FSP - History

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Browsing FSP - History by Subject "Eastern Europe"

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    Populism without history: Central and Eastern Europe and the case for a historical turn in populism research
    (2026-05) Craciun, Claudiu
    This article examines the dominant modes of conceptualising populism and critically engages with the ahistorical tendencies that have come to characterise much of the recent research in this field. Despite the robust historical reasoning and conceptual tools developed within comparative politics, populism research has largely avoided engaging with them. The article proposes an alternative analytical framework. In order to situate conditions, institutions, actors, and events within a single framework and across time, it advances the concept of populist configurations. These encompass populist actors, strategies, discourses, and styles, but also incorporate structural factors and transformations, such as degrees of sovereignty and socio-economic orders, as well as elite cohesion and responses, and critical junctures: significant events that alter power relations and shape the trajectories of (populist) politics. The article explores Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), a region with contested geographical and historical boundaries that nonetheless shares a distinctive set of structural features. Its belated development and chronic exposure to external aggression and domination, a consequence of the relatively small size of its historical polities, set the conditions for the region’s uneven and conflictual transition to modern politics. The region also endured two world wars and a turbulent succession of competing political regimes, such as constitutional monarchies, military and royal dictatorships, socialist and communist republics, and parliamentary democracies, a trajectory that sets it apart in global historical comparisons and poses significant challenges to any account of its long-term political dynamics. In this long-term dynamic, it can be argued that populisms are rooted in early-modern contention and not electoral politics, and this contention was defined by the sovereignty—social reform uneasy ambivalence. Drawing on the Romanian case, the article develops a typology, a timeline, and an illustrative case of populist configuration—antisemitism, both to demonstrate the advantages of this research strategy and to call for a systematic historical turn in the study of populism.
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    State socialist experts in transnational perspective : East European circulation of knowledge during the Cold War (1950s–1980s) : introduction to the thematic Issue
    (Brill | Schöningh, 2018) Iacob, Bogdan; Dobos, Corina; Grosescu, Raluca; Iacob, Viviana; Pașca, Vlad
    State socialist experts were at the center of Eastern Europe’s internationalization from the mid-1950s until 1989. They acted as intermediaries between their states and other national, regional, and international environments. The contributions integrate national milieus within broader frameworks mostly circumscribed by inter- and nongovernmental specialized organizations (the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe; the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; International Theater Institute, or the un Commission on Population and Development). The issue is an innovative initiative to identify within four fields (economy, demography, theatre, and historical studies) state socialist experts’ contributions to international debates and institution building. We argue that these groups were fundamentally characterized by their transnational dynamism. The resultant forms of mobility and transfer resituate specific systems of knowledge production from Eastern Europe within the larger story of postwar globalization. The collection also includes an anthropological study about the internationalization trajectories of lower-ranked professionals and the resilience of their expertise ethics after 1989. Socialist experts’ mobilities can be circumscribed at the intersection of multiple phenomena that defined the postwar: national settings’ impact on inter- and supra-state interactions; Cold War politics; the tribulations of international organizations; and global trends determined by the accelerating interconnectedness of the world and decolonization. Our findings de-center established narratives about the Cold War and they show how representatives from the East participated in and sometimes determined the conditions of Europeanizing and globalizing trends in their respective fields within particular organizations.