Suchergebnisse

This article addresses the persistence of anti-Semitism in Romania, placed in the context of some recent debates concerning the memory of the Holocaust in the country, as well as in the area of Central and Eastern Europe more broadly. It argues that, despite significant improvements in terms of legislation, the memory of the Holocaust remains a highly contested issue in contemporary Romania, torn between the attempts to join in the European memory of the Holocaust and local legacies that on the one hand focus primarily on the suffering of Romanians under the communist regime, and on the other perform a symbolic "denationalisation" of the Jewish minority in the country, whose own suffering is thus excised from national memory. It does so by focusing in particular on the debates surrounding the adoption of Law 217/2015, meant to clarify earlier legislation on Holocaust denial, and comparing them with those prompted by the Ukrainian "memory laws" passed in the same year. Taking into account both the national and international reactions to these very different pieces of legislation, the article shows the still-persisting discrepancy between a (mostly Western) "European" memory of the legacy of the twentieth century and local memory topoi characteristic of the countries that were part of the former socialist bloc.

This article answers the question how the situation of incorporation of Central Pomerania, formerly a German region, into Poland in 1945 affected the formation of its commemorative landscape. The author discusses how this affected the erection of new monuments after 1945, and if the example of German Great War memorials, erected here after 1918, had an influence on new Polish commemorative practices. A "competition of memories" is used here as the analytical tool. It is understood as a phenomenon that occurs in areas where two cultures are superimposed on one another, so primary commemorations are copied, employing the structures of the existing memorials, to produce secondary commemorations. Through an analysis of archival and fieldwork materials, the author examines the social practices of memory. The case studies are memorials recycled for commemorations connected to the Pomeranian Line and mythology of "recovery," legitimising the incorporation of Central Pomerania into Poland.

This article examines women's wartime experiences with a focus on Latvia's women volunteers in the Red Army in World War II. An estimated 8 percent of the Red Army was composed of women, who played a wide array of roles, including as snipers, combat engineers, medics, and frontline journalists. This level of female participation was unique in World War II, but a close examination of the phenomenon shows that motives and means for entry into the Red Army at the beginning of the war were not uniform. Our examination of the case of women volunteers from the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic reveals key factors that fed women's fervent desire to "get to the front." It shows particular ways in which the Red Army functioned as an unlikely refuge, sheltering women from some of the hardships and threats of life in the Soviet Russian interior, including hunger, loneliness, and a lack of warm clothing, while providing a means of exacting revenge against a mortal enemy. At the same time, it exposed women to extremes of violence and conflict. Dominant Soviet narratives of women in war have presented them in largely marginal roles or have silenced stories that failed to comport with triumphalist and masculine representations of World War II. This work uses the voices of women volunteers in the Latvian Riflemen's Divisions of the Red Army to construct an agent-centered history of motives, experiences, and memories.

How does the aftermath of 1989 shape the meaning of this event today? On the basis of an interview study with sixty-seven respondents from former East Germany and the Czech Republic administered in 2016–2017, this article asks how individuals articulate "economic memories" against the background of the 1990s, a time in which the transition to democracy was accompanied by labor market ruptures. It documents how salient themes of change are narrated in terms of work and its moral dimensions; and how memories of the time are concerned with mobilizing one's skills in the face of economic change. The article distinguishes five accounts by which respondents differently incorporate the historical event of 1989 into a vernacular, biographical logic. This framework offers a "bottom-up" perspective as a contribution to our understanding of the ongoing contestations over the meaning of the 1989 revolutions.

