Revolutions

Welche Vorstellungen und Ziele besaßen die jugoslawischen bzw. serbischen Kommunisten von einem neuen Jugoslawien und auf welche Art und Weise wurden diese Ideen in den ersten Nachkriegsjahren in der Vojvodina umgesetzt? Wie sahen die theoretischen Vorgaben der internationalistisch ausgerichteten Bevölkerungspolitik aus und welche Pläne verfolgte man in Bezug auf die internierten Donauschwaben? Welche Spuren haben das „Verschwinden“ der deutschsprachigen Bevölkerung einerseits und die Ansiedlung von mehrheitlich serbischen Anhängern der Volksbefreiungsbewegung andererseits hinterlassen? In welchen Bereichen war die kommunistische Landwirtschaftspolitik erfolgreich und wo traten schon bald Risse im Kriegsbündnis zwischen Bauern und Kommunisten auf? Und schließlich: Als wie beständig erwies sich die in diesem Gebiet bisher einzige nicht unter nationalen Vorzeichen stattfindende Revolution von oben? Auf diese Fragen sollen Antworten gegeben werden. Darüber hinaus bietet der Autor Einblicke in die militärisch-politischen, wirtschaftlichen und kulturellen Strukturen des kommunistischen Machtapparates in der Autonomen Provinz Vojvodina und dem jugoslawischen Gesamtstaat. Hierzu wurden in der deutschsprachigen Historiographie bisher unbekannte Akten aus mehreren Archiven in Serbien gesichtet und als Grundlage für eine umfassende Arbeit zum kommunistischen Revolutionsprozess ausgewertet.
„Eine lesenswerte und in den Wertungen und Schlussfolgerungen überzeugende Studie, die über den bisherigen Forschungsstand hinausführt.“ (Edgar Hösch, Würzburg)
…
What was the blueprint the Yugoslav/Serb communists had for a new Yugoslavia and how and to what extent were these concepts in the aftermath of the Second World War carried out in the Vojvodina? What can be stated about the theoretical guidelines of the internationalist population policy and which were the plans the rulers had in mind for the imprisoned Danube Swabians? What were the consequences of the "disappearance" of this German speaking minority on the one hand and the settlement with mostly Serbian sympathisers of the People's Liberation Front in the Vojvodina on the other? In which realms must the agrarian policy be considered a success and where did tensions occur in the dubious alliance between peasants and communists? And last but not least: How permanent was the socialist revolution in this area? These and other questions shall be answered. Furthermore the author provides an insight into the military-political, economical, and cultural structures of the communist apparatus in the Autonomous Province Vojvodina and the Yugoslavian state as a whole. So far unknown documents from several archives in Serbia have been taken as basis for this comprehensive study of the socialist revolution in the Vojvodina.
"This is a worth reading study, convincing in the conclusions and outreaching the stand of research." (Edgar Hösch, Würzburg)

In December 2010, what would soon be known as the Arab Spring began with protests and political unrest in Tunisia.  Subsequently, political action of various types and strengths began to appear across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and concluded some time between the end of 2011 and mid-2012.  Years later, however, assessing the ultimate successes and failures of the Arab Spring remains a complex, politically-fraught endeavor.  An important question -- as academic as it is practical -- remains:  why did the Arab Spring ignite in the final days of 2010?  Why was this sweeping sense of change, however fraught and fractured, not felt and expressed earlier?  Why did it not come later?

On December 8, 2012, in the last speech of the late Comandante Hugo Chávez, the issue of Venezuelan sovereignty reached its climax with the succinct phrase – 'Today we have Homeland! (Patria)'. Currently, Venezuela is going through a large-scale political conflict, trying to make sense of a pressing economic and humanitarian crisis. The so-called Bolivarian Revolution that began in 1999 as a project of revolutionary and anti-imperialist democracy, plays out today at an unprecedented geopolitical scale, increasingly appearing in international media, a media that distorts the many points of tension between the war and the resistance that Venezuelans experience in their daily lives. The slogan 'We have Homeland! (Patria)' has become the center of discord, splitting this nation: while some defend Venezuelan nationalist socialism, others oppose the system that has 'ruined' the country's economy. This photographic essay, produced between 2012 and 2016, as a part of the author's ethnographic work on geographies and socialist societies in Venezuela, shows the complex ways in which the discourse of national and territorial sovereignty materializes in the state, in the body, in the ways of life, in the city, in the neighborhoods and in the deserters of the Venezuelan socialist regime that faces neoliberal globalization. Living between the borders of two economies articulated by the state, one socialist and the other capitalist, renders the Venezuelan spirit a subject that is both challenging and contradictory, something that manifests itself in Bolivarianism, the cult of Chávez, the attachment to consumer goods, the 'escape' from the system (even in the Caribbean Sea) and the anguish over the economic and political confinement of lives.

