Central and Southeast European Studies (CSEES)

The faculty/graduate student reading group focusing on Eastern Europe, Turkey, and the Caucasus entered its sixth year in 2007-08. Under the leadership of Andrew Wachtel, this seminar brings together some 30 colleagues from multiple schools six times each academic year. For each meeting during the academic year, BCICS puts together a reading packet, which forms the basis for a discussion led by a facilitator drawn either from the NU faculty or from outside the university. The goal of these seminars is not be a gathering of academic specialists on a given topic but rather to allow specialists from a variety of fields to recognize how the problems of Eastern Europe, Turkey and the Caucasus overlap with their own research interests. Over the years, this seminar has led a number of faculty members to create new courses based on what they have learned as well as to revise existing courses. Even more importantly, it has built up such a strong faculty and graduate student constituency for research and teaching on this region.

WINTER 2008 SCHEDULE:

Thursday, February 21, 2008, :: 5:00 pm
"The Systems Made Me Do It: Corruption in Post-Soviet Societies"
Moderator: Rasma Karklins

Rasma Karklins is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Office for Democracy Studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago. She is an expert on Baltic corruption, and her current research areas include comparative politics, politics of USSR and successor states, East European politics, transitions to democracy, comparative ethnic relations, politics of public bureaucracy, collective action, and international relations.
Seminar readings:

• Karklins, Rasma. The System Made Me Do it: Corruption in Post-Communist Societies.  M.E. Sharpe, 2005;  chapters 1,  7 and 8.

• Anna Gryzmala-Busse, “The Discreet Charm of Formal Institutions: Postcommunist Party Competition and State Oversight,” Comparative Political Studies, 39:3 (apr.2006), 271-300.

• Bo Rothstein, M.Tegnhammer, The Mechanics of Corruption, 2006 Working Paper.

CANCELLED - Monday, March 10, 2008, :: 5:00 pm - CANCELLED
"Culture, Power and Social Change: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey"
Moderator: Esra Ozyurek

Esra Özyürek is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC San Diego. Her academic interests include secularism and Islam, ideologies of state and citizenship, public and private, alternative modernities, and social and cultural memory. Her regional areas are Turkey and Europe. She is author of Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey. 2006. Durham: Duke University Press, and editor of The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey. 2006. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

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FALL 2007 SCHEDULE:

Thursday, November 15, 2007:: 5:00 p.m.
"Chechnya"

Moderator: Tony Woods

"Chechnya"

"Putin's War"

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Monday, October 29, 2007, 5:00 PM.
“The Case of Kosovo and the Principle of Self-determination”

Moderator: Anton Bebler, University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Social Sciences

Anton Bebler studied various subjects in Slovenia, Serbia, Russia, USA, UK, France and earned his Ph.D. in Political Science at University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA in 1971. Since 1972 he has taught at University of Ljubljana, Slovenia and became a full Professor of Political Science and of Defense Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. For several years he regularly taught at the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna, also occasionally lectured at various universities and institutes in North America, Europe and Asia and served as member of several national and international advisory boards and panels. Dr. Bebler authored several books, wrote chapters in numerous international compendia and over 300 scholarly articles on various topics in the fields of international relations, international security, comparative political systems, European integration, European, African and other regional studies, federalism, etc. In 1991 - 1992 Dr. Bebler chaired the Slovenian Council of the European Movement. Dr. Bebler joined Slovenian Foreign Service in August 1992 and until September 1997 served as Ambassador and Permanent Representative at the UN Office in Geneva. Since February 1998 he has been President of the Atlantic Council of Slovenia (later renamed into the Euro-Atlantic Council of Slovenia), in 1999-2002 served as President, Slovenian Emigrants’ Association and in 1999 – 2002 as Vice-Chairman of the Atlantic Treaty Association.

Readings :

Western_Balkans_Security

Thoughts_Kossovo_Problem

Nationalism and Religious Extremism

Kosova_way_to_independence

Economic and Social Stability in Kosovo

Interethnic_Relations

Recognition of States: The Collapse of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union

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Monday, October 8, 2007, 6:00 PM.
"Russia/Election/Post- Putin era?"

