Pub Date : 2023-01-04DOI: 10.1177/16118944221146910
Piotr Kuligowski, W. Marzec
This article investigates the changing ideas of representation during one of the European upheavals of the 1830s, the Polish November Uprising. Studying the Polish Sejm proceedings, we ask about the impact of the uprising and warfare on revamping the concept of representation. A representative, parliamentary, but not yet democratic order emerged under the conditions of reduced sovereignty. We demonstrate how pragmatic considerations in times of war ushered in non-descriptive and non-imperative representation and how the struggle for legitimacy helped introduce the idea of the government's responsibility to the nation. Although the broadening of citizenship beyond the nobles was still debated only concerning possible land reform, the push and pull of the frontline situation and transnational diffusion and learning spurred on fundamental changes. The 1831 Sejm was a threshold for modern parliamentarism in Poland, bringing its earlier endogenous developments in line with European drift towards representative government.
{"title":"Who May Represent a Nation in Upheaval? The Concept of Representation during the Polish November Uprising, 1830–1831","authors":"Piotr Kuligowski, W. Marzec","doi":"10.1177/16118944221146910","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944221146910","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the changing ideas of representation during one of the European upheavals of the 1830s, the Polish November Uprising. Studying the Polish Sejm proceedings, we ask about the impact of the uprising and warfare on revamping the concept of representation. A representative, parliamentary, but not yet democratic order emerged under the conditions of reduced sovereignty. We demonstrate how pragmatic considerations in times of war ushered in non-descriptive and non-imperative representation and how the struggle for legitimacy helped introduce the idea of the government's responsibility to the nation. Although the broadening of citizenship beyond the nobles was still debated only concerning possible land reform, the push and pull of the frontline situation and transnational diffusion and learning spurred on fundamental changes. The 1831 Sejm was a threshold for modern parliamentarism in Poland, bringing its earlier endogenous developments in line with European drift towards representative government.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44218013","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-03DOI: 10.1177/16118944221146911
S. Gehrig
Histories of the freedom of movement during the Cold War often focus on issues of immigration. Yet, national security frameworks set up after the Second World War also involved restrictions of the right to leave one's own country. This article takes the Federal Republic of Germany as a case study to probe the political tensions between codified constitutional rights of the individual, new human rights norms, and the Bonn government's anti-communist mobilisation during the 1950’s. The example of the right to leave shows that the state retained crucial powers to curtail basic rights in the name of national security state.
{"title":"The Difficulty of Leaving: Freedom of Movement and the National Security State in Cold War West Germany","authors":"S. Gehrig","doi":"10.1177/16118944221146911","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944221146911","url":null,"abstract":"Histories of the freedom of movement during the Cold War often focus on issues of immigration. Yet, national security frameworks set up after the Second World War also involved restrictions of the right to leave one's own country. This article takes the Federal Republic of Germany as a case study to probe the political tensions between codified constitutional rights of the individual, new human rights norms, and the Bonn government's anti-communist mobilisation during the 1950’s. The example of the right to leave shows that the state retained crucial powers to curtail basic rights in the name of national security state.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48224298","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-25DOI: 10.1177/16118944221146902
Igor Ivašković
The article presents the idea of a third unit in the Habsburg Monarchy prior to World War I as seen through the eyes of Slovenian liberals. The author presents the broader political context in which the concept emerged and then analyses the reactions of various political groups amid national tensions in the Balkans. Extracts of two liberal Slovenian newspapers, Edinost (Trieste) and Soča (Gorizia), are examined with respect to the key geopolitical dilemmas and interests of different stakeholders affected by the new geopolitical construct. It is argued that trialism was chiefly an attempt by Austria to curtail the power of Hungary. The majority of Slovenians and Croatians initially supported the idea because it implied their political emancipation. On the other side were the Hungarians, Italians and Serbs who saw the idea as a threat to their national interests. In terms of South Slavic relations, trialism represented a new battlefield for the Catholic and Orthodox visions of Yugoslavism. With further development of the concept, first and foremost due to Austria's ambitions to satisfy the Italians and leave Trieste and Gorizia outside of the imagined third unit, the idea introduced tension into Croatian–Slovenian relations and led to a fresh dispute in the Slovenian political sphere between liberals and conservatives. Finally, the advocates of trialism were unable to gain sufficient internal support within the Habsburg Monarchy, which thereby preserved the status quo and the dual regime until the monarchy's collapse during war.
