Download or read book Slovakia a Playground for Nationalism and National Identity written by Ismo Nurmi and published by Finnish Literature Society. This book was released on 1999 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National identities and nationalism, especially in the European context have aroused lots of current interest among scholars from a wide variety of academic disciplines, and the topic most certainly will continue to attract further attention also in the future. A great number of the studies dealing with national identities have emphasized the long time span and the role of the national intelligentsia in the evolution of a national identity. This study uses another approach by underlining the short time span and a number of practical issues that contributed to the strengthening of the national identity of the Slovaks during the first two years following the independence of Czechoslovakia. Furthermore, the conflicting interests of the states of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland and the ethnic groups in Slovakia at that time have been given special attention. The study also aims to help us understand why it was initially so difficult for the Slovaks to agree with the idea of the one and united Czechoslovak nation.
Download or read book Central European Crossroads written by Pieter C. van Duin and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2009-05-01 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the four decades of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia a vast literature on working-class movements has been produced but it has hardly any value for today’s scholarship. This remarkable study reopens the field. Based on Czech, Slovak, German and other sources, it focuses on the history of the multi-ethnic social democratic labor movement in Slovakia’s capital Bratislava during the period 1867-1921, and on the process of national revolution during the years 1918–19 in particular. The study places the historic change of the former Pressburg into the modern Bratislava in the broader context of the development of multinational pre-1918 Hungary, the evolution of social, ethnic, and political relations in multi-ethnic Pressburg (a ‘tri-national’ city of Germans, Magyars, and Slovaks), and the development of the multinational labor movement in Hungary and the Habsburg Empire as a whole.
Download or read book Creating the Other written by Nancy M. Wingfield and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2003-10 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The historic myths of a people/nation usually play an important role in the creation and consolidation of the basic concepts from which the self-image of that nation derives. These concepts include not only images of the nation itself, but also images of other peoples. Although the construction of ethnic stereotypes during the "long" nineteenth century initially had other functions than simply the homogenization of the particular culture and the exclusion of "others" from the public sphere, the evaluation of peoples according to criteria that included "level of civilization" yielded "rankings" of ethnic groups within the Habsburg Monarchy. That provided the basis for later, more divisive ethnic characterizations of exclusive nationalism, as addressed in this volume that examines the roots and results of ethnic, nationalist, and racial conflict in the region from a variety of historical and theoretical perspectives.
Download or read book Imagining Europe written by Michael J. Wintle and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2008 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors of this research collection are not so much interested in what Europe thinks of itself, but rather what others think of it. They take a number of scenarios from recent history and examine how Europe has appeared to people in other parts of the world: America, China, the Arab world, for example.
Download or read book The Slovak Polish Border 1918 1947 written by Marcel Jesenský and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-09-02 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first English-language monograph on the Slovak-Polish border in 1918-47 explores the interplay of politics, diplomacy, moral principles and self-determination. This book argues that the failure to reconcile strategic objectives with territorial claims could cost a higher price than the geographical size of the disputed region would indicate.
Download or read book The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe written by T. Kamusella and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-12-16 with total page 1167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work focuses on the ideological intertwining between Czech, Magyar, Polish and Slovak, and the corresponding nationalisms steeped in these languages. The analysis is set against the earlier political and ideological history of these languages, and the panorama of the emergence and political uses of other languages of the region.
Download or read book The Intermarium written by Jonathan Levy and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 2007-06 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pub_AbstractText: This thesis proposes an alternative governance structure for east central Europe - the Intermarium. The Intermarium is based on the development of a supplementary federal structure capable of controlling factionalism and nationalism utilizing concepts from James Madison's Tenth Federalist. In particular, James Madison's approach to mitigating and preventing the formation of dangerous factions is found to be compatible with preexisting notions of federalism in east central Europe and offers a potential regional political solution that merits further study. In reaching the above proposal, the concepts of Wilsonian national self -determination, Pan European federalism, functionalism and historical east central European variants of federalism are explored along with their leading personalities. At the author's request over 100 previously unknown documents were declassified by a variety of intelligence agencies including the CIA, Army Counterintelligence, and FBI. In addition, three lengthy interviews were conducted with former American intelligence agent, William Gowen, who in 1947 and 1948 investigated and worked with several of the organizations and individuals profiled. The tragic history of east central Europe in the 20th Century consisted of bloody ethnic conflict, foreign invasion, and occupation with the lingering effects still evident today. While there is persuasive authority to suggest that the future for east central Europe is one of harmonious relations, liberal democracy and economic prosperity other forecasts predict decades yet of bloody conflict as the Russian Federation and its borderlands resolve rivalries fueled by national self-determination and irredentism. By developing a federal alternative to the European Union to be know popularly as the Intermarium, east central Europe might effectively pool its resources and meet the foreign relations and security challenges unique to the region rather than relying upon far away Brussels in the event of a crisis. Regional federation as exemplified by east central Europe's unique heritage may prove to be just the bridging mechanism needed to accelerate the goal of Pan Europe or provide a safe harbor from conflict in the event of the EU's inability to address future crises.