Moderator: Boris Kagarlitsky

Readings :

Failed Crusade

Russia Under Yeltsin and Putin

The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms

The Tsar's Opponent

G. Derluguian. The Fourth Russian Empire? PONARS Policy Memo No. 411

G. Derluguian RECASTING RUSSIA

Boris Kagarlitsky is one of the world’s premier social justice activists. He is a leading figure at World Social Forum events. He has taken a guiding role in anti-globalization movements. He is known for his lively speaking style and compelling analysis of Russian and global affairs.

Dr. Kagarlitsky’s experiences range wide. He has been an advisor to the Russian Duma, and a member of the Moscow city council himself. Boris has testified to the US Congress on Russian affairs. He is a professor with international affiliations, including serving as Director of the Institute for Globalization Studies. He has written several books and hundreds of articles. Dr. Kagarlitsky is a political media commentator. Boris Kagarlitsky is also a theater critic and even professionally reviews computer games.

Born in 1958, he studied sociology and theatre in Moscow. At 24, he was imprisoned for his work on the oppositional journal Left Turn. While jailed during the Brezhnev to Andropov transition in 1982-83 he wrote his book The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and The Soviet State from 1917 to the Present.

Released under Andropov, Boris would become the Co-ordinator of the Federation of Socialist Clubs. As an activist and theorist for democratic renewal in the Soviet Union, he drew the attention of the “West,” where he was sought out by The New Left Review and Times Literary Supplement. His many books have been published by Verso and other respected publishers.

Boris was elected to the Moscow Duma in 1990. He witnessed what some would argue were the early signs of democracy’s failings in Russia when Yelstin attacked the Duma, where it is estimated some 400-100 people died in that 1993 assault. Removed from public life, he worked as a consultant to Russian labor groups and went on to publish what many perceive to be the best books detailing the troubled years in Russia from the end of Gorbachev through Yelstin.

While Dr. Kagarlitsky has spoken at universities around the world. A Some of the US institutions he has delivered presentations at are: Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Tufts, Northeastern, Brown, University of Wisconsin, UCLA, Lafayette College, and more.

SPRING 2007

April 10, 2007: Kate Brown:Lost in Exile: Writing the History of Displaced Lives and Disembodied Communities

History has most often been written from the perspective of the winners, of those who at least won enough to leave a written record. The history of southeastern and central Europe, however, often concerns people who lost battles, or never even had the means to engage in them in the first place. How do we write the history of people who simply disappeared from a place as a culture or community leaving few written traces? With the usual tools of the historian out of commission, the researcher might turn to anthropological methods. Interview and observation, however, fall short because there is no community in place and few people left to tell the story. One of the questions that emerge from trying to recapture the histories of displaced communities concerns the soundness of our scholarly tools across all situations. Whether when one is researching a territory that has been radically de-populated or a community that has been displaced, the usual tools of academic research fail in these circumstances, and resulting histories tend to reflect state-building narratives. Reading list: Pam Ballinger, Exile in Memory, pp. 1-48 and 168-207 Brown, A Biography of No Place, pp. 19-83 Brown, “Historian in the Dead Zone, Chronicle Review, 23 Sept 2005

Kate Brown is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her book, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland won the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize. As a historian of Soviet history, she has sifted through an array of declassified NKVD and KGB documents about the abuse of prisoners in the Gulag. Her article, “Out of Solitary Confinement: The History of the Gulag,” will be published in Kritika vol. 8, no. 1 (Winter 2007). Brown recently answered a series of questions about the American penal and detention system, especially as it has developed post-9/11.

Reading list: 

Pam Ballinger, Exile in Memory, pp. 1-48 and 168-207

Brown, A Biography of No Place, pp. 19-83

Brown, “Historian in the Dead Zone, Chronicle Review, 23 Sept 2005

May 7, 2007: Rogers Brubaker: Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town

Rogers Brubaker has written widely on social theory, immigration, citizenship, nationalism, and ethnicity. His first book explored the idea of rationality in the work of Max Weber, while his essays on Pierre Bourdieu helped introduce Bourdieu to an English-speaking audience. His subsequent work analyzed European nationalism in historical and comparative perspective. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (1992) sought to explain the sharply differing ways in which citizenship has been defined vis-à-vis immigrants in France and Germany; Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (1996) compared contemporary East European nationalisms with those of the interwar period, both emerging after the breakup of multinational states into would-be nation-states. More recently, in a series of analytical essays, many of them collected in Ethnicity without Groups (2004), Brubaker has critically engaged prevailing analytical stances in the study of ethnicity and nationalism and sought to develop alternative analytical resources. His new book, Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town, will be published by Princeton University Press in November 2006.
Brubaker is a Senior Editor of Theory and Society and a member of the Editorial Board of numerous journals. He is Recurring Visiting Professor in the Nationalism Studies Program of the Central European University in Budapest.

