Preliminary Programme

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Romanian nation in Transylvania (and afterwards, Dualist Hungary) began to make a concerted effort to improve its social-economic and educational standing, as a means of avoiding political disenfranchisement and ensuring national survival in an increasingly de-nationalizing environment. Part and parcel of this endeavour was the establishment and maintenance of certain elite groups who could advance national causes, and serve as spearheads for general social-economic improvement at local and regional levels. One of the primary coordinates of this strategic effort was the increase in the number of young Romanians trained in Law, at many of the universities and academies in the Dual Monarchy: starting from the 1860s and 1870s, the myriad of foundations and scholarship funds provided by Romanian institutions and private individuals would prioritize the education of future legal elites, to the detriment of other professional categories, such as the clergy or teachers. We are warranted to ask at this point to what extent the strategy was successful, and whether those directions in which the nation (either individually or collectively) funnelled financial resources also yielded an appropriate return. Thus, the present paper seeks to provide a comparative prosopographic overview of the three main employment areas in which Romanian graduates of Law could return the support they had received: the jurists employed at Romanian banks and credit institutes, the lawyers of the Romanian Greek Catholic and Orthodox dioceses, and the individuals trained in Law who gained employment in the middling administrative structures of Transylvania at county level, after 1867. The analysis will focus on ascertaining to what extent the financial support provided by foundations and scholarship funds established on national or confessional criteria reflected itself in the composition of the legal elites employed in these three fields. It will map the characteristics of both the law-trained individuals who benefitted from this kind of support (in terms of geographical provenance and social-economic background, places and duration of education) and the groups employed in the three institutional frameworks noted above. Finally, it will examine those who made the leap from law student (and graduate) to legal elite in service of the nation (employed in the economic, confessional, or administrative milieus), and draft an ideal-typical image of this instrumental elite category for late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Transylvania. (Show less)

During the 1960s and the 1970s, universities faced many profound changes all over the Western world. The system of higher education changed together with the expanding of the number of universities. The consequences of the arrival of the post-war baby boomers to the universities were drastic and multidimensional. One of the most visible outcomes of the development was the international student revolt of 1968, which was for the most part a matter of the collision of traditions and institutions. Bourgeoisie hegemony, a fashionable term in 1968, was questioned. University Professors, the old elite, were the representatives of ancient world that did not meet the demands of a democratic and equal society to which the new student generation identified itself.
In Finland, the student activism of the late 1960s and the early 1970s linked to two reforms: the university administrative reform and the degree reform. They were the grounds for the battle where the authority of the professors was challenged. The student movement behind the battle was strongly politicized. Especially after the loud fraction the Finnish radical left students turned to pro-Soviet orthodox communist movement in the turn of the 1970s, the debunking of professoriate’s bourgeoisie power became one of the main goals of the loud student movement.
The stronghold of this movement called Taistoism was the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Helsinki. The activities of the Taistoists lead to the several confrontations between the teachers and the students during the 1970s. The attack by the students was often personal, albeit not physical. Because of the antagonism, some of the professors early retired, some of them strongly resisted the student efforts and some, especially younger teachers, sympathized the student activists. Besides the unique radical left movement, also the fact that Finnish ‘educated class’ has been traditionally close to the State had a bearing on both sides of the clash.
In my presentation, I depict what were the main battlefields in this ‘civil war’, how the old professoriate elite was challenged and how they responded to it. I concentrate on two aspects: the demands of the university democracy in one hand and the questioning of the hegemony of the post American positivist social sciences, on the other. (Show less)

Starting from the 1750s, European military academies forged a significant share of both national and imperial élites, which ruled the continent and the world during the long XIX Century. Écoles polytechniques and war schools raised engineers, mathematicians, physicians, but also philosophers and historians which became army generals, politicians, academics, contributing to innovate and consolidate their countries’ power structures.
However, this élite-building process was a highly risky one, as many XIX Century national and social revolutions had among their ringleaders officers issued from the same military academies. The revolutions of 1820-21 were led by army officers both in Spain and Italy, as were the 1831 uprisings, the 1848 intra-imperial wars in Central Europe and the civil wars which plagued the Iberian Peninsula during the whole Century. The same happened in the colonial world, where every single independence movement had a strong military backbone, often spearheaded by officers grown at some European (or European-shaped) military academy: a phenomenon which persisted during the whole XX Century, and continues even nowadays.
Freshly established nation-states invested substantial economic, cultural and symbolical resources in creating military élites as well. Being guide and forerunner of the whole nation on the road to technical progress, economic prosperity, and geopolitical grandeur, was the primary task of this new kind of soldier. No longer courtesans or mercenaries, they were perceived and perceived themselves as truly national cadres.
The paper will present the Italian case-study, comparing it to the Spanish one, and linking them to military-led nationalist movements in the colonial and post-colonial world. (Show less)

