The Phantom of the Good Soldier Švejk in the Czech Army Accession to NATO (2001–2002)

The article is based on the author’s ethnographic fieldwork in the Czech Armed Forces (2001–2002) in which she focused on the process of military professionalization—a set of extensive institutional reforms initiated upon the Czech Republic’s accession to NATO. She shows that these reforms were not limited to the military sector and involved efforts on the part of the state officials and the media to change the position of the military in the public sphere and culture. The goal of these changes was to bring the image of seriousness to the discredited Czech military, a process that demanded the obliteration of the cultural idiom of Švejk—a literary hero of the 1920s novel by Jaroslav Hašek and the representation of a peaceful resistance to war and military violence. In the course of the twentieth century, Švejk has become one of the most pervasive cultural references of the popular laughter at oppressive military power and has been a leading cultural idiom for the Czechs during the 30 years of German and Soviet military occupations. The article shows how the current official efforts at changing the image of the Czech military focus on the obliteration of Švejk’s cultural idiom, bringing him so frequently to the public discourse that they produce a phantom-like effect in which Švejk has come to haunt the process directed at his expurgation. The established cultural idiom of skepticism toward the army and military bureaucracy thus challenges the transition from communism to democracy and questions the reliance on military force, the imagery of violent conflicts, and just wars as necessary tools of politics.     

The post-communist left and the European Union: The Czech Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM) and the German Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS)

This article traces the development of two post-communist parties—the Czech KSČM and the German PDS—illustrating how they may continue to shape hard left policy in an expanded European Union (EU). It analyses three policy areas in detail (security and defense policy, employment policy and policies towards the institutional reform of the EU) and argues that, providing the parties avoid internal ideological conflict, they may come to play significant roles in influencing hard left policy in future years. The PDS is likely to act as a bridge for other hard left groups with more conservative agendas while the much larger KSČM may attempt to shift the ideological balance back towards more structurally conservative anti-capitalist policies.     

The Soviet Famine of 1931–1934: Genocide,a Result of Poor Harvests,or the Outcome of a Conflict Between the State and the Peasants?

Abstract

Interpretation of the Soviet famine of 1931–1934 (mainly in 1933) has long given rise to controversy. Publication of a Russian monograph by the leading spokesman for Russia in the international debates on the famine provides an opportunity both to analyse this Russian interpretation and to sum up the present state of knowledge about the famine and its causes.     

The founders of the association for the study of nationalities: the case of Stepan Horak (1920–1986) and the Shevchenko Scientific Society,USA

The present article critically evaluates the contribution of the Shevchenko Scientific Society, USA, and the founder of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN), Stepan Horak, to the genesis and development of the ASN.     

Local Nomenklatura in Communist Poland: The Case of the Warsaw Voivodship (1956–1970)

The nomenklatura system granted Poland’s communist party the opportunity to control key recruitment processes. This article analyses the rules whereby party authorities, between 1956 and 1970, introduced and implemented the nomenklatura system locally. The main goal is to examine how the system functioned, focusing on the strategy pursued by local party structures. The article shows that the agents manipulated the system and modified its rules. As a result, the nomenklatura system became one of the key forces behind the growing importance of informal political practices in Poland’s socialist-state system.     

Counting citizens: the transfer and translation of census categories from the international statistical congresses to the principality of Bulgaria (1872–1888)

This paper examines the nineteenth-century census as an early information technology and a medium for the transnational exchange of ideas in the nineteenth century. In particular, it considers how the ideas discussed by the International Statistical Congresses were directly applied in the newly established kingdom of Bulgaria in the first censuses from 1881 to 1888. It then examines how the legacy of Ottoman rule and the categories of the nineteenth-century Ottoman censuses unconsciously influenced the first census of Bulgaria, despite the desire of the new rulers to mark a significant break with the past. It also demonstrates how the nationalist feeling in the multi-ethnic former territory of the Ottoman Empire influenced the seemingly neutral categories of the first census. These categories then began to produce an implicit representation of the ideal Bulgarian citizen and so started the process of exclusion of the Turkish-speaking or Muslim population from full membership of the new body politic.     

“The (final) solution of the Gypsy-question:” continuities in discourses about Roma in Hungary, 1940s–1950s

Although the repression and elimination of Roma from Hungarian society in the 1940s did not reach the same extent as in the German and Austrian part of the Third Reich, their characterization as lazy and work-shy, used to justify their persecution, was similar. This paper establishes the presence of racial hygienic discourse related to Roma during the late 1930s and the first half of the 1940s in Hungary, and traces its survival and influence on regional policy-making in the postwar period. It furthermore explores the transformation and adaptation of racism and eugenics to the socialist ideology of equality based on citizens’ participation in productive work in the early state socialist period, including the first Party declaration on the situation of Roma in Hungary in 1961. Specific attention is paid to the role of medical experts who discussed the “radical solution of the Gypsy-question” in the early 1940s and the immediate years following World War II. Reflecting on wider transformations of racism in the postcolonial and post-World War II period in Europe and North America, the paper contributes to scholarship that complicates the evaluation of the state socialist past, including the connection between medicine and politics in Cold War Europe.     

Pantheon on a tablecloth: Yugoslav dictatorship and the confrontation of national symbols in Croatia (1929–1935)

This paper questions the effects of the state- and nation-building that occurred in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia during the 6 January Dictatorship (1929–1935) and points to the importance of symbols during this process. By using an ethno-symbolist approach and extending it to “banal nationalism,” the article analyzes some of the most prominent and influential symbols from within an everyday environment. Using the Croatian ethnic space as a framework, the article traces the population’s attitudes toward the Yugoslav national flag and representations of King Alexander – two of the most forced symbols in the centralized Yugoslav one state and one nation concept of nation-building. The regime possessed all the mechanisms of power necessary to impose these symbols, though most Croats clearly felt no connection to them. Despite severe penalties, they opposed the regime’s plans for national reconstruction of the country by displaying Croatian flags and various symbolic representations of Stjepan Radi? – as a martyr of the Croatian nation. By linking this problem to specific studies that deal with the development of nationalism, this paper outlines the struggle between Yugoslavism and Croatianism through acceptance and resistance toward the Yugoslav symbolism.     

Understanding the Politics of Latin America's Plural Lefts (Chávez/Lula): social democracy,populism and convergence on the path to a post-neoliberal world

This article explores the academic and public debate on the politics of Latin America's twenty-first century turn towards the left. It rejects dichotomous categorisations of ‘social democratic’ and ‘populist’ lefts as a disciplinary move by neoliberals that appeals to entrenched liberal predispositions. It suggests that such classificatory taxonomies are directly linked to an impoverished notion of the political, in which a politics of exalted expertise and enlightenment, based on reason, rationality and objectivity is juxtaposed against a lesser sphere of emotion, passion and ‘personalism’. This underlying dualism, which permeates academic disciplines and crosses lines of ideology, tracks established markers of hierarchical distinction in societies profoundly divided along multiple lines of class and cultural capital. This is explored through an analysis of the discourse of Chávez vis-a-vis Lula, while offering an appreciation of the subaltern origin of Lula's distinctive style of political leadership, from trade unionism to the presidency, based upon the creation of spaces of convergence.