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

All days
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Friday 14 April 2023 14.00 - 16.00
Y-11 POL11 Individual Leaders and Mass Politics
Västra Hamngatan 25 AK2 138
Network: Politics, Citizenship, and Nations Chair: Izabela Dahl
Organizers: - Discussants: -
Natalie Cornett : Rosa Luxemburg and the Struggle for Equality within the International Socialist Movement (1898-1914)
The renowned internationalist socialist Rosa Luxemburg grew up in Warsaw, under Russian rule, at a time of heightened underground political activity aimed mostly at preserving Polish culture in the face of Russian repression. In 1889, at age 19, Luxemburg fled to Zurich after her involvement with the socialist revolutionary movement ... (Show more)
The renowned internationalist socialist Rosa Luxemburg grew up in Warsaw, under Russian rule, at a time of heightened underground political activity aimed mostly at preserving Polish culture in the face of Russian repression. In 1889, at age 19, Luxemburg fled to Zurich after her involvement with the socialist revolutionary movement brought her to the attention of the local Russian authorities. During her nine years in mostly Swiss exile, she wrote a doctoral dissertation on the negative ramifications of Polish independence on the international workers’ movement; founded a Polish socialist political party (the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, SDKPiL); and co-founded the party’s newspaper, The Worker’s Cause, in which she contributed countless articles that supported an international, revolutionary vision of democratic socialism.
This presentation will focus on Luxemburg’s position on the national question and her gender politics, both topics related to her vision of equality that allowed for dissimilitude among socialist activists and workers. It will particularly focus on her first actions within the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) at the end of the nineteenth century, when she discovered the challenges of being a woman and a Pole among a sexist and nationalist Party leadership. Using her letters and political tracts, the presentation will weave the personal and political together in order to paint a fuller picture of how Luxemburg came to understand cultural expression and identity within the larger framework of socialist internationalism. It will explore how Luxemburg formed her unique ideas on nationalism specifically through the prism of the Polish question and her own feelings of "Polishness" as experienced in her lifetime.
Luxemburg’s internationalism has been attacked by her contemporaries and recently by scholars who aim to portray her as a “national nihilist” (Erlacher, 2014) deaf to the yearnings of national minorities within European empires, while others use her internationalist stance to show the overall political weakness of her socialist program (Blanc, 2018). While it is true that Luxemburg did not support Polish independence, she still rejected Russian and German imperial oppression of Polish national and cultural life and framed her international socialism as a truer form of patriotism that would better preserve linguistic and confessional expression than the imperialist-capitalist system of false patriotism.
In this presentation, I will argue that the defeat of Luxemburg’s brand of internationalist socialism has more to do with the power of right-wing nationalists than an inherent weakness in her internationalist political thinking or practice. Luxemburg well knew the power of nationalism, and as Stephen J. Bronner explains, her insistence on internationalism was an attempt to provide a socialist “qualitative alternative to the bourgeois model of nationalism” (Bronner, 1997). Luxemburg also saw the problems with social-patriotism, having witnessed its failures in both the Polish and German political spheres to spark a revolutionary movement that could overcome, or at least stand up to, imperialist-capitalist oppression. (Show less)

