My approach is not to cite everything I have read, but rather everything that I relied upon for the argument at hand. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2020. However, in certain cases the narrative seems to be a synthesis of the existing syntheses, and often not even the most recent ones, without utilizing the growing number of case studies, targeted analyses that have mushroomed in the last two decades and which offer valuable and deep insights into the ongoing social transformations, including nationalism, before 1945. Tough graders are okay if they teach how to get an A, but he does not teach you how to correct yourself. Disorganized professor. It is not to say that national indifference is unassailable and do not deserve critique. [57], Beyond manipulation of time, as Mazurek notes, my book applies another powerful tool that historians use infrequently: comparison, asking why outcomes eventuated in one place and not in another. Adam McGibbon, Northern Irelands Schools Still Arent Integrated,, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/northern-ireland-integration-schools-lagan/, On the tendency of democracies in multi-ethnic societies to produce competing party spectrums, see Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Power Sharing: Three Big Problems, in. [22] Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Milica Bakic-Hayden, Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia, Slavic Review 54:4 (1995): 917-31. He writes: An iron logic of history that had predetermined the failure of these projects exists in neither case, and while later historians have found several structural factors that contributed to their demise, it was often pure contingency that finally led to this outcome. He's understanding to students' issues. Modernity, Violence and (Be) Longing in Upper Silesia (New York: Routledge 2017); Rok Stergar, eds., Forum: The Adriatic, the Alps, and the Danube: Identities, Categories of Identification, and Identifications, Austrian History Yearbook 49 (2018): 17102; Peter Haslinger, Dilemmas of Security: The State, Local Agency, and the Czechoslovak-Hungarian Boundary Commission, 192125, Austrian History Yearbook 49 (2018) 187-206, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0067237818000152; Rok Stergar and Tamara Scheer, Ethnic Boxes: The Unintended Consequences of Habsburg Bureaucratic Classification, Nationalities Papers 46:4 (2018): 575-591, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2018.144837; Alexander Maxwell, Nationalism as classification: Suggestions for reformulating nationalism research, Nationalities Papers, 46:4, (2018): 539-555, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2018.1448376. The political significance of this fear is indisputable, but writing its history, whether in Eastern Europe or elsewhere, remains a challenging pursuit, one that is suggestively sketched out yet not fully realized in Connellys account. One gets hints of this keen sensitivity to history in Czesaw Mioszs recollections of World War II. [7] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991); Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and nationalism since 1780, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). This is not to say that Connellys work is not nuanced and balanced within most of the individual chapters, and, as described above, his narrative mostly avoids falling into the trap famously identified by Rogers Brubaker as groupism.[16] But it is hard not to see the final conclusion as a strict, almost deterministic view of Eastern Europe since 1780. Instead, I try to get inside of historical processes that led to their creation. This concern propels the books narrative; it operates in a space between what the experts on Eastern Europe think that nationality was constructed and unimportant in peoples everyday lives and what informed publics know about the region: that nationalized politics has had dramatic consequences, including two world wars and genocide. Do many people even speak Irish? [56] This is a truth extending into the present, and visible throughout writings from the region. The Habsburgs promoted economic development through well-run institutions and gradually enabled democracy; but democracy in turn opened spaces for political contestation and claims that the monarchy could not contain. Magorzata Mazurek astutely picks up on Connellys argument that Eastern European national self-determination fits less into the conventional notion of a short twentieth century dominated by struggles between the great European powers than into a long twentieth century characterized by the formation of small states after the collapse of empires across Eurasia and Africa. The comparative method also usefully highlights human interventions (agency) that stand out from context similar to Joseph IIs moves in the 1780s, for example the extraordinary roles of Polish Party leader Wadysaw (full name and title/label please here and for Ceausescu and for the others in this sentence Gomuka (to resist reform ideas) or his Romanian counterpart Nicolae Ceauescu (to drive Romania on the path to austerity), or in an earlier time the peasant politicians Stjepan Radi. The book leaves the impression that nationalism had no positive type, a future-oriented form that would have promised the certainty of existence without conflict with neighboring countries. He really made difficult fifteenth century literature interesting - fantastic prof; just GO TO CLASS and really put thought into papers and you'll do fine. 40% of the grade was participation, given at the end by grading criteria that changed throughout the semester. Yet the books point is not to tell readers how I understand words like ethnicity or patriot or memory, but rather how people in the region understand them. He tries SO HARD to make this super boring class fun. They knew that under conditions of empire or multinational state, people had mostly lived in peace. In that decade he tried to make German the language of his realm, and inadvertently caused sundry Hungarians and Czechs to fear they would become just one more among Central Europes groups of German speakers. I gave him a 5 to help out the overall score cause he really was pretty good teacher idk why its so low. [34] For a programmatic statement see Tara Zahra, Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis, Slavic Review 69: 1 (Spring 2010): 93-119. