Searching for Alternatives in Eastern Europe

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Tamás Krausz ◽  
Róbert Nárai
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Socialist Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Many ◽  
European Situation ◽  
Gyorgy Lukacs ◽  
Political Lessons

In the 1960s, György Lukács—under the slogan Back to Marx!—called for a "renaissance" of Marxism within Eastern Europe. To understand the nature of this renaissance, we have to understand the many important questions that the Hungarian uprising of 1956 raised for the anti-Stalinist left inside Hungary and Eastern Europe more broadly. This interview goes into the attempts to rethink the future of socialism from the Eastern European situation in the second half of the twentieth century, including the political lessons of 1968, the internal fight within the Hungarian Socialist Party, and the continued relevance of V. I. Lenin's Marxism.

A ‘Mediterranean New Left’? Comparing and Contrasting the French PSU and the Italian PSIUP

2010 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 309-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIEL A. GORDON
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
New Left ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Self Management ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
New Evidence

AbstractThis article argues that Gerd-Rainer Horn's model of a ‘Mediterranean New Left’ encompassing both the French Parti socialiste unifié (PSU, 1960–1990) and the Italian Partito socialista italiano di unità proletaria (PSIUP, 1964–1972) needs to be significantly revised. It agrees that, half a century on from the events which gave rise to their foundation, this much misunderstood part of the political spectrum, midway between social democracy and the far left, is worthy of rescue from the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’, but questions how similar the two parties actually were. Major differences emerge, especially in the nature of each party's relationship with communism, with the philosovietism of the PSIUP contrasting with the PSU's evolution towards an anti-Leninist decentralist socialism of self-management. Yet, at the same time, important new evidence is uncovered about the concrete political and personal links that developed between leading intellectuals of the PSIUP and PSU, an example being the friendship of the Italian parliamentarian and theorist Lelio Basso with the journalist Gilles Martinet, later French ambassador to Italy. Other transnational links, both across the Mediterranean and to eastern Europe, are explored. Furthermore, the location of the roots of both parties in the 1940s generation of anti-fascist resistance calls into question prevailing assumptions equating the New Left with the youth of the 1960s, with wider implications for our understanding of the development of the European left across the twentieth century.

The Culture of Contentment

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kenneth Galbraith
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Economic Advantage ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Process Of Change ◽  
The Many

This book examines what it calls the political economy of contentment. It argues that the fortunate and the favored do not contemplate and respond to their own longer-run well-being. Rather, they respond to immediate comfort and contentment. In the so-called capitalist countries, the controlling contentment and resulting belief is now that of the many, not just of the few. It operates under the guise of democracy, albeit a democracy not of all citizens but of those who, in defense of their social and economic advantage, actually go to the polls. This chapter discusses how economic life undergoes a constant process of change, and, in consequence, the same action or event occurring at different times can lead to very different results. It considers some examples throughout history, such as the economic ideas of the Physiocrats in France, the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, and Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.

Out of Eastern Europe

2015 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 409-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jelena Subotić
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
International Institutions ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
The Political ◽  
Difficult Case ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Political Challenge

What is the contribution of Eastern European scholarship to the study of human rights and transitional justice? This essay takes stock of the most significant empirical and theoretical contributions of the study of Eastern Europe, specifically the study of the difficult case of the former Yugoslavia, to the scholarship on transitional justice. I identify three main challenges the scholarship on the former Yugoslavia has presented to the larger field of transitional justice: the political challenge of multiple overlapping transitions, the inability of international institutions to effect domestic social change, and the dangers of politicization of past violence remembrance.

The Spatial Expansion of Language in Sound Poetry of Western and Eastern Europe

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Endre Szkárosi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Spatial Expansion ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Sound Poetry ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Given

This chapter offers an analysis of the process in which Hungarian poetry “takes back” (recuperates) the vocal and sonic dimensions of language in the second half of the twentieth century. Together with its actional parallels and consequences, this progress implicates a powerful functionalization of the performativity in poetry, which, for various reasons, was neglected in historical avant-garde poetry in Hungary. New avant-garde and experimental waves in art and influences of radical pop music were much more productive in this sense from the 1960s on, and several inspirations of Western cultural trends helped to form a particular underground scene, mainly in the 1980s. Contextualizing these phenomena, the author makes a comparative study of the main tendencies of the given period on such a field in Euro-American sound poetry experimentations (Futurism, Dada, Fluxus), while highlighting some outstanding works of Hungarian poets and groups, such as Tibor Papp, Katalin Ladik, and Konnektor.

scholarly journals Imagining Africa in Eastern Europe: Transcultural Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis in Cold War Yugoslavia

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-251
Author(s):  
Ana Antić
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Transcultural Psychiatry ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
World War ◽  
International Context ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Second World ◽  
Shed Light

This article seeks to write Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe into the history of post-Second World War global psychiatry and to explore the significance of Marxist psychiatry in an international context. It traces Yugoslav psychiatrists’ transnational and interdisciplinary engagements as they peaked in the 1960s. Focusing on the distinguished Belgrade psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Vladimir Jakovljevic (1925–68), it looks at Yugoslav psychiatry’s clinical and anthropological research in the global South to shed light on its contributions to Western-dominated transcultural psychiatry. Through this lens the article also explores how Eastern Europe’s intellectuals engaged with decolonisation and the notions of race, ‘primitivism’ and modernity. Jakovljevic’s involvement in transcultural psychiatry demonstrated the inherent contradiction of Eastern European Marxist psychiatry: its dubiously colonial ‘civilising mission’ towards the subalterns in its own populations and its progressive, emancipatory agenda. Jakovljevic’s writings about Africa ultimately turned into an unprecedented opportunity to shed light on some glaring internal inconsistencies from Yugoslavia’s own socio-political context.

