The first volume of our newsletter has just come out, featuring reports from our visiting scholars, information on our upcoming workshops and call for applications, latest talks and publications and much more! Keep a lookout for a new volume every term.
You can view the full newsletter here: Reluctant Internationalists Newsletter Vol 1
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Homecomings: Experiences and narratives of anti-fascist resistance veterans and the construction of post-war Europe
April 24-25, 2015
Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck College
In the aftermath of WW2, the narrative of widespread anti-fascist resistance became the true foundational myth of both Eastern and Western Europe, and the memory of the resistance came to constitute the core element in national identities and post-war legitimation of European states. However, the experiences of actual resistance soldiers at the end and in the immediate aftermath of the war were complex and multi-layered, and quite often far from celebratory and victorious. This conference will tell a much-neglected transnational European story of experiences of WW2 resistance, and address the mismatch between resistance soldiers’ expectations and their post-war socio-political realities. While historians of European resistance have primarily addressed the theme in isolated national contexts, this conference will explore the striking commonalities in veterans’ experiences across the divided European continent: why was it that resistance soldiers and veterans in so many different political settings, and both East and West of the Iron Curtain, reported a similar feeling of neglect, misunderstanding and betrayal? How can we explain the similarities in the way in which different European countries dealt with their resisters and veterans, and appropriated the narratives and memories of the resistance? The conference will thus cross the traditional boundaries of European historiography, and draw comparisons between the Soviet Union, East and Central Europe, and Western Europe. By including the Soviet Union in a broader European historical narrative, the conference will explore to what extent veterans’ experiences as well as associations cut across Cold War faultlines. Among other themes, the conference will advance our understanding of the history of soldiers’ trauma – physical and psychological – in the context of post-war social and cultural history and memory. It will examine the issue of veterans’ reactions to states’ attempts at appropriating or sanitizing the memory of the resistance, and veterans’ ability to influence national politics; internationalism of veterans’ organizations; veterans’ conceptualizations of justice, retribution and reconciliation; as well as everyday experiences of resistance soldiers in post-war societies and (both harmonious and fraught) relationships between different veterans’ associations.
Panellists are sought to present papers addressing one or more of the following questions: Why did post-war political and military authorities develop such an uneasy relationship with resistance soldiers’ groups, and why were these celebrated victors and anti-fascists often considered a threat to social order and stability? How did the relationship of veterans’ groups to the state evolve over time, and how was it affected by major political and social events of the Cold War? What were the relationships between different veterans’ groups and associations? What was the social, cultural and political position of veterans in post-war Eastern and Western Europe, and did they hold any significant national or international leverage? To what extent was the memory of WW2 shaped by the veterans’ memory/input? What were the early narratives of the resistance, generated from below, and how did they relate to the subsequent construction of memories of WW2? How did resistance soldiers imagine their role in post-war societies? Finally, how did WW2 resistance soldiers engage with the ideological struggles of the incipient Cold War, and how did the Cold War affect the veterans’ status?
Please send resumes, paper titles and abstracts (up to 400 words) to a.antic@bbk.ac.uk by December 7, 2014.
Contact information:
Dr Ana Antic, conference convener
Post-doctoral Researcher
Department of History, Classics and Archaeology
Birkbeck, University of London
26-28 Russell Square
a.antic@bbk.ac.uk
Industrial equipment arrives in Albania from the Soviet Union, 1951.
On Socialist Globalization
By Elidor Mehilli
The “Reluctant Internationalists” project is about the history of international collaboration—experts, policy-makers, doctors, planners, and diplomats—and the intended and unintended consequences of these exchanges in the twentieth century. Reflecting this theme, the project itself is international in conception: fellows come from across the Atlantic, as do occasional visiting scholars. This is a major strength.
One other important contribution of the project, to my mind, is the emphasis on Europe’s place in the story of internationalism. Histories of internationalist movements and the global Cold War have often intentionally looked beyond the European continent to highlight the role of non-European actors. Such efforts can be valuable. But they ignore the fact that there have been historically neglected and abused peripheries within Europe. This is a good opportunity to assess these internal divisions within a supposedly integrating continent and “periphery-periphery” relations in the world more broadly.
A highlight of the project, this past summer, was the conference “Agents of Internationalism,” which brought together scholars working on population transfers, relief workers, child-welfare programs, and transnational approaches to disease—among other topics.