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0037677900016715. While the book is remarkable for its narrative scope and depth, some of these uneven gradations shape Connollys discussions of different East European forms of nationalism. If you are in a position to review this teacher, please do so. The full accession to the world capitalist economy and the European Union (with the exception of Serbia) brought economic uplift, although at the price of new social disparities, sense of loss and feeling of deprivation. This class was fairly simple and graded by a few things. Very nice and understanding and also very soft personality and soft spoken. Yet in and outside the region these words meanings have shifted over time, making them unsuitable for terse platonic definitions standing above events. While the concept of national indifference, Connellys main target, came under sustained and growing criticism in the recent years,[10] this is the first major work that takes stock of its impact on the historical vision regarding this region, and I am inclined to think that the growing number of those critical works with a more targeted and limited scope themselves signal the necessity of such an attempt. See. Hope to be able to use some of these to help speed up my reading without losing any comprehension. The movements also created pseudo-pasts that one can scoff at, but their advocacy for threatened vernaculars drew strength from a powerful truth that moved early patriots like Franz Kinsky, namely that language and culture are not simply an important thing in peoples lives, but the mode for imagining important things as such. On the whole, the Balkan cases in his survey remain more elusive when compared to the more firmly grounded Central European terrain that dominates the book. If you ever need a bed-time story, record his lectures. Studii istorice dedicate lui George Cipianu la mplinirea vrstei de 75 de ani. Do NOT recommend this class. Yet these states had problems that went to the core of their being: they were formed to the exclusion of and against the will of many inhabitants, people belonging to ethnic groups that were denied not just statehood but any form of autonomy. If you pay attention in class you can do well without reading. As such this approach could potentially reconcile not only the nation-based narratives with social and cultural history, it provides something similar to what Connelly achieves in this book for the post-1945 period: a role for ordinary people on the stage of history. very boring!!! John Connelly has written a magisterial account about Eastern Europe that forcefully reminds us of the enduring and adaptable power of national passions in modern history. Most important: do people in their daily lives care about Irish? He shows that nationalism was motivated by a shared perception of existing or imagined threats, by the fear of oblivion, of losing identity, the fear of genocide, and the possibility of disappearing from history that finds its roots in shared experiences of dramas (3) and violent changes (3). Imagining nationalism out of history is an inclination, and a very admirable one. chaps. Most important: The book takes off in the 1780s largely because of the radical enlightener, Emperor Joseph II. Fascism was not just a deformation of nationalism. The regions tense juxtaposing of similarity and difference makes it a virtual laboratory for comparative research. See Grzegorz Krzywiec, O faszyzmie w wersji polskiej i jego nieoczywistych dziejach raz jeszcze (na marginesie ksiki Szymona Rudnickiego Falanga. Potential answers to that question seem unclear to me. He is not understanding of students at all. Personally, I don't think he is qualified to teach elementary physics. I've found him extremely sensitive to health-related issues I've had. These were truly contingent moments, attached to individual acts which we can imagine playing out differently, sending history along a different path. However, such ideas run against the core idea of nationhood based in the US Constitution, and researchers themselves hesitate to ask in surveys whether US nationhood might be attached to ethnic origin; both they and their respondents understand that to answer in the affirmative would be not only ethnicist, but racist; the discourse of civic nationalism is weighted against racism. [23] Historian James Gregor similarly noted that Enrico Corradini, the leading thinker of Italian nationalism in the early twentieth century, understood domestic class struggle as symptomatic of imminent extinction of the nation, thus adding to the many patriotic fears of disappearance circulating across Western as well as Eastern Europe. In this magisterial new history of East Central Europe since the late eighteenth century, John Connelly asks how ethnic nationalism became the language of politics in the region from the Enlightenment to the European Union. Connelly relevantly emphasizes the transfers and circulations of peoples and ideas, and the importance of migrations, thus participating in the writing of a global, crossed and connected history of the region, examining important phenomena from a de-centralized and de-westernized perspective. Attendance matters and is basically self-reported by a summary of what you learned. Indeed, as the title suggests, the book is focused on the peoples in order to tell a bigger history, one of the (de)construction of nations in Eastern Europe. [16] Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without groups, European Journal of Sociology 43:2 (2002) 163-189, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003975602001066. Thus, in Connellys narrative, nationalism and the emergence of nations became inevitable; perhaps Emperor Joseph II was the last person who could have precluded it without attempting to make German the official language of his realms (789.) To give but one example: in a vivid telling of the competing 1966 millennium celebrations of Polish statehood (taken up by the Communist regime) and Polish Christianity (promoted by the Catholic Church), Connelly draws out a compelling portrait of the attempts of Communist regimes to both stifle and harness the appeal of nationalist politics.