scholarly journals The Second World War in Southeastern Europe. Historiographies and Debates

Südosteuropa ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabine Rutar

AbstractIntroducing this special issue on historiographies and debates on the Second World War in Southeastern Europe, the author reflects on the conditionalities of a better balancing of research agendas in terms of the interdependencies between local dynamics and wider scales—be they the regional, national and transnational, or global dimensions of the war. She draws attention to the role the European Union has played in crafting public history, in which processes of ‘internationalizing’ and of ‘nationalizing’ the past have been entangled. She concludes that Southeast Europeanists could greatly enhance international research agendas by taking the lead in fostering a bottom-up, multiscale, and multiperspective history of postimperial, nationalizing societies at war.


Res Publica ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 36 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 361-380
Author(s):  
Paul Magnette

This paper examines the evolving ideological content of the concept of citizenship and particularly the challenges it faces as a consequence of the building of the European Union. From an epistemological point of view it is first argued that citizenship may be described as a dual concept: it is both a legal institution composed of the rights of the citizen as they are fixed at a certain moment of its history, and a normative ideal which embodies their political aspirations. As a result of this dual nature, citizenship is an essentially dynamicnotion, which is permanently evolving between a state of balance and change.  The history of this concept in contemporary political thought shows that, from the end of the second World War it had raised a synthesis of democratic, liberal and socialist values on the one hand, and that it was historically and logically bound to the Nation-State on the other hand. This double synthesis now seems to be contested, as the themes of the "crisis of the Nation State" and"crisis of the Welfare state" do indicate. The last part of this paper grapples with recent theoretical proposals of new forms of european citizenship, and argues that the concept of citizenship could be renovated and take its challenges into consideration by insisting on the duties and the procedures it contains.



2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 491-518
Author(s):  
Bianca Gaudenzi ◽  
Astrid Swenson

Introducing the Journal of Contemporary History Special Issue ‘The Restitution of Looted Art in the 20th Century’, this article proposes a framework for writing the history of looting and restitution in transnational and global perspective. By comparing and contextualizing instances of looting and restitution in different geographical and temporal contexts, it aims to overcome existing historiographical fragmentations and move past the overwhelming focus on the specificities of Nazi looting through an extended timeframe that inserts the Second World War into a longer perspective from the nineteenth century up to present day restitution practices. Particular emphasis is put on the interlinked histories of denazification and decolonization. Problematizing existing analytical, chronological and geographical frameworks, the article suggests how a combination of comparative, entangled and global history approaches can open up promising new avenues of research. It draws out similarities, differences and connections between processes of looting and restitution in order to discuss the extent to which looting and restitution were shaped by – and shaped – changing global networks.



Author(s):  
Jürgen Osterhammel

This chapter examines different approaches to global history. Modern world history differs from older universal-historical constructions in that it presupposes an empirical idea of geography and of both the unity and plurality of humanity’s historical experience. After the Second World War, historians paid more attention to the interaction of the nation-state (the local) and the world (the global). The newer global history, while it does not negate the nation-state, strives to understand the reasons for the success of the West, without however reverting to a Eurocentric and essentializing perspective. Aware of the constructedness of history, it nonetheless pays attention to agency in the past, and to the plurality of perspectives and divergent historical paths. It does so by focusing on topics such as the history of migration, the environment, and economic globalization.



2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-345
Author(s):  
Nir Arielli ◽  
Enrico Acciai

This is an introduction to a special issue on the role played by veterans of the Spanish Civil War’s International Brigades during the Second World War. It argues that the study of these veterans is worthwhile for three reasons: the extraordinary mobility that the antifascist struggle of the years 1936–45 enabled; the microcosm it provides for the assessment of what happens when ideologically fuelled concerns meet pragmatic wartime needs; and the relevance of how governments and military organizations have dealt with suspect returnees in the past for present-day dilemmas that several governments face.



Author(s):  
Felix Lange

The chapter discusses competing narratives of ‘rise’ and ‘decline’ of international law in the historical writings of international lawyers and historians. The author proposes a contextual approach to the history of international law which takes the terminology of the actors of the past seriously, but also leaves room for an assessment of functional equivalents. The author applies his contextual approach to the story of international law’s universalization. He claims that from the seventeenth century, European international law universalized via processes of forceful coercion by Western powers, internalization through non-Western states, and decolonization after the Second World War.



2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Marks

Psychotherapy was an invention of European modernity, but as the 20th century unfolded, and we trace how it crossed national and continental borders, its goals and the particular techniques by which it operated become harder to pin down. This introduction briefly draws together the historical literature on psychotherapy in Europe, asking comparative questions about the role of location and culture, and networks of transmission and transformation. It introduces the six articles in this special issue on Greece, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Russia, Britain and Sweden as well as its parallel special issue of History of Psychology on ‘Psychotherapy in the Americas’. It traces what these articles tell us about how therapeutic developments were entangled with the dramatic, and often traumatic, political events across the continent: in the wake of the Second World War, the emergence of Communist and authoritarian regimes, the establishment of welfare states and the advance of neoliberalism.



