Preliminary Programme

The newly elected Prime Minister Pierre Mendès France had successfully led the secession process between France and Indochina after the military disaster at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. Now Mendès France faced a new challenge, to negotiate a solution for future France-Algerian relations after an open revolt against France in 1954 by the FLN (Front de Libération National) in Toussaint. Yet Mendès France did not make it, and he had to left as prime minister only after just over seven months.
Although Pierre Mendès France expressed that Algeria was a part of France it did not implicate political suppression from Paris towards Algeria. However, this starting point was alien for most of the political elite and network surrounding him at that time. There was no consensus, not even among the foreign policy elite, about the French national and imperial identity. In the foreign policy elite’s identity discussions concerning decolonization, the disturbance was an absence of executive power in the political system. Due to this void, military assessments largely determined political decisions regarding colonial and overseas matters which created space for forceful lobbying from economic interest groups and extremists. A situation that gave way for quite another political solution after Mendès France’s resign and with Guy Mollet as prime minister in 1955. (Show less)

This paper explores Portuguese intellectual debates about the nation in the wake of the Carnation Revolution. I contend that we cannot fully grasp the post-revolution Portuguese transformation without accounting for the negotiation of the very idea of Portugal which unfolded in the late 1970s, proliferated in the 1980s, and lasted well into the 1990s. I bring into view a status group — the Portuguese intelligentsia — which has so far been nearly absent from accounts of post-revolution Portugal. I show how the role of intellectuals in the making of contemporary Portugal involved remaking ideas about what Portugal is, what it once was, and what it ought to become. I contextualise these intellectual debates historically in Portuguese traditions of thought about the nation, whilst also examining how the post-revolution period represented a new moment of ‘reinvention’ of the nation — a moment shaped by the aftermath of such watershed events as the Carnation Revolution, the end of the authoritarian New State regime, and the collapse of the Portuguese African Empire, as well as by the processes of democratisation and European accession. I use a combination of archival research and oral history, deploying grounded theory on a vast corpus of sources to offer a rich, deep, textured account of the history of intellectual thought about the nation in post-revolution Portugal. In this account, I posit that what was at stake in intellectual debates about the nation in post-revolution Portugal was not merely — though also importantly so — a struggle about the disengagement from the old African colonial empire and a re-territorialisation towards Europe. I contend that this is also a story about a profound reassessment of the metropole which took place in the context of a historical search for ‘Portuguese modernity’. (Show less)

Despite a series of paradigmatic shifts in the Ottoman historiography, the nationalist teleology and state-centered analyses preserve their hegemonic power to explain the dynamics of political conflicts in the Ottoman provinces during the long-nineteenth century. These tendencies brought about an ignorance to the varieties in the forms and patterns of the political conflicts and differences in the strategies and interests of the multiple actors taking part in those conflicts. As an important example to this fallacy, the Albanian League of Prizren (Besëlidhja e Prizrenit) is considered as the beginning of Albanian nationalist movement or awakening either against the Balkan irredentism or for the national self-determination and separation from the Ottoman Empire. In the face of this problem, this historical research will offer an alternative theoretical framework to analyze the characteristics of the League without invoking “the nation” and “the State” as a category of analysis. Building on the historical-materialist and strategic-relational analysis of the nationness and state-formation as a process, the research will focus on the diversity and complexity of the political conflicts depended upon a complex set of boundary conditions and strategies of different tribal and class groups in the Albanian provinces towards the regime. More specifically, this research will scrutinize the ways in which the strategies of Hamidian regime and international-geopolitical competition during the Berlin Treaty affected the different interests, strategies, positions, and discourses of different actors in the Albanian League of Prizren.

The research will propose that a proper understanding of the divergent dynamics of political conflicts and different responses in the Albanian frontiers which articulated in the League of Prizren requires focusing on the dynamic interplay between social-property relations, state-formation, international geo-political competition, and nationalization. To this end, by using the ministerial and local reports/correspondences in the Ottoman archives and contemporary public sources during the League of Prizren, the research will reveal the divergent pro-regime and anti-regime strategies of different strategical groups within the League in their relation to the Hamidian regime policies towards the region and the opportunity structures provided by the international context of the Berlin Treaty after the Russo-Ottoman War (1877-1878). Therefore, the world-historical and strategical-relational analysis presented in this study will provide a constructive criticism of the dominant state-centered and nationalist paradigms prevalent in the Ottoman historiography.

Keywords: Ottoman Empire, Albanian provinces, the League of Prizren, frontiers, political conflicts, nationalization (Show less)