Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Jochen Böhler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
The Political ◽  
Second Republic ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Civilian Population ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Political Factions ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Military Units

In Central Europe, 1918 marked not only the demise of the German, Austrian, and Russian Empires, but also the rise of a multitude of nation states. Poland, re-erected after 123 years of partition, was at the center of events, independence having been the dream of its elites since the nineteenth century. But the formation of the Polish Second Republic was not the result of a united effort of the whole Polish nation, its political leaders, and military units—first and foremost the legendary “Legions”—during and after the Great War. In reality, in late 1918, there was no united Polish nation, leadership, or army to speak of. The rural masses did not take up the call to arms, the political factions were at war with one another, and the country was on the brink of a domestic war, while marauding soldiers killed Jews and harassed the whole civilian population.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
pp. 187-195
Author(s):  
Jochen Böhler
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Minorities ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Authoritarian Regime ◽  
The Political ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Second Republic ◽  
Coup D'etat ◽  
Central European ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Masses

The Conclusion sums up the major arguments of the book and gives an outlook on the decade following the postwar struggles. Polish nationalism had not managed to incite the masses in 1918. Until 1921, the state frontiers in Central Europe were fixed, but they ran through ethnically mixed borderlands. All Central European nation states had ethnic minorities living within and co-nationals living beyond their respective borders. As a result of the enmities brought by the Central European Civil War, a collective postwar security system failed to materialize. Internal and external conflicts were simmering on. Even the fight of the Polish Second Republic for its survival did not unite the nation. Following the border struggles, the political elites were more estranged than ever. Their feud resulted in the assassination of the Prime Minister by a right-wing extremist in 1922 and a left-dominated coup d’état in 1926, which established an authoritarian regime.

Civil War in Central Europe, 1918-1921

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jochen Böhler
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Second Republic ◽  
Central European ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Great War

The Great War had come to an end in Europe in November 1918, but Central Europe did not come to a rest. The demise of the German, Austrian, and Russian Empires had left a geographical void, a theatre of armed conflicts between the imperial heirs for years to come: the Central European nation states. The Second Republic of Poland was one of them. Historiography has described these postwar struggles as rather unrelated conflicts. This book argues that they were much more part of one Central European Civil War. Since re-erected Poland was at the center of events, it provides a perfect case study and tells the story of this civil war in a nutshell. It challenged its neighbors on all frontiers: Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Soviets to the northeast, Germans to the west, and Czechs to the south. A concise history of these related conflicts questions their common perception as moments of national bravado. In the embattled borderlands, nationality was not a constant, and national independence therefore not a matter of course. The people living there experienced the Central European Civil War rather as a tragedy, when brothers had to fight against brothers. Clearly defined nations did not exist in late 1918 Central Europe, they were rather forged in the fires of a civil war which shook the area for almost three years. Furthermore, in the leeway of these conflicts, Poland—like many other parts of Europe—witnessed a wave of paramilitary violence, with its own soldiers running wild beyond the battlefields.

scholarly journals State of Exception: The Birthplace of Kafka’s Narrative Authority

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimir Biti
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
The Political ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Narrative Authority ◽  
Center Stage ◽  
European Nation ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Collateral Effects

Across the postimperial East Central Europe, whose geopolitical space was reconfigured on the model of West European nation-states, unprocessed human residues proliferated as the collateral effects of politically guided national homogenizations. These positional outsiders, who were prevented from becoming legible within the newly established political spaces, take center stage in Kafka’s narratives, not only in the form of their characters but also their narrators and ultimate authority. They passionately attach themselves to the zones of indistinction, which the modern societies’ “egalitarian discrimination” has doomed them to, thus trying to turn their enforced dispossession into a chosen self-dispossession. I argue that Kafka’s narratives owe their elusive ultimate authority precisely to this persistent translation of the political state of exception of his agencies into their literary state of exemption. They are at constant pains to transfigure the imposed state of exception through its peculiar fictional adoption, but Kafka’s ultimate narrative authority nevertheless takes care to keep an edge over their efforts. It is precisely this never-ending gradation of subversive mimicry in Kafka’s works that his postcolonial successor J. M. Coetzee most admired.

