Preliminary Programme

Wed 12 April
    08.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 13 April
    08.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Fri 14 April
    08.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 15 April
    08.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00

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Thursday 13 April 2023 11.00 - 13.00
H-6 ELI06 WW II and After: from Totalitarian/authoritarian to Liberal/democratic Elites
B33
Network: Elites and Forerunners Chair: Aappo Kähönen
Organizers: - Discussants: -
Marc Gil Garrusta, Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora : (Dis)Progression of Local Political-administrative Elites in Early Francoism: Analyzing Individual Labor Trajectories in the City Council of Barcelona (Spain) 1939 - 1950
One of the main characteristics of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes was their statism and, consequently, their concern to ensure complete control of the state apparatus, an essential instrument for the implementation of their ideology (Burrin, 2000; Gentile, 2005; Evans, 2005). In this sense, the Franco regime was no exception. His ... (Show more)
One of the main characteristics of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes was their statism and, consequently, their concern to ensure complete control of the state apparatus, an essential instrument for the implementation of their ideology (Burrin, 2000; Gentile, 2005; Evans, 2005). In this sense, the Franco regime was no exception. His peculiar ascent to power, after the Civil War, allowed to establish a more radical and profound control plan for the administration of the state.
In this sense, the Franco regime built its state, its administration and its political-administrative elites on the basis of an exhaustive purge of the civil service of the Republican State. The main objectives of this purging process were to eliminate the opponents, to warn the indifferent and to configure a compact civil service body absolutely loyal to the regime. The resulting administration would therefore only be composed of those addicted to the regime and those who, even with temporary administrative sanctions, the regime considered to be recoverable. It would soon be completed with the incorporation of those who collaborated along the war with Francos’s side, occupying the positions of all those who had been expelled.
Although the purge process is widely known, the studies carried out have been mainly concerned with establishing the procedures and the results of it. They focused especially on those who were dismissed. Moreover, little attention has been paid to the fate and durability of the effects of the purge on those civil servants who were only sanctioned, but not dismissed, as well as to the subsequent development and consolidation of the Francoist administration (Cuesta, 2009; Aróstegui, 2012; Gil, 2017).
In this paper we propose to analyze the paradigmatic case of the purge of municipal civil servants in the Barcelona City Council. A purge that affected its 7,100 municipal servants. In this way, our aim is to measure the labor progression of the civil servants who formed the Francoist council from the closing of the purging process, around mid 1940.
For this purpose, the labor trajectories of the Barcelona civil servants, who served between 1939 and 1950, have been constructed through the information that appeared in the city council's ladder-rank of municipal civil servants, using record linkage techniques such as the Jaro-Winkle and Levenshtein string distances. These sources provide individually the name and surname of each civil servant as well as the date of entry into this administration and the time spent in the specific socio-professional category. Since these trajectories constitute longitudinal data of first magnitude, they will be modeled with event history analysis, specifically with the so-called Cox regressions. To this effect, the occurrence and timing of the change of socio-professional category will be measured controlling for the outcome of the purge, date of entry, gender and kinship ties into the council. Given the heterogeneity of the socio-professional categories, these will be modeled separately, which will be conveniently codified with HISCAM and HISCLASS classifications. It should be noted that we will use the 1934 ladder-rank as a control data. (Show less)

Kaisa Hirvonen : Festivities Serving the Ideology and Constructing the Society: Volksweihnachtsfeier – the Christmas Celebrations of the NSDAP
In totalitarian societies – such as the National Socialist Germany – festival culture was a way to build the new society, define its value system and form national identity. Festival culture is also an excellent indicator of the changes in the society, and furthermore it reveals the regime’s expectations for ... (Show more)
In totalitarian societies – such as the National Socialist Germany – festival culture was a way to build the new society, define its value system and form national identity. Festival culture is also an excellent indicator of the changes in the society, and furthermore it reveals the regime’s expectations for the future. In the National Socialist Germany (1933–1945) the regime constructed its own festival calendar. At the same time, it also made changes to the existing one and made it serve the NS-ideology.
Christmas was the most popular festival in Germany already from the 19th century and during the NS era it continued to be so. The National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) had its own concept of the Christmas celebration. It was called Volksweihnachts Feier – celebration of People’s Christmas. It was organized by the local NSDAP branch together with the National Socialist organisations such as Hitler Jugend and Bund deutscher Mädel.
The regime published several instructions for the party officials for organizing the celebrations. In Die Neue Gemeinschaft many detailed articles were issued over the years and some booklets were published just for this purpose as well. The first instructions were announced in 1937, and the first improved versions were published already the next year. In 1939 WWII broke out and the name of the celebration was changed to Deutsche Kriegsweihnacht – German War Christmas – and the instructions were updated yet again.
The main purpose of the People’s Christmas celebrations was to build and strengthen the society – Volksgemeinschaft. The celebration of People’s Christmas offers a fascinating view to observe several key elements that occur in the NS festival culture as whole, such as unifying the celebrations, using religious rhetoric and elements, and constructing new traditions. The instructions also reflect the changes in the society: bright optimism shifts to the darkness of the war.
In 2014 ESSHC I introduced the first time my ongoing PhD research, which is about the Festival Culture in National Socialist Germany. In 2014 my topic was Christmas in Third Reich. – Manipulating collective memory and creating National Socialist traditions. In 2016 ESSHC I had a presentation The National Socialist Ideology Reaches the Private Sphere. The Festival Culture in NS. Frauen-Warte (1933–1944), which presented the National Socialist festival culture in the women’s magazine NS-Frauenwarte. The presentation I’m offering this time provides yet another perspective to the National Socialist festival culture. In 2016 I concentrated on the private sphere and the Volksweihnachts Feier is about the public sphere and the public celebrations. (Show less)

