scholarly journals ‘You do not become a European by choice but by necessity’: The Alsace border region and its opening up to Europe in the writings of Otto Flake, René Schickele and Hermann Wendel

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 252-261
Author(s):  
Christian Luckscheiter
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Border Region ◽  
World War ◽  
Hybrid State ◽  
Mediating Role ◽  
European Approach ◽  
Border Literature ◽  
Opening Up

The three writers Otto Flake, René Schickele and Hermann Wendel met in Straßburg in 1901. Together with other artists and writers they founded the group ‘Das jüngste Elsaß’ (also known as ‘Der Stürmerkreis’). One of the purposes of this artistic group was to shed the ‘hybrid state’ of Alsace as a border region and instead urge that Alsace take on a mediating role in a future united Europe. Their pacifist European approach, which they adhered to during World War I and later on in exile, originated from controversial debates emerging from the extreme tensions caused by German and French nationalism. The three writers viewed Alsace as a symbol of Europe. For their ‘border literature’ Europe offered the possibility of refraining from the concept of nationhood, which is based on homogeneity and therefore violent exclusion, something in which they did not find themselves represented.

Literary Agents

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Scott Belk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
World War ◽  
Mediating Role ◽  
Literary Agent ◽  
Literary Markets ◽  
Literary Agents

Despite early resistance from publishers such as William Heinemann, the expansion of British and American literary markets between 1880 and World War I rendered the services of a shrewd and knowledgeable literary agent necessary. This was especially the case for authors who hoped to make a living from their literary income. Agents arranged terms, negotiated rights and contracts, assessed markets and placed material accordingly. They helped navigate an increasingly fragmented print culture field and by doing so served an important mediating role between publishers, authors and the mercurial reading public at the turn of the twentieth century.

scholarly journals The report on secret activity in the territory of the Trans-Baikal Region in the early XX century

2021 ◽  
pp. 284-290
Author(s):  
Ol'ga Anatol'evna Malygina
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
World War I ◽  
Baikal Region ◽  
Border Region ◽  
World War ◽  
Railway Line ◽  
Irkutsk Region ◽  
The World ◽  
In Trans ◽  
Region Description

The main mission of the Imperial government in the early XX century consisted in ensuring foreign policy security of the eastern trans-border region. The construction of Trans-Siberian Railway, defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, and the beginning of the World War I in 1914 severely affected the geopolitical situation in Trans-Baikal Region. Thus, in the conditions of the outbreak of the World War I, the question of uninterrupted supply of weapons, food, etc. along the railway line from the east to the center of the country was critical. All this turned Trans-Baikal Region into a special zone for the foreign intelligence agents. Leaning on the materials of the State Archive of Irkutsk Region, description is given to the system of obtaining information from various sources on the attempts of creating secret network, alleged military espionage, and sabotage attempts in the territory of Trans-Baikal Railway. The article also reveals the interaction of command levels in the region and their activity in the event of manifestation of the persuasive threat to foreign policy security. No actual sabotage attempts are detected according to the archival sources. This may be due to absence of such data in the civil archive. However, the archive stores an array of information on the alleged attempts of creating secrent network in the territory of Trans-Baikal Region.

Through the prism of Spain. Socio-economic causes of different outcomes of Russian and Spanish civil wars

2017 ◽  
pp. 142-155
Author(s):  
I. Rozinskiy ◽  
N. Rozinskaya
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Russian Civil War ◽  
World War ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Economic Well Being

The article examines the socio-economic causes of the outcome of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1936), which, as opposed to the Russian Civil War, resulted in the victory of the “Whites”. Choice of Spain as the object of comparison with Russia is justified not only by similarity of civil wars occurred in the two countries in the XX century, but also by a large number of common features in their history. Based on statistical data on the changes in economic well-being of different strata of Spanish population during several decades before the civil war, the authors formulate the hypothesis according to which the increase of real incomes of Spaniards engaged in agriculture is “responsible” for their conservative political sympathies. As a result, contrary to the situation in Russia, where the peasantry did not support the Whites, in Spain the peasants’ position predetermined the outcome of the confrontation resulting in the victory of the Spanish analogue of the Whites. According to the authors, the possibility of stable increase of Spanish peasants’ incomes was caused by the nation’s non-involvement in World War I and also by more limited, compared to Russia and some other countries, spending on creation of heavy (primarily military-related) industry in Spain.

‘Grey Dawn’ in the British Pacific: Race, Security and Colonial Sovereignty on the Eve of World War I

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
World War ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Cooperative Security ◽  
Strategic Defense ◽  
Racial Discourses ◽  
The Way

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.

The Anarchist Press in Egypt before World War I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Gorman
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Public Education ◽  
World War I ◽  
State Power ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
World War

This chapter traces the development of the radical secular press in Egypt from its first brief emergence in the 1870s until the outbreak of World War I. First active in the 1860s, the anarchist movement gradually expanded its membership and influence over subsequent decades to articulate a general social emancipation and syndicalism for all workers in the country. In the decade and a half before 1914, its press collectively propagated a critique of state power and capitalism, called for social justice and the organisation of labour, and promoted the values of science and public education in both a local context and as part of an international movement. In seeking to promote a programme at odds with both nationalism and colonial rule, it incurred the hostility of the authorities in addition to facing the practical problems of managing and financing an oppositional newspaper.

Press Propaganda and Subaltern Agents of Pan-Islamic Networks in the Muslim Mediterranean World prior to World War I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Odile Moreau
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
World War ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Resistance Movements ◽  
The Press ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
History Of

This chapter explores movement and circulation across the Mediterranean and seeks to contribute to a history of proto-nationalism in the Maghrib and the Middle East at a particular moment prior to World War I. The discussion is particularly concerned with the interface of two Mediterranean spaces: the Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco), where the latter is viewed as a case study where resistance movements sought external allies as a way of compensating for their internal weakness. Applying methods developed by Subaltern Studies, and linking macro-historical approaches, namely of a translocal movement in the Muslim Mediterranean, it explores how the Egypt-based society, al-Ittihad al-Maghribi, through its agent, Aref Taher, used the press as an instrument for political propaganda, promoting its Pan-Islamic programme and its goal of uniting North Africa.

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