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More than twenty years have passed since the disintegration of Yugoslavia, a multiethnic country that did not establish nation-states like most of Europe but opted for a confederation. In the 1990s, when the European Union was consolidating and expanding, Yugoslavia was fast dissolving. Scholarship treating the disintegration of Yugoslavia has overlooked the cultural dimension of its collapse. This volume fills that gap by bringing together leading writers and scholars to focus specifically on the dynamics of post-Yugoslav cultural transition. The authors touch upon the topic of dissolution of the common state but move beyond it to consider consequences and repercussions in various cultural fields. Together, the contributions show that while the country has ceased to exist as a political project, it lives on in the individual and collective memory, in a variety of cultural practices, and as a potent legacy.

This book tells the story of eight men and women with deep roots in provincial Hungary. "Hungary" before the First World War meant the eastern half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the second largest state in Europe after Russia. Hungary then was as large as Italy and more populous than Spain. Another Hungary lingers in prewar Hungary's small towns and studies their inhabitants, asking how they earned a living, what they thought about politics, and how they got along with their neighbors, including those who might speak a different language or practice a religion different from their own. This book argues that the history of small towns in Eastern Europe matters. They were not just a dull reflection of the capital city or of western Europe, but interesting and important in their own right. They mattered economically, they mattered culturally, and they mattered politically; their history deserves our attention. Each of the book's eight chapters examines someone born in a small town but eager to act upon a wider stage. They include a garrulous aristocrat, a misunderstood merchant, a tobacco enthusiast, and other figures from the nineteenth-century provinces. One of the central premises of this book is that surprising, interesting, and valuable ideas can sometimes emerge from the most unlikely of places.

This book tells the story of the Muslim community in modern Bulgaria during a period of imperial dissolution, conflicting national and imperial enterprises, and the emergence of new national and ethnic identities. Following the Ottoman-Russian war of 1877-1878 that paved the way for Bulgarian independence, a movement for cultural reform and political mobilization gained momentum within Bulgaria’s sizable Muslim population. From the establishment of the Bulgarian state in 1878 until the 1908 Young Turk revolution, this reform movement emerged as part of a struggle to redefine Muslim collective identity without severing ties to the Ottomans, during a period when Muslims were losing faith in the Sultan, while also fearing Young Turk secularism. This book draws on both Ottoman and Eastern European historiographies, and approaches the question of Balkan Muslims’ engagement with modernity through a transnational lens, demonstrating how Bulgarian Muslims debated similar questions as Muslims elsewhere around the world. This book situates the Bulgarian story within a global narrative of Muslim political and cultural reform movements, analyzes how Muslims understood and conceptualized “Europe,” and reveals the centrality of the Bulgarian Muslims to the Young Turk Revolution. Milena Methodieva makes a compelling case for how the experience of a Muslim minority provides new insight into the nature of nationalism, citizenship, and state formation.

This book focuses on the first fifty years of the Ligue des droits de l'homme—the League of the Rights of Man—informed by the recently available archives of the organization. Founded during the Dreyfus affair, the Ligue took as its mandate the defense of human rights in all their forms. The central argument of this book—and the point on which it differs from all other writings on the subject—is that the Ligue often failed to live up to its mandate because of its simultaneous commitment to left-wing politics. By the late 1930s the Ligue was in disarray, and by the 1940s a number of its members opted to defend the Vichy regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain.

The Transylvanian Question—the struggle between Hungary and Romania for control of Transylvania—seems at first sight a side-show in the story of the Nazi New Order and the Second World War. These two allies of the Third Reich spent much of the war arguing bitterly among themselves over Transylvania's future; Europe's leaders, Germany and Italy, were drawn into their dispute to prevent it from spiraling into a regional war. But precisely as a result of this interaction, the story of the Transylvanian Question offers a new way into the history of the European idea—how state leaders and national elites have interpreted what “Europe” means and what it does. For tucked into the folds of the Transylvanian Question's bizarre genealogy is a secret that no one ever tried to keep, but that has remained a secret nonetheless: small states matter. The perspective of small states puts the struggle for mastery among its Great Powers into a new and perhaps chastening perspective. In short, when we look closely at what people in small states think and how they behave, the history of twentieth-century Europe looks suddenly very different.

