Modern European History Seminar Blog

Abstract:

In this talk, Professor Martin presents his on-going work on an article in which he documents and interprets the extraordinary growth in the use of bilateral treaties on cultural cooperation and exchange that took place in the 1950s and 60s. This event, the rise of the cultural treaty, was a dramatic, system-wide change in the way states around the world arranged cross-border cultural, educational and scientific cooperation. Yet we know next to nothing about it. In the historical literature on Cold War-era cultural diplomacy, scholars have often noted these agreements, more or less in passing, but virtually no systematic attention has been devoted to them as a genre. The paper is based on the notion that bilateral cultural treaties—the documents themselves as well as the historical patterns of their creation and use—offer rich materials with which to analyze the changing role of culture in twentieth-century international relations, in the context of broader transformations in the age of the Cold War and decolonization. 

Professor Martin first reconstructs the history of how ‘cultural’ agreements have been defined and discussed within the international system. On this basis he present a categorization—applied to data available in the electronic World Treaty Index—that I use for counting these agreements. Second, he offers a quantitative analysis of how (and when, and by whom) such agreements were used between 1935 and 1980, identifying and interpreting several striking trends. This combination of approaches is designed to allow me to explore the bilateral cultural agreement as a technology of international relations—one that came to be a distinctive feature of political and cultural internationalism in what Michael Denning has called ’the age of three worlds’. That, in turn, is a first step toward a broader exploration of this technology’s history in international and transnational perspective. This research is part of a larger project, The Culture of International Society, funded by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences (2017-2021).

C. Burke Elbrick, U.S. ambassador (left), and Vukasin Micunovic, Yugoslav Federal Council President for Education and Culture (right), sign an agreement extending the U.S.-Yugoslav binational educational exchange program in December 1968. (Photo credit: The Fulbright Program, 1946-1996: 

Biography:

A graduate of the University of Chicago and Columbia University, Benjamin G. Martin is senior lecturer in the Department of History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University, where he is lead researcher on the project ‘International Ideas at UNESCO: Digital Approaches to Global Conceptual History’, funded by the Swedish Research Council (2020-2022). His publications have appeared in The Journal of Contemporary History and International Politics as well as in several edited volumes. He is co-editor (with Elisabeth Piller) of the forthcoming special issue of Contemporary European History, “Cultural Diplomacy and Europe’s Twenty Years’ Crisis”. His book The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture (Harvard University Press, 2016), won the 2020 Culbert Family Book Prize of the International Association for Media and History.

Editors Stella GHERVAS (Newcastle) and David ARMITAGE (Harvard)
in conversation with Sylvana TOMASELLI (Cambridge) and Richard WHATMORE (St Andrews)
Commentator: Rachel HAMMERSLEY (Newcastle)

A Cultural History of Peace presents an authoritative survey from ancient times to the present. The set of six volumes covers a span of 2500 years, tracing how different cultures and societies have thought about, struggled for, developed and sustained peace in different ways and at different times. A Cultural History of Peace in the Enlightenment (1648-1815) is the fourth volume in this series.

NOTE 12.00 – 13.00

This talk provides an introduction to my current the book project which aims at reconstructing the political and intellectual biography of one of Germany’s most ostracized public intellectuals of the twentieth century: Hermann Budzislawski (1901-1978), a German-born Jewish publicist, politician and later professor of journalism. By applying a multilateral, transnational perspective, my study is expected to contribute to the existing studies on Socialism, anti-Fascism and exile, and the Cold War, and engages current methodological debates on identity, individuality and biography. Like many intellectuals of his generation, Budzislawski lived through four political regimes in Europe and the United States. Challenged to position himself in these changing political contexts, Budzislawski fashioned himself as socialist democrat, a western liberal and – ultimately – a hard-boiled communist. His life story allows for rare insights into the complexities and continuities of political and intellectual engagement in the twentieth century. On a more abstract level, it demonstrates the interaction between personal agency and the disciplinary power of political regimes to curtail expressions of individuality.

