Suchergebnisse

The essay examines the attempts of communist regimes to legitimize their states and analyzes them within the framework of European Staatswissenschaft of the time. The discussion of the construction of Soviet statehood is compared with the communist nation-states founded during and in the aftermath of WWII. The essay argues that Stalin abandoned Lenin's revolutionary order for the introduction of a Stalinist volonté générale in the 1936 constitution. During WWII, however, the Stalinist leadership ended the universalistic ambition of the USSR and fostered the formation of communist nation-states. The cases of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Germany show how communist statehood could be legitimized differently from the Soviet case and how it remained tied to national tradition. In a different manner such continuities even existed in Russia where Stalin created his own form of Scheinkonstitutionalismus. Yet, despite national peculiarities, from 1936 until their demise, European communists underlined that their states—unlike the liberal orders of the West—were supported by the volonté générale of their peoples.

(Version 1.0, siehe auch Version 2.0) Der Begriff Diktatur stammt aus dem römischen Staatsrecht, wo er die temporäre Herrschaft eines Diktators bezeichnete, der zur Verteidigung der Republik über dem Gesetz stand. Diese klassische Bedeutung wurde im 20. Jahrhundert vielfach überformt; der moderne Diktaturbegriff entstand als Eigen- und Fremdbezeichnung für die kommunistische, faschistische und nationalsozialistische Herrschaft. Der Artikel unseres Autoren Jan C. Behrends rekonstruiert die Geschichte des Begriffs im 20. Jahrhundert mit einem Schwerpunkt auf den russischen und deutschen Fall und blickt abschließend auf die zeithistorische Forschung der Gegenwart.

"Politische Führung in der Diktatur gründet sich auf persönliche Netzwerke im Innern der Macht und den Versuch, eine charismatische, 'emotionale Vergemeinschaftung' (Max Weber) zwischen Herrscher und Beherrschten herzustellen." (Autorenreferat)

IntroductionIn 1944 Poland was re-established for the second time in the twentieth century. Between the Lublin manifesto of 22 July 1944 and the Potsdam conference of summer 1945 a communist-dominated regime had formed, which was had little in common with the Second Republic that had been founded between the declaration of independence on 9 November 1918 and the peace of Riga with Bolshevik Russia signed in March 1921. Post-war Poland was significantly smaller, geographically further to the west, and ethnically more homogeneous. The Holocaust had destroyed Europe's most sizeable Jewish population, the loss of thekresy(eastern borderlands) to the USSR had reduced the size of eastern-Slavic minorities and the expulsion of the Germans from East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia further helped to create an ethnically homogeneous country. For the first time in her history, Poland had the structure of a nation-state. Through the destruction and catastrophe of Nazi occupation and genocide the goal of firebrand Polish nationalists such as Roman Dmowski had been achieved: a Poland inhabited by ethnic Poles. Still, the new Poland was less independent than its predecessor; from 1944 onwards it was part of the emerging post-war Soviet Empire. Polish sovereignty had fallen victim to Stalin's "revolutionary-imperial paradigm." Expansion of Moscow's power was as much a priority of the Soviet leadership as the export of Bolshevik revolution.