This article explores how the Southern Slavs, decried as Völkerabfälle by Engels in 1849, managed nevertheless to develop a distinctively social­ist movement and culture of their own, particularly from 1903 to 1914, capable of both challenging and shaping politics in the Balkans. Although heavily influenced by Marxist theoretical currents and external ideas such as Austro-Marxism, the formation of this South Slavonic Left was rooted in the social and historic contexts of its adherents’ respective homelands. Limited industrialisation, coupled with the rise of rival political move­ments such as nationalism and peasant agrarianism, prompted many on the Left to turn to the region’s early socialist heritage, specifically the phi­losopher Svetozar Markovic’s concept of Balkan Federalism. As well as providing a means by which the region could begin to modernise through closer economic and political cooperation, the perceived threat of Austro-Hungarian and Italian expansionist ambitions legitimised the left-wing belief that a Balkan Federation was now essential to the future preser­vation of regional identity and political freedoms. Consequently, the creation of the first Yugoslavian state in December 1918 was welcomed as the first step to fulfilling these goals.

Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish Jewish woman, born and raised in an oppressive and autocratic state. At the age of seventeen, she left the Russian Empire for western Europe, where she spent the rest of her life (except for a brief revolutionary interlude in 1906). This paper presents some of the key findings of a doctoral research project into Luxemburg’s identity, family and background. Using a wealth of new and previously unknown sources, including extensive archival materials and numerous interviews with Luxemburg’s relatives, the paper investigates Luxemburg’s national, religious, cultural, and gender identities, and the important role which her family played in her life.

The publication “The Future Revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe” represents the collection of views of experts from the different field of expertise – foreign and security policy, migration, political science, history and information warfare. The idea of writing this book was influenced by the fact that Central and Eastern European countries and Europe itself are facing various types of “revolutions”. By the word “revolution” we mean an important change in the particular area of human activity, which has the potential to change policy outcomes. On the international level, Europe is facing information and technological revolution, which had and will have a significant impact on its security architecture and which have the power to influence domestic and foreign policies of all countries. On the regional and national level, countries are facing revolutions within their political systems and societies, which is also able to change countries and its internal and external policies. Central and Eastern Europe is not an exception.

The project’s goal is to provide a new, overall narrative of how the Habsburg Empire was replaced by nation states at the end of WWI and reconsider in the light of its results categories and concepts like state and statehood, local, regional and national, transition and transformation. A novel combination of historical comparison and histoire croisée enables the in-depth analyses of a set of local transitions in diverse regions (agrarian, industrial, commercial, urban, rural, multi-and mono-ethnic, borderland and mainland, litoral) and the combination of these results with the existing literature on other localities.

The team addresses four main themes: state, elites, identities and discourses. The focus is always local, the question is how these societies faced the momentous changes and found their place within empire and nation-state(s). It will look at interactions, cultures and especially rupture and continuity of people, norms, practices, institutional cultures in order to discover patterns of transitions and the social factors influencing them. Besides a typology of transitions, it also aims at gaining a new perspective on empire and nation-state from this crucial moment of collapse and state-building.

The project is informed by New Imperial history, the idea of phantom boundaries, everyday ethnicity, integrated urban history. At the methodological level, it builds on symmetrical comparison of the selected cases and on an asymmetrical one with the existing literature, while the object of comparison is the transition that we conceptualize as an “intercrossing”. Through analysing this ‘transformation from below’ and connecting for the first time what has remained scattered both in historiography and in the social representations, the project aims to write a new history of modern Eastern Europe as a common legacy for an integrated European history.