During my residency in London (June—July 2014), I worked on a book on socialist globalization—the state-directed but also informal circulation of practices and planners—through the angle of Albania under Yugoslav, Soviet, Eastern bloc, and Chinese patronage. After the Second World War, tiny Albania came to embody the ethos of socialist internationalism, as Soviet advisers, East German engineers, and Czechoslovak technicians descended on the country to lift it up from poverty and deliver on the promise of a workers’ state (which governed an overwhelmingly rural populace). But by the early 1960s socialist internationalism seemed broken. China and the Soviet Union quarreled, Albania and North Korea sought to go their own way, and Third World countries desperately tried to negotiate space for themselves. My book, then, is a study of local and global socialist commonalities that take shape despite political allegiances.
During my residency, I was fortunate to present a chapter of my manuscript to the project participants and receive a good deal of valuable feedback. Informal chats were as productive. London, needless to say, offers fantastic resources. My only disappointment was the fact that England, my lifelong favorite national soccer team, was kicked out early from the World Cup in Brazil. To share the pain in the pub was, at least, of some consolation.
Elidor Mehilli was the 2014 Visiting Research Fellow of the Reluctant Internationalists project. Applications are currently being accepted for the 2015 Visiting Research Fellowship. Please see the Call for Applications.
In June 2014 we welcomed Elidor Mehilli to Birkbeck as the Reluctant Internationalists’ first Visiting Research Fellow. Elidor’s work focuses on Albania and its place in the socialist world of the 1950s and 1960s. In the video below you can see Elidor discussing his work with Jessica Reinisch, including his interest in socialist internationalism, the changing relationship between Albania and Mao’s China, and the role of experts in the Cold War world.
If you’re interested in applying for our 2015 Visiting Fellow position, please see the call for applications in the post below.
The Reluctant Internationalists project is now accepting applications for its 2015 summer research fellowship.
The Reluctant Internationalists is a four year Wellcome Trust-funded project, run by Dr Jessica Reinisch at Birkbeck College, University of London, with a team of four full-time researchers. Each summer term we invite a Visiting Research Fellow to join the project team.
Fellowships are open to academic researchers working on any aspect of the history of internationalism or international organisations in the twentieth century. The Fellow will be entitled to £1,300 per month for a maximum of three months. The Fellow will be expected to collaborate with the Reluctant Internationalists team by taking part in our reading group and project meetings, and by helping us to organise a seminar, lecture or other public or outreach event. The Fellow will be a member of the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology for the duration of their stay, and will have access to Birkbeck’s and the University of London’s facilities, including use of a shared office for visiting fellows in Birkbeck’s Russell Square site. Successful applicants can take up their posts any time between April and July 2015.
Applications consisting of a CV, a one page research overview, a suggested event and the preferred period of residence, should be sent to reluctant.internationalists@gmail.com by 1 December 2014.
For further details about the project and previous visiting fellows, please see http://www.bbk.ac.uk/reluctantinternationalists, or contact reluctant.internationalists@gmail.com
The Black Sea in the Socialist World
Birkbeck College, University of London
February 6-7, 2015
Supported by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, The Wellcome Trust, The Society for the Social History of Medicine, and The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities
Call for Papers
In May 1962, shortly before the Cuban Missile Crisis, Soviet premiere Nikita Khrushchev toured Bulgaria. Under banners declaring “Forward, to Communism!” at a mass meeting in Varna, a Bulgarian health resort, Khrushchev lauded the Bulgarian people for the way in which they had developed the Black Sea coastline. Model health resorts like Varna, which drew visitors from all over the world, were the pride of the Bulgarian people, he claimed. These resorts demonstrated the commitment of the socialist states to the health and welfare of the people. He contrasted the health resorts on the socialist side of the Black Sea to the NATO missile build-up across the sea in Turkey. The health resorts of the Black Sea demonstrated the peace-loving nature of the socialist states to the world. “The Black Sea should be a sea of peace and the friendship of the peoples,” he argued.
While interest in the place of the Black Sea in the history of tourism, public health and architecture has grown rapidly in recent years, leading to ground-breaking studies, these works have treated each topic and national context in isolation. Works on Cold War diplomacy, too, have not taken into full consideration the position of the Black Sea as a site of cultural and political diplomacy in the socialist world. This workshop seeks to bring together historians studying the Black Sea or whose work involves the Black Sea from a variety of perspectives and both historians of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. The objective of the workshop is to develop the idea of the Black Sea littoral as an international meeting place of the socialist world.
