scholarly journals Territorial and Non-territorial Aspects in the Autonomist Proposals of the Sudeten German Party, 1937–38

2022 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Oskar Mulej

Abstract The article focuses on two sets of autonomist demands that the far-right Sudeten German Party (SdP) in Czechoslovakia put forward during 1937–38. Its central thesis being that both sets were marked by a profoundly close interplay between territorial and non-territorial approaches at accommodating national diversity, it sets to explore this relationship, highlighting the underlying dynamic. Although the 1937 Volksschutzgesetze posed as an ostensibly “pure” case of non-territorial autonomy, whereas the 1938 Skizze über Neuordnung der innerstaatlichen Verhältnisse entailed major territorial provisions, in both cases the practical end-goal implied territorial autonomy. A closer look into their inner logic and intellectual origins however, also reveals a shared, essentially non-territorial underpinning. While the SdP agenda was firmly centered on national territory, its specific völkisch and organicist understanding of nationality manifested a clear preponderance of non-territoriality. Both sets of autonomist demands may thus be treated as a potentially maximalist combination of territorial and non-territorial arrangements resting on a fundamentally non-territorial notion of Volkspersönlichkeit. Encompassing all the members of the national group, the latter was simultaneously conceived as the basic carrier of political will. Volksschutzgesetze and Skizze thus represented clear examples of illiberal (re-)conceptualization of national autonomy, informed by contemporary völkisch sociological, legal, and political thought.

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (188) ◽  
pp. 487-494
Author(s):  
Daniel Mullis

In recent years, political and social conditions have changed dramatically. Many analyses help to capture these dynamics. However, they produce political pessimism: on the one hand there is the image of regression and on the other, a direct link is made between socio-economic decline and the rise of the far-right. To counter these aspects, this article argues that current political events are to be understood less as ‘regression’ but rather as a moment of movement and the return of deep political struggles. Referring to Jacques Ranciere’s political thought, the current conditions can be captured as the ‘end of post-democracy’. This approach changes the perspective on current social dynamics in a productive way. It allows for an emphasis on movement and the recognition of the windows of opportunity for emancipatory struggles.


2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 537-563 ◽  
Author(s):  
KEVIN DUONG

Does democracy end in terror? This essay examines how this question acquired urgency in postwar French political thought by evaluating the critique of totalitarianism after the 1970s, its antecedents, and the shifting conceptual idioms that connected them. It argues that beginning in the 1970s, the critique of totalitarianism was reorganized around notions of “the political” and “the social” to bring into view totalitarianism's democratic provenance. This conceptual mutation displaced earlier denunciations of the bureaucratic nature of totalitarianism by foregrounding anxieties over its voluntarist, democratic sources. Moreover, it projected totalitarianism's origins back to the Jacobin discourse of political will to implicate its postwar inheritors like French communism and May 1968. In so doing, antitotalitarian thinkers stoked a reassessment of liberalism and a reassertion of “the social” as a barrier against excessive democratic voluntarism, the latter embodied no longer by Bolshevism but by a totalitarian Jacobin political tradition haunting modern French history.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Daniel Lee

What was sovereignty supposed to be, and what purpose might it serve for our common future? This study addresses these questions by examining the legal and political thought of Jean Bodin (1529/30–1596), widely regarded as the preeminent theorist of sovereignty in early modern political thought. This Introduction offers a preview of four principal themes and arguments to be explored in this book: (1) sovereignty as a permissive legal right; (2) Bodin’s concept of positive law as duty-creating command; (3) the negative function of absolute power; (4) the pluralistic structure of the Bodinian sovereign state. Special emphasis will be placed on Bodin’s outsized, though overlooked, influence on the intellectual origins of modern public international law, whose architecture is still anchored fundamentally in the notion of a state’s sovereign right.


2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
ANNELIEN DE DIJN

This essay shows that the central core of Tocqueville's book, its condemnation of the centralist state of the Old Regime, can be placed in a specific tradition in French political thought—the legitimist critique of centralization. Long before the publication ofL'Ancien Régime et la Révolution, the legitimists had made the problem of centralization into one of their central themes, and they had come to attribute all of France's ills to the centralist legacy. As this essay illustrates, the particular vocabulary and arguments used by the legitimists to describe the nefarious effects of centralization on the French body politic showed a considerable resemblance to the language used by Tocqueville inL'Ancien Régime et la Révolution. Indeed, this resemblance is so striking that, while direct influence is difficult to pinpoint, the legitimist publicists and political thinkers discussed in this essay—many of whom were friends or acquaintances of Tocqueville's—contributed in an important way to shaping the linguistic universe in whichL'Ancien Régime et la Révolutionwas created.


