Kristian Gerner

North Eastern Europe and Swedish great power policy: Reflections on historical consciousness

Abstract The article discusses the usefulness of the concept of North Eastern Europe. It was developed as a cognitive instrument in order for historical analysis to focus on social structures and processes rather than on states. Swedish historical consciousness is linked to the history of the seventeenth century, not least thanks to the historical novels by Peter Englund. Sweden of those times was a multinational Baltic empire. Thus the use of the concept North Eastern Europe makes the active Swedish policy vis-à-vis the Baltic states and North West Russia acquire a certain legitimacy in the eyes of the Swedish public.

Conrad and Turgenev: Toward the Real

ethical responsibility. And so, though ZoxWeaver’s description and analysis leads to this conclusion, she unfortunately neglects to draw it out for her readers, and neither does she refer directly to the large body of literature on art, the Holocaust, and ethics towards which the stories of her subjects so insistently point. Zox-Weaver’s chapter on Janet Flanner is the strongest in the book. Several modernist tropes become problematized through her analysis of Flanner’s work, such as the consistently ironic and urbane tone that Flanner took in her New Yorker profiles of Hitler, Pétain, and even Göring; her admiration for beauty “with a capital ‘B’” and her fascination with “genius,” which she shared with Gertrude Stein as well as many other modernists. Like Stein, Flanner preferred to see history as a phenomenon of individuals and personalities, arguing explicitly in a 1938 column: “Everything that is happening in Europe now is happening according to the characters, rather than the politics of a few leading men. What is taking place here is psychology not history. History will come later” (117). Thus, as Zox-Weaver maintains, Flanner “scrupulously refrained from digressing into ethical theorization. Ideology is only fleetingly broached in her work and Hitler’s political and moral agenda passes largely unnoticed” (149). Flanner’s labor, then, was not politics but the deconsecration of “great men,” the undoing of their iconicity (117). The result was mixed: Flanner’s two profiles of the Führer enjoyed the dubious distinction of success both in anti-Fascist America and in Nazi Germany, where they were copied and passed around between Nazi officers who viewed the pieces as unironically pro-Hitler (132). Nevertheless, Zox-Weaver maintains that Flanner’s irony worked as critique. “In the end,” she writes, “Flanner’s strange brand of disruptive resistance is [to depict] a Hitler who ‘scrupulously chooses a second rate tailor’”—and yet, while such ‘cute’ details may have run the risk of humanizing Hitler, Zox-Weaver concludes that Flanner’s style “effectively deconstructs and dissects the theatrical spectaculars that encouraged Nazism to subscribe to its own myths” (149). Zox-Weaver herself brings up the salient question, quoting Andreas Huyssen, who asks, “Are irony and satire really the appropriate mode for dealing with fascist terror” (22)? But she withholds a definitive answer to this question, and though her book describes and even foregrounds the instances of irony that three of her four subjects characteristically use (Riefenstahl’s films prove to be as un-ironic as it gets), she glides past this critical conundrum with just a few sentences in her introduction and does not come back to it in a satisfying concluding chapter. After raising these high-stakes issue—the possible limits of irony as critique, the problem inherent in bracketing the political and the ethical— Zox-Weaver thus limits her mission to describing rather than to judging these women who described rather than judged Adolf Hitler.

Review: To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica's Missing

Modern history offers several examples of the special significance of culture and science for augmenting national identity of powerful states, after humiliating defeats in war and severe pruning of their former greatness. One famous example is how after the First World War Germany highlighted the country’s intellectual potential and how its science was mobilized. Gabrielle Hecht presents the case of France after WWII and its focusing on nuclear technology as the road to regain power and grandness. Notice the title of her book: the phrase ‘‘the radiance of France’’ was much in use together with ‘‘the grandeur of France.’’ The book explores how nuclear technologies are interwoven with politics and national identity. It studies technologists, institutions and working places. It makes use of extensive written sources and a substantial amount of interviews. The concept ‘‘technopolitical regimes’’ is developed and put into action in studies of central institutions such as ‘‘Commissariat á l’Energie Atomique’’ and ‘‘Electricité de France.’’ Hecht analyses how the programmes were designed and the role of nuclear workers, thus elucidating the relations between technology, national grandeur and the actual work being done. Two chapters are devoted to the popular representations of nuclear technology—part of their performance can best be described as spectacle; the Chinonreactor even entered on the wine label of the local wine producers. One chapter analyses opinions on nuclear energy generation. Hecht’s work should be highly ranked. In social research on nuclear power and nuclear waste there are certain dangers. One is to delve into narrow studies of certain projects, losing sight of contexts. Another is to get stuck with research questions that are set by industry, led by the need to obtain legitimacy for nuclear facilities. Hecht skilfully avoids such dangers. This is a qualified and critical study of nuclear power in its cultural context. As this is a reprint of the 2009 original, it is helpful to find an afterword that brings up issues of the trans-nationalisation of nuclear power in the last decades. The study is of great value for understanding the expansion of nuclear generation in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. It is unique in its thoroughness in exploring the relations between nuclear technology and national identity. This factor is of much significance for the growing interest in nuclear generation in developing and newly industrialised countries. Hecht’s book stands out as an important case for further comparisons.

Discourse and Transformation in Central and Eastern Europe

At a time when political discourse in America is dominated by moralistic blowhards, Michael O’Hanlon offers a pleasant respite. With levelheaded circumspection he tries to unravel defense analysis in all its complexities for lay audiences. An example: The U.S.-led global alliance exceeds 80% of the world’s total military spending, ‘‘dwarfing’’ both China and Russia. The total (

Katyn: A Crime without Punishment.

