Tag: James Mark

Decolonising Europe #12: Decolonising the Non-Colonisers?

Published on by CIGH Exeter

This the 12th session of the successful Decolonising Europe Lecture Series. In this session the gaze is towards Eastern Europe. Where is Eastern Europe in the history of global colonialism? This session explores why Eastern Europe has been largely absent from mainstream histories of global colonialism and studies of postcolonialism and decolonialism.

Date 17 February 2021
Time 16:00 -17:00

The region’s integration into capitalism meant integrating into an evolving global colonial-racial system. Eastern Europeans were often racialised as inferior and ‘uncivilised’ while their region became a dependent hinterland and colonial arena of various imperialist projects. However, Eastern Europeans also supported global colonialism, (re)produced white supremacy and Eurocentric or colonial worldviews, partook in colonial expeditions and accumulated colonial collections, and strove to acquire colonies and build empires. The region’s contradictory historical relationship with colonialism is laden with the tensions and challenges of ‘in-betweenness’: being part of ‘white Europe’ and striving to ‘catch up’ to the West, but being ‘not-quite-white’ and a (semi)periphery of the core. This tension facilitated various strategies of globally manoeuvring between rebel anti-colonial alliances and comprador colonialist positions.

How do these contradictory histories inform current debates about anti-racism and decolonisation? What are the challenges of decolonial politics in a postsocialist region where “white lives matter”? Can we decolonise the ‘non-colonisers’?

This event is co-organized by ACES and Zoltán Ginelli to foster dialogue on Decolonising Eastern Europe. Please follow the group Decolonizing Eastern Europe on Facebook and Twitter for existing debates and collaborations on the topic.

Zoltán Ginelli is a critical geographer and Independent Researcher from Budapest (Hungary), currently working on his book on the global history of the ‘quantitative revolution’. He is member of Karl Polanyi Research Centre and the Dialoguing Posts Network. During 2015–2019, he worked as Assistant Researcher in the Leverhulme Trust and AHRC research projects 1989 After 1989 and Socialism Goes Global. He is co-curating with Eszter Szakács the exhibition Transperiphery Movement: Global Eastern Europe and Global South for the 2021 OFF-Biennale Budapest. Zoltán is founder admin of Decolonizing Eastern Europe (Facebook, Twitter) and blogs at kritikaifoldrajz.hu.

James Mark is a Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He has recently been part of projects aimed at rethinking Eastern European history in the context of global Empires and their ends. He was Principal Investigator on a Leverhulme Research Leadership Award (2014 – 2019): ‘1989 after 1989: Rethinking the Fall of State Socialism in Global Perspective’; and an Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) funded project; ‘Socialism Goes Global: Cold War Connections Between the ‘Second’ and ‘Third Worlds” (2015-19).  He is the author of The Unfinished Revolution: Making Sense of the Communist Past in Central-Eastern Europe (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) and co-author of Europe’s 1968: Voices of Revolt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); 1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe and co-editor of Alternative Globalisations: Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World. A co-written work reframing Eastern European history as part of a global story of Empires and their ends will be published with OUP later this year.

Click here for further details and to register

Why Globalise? 1989 in Eastern Europe and the Politics of History

Published on by CIGH Exeter
East and West Berliners gathering at the Berlin Wall on November 10, 1989, one day after the wall opened. Source: britannica.com

Zoltán Ginelli

Excerpted from LeftEast

In this three-part interview, conducted, transcribed and edited by Zoltán Ginelli, history professor James Mark talks about his latest book.

James Mark is a British Professor of History at the University of Exeter. His research focuses on the history and memory politics of state-socialism in East Central Europe from the perspective of broader global histories, transnational processes and comparative methods. In 2019, James finished leading two 5-year international research projects: 1989 After 1989: Rethinking the Fall of State Socialism in Global Perspective and Socialism Goes Global: Cold War Connections Between the ‘Second’ and ‘Third Worlds’. The two projects focused on how to reinterpret state-socialism, the Cold War, the 1989–91 system changes and the postsocialist period in Eastern European history as part of global processes and in the histories of colonialism and anti-colonialism. The titles of the two projects came from two published articles.[1] In 2019, these projects published several books, such as 1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe, and Alternative Globalizations: Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World, but three further volumes are in also production, one of them entitled Historicizing Whiteness in Eastern Europe. Readers might also be interested in the exhibition Tito in Africa: Picturing Solidarity organised as part of the second project and bearing an exhibition book (The Wende Museum, Pitt Rivers Museum, Museum of Yugoslavia). The exhibition presents the African round-trips of Yugoslavian president Tito in the 1960s and 1970s in the context of the development of the Non-Aligned Movement and the Third World. Continue reading “Why Globalise? 1989 in Eastern Europe and the Politics of History” →

