A new issue of  the Journal of Contemporary History is now available and contains the following articles:

Eugene Kulischer, Joseph Schechtman and the Historiography of European Forced Migrations by Antonio Ferrara

This article deals with two prominent figures in the historiography of twentieth-century European forced migrations: Eugene Kulischer and Joseph Schechtman. Their studies, although published between 1946 and 1962, are still among the standard works on the subject and are as yet unsurpassed in their scope and breadth of outlook, despite the flurry of new publications on the subject after the opening of East Central European archives after 1989. In this article I strive to explain how and why they were able to accomplish such a scholarly feat, paying special attention to their biographies which I have tried to reconstruct, using, for the first time, not only their own writings but also personal testimonies from their students and disparate archival sources located in the United States and Israel. I also discuss the strengths and weaknesses of their works by comparing them with more recent works on the same subject. This is, to my knowledge, the first attempt to reconstruct on the basis of archival evidence the lives and works of the two most important historians of a phenomenon whose impact on the overall history of Europe (and especially of its East Central part) is now generally recognized.

Reframing the Interwar Peace Movement: The Curious Case of Albert Einstein by Ofer Ashkenazi

The diversity of transnational interrelations within the peace movement has been commonly overlooked in studies on the anti-war struggle in the interwar years. Consequently, these studies have often provided an over-simplified view of the formation of anti-war ideologies, worldviews, and objectives. Contrary to this tendency, this article examines Albert Einstein’s engagement with the peace movement in a way that emphasizes its transnational facets. Associating Einstein’s worldview with ideas that were prevalent in transnational organizations in the decade preceding the second world war, it explains the scientist’s propensity to endorse seemingly incompatible ideas as inherent to the nature of these organizations. Focusing on his relationships with two apparently contradictory organizations – the War Resisters’ International and The New Commonwealth Society – I argue that Einstein’s views reflect a set of principles that were held by many supporters of both organizations. Mainly, these principles constituted a revision of nineteenth-century liberal thought which sought to marginalize the impact of nationalist sentiments, redefine the social responsibilities of the state, and restrict its sovereignty. Thus, shifting the emphasis to the transnational aspects of the peace movement would not only make sense of Einstein’s ‘confused’ politics, but also shed new light on interwar pacifism, its objectives, popularity, and enduring influence.

H.M. Hyndman and the Russia Question after 1917 by Markku Ruotsila

In the last four years of his life the eclectic veteran of British Marxism, H.M. Hyndman (1842–1921), was intimately involved in a transatlantic socialist effort to destroy the Russian Bolshevik regime. Historians have rarely investigated this effort, because it appears not to fit into the customary categories constructed about Marxian socialism. Utilizing Hyndman’s extensive published writings and hitherto mostly ignored private correspondence with his many American socialist collaborators, this article reconstructs Hyndman’s thinking on Russia after 1917 in an attempt to shed further light on our understanding of socialist anti-Bolshevism in Britain and in the United States. It argues that Hyndman was a much more influential figure in the construction of socialist anticommunism in the English-speaking world (in particular in the United States) than has been generally recognized. His writings and activities in 1917–21 were key not only in setting the ideological bases for much of the English-speaking world’s socialist anticommunism but in pioneering the abiding, considered willingness by a significant section of its adherents to use military force to destroy the Soviet regime before and during the Cold War.

Foreign Involvement and Loss of Democracy, Estonia 1934 by Jaak Valge

Estonia, where influential major powers have often had competing interests, is able to provide a specific example of how involvement from foreign countries can influence the collapse of democracy. Both the undemocratic Soviet Union, with 150 times the population of Estonia, and 60 times more populous Germany, which had become undemocratic in 1933, were seen in Estonia as security risks. In contrast to this, the democratic United Kingdom was seen as Estonia’s best friend. The United Kingdom and Germany were also Estonia’s main trading partners. But London was primarily concerned to limit the influence of Germany in the Baltic States, and Estonia’s internal situation was of interest in this context. The co-operation by Estonian socialists with Moscow undoubtedly aggravated the Estonian domestic political situation, but the initiators of this co-operation were more the Estonian socialists themselves. Germany’s attempts to influence Estonian domestic politics were of a limited nature. But there is no doubt that events in Germany had a major influence on Estonia’s domestic politics.