This book tells the story of French statues and monuments that were melted down and shipped to Nazi munitions factories during the Second World War. Beginning with the economic context that led to the destruction of public art, the book goes on to detail the process by which monuments were removed and destroyed and the metal sent to Germany for Hitler's war machine. The most remarkable part of the story is the reaction of the French public to the loss of its artwork. People protested all over France, and many communities took extraordinary measures to save their statues. This protest, and the way the collaborationist Vichy government handled it, sheds light on the complexities of life in wartime France.

This book explores the fate of art and cultural heritage during the Nazi occupation of France. The French cultural patrimony was a crucial locus of power struggles between German and French leaders and among influential figures in each country. The book examines the preservation policy that the Vichy regime enacted in an assertion of sovereignty over French art museums, historic monuments, and archeological sites. The limits to this sovereignty are apparent from German appropriations of public statues, Jewish-owned art collections, and key “Germanic” works of art from French museums. A final chapter traces the lasting impact of the French wartime reforms on preservation policy. The book introduces the concept of patrimania to reveal examples of opportunism in art preservation. During the war, French officials sought to acquire coveted artwork from Jewish collections for the Louvre and other museums; in the early postwar years, they established a complicated guardianship over unclaimed art recovered from Germany. A cautionary tale for our own times, this book examines the ethical dimensions of museum acquisitions in the ongoing noble quest to preserve great works of art.

This book follows the plight of German-Jewish humanists who escaped Nazi persecution by seeking exile in a Muslim-dominated society. The book asks why philologists like Erich Auerbach found humanism at home in Istanbul at the very moment it was banished from Europe. It challenges the notion of exile as synonymous with intellectual isolation and shows the reciprocal effects of German émigrés on Turkey's humanist reform movement. By making literary critical concepts productive for our understanding of Turkish cultural history, the book provides a new approach to the study of East–West relations. Central to the book is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, written in Istanbul after he fled Germany in 1936. The book draws on some of Auerbach's key concepts—figura as a way of conceptualizing history and mimesis as a means of representing reality—to show how Istanbul shaped Mimesis and to understand Turkey's humanist reform movement as a type of cultural mimesis.

This book tells the story of the origins and shared history of representative and democratic institutions in central Europe—a history that has been largely erased by the nation-state-centered histories which have dominated European historiography after 1918. This is a political history of constitution making and state building in one of the most complex polities that modern European history has known, the Habsburg monarchy. The book specifically aims at looking at how the Habsburg state was built, how its political institutions developed, and how the imperial bureaucracy—normally regarded as an absolutist organization—participated and even led this process. The imperial administration fostered and developed first representative institutions and then democratic ones over the course of the nineteenth century. By engaging in state building through the channeling of public participation in governance, the Habsburg state administration not only built the foundations of democratic practice and liberal citizenship in much of central Europe, but it—in the process—attempted to retool itself to accommodate popular participation in policy making. The book is clearly a revisionist work. It argues for seeing the ways in which the Habsburg state actively developed a vibrant political culture through political practice and representative institutions.

Eugénie Luce was a French schoolteacher who fled her husband and abandoned her family, migrating to Algeria in the early 1830s. By the mid-1840s she had become a major figure in debates around educational policies, insisting that women were a critical dimension of the French effort to effect a fusion of the races. To aid this fusion, she founded the first French school for Muslim girls in Algiers in 1845, which thrived until authorities cut off her funding in 1861. At this point, she switched from teaching spelling, grammar, and sewing, to embroidery—an endeavor that attracted the attention of prominent British feminists and gave her school a celebrated reputation for generations. The portrait of this remarkable woman reveals the role of women and girls in the imperial projects of the time and sheds light on why they have disappeared from the historical record since then.

Genocide in the Carpathians presents the history of Subcarpathian Rus', a multiethnic and multireligious borderland in the heart of Europe. This society of Carpatho-Ruthenians, Jews, Magyars, and Roma disintegrated under pressure of state building in interwar Czechoslovakia and, during World War II, from the onslaught of the Hungarian occupation. Charges of “foreignness” and disloyalty to the Hungarian state linked antisemitism to xenophobia and national security anxieties. Genocide unfolded as a Hungarian policy, and Hungarian authorities committed mass robbery, deportations, and killings against all non-Magyar groups in their efforts to recast the region as part of an ethnonational “Greater Hungary.”

