|
Europe’s Futures Colloquium
|
|
Seminars and Colloquia
|
Ivan VejvodaOana Popescu-ZamfirWojciech Przybylski
|
Series: Seminars and Colloquia
|
Series: Seminars and Colloquia
|
|
The “Migrant” in the Middle: How the Struggle for Decolonization and the Struggle against Fascism Are Linked
|
|
Seminars and Colloquia
|
Ayşe ÇağlarGregory Feldman
|
Series: Seminars and Colloquia
|
Series: Seminars and Colloquia
|
|
Facing Post-Truth in Central-Eastern Europe
|
|
Seminars and Colloquia
|
Arvydas GrišinasLudger Hagedorn
|
Series: Seminars and Colloquia
The main challenge that post-truth poses, as the concept itself suggests, is the alleged end of centrality of the idea of truth in politics. Central and Eastern Europe finds itself in a political culture where claims, ideas and utterances must no longer necessarily be grounded in proven empirical facts, in order to be held true by the broader public. This situation, however, is by no means new or unheard of. In this regard, it resembles Soviet social reality, where officially held narratives also had scant empirical grounding. Furthermore, while it were Central-Eastern European dissidents who problematized these issues and set out to successfully counter them, resulting in the events of 1989, the same dissident heritage is also used nowadays to promote agendas of populist illiberal regimes in the region. The talk explored the prospects and challenges to utilizing the dissident heritage to tackling these contemporary issues.
Read more
|
Series: Seminars and Colloquia
The main challenge that post-truth poses, as the concept itself suggests, is the alleged end of centrality of the idea of truth in politics. Central and Eastern Europe finds itself in a political culture where claims, ideas and utterances must no longer necessarily be grounded in proven empirical facts, in order to be held true by the broader public. This situation, however, is by no means new or unheard of. In this regard, it resembles Soviet social reality, where officially held narratives also had scant empirical grounding. Furthermore, while it were Central-Eastern European dissidents who problematized these issues and set out to successfully counter them, resulting in the events of 1989, the same dissident heritage is also used nowadays to promote agendas of populist illiberal regimes in the region. The talk explored the prospects and challenges to utilizing the dissident heritage to tackling these contemporary issues.
Read more
|
|
Non-Territorial Autonomy and National Minorities in Interwar Europe
|
|
Seminars and Colloquia
|
Börries KuzmanyKatherine YoungerMarina Germane
|
Series: Seminars and Colloquia
|
Series: Seminars and Colloquia
|
|
The Compatriots
|
|
Seminars and Colloquia
|
Andrei SoldatovClemena AntonovaIrina Borogan
|
Series: Seminars and Colloquia
|
Series: Seminars and Colloquia
|
|
Fluid Zones of Hegemony
|
|
Seminars and Colloquia
|
Ayşe ÇağlarEzgican Özdemir
|
Series: Seminars and Colloquia
|
Series: Seminars and Colloquia
|
|
Minority and Majority as Asymmetrical Concepts: The Perils of Democratic Equality and Fantasies of National Homogeneity
|
|
Seminars and Colloquia
|
Ludger HagedornTill van Rahden
|
Series: Seminars and Colloquia
|
Series: Seminars and Colloquia
|
|
What is Political Cruelty?
|
|
Seminars and Colloquia
|
Aishwary Kumar
|
Series: Seminars and Colloquia
“The important point for liberalism is not so much where the line is drawn,” Judith Shklar writes in a fascinating moment in her critique of cruelty, “as that it be drawn, and that it must under no circumstances be ignored or forgotten.” Where is this line? And who lives under its ambiguous constitutionality? Neither in her 1989 theses on the “liberalism of fear” nor in her 1982 demand that liberals start “putting cruelty first” does Shklar fully pursue the consequences of this morally unforgiving yet spatially uncertain line of liberal intolerance of cruelty. And while she does starkly pose the question “what is moral cruelty?” in terms of its debilitating effect on human freedom, the limit—border—that circumscribes liberalism’s constitutional response to extreme violence continues to waver. In this paper, Aishwary Kumar offers an archeology of this vacillating, political “line” that runs through liberal resistance against cruelty. By way of exploring its global implications, he follows Shklar on the cosmopolitical path she takes, along with BR Ambedkar and Hannah Arendt, into that “most ancient,” most exemplary form of organized violence and constitutional stasis known to legal and moral philosophy: the “Indo-European caste society,” which in her later writings Shklar sometimes replaces by the adjacent term “warrior society.” Her legalism is not causal. For it is in that trans-continental tradition that a relation is forged between caste and war, and the sovereignty of the line—maryada—attains its apotheosis. Might a semblance of political courage still be retrieved from that tradition of cruelty—a modern part of which becomes genuinely “anticolonial”—and rehabilitated into norms of democratic government today?
