Preliminary Programme

After the end of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles ordered a plebiscite in Upper Silesia to determine whether the territory should be part of Germany or Poland. The land was divided and Eastern Upper Silesia was shifted from Germany to Poland. Its population, without considering itself German or Polish, experienced intensive processes of “nationalization” or “Polonization”.
The education system was chosen by the authorities of the Polish Republic as an important tool in this process. The goal was to create a new Polish citizen from the non-national young generation. However, in the border area of Polish Silesia this clear ideological aim of the national state met many obstacles and was entangled in transnational political, economic and legal disputes during its entire interwar existence.
In accordance with the Geneva Convention agreements, the non-national Silesian youth had to be divided between the German speaking “minority schools” and the Polish speaking schools for “Poles”. On the one hand, the Polish authorities tried to make their own national division and create new loyal Polish citizens from potential Germans and Poles, even though the whole education system had to be re-established from three different inherited systems of the former empires: Russian, Prussian and Austro-Hungarian. On the other hand, the decisions concerning education in the Silesian Polish and minority schools depended on the unstable interwar political situation in Europe, the change of balance between Poland, its allies and its foes, international treaties, border conflicts and economic crises.
This paper will trace the way in which the shaping of the “new” young Germans and Poles in the small border area and their national affiliation depended on the grey areas of post-imperial national state ideology, international legal decisions, secret diplomatic agreements and the transnational position of interwar Upper Silesia. (Show less)

After the Second World War, Swedish policies towards minority and/or marginalised groups shifted from being excluding or oblivious at best, towards being more attentive and including. These new policies were tightly connected to the labour market and an increasing focus on public health as an objective in itself and a means to reach full employment. The Gypsies who had been in Sweden since the end of the 19th century were in 1952 officially recognised as citizens and thus became a target group for public intervention. An official investigation (SOU 1956:43) described them as socially handicapped and stated that they needed help adjusting to the modern life in the welfare state.

By being categorised as socially handicapped, the Swedish Gypsies fell into a larger segment of potential wage earners, whom all together made up the manpower reserve of the partially able-bodied. As partially able-bodied the Gypsies were, according to the authorities, in need of rehabilitation to enter the labour market and mainstream Swedish social life. Key words in the public debate and the official documents from this time were adjustment and adaptation. A sociomedical examination was initiated in 1962, financed by the National Labour Market Board which by now was in charge of the “Gypsy question”. The purpose of this examination was to investigate the Gypsies’ medical, social and cultural situation in order to identify obstacles for rehabilitation and propose individual interventions mainly in the areas of housing, (re)education and employment.

Simultaneously during the 1960s, Swedish Gypsies/Roma themselves mobilised in a growing citizenship rights movement, requiring housing, education and employment. Hence, Swedish authorities and Roma/Gypsies worked ostensibly towards a common goal of normalisation within the boundaries of Swedish citizenship rights and duties. In my ongoing doctoral thesis, which concerns these post-war processes on a practical every-day level, I discuss the use of established dichotomies such as exclusion and inclusion, which risks oversimplifying complex historical processes and actors. Focusing on local every-day meetings between Gypsies/Roma and non-Gypsies/Roma might countervail such dichotomies. Moreover, a local case-study illuminates how policies are made in the daily practices of different actors, and that these practices and policies seldom functioned as strictly excluding or including. (Show less)

The question of the failure of multi-religious citizenship in the late Ottoman Empire has been explored from a number of disciplinary perspectives and within multiple regional contexts from late Ottoman Greece to Mount Lebanon, Bulgaria and eastern Anatolia. Even as historians gain a greater understanding of the genocidal policies of the last Ottoman regimes, most studies fail to appreciate the degree to which external factors -- prior assaults by foreign powers on the territorial and socio-organisational integrity of the imperial state and migration/resettlement of foreign populations -- heightened simmering ethno-religious and social tensions in specific regional contexts. This paper explores the role of compromised sovereignty and local socio-political conflicts (often revolving around new, universal rights and their enforcement) in massacres and pogroms carried out against non-Muslim civilians in Greater Syria (1840-1860)and Eastern Anatolia (1880-1915). (Show less)