As Khrushchev’s words suggested, the idea of the socialist Black Sea was closely linked to ideas of health and welfare during times of peace. The Black Sea littoral became a favoured health retreat of the political elite and soon became a setting for high politics and diplomatic negotiations. With the Yalta conference (February 4-11, 1945), the place of the Black Sea as a site of East-West diplomacy was formalized. But the Black Sea also became a place of less formal international exchange. From international children’s camps to delegation visits, at the Black Sea people from the socialist world introduced visitors from all over the world to the socialist way of life, in a Cold War contest fought over standards of living.
Participants are sought to present papers which may but will not necessarily fall into the following themes: The divided sea in the Cold War; the political context of Soviet-Turkish, East-West and socialist relations; ideas of Europe; international law; mobility, migration and tourism; commodities; socialist design and urban planning; environmental health; international congresses and festivals, and environmental history. Papers relating to all countries of the Eastern Bloc and the USSR, and which emphasize transnational and international components, are welcome.
Informal enquiries are welcome. Please send paper titles and abstracts (around 300 words) by November 15, 2014 to j.conterio@bbk.ac.uk. Workshop papers will be pre-circulated and are due January 15, 2015.
Contact Details
Dr Johanna Conterio, conference convener
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Birkbeck College, University of London
Department of History, Classics and Archaeology
26-28 Russell Square
London, United Kingdom, WC1B 5DQ
j.conterio@bbk.ac.uk
While we were away from our blog, the researchers of the Reluctant Internationalists were busy this summer. A number of us saw publications come out, which may be of interest to some of our readers.
Dora Vargha published an article in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, “Between East and West: Polio Vaccination across the Iron Curtain in Cold War Hungary” (v. 88, no. 2, Summer 2014), which is part of her larger book project, Iron Curtain/Iron Lungs: Governing Polio in the Cold War.
Jessica Reinisch edited, with Matthew Frank, a special issue of Contemporary European History, “Refugees and the Nation-State in Europe, 1919–59,” (v. 49, no. 3, July 2014), which examines how refugees and refugee crises were defined and managed by European nation-states in the forty years after the First World War. Read their introduction for a sketch of the historical context of the refugee problem in Europe and an analysis of the common themes of the papers.
The special issue continues conversations started at a conference Jessica Reinisch and Matthew Frank convened at Birkbeck in 2010, “The Forty Years’ Crisis: Refugees in Europe, 1919-1959.”
Ana Antic published two articles: “Heroes and Hysterics: ‘Partisan Hysteria’ and Communist State-building in Yugoslavia after 1945,” in Social History of Medicine (v. 27, no. 3, August 2014), and, earlier this year, “Therapeutic Fascism: ‘Re-educating’ Communists in Serbia, 1942-1944,” in History of Psychiatry (v. 25, no. 1, March 2014). Both articles are part of her larger research project on the development of psychiatry and psychiatric culture under the conditions of Nazi occupation in Eastern Europe and in its immediate aftermath.
In other publishing news, Dora Vargha was awarded the 2014 Young Scholar Book Award by the International Committee for the History of Technology for her dissertation, Iron Curtain, Iron Lungs: Governing Polio in Cold War Hungary, completed at Rutgers University in 2013.
Also over the summer, we hosted our first major workshop, “Agents of Internationalism”. Thank you to all the participants who made that workshop a great success. Please keep your eye out for further posts about the workshop and about our work together with our first visiting fellow, Elidor Mehilli, Assistant Professor at Hunter College in New York.
This will be a very eventful year for our research group, so please keep your eye out for more details about upcoming talks, events and publications, and for calls for papers. In the meantime, welcome back, and we wish everyone a good start to the new term.
Read Dora Vargha’s blog post in The Guardian on Outbreaks of disease and war: polio’s history with conflict
The World Health Organization has declared polio as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern; in the past Polio eradication brought warring nations together – might it do so again now?
Mosaic, the new online magazine of the Wellcome Trust recently published a feature article by Penny Bailey titled “Hungary’s Cold War with Polio”, based on Dora Vargha’s research. The BBC and the New Statesman also took up the story. Find out about a more personal take on the Cold War politics of epidemics here.
19 to 20 June 2014
This workshop is the first in a series of events organised under the umbrella of The Reluctant Internationalists, a four-year project which examines the development and institutionalisation of international collaboration in twentieth-century Europe.