Abstract

This paper, based on my monograph The Making of the Greek Genocide: Contested Memories of the Ottoman Greek Catastrophe (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2017), examines the construction of a trauma narrative in Greece during recent decades about the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922 as a genocidal experience. The expulsion of Greeks from Turkey after the First World War is remembered as one of the great collective tragedies in modern Greek history. In the 1980s, descendants of the expelled Greeks from Pontos in northeastern Turkey started a campaign to mobilize their community behind the demand to have the persecution of their ancestors recognized as genocide. The role model was the Armenian campaign for genocide recognition which was gaining a momentum at the time. Since 1994 and 1998, the Greek Parliament recognizes the genocides of the Pontian Greeks and the Anatolian Greeks respectively, as a result of ethno-political lobbying by organizations representing descendants of refugees expelled from Anatolia in 1922-23. This is a re-interpretation of the history of the Greek Asia Minor Catastrophe that is a subject of controversy in Greece, with critics accusing it of altering and distorting an already established collective memory deemed essential to “national self-knowledge”. The notion of the Pontian Greek genocide has also been criticized within the Anatolian Greek community on the ground that it obscures the suffering of other Ottoman Greeks by exclusively highlighting the experience of Pontos during and after the Great War. As a result, the notion of the Ottoman Greek genocide has emerged as an alternative concept; expanding the circle of victims and stressing commonality with other Ottoman Christian groups. An important aspect of these controversies is the process of memorialization. Why did this memory-political activity erupt in the late 20th century instead of earlier? Activists concerned with genocide recognition in Greece have often claimed that the Greek state had actively suppressed knowledge about the atrocities in Asia Minor prior to the expulsion, out of diplomatic concern. The demand for the “right to memory” was thus presented as a popular response to a double historical injustice. The basic argument of this paper departs from sociologist Jeffrey Alexander’s notion of cultural trauma, or trauma drama, which opposes the common view that collective traumas exist in and of themselves. Individuals respond to trauma constructions, in response to different political, cultural and personal needs which change over time. In the paper, I explore how the process of memorialization changed from the aftermath of the Catastrophe in the 1920s to the emergence of Pontian Greek identity politics in the 1980s, using various press sources, literary works and activist publications as sources.

Dr Erik Sjöberg is Associate Professor of History at Södertörn University

Paper Abstract

As is well known, a Romanian national movement developed in the nineteenth century, as a process accompanying the formation of an independent state alongside several others in Central and Southeastern Europe. Independence involved international recognition by Europe’s ‘Great Powers’ on the level of international politics; but is also reflected in the personal experiences of Romanians who sought through travel and education to place themselves, both literally and figuratively, in ‘the Great European Family’. Travellers often reported being misidentified as Slavs, Turks, Russians or other as nationalities, and adopted different strategies to cope with this, be they of indignation, irony, imitation or indifference. Based on a broad selection of accounts of travels to Britain, France and Germany in the period 1825-1900, this paper will try to show the importance of both travel and writing to identity formation, understood as a rhetorical process in relation to, and sometimes in rejection of, European norms and templates.

Biography

Alex Drace–Francis is Associate Professor of Modern European Cultural History at the University of Amsterdam. He has published books on Romanian political and cultural development, on European travel writing, and on the history of the idea of Europe. Most recently he contributed to the Routledge History of East-Central Europe (2017), to theCambridge History of Travel Writing (2019) and to the volume Keywords in Travel Writing (both 2019).

Abstract

This paper, based on my monograph The Making of the Greek Genocide: Contested Memories of the Ottoman Greek Catastrophe (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2017), examines the construction of a trauma narrative in Greece during recent decades about the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922 as a genocidal experience. The expulsion of Greeks from Turkey after the First World War is remembered as one of the great collective tragedies in modern Greek history. In the 1980s, descendants of the expelled Greeks from Pontos in northeastern Turkey started a campaign to mobilize their community behind the demand to have the persecution of their ancestors recognized as genocide. The role model was the Armenian campaign for genocide recognition which was gaining a momentum at the time. Since 1994 and 1998, the Greek Parliament recognizes the genocides of the Pontian Greeks and the Anatolian Greeks respectively, as a result of ethno-political lobbying by organizations representing descendants of refugees expelled from Anatolia in 1922-23. This is a re-interpretation of the history of the Greek Asia Minor Catastrophe that is a subject of controversy in Greece, with critics accusing it of altering and distorting an already established collective memory deemed essential to “national self-knowledge”. The notion of the Pontian Greek genocide has also been criticized within the Anatolian Greek community on the ground that it obscures the suffering of other Ottoman Greeks by exclusively highlighting the experience of Pontos during and after the Great War. As a result, the notion of the Ottoman Greek genocide has emerged as an alternative concept; expanding the circle of victims and stressing commonality with other Ottoman Christian groups. An important aspect of these controversies is the process of memorialization. Why did this memory-political activity erupt in the late 20th century instead of earlier? Activists concerned with genocide recognition in Greece have often claimed that the Greek state had actively suppressed knowledge about the atrocities in Asia Minor prior to the expulsion, out of diplomatic concern. The demand for the “right to memory” was thus presented as a popular response to a double historical injustice. The basic argument of this paper departs from sociologist Jeffrey Alexander’s notion of cultural trauma, or trauma drama, which opposes the common view that collective traumas exist in and of themselves. Individuals respond to trauma constructions, in response to different political, cultural and personal needs which change over time. In the paper, I explore how the process of memorialization changed from the aftermath of the Catastrophe in the 1920s to the emergence of Pontian Greek identity politics in the 1980s, using various press sources, literary works and activist publications as sources.

Professor Svenja Goltermann  (University of Zurich)

Palimpsests of History: German War Returnees, Psychiatry, and the Making of Memory Since 1945

(Abstract to Follow)

Biography:

Svenja Goltermann is Professor of History at the University of Zurich. Her monograph The War in Their Minds: German Soldiers and Their Violent Pasts in West Germany, trans. Philip Schmitz was published by University of Michigan Press in 2017.  Link

Dr Rob Dale (Newcastle University)

Testing the Silence:  Trauma in the Archive of the Ukrainian Republican Neurosurgical and Neuropsychiatric Hospital for Invalids of the Great Patriotic War.