Download or read book Illustrated Slovak History written by Anton Špiesz and published by Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers. This book was released on 2006 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Little contemporary scholarship on Slovak history exists in English. This title fills an important gap in historiography about events throughout Central Europe over the last fourteen centuries. It presents the history of Slovakia in terms of the latest scholarship and in the context of on-going historical debate about Slovak history and its presentation in post-socialist world. Extensive footnotes by scholars, 350 color illustrations, Index, Bibliography, Foreword and Epilogue.
Download or read book Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar Slovakia written by Rebekah Klein-Pejšová and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-12 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Well researched . . . A major contribution to our understanding of the dilemmas and challenges faced by Czechoslovak Jewry in the interwar period.” —Michael Miller, Central European University In the aftermath of World War I, the largely Hungarian-speaking Jews in Slovakia faced the challenge of reorienting their political loyalties from defeated Hungary to newly established Czechoslovakia. Rebekah Klein-Pejšová examines the challenges Slovak Jews faced as government officials, demographers, and police investigators continuously tested their loyalty. Focusing on “Jewish nationality” as a category of national identity, Klein-Pejšová shows how Jews recast themselves as loyal citizens of Czechoslovakia. Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar Slovakia traces how the interwar state saw and understood minority loyalty and underscores how loyalty preceded identity in the redrawn map of east central Europe. “This book makes a crucial contribution to the question of minority loyalties in Central Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. It points to a dramatic divergence of the constructions of loyalties between the majority and minority populations.” —Slovakia “After WW I, former Hungarian territory became part of the newly established state of Czechoslovakia. Jews who had lived under Hungarian rule faced the problem of status and identity in a new state . . . The overall picture the author presents is skillfully balanced by effective individualized treatments of individuals and events . . . Recommended.” —Choice “Klein-Pejšová has contributed a succinct and sophisticated profile of an understudied community, one that can help us understand the impossible dynamic faced by all Jews who lived among multiple nationalities with competing national claims.” —Slavic Review
Download or read book Between Cross and Class written by Lex Heerma van Voss and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2005 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late nineteenth century in a number of continental European countries Christian associations of workers arose: Christian trade unions, workers' cooperatives, political leagues, workers' youth movements and cultural associations, sometimes separately for men and women. In some countries they formed a unified Christian labour movement, which sometimes also belonged to a broader Christian subculture or pillar, encompassing all social classes. In traditional labour history Christian workers' organizations were solely represented as dividing the working class and weakening the class struggle. However, from the 1980s onwards a considerable amount of studies have been devoted to Christian workers' organizations that adopted a more nuanced approach. This book takes stock of this new historiography. To broaden the analysis, each contribution compares the development in at least two countries, thus generating new comparative insights. This volume assesses the development of Christian workers' organizations in Europe from a broad historical and comparative perspective. The contributions focus on the collective identity of the Christian workers' organization, their denominational and working-class allegiances and how these are expressed in ideology, organization and practice. Among the themes discussed are relations with churches and Christian Democracy, secularization, the development of the Welfare State, industrial relations and the contribution to working-class culture. This volume is the result of a joint intellectual enterprise of the International Institute of Social History (IISG) in Amsterdam (Netherlands) and a group of scholars linked to the KADOC - Documentation and Research Centre for Religion, Culture and Society of the KU Leuven (Catholic University Leuven-Belgium).
Download or read book Vanquished and Victorious written by Václav Šmidrkal and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2024-09-01 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent research has revised earlier views about the role of veterans of World War One in paramilitary formations, radical nationalism and political extremism in inter-war Europe, yet there remain considerable gaps in our understanding of the role they played in the ‘successor states’ of the Habsburg Empire. Vanquished and Victorious provides an innovative comparative investigation of veterans in Austria and Czechoslovakia, two states whose wider political development was of crucial importance to the question of stability in Central Europe after 1918. While differing in terms of how successfully veterans reintegrated into post-war society, this volume shows that both countries incorporated elements of ‘cultures of victory and defeat’.
Download or read book Less than Nations written by Giuseppe Motta and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-11-18 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Less than Nations: Central-Eastern European Minorities after WWI represents the result of research that the author has carried over recent years, and was facilitated by the 2008 PRIN project (Programmi di Ricerca di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale) and the 2010 Sapienza Research funds. The book analyses the conditions of national minorities after World War I, when the geo-political map of Central-Eastern Europe was redefined by international diplomacy. The new settlements were based on the principle of national self-determination and were conditioned by the geographic reality of Central-Eastern Europe, where states and nations rarely coincided. The second volume of the book analyses some special aspects of this question and focuses on the interpretation of some particular cases, which had an outstanding role in the definition of the international framework. The massacres of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and of the Jews in Eastern Europe, for example, alarmed the international community and contributed to the 1919 “emergency” of minority rights. The role of Kin States such as Germany and Hungary, instead, characterized the entire interwar period and conditioned the stability of Europe and the League of Nations. Finally, special cases like those of Slovakia and Bosnia are also helpful in understanding the ideas of nation and minority, and how conceptualisations of the latter have changed throughout the last century.
