Nick Baron, Luminița Gatejel, Stephan Rindlisbacher
{"title":"‘Drawing The Line’: Border Commissions in Eastern Europe. Introduction","authors":"Nick Baron, Luminița Gatejel, Stephan Rindlisbacher","doi":"10.1177/16118944231222445","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944231222445","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":"32 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138948163","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Riding the Line. Expertise and the Making of the Bessarabian Border, 1856–1857","authors":"C. Ardeleanu","doi":"10.1177/16118944231221026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944231221026","url":null,"abstract":"This article aims to historicise the making of the border between the Russian and Ottoman empires in southern Bessarabia, drawn in the post-Crimean War context in 1856–1857. An international commission was appointed for this purpose, and delegates from five empires – Austrian, British, French, Russian and Ottoman – gathered in the province on the ground to demarcate the border decided by Europe's powers. Based on the commission's lengthy protocols, and on the memoirs of several experts involved in surveying, mapping and demarcating the border on the ground, this article delves into the mechanisms of border-making in the field, examining the challenges that commission members encountered with finding a common vocabulary and with balancing larger geopolitical interests with local geographical realities. The case study is also an excellent illustration of what it means to zoom in and out of the different scales involved in bordering. From the diplomatic meetings in Paris to the commissioners’ negotiations in Chișinău and the land surveyors adding names on maps after discussions with peasants in a village close to the Dniester, border making is a complex process that operated simultaneously at different scales, spaces and times.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":"8 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139168793","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beyond Diplomacy: The Demarcation of Montenegrin-Ottoman Borders (1879–1881)","authors":"Giorgio Ennas","doi":"10.1177/16118944231221024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944231221024","url":null,"abstract":"In the 19th century, several factors influenced the development of Montenegrin-Ottoman borders: European experts’ stereotypes and limited knowledge of the Balkans, the Great Powers’ interests, and local populations’ conceptions of their own territories and societies. This article considers how these factors interacted in the demarcation of Montenegrin-Ottoman borders between 1879 and 1881 by not only studying the profiles, statements and actions of regional ‘experts’ at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 but also of the delegates to the Commission for the Delimitation of Montenegro and of the members of the Albanian League. Through critical readings of documents produced by the delegates of ‘secondary’ powers, such as the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Italy, it argues that the effectiveness of the border-demarcation was undermined by the failure of the Delimitation Commission, the Great Powers’ misperceptions and lack of knowledge, which was shaped by poor expert advice, and finally, by the resistance of local populations.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":" 26","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138962282","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fighting Against ‘Apology of Fascism’: Origins and Contradictions of the Italian Approach to Militant Democracy","authors":"Andrea Martini","doi":"10.1177/16118944231221036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944231221036","url":null,"abstract":"Although Italy was one of the first European countries to tolerate the existence of a fascist party, the democratic governments of its immediate postwar engaged in a genuine and important reflection on the means to counter the re-emergence of fascism. Thus Italy too, like its European counterparts, sought to conceive of itself as a militant democracy. This article aims to illuminate its efforts and its approach, and also to cast light on the evident limits and contradictions. Looking at the Italian case while observing how other European countries tackled the re-emergence of fascism in the same period will make clear the intrinsic difficulties of turning a democracy into a militant one only a short time after the fall of an authoritarian regime and in the aftermath of an inevitably problematic transition.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":"7 23","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138966553","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Bitter Enemies to Political Partners: Shifting Viewpoints of Slovenian Clericals and Liberals During the World War I","authors":"Igor Ivašković","doi":"10.1177/16118944231221037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944231221037","url":null,"abstract":"The article examines Slovenian liberal and clerical magazines to analyse the adaptations of the political narratives of the two main Slovenian political parties from the assassination in Sarajevo in 1914 until early in the final stage of World War I in March 1918. Slovenian clericals, who gathered together in the Slovenian People's Party, reacted to the killings in Sarajevo by adopting a strong pro-Habsburg and anti-Serbian position. Their magazines even called for a military invasion of Serbia. In comparison, their primary political competitors on Slovenian soil, the Slovenian liberals congregated in the National Progressive Party and condemned the act of assassination, yet they were critical of the Austrian anti-Serbian policy for having escalated the war. These two Slovenian political parties were also divided on the issue of the future envisioned for the Slovenian nation within South Slavic state formations. The clericals pressed for realization of the trialist idea, which forecast a Croatian–Slovenian state unit within the Habsburg Monarchy with its centre in Zagreb. The liberals, in contrast, dreamed of a larger South Slavic state that would bring all South Slavs together and have its centre in Serbia. The development of the war, chiefly the Entente's foreseeable victory, the threat of implementation of the London Pact, and the fact that Austrian Germans characterized all emancipatory Slovenian political movements as an anti-state element, all worked to force Slovenian clericals to cooperate with their pre-war enemies. The overriding aim was for them to retain their leading position among Slovenians by formally cooperating with the liberal stream, including taking over part of the liberal political strategy, in order to ensure that it was in the best possible position in the South Slavic state at end of the war.