Read more
|
Series: Seminars and Colloquia
“The important point for liberalism is not so much where the line is drawn,” Judith Shklar writes in a fascinating moment in her critique of cruelty, “as that it be drawn, and that it must under no circumstances be ignored or forgotten.” Where is this line? And who lives under its ambiguous constitutionality? Neither in her 1989 theses on the “liberalism of fear” nor in her 1982 demand that liberals start “putting cruelty first” does Shklar fully pursue the consequences of this morally unforgiving yet spatially uncertain line of liberal intolerance of cruelty. And while she does starkly pose the question “what is moral cruelty?” in terms of its debilitating effect on human freedom, the limit—border—that circumscribes liberalism’s constitutional response to extreme violence continues to waver. In this paper, Aishwary Kumar offers an archeology of this vacillating, political “line” that runs through liberal resistance against cruelty. By way of exploring its global implications, he follows Shklar on the cosmopolitical path she takes, along with BR Ambedkar and Hannah Arendt, into that “most ancient,” most exemplary form of organized violence and constitutional stasis known to legal and moral philosophy: the “Indo-European caste society,” which in her later writings Shklar sometimes replaces by the adjacent term “warrior society.” Her legalism is not causal. For it is in that trans-continental tradition that a relation is forged between caste and war, and the sovereignty of the line—maryada—attains its apotheosis. Might a semblance of political courage still be retrieved from that tradition of cruelty—a modern part of which becomes genuinely “anticolonial”—and rehabilitated into norms of democratic government today?
Read more
|
|
Kidnapped from Nazism, or the Greek Tragedy of Central Europe
|
|
Seminars and Colloquia
|
Aspen BrintonLudger HagedornTomáš KordaVlasta Kordová
|
Series: Seminars and Colloquia
The paper recalls the essay The Tragedy of Central Europe, written by the Czech novelist Milan Kundera. Vlasta Kordova and Tomas Korda criticize the unhistorical cold-war image of the West that Kundera employs. In his reading, the Second World War just did not take place. They do not mean this objection as an external critique. Since why should someone be interested in Kundera’s omission, after all. They mean their criticism as immanent in the sense that ignoring the WWII, as the “truth” and result of the severe nationalism that was then spread across the continent, precludes the very possibility to apprehend the moral equality or equal legitimacy of the “socialist” East and the “capitalist” West. Since a tragic collision of two powers is set up only by their equal essentiality, Kundera cannot grasp the tragical dimension of the Cold War, and Central Europe respectively. Underpinned by the WWII and thereby elevated into the genuine Greek tragedy, the Cold War cannot know any victors, losers or pure victims and, moreover, both powers of equal essentiality must experience their own respective demise.
Read more
|
Series: Seminars and Colloquia
The paper recalls the essay The Tragedy of Central Europe, written by the Czech novelist Milan Kundera. Vlasta Kordova and Tomas Korda criticize the unhistorical cold-war image of the West that Kundera employs. In his reading, the Second World War just did not take place. They do not mean this objection as an external critique. Since why should someone be interested in Kundera’s omission, after all. They mean their criticism as immanent in the sense that ignoring the WWII, as the “truth” and result of the severe nationalism that was then spread across the continent, precludes the very possibility to apprehend the moral equality or equal legitimacy of the “socialist” East and the “capitalist” West. Since a tragic collision of two powers is set up only by their equal essentiality, Kundera cannot grasp the tragical dimension of the Cold War, and Central Europe respectively. Underpinned by the WWII and thereby elevated into the genuine Greek tragedy, the Cold War cannot know any victors, losers or pure victims and, moreover, both powers of equal essentiality must experience their own respective demise.
Read more
|
|
Debating Citizenship and Emancipation during the Long 19th Century
|
|
Seminars and Colloquia
|
Holly CaseConstantin Iordachi
|
Series: Seminars and Colloquia
Holly Case has called the period spanning the late-18th to the second half of the 20th century “The Age of Questions,” which included the Eastern question, Jewish question, social question, and countless others. In his recent book Liberalism, Constitutional Nationalism, and Minorities: The Making of Romanian Citizenship, c. 1750–1918 (2019), Constantin Iordachi shows how the succession of transnational “questions” that were at the heart of European and North-Atlantic politics during the long nineteenth century, and the interplay between them, impacted citizenship policies in Romania and beyond. He further describes the transfer of novel institutions of citizenship across temporal and political boundaries. In this discussion, Iordachi briefly outlined some of his broader conclusions regarding citizenship and statebuilding across the nineteenth century, after which he and Case engaged in a discussion about the role of “questions” in this dynamic and across this critical span of European and global history.
Read more
|
Series: Seminars and Colloquia
Holly Case has called the period spanning the late-18th to the second half of the 20th century “The Age of Questions,” which included the Eastern question, Jewish question, social question, and countless others. In his recent book Liberalism, Constitutional Nationalism, and Minorities: The Making of Romanian Citizenship, c. 1750–1918 (2019), Constantin Iordachi shows how the succession of transnational “questions” that were at the heart of European and North-Atlantic politics during the long nineteenth century, and the interplay between them, impacted citizenship policies in Romania and beyond. He further describes the transfer of novel institutions of citizenship across temporal and political boundaries. In this discussion, Iordachi briefly outlined some of his broader conclusions regarding citizenship and statebuilding across the nineteenth century, after which he and Case engaged in a discussion about the role of “questions” in this dynamic and across this critical span of European and global history.
Read more
|