This article explores how the changes in commemorative culture in postcommunist Poland, namely, the loss of status of the traditional self-sacrificial martyr/hero at the expense of the passive victim, have produced new models for individual and collective identification based on vulnerability and suffering. Through the analysis of Pilgrim/Majewski's surrealist plays The Peregrinations of the Black Iza of Wałbrzych (2009) and The Testimonies of the Ups Downs Ups Ups Ups Downs and so on of Antek Kochanek (2012), I examine the artistic transformations of two nearly forgotten city legends into victims of communist gender oppression and cultural icons of tolerance and inclusiveness for the purposes of reinventing the Lower Silesian Town of Wałbrzych's postcollapse identity. I argue that Pilgrim/Majewski's plays challenge the centering of Wałbrzych's post-1989 identity discourse on the traumatic loss of the coal-mining industry by undermining hegemonic male heterosexuality's exclusive claim on collective trauma and inscribing female and queer trauma into collective suffering. By heroizing two marginal characters with "socially inappropriate" sexual behavior, the playwright brings to the fore alternative subjectivities predicated on gender, sexuality, and the body, thus advocating for a more inclusive, polyvalent citizenship. More broadly, the author questions essentialist understandings of the self as a set of immutable core attributes (hinting at Wałbrzych's clinging to its traditional identity as a coal-mining center) and promotes the social constructivist approach to identity as a fluid entity, a product of human definition and interpretation shaped by cultural and historical contexts.

The Council of the EU is the primary institution through which ministers of member states can express their positions on Commission proposals and vote upon legislation. This article first examines the extent to which ministers actually attend Council meetings before moving toward investigating the determinants of ministerial participation in over a period covering almost thirteen years between May 2004 and December 2016. It aims to identify determinants of why ministers from the Visegrad countries participate at some meetings and are absent from others. Using an original data set containing information about 940 Council meetings as well as several country-specific characteristics, we show that, on average, at about four out of every six meetings, ministers are absent. The results of our regressions indicate a pattern in which holding the office of the EU's rotating presidency, the number of b-points on the agenda, and the size of the government increase the likelihood of ministerial participation in meetings. In contrast, high levels of popular support for Eurosceptic parties and holding of national legislative elections decrease the probability of ministerial attendance. Moreover, meetings of Council formations related to policy areas with a low level of EU competence are significantly less likely to be attended by ministers.

The 2015 refugee crisis has held the attention of Romanian news media, as one of the most challenging issues for the European Union in the last decade, even though Romania is not situated on the main routes on which refugees arrive. Our research focuses on the variation of issue-specific news frames in time, according to media type, and by the countries covered, also addressing the locally salient issue of religion. Articles from the websites of the top-ranked six Romanian news outlets were analyzed, including three quality papers and three tabloids (N=6,183), from 1 April 2015 to 30 September 2017. Using a computer-assisted, cluster-based frame analysis, we identify six primary, mutually exclusive and six secondary, nonexclusive frames: European crisis, context/victimization, relocation/distribution, international conflict, and social problem, national costs, religious issues, US immigration policy, humanitarian/international. The variations in their salience follow the general European tendency toward securitization. At the same time, the emphasis on the issue as a European crisis indicates a tendency characteristic of Central and Eastern European media coverage. Co-occurrence patterns of frames and specific countries also indicate that the salience of some globally recurrent frames varies by countries covered.

The integration process is increasingly politicized across the member states of the European Union (EU). While this phenomenon has been analyzed from many perspectives, this article aims to look at a so far neglected aspect—how increased levels of politicization of the EU might have impacted on the role small states play in the EU decision-making process. Using the case of Brexit negotiations, the article starts from the hypothesis that higher levels of politicization could increase the influencing capacity of smaller states. As national sovereignty concerns may become more relevant due to politicization, it can be expected that small states become more active in EU-level negotiations, especially in cases where the future of the integration is also at stake. However, looking at the cases of Czechia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Slovenia, the article concludes that the behavior of these countries is still determined by their small-state character. Interestingly, different levels of EU politicization did not determine their bargaining strategies in Brexit negotiations. Consequently, while we see a slight variation in the level of engagement, the article argues that the influencing capacity of the member states under scrutiny was mainly driven by their small state characteristics.

