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Discusses how modernization and the birth of the nation state, with the concomitant impact of Western ideas, gave birth to a significantly different form of anti-Semitism in Romania. This type defined its national goals in a limited manner. That it did so would be critical in the 20th cent. for the survival of almost half a million Romanian Jews. Its unusual character would be hidden from view in most instances by a brutality of execution that has led observers over the course of the last hundred years or so to focus on the style rather than substance of what happened. The Romanians did not cooperate in the full execution of the Final Solution as the Nazis wanted and expected them to do. As they had done in the 19th cent., the Romanians attempted to counterpoise Great Power interests and thereby pursue their own self-interest whenever the Jewish Question came into play.
Oldson examines the efforts of religious authorities in Western Europe to reconstruct a Catholic majority in Transylvania after the Ottoman Empire ceded control of the region. These attempts sparked a pronounced sense of Romanian historical consciousness that resulted in an impassioned religious and cultural resistance, centering on the Eastern liturgy.
Bessarabia?mostly occupied by modern-day republic of Moldova?was the only territory representing an object of rivalry and symbolic competition between the Russian Empire and a fully crystallized nation-state: the Kingdom of Romania. This book is an intellectual prehistory of the Bessarabian problem, focusing on the antagonism of the national and imperial visions of this contested periphery. Through a critical reassessment and revision of the traditional historical narratives, the study argues that Bessarabia was claimed not just by two opposing projects of ?symbolic inclusion,? but also by two alternative and theoretically antagonistic models of political legitimacy. By transcending the national lens of Bessarabian / Moldovan history and viewing it in the broader Eurasian comparative context, the book responds to the growing tendency in recent historiography to focus on the peripheries in order to better understand the functioning of national and imperial states in the modern era. ÿ
A highly topical analysis of European Nationalism from the French Revolution through to the aftermath of the First World War, when the nationalist issues and problems that dominate the political landscape of our own time were already fully established. Covering an enormous range of peoples -- from the Icelanders to the Gypsies, from Brittany to Wallachia -- the book presents a wealth of historical geopolitical information unavailable elsewhere. Essential as a reference work, it also provides a unique opportunity to survey systematically a crucial but fragmented subject in its full European context. For historians, political scientists, departments of European studies, and general readers.
The last volume of the Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe 1770–1945 series presents 46 texts under the heading of "antimodernism". In a dynamic relationship with modernism, from the 1880s to the 1940s, and especially during the interwar period, the antimodernist political discourse in the region offered complex ideological constructions of national identification. These texts rejected the linear vision of progress and instead offered alternative models of temporality, such as the cyclical one as well as various narratives of decline. This shift was closely connected to the rejection of liberal democratic institutionalism, and the preference for organicist mod...
This study challenges the rose-tinted view of the interwar period in Romanian history, which is often judged against the darkness of almost five decades of Communist rule. Romania, like several of the states of Eastern Europe, emerged from the First World War as it had entered it, as a predominantly agricultural country, and one of its major problems was the condition of the peasantry. This volume’s focus is the drive to improve that condition, on the collapse of democracy, and the search by Romania’s leaders for strategies to secure the state, to assert the country’s independence, and to maintain its territorial integrity in the face of the threat to the European order posed by two totalitarian systems, represented by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. By examining recent scholarship, this volume provides the most up-to-date account of Romania’s predicament in the interwar years. Romania, 1916–1941 is a useful resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars interested in foreign policy, politics, society, internationalization and late development in interwar Central and Eastern Europe.
Yet this woman whom Time Magazine described in 1948 as "the most powerful woman alive" has been buried under a myth of mindless loyalty to Stalin and such fanaticism that she supposedly could denounce her own husband, Marcel Pauker, as a traitor, which Levy proves she did not do.".
This is the first volume to examine how the history of Wales was written in a period that saw the emergence of professional historiography, largely focused on the nation, across Europe and in the United States. It thus sets Wales in the context of recent work on national history writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and, more particularly, offers a Welsh perspective on the ways in which history was written in small, mainly stateless, nations. The comparative dimension is fundamental to the volume's aim, highlighting what was distinctive about Welsh historical writing and showing how the Welsh experience mirrors and illuminates broader historiographical developments. The book beg...
In the modern Greek city of Thessaloniki, the ruins of a vast Jewish cemetery lie buried under the city’s university. Nearby is the site of the childhood home of one of the founders of the modern Turkish state. These are tantalizing reminders of what was once the bustling cosmopolitan city of Salonica, home not just to Greeks but to thousands of Sephardic Jews, Turks, Bulgarians, and Armenians living and working peacefully alongside one another. Thessaloniki is just one example among many of what used to be. Over the past two centuries, ethnic cleansing has remade the map of Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East, transforming vast empires that embraced many ethnic groups into near...
The Balkans has long been a place of encounter among different peoples, religions, and civilizations, resulting in a rich cultural tapestry and mosaic of nationalities. But it has also been burdened by a traumatic post-colonial experience. The transition from traditional multinational empires to modern nation-states has been accompanied by large-scale political violence that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the permanent displacement of millions more. Mark Biondich examines the origins of these conflicts, while treating the region as an integral part of modern European history, shaped by much the same forces and intellectual impulses. It reminds us that political viole...