Preliminary Programme

The cultural production of the state-socialist Eastern Europe received little serious scholarly attention for over a decade immediately following the political system change in the region. Apart from a transient — and mostly curatorial — interest in the artistic output of the period, the cultural production of the pre-1989 period was often viewed as a well-designed manipulation of the communist propaganda and ideology, incapacitated through structures of censorship and the isolation secured by the Iron Curtain.
More recent years, however, yielded academic studies and publications as well as research-based art exhibitions that no longer view those forty-something years as an unchanging and undifferentiated monolith across the region, would evaluate the state-socialist system of cultural production in its own terms, and/or would regard art — its products, institutions and events — as a reservoir of valuable records for social history. Investigations now also reckon with the cross-border flow of artists, artworks, artistic ideas and practices that never ceased despite the relevance of the Iron Curtain and national borders. Some of these undertakings focus on interactions between Western centers and the “peripherically Western” cultures of East-Central Europe, while others more specifically consider exchanges within the Soviet bloc and its allies: between socialist countries from different continents (the exhibition Subversive Practices: Art under Conditions of Political Repression. 1960s–80s / South America / Europe, Stuttgart, Germany, 2009) or between cultural actors from state-socialist societies and leftist circles in contemporaneous Western Europe (the book project-in-progress Art beyond borders in communist Europe [1945-1989]). In their approaches these projects also relativize the pivotal role of censorship and direct attention to both the subversive potential of artistic action and the agency of individual actors under repressive regimes (the exhibition Agents and Provocateurs, 2009, Dunaujvaros, Hungary).
Drawing on the above inquiries, the talk will present selected examples that can contribute to the drafting of a more globally inscribed cultural history of East Central Europe. (Show less)

Only recently historical research turned its attention again to the escape of scholars and intellectuals from continental Europe since the 1930s by examining closely the political, social, cultural and institu-tional background for what has become known as the so called mass exodus of a large part of the European intellectual and academic elites. A great number of these studies either concentrate on the academic, literary or artistic coming to terms with the experience of escape and exile and the often-times serious difficulties to resettle in the host countries, they examine the transformations the intellec-tual refugees brought for the cultural and academic landscape of the host countries or these studies concentrate on the life of certain, well-known refugee scholars. However, most of these studies have at least two blind spots: First, attention is given primarily to German speaking academics and their es-cape routes that led them mainly to Great Britain, Turkey, port cities in East Asia, North and South America as the main host countries while leaving out refugee scholars from the newly founded nation-states in Eastern Europe. Second, most studies stop in 1945 interpreting the end of World War II as a break that disbanded exile groups in the West due to the fundamental transformation of political con-ditions while the escape of intellectuals from Eastern Europe in the following decades is only barely taken into account.
The proposed talk intents to question this master narrative by placing academic refugees from East Central Europe in a global context. Taking the British Society for Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL) as starting point and drawing on selected examples, the talk will focus on this particular trans-national civil society network, which had its roots already in the 1930s and thus in the pre Cold War era. The paper will show how the SPSL brought its influence into play when it came to academic refu-gees from East Central Europe in the 1950s and 1960s by activating its close contacts to governmental institutions in the Atlantic World, to philanthropic foundations, to international organizations such as the Red Cross and later on the United Nations. The talk will embed the predominantly individual flight stories of scholars from of East Central Europe in a systematic analysis of transnational civil society networks that were themselves part of a dense network of governmental, private and academic institu-tions with a global reach. (Show less)

The paper analyzes how social changes were intertwined with the history of "local" symbolic processes in the 1970s and 1980s in state socialist Hungary. This is certainly a very complex history with a very complex set of institutional and social actors. Here we focus on some major economic and demographic changes and the related political and discursive developments, and we also relate this to major changes to Hungary’s position in the world economy. (Show less)

The general picture, East Central Europe being largely ignored in recent global histories, is true also for the study of processes of global governance and international organizations. Even a short glance at the secondary literature both on the League of Nations and the UN System reveal a strong interest in everything outside of Europe, following the dynamics of the globalization processes of the second half of the 20th century and the cause they stirred. While the so-called ‘second world’ had a stable position in the time of the Cold War it had been forgotten after its end, the former socialist states and societies are not talked about, at best mentioned at the side.
In contrast to this I would like to ask deliberately in which ways historical actors from Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia have taken part in institutions that aimed at regulating global issues. It does by following the argument that during the 20th century, the involvement in international organisations became an indicator for recognition and relevance in world politics and thus nation-states reckoned them as arenas in which they could strive for global political status, which was of importance especially for smaller and newly founded states. Not surprisingly the governments of the countries that emerged out of the ashes of the Habsburg Monarchy and the German Reich opted for membership in the League of Nation and its affiliated institutions, like the ILO, that had been established in parallel in the peace conference in Paris and through the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.
The involvement in the ILO also after the next World War suggested itself because of ILO’s tri-parte structure by which governments, employers and employees are represented in equal terms since this offered spaces of manoeuvre aside of the thoroughly governmental interests and positions. Added to that concentrating at the ILO brings a delicate and thus interesting issue to the fore, namely the relationship between an institution that at its core aimed at better labour conditions for social peace and thus the preservation of the established social order and actors coming from and representing states in which an alternative model of organizing labour and social relations was followed. (Show less)

Women’s organizations (National Women’s Councils) from many socialist states in Eastern Europe have resolutely supported activism leading to international commitments to improving the situation of women, such as International Women’s Year (1975), the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women or the UN Decade for Women (1976-1985). The main avenues for the participation of state socialist women’s organizations in international activism on women’s issues have been the United Nations and particularly the UN Women’s Conferences and the post-World War II international organization Women’s International Democratic Federation. I begin a discussion of the involvement of state socialist women’s organizations in international activism by presenting the initiatives of several Romanian and Hungarian women advocates, who largely due to their privileged positions were able to attend and influence UN fora. One of them was Maria Groza, daughter of the first Communist Prime-minister Petru Groza; Maria Groza was a recurrent member of the Romanian Governmental delegations to the UN General Assembly, a member of the Romanian delegation to the UN Conference on Women in 1975, and vice-president of Women’s National Council during the 1970s. The Romanian Florica Andrei was the representative of the Romanian Government in the UN Commission on the Status of Women and she introduced the proposal that led to the 1972 General Assembly Resolution declaring 1975 International Women’s Year. Stana Buzatu was a Romanian academic who acted as Secretary for the Women’s International Democratic Federation in Berlin between 1965 and 1971. The Hungarian Hanna Bokor was a member of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (1972) and a member of the UN Working Group on new draft instrument or instruments of international law to eliminate discrimination against women (established 1973; the working group drafted the UN “Women’s Bill”, the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women).

While focusing on the activism of Romanian and Hungarian representatives in UN fora dedicated to improving the status of women, the purpose of the paper is to review some of the analytical categories that still dominate the historiography of state socialist, state-sponsored women’s organizations. I will argue that the analytical categories used to write the history of women’s organizations affiliated with the Communist Parties are (still) stigmatizing and deny organizational and individual agency. (Show less)