The paper analyzes the changes that occurred in the second half of the XIX - early XX centuries on the territory of the Orenburg region in relation to the education system in the Kazakh people. The role of these changes is shown both for the implementation of the imperial acculturation policy and for the formation of the national Kazakh elite. The author considered the process of formation of the national Kazakh elite as a result of the westernization of part of the Kazakh ethnic group under the influence of the Russian secular education. It was concluded that with the creation of the Special Committee on Non-urban Education (1866) under the Kazan School District, the Empire took a course towards enhancing the use of the Russian language by the national minorities of the Orenburg Border Area. The imperial authorities put into practice the idea that a single and stable multinational state is possible only if there is a solid ideological base, which was based on a Russified public education system. As a result, gradually in late imperial Russia, the concept of expanding "foreign" education through the same enlightened "aliens" emerged.
The paper will show how specific illiterate representatives of the Kazakh people after receiving this type of education became representatives of the national elite, influential in solving political and administrative issues in the Kazakh lands.
In fact, with the help of this system, the Russian Empire has achieved great success on the path of constructing a single socio-cultural space in the region. Creating an education system with the inclusion of Russian-Kazakh and aul (i.e. local Kazakhs) schools was one of the most important features of this system. These schools actually represented the acculturation model of an educational institution with a tendency to intersect two cultural and civilizational foundations - the Russian-imperial (basically Russian) and Kazakh-Muslim. As a result, Orenburg became the city where the foundations were laid for the development of the Kazakh national elite, the Kazakh intelligentsia, and, therefore, for the consolidation of the Kazakh national identity. It is important to emphasize that this did not occur contrary to, but precisely because of the implementation of the imperial policy of acculturation by means of the elementary educational system. It is possible, of course, to evaluate this process as the Empire’s cultivation of its own grave-diggers - indeed, the emergence of an educated national elite further aggravated the national Kazakh movement within the Russian Empire. However, it is no less possible to interpret the process as a key mechanism for the gradual transformation of the Empire into a modern state, following the path of federalization. (Show less)

The prefect is a key “figure” to understanding the state functioning mechanisms in Greater Romania, which was dominated by a centralized public administration. Similar to the French model, the Romanian prefect was the most important agent of the government in the territory: a high-ranking political dignitary, in charge of the national interest, government representative, supervisor of all the public services, responsible for maintaining public order and security. The prefect owed his appointment mainly to the loyalty he displayed towards the ruling party, to which I can add in the 1930’s the will of King Carol II. He was a guarantee of the elections’ legality, but was, unofficially, in charge of ensuring the victory of the governmental parties. However, in the Interwar Period, he served also as a guarantee for a better strengthening of the Crown and Romanian rule in the regions integrated in 1918-1919. The prefects, especially those with military backgrounds, were viewed by the central administration as a decisive factor for the consolidation of a strong national state. Furthermore, between 1938 and 1940, prefects were replaced solely with military personnel (as delegates) and became important agents for the authoritarian regime of King Carol II and the militarization of Romanian society.
This study tries to offer a qualitative and quantitative analysis of a phenomenon which could not been explained only by the need of the state to place trustworthy civil servants and dignitaries as prefects. In fact, many members of the military elite replaced members of the political or even administrative elites in this function. My first objective is to range all the reasons of all the actors who determined the nomination of high-ranking officers as prefects. On one hand, after retiring from the army, many officers decided to play an active role in public life, and even pursue a political and/or administrative career. On the other hand, the professionalization of the military, the First World War, a nationalistic policy and the international political context contributed to the appreciation and trust placed in military personnel by the state, citizens and political parties after 1918. They were not only considered war heroes, traditional allies of the Crown, good administrators, untouched (yet) by the “dirt” of politics, but also better administrators than the political elite and more obedient towards the government than professional civil servants. The second objective is to investigate foreign influences and make comparisons about the militarization of the civil service, especially the prefects. The third objective consists of measuring the scale of the militarization of the prefects’ administrative body (tenured or delegates), not just in number, but also considering the term of office, the historical period and the counties where this practice was more frequent (especially in Southern Dobruja and Bessarabia). The fourth and final objective is to try to evaluate, even preliminarily, their offices: were these members of the military elite excellent administrators and/or good political actors? Do their civil careers end, or not, as prefects? (Show less)

This paper explores the shifts in (un)hiddenness of one of only a few (female) Afrikaner public intellectuals that could be typified as a ‘leftist’ or ‘dissident’ thinker in 20th century South Africa. Dr Petronella ‘Nell’ van Heerden (1887-1975) was embraced by cultural entrepreneurs advancing the burgeoning Afrikaner nationalist cause in the 1920s after she became the first Afrikaner woman to qualify as a gynaecologist. Apart from hailing from a family with close links to the ruling elite of the former Orange Free State, she supported the development of Afrikaans, having written the first dissertation (1923) in this language at the University of Amsterdam. Upon her return to South Africa, she joined the National Women’s Party in the Cape province, and was celebrated as a convincing advocate of the franchise for women. Soon, however, cracks started to appear: her outspokenness was not limited to her feminist and anti-British politics. By the 1930s she broke with the National Party over its refusal to explicitly condemn Nazism and anti-Semitism. Her subsequent marginalisation as a public figure is investigated as a reaction against both her socialist and anti-Nazi stance and her non-conforming gender identity and sexuality. She was partially restored in public Afrikaner nationalist discourses in the 1960s, only to be forgotten again by the 1980s. The paper draws on selected speeches, letters to newspapers, pamphlets and autobiographies that Van Heerden wrote between 1920 – 1970 with a view to understanding the omissions and erasures surrounding this complex and contradictory figure. (Show less)