Territorial disputes between Poland and Czechoslovakia 1938–1945

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (38) ◽  
pp. 9-17
Author(s):  
Michał Błachut

The historical point of view is important to fully understand foreign affairs. For Polish-Czech relations the crucial period in this respect is 1918–1945. The matter of the conflict were borderlands, with the most important one – Zaolzie, that is, historical lands of the Duchy of Cieszyn beyond Olza River. Originally, the land belonged to the Crown of the Polish Kingdom, then to the Kingdom of Bohemia and Austrian Habsburg dynasty. After World War I, local communities took control of the land. Czechoslovakian military intervention and a conflict with Bolsheviks caused both parties to agree to the division of Zaolzie through arbitration of powers in 28 July 1920. Until 1938, key parts of Zaolzie belonged to Czechoslovakia. In that year, Poland decided to annex territories lost according to the arbitration. After World War II tension between Poland and Czechoslovakia heightened again. Czechoslovakia made territorial claims on parts of Silesia belonging to Germany. Poland once more tried to reclaim Zaolzie, but military invasion was stopped by Stalin. Negotiations failed, but the escalation of the conflict was stopped. Two years later the relationship between the parties was eventually normalized, the final agreement was signed in 1958 and it is still in place today.

2021 ◽  
Vol 123 ◽  
pp. 01027
Author(s):  
Yifei Liu

World War I (WWI) causes irreversible consequences on the British economy, and Britain has experienced the most severe economic crisis in the 1920s. This paper aims to explain the causes of unemployment in Britain in the years between the wars and why that problem persisted for much of that period. This paper will describe the causes of unemployment by analyzing how World War I affected the British exports market. Then this essay will move on by exploring how the economic policy of Britain after World War II(WWII) damages the exports market and creates high unemployment. In addition, this paper will also discuss the relationship between the change in the labour market in World War I and the unemployment problem. Finally, this paper will illustrate why the unemployment problem persists by exploring regional and industrial unemployment issues.


2021 ◽  
pp. 136-160
Author(s):  
Roger Mac Ginty

This chapter examines informal truces and acts of humanity and reciprocity during violent conflict. It is interested in the ‘hard cases’ of all-out warfare and draws on World War I and World War II personal diaries and memoirs. The chapter demonstrates that in some circumstances, everyday peace—or at least everyday tolerance and civility—has been possible during warfare. It contains multiple examples of ‘ordinary’ combatants showing humanity, compassion, and generosity to their supposed opponents. These cases are particularly interesting from the point of view of this book as they often occurred ‘under the radar’ or outside the surveillance of the state and others. Indeed, in many cases, they were expressly forbidden by military organisations and were contrary to the prevailing national mood of antagonism towards the enemy. They show individual and group initiative, as well as resistance to a national or wider group.


2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1 (464)) ◽  
pp. 129-140
Author(s):  
Maciej Górny

The article describes the newer works devoted to the occupation of Polish lands, especially of Warsaw during World War I. Recently, this subject, so far neglected, has drown the attention of numerous scientists, both from Poland and from abroad. Their point of view is different not only from the older perspectives, but also from the perspectives of slightly newer works on the other occupied areas and emphasizing the connection between the experience of the Great War and genocide during World War II. In the most precious fragments, the new historiography gives a very wide image of social life, in which the proper place is taken by previously marginalised social groups. Differently from the older works, the policy of the occupants on the Polish lands is not treated only as a unilateral dictate, but rather as a dynamic process of negotiation, in which the strength and position of each of the (many) sides has been changed. And, this change is accompanied by the new arrangements concerning almost all aspects of the German policy and the conditions of living during World War I.


2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 317
Author(s):  
Nina N. Loginova ◽  
Milan M. Radovanović ◽  
Anatoliy A. Yamashkin ◽  
Goran Vasin ◽  
Marko D. Petrović ◽  
...  