Karin Dupinay-Bedford : The Heroic Figure of the Maquis: a Vector of Political Integration and a Societal Assertion. The Case of Rhonalpin from 1945 until 1995
The Rhône-Alpes region was illustrated by a History that must be glorious through the ages, to the discretion of the chronology of the national events, and had been brilliantly retaken during the Second World War. The figure of the Maquis and maquisard is part of the pantheon of the Nation, ... (Show more)
The Rhône-Alpes region was illustrated by a History that must be glorious through the ages, to the discretion of the chronology of the national events, and had been brilliantly retaken during the Second World War. The figure of the Maquis and maquisard is part of the pantheon of the Nation, of the Republic, with particular attention since 1945; but whose way had been traced before the war: the Daladier government has entered the department of Isère into the defensive system, through the Alps with a Maginot Line of the Alps between Nice and the Mont Blanc, just after Hitler and Mussolini have signed the Stahlpakt. During the campaign of France, the mountain infantry prevented the taking of Grenoble. In June 1941, the police of Grenoble let the prefect know the opposition was clear, Movements Libération, Franc-Tireur, Front National and Combat were created during the winter of 1941-1942; attacks, fighting and demonstrations identified the struggle for Liberty.
On the 4th of September 1944, the region was liberated in jubilation of the people; the maquisards had a place of honour and celebrated the moment. But many fighters were not here anymore. If the network of Resistance was thick, if Isère and in particular Grenoble were indicated recognized as the capital of the Maquis, the consequences of this reality were that fights remained particularly dreadful: the price of blood has been paid. By the way, some of them did not stop fighting and followed it until the defeat of Nazi Germany. Their courage and their self-sacrifice became the norm in 1945, making the base of the Renaissance française and the résistancialiste Myth. From then on, the heroic figure of the Maquisard decreed as a vector of political integration and societal assertion.
This figure directly served the statement of a political role that Résistants wanted to act due to the role model of the Resistance national Council: above all, it claimed to the Republic a democratic and institutional renewal, with the General De Gaulle, this one asking for a political union all around those who fought for the Victory. Indirectly, this situation also led to another situation: the people were indebted to the Maquisards for this incoming freedom and the victory. So, something appeared in the light of these elements: the two parts of our study interlocked around a centrality made by the maquisard, but a progressive centrality because of the conflicts of the Cold War before finding a cooling down in 1995.
So, this paper will be organised through three moments. For the first time, from 1945 to 1960, the political integration was inextricably linked with the heroic figure of the maquisard, through ex-résistants associations, with no sharing due to the only definition of the fight which was taken on for men and women, and in which some became representative. The glorification of the sacrifice made by the Résistants introduced real public policies and societal assertion through the commemorations. Then, from 1960 to 1989, the definition of the maquisard increased, regarding the fighting survivors from the concentration camps, those illustrating far more clearly the necessity of the integration as the beginning of consideration by the sacrifices agreed. But in this situation, the necessity was impacted by two political ideologies, one Communist and the other Gaullist. Finally, the last time opened in 1995 in the commemoration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Liberation. Cooling down appeared in the maquisards' quest. There, the political integration and the societal assertion were linked to show a united face, the one asked for by De Gaulle in 1945. (Show less)

Eva Gómez Fernández : Racial Supremacism: Kaúlza de Oliveira de Arriaga (1970-1984)
One of the anomalies of the Portuguese right-wing extremism is supremacism in racial terms. The Portuguese State was devastated for forty-eight years (from 1926 to 1975) by a national Catholic authoritarian regime where the extreme right remained in a state of ideological parasitism by not adopting neo-fascist elements from Europe ... (Show more)
One of the anomalies of the Portuguese right-wing extremism is supremacism in racial terms. The Portuguese State was devastated for forty-eight years (from 1926 to 1975) by a national Catholic authoritarian regime where the extreme right remained in a state of ideological parasitism by not adopting neo-fascist elements from Europe during World War II.
Our main objective in this paper is to delve into this figure who has gone unnoticed in academic studies despite the fact that several documents suggest that he could have been the successor of the dictator Antònio Salazar. In order to examine his career, we will take into account his ideology, which draws directly from Lusitanian Integralism (IL), an elitist movement that was born in 1914. Also, the role he played during his stay in Mozambique and, finally, the role played by his political grouping, Movimento Independente para a Reconstrução Nacional (MIRN), both in Portugal and in Europe.
To support our study, we will use secondary sources from newspaper archives, archives from different countries (Portugal, the United States, Spain, England and Mozambique) and, finally, the writings of Kaúlza de Arriaga. Finally, we will carry out a questionnaire with Ernesto Milá Rodríguez, a former Spanish neo-fascist who was in contact with various European extremist leaders during this period.
Our main impression is that, despite being a staunch defender of Salazarism, de Arriaga adopted a Portuguese-style supremacism which, far from imitating the national-socialist model, he had borrowed from the early literary period of Antònio Sardinhia, precursor of Lusitanian Integralism, as well as from the rulers of Southern Africa; Ian Smith of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Jim Fouché of South Africa sent reinforcements to the commander-in-chief to put down the guerrilla insurrections.
As far as de Arriaga's political facet is concerned, we consider that his electoral failure was due to his attachment to the ideological postulates of Salazarism, which for half a century had abused national symbols that were fragmented during the transitional process that reinforced a pro-democratic, pro-modernisation and pro-Europeanist narrative. In this sense, Arriaga's discourse was Europeanist because he believed in the viability of a Euro-Afro-Asian civilisation in which Portugal would be the metropolis. His project failed because he shed the "extreme right" label to join the "civilised right". This damaged his image.
Our essay aims to illustrate the work of a figure of the Lusitanian extreme right who has gone unnoticed and who is still claimed in certain military sectors today. (Show less)