Jacobin interview with Prof. James Mark: When Eastern Europe Left the World Behind

Published on by CIGH Exeter

We at the Forum are delighted to draw your attention to the magazine Jacobin, which has just published an interview with Prof. James Mark about the new book 1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe, co-authored with Exeter colleagues Bogdan Iacob, Tobias Rupprecht, and Ljubica Spaskovska. Here is the introduction:

When Eastern Europe Left the World Behind: An Interview with James Mark

On the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, commemorations of the “end of communism” proved rather muted. The Washington Post lamented the dismantling of the democratic institutions so hard-won in 1989, accusing Hungary’s far-right premier Viktor Orbán of antics that would make his communist predecessors “blush.” Writing in the Guardian, liberal historian Timothy Garton-Ash also felt that the “dictators [are] coming back,” but insisted the “spirit of 1989” could resist the spread of so-called “illiberal democracy.”

Both readings conform to a commonplace understanding of what happened in central-eastern Europe after 1989 — a wave of democratic mobilization, cruelly beaten down by new Moscow-aligned autocrats who do not want to embrace “Western values.” This perception has been fueled by the public declarations of many leaders in the “Visegrád” countries (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia) who have insisted on the preservation of their Christian and national culture as against “globalism” and multiculturalism. Continue reading “Jacobin interview with Prof. James Mark: When Eastern Europe Left the World Behind” →

The struggle over 1989: The rise and contestation of eastern European populism

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment

Bogdan Iacob, James Mark, Tobias Rupprecht

First published in Eurozine

Eastern Europe is clearly part of a global populist wave, and is now part of the western right-wing populist imaginary as the bedrock for ‘pure’ European values. Only by looking at ‘1989’ from a new angle can we see how populist governments’ rejection of a ‘decadent’ and ‘imperialist’ West merely continues a communist stance, despite their strident anti-communist rhetoric.

The spread of populist governments in eastern Europe over the last decade, and their nationalist challenging of core tenets of western liberalism, has given currency to talk about a ‘new east-west divide’. A notion has taken hold that draws on a longer history of western views of eastern backwardness: a specifically eastern illiberal ‘infection’ is allegedly threatening the stability of the entire European project. In this vein, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called upon ‘the EU and the people of Europe to resist the backsliding we are seeing in the east’.1 Yet the parallel ascent of populist parties in much of the West, and a wave of anti-populist mass protests in the east, suggest the divide is not defined by geography alone.

As we argue in 1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe, the current wave of east European populism, while rooted in local nationalist traditions, is best understood by also considering its global ideological bedfellows. Nativists in eastern Europe, and those who embrace similar forms of ethnonationalist cultural traditionalism elsewhere, have mutually reinforced each other. Radical right-wing figures in western Europe have developed strong bonds with eastern European populists in a common push to ‘re-found’ Europe on an explicitly anti-liberal basis. Beyond Europe, leaders with an authoritarian bent, from the right-wing of the Republican Party in the United States, to Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, and Xi Jinping in China, have contributed to eastern European populists’ re-positioning against the West. Through these relationships, leading figures of such nationalist parties as PiS in Poland and Fidesz in Hungary, as well as their intellectual supporters, re-imagined their place in a broader world beyond the liberal rule of law and what they consider the neo-colonial interference of the EU in their countries’ domestic affairs. Together, they clamour for the defence of their societies’ ‘Europeanness’, allegedly threatened by Western multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and ‘political correctness’. Continue reading “The struggle over 1989: The rise and contestation of eastern European populism” →

Upcoming @socialismglobal Conference: Historicizing “Whiteness” in Eastern Europe and Russia (Bucharest, June 25-26)

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Historicizing “Whiteness” in Eastern Europe and Russia

Venue:   Institute for Political Research, Spiru Haret street no 8, Bucharest, zip-code 010175

Date: 25-26 June 2019

Over the last decade, issues of migration both out of and into Eastern Europe have brought questions of “whiteness” and its “defence” into the public language of the region. Populists of different political stripes have presented their countries as protectors of traditional European whiteness against a multicultural West. This is in fact quite an unusual phenomenon: race in general and whiteness in particular have for the most part been hidden discourses, absent from mainstream political or cultural thinking about the area itself. At those moments when race did come to the fore, it was often externalised as a phenomenon which adhered only to the western and/or the capitalist imperialist other.