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":"358 16","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138966702","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Most Glorified Day: Memory and Narratives on the Normandy Landings in the Italian Daily Press","authors":"Daniele Pipitone","doi":"10.1177/16118944231202176","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944231202176","url":null,"abstract":"The article focuses on the memory of the Normandy landings in post-war Italy, as a case study for investigating the wider subject of the memory of World War II in the country. It is based on two main assumptions: that memories of World War II were by no means limited to the national level (i.e. to the aspects of the conflict that directly involved Italy) and necessarily included a representation of the global features of the war and that memories often have a transnational nature and undergo a continuous process of importation and exportation beyond national boundaries. In order to investigate the issue, a corpus of sources has been collected, made up of articles published on five Italian newspapers of different political allegiance, roughly in the first two decades after the war, from 1945 to 1968. The results of the analysis show how the memory of the landings was paid very different attention, depending on the cultural and political stance of the daily: while the right- and left-wing press seldom focused on it, the moderate and pro-governmental newspapers showed a greater interest. Two other key elements emerge from the analysis: the transnational character of the memories and their strongly celebratory nature. In fact, many articles on the D-Day drew upon foreign sources (of Anglo-American, but also of German origin) in different ways, and almost all of them depicted the landings as the turning point of the war, the moment when Europe was freed and the final triumph of the good against the evil. In conclusion, it is outlined how the memory of the landings played a key role in making the global war known, in importing to Italy the (western) idea of the ‘good war’ and in spreading in Italy the ‘western’ set of values, thus strengthening the bonds of the country with its Cold War allies.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":"69 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135536782","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Representatives of the Central Authority and County Administration in Transylvania (1867–1925)","authors":"Judit Pál, Vlad Popovici","doi":"10.1177/16118944231202156","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944231202156","url":null,"abstract":"The transition from the administrative system of the Habsburg monarchy to that of the successor nation-states after World War I has traditionally been analysed in terms of discontinuity, or even rupture. In our research, which focuses on the specific case of Transylvania, we demonstrate that both the development of a centralised administrative system and the relationship between the state authority and local autonomies were characterised by continuity rather than change. In both the Hungarian and the Romanian state, the key institution involved in the process of diminishing local self-government was the representative of the central power in the territory (the lord lieutenant until 1918 and later the prefect). The gradual expansion of his prerogatives over institutions and county officials began in Hungary in the early 1870s, and continued until the interwar period in Romania; this was a process that extended beyond the changes in the political and state regime in 1918. Thus, for interwar Transylvania, administrative centralisation in the French tradition did not represent a paradigm shift, but instead the continuation and acceleration of an already quite advanced process that the Hungarian state, which had been eager to modernise its administrative structures, had already introduced 50 years earlier.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135537722","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Responses of Muslims in Weimar Germany to the Abolition of the Caliphate","authors":"Sergey Sherstyukov","doi":"10.1177/16118944231202150","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944231202150","url":null,"abstract":"The abolition of the Caliphate in 1924 had profound global repercussions that were felt far beyond the territorial boundaries of the former Ottoman Empire. This event provoked intense and ambivalent responses among the community of Muslims in Weimar Germany. To date, this reaction has received little attention. Defeat in the war deprived Germany of its colonies, but Berlin became an important point on the map of emerging transnational anti-colonial networks and the centre of the intellectual and political life of Muslims in Europe. In the Islamic space of Berlin, there was an active search for new normative values and a vocabulary that would correspond to the realities of the post-Ottoman Muslim world. A more detailed and nuanced picture of Muslim reactions in Germany to the abolition of the Caliphate can shed more light on the history of Muslim émigré activism and the creation of a Muslim space in Europe during this period.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":"168 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136308996","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"War, Public Opinion and the British Constitution, c. 1867–1914","authors":"Christian K Melby","doi":"10.1177/16118944231202147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944231202147","url":null,"abstract":"By the late nineteenth century, questions were raised about the efficacy of the British political system to manage and prosecute modern wars. At the centre of these questions was the issue of public opinion, seen as a potentially detrimental influence on planning and preparation for future wars. This article outlines the late-Victorian and Edwardian views on the role between Britain's constitution and war, and shows how public opinion was brought up in discussions on how Britain's armed forces could be better prepared for future conflicts. It argues that, by World War I, British officers as well as civilian experts proposed various solutions to the country's perceived political problems and argued that the public could potentially be mobilised to side-line a lethargic parliament and the political parties. The article thereby follows in the wake of an increased interest in the intellectual and political history of war and military planning, and offers a new perspective on political thought in Victorian and Edwardian Britain.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":"191 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135206718","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On the Coattails of Empire: Norway and Imperial Internationalism in the Time of the League of Nations","authors":"Marta Stachurska-Kounta","doi":"10.1177/16118944231202182","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944231202182","url":null,"abstract":"The popular perception concerning Norway's particular commitment to peace and impartiality in international politics has from time to time been bracketed by the fact that the country has no colonial past. Such an understanding fails to address Norway's rise to a major position in the global shipping system and maritime trade during the colonial era and that this economic expansion had only been possible due to Britain's liberal trade policy and imperial rule. The article shows that reliance on Britain's global leadership moulded Norway's vision of the emerging international order in the aftermath of World War I and was one of the most crucial arguments for the country to become a member of the League of Nations. It argues that Norway's advocacy of free trade as a key to international peace in the interwar period has to be seen in the light of the country's commercial interests and assumptions about Britain's civilizing mission.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":"354 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135307289","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}