Population changes of the Russians and other Slavs are an important original indicator of demographic, economic, political, and cultural analysis of over 300 million Slavic inhabitants in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. The indicators are conditioned by the large number of people executed in World War I and World War II, significant economic migrations, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. Utilizing data from official reports, the authors proceed to analyze the demographic tendencies in order to find out the relationship between modern demographic trends and political and economic events over the past years. The results showed that economic and demographic stagnation, which favor religious and national (ethnic) ambivalence, influence the strengthening of groups ethnically isolated or religiously differentiated in the observed macroregions of Eurasia. The contemporary challenges of modern society in terms of global politics (e.g. terrorism and migrations) will be more pronounced and turbulent in these areas. For these reasons, the original data represent an important segment of the study of Slavic history, demography, and politics throughout the turbulent 20th century and the beginning of the new millennium.   


Author(s):  
Burim Mexhuani

Neorealists say that a country's Foreign Affairs is based on its power or position as the power that has a state in the international system. Field of International Relations based on international legal policies and norms; It can be defined by different political perspectives and phenomena, depending on certain theories. Theories are the best determinant of defining policies in the International System. For a long time, in the international system have dominated realistic, liberal and radical theories; After the Second World War for the purposes of explaining or defining international policies, other theories, including neo-realism, were listed. As a structured theory versus reality that defined the theory of alignment for defining political theories in the international system. In International Relations there is no central authority or world government, the state and the international environment is in a state of anarchy, which pushes the states to create the conditions to create an environment where they can survive. Special studies of International Relations theory were spurred especially after World War I and World War II. The neorealistic theory itself contains some elements that differ from other theories and that as its base takes the strength or position of power of states in the international system. Responses to the framework of action, the theories are directed as perimeters to solve the problems of the international system. The international relations system may be positioned in other circumstances when a power is not balanced, depending on the different circumstances of politics and politicians


2007 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 370-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick J. McDonald ◽  
Kevin Sweeney

Despite substantial evidence that international trade has promoted peace in the post—World War II era, the commercial peace research program still faces an important historical challenge. Dramatic economic integration in the nineteenth century failed to prevent the increasing interstate hostilities that culminated in the outbreak of war in 1914. This article uses a theoretical revision grounded in standard trade theory to reexamine the relationship between commerce and peace in the fifty years before World War I, a period often referred to as the first era of globalization. The article focuses on domestic conflict over commercial policy rather than on interdependence to understand the conditions under which globalization promotes peace. In a sample dating from 1865 to 1914, the authors find that lower regulatory barriers to commerce reduce participation in militarized interstate disputes. Contradicting conventional wisdom, this evidence affirms a basic premise of commercial liberalism during the first era of globalization—free trade promotes peace.


Author(s):  
Vanessa L. Burrows

Stress has not always been accepted as a legitimate medical condition. The biomedical concept stress grew from tangled roots of varied psychosomatic theories of health that examined (a) the relationship between the mind and the body, (b) the relationship between an individual and his or her environment, (c) the capacity for human adaptation, and (d) biochemical mechanisms of self-preservation, and how these functions are altered during acute shock or chronic exposure to harmful agents. From disparate 19th-century origins in the fields of neurology, psychiatry, and evolutionary biology, a biological disease model of stress was originally conceived in the mid-1930s by Canadian endocrinologist Hans Selye, who correlated adrenocortical functions with the regulation of chronic disease. At the same time, the mid-20th-century epidemiological transition signaled the emergence of a pluricausal perspective of degenerative, chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and arthritis that were not produced not by a specific etiological agent, but by a complex combination of multiple factors which contributed to a process of maladaptation that occurred over time due to the conditioning influence of multiple risk factors. The mass awareness of the therapeutic impact of adrenocortical hormones in the treatment of these prevalent diseases offered greater cultural currency to the biological disease model of stress. By the end of the Second World War, military neuropsychiatric research on combat fatigue promoted cultural acceptance of a dynamic and universal concept of mental illness that normalized the phenomenon of mental stress. This cultural shift encouraged the medicalization of anxiety which stimulated the emergence of a market for anxiolytic drugs in the 1950s and helped to link psychological and physiological health. By the 1960s, a growing psychosomatic paradigm of stress focused on behavioral interventions and encouraged the belief that individuals could control their own health through responsible decision-making. The implication that mental power can affect one’s physical health reinforced the psycho-socio-biological ambiguity that has been an enduring legacy of stress ever since. This article examines the medicalization of stress—that is, the historical process by which stress became medically defined. It spans from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, focusing on these nine distinct phases: 1. 19th-century psychosomatic antecedent disease concepts 2. The emergence of shell-shock as a medical diagnosis during World War I 3. Hans Selye’s theorization of the General Adapation Syndrome in the 1930s 4. neuropsychiatric research on combat stress during World War II 5. contemporaneous military research on stress hormones during World War II 6. the emergence of a risk factor model of disease in the post-World War II era 7. the development of a professional cadre of stress researchers in the 1940s and 50s 8. the medicalization of anxiety in the early post–World War II era 9. The popularization of stress in the 1950s and pharmaceutical treatments for stress, marked by the cultural assimilation of paradigmatic stress behaviors and deterrence strategies, as well pharmaceutical treatments for stress.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-45
Author(s):  
Carmen Chelaru