Yet, as some have argued, whiteness has been fundamental to Eastern European history and even the very conception of the region since the 19th century. Anikó Imre referred to Eastern European nationalisms ‘unspoken insistence on their whiteness’. Some have posited a regional identity based on the in-between-ness born of a fragile or frustrated whiteness: such an identity might be allied with the privileged whiteness produced by European imperialism and the global colour line to which it gave rise, whilst also being ambivalent towards, or sometimes excluded from, the projects and institutions from which the power of whiteness has stemmed. While critical theories of race and whiteness emphasise the idea that, in Charles W. Mills’s words, ‘white supremacy was global’, eastern Europeans’ ability to fully exploit being racialised as white has arguably been more conditional, as a result of the peripheralisation of the region itself.  Yet it was visits to Eastern Europe that prompted W.E.B. Du Bois to redefine his thinking about race. He observed ethnic relations in the region and understood that race problems were not only about colour.

Despite the growing number of critical histories of whiteness both on a regional and global level, there has been little academic engagement with such questions in the study of Eastern Europe, the Russian Empire and the USSR. This workshop seeks to explore the role that whiteness has played in the articulation of identities from a historical perspective – roughly from an age of high European imperialism in the mid-19th century until the present. We encourage contributions which explore the multiple conceptualisations of whiteness in national spaces, intercultural transfers and transnational impacts across the region, whether this be Central Europe, South- or North-Eastern Europe, Russia or what is now the “post-Soviet space”. Continue reading “Upcoming @socialismglobal Conference: Historicizing “Whiteness” in Eastern Europe and Russia (Bucharest, June 25-26)” →

CfP: Criminalising Violent Pasts: Multiple Roots and Forgotten Pathways 1950s-2010s (London South Bank University, 15-16 November 2018)

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment

Over the last half century, discourses and practices connected to the idea that violent or dictatorial pasts should be marked as criminal have proliferated. A variety of actors – from victims groups to social movements, to expert groups such as lawyers, museums specialists and even economists – have contributed to the emergence and circulation of the notion that political violence could only be overcome through its criminalization in courts, lustration procedures, history writing, activism or memorial sites. Produced across different fields of action and expertise, this assumption has become dominant in the political and judicial sphere at a global level and has permeated many political cultures and everyday life practices. Even where decriminalisation (amnesties, pardons, closure of archives) prevailed, debates worked within the set of assumptions about the past established through this globally expanding paradigm.

Despite its dominance, we still lack a truly international history of its roots. This is in part because modern day practices of criminalisation often play down their own historicity. Coming of age at the so-called ‘end of history’, their promoters came to see their application as a natural end point in the achievement of human rights, democracy or good governance. When histories are offered, they too often provide a rather linear narrative that links these developments to – mainly Western – political processes established to address the legacies of Nazism after World War Two. Such accounts have also commonly resisted incorporation into broader frameworks supplied, for example, by histories of globalization, neoliberalism or postcolonialism. Only recently have a few authors sought to make sense of the emergence of the modern criminalisation paradigm in new ways, connecting it, for example, to the rise of the homo economicusand a concomitant individualistic approach to human rights.

This conference seeks to explore the history of the (often forgotten) pathways and contested visions through which the criminalization paradigm developed. This conference welcomes contributions that explore the emergence of multiple, potentially competitive visions of criminal pasts. Taking as its starting point the moment of an acceleration of decolonisation, globalisation and de-Stalinisation in the 1950s, we encourage papers that explore the variety of actors, activisms and political projects that lay behind the global expansion of such ideas. Human rights organisations, international legal associations, post-colonial and Communist states, all variously developed the idea of overcoming criminal pasts as they sought, to legitimate new political projects, reconceptualise the relationship between the individual and the state, or seek collective or socio-economic justice for past wrongs. We welcome papers that, for example, address the complexity and interplay of these ideas in different arenas and seek to connect these phenomena to wider literatures. We are also wary of easy teleologies, and are as interested in the histories of the marginalization of some visions, as in the growing dominance of others.

Papers might address the following topics: Continue reading “CfP: Criminalising Violent Pasts: Multiple Roots and Forgotten Pathways 1950s-2010s (London South Bank University, 15-16 November 2018)” →

Global Neoliberalisms: Lost and Found in Translation

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BRITISH ACADEMY, 10–11 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH. Charing Cross / Piccadilly Circus Tube.

 This conference addresses questions about neoliberalism’s intellectual (and other) origins, and why it came to play such a powerful role across the globe. It will develop and extend new work which seeks to understand the rise of multiple neoliberalisms as ideology and practice.

FIND OUT MORE britishacademy.ac.uk/conferences

All welcome. Registration fee payable.