Adrian Magaldi : Alfonso Osorio: a Biography of Spanish Transition
The political career of Alfonso Osorio (1923-2018) must be one of the longest in the history of twentieth-century Spain and yet also one of the least known. He held any number of offices both under Franco and in the new Democracy, the most important of them during the years of ... (Show more)
The political career of Alfonso Osorio (1923-2018) must be one of the longest in the history of twentieth-century Spain and yet also one of the least known. He held any number of offices both under Franco and in the new Democracy, the most important of them during the years of political reform and the Transition after Adolfo Suárez made him Deputy Prime Minister. Osorio described himself as “monarchist by conviction, Christian Democrat by training, and Liberal by instinct” and those three principles would shape his public life, initially during his time in the reformist ranks under the dictatorship and then as part of what came to be known as the “civilized Right”. His is the life of an éminence grise, a strategist who shunned the limelight and a permanent fixture on the Spanish political scene. He worked closely and loyally with prominent politicians, among them Federico Silva, Adolfo Suárez, Manuel Fraga, and Antonio Hernández Mancha, but when disagreements arose he was quite prepared to go his own way, driven by a sense of honour and by principles he refused to compromise. The eternal Number Two, whether of his own choice or that of others, and a never-ending source of ventures that came to nothing, this statesman from Santander was an indispensable and vital part of the political scene. Alfonso Osorio’s life story is that of the “perpetual” yet necessary “Loser” and as we examine it we shall not only learn more about him but also be able trace the story of the Right in Spain —of how it adapted, reorganized, and transformed itself as Francoism faded and Democracy assumed centre stage— and, by painting a composite picture of those who shared that journey with him, to shed some light behind the scenes of twentieth-century Spanish politics. This political biography of Alfonso Osorio has been conceived as a way of getting closer to the man and his times in order better to understand our recent history. (Show less)

Ahti Valkonen : The Ideological Evolution of the Finnish Young Liberals in the Context of Student and Youth Radicalism from the 1960’s through to the Early 1980’s
The turbulence of World War II, post-war reconstruction, and record fast socio-economic structural change engendered a stark contrast in the perceptions of social reality and experiences between the younger generation and the war-torn older ones in charge of society, which in turn lead to intergenerational value conflicts in 1960’s Finland. ... (Show more)
The turbulence of World War II, post-war reconstruction, and record fast socio-economic structural change engendered a stark contrast in the perceptions of social reality and experiences between the younger generation and the war-torn older ones in charge of society, which in turn lead to intergenerational value conflicts in 1960’s Finland. Whilst the societally or politically oriented part of the youth initially formed single-issue movements of its own, over time it began to increasingly identify itself as “New Left” and consequently for the most part ended up joining socialist parties on the left, and especially the Social Democrats opening to their ideas by the middle of the decade. By the early 1970’s, after widespread youth disillusionment with the policies of the Social Democrat-lead popular front coalitions and some right-wing filibustering in parliament, this party politicisation process culminated in turning what was originally an intergenerational conflict into more of a highly charged intra-youth party polarisation, pitting a united centre-left front ideologically dominated by the so-called “Taistoists” affiliated with the orthodox pro-Soviet minority wing of the Finnish Communist Party against the ostracised conservative National Coalition Youth. The overly charged party polarisation, coupled with the oil crisis-induced economic recession, however eventually served to bring about another counter wave, this time in the form of non-partisan youth alternative movements partly similar to those of the 60’s. Unlike the student and youth radicalism of the 60’s however, these new alternative movements resulted in the emergence of a totally new political party in the Finnish political spectrum in the 1980’s: the Greens.

The doctoral thesis project behind this presentation seeks to map out the thus-far neglected ideological evolution of the Finnish Liberal youth and student leagues against the backdrop of the afore described sequence of events by means of archival and various literary sources. It aims to provide answers to the following questions: when and how did the student and youth radicalism of the 1960’s begin in the Young Liberals? How was the party politicisation process reflected in Young Liberal policies? What was the relationship of the Young Liberals to the alternative movements of the late 1970’s, especially in the case of the green movement, in which some Young Liberal activists occupied pre-eminent positions? The presentation is best suited to be part of the “elites and forerunners” network in the ESSHC given that it will make use of Karl Mannheim’s theory of generations as a means of explaining and contextualising changes in the Finnish Young Liberals’ policies. The theory is based on a social generation having a distinctive consciousness resulting from experiencing major historical events in its youth and on this consciousness being interpreted notably by generational elite units attached to different political traditions. (Show less)



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