Abstract In 2018, Romanians celebrate the Centenary – a hundred years since Romania had the largest territory ever inhabited primarily by Romanians, at the same time, a century since Romania as a modern country was born. What do we know about our history in the last one hundred years? What and why do we celebrate? We know too little; many of the Romanians participating in the celebration do not know what it is for. The torrent of pathetic and solemn words about the past is useless. I followed two paths side by side, which happen to be in a natural connection, but sometimes they also go through distinct stages: on one hand, the course of the main historical events from the beginning of World War I until now, and on the other hand, Romanian musical life during the same period. I will cover five historical stages (World War I, Interwar Period and World War II, Soviet Occupation, Ceauşescuʼs era and Post-Communist Period) pursuing four main aims: a) an explicit historical image (as a musician I had a relatively narrow perspective on general historical facts); b) completing superficial knowledge received in school (before 1989) with information to justify certain events; c) the relationship between history–culture–music, in support of the idea that art does not exclude knowledge and civic involvement, on the contrary; d) the Past justifies the Present and together they work upon the Future. In the epilogue I will reveal an example that I consider illustrative for this fourth aim: the project Saving Enescu’s Cottage from Mihăileni. I have made this study mainly for my own benefit, in order to understand the historical facts, but especially to find an answer to the question: knowing history – what’s the use?


Author(s):  
Diego Gaspar Celaya

Professor Robert O. Paxton is one of the greatest historians who has most reflected on France, fascism and Europe during World War II. His research has changed the historical understanding of France’s Vichy régime, as he used exceptional empirical evidence to demonstrate that Vichy was a voluntary program, at least at first, more than one forced on France by German pressure. In this interview he is asked about some burning issues concerning fascism historiography today, the Spanish case, and also his personal point of view about the relationship between history and memory about World Word II in France. This gives him cause to review topics such as historiography, present tendencies in fascism studies, the specificities of Franco’s régime and the dominant post war memories in France.Key wordsFascism, memory, Resistance, francoism.AbstractLe Professeur Robert O. Paxton est l’un des plus grands historiens qui ait réfléchi sur la France, le fascisme et l’Europe pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Ses recherches ont changé la compréhension de l'histoire du régime de Vichy en France. Il a notamment démontre que Vichy était un programme volontaire, au moins au début, plutôt qu’une contrainte sous la pression allemande. Dans cette interview, il est interrogé à propos de questions brûlantes qui concernent l'historiographie du fascisme aujourd'hui, le développement du fascisme en Espagne, et aussi son point de vue personnel sur la relation entre histoire et mémoire de la seconde Guerre mondiale en France. Cette type de question a permis à monsieur Paxton d'examiner des thèmes tels que les tendances actuelles de l’historiographie sur le fascisme, les spécificités du régime de Franco et les souvenirs et mémoires qui dominent l'après-guerre en France par rapport à la période de Vichy et à la Résistance.Mots clé.Fascisme, mémoire, Résistance, franquisme.


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