Before coming to UCLA, Brubaker was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows of Harvard University (1988-1991). He has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (1994-99), a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation (1994-99), and a Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1999-2000). He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1995-96.

Rogers Brubaker Table of Contents

Rogers Brubaker Text

Rogers Brubaker Text part 2

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PREVIOUS SEMINARS:

Winter 2007

January 23, 2007 at 5 P.M. : Organized Interests, Corruption and the State. Facilitated by Venelin Ganev

Venelin I. Ganev is assistant professor of political science at Miami University in Ohio. He has published various articles on constitutional theory, ethnic politics, and institution and state building in post communist Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Readings:

1. Mancur Olson, “Why the Transition from Communism Is So Difficult,” Eastern Economic Journal, Vol21, Nor. 4 (Fall 1995), particularly the passages on “law enforcement by the private sector.”

2. Norbert Elias, “On the Monopoly Mechanism,” in: The Civilizing Process, Vol. II, State Formation and Civilization, (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), pp.345-355.

3. Max Weber:

a. “Legal Order and Economic Order,” Economy and Society, Vol. I, pp.311-319;
b. “Logical Categories of “Legal Propositions” ­ Liberties and Powers ­ Freedom of Contract,” Economy and Society, Vol. II, pp.666-668.

4. Hilton L. Root, The Fountain of Privilege: Political Foundations of Markets in Old Regime France and England (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1994), pp. ix-xv; 1-12; 45-52.

5. Christian Lucky, “Public Theft in Early America and Contemporary Russia,” East European Constitutional Review, Vol. 6, No.4 (Fall 1997), available at:
http://www.law.nyu.edu/eecr/vol6num4/feature/publictheft.html

6. Charles Tilly, “War Making and State-Making as Organized Crime,” in: Theda Skocpol et al., eds., Bringing The State Back In, Cambridge UP, 1985, available at:
https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/rohloff/www/war%20making%20and%20state%20making.pdf

7. Venelin I. Ganev, “Postcommunism as an Episode of State Building: A Reversed Tillyan Perspective,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Vol.38. No.4 (December 2005),
pp.425-445.

February 8, 2007 at 5 :30 P.M. : Facilitated by Charles King: Can the Caucasus Be Part of European History?

Charles King is Chair of the Faculty and Associate Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where he also holds the university's Ion Ratiu Chair in Romanian Studies. A former Marshall Scholar and Fulbright Scholar, he has worked as a research fellow at New College, Oxford, and as a research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. He is the author of The Black Sea: A History (2004); The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture (2000); Nations Abroad: Diaspora Politics and International Relations in the Former Soviet Union (as co-editor, 1998); and Ending Civil Wars (1997). His articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, World Politics, International Security, Slavic Review, and other journals, and he has contributed opinion pieces to such newspapers as The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Christian Science Monitor. King’s research interests include political change, social violence, and ethnicity in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He has lectured widely on these and other topics and has worked with broadcast media ranging from CNN, National Public Radio, and the BBC to the History Channel and MTV. He holds a B.A (history) and B.A. (philosophy), both summa cum laude, from the University of Arkansas and an M.Phil. (Russian and East European Studies) and D.Phil. (Politics) from Oxford University.

READINGS:

1. Thomas Barrett, "Lines of Uncertainty: The Frontiers of the North Caucasus," Slavic Review, 54:3 (1995): 578-601.

2. Michale Khodarkovsky, "Of Christianity, Enlightenment, and Colonialism: Russia in the North Caucasus, 1550-1800," Journal of Modern History, 71:2 (1999): 394-430.

