Suchergebnisse

In 1997 the parliaments of both the Federal Republic of Germany & the Czech Republic ratified a joint declaration on reconciliation. The political conflict surrounding the agreement illustrates how collective memory influences & shapes ethnic relations. The path by which memories are institutionalized determines how they reenter politics. Although the purpose of the declaration was to clear the air & pave the way for a new era in ethnic relations in the region, Germans & Czechs with access to institutional resources who opposed specific passages in the declaration succeeded in impeding its passage & ultimately in watering down its meaning. Adapted from the source document.

Why do pogroms occur in some localities and not in others? Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg examine a particularly brutal wave of violence that occurred across hundreds of predominantly Polish and Ukrainian communities in the aftermath of the...

Why, after the outbreak of World War II in Eastern Europe, did the inhabitants of some communities erupt in violence against their Jewish neighbors? The authors hypothesize that the greater the degree of preexisting intercommunal polarization between Jews and the titular majority group, the more likely a pogrom. They test this proposition using an original data set of matched census and electoral returns from interwar Poland. Where Jews supported ethnic parties that advocated minority cultural autonomy, the local populations perceived the Jews as an obstacle to the creation of a nation-state in which minorities acknowledged the right of the titular majority to impose its culture across a country's entire territory. These communities became toxic. Where determined state elites could politically integrate minorities, pogroms were far less likely to occur. The results point to the theoretical importance of political assimilation and are also consistent with research that extols the virtues of interethnic civic engagement. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

Why, after the outbreak of World War II in Eastern Europe, did the inhabitants of some communities erupt in violence against their Jewish neighbors? The authors hypothesize that the greater the degree of preexisting intercommunal polarization between Jews and the titular majority group, the more likely a pogrom. They test this proposition using an original data set of matched census and electoral returns from interwar Poland. Where Jews supported ethnic parties that advocated minority cultural autonomy, the local populations perceived the Jews as an obstacle to the creation of a nation-state in which minorities acknowledged the right of the titular majority to impose its culture across a country's entire territory. These communities became toxic. Where determined state elites could politically integrate minorities, pogroms were far less likely to occur. The results point to the theoretical importance of political assimilation and are also consistent with research that extols the virtues of interethnic civic engagement.

Most standard models of democratization privilege class-based actors and the regimes they prefer to account for patterns of dictatorship and democracy. These models are ill suited, however, to explain political regime change in interwar Eastern Europe, where the dominant cleavage was not class but nationality. As a consequence, neither the process of regime change nor the resulting regime outcomes in Eastern Europe conform to the standard Western European models. Through a detailed analysis of key episodes of regime change in interwar Czechoslovakia and Poland, the authors explore the different ethnic and social coalitions on which political authority was built and the circumstances under which these two countries made the transition from one regime type to another. The depth of the ethnic divide meant that sustaining democracy in Eastern Europe required sidelining the urban bourgeoisie of the majority ethnic group from a dominant role in political life, a finding quite at odds with common views of the origins of democracy.