 

 

The new issue of “European Integration online Papers (EloP)“ is now available online.

EU Law as Janus bifrons, a sociological approach to “Social Europe”

On the basis of sociological research focused on actions and appreciations of “social policy” actors, this paper contends that, apart from the powerful constraint of macroeconomic governance, the main governance instrument has been hard law, even in an area where member states are deemed to have retained most of their jurisdiction (Leibfried and Pierson, 1995, Ferrera, 2005; Barbier, 2008). The sociological material is systematically cross-checked with legal literature and with material drawn from 26 EU law specialists. The authors focus on the relationship between EU law and “social law” (social protection, labour law and social services). The main finding is the confirmation of the jeopardization of systems of social protection in the “old member states”. On the other hand, though, the Court of Justice of the European Union and the Commission have been able to display continual advances on the subject of “fundamental rights”, thus producing key sources of legitimacy among various actors. With the classically documented support of big business and corporations, and the active support of non-governmental organizations in favour of expanding individual fundamental rights, the on-going dynamics of EU law seems to inexorably lead to the demise of the late 19th century born systems of social protection, as F. Scharpf argues. This deterministic analysis however does not take into account the current uncertainties about the role of actors

Deconstructing EU old age policy: Assessing the potential of soft OMCs and hard EU law

When it comes to EU old age policy, the political science literature primarily focuses on soft governance through the OMC (Open Method of Coordination) on social inclusion, pensions and health care. However, a mapping of EU old age policy instruments shows that developments started earlier and are broader and more influential. Employing a policy analysis perspective, I explore problem perceptions and actor constellations to explain the development of a number of directly or indirectly relevant policy instruments and discuss their (potential) effects. On this basis, I show that the governance capacity of soft steering instruments that seek to trigger reforms in the area of pensions is typically overvalued. In contrast, we tend to underestimate how much the EU shapes national room to manoeuvre on ageing and old age security through legislative instruments establishing individual rights for equal treatment or through the free movement of capital and persons. What is more, tracing when and how a range of instruments developed brings to the fore a number of different actors and arenas, interest constellations and conflict lines. Thus, contrasting with the OMCs, the present analysis provides for an understanding of EU governance as a complex, at times contradictory and inherently political process.

European social dialogue as multi-level governance: Towards more autonomy and new dependencies

EU governance and social services of general interest: When even the UK is concerned

The level of autonomy afforded to Member States to define certain services as ‘services of general interest’ and to shelter them from the market so as to promote social objectives has become in recent years a highly sensitive topic among EU and national policy actors and organisations. The increased activity in this area of the European Commission and the general absence of guidance on the conditions necessary to render such services of general interest by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) have resulted in uncertainty concerning the interaction of EU law with social services and more generally public services in the EU Member States. By focusing on the EU regulation on social services of general interest, the paper evaluates how the nature and provision of such services in the UK has been susceptible to changes as a result of the Services Directives, EU public procurement and competition law. The implementation of liberalisation plans in the UK well before any EU initiatives in this area meant that such services have been open to market forces well before other Member States. However, this has not led to the absence of concerns regarding the precise impact of EU law in this area. Recent policy initiatives by the Coalition government may expand further the degree of marketisation and increase the scope for interaction between EU and national-level regulation.

The new issue of ” History of European Ideas” is now available and includes the following articles:

The Bond of Civility: Roger Williams on toleration and its limits by Teresa M. Bejan

In this article, I examine the meaning of the concept of ‘civility’ for Roger Williams and the role it played in his arguments for religious toleration. I place his concern with civility in the broader context of his life and works and show how it differed from the missionary and civilizing efforts of his fellow New English among the American Indians. For Williams, civility represented a standard of inclusion in the civil community that was ‘essentially distinct’ from Christianity, which properly governed membership in the spiritual community of the church. In contrast to recent scholarship that finds in Williams a robust vision of mutual respect and recognition between co-citizens, I argue that civility constituted rather a very low bar of respectful behavior towards others entirely compatible with a lack of respect, disapproval, and even disgust for them and their beliefs. I show further that civility for Williams was consistent with—and partially secured by—a continued commitment on the part of godly citizens to the potential conversion of their neighbors. Williams endorsed this ‘mere’ civility as a necessary and sufficient condition for toleration while also delineating a potentially expansive role for the magistrate in regulating incivility. Contemporary readers of William who conflate civility with other good things, such as mutual respect, recognition, and civic friendship, slide into a position much like that he was trying to refute.

