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During the final decade of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), young citizens found themselves at the heart of a rigorous programme of socialist patriotic education, yet following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the emphasis of official state rhetoric, textbooks and youth activities changed beyond recognition. For the young generation growing up during this period, ‘normality’ was turned on its head, leaving a sense of insecurity and inner turmoil. Using a combination of archival research, interviews, educational materials and government reports, this book examines the relationship between young people and their two successive states in East(ern) Germany between 1979 and 2002. This time-span straddles the 1989/1990 caesura which often delimits historical studies, and thus enables not only a detailed examination of GDR socialisation, but, crucially, its influence in unified Germany. Exploring the extent to which a young generation's loyalties can be officially regulated in the face of cultural and historical traditions, changing material conditions and shifting social circumstances, the book finds GDR socialisation to be influential to post-unification loyalties through its impact on the personal sphere, rather than through the official sphere of ideological propaganda. This study not only provides insight into the functioning of the GDR state and its longer-term impact, but also advances our broader understanding of the ways in which collective loyalties are formed.
divided nation and now ‘soldered state’, namely Germany. The rebranding of Berlin from a divided, Cold War ‘frontier town’ to the capital of unified Germany plays a key role in government-led nation-building. Berlin has been described as ‘the city where, more than any other city, German nationalism and modernity have been staged and restaged, represented and contested’ (Till 2005 , 5). Rebuilding
This study set out to look at three shared features of nation-building in unified Germany and Vietnam, namely national division, the impact of communism and the interplay with regional integration. It found that the nation-building process in post-unification Germany and Vietnam cannot be understood without a close reading of their respective historical, political and cultural contexts. The following
Part I Research design and historical background The German out-of-area debate did not, as an external observer might have expected, evolve around the question of re-unified Germany’s national security interests in the post-Cold War era. Instead, it represented a battle over the lessons of the past and the expectations of Germany’s partners. The debate looked backward much more than forward, and evolved around negative notions of what dangers Germany needed to avoid rather than positive notions of what could be achieved through engaging the Bundeswehr in
, headed by the slogan ‘Germans – We can be proud of our country’, the 2001 poster campaign was loaded with controversy. Despite recent claims that unified Germany has regained a sense of ‘normality’, the expression of collective German pride is clearly still considered anything but ‘normal’. The attitudes of young east Germans exemplify the unease that surrounds the expression of patriotic pride in contemporary Germany yet, in contrast to their elders, they often have little personal memory of divided Germany, and none of National Socialism. For the majority, unified
Does European integration contribute to, or even accelerate, the erosion of intra-party democracy? This book is about improving our understanding of political parties as democratic organisations in the context of multi-level governance. It analyses the impact of European Union (EU) membership on power dynamics, focusing on the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party (PS), and the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). The purpose of this book is to investigate who within the three parties determines EU policies and selects EU specialists, such as the candidates for European parliamentary elections and EU spokespersons.
The book utilises a principal-agent framework to investigate the delegation of power inside the three parties across multiple levels and faces. It draws on over 65 original interviews with EU experts from the three national parties and the Party of European Socialists (PES) and an e-mail questionnaire. This book reveals that European policy has largely remained in the hands of the party leadership. Its findings suggest that the party grassroots are interested in EU affairs, but that interest rarely translates into influence, as information asymmetry between the grassroots and the party leadership makes it very difficult for local activists to scrutinise elected politicians and to come up with their own policy proposals. As regards the selection of EU specialists, such as candidates for the European parliamentary elections, this book highlights that the parties’ processes are highly political, often informal, and in some cases, undemocratic.