‘Working Towards the Führer.’ Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship

1993 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Kershaw
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Many

The renewed emphasis, already visible in the mid-1980s, on the intertwined fates of the Soviet Union and Germany, especially in the Stalin and Hitler eras, has become greatly intensified in the wake of the upheavals in Eastern Europe. The sharpened focus on the atrocities of Stalinism has prompted attempts to relativise Nazi barbarism – seen as wicked, but on the whole less wicked, than that of Stalinism (and by implication of communism in general).1 The brutal Stalinist modernising experiment is used to remove any normative links with humanising, civilising, emancipatory or democratising development from modernisation concepts and thereby to claim that Hitler's regime, too, was – and intentionally so – a ‘modernising dictatorship’.2 Implicit in all this is a reversion, despite the many refinements and criticisms of the concept since the 1960s, to essentially traditional views on ‘totalitarianism’ and to views of Stalin and Hitler as ‘totalitarian dictators’.

Mikhail Gorbachev: The Decay of Socialism and the Renaissance of Eastern Europe (From the Perspective of an Insider)

2004 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ceslav Ciobanu
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Economic Change ◽  
The Other ◽  
Market Reforms ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Soviet Leader ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
Distinguished Leaders

This article provides an insider’s view of Gorbachev’s policy “perestroika and glasnost” as it related to the former Central and Eastern European socialist countries. The author describes Gorbachev’s relations with the leaders of communist parties of the Warsaw Treaty. A participant in many of Gorbachev’s meetings with his counterparts, the author analyzes the emergence of democracy and market reforms in these countries. He observed two distinct groups of socialist leaders, one relatively progressive and reform oriented and the other consisting of hardliners with traditional views opposed to any political and economic change. The author describes their attitude toward Gorbachev’s reforms. Based on his personal experience with the Soviet leader, the author also identifies some of the characteristics that made Mikhail Gorbachev one of the most distinguished leaders of the twentieth century, based on his personal experience with the Soviet leader. The author’s description highlights lesser-known aspects of Gorbachev’s performance that complete a portrait of this complex person.

The ‘Yidishe Paganini’: Sholem Aleichem's Stempenyu, the Music of Yiddish Theatre and the Character of the Shtetl Fiddler

2014 ◽  
Vol 139 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua S. Walden
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Small Town ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Character Type ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish Immigrants

ABSTRACTThis article explores the music of Yiddish theatre in early twentieth-century New York by considering multiple adaptations of Russian Jewish author Sholem Aleichem's 1888 novel Stempenyu, about a klezmer violinist, which was transformed into two theatrical productions in 1907 and 1929, and finally inspired a three-movement recital work for accompanied violin by Joseph Achron. The multiple versions of Stempenyu present the eponymous musician as an allegory for the ambivalent role of the shtetl – the predominantly Jewish small town of Eastern Europe – in defining diasporic Jewish life in Europe and America, and as a medium for the sonic representation of shtetl culture as it was reformulated in the memories of the first generations of Jewish immigrants. The variations in the evocations of Eastern European klezmer in these renderings of Stempenyu indicate complex changes in the ways Jewish immigrants and their children conceived of their connection to Eastern Europe over four decades. The paper concludes by viewing changes in the symbolic character type of the shtetl fiddler in its most famous and recent manifestation, in the stage and screen musical Fiddler on the Roof.

The Curious Origins of Airline Deregulation: Economic Deregulation and the American Left

2019 ◽  
Vol 93 (4) ◽  
pp. 729-753 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reuel Schiller
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
New Left ◽  
The Political ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Regulatory Policies ◽  
Airline Deregulation ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Political Right ◽  
American Left

This article examines the politics of airline deregulation in the 1970s, and the events that led to the passage of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. It links the antibureaucratic, antiregulatory policies of the 1970s to ideas closely connected to the New Left, the counterculture, and other left-wing subcultures that dominated high and low thought in the 1960s. By linking this source of antibureaucratic sentiment to the politics of airline deregulation, this article suggests a new direction for historians who study the American state in the last decades of the twentieth century. As they focus their attention on the rise of market-based, neoliberal regulatory policies, they should look for their origins not only in the growing strength of the intellectual and political right, but also in the political thought and practice of the 1960s left.

Minor Nation

2010 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-398 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Pershái
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Post Colonial

In the twentieth century, nationalism has become an unwritten yet strong hegemonic rule that prescribes and defines cultural configurations of statehood. In the context of post-socialist and post-colonial transformations in “expanding” Eastern Europe, nation building is a complicated and incoherent process: the nation’s canonic attributes may contradict the cultural and historical “circumstances” of the development of a particular nation. This article questions a complicated dynamic between theoretical frameworks of nationalism and their applications in Eastern European states, such as in Belarus. More specifically, it argues against the discursive conceptualization of Belarus as a “nonexistent” or “undeveloped” nation. This article suggests rethinking nation building in Belarus in relation to the notion of major/minor developed by Deleuze and Guattari. The author implies that the unusual mode of Belarusian nationalism is not only a part of a struggle for domination between different intellectual groups in Belarus; it is also an issue of relying on traditional scholarly paradigms of nationalism that may no longer suffice.

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