From Greece to Babylon: The political thought of Andrew Michael Ramsay (1686-1743) by Doohwan Ahn

This paper explores the political thought of Andrew Michael Ramsay with particular reference to his highly acclaimed book called A New Cyropaedia, or the Travels of Cyrus (1727). Dedicated to Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, to whom he was tutor, this work has been hitherto viewed as a Jacobite imitation of the Telemachus, Son of Ulysses (1699) of his eminent teacher archbishop Fénelon of Cambrai. By tracing the dual legacy of the first Persian Emperor Cyrus in Western thought, I demonstrate that Ramsay was as much indebted to Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet’s Discourse on Universal History (1681) as he was to Fénelon’s political romance. Ramsay took advantage of Xenophon’s silence about the eponymous hero’s adolescent education in his Cyropaedia, or the Education of Cyrus (c. 380 B.C.), but he was equally inspired by the Book of Daniel, where the same Persian prince was eulogised as the liberator of the Jewish people from their captivity in Babylon. The main thrust of Ramsay’s adaptation was not only to revamp the Humanist-cum-Christian theory and practice of virtuous kingship for a restored Jacobite regime, but on a more fundamental level, to tie in secular history with biblical history. In this respect, Ramsay’s New Cyropaedia, or the Travels of Cyrus, was not just another Fénelonian political novel but more essentially a work of universal history. In addition to his Jacobite model of aristocratic constitutional monarchy, it was this Bossuetian motive for universal history, which was first propounded by the German reformer Philipp Melanchthon in his Chronicon Carionis (1532), that most decisively separated Ramsay from Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, author of another famous advice book for princes of the period, The Idea of a Patriot King (written in late 1738 for the education of Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales, but officially published in 1749).

 

The moral person of the state: Emer de Vattel and the foundations of international legal order by Ben Holland

Emer de Vattel was the first writer systematically to combine three arguments in a single work, namely: that states have a fundamental duty of self-interestedness; that they nonetheless have reason to see themselves as inhabiting a kind of society; and that this society is held together by positive agreements between its members on rules that shall regulate their interactions. This article explores how Vattel arrived at his vision of international order. It points to the significance of his understanding of the state as being a ‘moral person’. This was a description of the state introduced by Samuel von Pufendorf, who argued that the state was a moral person because it possessed the moral faculties of intellect and will. This helped to ground a constitutionalist theory of the state, for intellect and will, being represented by separate institutions of the state, in effect balanced each other. But the notion of the state as a moral person was later taken up in a rival intellectual tradition that allotted no independence to the will. This was the philosophical tradition to which Vattel belonged. In this altered context, the notion of moral personality was transformed. I argue that this was critical to the formulation of Vattel’s theory.

 

Jeremy Bentham’s ‘unsually liberal’ representative democracy by Filimon Peonidis

Jeremy Bentham is a philosopher who deserves a prominent position in the history of democratic ideas. He not only thought popular rule as a vehicle for materializing his vision of utilitarian society, but also gave us a detailed picture of the basic institutions of the form of democratic governance he envisaged. It is also noteworthy that in his radical system the people, who are the ultimate and undisputable source of all power, are protected from the authoritarian tendencies of state authorities not by a bill of constitutional rights but by a set of enhanced democratic powers that enable them to exercise strict control over their elected representatives. In this essay we present an outline of his ‘unusually liberal’ theory of democracy based on recently published texts and studies as well as a brief assessment of its strong and weak points.