2004 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 716-730
Author(s):  
N. Hwalla ◽  
M. Koleilat

The history of dietetics can be traced as far back as the writings of Homer, Plato and Hippocrates in ancient Greece. Although diet and nutrition continued to be judged important for health, dietetics did not progress much till the 19th century with the advances in chemistry. Early research focused focuses on vitamin deficiency diseases while later workers proposed daily requirements for protein, fat and carbohydrates. Dietetics as a profession was given a boost during the Second World War when its importance was recognized by the military. Today, professional dietetic associations can be found on every continent, and registered dietitians are involved in health promotion and treatment, and work alongside physicians. The growing need for dietetics professionals is driven by a growing public interest in nutrition and the potential of functional foods to prevent a variety of diet-related conditions



Linguistica ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-151
Author(s):  
Gregor Perko

The wars and conflicts that accompanied the breakup of the former Yugoslavia are inextricably linked to “language”. The “breakup” of Serbo-Croat into several national languages and the determination of Slovenes and, to a lesser extent, Ma­cedonians to restrain the influence of Serbo-Croat on their respective languages ​​was a prelude to the country’s political breakup. Military violence was carefully prepared by linguistic means: hate speech, which quickly turned into war speech, dominated the words of politicians, media, culture and everyday conversation. This would not have been possible without resorting to the past and to the mythologized history of the warring parties (the Battle of Kosovo Polje, Yugoslavia before the Second World War, the Second World War itself). The analysis of the political and media discourses carried out in this study revealed three major types of semantic inversions on which the underlying discursive mechanisms largely rely: diachronic inversions (the resurgence of the terms “Ustashe”, “Chetniks”, “Turks”), semantic and logical travesties (in which terms such as “defend” and “liberate” lose their primary meanings) and semantic asymmetries (the enemy is an inhuman “aggressor” and “slaughterer”, while “our” side is made up of “innocent victims”, “martyrs” or “heroes”). As a result, the terms and utterances used lose their semantic and referential “basis”, so that they can no longer fully function except within the discursive universe that generated them.



2014 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 183-208

Archiwum Państwowe w Poznaniu może poszczycić się wartościową kolekcją starodruków z dawnej biblioteki kościoła św. Jana w Lesznie. Książki wraz z dokumentami archiwalnymi stanowią integralną część zespołu Akt Braci Czeskich. Ze względu na burzliwe dzieje Jednoty, które zostały tu zarysowane, zabytki piśmiennictwa uległy w znacznej mierze rozproszeniu. Wskazano miejsca w Europie, a szczególnie w Polsce, gdzie można szukać źródeł do dziejów braci czeskich. Materiały przechowywane w Archiwum Państwowym w Poznaniu, szczególnie rękopisy, tworzą chyba największy zbiór pism wytworzonych i zgromadzonych przez braci czeskich. O ile opracowanie archiwaliów ukończono w 1977 r., o tyle materiały biblioteczne, które przywiezione zostały po II wojnie światowej z Herrnhut w dwóch drewnianych skrzyniach, funkcjonują nadal bez jakiegokolwiek katalogu. W przeszłości podejmowane były próby utworzenia repertorium, lecz dopiero w 2011 r. prace nad katalogiem starych druków Archiwum Państwowego w Poznaniu nabrały tempa. Przypuszczalnie katalog będzie gotowy w połowie 2016 r., ale już teraz można częściowo scharakteryzować archiwalne starodruki, i właśnie tej problematyce poświęcono największą część artykułu. Archive old prints – the unknown part of the Unity of Brethren Acts The National Archive in Poznan is the proud owner of a valuable collection of old prints from the old library of St. John’s parish in Leszno. The books, along with archive documents, are the core element of the Unity of Brethren Acts. Due to the turbulent history of the Unity, which is outlined here, written heritage was, to a large extent, scattered. Some places in Europe, particularly in Poland, were pointed out as possible locations where source material for the history of the Unity can be found. The materials kept in the National Archive in Poznań (in particular the manuscripts) are probably the largest group of writings created and gathered by the Unity of Brethren. Although the examination of the archives was finished in 1977, the library publications, which were brought after the Second World War from Herrnhut in two wooden chests, still have not been classified. In the past, there were attempts to create a register, but it was only in 2011 that the work on the catalogue of the old prints in the National Archive in Poland gathered pace. The catalogue is probably going to be ready in mid-2016, but it is already possible to partially describe the archive old prints and this is the main focus of this article.



Modern China ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 009770042094285
Author(s):  
Jonathan Henshaw

Chinese commemoration of the Second World War and of the Nanjing Massacre that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s has been framed as a “new remembering” in response to political change in China and Japanese denial. This periodization obscures both earlier Chinese commemorations and the multiple ways the past has been (re-)remembered. In fact, Chinese commemoration of the victims of the Nanjing Massacre began much earlier, in 1937. Nanjing and its history of building, bulldozing, and restoring wartime monuments and memorial sites offer a case study of how China’s shifting political priorities have provided frameworks that alternately enable and restrain commemoration of the wartime past. This article explores these frameworks, with particular attention to occupied territory, in order to more fully understand the war’s legacy in the People’s Republic of China.



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