This paper re-examines evidence concerning the extent and treatment of war-related trauma in the Soviet Union in the wake of Great Patriotic War (1941-1945).  In so doing it challenges the deeply embedded narrative that Soviet Combatants escaped the Second World War without falling victim to the neuroses that affected the bourgeois West.  The paper tests the boundaries of the social, cultural and scientific silences around war-related trauma in late Soviet society.  First, it briefly outlines the historiographical context, before arguing that there was a much wider articulation of war-trauma than commonly than often suggested.  In their letters, diaries and memoirs, frontline soldiers regularly listed instances of concussion (kontuziia), described their psychological and emotional pain, and identified themselves as traumatized more openly and frequently than commonly appreciated.  Second, the paper attempts to illustrate these issues through a case study of how war-trauma was represented and treated in the archives of the Ukrainian Republican Neurosurgical and Neuropsychiatric Hospital for Invalids of the Great Patriotic War in Kharkhiv between 1945 and 1958.  These files offer the opportunity to reconstruct the kinds of traumatic reactions veterans experienced, how they were understood and treated by medics, as well as the disorderly and disruptive behaviour traumatised veterans displayed in this setting.  Taken together these files challenge the notion of a deadening silence around trauma in the Soviet Union.

Biography:

Rob Dale is Lecturer in Russian History at Newcastle a post he has held since September 2015. His work focuses on issues of post-war reconstruction in the Soviet Union after 1945. He is one of the co-convenors of the seminar.

Abstract

The literature on nationalism and violence has paid little attention to the role played by  violence in the process of making and remaking national polities. This paper will explore political violence as a generative force of nationalism and a useful tool in the process of nationalization. First, I will discuss new theoretical approaches to the relationship between nationalism and violence. Then I will compare two case studies in twentieth-century Spain: the Francoist State, 1936-1975 and the Basque Autonomous Community, 1977-2011. The comparison will allow for a revision of a number of concepts, including mass violence, genocide, political violence, terrorism and ethno-nationalist violence. By analyzing the complex relationship between violence and nationalization in Spain, this paper sheds light on the current disputes about collective memory and the narrations of the Spanish nation(s).

Biography

Fernando Molina is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of the Basque Country. He specializes on the study of nationalism and political violence. He has published, among other books, El peso de la identidad (Madrid, 2015); Los caminos de la nación (Granada, 2016) and ETA’s Terrorist Campaign (London-New York, 2017).

Paper Abstract

This paper will examine how the First World War changed attitudes towards monarchy in Britain. It will compare how three dynasties were seen across the conflict, looking at the positive narrative built around the public image of the Belgian monarchy, which, throughout the war, had very close ties to its allied British counterpart, with the Belgian King’s children sent to the UK for part of the conflict for safety reasons. It will contrast this with the narrative of tyrannical kingship that was used in the UK to portray the Prussian monarchy’s Kaiser Wilhelm II and his son – with its echoes of the rhetoric of the English Civil War denigration of Charles I. The Belgian and Prussian cases will then be compared with the evolving wartime depiction of the British royal dynasty. The paper will explore how the revised depictions of continental monarchies, which the wartime situation created and necessitated, fostered an increasing emphasis on the ‘difference’ of the British monarchy from its European peers. How a narrative of ‘English’ monarchical ‘exceptionalism’ was created through contrasting the British King and Queen with other European monarchies, and how this ultimately protected the British monarchy in the revolutionary era of 1917-1923 will be explored, as well as the long-term legacy of this process in distancing the British monarchy from continental royals. Within the British press and other public sphere depictions, the British monarchy by 1918 was portrayed as democratic, egalitarian, thrifty, hard-working and as ruling by ‘consent’ not by birthright and therefore as not necessitating any revolutionary overthrow – unlike the continental monarchies that the war, and the revolutions that it unleashed, had destroyed. How the image of the continental ‘other’ was used to create this British nationalist narrative of democratic monarchism and its implications for how we understand the impact of the Great War upon British culture will ultimately be evaluated.

Background, Research Interests, and Publications

Heather Jones is Professor in Modern and Contemporary History at University College London. Prior to UCL, she was an Associate Professor in International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin where she was a foundation scholar and a Government of Ireland Research Scholar, and St John’s College, Cambridge. She was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence and is a member of the Board of Directors of the International Research Centre of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne. Her 2011 monograph Violence Against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France and Germany, 1914-1920 was published by Cambridge University Press. She has co-edited two books and published over 27 scholarly articles and chapters on the First World War. Her next monograph on the British monarchy at war, 1914-1918 is forthcoming with CUP, 2019.

King George V during his visit to the cemeteries of the Western Front in 1922