Download or read book Czechoslovakism written by Adam Hudek and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection systematically approaches the concept of Czechoslovakism and its historical progression, covering the time span from the mid-nineteenth century to Czechoslovakia’s dissolution in 1992/1993, while also providing the most recent research on the subject. "Czechoslovakism" was a foundational concept of the interwar Czechoslovak Republic and it remained an important ideological, political and cultural phenomenon throughout the twentieth century. As such, it is one of the most controversial terms in Czech, Slovak and Central European history. While Czechoslovakism was perceived by some as an effort to assert Czech domination in Slovakia, for others it represented a symbol of the struggle for the Republic’s survival during the interwar and Second World War periods. The authors take care to analyze Czechoslovakism’s various emotional connotations, however their primary objective is to consider Czechoslovakism as an important historical concept and follow its changes through the various cultural-political contexts spanning from the mid-nineteenth century to the breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1993. Including the work of many of the most eminent Czech and Slovak historians, this volume is an insightful study for academic and postgraduate student audiences interested in the modern history of Central and Eastern Europe, nationality studies, as well as intellectual history, political science and sociology.
Download or read book Narratives Unbound written by Sorin Antohi and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This volume is the first work to cover post-Communist developments in historical studies in six Eastern European countries (Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria) from a comparative and critical perspective, written by scholars from the region itself. It is a building block for scholars of the history of European and global historical studies, and a useful pedagogical tool for classes on the history of historical studies. Each individual chapter is in itself a guide to further research through a wealth of detailed notes and references."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Paths Out of the Apocalypse written by Ota Konrád and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paths out of the Apocalypse uses violence as a prism through which to investigate the profound social, cultural, and political changes experienced by (post-) Habsburg Central Europe during and immediately after the Great War. It compares attitudes toward, and experiences and practices of,physical violence in the mostly Czech-speaking territories of Bohemia and Moravia, the German-speaking territories that would constitute the Republic of Austria after 1918, and the mostly German-speaking region of South Tyrol. Based on research in national and local archives and copious secondaryliterature, the study argues that, in the context of total war, physical violence became a predominant means of conceptualizing and expressing social-political demands as well as a means of demarcating various notions of community and belonging. The authors apply an interdisciplinary understandingof violence informed by sociological and psychological theories as well as by rigorous empirical historiographical approach. First, they examine the most severe kind of physical violence - murder - against the backdrop of shifting scientific and media discourses during the war and its immediateaftermath. Second, the authors use numerous cases of collective violence, ranging from less serious everyday conflicts to massive hunger demonstrations and riots, to unravel its 'language', thus deciphering the attitudes and values shared among an ever-growing group of perpetrators. Paths out of theApocalypse thus fundamentally rethinks some key topics currently debated in the scholarship on early twentieth-century Central Europe, the First World War, violence, nationalism, and modern European comparative social and cultural history.
Download or read book Iron Landscapes written by Felix Jeschke and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2021-08-13 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the newly formed country of Czechoslovakia built an ambitious national rail network out of what remained of the obsolete Habsburg system. While conceived as a means of knitting together a young and ethnically diverse nation-state, these railways were by their very nature a transnational phenomenon, and as such they simultaneously articulated and embodied a distinctive Czechoslovak cosmopolitanism. Drawing on evidence ranging from government documents to newsreels to train timetables, Iron Landscapes gives a nuanced account of how planners and authorities balanced these two imperatives, bringing the cultural history of infrastructure into dialogue with the spatial history of Central Europe.
Download or read book The Mediatization of War and Peace written by Christoph Cornelissen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-02-08 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the First World War, mass media achieved an enormous and continuously growing importance in all belligerent countries. Newspaper, illustrated magazines, comics, pamphlets, and instant books, fi ctional works, photography, and the new-born “theater of imagery”, the cinema, were crucial in order to create a heroic vision of the events, to mobilize and maintain the consensus on the war. But their role was pivotal also in creating the image of the war’s end and fi nally, together with a widespread, new literary genre, the war memoirs, to shape the collective memory of the confl ict for the next generations. Even before November 1918, the media raised high expectations for a multifaceted peace: a new global order, the beginning of a peaceful era, the occasion for a regenerating apocalypse. Likewise, in the following decades, particularly war literature and cinema were pivotal to reverse the icon of the Great War as an epic crusade and a glorious chapter of the national history and to create the hegemonic image of a senseless carnage. The Mediatization of War and Peace focalizes on the central role played by mass media in the tortuous transition to the post-war period as well as on the profound disenchantment generated by their prophesies.