This book—a long-term study of educational travel between France and the United States—suggests that, by studying abroad, ordinary people are constructively involved in international relations. It analyzes study abroad from the perspectives of the students, schools, governments, and non-governmental organizations involved, and charts its changing purpose and meaning throughout the twentieth century. The book shows how students' preconceptions of themselves, their culture, and the other nationality—particularly differences in gender roles—shaped their experiences and were transformed during their time abroad. It presents Franco-American relations in the twentieth century as a complex mixture of mutual fascination, apprehension, and appreciation—an alternative narrative to the common framework of Americanization and anti-Americanism. The book offers a definition of internationalism as a process of questioning stereotypes, reassessing national identities, and acquiring a tolerance for and appreciation of difference.

In the age of the Grand Tour, foreigners flocked to Italy to gawk at its ruins and paintings, enjoy its salons and cafés, attend the opera, and revel in their own discovery of its past, but they also marveled at the people they saw, both male and female. In an era in which castrati were “rock stars,” men served women as cicisbei, and dandified Englishmen became macaroni, Italy was perceived to be a place where men became women. The great publicity surrounding female poets, journalists, artists, anatomists, and scientists, and the visible roles for such women in salons, academies, and universities in many Italian cities, also made visitors wonder whether women had become men. Such images, of course, were stereotypes, but they were nonetheless grounded in a reality that was unique to the Italian peninsula. This book illuminates the social and cultural landscape of eighteenth-century Italy by exploring how questions of gender in music, art, literature, science, and medicine shaped perceptions of Italy in the age of the Grand Tour.

In 1808, the transatlantic slave trade began its transformation from a legal to an illegal enterprise. Although Spain signed a series of treaties outlawing the slave trade in the first third of the nineteenth century, it brought more men and women from Africa to Cuba as slaves between 1808 and 1865 than it had to all of Spanish America during the previous three hundred years. The Spanish population living in the metropolis was not ignorant of their nation’s slaving practices that fueled the sugar boom that financed liberal Spain’s modernization. Spain was-and remains-conflicted over its transgression of international law. Through a literary analysis of works from key historical moments across two hundred years, Monsters by Trade traces shifting anxieties over the transformation of Spain into a slave-trader nation, formed financially and ideologically by its morally corrupt slave economy in Cuba and condemned by all other Atlantic powers. The book thus expands our present consideration of modern empire, while previous work on this period has mostly focused on Spain’s loss of territory in the first and last years of the nineteenth century, rather than examining how the empire was sustained and, in fact, thrived. Indeed, most considerations of modern empire exclude Spain altogether.

We can often learn as much from political movements that failed as from those that achieved their goals. This book looks at one such frustrated movement: a group of community leaders and writers in Venice, Trieste, and Dalmatia during the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s who proposed the creation of a multi-national zone surrounding the Adriatic Sea. At the time, the lands of the Adriatic formed a maritime community whose people spoke different languages and practiced different faiths, but identified themselves as belonging to a single region of the Habsburg Empire. While these activists hoped that nationhood could be used to strengthen cultural bonds, they also feared nationalism's homogenizing effects and its potential for violence. This book demonstrates that not all nationalisms attempted to create homogeneous, single-language, single-religion, or single-ethnicity nations. Moreover, in treating the Adriatic lands as one unit, this book serves as a correction to “national” histories that impose our modern view of nationhood on what was a multi-national region.

This book examines the 1898 anti-Jewish riots in western and central Galicia, the Habsburg province acquired in the eighteenth century partitions of Poland and now divided between Poland and Ukraine. This volume explores how Jewish-Catholic relations functioned; how antisemitic tropes and writings gained traction at local levels even in regions with high rates of illiteracy; how the Habsburg state provided or attempted to provide stability and law and order to its far-flung provinces in the decades before World War I. At the center of interest are the choices made and actions taken on the ground by peasants, townspeople, Jews, local officials, as well as the interpretations imposed on these actions by interested parties farther removed from the scene. This book considers the new forms of political organization and virulent Catholic antisemitism that facilitated the transformation of confrontations between Catholics and Jews into a series of attacks moving from town square to village tavern while drawing ever greater numbers of people as participants in or objects of communal violence. The 1898 anti-Jewish riots and their aftermath—mass arrests, trials, political mobilization, and government and military intervention—did not simply arise from Galician backwardness. This examination of the experience of anti-Jewish violence in this rural corner of the Habsburg Monarchy is a local study of European-wide political, economic, social, and cultural transformation.