 

Vergemeinschaftung and vergesellschaftung in Max Weber: A reconstruction of his linguistic usage by Klaus Lichtblau

When Max Weber made use of the terms “Vergemeinschaftung” and “Vergesellschaftung” in the first chapter of “Economy and Society”, he was among other things alluding to Ferdinand Tönnies’ well-known usage of “Gemeinschaft” and “Gesellschaft”, as well as to related conceptions in the work of Georg Simmel. However, Weber’s usage not only differed from the senses in which Tönnies and Simmel used these terms; he had himself altered his own usage since the early draft of this chapter, published in 1913 as “On some Categories of Interpretive Sociology”. The tangled resonances that result from this are carefully identified and separated, and in so doing light is shed upon the nature and status of Weber’s intentions in writing his important chapter on “Basic Sociological Categories”.

 

The uses and abuses of ‘secular religion’: Jules Monnerot’s path from communism to fascism by Dan Stone

From starting his intellectual career as a surrealist, communist and co-founder of the Collège de Sociologie in 1937, Jules Monnerot (1911–95) ended it as a candidate for the Front National in 1989. In this article I offer an explanation for the unexpected trajectory of this thinker whose work is little known in the English-speaking world. Without overlooking the idea that the infamous College encouraged such tendencies, I argue that the notion of ‘secular religion’, as Monnerot developed it in his Sociology of Communism (1949), goes some way to explain his gradual radicalization from Cold Warrior to fascist, a path that otherwise seems unlikely for a French intellectual after World War II. In order to emphasize the unusualness of Monnerot’s case, I contrast it with that of his erstwhile collaborator, Georges Bataille. I show that accusations of fascism often levelled against Bataille should be more accurately directed at Monnerot, indeed that the fascism inherent within the College of Sociology was brought out not by Bataille but by Monnerot. Monnerot’s case is unsettling first because his definition of ‘secular religion’ contributed to his pro-fascist stance; and second, because it forces us to rethink what is meant by ‘philosophy after Auschwitz.’ This term usually brings to mind scholars such as T.W. Adorno, Emil Fackenheim or Emmanuel Levinas. Monnerot provides a rare example of a thinker whose fascism only developed after the Holocaust, a shocking response that demands the attention of all those interested in the relationship between religion and politics.

 

An ineluctable minimum of natural law: Francois Gény, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the limits of legal skepticism by Ward Alexander Penfold

During the first few decades of the twentieth century, legal theory on both sides of the Atlantic was characterized by a tremendous amount of skepticism toward the private law concepts of property and contract. In the United States and France, Oliver Wendell Holmes and François Gény led the charge with withering critiques of the abuse of deduction, exposing their forebears’ supposedly gapless system of private law rules for what it was, a house of cards built on the ideological foundations of laissez faire capitalism. The goal was to make the United States Constitution and the French civil code more responsive to the realities of industrialization. Unlike the other participants in this transatlantic critique, François Gény simultaneously insisted on the immutability of justice and social utility. His “ineluctable minimum of natural law” would guide judges and jurists toward the proper social ends, replacing deduction with teleology. The problem was that nearly all of Gény’s contemporaries were perplexed by his conception of natural law, which lacked the substance of the natural rights tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the historicist impulse of the early twentieth. No one was more perplexed than Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose more thoroughgoing skepticism led him to see judicial restraint as the only solution to the abuse of deduction. The ultimate framework for this debate was World War I, in which both Holmes and Gény thought they had found vindication for their views. Events on the battlefield reaffirmed Gény’s commitment to justice just as they reignited Holmes’ existential embrace of the unknown. In a sense, the limits of their skepticism would be forged in the trenches of the Great War.