3. Charles King, The Black Sea: A History (Oxford 2004), pp. 1-21

4. Charles King, "Introduction" and "Epilogue: Continental Shift" from book manuscript "The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus,"

5. Bruce Grant, "The Good Russian Prisoner: Naturalizing Violence in the Caucasus Mountains*," /Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Feb., 2005), pp. 39-67.

6. Susan Layton, "Imagining a Chechen Military Aristocracy," Central Asian Survey, 23:2 (2004): 183-203.

FALL 2006

November 6, 2006, 5:30p.m. : "History as a Destructive and Reconstructive Force"

Facilitator: Charles Ingrao

Professor Ingrao has a BA degree from Wesleyan (1969) and a Ph.D. from Brown (1974). His areas of specialty are Early Modern Europe, Habsburg and Central European History. Since 1995, he has been the editor of the Austrian History Yearbook and, since 1997, general editor of the Purdue University Press "Central European Studies" series. His publications include: The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618-1815, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994; The Hessian Mercenary State: Ideas, Institutions, and Reform under Frederick II, 1760-1785, Cambridge University Press, 1987; In Quest and Crisis: Emperor Joseph I and the Habsburg Monarchy, West Lafayette, IN, Purdue University Press, 1979; Josef I. Der "vergessene" Kaiser, Vienna: Styria Verlag, 1982, revised and expanded German edition. Over the past decade he has focused on issues of ethnic conflictand coexistence in contemporary central Europe, and presently directs The Scholars' Initiative: Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies (www.cla.purdue.edu/si).

RECOMMENDED READINGS

Eric Gordy, "Postwar Guilt and Responsibility in Serbia," in Sabrina Ramet and Vjeran Pavlakovic, eds., Serbia since 1989: Politics and Society under Milosevic and After (2005), 166-91.

Charles Ingrao, "Understanding Ethnic Conflict in Central Europe: an Historical Perspective,” Nationalities Papers, 27:2 (June, 1999), 291-318, 331-32.

Erna Paris, Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History (2000), 346-95.

"We are Diferent People : A Discussion about jedwabne in Jedwabne," in The neighbors respond : the controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland , edited by Antony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlic. (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 2004)

The Scholars' Initiative : Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies

Czech-German Declaration from 1997:

Czech-German relations till 2001:

Czech-German Textbook Project

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October 17, 2006, 5:00p.m. : Ales Debeljak: The Rise of the (Neo) Right in Post-Communist Eastern Europe

Aleš Debeljak (1961) holds a Ph.D. in Social Thought from Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, New York. He was a Senior Fulbright fellow at the University of California-Berkeley, a fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study-Collegium Budapest, a writing fellow at Civitella Ranieri Center and a fellow of Bogliasco Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanitites. Debeljak published books on cultural criticism and has written several volumes of poetry in his native Slovenian. His books of poems in English translation include Anxious Moments (1994), Dictionary of Silence (1999) and The City and the Child (1999). His non-fiction books in English include The Hidden Handshake: National Identity and Europe in a Post-Communist World (2004), Reluctant Modernity: The Institution of Art and its Historical Forms (1998), Twilight of the Idols: Recollections of a Lost Yugoslavia (1994), and a comprehensive anthology The Imagination of Terra Incognita: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 (1997) which he edited. Professor Debeljak has won several awards, including the Slovenian National Book Award and the Chiqyu Poetry Prize (Tokyo), while he was named Ambassador of Science of the Republic of Slovenia. His books have appeared in English, Japanese, German, Croatian, Serbian, Polish, Lithuanian, Romanian, Finish, Hungarian, Czech, Spanish, Slovak, Catalan, Macedonian, and Italian translation. Debeljak is currently Director of the Center for Cultural and Religious Studies at the University of Ljubljana. While at CICS, Debeljak will teach courses in the European Union, the Balkans, modernity and the arts, and on East European poetry and politics in 20th century. His research plans include a book on the narratives of the modern Western cities and a book of poetry. 

Readings

1. Ramet, Sabrina Petra (1999) The radical right in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Chapter 1 and 2.

2. Mudde, Cas. "Extreme Right Parties in Eastern Europe", Patterns of Prejudice, Vol.34, No.1, 2000, pp. 5-27.

3. Minkenberg, Michael. "The Radical Right in Postsocialist Central and Eastern Europe: Comparative Observations and Interpretations", East European Politics and Societies, Vol.16, No.2, 2002, pp.

