André Liebich

From the other shore : Russian social democracy after 1921

Part 1 The Menshevik Family: a group portrait a portrait gallery. Part 2 1903-1921: Mensheviks and Bolsheviks - a phenomenology of factions, the second congress and its aftermath, revolutionary rehearsal, after the revolution (1905), into the Great War from exile to exile - war, revolution, facing Bolshevik power, within the party, personal itineraries. Part 3 1921-1933: inside and outside - settling into exile, the political economy of NEP, the nature of NEP Russia, the party underground, watching the Kremlin Mensheviks and the wider world - into the international arena, Menshevik foreign relations, fraternal parties Stalins revolution - the great turn, socialist debates, the Menshevik trial. Part 4 1933-1965: hard times - life in France, contacts, the totalitarian nexus, purges and politics, search for unity, division and defeat sea change - new roads and old, the last of the Martov line, the end of the foreign delegation, waging the Cold War, the American file, the final campaign conclusion.

Citizenship, East and West

The outcome of the political transition in Eastern Europe depends not only on the politics pursued but on the understanding of politics pursued but on the understanding of politics in the countries involved. This volume examines a key aspect of this understanding, the notion of ‘citizenship’ as it is being defined in Eastern Europe today. Formally, ‘citizenship’ refers to the criteria of membership in a political community. More broadly, it raises key questions of identity, contract and culture, which bear upon the future of such issues as human rights, mobility and the relations between state and civil society in the post-communist world. This interdisciplinary collection brings together sociologists, jurists and political theorists from Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic as well as from Switzerland, France, Great Britain and the United States. The volume seeks to articulate and compare the meanings and implications of ‘citizenship’ in terms of key issues and in several national contexts. Common to all contributions is the conviction that a comparison among different understandings of citizenship illuminates national specifications and brings into focus some of the constraints on the emergence of a democratic consensus shared by East and West.

Bandera: memorialization and commemoration

This article examines the current heroization of Ukrainian nationalist leader, Stepan Bandera, as manifested in monuments and commemorative practices. It offers a topographic survey that reveals the extent and variety of modes of Bandera heroization. It examines the esthetic and historical controversies that surround Bandera memorialization. It enquires into the personal motivations and political strategies that underlie the effort to project the chosen image of Bandera upon the public space in highly visible terms. It suggests that the campaign in favor of memorializing Bandera can best be understood in performative terms. It is in depicting Bandera as a hero of Ukraine that Bandera becomes a hero of Ukraine.

Minority as inferiority: minority rights in historical perspective

This article argues that minority rights developed as an indemnity offered to defeated parties. As a grudging and begrudged calculus of compensation, considered inadequate by the vanquished and offensive by the victors, minority rights have been unable to compete in terms of legitimacy with either an increasingly robust international human rights regime or with the right of national self-determination. After reviewing some explanations for the weakness of the existing minority rights regime, this article traces the rationale of what may be described anachronistically as minority rights provisions in international treaties from the Peace of Westphalia to the Versailles settlement, concluding with a consideration of present-day implications of the argument elaborated here.

Was Herder a Nationalist

This article re-examines Herders status as one of the founders of nationalism in the light of both older and more recent literature. The article focuses specifically on Herders position with regard to the classical nationalist thesis that state and nationality should be coterminous. It argues that a close reading of Herders oft cited and most explicit statement apparently lending support to this thesis has been misunderstood. The existing literature underestimates Herders concern regarding the question of governance. For Herder there can be no case for statehood without just governance. As earlier drafts of his work confirm, Herder was deeply critical of the states he knew and denounced their overly bureaucratic and despotic character. He thought that nations could and should exist without being states. Depending on the circumstances, however, states might fulfil temporary functions to strengthen and preserve the national character, that most essential attribute of every nation. For Herder the diversity of nations is an insurance against despotism. It is not a licence for the creation of states.