THURSDAY 7th JUNE

REGISTRATION, 8.45-9.15

INTRODUCTION 9.15-9.30 James Mark, Richard Toye, Tobias Rupprecht, Ljubica Spaskovska

9.30-11 CIRCULATIONS: THE COLD WAR AND AFTER

Chair: James Mark (Exeter)

Vanessa Ogle (UC Berkeley), Diplomat Capitalists, Spooks, and the spread of Free-Market Capitalism: Revisiting the Global Cold War, 1960s-1970s

Quinn Slobodian (Harvard/ Wellesley), White Supremacy and the Neoliberals: South Africa as Laboratory and Limit Case

REFRESHMENTS

11.15- 12.45 CIRCULATIONS: THE COLD WAR AND AFTER (2)

Tobias Rupprecht (Exeter), Pinochet in Prague: Latin American Neoliberalism and (Post-) Socialist Eastern Europe  

Richard Toye (Exeter) and Daisuke Ikemoto (Meiji Gakuin University), Contesting ‘economic miracles’: neoliberal exchange and resistance in the UK and Japan

LUNCH 12.45-1.45

1.45 – 3.15 LABOUR, GENDER AND NEOLIBERALISM

Chair: Matthew Eagleton-Pierce (SOAS)

 Pál Nyíri  (Amsterdam), “Culture talk,” spectres of socialism and neoliberal management techniques in a Chinese-run factory in Hungary

Artemy Kalinovsky (Amsterdam), Abandoning the Factory: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Soviet Central Asian Entrepreneur

REFRESHMENTS

3.30- 5.00 LABOUR, GENDER AND NEOLIBERALISM (2)

Pun Ngai (Hong Kong University), Neoliberalism in Crisis: Producing new subjects of Migrant Labour in China

Bernhard Rieger (Leiden), Making Homo Oeconomicus? Unemployment Policy Since the Sixties in Transatlantic Context

FRIDAY 8th JUNE

9-10.30 INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS: BETWEEN THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

Chair: Ljubica Spaskovska (Exeter)

Alexander Kentikelenis (Oxford), The Making of Global Neoliberalism: The IMF, Structural Adjustment, and the Clandestine Politics of International Institutional Change

Jennifer Bair (Virginia), The Long 1970s: NIEO, Neoliberalism and the Right to Development

10.30 – 10.45 REFRSHMENTS

10.45- 12.15  INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS: BETWEEN THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL (2)

Stephanie Decker (Aston Business School), The World Bank in Ghana, 1970-1985 – Neoliberalism and institutional voids

Jörg Wiegratz (Leeds), Embedding the neoliberal moral order: The political economy of moral change in Uganda

LUNCH 12.15-1.15

1.15-2.45 SOCIALISM/ POSTSOCIALISM AND THE RISE OF NEOLIBERALISM

Chair : Artemy Kalinovsky (Amsterdam)

Johanna Bockman (George Mason), Recovering the Socialisms in Neoliberalism: Anti-Colonial Banking, Anti-Capitalist Markets, and Revolutionary Structural Adjustment

Julian Gewirtz (Harvard Kennedy School), The Transnational Roots of China’s Socialist Market Economy

REFRESHMENTS 2.45 -3.00

3.00 – 4.30 SOCIALISM/ POSTSOCIALISM AND THE RISE OF NEOLIBERALISM (2)

Susan Bayly (Cambridge), Neoliberalisms in Asian global dialogue: The perspective from late-socialist Vietnam

David Priestland (Oxford), Embedding Neoliberalism: Politics, Markets and Morality in the Czech Republic and Russia

4.30 -5.00 CONCLUDING DISCUSSION

Global Neoliberalisms: Lost and Found in Translation

Published on by CIGH Exeter2 Comments

This conference aims to provide a truly global account of the rise and entrenchment of the modern neoliberal order. Contributors will consider how neoliberal ideas travelled (or did not travel) across regions and polities; and analyse how these ideas were translated between groups and regions as embodied behaviours and business practices as well as through the global media and international organisations. As the fate of neoliberalism appears in question across many regions, it is an opportune moment to make sense of its ascendancy on a global scale.