The workshop programme is now available at http://www.bbk.ac.uk/reluctantinternationalists/events/
The workshop is co-hosted by Contemporary European History and has three main aims:
Each of the seven panels will examine one group with international connections (relief workers, women, children, refugees, collaborators, soldiers, and ‘experts’) and identify continuities and disjunctures in the appeal and application of different internationalist programmes and agendas.
Attendance is free but places are limited. Please contact Ana Antic a.antic@bbk.ac.uk to reserve a space.
Reposted from CEEHM Network:
Katharina Kreuder-Sonnen
The articles, published in English and German language, deal with the history of epidemics, public health policies and institutions, the popularisation of hygiene, and eugenics in the 19th and 20th century. The regional focus is on Poland, Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union. The issue covers a wide range of topics, from anti-cholera campaigns in the Kazakh steppe in the 19th century by Anna Afanasyeva, through the relationship of science and policy in an effort against malaria in Soviet Azerbaijan by Matthias Braun, to German hygienic institutions and colonial agenda in the turn of the 20th century by Justyna A. Turkowska. Katrin Steffen explores the role of experts in developing public health in Poland, Angelika Strobel analyses hygiene propaganda efforts and the evaluation of their effectiveness in Russian provinces, while Birte Kohtz focuses on eugenics in the Soviet Union.
For a complete table of contents and abstracts see http://www.steiner-verlag.de/programm/zeitschriften/jahrbuecher-fuer-geschichte-osteuropas/jgo-6120134.html
When we started to think about ways to visually present the concept of internationalism for the purposes of our research project, we faced a number of difficulties. What do we mean by ‘internationalism’, and who is the most appropriate to represent it? What exactly does ‘internationalism’ do?
In order to resolve these questions, we realised that we must first understand and contextualise the multiplicity of meanings assigned to the concept. In historiographical literature, we have regularly come across the assumption that internationalism is bound to represent a force of good, a benevolent process predicated on humanitarian assumptions, and meant to increase mutual understanding and respect between nations. However, such scholarly readings seem to omit a very important point: in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in particular, internationalism came to denote a number of different and often unrelated processes and efforts which included governments, non-governmental institutions, politicians, experts of all kinds, refugees and stateless people, etc. Moreover, internationalism appeared in a number of different guises, and proclaimed radically different ideological, social and political aims and goals, some of which were indeed far from humanitarian, democratic or cosmopolitan. Even more importantly, internationalism was perceived in a variety of ways by different audiences. And while the globe of the world seems to be rather popular as a positive symbol of internationalism, a number of scholars dealing with the history of this phenomenon have often tended to overlook the globe’s cynical or sardonic uses (and their broader implications). Such uses, though, have been equally important for articulating critical appraisals of some particularly negative effects of certain forms of internationalism. It is, therefore, our aim to explore alternative visualisations of internationalism, and to use them as a tool for understanding and historicising radically different visions and interpretations of this concept.
Figure 1 (Source: Bowman Gray Collection of World Wars I and II, Rare Book Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill)
It was in the course of WWI that different visions of the international order clashed causing a veritable global explosion, while the orgy of what came to be seen as purposeless violence and chauvinism provoked disappointment in the ranks of those who hoped that a more tightly interconnected world would lead to more stable peace. Interestingly, while WWI marked the failure of nineteenth-century liberal internationalism, it was also the origin of a new and highly ambitious concept of ordering international relations. In a series of Italian postcards from WWI, several cartoonists and painters, such as R. Ventura and Aurelio Bertiglia, articulated this profound disappointment with some of the predominant agents of internationalism at the time, and used the image of the globe in imaginative, sarcastic and unusual ways in order to reinforce their political message.