Theories of Language

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Fellerer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
The Political ◽  
The West ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
East Central ◽  
The Third ◽  
Political Implications

This chapter identifies key notions about the nature and workings of language and their wider political implications in Europe from around 1789 to the first decades of the nineteenth century. There are at least three formations, aesthetic and philosophical, linguistic, and political. Even though treated under separate headings for ease of exposition, they are meant to meet in this introduction in response to more granular surveys. The political dimension in particular tends to be left to historians or to philologists who deal with that part of the continent where it first gained real prominence: East and East Central Europe. Thus, after the first two sections on aspects of philosophy and early linguistics, where the focus is on Germany with France and England, the third section on language and nation moves eastwards to the Slavonic-speaking lands, to finally return back, albeit very briefly, to the West. The main purpose of this survey to provide introduction and guidance.

How to Mobilize the Polish Nation

2018 ◽  
pp. 33-58
Author(s):  
Jochen Böhler
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
The Political ◽  
Great War ◽  
Armed Struggle ◽  
Polish Society ◽  
Chain Of Command ◽  
Political Left ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Organic Change

Chapter 2 highlights the fragmentation within Polish society in partition times, during the Great War, and in its after-battles. While the political left prior to 1914 prepared for armed struggle, the right preferred a tactic of “organic change.” During the Great War, genuine Polish military formations became the incarnation of Polish independence. But they formed on opposing sides of the frontline, and were, in terms of numbers, insignificant, while most Polish soldiers served as cannon fodder in the ranks of the imperial armies. Following independence in late 1918, most peasants—80 percent of the Polish-speaking population in Central Europe—mistrusted the “national project” and did not follow the call to arms voluntarily. The Polish Army from the start had to struggle with a serious shortage of soldiers, armament, and provisions. A functioning united national army and chain of command needed years to materialize.

A Party Built on Bigotry Alone? The Scottish Board of Dissenters and Edinburgh Liberalism, 1834–56

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-180
Author(s):  
Ryan Mallon
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Great War ◽  
Liberal Party ◽  
John Brown ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Central Board ◽  
Scottish Politics

By assessing the Central Board of Dissenters, arguably the most influential liberal-voluntary group of the mid-nineteenth century and the political wing of Scottish dissent, this article questions whether the Liberal party in Edinburgh was indeed built on ‘bigotry alone’, and asks whether the groups that would later form the backbone of Scottish Liberalism until the Great War were, as John Brown claimed, the enemies of all oppressions and monopolies, or simply the products of sectarian strife. The Central Board of Dissenters acted as the conduit for ecclesiastical and political organisation for Edinburgh's radical voluntaries during the bitter conflict of the pre-Disruption period, and utilised this organisational strength after 1843 to create a pan-dissenting alliance based on the anti-Maynooth campaign. Despite their foundations in the intra-Presbyterian strife of Victorian Scotland, the electoral successes of this period created a base both in Edinburgh and across Scotland for a Liberal party, once it threw off the ideological shackles of these denominational struggles, which would dominate Scottish politics until the Great War.

Introduction: Slaves, Spheres, Poetess Poetics

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tricia Lootens
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Absolute Identification ◽  
Separate Spheres ◽  
The Third ◽  
Nation States ◽  
And Performance

This book examines the performance of the Political Poetess and its mythic, absolute identification with “separate spheres.” It explores the connection between “Political Poetess” and “Black Poetess” in relation to nineteenth-century women's patriotic poetry, “Politics” as practiced by nation-states, and ongoing conflicts around the histories of slavery and the meanings of “race.” The book is divided into three sections: the first considers racialized Poetess reception and performance, the second analyzes negotiations with the forms of “spheres” and of sentimental poetry, and the third deals with transatlantic readings. Each section focuses on a “nineteenth-century Poetess” who shifts, flickers, and mourns through the nineteenth century, the 1930s, the 1970s, the 1990s, and beyond.