This book examines the historical origins and complex evolution of Italian national citizenship and identity from the political unification of monarchical Italy in 1861 to the first developments of republican Italy in 1950. Using the two metaphors of “citizenship as a mirror” and “citizenship as a pencil” for the historical analysis of nationhood, the book details the policies, debates and formal notions of Italian national citizenship to grasp and discuss the multi-faceted, evolving, and often contested visions of italianità. It does so by exploring the genesis of Italian monarchical subjecthood as the first juridical bond linking the populations of the peninsula in 1861. It then examines the major developments-of the liberal period and of the fascist era-by focusing on the civic history of Italian women and men, of Italy’s immigrants and emigrants as well as of colonial and overseas native populations. It concludes with an analysis of the birth and first characteristics of post-World War Two Italian republican citizenship. Italianità is by no means a fixed notion; that it has been dual, multidimensional and variable in historical perspective; and that it has also been shaped, since the first post-unification years, by homegrown traditions of racial thinking. The book advances the current historiographical discussion by highlighting often-overlooked precedents, continuities and discontinuities within and between liberal and fascist Italies; and by offering an analysis in the longue durée through the useful combination of two citizenship-nationhood metaphors

This book examines city building in East Berlin from the end of World War II on May 8, 1945, until the construction of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961—a period of great interest in reshaping the city to express new political ideals. It examines how key decision-makers were influenced by their worldview and political ideology; beliefs about the relationship between urban form and society including formal theories; political strategizing at municipal, national, and international levels; and assessments concerning the deployment of limited resources. The book emphasizes how extant discourses acted as “pathways of memory,” shaping the way key actors attributed meaning to different elements of the urban landscape. The East German approach to creating a new city and a new society did not neatly mimic the Soviet model, and it did not emerge in a creative flash. Rather, the city planning and building depended upon the selective application of existing discourses based on cultural and political leaders’ personal knowledge, beliefs, and preferences, their assessments of contemporary political and material conditions, and their view regarding long-term development. Novelty would arrive in how cultural and political leaders combined these elements and how some frameworks were adapted over time.

Like secret intelligence itself, the history of secret intelligence is elusive, for unknowns abound regarding the reliability and completeness of sources, and the motivations behind their release, which are often the product of ongoing propaganda efforts as well as competition among agencies. Indeed, these difficulties lead to the challenge of both overestimating and underestimating the importance of secret intelligence for foreign policy and statecraft. In recent decades, however, traditional perspectives have shifted ground and judgments can be revised in light of new evidence. This volume brings together a collection of essays that avoid the traditional pitfalls, while carrying out the essential task of analyzing the recent evidence concerning the history of the European states system of the last century. The essays offer an array of insight across countries and across time. Together they highlight the critical importance of the prevailing domestic circumstances—technological, governmental, ideological, cultural, financial—in which intelligence operates. A keen interdisciplinary eye focused on these developments leaves us with a far more complete understanding of secret intelligence in Europe than we have ever had before.

This book explores the important cultural phenomenon of operas about the Ottoman Turks in eighteenth-century Europe—from the 1680s to the 1820s—and considers what the figure of the singing Turk signified to European publics in the context of European-Ottoman relations, the European Enlightenment, and Europe’s cultural perspective on the Orient. The research addresses the enormous extent of this largely forgotten repertory, beginning with the many tragic operas about the captivity of Bajazet (as in Handel’s Tamerlano), and then addressing the many comic operas that followed the precedent of Rameau’s “generous Turk”—operas about the ultimately magnanimous Ottoman masters of European captives. The book further considers the use of “Janissary” or alla turca style in operas by Gluck, Haydn, and Mozart, the paradigmatic aspects of Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio, and the Napoleonic context for the several operas composed by Rossini on Turkish themes. The creation, performance, and reception of operas about Turks were conditioned by the international circumstances of European-Ottoman relations, dating from the failure of the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683—which made Turks seem less fearsome to the European imagination. The singing Turk was never altogether exotic, Other, or alien to Europe, but, rather, addressed crucial issues of European political and cultural concern, especially issues of absolute power and extreme emotion. The Napoleonic age, with its agendas of conquest and empire, brought about a final flowering of operas about Turks, before Turkish themes disappeared altogether from the modern operatic repertory.