These postcards were an essential part of WWI political propaganda, and contributed to the extremely extensive propaganda campaigns undertaken by the Entente governments to discredit German military conduct and involvement. One of the most striking phenomena related to WWI was the importance political governments attached to public mobilization through atrocity reports and similar psychological techniques to demonize the enemy; moreover, from the very beginning of the war, different governments worked to revise or falsify original documents in order to place the blame for the outbreak of WWI on the enemy side, so that historiographical debates regarding the origins of WWI began as early as 1914. In 1918, Germany was forced to accept full responsibility for ‘all the loss and damage’ caused to the Allied countries; however, throughout the conflict, the Allied governments carefully worked toward this placing of the full burden of war guilt on Germany (and her allies). The ‘guilt clause’ was carefully prepared through numerous propaganda campaigns, which depicted Germany in particular as a brutal and even demonic force. It was this strong anti-German sentiment that informed the theme and style of the Italian postcards. The postcards were created in 1915 or 1914, around the time the Italian government negotiated joining the war on the side of the Entente against her former allies in the Triple Alliance – Germany and Austria-Hungary – which explains the political edge of the postcards. As is clear from Figure 1, the postcards also expressed a strong anti-Austrian feeling, which was hardly surprising given Italy’s long-standing territorial pretensions to large parts of the Habsburg Empire.
The first postcard, from about 1914, depicts a ‘bloody handshake’ between the leaders of two Central Powers: Austria-Hungary’s Franz Joseph and Germany’s Wilhelm II. It is captioned ‘The Pact’, and uses the globe to articulate a pithy critique of the German- and Austrian-led attempts at (re-)ordering the international affairs: through their particular vision of internationalism, the Habsburg Emperor and the German Kaiser have plunged the entire world into a bloody conflict. The alliance between the two powers is then held solely responsible for the outbreak of the conflict, and their incompetent leadership as well as the malicious effects of their political friendship are exposed to ridicule and contempt. Yet another postcard, from 1915, communicates a very similar political message, but, in addition, emphasizes the Central Powers’ criminal negligence towards the rest of the world, with which they toyed for their own selfish purposes and self-aggrandizement. In Figure 2, Wilhelm II and Franz Joseph play football with the globe before an assortment of international onlookers. The caption says ‘How small the world is’, and captures perfectly the cartoonist’s message regarding the two leaders’ self-centredness, ignorance and inadequacy.
Figure 2 (Source: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz)
In a number of postcards, Germany, represented by Wilhelm II, was depicted as extremely militaristic, aggressive, ruthless and greedy for world power. In a series of pictures, Wilhelm II endeavours to take possession of the world in a number of ways. In Figure 3, dressed in a full military uniform and also wearing a helmet, the Kaiser actually reaches to grab the globe, while war and violence rage behind his back. The map of Italy is quite prominent on the globe itself, while the cartoon implies quite forcefully that the conflict was a result of Wilhelm’s obsession with ruling the world. Interestingly, the sun itself is against Germany’s (unnatural?) expansion, and warns the Kaiser in the caption that it will burn his hands.
Figure 3 (Source: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz)
In Figures 4 and 5, the same interpretation of Germany’s relationship with the rest of the world was expressed, and German militarism and aggression singled out as the primary culprits for the contemporary global catastrophe. In both postcards, Wilhelm II attempts to actually eat the globe. In Figure 4, the caption calls him ‘the glutton’, and he obviously finds his food of choice a bit too hard to crack.
Figure 4 (Source: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz)
In Figure 5, in which Wilhelm II actually cuts into a watermelon in the shape of the globe, the postcard similarly warns him: ‘Mind you, this might give you indigestion.’ This cartoon further emphasized the supposed bloodthirstiness and criminality of Germany’s wartime conduct and ambitions: on Wilhelm’s table, the globe of the world is accompanied by a baby with French and Belgian flags sticking out of its belly, and a bottle of wine filled with ‘Latin blood.’ The Kaiser’s sword and helmet, the ultimate symbols of his and his country’s aggressive militarism, rest by his feet.
Figure 5 (Source: Bowman Gray Collection of World Wars I and II, Rare Book Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill)
It was these and similar critiques that aimed to contribute to strengthening public support for the war, and to foster and encourage nationalist, even chauvinistically anti-German and anti-Austrian, sentiments. Quite paradoxically, however, they also provoked a far-reaching rethinking of possibilities, limitations and potential meanings of political internationalism in Europe during and after WWI, and gave an important impetus to implementing a new, more ambitious vision of world governance, which was to be institutionalised and developed in the interwar years. It was in this context of the war, destruction and vicious nationalist propaganda that the project of internationalism was infused with renewed significance, and brought back to the centre of political discussions. These postcards articulated powerful criticisms of Europe’s pre-war alliance system and pointed out its deleterious consequences; their messages were part of a broader movement that emphasised the shortcomings of pre-WWI forms of international cooperation, and encouraged a political and intellectual search for a different postwar order which would ensure permanent peace.
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