{"title":"How Littoral Slovenians Viewed the Idea of a South Slavic Unit in the Habsburg Monarchy","authors":"Igor Ivašković","doi":"10.1177/16118944221146902","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944221146902","url":null,"abstract":"The article presents the idea of a third unit in the Habsburg Monarchy prior to World War I as seen through the eyes of Slovenian liberals. The author presents the broader political context in which the concept emerged and then analyses the reactions of various political groups amid national tensions in the Balkans. Extracts of two liberal Slovenian newspapers, Edinost (Trieste) and Soča (Gorizia), are examined with respect to the key geopolitical dilemmas and interests of different stakeholders affected by the new geopolitical construct. It is argued that trialism was chiefly an attempt by Austria to curtail the power of Hungary. The majority of Slovenians and Croatians initially supported the idea because it implied their political emancipation. On the other side were the Hungarians, Italians and Serbs who saw the idea as a threat to their national interests. In terms of South Slavic relations, trialism represented a new battlefield for the Catholic and Orthodox visions of Yugoslavism. With further development of the concept, first and foremost due to Austria's ambitions to satisfy the Italians and leave Trieste and Gorizia outside of the imagined third unit, the idea introduced tension into Croatian–Slovenian relations and led to a fresh dispute in the Slovenian political sphere between liberals and conservatives. Finally, the advocates of trialism were unable to gain sufficient internal support within the Habsburg Monarchy, which thereby preserved the status quo and the dual regime until the monarchy's collapse during war.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41491889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-25DOI: 10.1177/16118944221146898
Anne Engelst Nørgaard
This article investigates the first generation of peasant farmers elected to modern representative assemblies in Denmark. I argue that the contributions of the first peasant farmer politicians are an important but overlooked part of the history of democratisation in Denmark. The peasant farmer members were uneducated and unable to speak in a way considered suitable for parliament. For that reason, they were deemed unfit for political participation by their contemporaries and have been similarly judged in most of the existing literature. The peasant farmer members were not as timidly passive as they have been described. Instead of speaking, they used petitions to gain a voice in parliament. The farmer members thus introduced petitioning as a form of political participation in parliamentary politics, a practice that remains central to popular politics today. The actions of the peasant farmer politicians challenged the existing boundaries of what was considered appropriate political practice and thereby expanded the repertoire of forms of political participation available to the uneducated majority of the population.
{"title":"Speaking through Petitions: Peasant Farmers in the Nascent Democracy, Denmark 1830s","authors":"Anne Engelst Nørgaard","doi":"10.1177/16118944221146898","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944221146898","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the first generation of peasant farmers elected to modern representative assemblies in Denmark. I argue that the contributions of the first peasant farmer politicians are an important but overlooked part of the history of democratisation in Denmark. The peasant farmer members were uneducated and unable to speak in a way considered suitable for parliament. For that reason, they were deemed unfit for political participation by their contemporaries and have been similarly judged in most of the existing literature. The peasant farmer members were not as timidly passive as they have been described. Instead of speaking, they used petitions to gain a voice in parliament. The farmer members thus introduced petitioning as a form of political participation in parliamentary politics, a practice that remains central to popular politics today. The actions of the peasant farmer politicians challenged the existing boundaries of what was considered appropriate political practice and thereby expanded the repertoire of forms of political participation available to the uneducated majority of the population.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48384609","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-25DOI: 10.1177/16118944221146897
Erik Bengtsson
In the 20th century, Sweden distinguished itself as one of the most organized and participatory democracies in the world. But in the late 19th century the situation was much the opposite – Sweden had for Western Europe a low degree of suffrage, and low political participation. To explain the turnaround, this paper explores the evolution of a democratic political culture in the final third of the 19th century, in opposition to the oligarchic system. The empirical material consists of digitalized newspapers from the south of Sweden in the period 1866 to 1900, studying about 2700 articles that mention ‘popular meetings’, folkmöten, which was the contemporary description of political meetings. In the 1860s and 1870s a farmer-centred democratic critique dominated, combining proposals for widened suffrage with criticisms of banks and the bureaucracy. In the 1880s and 1890s, the social base was widened as urban workers – socialist and antisocialist – took a greater part and the ideological composition became more heterogeneous. The paper suggests that the folkmöten constituted an important arena for democratic socialization in a country with an oligarchical political system, creating a road forward for democratic reforms and a democratic society.