Convenors:
Professor James Mark, University of Exeter
Professor Richard Toye, University of Exeter
Dr Ljubica Spaskovska, University of Exeter
Dr Tobias Rupprecht, University of Exeter

Speakers include:
Professor Jennifer Bair, University of Virginia
Professor Susan Bayly, University of Cambridge
Professor Johanna Bockman, George Mason University
Professor Stephanie Decker, Aston Business School
Mr Julian Gewirtz, University of Oxford
Professor Vanessa Ogle, UC Berkeley
Professor Daisuke Ikemoto, Meijigakuin University
Professor Artemy Kalinovsky, University of Amsterdam
Dr Alexander Kentikelenis, University of Oxford
Professor Pun Ngai, Hong Kong University
Professor Pal Nyiri, University of Amsterdam
Professor David Priestland, University of Oxford
Professor Bernhard Rieger, University of Leiden
Professor Quinn Slobodian, Wellesley College and Harvard University
Dr Jorg Wiegratz, University of Leeds

Registration:
A registration fee is payable at the time of booking. For further information and details of how to book please click on ‘Book event’.

Standard Admission: £95 for both days; £50 for one day
Early Bird booking (before 31 January 2018): £75 for both days; £40 for one day
Concessions: £36 for both days; £20 for one day

Date

Thu 7 Jun 2018 09:00 to Fri 8 Jun 2018 17:00

Location

The British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AH

BOOK EVENT

James Mark Discusses ‘Red Globalization’ on BBC Radio 4

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment

In case you missed it last week, the Centre for Imperial and Global History’s  Professor James Mark was on BBC Radio 4 discussing ‘Red’ globalization:

Marxism – Laurie Taylor talks to David Harvey, Professor of Anthropology at CUNY and world authority on Marx’s thought. His latest book explores the architecture of capital & insists that Marx’s original analysis of our economic system still resonates today. They’re joined by Jonathan Sperber, Professor of History at the University of Missouri. He insists that Marx was a 19th century figures who ideas have run their course. Also, ‘red’ globalisation. James Mark, Professor of History at the University of Exeter, tells a little known story about the way in which anti capitalist ideas once circulated the globe. [Listen to the programme]

Call For Papers – Alternative Global Geographies, Imagining and Re-Imagining the World

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment

Global-South-America-Brazil-and-Argentina

Call for Papers

Alternative Global Geographies, Imagining and Re-Imagining the World

Late 19th century – Present Day

Conference of the Research Network “Socialism Goes Global”

In contrast to public claims of the early 1990s, space and geographies have not lost their central role in defining an ever more globalized world. We still live in territorialized spaces: not only in the narrow sense of states and societies that reside within their borders, but also geographies and spatial formats on regional and world scales. Research in the aftermath of the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences is increasingly drawing our attention to the importance of understanding large-scale spatial dynamics for global history. Continue reading “Call For Papers – Alternative Global Geographies, Imagining and Re-Imagining the World” →

Socialism Goes Global: Cold War Connections Between the ‘Second’ and ‘Third Worlds’ 1945-1991

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Global-South-America-Brazil-and-Argentina

James Mark
History Department, University of Exeter

The University of Exeter, in collaboration with the Universities of Oxford, Columbia, Leipzig and Belgrade, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and University College London, has recently been awarded a major Arts and Humanities Research Council Grant (2014-18) to address the relationship between what were once called the ‘Second World’ (from the Soviet Union to the GDR) and the ‘Third World’ (from Latin America to Africa to Asia).

In the post-war period, as both decolonization and new forms of globalisation accelerated, new linkages opened up, and existing ties were remade, between these ‘worlds’. Contacts multiplied through, for instance, the development of political bonds; economic development and aid; health and cultural and academic projects; as well as military interventions.

Yet these important encounters, and their impacts on national, regional and global histories, have hitherto only played a marginal role in accounts of late 20th century globalization, which have mainly focused on links between the West and former colonies, or between the countries of the ‘Global South’. Continue reading “Socialism Goes Global: Cold War Connections Between the ‘Second’ and ‘Third Worlds’ 1945-1991” →

CFP: Entangled Transitions: Between Eastern and Southern Europe 1960s-2014

Published on by CIGH Exeter4 Comments

James Mark

In under two decades, authoritarian political systems collapsed across Europe – in the south of the continent in the 1970s, and then in the east between 1989 and 1991. Although much work has been done on these processes in each region, and comparative work carried out on post-authoritarian transitions and memories, there has yet to be any sustained scholarship that examines the ‘entangledness’ of these processes in the context of broader European and global processes of the late Cold War and its aftermath. Taking a longue durée approach, this conference will explore these inter-relationships between the 1960s and the present day. 2014 marks the 25th anniversary of the fall of state socialism and the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the transition from dictatorship on the Iberian Peninsula and in Greece: an ideal time to consider the relationship between these processes that have been central to modern European history. Continue reading “CFP: Entangled Transitions: Between Eastern and Southern Europe 1960s-2014” →