial talks resumed only in 1953, and a trade agreement was not signed until June 1956. In addition to providing an outline of British-Hungarian economic relations, this article also assesses the relationship between a relatively small country in the Soviet sphere of influence and the United Kingdom, as well as the role of economic diplomacy in East-West relations in the first decade of the Cold War.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-24DOI: 10.30965/18763308-50010006
C. Alston
This article explores the challenge presented to governments and the scientific establishment by physicists who campaigned internationally on behalf of their Soviet scientific colleagues in the early 1980s. Cold War science operated in a highly charged environment: while the work of scientists on both sides of the Cold War divide was sponsored and closely guarded by government and military agencies, scientists were also at the forefront of activist challenges to human rights infringements suffered by their colleagues. The article explores the motivations for and limitations of a moratorium on participation in scientific exchange with the Soviet Union launched by the California-based group “Scientists for Sakharov, Orlov and Shcharansky” (sos). It considers the ways that both professional identity and Cold War dynamics shaped this solidarity campaign. sos sought to build their activism on a transnational basis and worked closely with scientific colleagues in Europe to do so. They pitched a campaign that appealed beyond the university and national scientific laboratories to a broad range of people who identified as scientists. Unlike many contemporary scientific organizations, the sos leadership embraced the political nature of such activism. As a whole, this article shows how scientists navigated different political and scientific contexts when organizing support for their Soviet colleagues.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-24DOI: 10.30965/18763308-50010005
Kim Christiaens, Manuel Herrera Crespo
This article examines the ways in which campaigns supportive of dissidents and human rights in Eastern Europe developed in Belgium during the Cold War. The Belgian case study reveals the critical role of internationally oriented Catholic organizations and social movements in these campaigns. This Catholic activism has often been neglected in mainstream accounts focusing on left-wing or liberal support for Eastern European dissidents or human rights, but it is key to understanding the development of campaigns and their relationships, both real and imagined, with other causes, especially movements with a North – South orientation. Catholic ngo s and social movements constituted a site where activism on behalf of dissidents and human rights in Eastern Europe encountered and entangled with solidarity movements oriented toward the “Third World”. Revealing crossovers and connections, this article argues that the engagement with and images of Eastern European dissidents cannot be understood apart from the development of North – South movements. It also reveals tensions and limitations that have remained neglected in universalizing human rights narratives stressing connections and flows.
{"title":"Failures, Limits and Competition: Campaigns on Behalf of Eastern European Dissidents in Cold War Belgium, 1956–1989","authors":"Kim Christiaens, Manuel Herrera Crespo","doi":"10.30965/18763308-50010005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763308-50010005","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article examines the ways in which campaigns supportive of dissidents and human rights in Eastern Europe developed in Belgium during the Cold War. The Belgian case study reveals the critical role of internationally oriented Catholic organizations and social movements in these campaigns. This Catholic activism has often been neglected in mainstream accounts focusing on left-wing or liberal support for Eastern European dissidents or human rights, but it is key to understanding the development of campaigns and their relationships, both real and imagined, with other causes, especially movements with a North – South orientation. Catholic ngo s and social movements constituted a site where activism on behalf of dissidents and human rights in Eastern Europe encountered and entangled with solidarity movements oriented toward the “Third World”. Revealing crossovers and connections, this article argues that the engagement with and images of Eastern European dissidents cannot be understood apart from the development of North – South movements. It also reveals tensions and limitations that have remained neglected in universalizing human rights narratives stressing connections and flows.","PeriodicalId":40651,"journal":{"name":"East Central Europe","volume":"129 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41275181","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-24DOI: 10.30965/18763308-50010002
R. Millington
Friedrich Engels claimed that communism would eliminate criminality. With “exploitative” capitalist societal conditions removed, there would no longer be any material or psychological reasons for people to commit crime. The reality in the Eastern Bloc in the late Cold War was, however, very different. Petty theft was a particular problem area. Citizens filched alcohol from supermarkets, bricks from construction sites, and money from colleagues’ lockers on an epidemic scale. This article employs archival and oral history evidence to examine petty theft in the German Democratic Republic (gdr). Scholars have generally attributed its occurrence to “economy of scarcity conditions,” that is, citizens stole items that were in short supply or not on general sale. This article, however, considers whether petty theft constituted a challenge to socialist rule since this crime contravened state ideology. It finds evidence that a desire to defy the state did motivate some citizens to steal, but that the majority of thefts were inspired by more prosaic reasons. The analysis does show, however, that citizens mocked and dismissed the concept of People’s Property, thereby rejecting a central tenet of the regime’s political project.
{"title":"The ‘People’s Sport’: Petty Theft in the German Democratic Republic, 1963–1985","authors":"R. Millington","doi":"10.30965/18763308-50010002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763308-50010002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Friedrich Engels claimed that communism would eliminate criminality. With “exploitative” capitalist societal conditions removed, there would no longer be any material or psychological reasons for people to commit crime. The reality in the Eastern Bloc in the late Cold War was, however, very different. Petty theft was a particular problem area. Citizens filched alcohol from supermarkets, bricks from construction sites, and money from colleagues’ lockers on an epidemic scale.\u0000This article employs archival and oral history evidence to examine petty theft in the German Democratic Republic (gdr). Scholars have generally attributed its occurrence to “economy of scarcity conditions,” that is, citizens stole items that were in short supply or not on general sale. This article, however, considers whether petty theft constituted a challenge to socialist rule since this crime contravened state ideology. It finds evidence that a desire to defy the state did motivate some citizens to steal, but that the majority of thefts were inspired by more prosaic reasons. The analysis does show, however, that citizens mocked and dismissed the concept of People’s Property, thereby rejecting a central tenet of the regime’s political project.","PeriodicalId":40651,"journal":{"name":"East Central Europe","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48620565","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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