{"title":"The Evolution of Popular Politics in 19th-Century Sweden and the Road from Oligarchy to Democracy","authors":"Erik Bengtsson","doi":"10.1177/16118944221146897","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944221146897","url":null,"abstract":"In the 20th century, Sweden distinguished itself as one of the most organized and participatory democracies in the world. But in the late 19th century the situation was much the opposite – Sweden had for Western Europe a low degree of suffrage, and low political participation. To explain the turnaround, this paper explores the evolution of a democratic political culture in the final third of the 19th century, in opposition to the oligarchic system. The empirical material consists of digitalized newspapers from the south of Sweden in the period 1866 to 1900, studying about 2700 articles that mention ‘popular meetings’, folkmöten, which was the contemporary description of political meetings. In the 1860s and 1870s a farmer-centred democratic critique dominated, combining proposals for widened suffrage with criticisms of banks and the bureaucracy. In the 1880s and 1890s, the social base was widened as urban workers – socialist and antisocialist – took a greater part and the ideological composition became more heterogeneous. The paper suggests that the folkmöten constituted an important arena for democratic socialization in a country with an oligarchical political system, creating a road forward for democratic reforms and a democratic society.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47016289","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-08DOI: 10.1177/16118944221130464
Jacqueline Adams
One route out of continental Europe for Jewish refugees seeking to escape Nazi and Vichy persecution was via Franco’s Spain. Yet hundreds of these refugees were imprisoned soon after arriving in the country. From prison, men of military age tended to be sent to a detention camp for weeks, months or up to three years. This camp was known as the ‘Campo de Concentración de Miranda de Ebro’, and conditions in it were harsh. Why were Jewish men sent there? They were interned in the camp because senior Spanish officials created a series of policies that spelt out what officials and officers should do with different categories of foreigners who had entered the country without all the necessary documents. These policies did not target Jews. They were influenced by large population movements within France and from France into Spain; by the pro-Axis and pro-Allies leanings of senior officials; and by pressure that the British, American and German ambassadors in Madrid put on the Spanish government. Between September 1940 and January 1943, the policy determined that provincial governors were responsible for deciding what to do with newly arrived foreigners. Provincial governors’ membership in the Falange, a Germanophile party, may have influenced their decisions. While interned in the camp, many Jewish refugees saw their visas to their final destinations and boat tickets out of Europe expire, and they endured hunger, illness, separation from their family and other conditions that were detrimental to their health.
寻求逃离纳粹和维希迫害的犹太难民离开欧洲大陆的一条路线是经由佛朗哥的西班牙。然而，数百名难民在抵达该国后不久就被监禁了。从监狱出来，军龄男子往往会被送往拘留营数周、数月或长达三年。这个营地被称为“Campo de Concentración de Miranda de Ebro”，那里的条件很恶劣。为什么犹太人被送到那里？他们被拘留在集中营是因为西班牙高级官员制定了一系列政策，规定了官员和官员应该如何处理在没有所有必要文件的情况下进入该国的不同类别的外国人。这些政策并没有针对犹太人。他们受到法国境内以及从法国进入西班牙的大规模人口流动的影响；高级官员的亲轴心国和亲盟国倾向；以及英国、美国和德国驻马德里大使对西班牙政府施加的压力。1940年9月至1943年1月，该政策规定，省长负责决定如何处理新来的外国人。各省省长在法兰热（一个亲德国的政党）的成员身份可能影响了他们的决定。在难民营被拘留期间，许多犹太难民看到他们前往最终目的地的签证和离开欧洲的船票到期，他们忍受着饥饿、疾病、与家人分离以及其他对他们健康不利的条件。
{"title":"Why Jewish Refugees Were Imprisoned in a Spanish Detention Camp while Fleeing Europe (1940–1945)","authors":"Jacqueline Adams","doi":"10.1177/16118944221130464","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944221130464","url":null,"abstract":"One route out of continental Europe for Jewish refugees seeking to escape Nazi and Vichy persecution was via Franco’s Spain. Yet hundreds of these refugees were imprisoned soon after arriving in the country. From prison, men of military age tended to be sent to a detention camp for weeks, months or up to three years. This camp was known as the ‘Campo de Concentración de Miranda de Ebro’, and conditions in it were harsh. Why were Jewish men sent there? They were interned in the camp because senior Spanish officials created a series of policies that spelt out what officials and officers should do with different categories of foreigners who had entered the country without all the necessary documents. These policies did not target Jews. They were influenced by large population movements within France and from France into Spain; by the pro-Axis and pro-Allies leanings of senior officials; and by pressure that the British, American and German ambassadors in Madrid put on the Spanish government. Between September 1940 and January 1943, the policy determined that provincial governors were responsible for deciding what to do with newly arrived foreigners. Provincial governors’ membership in the Falange, a Germanophile party, may have influenced their decisions. While interned in the camp, many Jewish refugees saw their visas to their final destinations and boat tickets out of Europe expire, and they endured hunger, illness, separation from their family and other conditions that were detrimental to their health.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44811682","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1177/16118944221130216
Barbora Fischerová, Jochen Böhler