Roma Nation? Competing Narratives of Nationhood

This article considers two alternative accounts of Romani ethnogenesis, an ethnic narrative exuding the romance of exoticism and a functional one underpinning the pathos of deprivation. Neither of these accounts conveys the specificity of the Romani condition which cannot be defined by mythical nomadic lifestyle, by the legal and political situation of an ethnic minority, or by social economic status. The article argues that the imbrication of the twin accounts of ethnogenesis and of their corresponding structures of legitimization has distorted both analysis and policy with respect to the “Roma Question” in East Central Europe.

Must Nations Become States

A world in which every nation has become a state, that is, a world in which cultural and political units coincide, would be a very different world from the one we know. There are now close to 200 political units recognized as states in the international system. Nations, understood as cultural units, are not as easily identified. Taking only language as a defining criterion, one could count some 6,000 linguistically defined groups. Many of these groups number so few speakers and are so close to extinction that their future can be discounted.2 If one turns to other cultural markers, however, from religion (or church) and ethnicity, in the sense of common origins, to “a shared style of expression,” the number of cultural groups may well be almost unlimited. Many such groups would call themselves “nations” as a dignified form of selfdesignation. The claim that cultural nations must become political states thus presumes strongly on present-day reality and has deep implications for the future. An international system consisting of many hundreds, possibly even thousands, of state units would function along different lines from the one we know. Granted that such an outcome is not likely to be realized integrally, the general theoretical proposition underlying this vision receives a respectful hearing. Though resisted by many jurists and other scholars, the thesis that nationhood, understood in a cultural sense, must-both in the sense of “should” and in the sense of “will necessarily”—entail political statehood continues to advance in public consciousness. After the end of decolonization, where state creation was dictated by unique considerations, we have continued to witness a rise in the number of recognized states and, even more so, in the number of struggling independence movements. Debate focuses on procedural issues, such as modes of separation from existing states, rather than on the fundamental premises underlying and legitimizing the acquisition of statehood. In this paper I propose first to examine three sorts of arguments invoked to justify the claim that cultural nations must—in the different senses of that term—become political states. These are arguments that can be described as definitional, causal or functional, and moral. The definitional argument makes a case based on linguistic coherence in the use of terms. The causal or functional argument founds itself on a sociology of modernity which posits the interdependence of culture and politics. The moral argument is rooted in an ethics of autonomy and self-rule, recognition and identity.

Nationalizing the Globe, Globalizing the Nation

The paradigm of the nation-state has been Europe’s most successful export product. Indeed, the European model of the nation-state has acquired a worldwide monopolistic position as the sole legitimate form of political organization. As a result, almost the entire globe is today divided into political entities which claim to already be or aspire to become nation-states, that is, sovereign territorial units of governance (states) which coincide with a cultural reality (nations).

Simon Geissbühler, ed. Kiew—Revolution 3.0: Der Euromaidan 2013/14 und die Zukunftsperspektiven der Ukraine.

Simon Geissbuhler, ed . Kiew—Revolution 3.0: Der Euromaidan 2013/14 und die Zukunftsperspektiven der Ukraine . Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society. Ed. Andreas Umland. Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2014. 160 pp.

Maîtres à l’épée, Maîtres à danser, Maîtres à penser:Founding French National Consciousness in Russian Exile

Abstract Proceeding from Lord Acton’s insight that “exile is the nursery of nationality,” this paper examines a peculiar historical instance of dislocation as a relevant matrix for the articulation of national identity. I inquire into aspects of the elaboration of French national consciousness among French émigrés of the revolutionary period in Russia, approaching the subject at two levels: first, the maîtres à danser, the run-of- the-mill émigrés who abandon cosmopolitan certitudes or pretensions of a “monde français” and abstractions of dynastic loyalty, in favour of nostalgic attachment to a tangible patrie, very much at odds with the Russian otherness into which they have been thrust. Second, the maîtres à penser, those émigré thinkers in whom the Revolution provokes a reconsideration of established universals and who conceptualize Russia in terms of a project to reconcile universal and particular or national values. I examine the dilemmas and ultimate failure of such a projection by focusing on the work of Joseph de Maistre. On both levels, the historical case studied here is an exemplification of the proposition that nationalism is founded on a disenchantment with the world, and that physical estrangement from both the world to which one believes oneself to belong as well as spiritual estrangement from the world in which one treads, may provide a critical context for defining collective identity.