Islam and Politics in Malaysia: The Realisation of Islam as a State Religion in Sabah (Islam dan Politik di Malaysia: Realisasi Islam sebagai Agama Negeri di Sabah)

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 254-272
Author(s):  
Sharifah Sara Hasliza Syed Hamid ◽  
Elmira Akhmetova
Keyword(s):  
Religious Education ◽  
Strong Relationship ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Islam And Politics ◽  
State Constitution ◽  
Nation States ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The Government

This paper analyses the process of independence in Sabah and the consequent Islamisation of its population, which caused the amendment of the State Constitution in 1973. The first part of the paper states that the unification of Sabah with Malaya into the Federation of Malaysia guaranteed its independence from the British colonial rule as well as saved it from the communist threat. The next part of the paper suggests that the Islamisation activities were highly associated with the political needs of the government where the Muslim political leaders strived for increasing the number of their supporters in order to maintain their seats as the ruling government in Sabah. Thus, the paper finds the strong relationship between Islam and politics in modern nation-states, and concludes that the rapid growth of the number of Muslims in Sabah later created the quality problem as their religious education was not seen as the priority by the ruling government. Keywords: Malaysia, Constitution, Islam in Sabah, Independence of Malaya, Islam and Politics, Federation of Malaysia. Abstrak Makalah ini menganalisis sejarah kemerdekaan di Sabah dan proses Islamisasi penduduknya yang menyebabkan pindaan Perlembagaan Negeri pada tahun 1973. Bahagian pertama makalah ini menyatakan bahawa penyatuan Sabah dengan Tanah Melayu ke Persekutuan Malaysia menjaminkan kebebasannya dari penjajahan British serta menyelamatkannya dari ancaman komunis. Bahagian seterusnya menunjukkan bahawa aktiviti pengislaman sangat dikaitkan dengan keperluan politik kerajaan di mana pemimpin politik yang Muslim berusaha meningkatkan jumlah penyokong mereka untuk mengekalkan kerusi mereka sebagai pemerintah di Sabah. Oleh itu, makalah ini mendapati hubungan kuat antara Islam dan politik di negara-negara moden, dan menyimpulkan bahawa pertumbuhan pesat bilangan umat Islam di Sabah kemudiannya menimbulkan masalah kualiti kerana pendidikan agama mereka tidak dilihat sebagai keutamaan oleh kerajaan pemerintah.   Kata Kunci: Malaysia, Perlembagaan, Islam di Sabah, Kemerdekaan Malaya, Islam dan Politik, Persekutuan Malaysia.

Weapons of Mass Instruction

2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 180-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Ingrao
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Economic System ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Electoral Process ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
History Teaching ◽  
The Past ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Uncritical Acceptance

History schoolbooks are part of a much broader legitimation process through which every society's ruling elite secures the uncritical acceptance of the existing political, social and economic system, together with the cultural attributes that re ect its hegemony. In central Europe, the need to justify the creation of nation-states at the beginning and end of the twentieth century has generated proprietary accounts that have pitted the region's national groups against one another. Post-communist democratization has intensi ed these divisions as political leaders feel obliged to employ hoary myths—and avoid inconvenient facts— about their country's history in order to survive the electoral process. In this way they succumb to the "Frankenstein Syndrome" by which the history taught in the schools destroys those who dare to challenge the arti cial constructs of the past. The article surveys history teaching throughout central Europe, with special emphasis on the Yugoslav successor states.

Renouvier: the Man and His Work (i)

Philosophy ◽  
1932 ◽  
Vol 7 (25) ◽  
pp. 42-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Alexander Gunn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Political ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Second Republic ◽  
The Third ◽  
Active Life ◽  
Commune Of 1871 ◽  
The Revolution

In Charles Renouvier we have one of the lone, stern, and indefatigable workers in philosophy in the nineteenth century. His powerful mind, moral earnestness, and intellectual vigour command respect and attention and place him high in the ranks of the philosophical thinkers of his century. He differed profoundly from his English contemporary Spencer and his German contemporary Lotze, both of whom have received more attention than Renouvier. His long and immensely active life fell into periods which coincide with, and partly reflect, the political and intellectual fortunes of his country from the Battle of Waterloo, through the Revolution of 1830, the Second Republic of 1848, the Second Empire, the War and the Commune of 1871, into the Third Republic, with its Dreyfus struggles and its Educational and Disestablishment problems in the early years of the present century.

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