The project is financed by the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant agreement 772264

Principal Investigator: Gábor Egry

This article explores men at a state-owned youth center in Cairo, struggling to cope with uncertainties and change in the aftermath of Egypt’s January 2011 Revolution. Conceptually, the article critically engages anthropologist Laura Bear’s suggestion that an ethics of productivity saturate neoliberal masculinity. As my ethnographic stories about football coaches and state bureaucrats illustrate, being a good man recurrently surfaced as a problem of how to work productively in and on time: as ambiguities between discordant futures that left material needs, familiar care, and development of football talents difficult to reconcile. Often, my interlocutors linked this conundrum to a wide-ranging opacity, conjured as “corruption” (fisad). My analysis of this male predicament allows me to spotlight one of the Egyptian revolution’s most luring promises: a transparent and meritocratic system, where a man’s work would finally be allowed to work on all futures deemed morally and materially significant.

The purpose of this pamphlet is to introduce some of the key concepts involved in understanding society and social movements. Equally important is that this pamphlet seeks to invigorate fighters with the idea that we all can and must grasp these important concepts to make our efforts count for something. Activity without the proper grounding – without the proper understanding of what we’re fighting – is a sure route to burnout. We need all the fighters and leaders we can muster.

Popular protest, which repeatedly occurred in communist regimes, turned into massive mobilizational waves in the late communist period. Why did some protests result in state cooptation and particularist nationalism (Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union), and others in state-society polarization (Poland) and protest containment (China), when these states shared important historical, political and institutional legacies? Political regimes with origins in indigenous popularly-based revolutionary movements are more resilient to popular protests and other major crises than other authoritarian regimes. Protracted ideological armed struggle largely overlaps with broader patriotic causes, such as liberation wars or struggles against foreign intervention. The revolutionary regimes thus acquire patriotic credentials, while boundaries between partisan and patriotic identities become blurred, which strengthens their elite unity and popular base. Popular protests thus facilitate a complex political game of old and new actors that may result in regime survival or transformation. In other regimes, popular unrest tends to produce state-society polarization and, ultimately, regime delegitimation and breakdown. Popular contention in complex multinational institutional settings, if there is no major external threat, highlights old and triggers new conflicts along these structural and institutional divides and, where dual political identities prevail, facilitates identity shifts in particularist direction.

Capitalism is in a dialectical leap to communism, the next human stage. The laws of dialectical materialism and of historical materialism are examined. The scientific and technical revolution is examined. This revolution is creating a period of social revolution. Electronics is a labor-replacing technology, which destabilizes capitalism. Imperialism, Globalization and Financialization are shown to be features of the current period, not stages of capitalism. The role of activists is outlined.

Anwar Shaikh is a well-known and highly respected economist at the New School for Social Research in New York. This is truly his Magnum Opus. At 1,000 pages, it is a weighty tome and the content is even heavier. It covers a lot of economic territory. It has many strengths. Shaikh analyzes virtually every stream of economic thought covering the topics he has selected. He not only presents his classical approach, but in every chapter summarizes virtually all of the pertinent material from various schools of economic thought. Additionally, each chapter ends with a detailed empirical review pertaining to that chapter.

Je laisse Jaurès exprimer une opinion d'une grande finesse : « Il était tout ensemble pour la paix avec le dehors et pour la légalité au dedans : c’était trop demander à un peuple dont les nerfs ou excités ou affaiblis vibraient de nouveau après quelques mois d’atonie. Aussi, son action contre la guerre, si elle fut grande et noble, ne fut pas efficace. Mais quel sens merveilleux de la réalité, surtout quel sens des difficultés, des obstacles chez cet homme que d’habitude on qualifie d’idéologue, de théoricien abstrait ! »

Entre 2012 et 2014, les « anniversaire de la Révolution », attendus comme de véritables événements, ne font pas que révéler mais influencent et modifient directement le processus révolutionnaire, notamment en raison des perceptions durables qu'ils laissent sur les protagonistes. En analysant l'évolution de ces anniversaires entre 2012 et 2016, ce mémoire montre que cela est particulièrement vrai de la journée du 25 janvier 2014 qui a été un véritable échec pour les forces révolutionnaires.