The Great Idea is Dead, Long Live the Great Ideas

The “Asia Minor Catastrophe” cast its heavy shadow over Greek interwar era developments in two fundamental ways: first, there was the terror of the ideological void after the bankruptcy of the Hellenic “Great Idea” due to the military defeat in Asia Minor; and second, the physical arrival in Greece of an almost 1,500,000 refugee population after their expulsion from Turkey. This paper argues that against this background, the issues of national reconstruction and a new cultural orientation for the Greek nation were strongly connected. Moreover, it argues that various projects and discourses emerged in search of the new Great Ideas that would successfully replace the irrevocably lost one. They had as a common denominator the “modernist ethos” of a “new beginning” which was necessary for the nation’s and society’s regeneration to be achieved. Thus, in exploring these projects, it attempts to identify their convergences, their mutual exclusions, as well as their cultural, ideological and political imprints.

Authoritarian Liberalism and the Transformation of Modern Europe

<Online Only>This book recounts the transformation of Europe from the interwar era until the euro crisis, using the tools of constitutional analysis and critical theory. The central claim is twofold: post-war Europe is reconstituted in a manner combining political authoritarianism and economic liberalism, producing an order which is now in a critical condition. The book begins in the interwar era, when liberalism, unable to deal with mass democracy and the social question, turns to authoritarianism in an attempt to suppress democracy, with disastrous consequences in Weimar and elsewhere. After the Second World War, partly on the basis of a very different diagnosis of interwar collapse, and initially through a passive authoritarianism, inter-state sovereignty is reconfigured, state-society relations are depoliticized, and social relations transformed. Integration is substituted for internationalism, technocracy for democracy, and economic liberty for political freedom and class struggle. This transformation takes time to unfold, and it presents continuities as well as discontinuities. It is deepened by the neo-liberalism of the Maastricht era and the creation of Economic and Monetary Union, and yet countermovements then also emerge: geopolitically, in the return of the German question; and domestically, in the challenges presented by constitutional courts and anti-systemic movements. Struggles over sovereignty, democracy, and political freedom resurface, but are then more actively repressed through the authoritarian liberalism of the euro crisis phase. This leads now to an impasse. Anti-systemic politics return but remain uneasily within the EU, suggesting that the post-war order of authoritarian liberalism is reaching its limits. As yet, however, there has been no definitive rupture.</Online Only>

Conclusion

In a constitutional order based on popular sovereignty and parliamentary democracy, the extension of political consciousness and representation to the working class could destabilize the liberal state. As the ‘social question’—the question of material inequality—became not just an economic, but a political, and even a constitutional issue in the interwar era, the liberal state struggled to maintain hegemony. The bourgeois ...

Soekarno and the Promise of Nasakom

This chapter begins by introducing an article titled “Nationalism, Religion, and Marxism” by the twenty-five-year-old, Dutch-educated ingenieur named Soekarno. It discusses the conflicts, tensions, and mistakes that had come to divide the variously Islamic- and Marxist-oriented leaders of the Sarekat Islam and the broader field of political and social action in the Indies, now described, as the title of the journal indicated, as Indonesia. The chapter details Soekarno's rallying call for unity among Muslims and Marxists and for Indonesian independence in 1926, which represented the rise of classically Andersonian nationalism among the bilingual Dutch educated elite stratum of society in the late colonial Indies. The chapter also argues that the late interwar era in Indonesia helped to lay the groundwork for communist and Islamic revolution making by sustaining transoceanic connections to diverse sources of real, imagined, and potential solidarity and support across the world, and by maintaining or (re)building discursive and institutional structures for popular mobilization in the name of communism and Islam. Ultimately, the chapter contends that the Japanese occupation period severely constrained opportunities for organization and mobilization by activists inspired by communism and other strains of revolutionary socialism in the Indonesian archipelago.

Zionism, Pan-Asianism, and the Postcolonial Predicament in the Interwar Writings of Eugen Hoeflich

In the early 1920s, the Viennese writer and journalist Eugen Hoeflich promoted a unique vision of Zionism that aligned Jewish nationalism with a set of anticolonial ideologies collectively known as Pan-Asianism. This article explores the poetic and political strategies Hoeflich employed in order to affiliate Zionism with the Pan-Asian idea in general, and the Indian anticolonial struggle in particular. I read Hoeflich's turn to Pan-Asianism as an attempt to work through a conceptual problem that theorist Partha Chatterjee calls the “postcolonial predicament.” That is, how might the Jews assert their collective identity without reproducing the Eurocentric discourses that presuppose their inferiority? Hoeflich's vision of Indian-Jewish solidarity constitutes an imaginative effort to de-Europeanize Jewish nationalism and disentangle Zionism from British imperial designs. On a broader level, this study sheds light on the transnational solidarities that informed central European Zionists in the interwar era, and points to the discursive continuities that linked Jewish nationalists in Europe to anticolonial thinkers in Asia.

Tracing Ocular Conditions in 15,921 Interwar Refugees, Veria, Greece (1926-1940)

<p class="Default"><strong><span>Objective. </span></strong><span>This historical epidemiological study aims to investigate ocular conditions in Greek refugees during the Interwar pe­riod (1926-1940) in the region of Imathia, Greece. </span></p><p class="Default"><strong><span>Materials and Methods. </span></strong><span>The archival material encompasses 15,921 patients who were admitted to the Refugee Hospital of Veria, Imathia, Greece. Descriptive statistics were estimated. </span></p><p class="Default"><strong><span>Results. </span></strong><span>Twenty-two cases of ocular conditions were identified. Ten patients had anterior segment conditions, such as keratitis, blepharoconjunctivi­tis, conjunctivitis, epithelioma, leukoma and an operated cataract. Another patient was diagnosed with ocular trachoma. Four patients presented sympathetic ophthalmia; two additional patients suffered from ophthalmia due to syphilis. One patient was diagnosed with ocular malaria. Four cases of ocular traumas were recorded, among which an ocular burn due to gunpowder, a motorcycle accident leading to a retro-ocular hematoma, and a kick in the eye resulting in ocular trauma were notable. </span></p><p class="Default"><strong><span>Conclu­sion. </span></strong><span>The disease spectrum in Greek refugees reflects the adverse conditions during the Interwar era.</span></p>

Peaceful Change: The Interwar Era and the Disciplinary Context

The first thorough discussion of “peaceful change” took place in 1936–1937 in two international conferences sponsored by the League of Nations. The League was prompted by the uncertainties and tensions that followed decisions by Germany, Italy, and Japan to leave it. Teachers and scholars of international relations convened in these League-sponsored conferences to assess the demands of the three dissatisfied powers. As they debated how the demands of these powers could best be tackled, one answer tended to emerge: through a policy of peaceful change. But what was “peaceful change”? And how did the early IR scholars approach the concept scientifically? This chapter seeks to answer these two questions.

Scotland in the 1930s

Scotland suffered acutely from the economic and political crises of the interwar period, with industrial decline, mass unemployment and cultural uncertainty in evidence by the early 1920s. This chapter explores the consequences of this economic and social dislocation for Scottish politics in the lead up the late 1930s. Particular emphasis is given to left-wing politics and anti-unemployment activism, suggesting that the roots of a distinctively Scottish response to the Spanish Civil War lay in older radical political cultures that had survived and evolved into the interwar era.