This article investigates the struggle for control over the violence that the Second Polish Republic and the First Czechoslovak Republic fought during their early independence in 1918. As violence had spread throughout the European continent during World War I, it became a crucial post-war question to control its expansion throughout the societies, as different paramilitary groups started to take the law into their own hands, either to protect their co-citizen's interests, or to enforce their own political or economic ambitions, and very often both at the same time. Thus, the use and limitation of violence were ambivalent: the newcomer states often relied on paramilitary units as policing forces and instruments to expand their state power into contested, ethnically mixed border areas. On the other hand, these emerging states faced difficulties to control paramilitary groups, which challenged the state's authority and followed their own – often criminal – agenda. This article aspires to comparatively examine the use of violence and its attempted regulation in Poland and Czechoslovakia during the first years of their existence. Furthermore, presenting the Polish-Czech conflict over Cieszyn Silesia, it aims to show how, immediately after the Great War, ethnopolitical tugs-of-war, fought between regular soldiers and paramilitaries of neighbouring states over borderlands created civil war-like scenarios and put the ethnically mixed population in these regions between a proverbial rock and a hard place.
{"title":"Security, Public Order and Paramilitarism in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1918–1920: Comparative Considerations","authors":"Barbora Fischerová, Jochen Böhler","doi":"10.1177/16118944221130216","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944221130216","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the struggle for control over the violence that the Second Polish Republic and the First Czechoslovak Republic fought during their early independence in 1918. As violence had spread throughout the European continent during World War I, it became a crucial post-war question to control its expansion throughout the societies, as different paramilitary groups started to take the law into their own hands, either to protect their co-citizen's interests, or to enforce their own political or economic ambitions, and very often both at the same time. Thus, the use and limitation of violence were ambivalent: the newcomer states often relied on paramilitary units as policing forces and instruments to expand their state power into contested, ethnically mixed border areas. On the other hand, these emerging states faced difficulties to control paramilitary groups, which challenged the state's authority and followed their own – often criminal – agenda. This article aspires to comparatively examine the use of violence and its attempted regulation in Poland and Czechoslovakia during the first years of their existence. Furthermore, presenting the Polish-Czech conflict over Cieszyn Silesia, it aims to show how, immediately after the Great War, ethnopolitical tugs-of-war, fought between regular soldiers and paramilitaries of neighbouring states over borderlands created civil war-like scenarios and put the ethnically mixed population in these regions between a proverbial rock and a hard place.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45748706","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1177/16118944221130226
Franziska Zaugg, Jason Chandrinos
This article assesses the occurrence of civil war in the Balkans during World War II and the Axis occupation. It draws on the wartime experiences in the border areas of Kosovo (‘Greater Albania’)/Serbia and Albania/Greece to illustrate the complex interrelation between ethnic tensions and political imperatives, on a local, national and transnational scale. It discusses the Italian and German occupation policy towards national minorities and armed groups as a key contributing factor to civil war and pinpoints the similarities, differences and interdependencies between the different civil war parties and agents of violence.
{"title":"Civil Wars in the Shadow of World War II: The Cases of Chameria/Çameria and Kosovo","authors":"Franziska Zaugg, Jason Chandrinos","doi":"10.1177/16118944221130226","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944221130226","url":null,"abstract":"This article assesses the occurrence of civil war in the Balkans during World War II and the Axis occupation. It draws on the wartime experiences in the border areas of Kosovo (‘Greater Albania’)/Serbia and Albania/Greece to illustrate the complex interrelation between ethnic tensions and political imperatives, on a local, national and transnational scale. It discusses the Italian and German occupation policy towards national minorities and armed groups as a key contributing factor to civil war and pinpoints the similarities, differences and interdependencies between the different civil war parties and agents of violence.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48889077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1177/16118944221130221
Yiannis Kokosalakis
This article examines the process of disintegration and reconstitution of political authority in civil war with reference to the Russian (1918–1921) and Greek (1946–1949) civil wars. These conflicts bracket the post-World War I period of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary conflicts that has been the core subject of historical scholarship on European civil strife. Both cases were highly polarised clashes between establishment and revolutionary forces, and much of the relevant historiography has been naturally coloured by this aspect of the conflicts. I argue that the interpretative focus on polarisation obscures a different dynamic that is equally important for our understanding of civil war as a type of military conflict and, crucially, its political aftermath. Civil war in Russia and Greece did not emerge as a result of functioning states splitting into two or more competing authorities. It was rather the product of a multifaceted fragmentation of political power as a result of war and revolution; a shattering of the state into an array of asymmetrical actors competing for control over both its territory and its administrative resources. Polarisation followed this fragmentation, as these disparate actors manoeuvred to form the camps of the civil wars. This form of coalition building was a dynamic process in which armed violence was not only the chief means of resolution of the competing claims to power but also an essential factor in the formation of the sides themselves. A corollary of this is that the process of political reconstruction that follows civil war is determined as much by the imperative to work out a functioning relationship between the various elements of the victors’ camp as by securing victory through the permanent exclusion or reintegration of the vanquished.