 

Hugh Trevor-Roper and the history of ideas by Peter Ghosh

A wave of recent publication connected to Hugh Trevor-Roper offers cause to take stock of his life and legacy. He is an awkward subject because his output was so protean, but a compelling one because of his significance for the resurgence of the history of ideas in Britain after 1945. The article argues that the formative period in Trevor-Roper’s life was 1945–57, a period curiously neglected hitherto. It was at this time that he pioneered a history of ideas conceived above all as the study of European liberal and humanist tradition. Analysis of the relative importance of contemporary and early modern history in his oeuvre finds that, while the experience of Hitler and the Cold War was formative, it was not decisive.Trevor-Roper was at heart an early modernist who did not abjure specialization.However, he insisted that specialized study must be accompanied by “philosophical” reflection on the workings of a constant human nature present throughout history, a type of reflection best pursued by reading classical historians such as Gibbon and Burckhardt.Yet this imperative in turn fostered purely historical research into the history of historical writing – another branch of the history of ideas.

 

Historical reflections upon commerce, political economy and revolution in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World by Manuela Albertone

No abstract . It’s the review essay.

 

 

 

 

The new issue of “European History Quarterly” is now available online and includes the following articles:

War Stories: French Veteran Narratives and the ‘Experience of War’ in the Nineteenth Century by Philip Dwyer

“The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were the first in history to be written about in great numbers by the common soldier. This article, which focuses on French reminiscences of the wars, examines a variety of memoirs published from the late eighteenth through to the twentieth century. During this time we see a different approach to war and how it was recalled and remembered, more personal, more experiential than ever before. This article argues that the historical accuracy of these veteran narratives is unimportant. Instead, they reveal much more about how the wars were portrayed, and how they were remembered. Important too is what these narratives reveal to historians about the (inner) lives of soldiers during the wars, and what veterans in hindsight thought and felt about particular events. Here too the reality of the ‘experience of war’ is not as important as the cultural construct that is presented. As such, war narratives are an important source for the ways in which veterans and French society preferred to remember and process the past.”

 

Noble Status and Royal Duplicity in the Crown of Castile, 1454–1504 by Michael J. Crawford

 

This article examines the seemingly opposing actions of Castile’s late medieval monarchs, who both authorized the noble status of hidalgo for supporters and developed rules and legal procedures to limit the proliferation of this status. Addressing both royal policy and disputes over status in the territory of Seville during the second half of the fifteenth century, it demonstrates how local authorities strategically employed laws and appeals to royal courts to resist the recognition of those who claimed hidalgo status and to deny them related privileges. The actions of these monarchs and their subjects reveal the nature and limits of royal absolutism in matters of social status in the late fifteenth century and the degree to which the development of state judicial apparatus affected the local recognition of status and the growth of state power

Carton de Wiart’s Second Military Mission to Poland and the German Invasion of 1939 by E.D.R. Harrison

Poland’s strategy for fighting Nazi Germany has always been controversial. Was it necessary to confront the invaders close to the frontier, or should Poland’s forces have stayed much further back to allow a more viable defence? The head of the British Military Mission to Poland in 1939, Major-General Adrian Carton de Wiart, argued strongly but in vain for a defence in the interior. The Polish army proved inadequate against German forces using new lightning operations. The promised major offensive by France did not materialize. Carton de Wiart failed in his efforts to expedite material assistance from Britain, whose political and military leadership wrote off the Poles. Carton de Wiart and his officers continued to report to the War Office until Soviet intervention on 17 September brought an end to the Military Mission. After leaving Poland, the Mission produced invaluable accounts of the new German warfare but these had little influence on army practice. So there was a failure to learn from the fall of Poland.

 

Imperial Myths between Nationalism and Communism: Appropriations of Imperial Legacies in the North-eastern Adriatic during the Early Cold War by Sabina Mihelj

 

In contemporary scholarly discussions, political uses of imperial pasts are typically associated with the rise of modern nation-states and nationalist principles of identity formation. Although clearly important, this approach can lead us to neglect the appropriations of imperial myths based on other types of ideological frameworks. In communist Eastern Europe, official representations of the past followed the imperatives of a historical-materialist vision of history, which, at least in its initial form, necessitated a rejection of both imperialism and nationalism. It is therefore reasonable to expect that communist appropriations of imperial legacies were significantly different from those found in Western Europe at the time. This article examines these different uses of imperial pasts – informed by either communism or nationalism or both – by focusing on the competing perceptions of imperial history and heritage at the Italo-Yugoslav border during the early Cold War