Zeth Isaksson : Blood and Soil – How Historical Inequalities in Landownership Contribute to Spatial Variations in the Support for the Radical Right
There are substantial spatial differences in the support for the radical right and there have been multiple attempts to explain this variation in political preferences by looking on legacies of historical institutions. This study expands this literature by arguing that unequal variations in land ownership during the early-modern period, with ... (Show more)
There are substantial spatial differences in the support for the radical right and there have been multiple attempts to explain this variation in political preferences by looking on legacies of historical institutions. This study expands this literature by arguing that unequal variations in land ownership during the early-modern period, with disproportional ownership by the nobility and systems of corvée, creates a local counterculture among tenants. This counterculture in turn persists across centuries, spurs revolt, and becomes the core ideology of solidified political movements. As an effect, some areas are expected to expose substantially higher support for regional and radical-right wing parties, centuries later. By using historically informed data on historical conflicts over landownership between landowners and tenants in southern Sweden and historical borders between Denmark and Sweden, these expectations are confirmed. Areas where the nobility had a disproportionally large portion of land ownership expose as much as 10 percentage points higher support for the radical right. This study contributes to our understanding of how legacies of historical land distribution influence spatial variation in political preferences at the subnational level, and it expands our theoretical understanding of how local countercultures contribute to the creation of new parties in general and the rise of the radical right in particular. (Show less)

Johannes Lindvall, Guillem Amatller : The Telegraph and Turnout: Evidence From Sweden
Electoral turnout varied a lot in nineteenth-century states. In the Swedish parliamentary election of 1875, for example, turnout was a mere 3 percent in the Orust and Tjörn electoral district, covering two large islands 50 kilometers north of Gothenburg, but it was 67 percent in the urban electoral district that ... (Show more)
Electoral turnout varied a lot in nineteenth-century states. In the Swedish parliamentary election of 1875, for example, turnout was a mere 3 percent in the Orust and Tjörn electoral district, covering two large islands 50 kilometers north of Gothenburg, but it was 67 percent in the urban electoral district that comprised the four northern cities of Härnösand, Umeå, Luleå and Piteå. In this paper, we study one explanation for these varying levels of turnout in the nineteenth-century world:\ the telegraph. We estimate the effect of the expansion of the electric telegraph network on electoral turnout using district-level panel data from the Swedish elections of 1872, 1875, and 1878. The telegraph contributed to higher turnout since it connected local communities to a national communication network that brought news from the capital, which made people more aware of national politics and more motivated to vote. Our work is closely related to that of Wang (2019), which examines the relationship between telegraph connections and turnout in presidential elections in the United States in 1844--1852, but there are several differences between 1840s United States and 1870s Sweden that warrant attention and that distinguish our work. Most importantly, in 1840s United States, most white men could vote and turnout was already very high, but in 1870s Sweden, only a small minority of adult men could vote, with average turnout remaining low. (Show less)



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