{"title":"Shattered States: Reconstituting Political Authority in the Aftermath of Civil War in Russia and Greece","authors":"Yiannis Kokosalakis","doi":"10.1177/16118944221130221","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944221130221","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the process of disintegration and reconstitution of political authority in civil war with reference to the Russian (1918–1921) and Greek (1946–1949) civil wars. These conflicts bracket the post-World War I period of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary conflicts that has been the core subject of historical scholarship on European civil strife. Both cases were highly polarised clashes between establishment and revolutionary forces, and much of the relevant historiography has been naturally coloured by this aspect of the conflicts. I argue that the interpretative focus on polarisation obscures a different dynamic that is equally important for our understanding of civil war as a type of military conflict and, crucially, its political aftermath. Civil war in Russia and Greece did not emerge as a result of functioning states splitting into two or more competing authorities. It was rather the product of a multifaceted fragmentation of political power as a result of war and revolution; a shattering of the state into an array of asymmetrical actors competing for control over both its territory and its administrative resources. Polarisation followed this fragmentation, as these disparate actors manoeuvred to form the camps of the civil wars. This form of coalition building was a dynamic process in which armed violence was not only the chief means of resolution of the competing claims to power but also an essential factor in the formation of the sides themselves. A corollary of this is that the process of political reconstruction that follows civil war is determined as much by the imperative to work out a functioning relationship between the various elements of the victors’ camp as by securing victory through the permanent exclusion or reintegration of the vanquished.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49588680","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1177/16118944221130231
Martin Thomas, Pierre Asselin
This article draws together historical sources and political science insights to test the emergence of civil war at the end of empire. It focuses on civil conflict in two French colonial territories, Vietnam and Algeria, during and immediately after 1945. It investigates the civil war dynamics of local, often intra-ethnic contests among anticolonial oppositionists. Concentrating on the early, formative years of insurgent violence, we aim to demonstrate that elements of civil war pre-existed the supposed outbreak of decolonisation conflicts – 1946 in Vietnam and 1954 in Algeria. Our approach combines narrative assessments of the early phases of these conflicts with analysis of their civil war dynamics. As we seek to demonstrate, cycles of internecine killing, massacre and counter-massacre, normalized summary killing, maltreatment of detainees, and loss of distinction between civilians, seditionists, and ‘traitors’. Our argument is that decolonisation violence in both Vietnam and Algeria may be usefully rethought in civil war terms.
{"title":"French Decolonisation and Civil War: The Dynamics of Violence in the Early Phases of Anti-colonial War in Vietnam and Algeria, 1940–1956","authors":"Martin Thomas, Pierre Asselin","doi":"10.1177/16118944221130231","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944221130231","url":null,"abstract":"This article draws together historical sources and political science insights to test the emergence of civil war at the end of empire. It focuses on civil conflict in two French colonial territories, Vietnam and Algeria, during and immediately after 1945. It investigates the civil war dynamics of local, often intra-ethnic contests among anticolonial oppositionists. Concentrating on the early, formative years of insurgent violence, we aim to demonstrate that elements of civil war pre-existed the supposed outbreak of decolonisation conflicts – 1946 in Vietnam and 1954 in Algeria. Our approach combines narrative assessments of the early phases of these conflicts with analysis of their civil war dynamics. As we seek to demonstrate, cycles of internecine killing, massacre and counter-massacre, normalized summary killing, maltreatment of detainees, and loss of distinction between civilians, seditionists, and ‘traitors’. Our argument is that decolonisation violence in both Vietnam and Algeria may be usefully rethought in civil war terms.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48345374","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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