4. Kai-Olaf Lang. "Parties of the Right in East Central Europe", Debatte, Volume 13, Number 1, April 2005, pp. 73-81

5. Eurozine Electronic Journal. "The Polish Right: Its rise and fall?"

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Spring 2006

The last Central and Southeast European Faculty Seminar for this quarter will be held on May 16, Tuesday, at 5:00 pm. The seminar will host Marguerite D. Allen and Peter Hayes and will cover topics such as the activities of the National Bank of Hungary during World War II and fiscal issues related to the Holocaust.

Reading Materials

Simon Bourgin, "Those Irresistible Hungarians" Harper’s Bazaar (November 1960). 

Ib Melchior, "Chapter 8" (Capture of the Werewolf Organization) Case by Case: a U.S. Army Counterintelligence Agent in World War II (Novato, Ca.: Presidio, 1993).

Braham, Randolph L. "Hungary and the Holocaust: The Nationalist Drive to Whitewash the Past." The Treatment of the Holocaust in Hungary and Romania During the Post-Communist Era. NY: Columbia UP, 2004.

Braham, Randolph L. "Hungary" Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.

Kadar, Gabor and Zoltan. "Prologue: The Specifics of the Genocide Against the Hungarian Jews" Self-Financing Genocide: The Gold Train, the Becher Case and the Wealth of Hungarian Jews. Translation from the original Hungarian. NY: CEU Press, 2001. "Prologue: The Specifics of the Genocide Against the Hungarian Jews"

Allen, Marguerite DeHuszar. The Wartime History of the National Bank of Hungary Through Hungarian-American Eyes Hungarian Studies Review (forthcoming).

Hayes, Peter. Industry and Ideology: I. G. Farben in the Nazi Era. "Part V. The Nature of War, 1939-1945; Commerce and complicity; Epilogue." (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Deak, Istvan. Essays on Hitler’s Europe. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2001). "Romania: Killing Fields and Refuge";

Deak, Istvan "A Hungarian Admiral on Horseback"

Winter 2006

The first seminar will be on 19 January 2006, Thursday, and will host Sufian Zhemukhov, a Fulbright scholar at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC. Sufian N. Zhemukhov, from Nalchik, is a historian currently completing a post doc in Kabardino-Balkarian State University. He worked as a head of the department of social and humanities education and then as a director of the institute of in-service teacher training. He has written historical books, "The Life of Shora Nogma" (2002), "The World Outlook of Han-Girey" (1997), "History of Khahun Village" (1998, co-authored) and a book of poems, "Mystery of the Soul" (1999, in Circassian). He has a diploma from the Open Society Institute/Russia. In October 2001 he worked in the joint programme of co-operation between the European Commission and the Council of Europe to strengthen democratic stability in North Caucasus. His current research is on "the Caucasus in American Historiography".

Readings

Essad Bey

William Curtis

Osio Mandelstam

Fridtjof Nansen

Alexander Pushkin

The second seminar, on Thursday, February 2 2006, will host David L. Phillips. Some of the themes to be discussed will be "apology, denial/acknowledgement in international/intercommunal relations". David Phillips is a senior fellow and deputy director of the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations. In addition to his current position at the Council, Phillips is a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Center for Middle East Studies, and a scholar in residence and director of the Program on Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding at American University’s Center for Global Peace.
Phillips will talk on "Unsilencing the Past," his book about his endeavor to Turkish-Armenian reconciliation and the impact of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict on Turkish-Armenian relations. Please note that this seminar will start at 7:00 pm, after Phillips’ talk on “THE IRAQ WAR: ITS IMPACT ON TURKEY, THE MIDDLE EAST AND THE WORLD,”Harris 108.(5:00 pm)

US Position

Reconstructing Turkish Historiography

Healing and Reconciliation

Categorical Apology

After Independence

Phillips’ book, Unsilencing the Past: Track Two Diplomacy and Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation, is available on library core reserve for your use.

You may also want to take a look at the memorandum that was drafted by the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), upon the request of TARC, seeking an objective and independent legal analysis regarding the applicability of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to events which occurred in Anatolia during the early twentieth century.