Suchergebnisse

Intro -- Contents -- Foreword (Nigel Swain) -- Introduction -- 1. The Limits of Liberation March 1944-November 1945 -- 2. Struggles for Legitimacy November 1945-August 1947 -- 3. The Social Roots of Dictatorship August 1947-August 1949 -- 4. Revolution in Production August 1949-January 1951 -- 5. Expanding Workforces, Reproducing Traditions January 1951-June 1953 -- 6. Dynamics of Reform and Retreat June 1953-February 1956 -- 7. The Process of Revolution February-November 1956 -- 8. The Foundations of Consolidation November 1956-June 1958 -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Index.

AbstractThis article examines the process of state reconstruction in Austria and Hungary's borderlands that followed the Second World War. This process of state reconstruction was also a process of pacification, as it represented an attempt to (re)build states on the foundations of the military settlement of the war. The construction of legitimate state authority was at its most successful on the Austrian side of the border, where political actors were able to gain legitimacy by creating a state that acted as an effective protector of the immediate demands of the local community for security from a variety of threats. On the Hungarian side of the border the state was implicated with some of the actors who were seen as threatening local communities, something that produced political polarisation. These differences set the stage for the transition from war to cold war in the borderlands.

The essays in this special issue by Jack R. Friedman, Sándor Horváth, Peter Heumos, and Eszter Zsófia Tóth, reflect a growing interest in the social history of industrial labor and industrial communities in postwar Central and Eastern Europe. While they approach their subjects in different ways and employing distinct methodologies, the essays suggest how the history of the working class and its relationship to postwar socialist state formation across the region might be rethought. They illustrate how the protracted construction and consolidation of socialist states in the region was negotiated on an everyday level by working-class citizens, and that this was a dynamic process in which state projects interacted with a variety of working-class cultures, that were in turn segmented by notions of gender, skill, generation, and occupation. The essays all demonstrate, in their different ways, how working-class Eastern Europeans were not simply acted upon by the operation of dictatorial state power, but played a role in state formation across the region. This role was characterized by an ambiguous relationship between workers and those in power who sought legitimacy by claiming that their states represented the interests of the "working class." Yet the policies those in power pursued often confronted working-class communities directly in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania, as these essays suggest. This produced a complex relationship characterized by consent, accommodation and conflict that varied from locality to locality, state to state, and from period to period.

This article presents a re-examination of Hungary's postwar transition from the perspective of the politics of legitimacy that were deployed by the various significant political actors. It argues that postwar state formation following Soviet occupation and legitimacy were closely connected. Hungary's communists and their allies aimed to create a state based on the ideological formula of 'people's democracy', which in the Hungarian context led them to build a state based on the restricted social base of the industrial working class. They ignored or antagonised alternative political traditions, particularly those associated with the rural majority and middle classes, which were instead mobilised by an alternative project that rested on a democratised conservatism. This created two visions of a potential postwar political order. The contest between these two visions generated the bitter political struggles that characterised the late 1940s and shaped the social roots of dictatorship in the country.