Two former industrial giants on opposite sides of the globe—the well-known and extensively studied city of Detroit (USA) and the lesser-known but regionally important city of Łódź (Poland)—developed in historically differing economic and political circumstances but have much in common. In both cases, postwar prosperity brought the working class to the center of the social imaginary, resulting in the emergence of a corporate welfare state on one side of the Atlantic Ocean and a socialist one on the other. Thus, two "workers' El Dorados" were based on almost opposite lifestyles, values and models of society, and each lasted for no more than one generation. Changes in industrial structures and locations, the inflexibility of the mono-industrial giants, and a general shift to late capitalism and the post-Fordist mode of production affected both cities. Workers' biographies were experienced through the primacy of work as a means of individual, social, and state reproduction. Factory work offered a device for the allocation of social worth and welfare benefits across time in both contexts. The latter is examined by the construct of a "good worker" and the creation of an imagined, expected life course in the postwar welfare projects, as well as the generational division of workers.

This article explores the literary writing of ethnographers, a genre that has not yet been systematically researched in Polish sociocultural anthropology. The theoretical framework of the article is built on the concepts of reflexivity and auto-ethnography. Its main goal was to trace these issues in three texts of female Polish ethnographers in the first half of the twentieth century. These authors represent three different structural situations in the field: a European researcher in a colonial context (Maria Czaplicka), a member of the intelligentsia studying peasants (Kazimiera Zawistowicz-Adamska), and an amateur "native ethnographer" in her own community (Maria Pilchówna). One of the results of the analysis is inventing the concept of "emphatic hegemony" grasping the situation when an empathic and sympathetic observer can be also a dominant and patronizing writer, even if she is a woman. Another feature of the analyzed texts lies in their patriotic subtext.

The existing research suggests that socially rooted new political parties are more likely to be reelected to parliaments than parties emerging without links to preexisting social groups. It is argued that the two groups face different prospects of institutionalization: Rooted parties are more viable because their links to preexisting societal groups contribute to a higher sustainability of their electoral support and stronger institutionalization. We assess the link between the origin of parties, their level of institutionalization, and their electoral performance in the context of Slovakia, a new Eastern European democracy. We add to the existing state of knowledge in three ways. First, we empirically assess the link between the social origin of parties and their level of institutionalization. We also provide rich empirical material on the intraparty processes resulting in various levels of institutionalization. Subsequently, we assess whether rooted parties record better electoral performance than political entrepreneur parties. Second, we provide some illustration of the fact that agential factors, especially the decisions and activities related to leadership contestation, directly impact both party institutionalization and electoral performance. Third, we show that developing the links to a sociostructurally well-defined electorate may be a viable strategy to secure a parliamentary relevance for a prolonged period of time for some political entrepreneurs. Our findings suggest that parties with different levels of institutionalization are able to secure reelection, and that their electoral performance is not directly linked to their social origins.

Robert Gliński's post-communist film Cześć Tereska generated extensive controversy as a story of Polish teenagers disconnected from traditional morality in an anonymous apartment block. Its central character of a young girl, Tereska, makes the film appear to be about femininity and danger in 1990s neoliberal Poland. In an alternative interpretation using the approach that neoliberalism is a form of governmentality, an analysis of male characters surrounding Tereska demonstrates that the film can also be interpreted as a depiction of the inability of individuals to achieve neoliberal ideals of masculinity. The 1990s' dominant ideology of individualism and freedom created expectations that men would embody a self-contained, self-restrained potency that functioned to curb the excesses of the society around them. We argue that the impossibility of achieving this embodiment generates tensions in the film that are only resolved at times when Tereska is made to take on the responsibility for managing men's desires. While several scholars have pointed to a "crisis of masculinity" in Eastern Europe, we find that Cześć Tereska can be seen as a narrative that delineates the specific effects of anxious masculinities on female-gendered agency and autonomy, but that is limited in its ability to fully work out those implications.