Historical practice today is characterised by such growing diversity that there are now many ways of being a professional historian. This book focuses specifically on the rise of those who Carole Fink has recently referred to as the 'new historians', who choose to play the role of 'expert' in public debates about the past. Contemporary historians have been given the opportunity to climb down from the ivory tower and engage fully in public debate. It starts with two contributions exploring the general context of the changing role of the historian. Peter Mandler addresses the fundamental problem of the historian's professional, political and moral responsibilities. The book examines the contribution of historians to the process of coming to terms with a recent totalitarian, colonial or otherwise problematic past. It analyses the workings of bilateral historical commissions since the First World War, for example, those funded by UNESCO after 1945 to re-write history textbooks as part of the wider process of denazification. Many Communist countries also established bilateral commissions in an attempt to suppress long-term, 'pre-revolutionary' antagonism. The book discusses the problems encountered by the bilateral commission that investigated Italo-Slovene relations from the end of the nineteenth until well into the twentieth century, including the First and Second World Wars and their aftermath. The former imperial powers have been confronted in the past decade with uncomfortable questions resulting from the process of decolonisation after 1945. The book discusses the consequences of regime change on the way that the historical profession is organised and how historical inquiry is conducted. Historians in the East were profoundly affected by the 1989 Wende in Germany.
This book sets the context for a detailed exploration of the academic debate about the origins of the British empire, and outlines and engages with a key interpretation or approach to the subject. It gives a brief outline of the growth of the empire from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, together with a survey of various theoretical explanations and justifications offered by commentators from the early mercantilists, to apologist historians of the late Victorian period such as Froude and Seeley. The book considers more closely the problems surrounding the concept of imperialism, and its many definitions. It also considers why the British among the various continental European empires, has attracted so much interest and controversy among historians. The White Dominions, particularly Canada, Australia and New Zealand were the beneficiaries of such liberal concession, which was granted on the assumption that the predominantly white and British inhabitants of these colonies needed and deserved the right of self government. It is unsurprising, therefore, given the kaleidoscopic quality of the British empire, its ethnic and cultural diversity and the baffling varieties of its formal and informal rule, that historians of imperialism have come to regard it as the richest source of insights into the subject. It has become a testing ground for theoretical models of imperialism, a function it seems likely to continue to serve.
What is crucial to the performative monument cannot be impermanence as such, but the temporal interaction with an audience that itself is no eternal public, but a succession of interacting subjects. Ephemerality of objects is one strategy among others in making concrete this temporality of the work. Theoretically, the task is to understand the combination of political needs and aesthetic solutions proposed for them that comprise the performative monument. Performative monuments work to establish a political relation to a history that the performer has not personally experienced. The attitude to the past of the spectator of a performative monument is conventionalized and made public, and thus becomes an object of public inquiry. The book connects performance with history through the recent phenomenon of re-performance, reconstructing the different temporal layers of the audience of one act. It turns to the Austrian avant-garde since the 1960s, whose contradictory, elaborate staging of visceral acts. The book examines art in the former Yugoslavia. It starts with early works by Marina Abramović wherein she politically marks the city through acts of erasure and projection. The book begins with the Venice Biennale of 1976, remarkable for contributions by Joseph Beuys, Jochen Gerz, and Reiner Ruthenbeck that circle around the monument as metaphor for national identity. Gerz's 1986 Monument against Fascism, a column that visitors signed as a protest against fascism and that was lowered into the ground when enough signatures had accumulated, is key to this development.
The ambitions of this book are twofold, one fraternal and one methodological. It shows that the realist tradition is alive and well in Europe, by presenting a sample of European scholars working under the realist paradigm - including Russia. Introducing neoclassical realism to a European academic audience poses a particular challenge. For Europeans, the American discourse of 'bringing intervening variables back in' sounds curious. In sum, the American approach privileges neorealism at the expense of classical realism. In the United States, neoclassical realism is essentially a research programme aimed at explaining how states filter systemic factors through domestic structures, thus explaining foreign policy output on the basis of both systemic and domestic variables. Neoclassical realism, as it stands, is thus some sort of 'neorealism + domestic variables'. It is an attempt to respond to the shortfalls of structural realism by (re)incorporating variables located within the famous 'black box'. Domestic factors are yet clearly relegated to second-order status, as they play the role of intervening variables in the so-called missing link between power resources and foreign policy output. American ontological approaches and methodological preferences give neoclassical realist literature a decidedly scientific rationalism, grounded in material factors. In Europe, however, the English school and constructivist approaches have emphasized the non-material aspects of international relations, factors that were taken seriously by classical realist authors but which became a victim to the attempt to 'scientize' the discipline. Neorealist approaches see the structure of the international system as the driving force behind changes in European politics.