Author(s):  
Viviana Galletta

This paper analyses the work Riflessioni sulla violenza written by Georges Sorel and published in 1908. The principal aim of this paper is to present the deep relationship between myth, violence and politics in order to reevaluate how irrational forces have guided social movements and revolutions. The distinction between the notions of force and violence introduces the central thesis of Georges Sorel’s political thought, which is called anarcho-syndacalism. More specifically, George Sorel puts together Marx and Bergson in order to develop a severe criticism of the Third Republic and to theorize the role of violence in the transition from capitalism to socialism. Through the myth of the general strike, Sorel introduces his philosophical perspective on social struggles against the parlamentarism.


2020 ◽  
pp. 197-214
Author(s):  
Banu Turnaoğlu

This chapter traces the radical heritage of Turkish republicanism to the political thought of the radical branch of the Young Ottoman secret society. It examines the core republican principles of several leading Young Ottoman radicals: Sağır Ahmed Beyzâde Mehmed, İskender Beyzâde Reşad, and Subhî Paşazâde Nuri. The core notions of their ideology entail freedom from oppression, a deep commitment to popular sovereignty and constitutionalism, an emphasis on political activism and revolution, a stress on international solidarity and peace, and a recognition of the need for social equality. Their republicanism was antithetical to monarchy, and a central aim was the abolition of the sultanate by force, but unlike European republican models they wanted the head of government to be a non-hereditary elected caliph. Although less known than some of their intellectual counterparts, the role they played in the development of Turkish republicanism proved no less pervasive and profound.


2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 349
Author(s):  
Maciej Marszał

Zygmunt Wojciechowski’s Assessment of the History-Based Policy in the Interwar PeriodSummary This paper will provide an analysis of the History-Based Politics in thoughts of Zygmunt Wojciechowski (1900–1955) – history profesor at the University of Poznań, co-founder of the Baltic Institute (Instytut Bałtycki) in Toruń, publicist of the “Avant-garde” and expert on PolishGerman relations. Wojciechowski in Polish political thought was a representative of the Integral Polish nationalism (polski nacjonalizm integralny), which meant synthesis of national and state’s demands. He opted for the ideological formula in order to reach an agreement between the political heritage of Roman Dmowski and the Józef Piłsudski’s political reforms. For Wojciechowski, a professor of history, an important element of national consciousness was the historical awareness that the Polish state must continuously maintain through History-Based Policy. According to him, this policy should focus on three main issues: First, the expansion on the tradition referring to the beginning of Polish statehood. Second issue would be to make Poles aware of their international situation, especially in the context of their struggle with the Germanic and Prussian element. And the third issue would be to revise and update the values of the Constitution of May 3. It should be noted that the views of Zygmunt Wojciechowski on History-Based Policy in the interwar period were a part of a political discourse. His bold and uncompromising thoughts of the Polish-German relations and the demand to return the “Lands of Piasts” (ziemie Piastów) constituted an important element of the Integral Polish nationalism. It wouldn’t be too far-fetched to say that the desire to carry-on the political will of Jan Ludwik Popławski and bring the Poles back to their “ancestral lands” (ziemie macierzyste) was present in Polish historical consciousness of the interwar period.


2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 49-64
Author(s):  
Joanna Sondel-Cedarmas

CRITICISM OF “FASCIST NOSTALGIA” IN THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF THE NEW RIGHTThe article analyses the way in which the Italian New Right perceived fascist traditions as cultivated by the Italian Social Movement Movimento Sociale Italiano. The New Right that was shaped in the period of student protests and marches in the 1960s and 1970s among the youth environment of the MSI strived for the ideological renewal of this party, in particular seeking to discard the so-called “Fascist Nostalgia” that had been dooming it to political exclusion. The party principally rejected Julius Evola’s integral traditionalism, which had been a point of reference for neo-fascist circles, and castigated the absence of contemporary cultural and ideological patterns of the Italian far right. Under the infl uence of the French idea of “Nouvelle Droit”, the Italian New Right was meant to be a metapolitical programme that assumed expanding of the traditional electorate with a simultaneous and direct impact on the civil society through taking up contemporary social and cultural topics, as well as fi ghting traditional dichotomy of the right and the left.


Politeja ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1(58)) ◽  
pp. 211-227
Author(s):  
Agata Kałabunowska

Borders in the Political Vision of Contemporary Extreme Right in Germany The article deals with the issue of broadly defined borders in political and ideological programmes of selected extreme right organisations in contemporary Germany (AfD, NPD, IBD). The starting point for the textual and content analysis of actual programs of these organizations is the author’s reflection on the importance of dichotomy in the broader political view of the extreme right. The author claims that the considerably strong focus of the selected right‑wing organisations on the issue of physical or cultural borders does not only derive from the timing of their activism – the so called migration crisis. It is rather pre‑defined by the ideological features of the far right in general. The core ideological elements ascribed to the far right as a stream of political thought, such as nationalism or authoritarianism, are based on the dichotomy and influence on the far right perception of the world.


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