500þ billion annually, not counting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) is, O’Hanlon admits, ‘‘exorbitant.’’ But this does not mean it is economically harmful. In fact it is a smaller proportion of the GNP than what prevailed during the Cold War, and sometimes deficit spending can benefit an advanced economy. Nor is this amount avoidable given America’s vast overseas commitments, and its reliance on high technology instead of troops (of which it has only ca. 10% of the world’s total). In any case, America always seeks a ‘‘major qualitative advantage in military capability’’ over other nations, not a ‘‘fair fight.’’ O’Hanlon employs this kind of systematic logic in every chapter, at the end of which he raises questions so that readers can apply what they have presumably learned. To me, the most interesting chapters concern logistics and the computer-mediated ‘‘revolution in military affairs.’’ In regard to the first, O’Hanlon points out that the basis of American military prowess is not its weaponry, which is being rapidly mimicked (and occasionally exceeded) by other countries, but its capacity to safely move and base equivalents of mid-sized cities and their supplies quickly over large distances by sea and air. This is another way of saying (which O’Hanlon does not) that America is the world’s sole imperialistic power. Concerning ‘‘nifty’’ high-tech warfare, O’Hanlon does great service by urging ‘‘a certain humility’’ and ‘‘sobriety’’ about our accomplishments. To be sure, the militarization of space, advances in sensing and ordnance, and GPS battlefield coordination are ‘‘not unimportant.’’ However, they should not be ‘‘exaggerated,’’ lest we repeat the disastrous mistakes made early in the Iraq War; and neither should their ‘‘staggering’’ expenses be ignored. At least into the near future, traditional ground combat skills will remain important. For all this, I am nonetheless left wondering what ‘‘science’’ in the title refers to. That defense analysis has its own arcane vocabulary—‘‘aimpoint,’’ ‘‘combat exchange ratio,’’ ‘‘fratricide’’ (1⁄4 one American warhead inadvertently destroying a friendly second), ‘‘circular error probable’’—is certainly no proof that it is scientific. Indeed, O’Hanlon himself acknowledges that war-making is ‘‘at least as close to art’’ as it is to science. My guess is that what makes defense analysis ‘‘scientific’’ to O’Hanlon is that it attempts to (very) roughly estimate the costs and benefits of different military policies. But this hardly makes this book, as advertised, ‘‘the definitive guide’’ to war-making after Sun Tzu. Recommended for all public and university libraries.

Between the Holocaust and Trianon - Historical Culture in Hungary

In the wake of Michael Friedman’s pathbreaking book, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Open Court, 2002), there has been an upsurge of interest in the neglected philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874– 1945). Edward Skidelsky’s new intellectual biography is part of this burgeoning ‘‘Cassirer industry,’’ and he has produced a scholarly masterpiece that complements and, in many ways, surpasses Friedman’s project. With lively and engaging writing, a clear grasp of the most difficult conceptual twists and turns of latenineteenthand early-twentieth-century European philosophy, and a deep historical understanding of the intellectual and political climate in Germany, Skidelsky’s book is a must read for those interested in the history of ideas in general and for academic philosophers in particular. Indeed, philosophers, particularly of the Anglo-American variety, will find this book especially enlightening as it identifies the common historical (largely neo-Kantian) sources out of which the infamous ‘‘Continental/Analytic’’ divide emerges, a polemical divide that has plagued professional philosophers for nearly a century. Skidelsky begins his study by carefully tracing Cassirer’s intellectual roots in the neoKantian movement in Germany, which emerged largely as a reaction to the detached technicism and neutrality of positivism (Naturwissenschaften) and threatened to colonize the entire domain of ‘‘lived-experience’’ (Erlebnis), culture, and the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). Cassirer was sympathetic to the Marburg school, which, unlike the so-called Southwestern school of neoKantianism, was not, strictly speaking, antipositivist. Representatives of the Marburg school ‘‘hoped not only to rescue science from increasing technicization but also to save the humanities from increasing irrationalism’’ (24) that was emerging in the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger. Rather than being regarded as the default setting for ‘real’ philosophy, positivism came to be viewed as a particular historical expression of human reason, an expression that is in no way antagonistic to the other active and creative capacities of culture, including the arts and humanities. Cassirer, however, breaks with the Marburg school by regarding the ‘‘various forms of culture not as products of a universal rational faculty but as aspects of our symbolic self-expression’’ (49). In this regard, he plays the role of a mediator who attempts to reconcile the conflicting positions of rationalism and objectivity characteristic of the Naturwissenschaften with the irrationalism and historicism of the Geisteswissenschaften. For Cassirer, both perspectives emerge from the same symbolic wellspring and have their own unique ‘‘symbolic forms.’’ With chapters devoted to Cassirer’s engagement with the new logic in the work of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein (chapter 3) and with the Vienna Circle and logical positivism in general (chapter 6), Skidelsky provides a valuable survey of the intellectual and historical backdrop that made mainstream Anglophone philosophy possible. He also offers an insightful chapter on Goethe’s influence on Cassirer’s project and the role that the Warburg library played in the development of his theory of symbolic forms (chapter 4). The heart of the book, however, is in the last three chapters that address Cassirer’s engagement with the growing social and political influence of Lebensphilosophie, which comes to a head in March of 1929 with Cassirer’s famous disputation with Heidegger in Davos, Switzerland. Skidelsky builds the tension by describing the growing cultural and intellectual backlash against scientific positivism that created an increasingly instrumental, technological and

After the demise: the normalization of soviet history

Historical culture is about public memory, that is, representations of the past in the public sphere. It ranges from scholarly works to monuments, novels and movies, to ‘sites of memory’ in Pierre Nora’s sense.2 An important part of historical culture is public debate and political discussion. Certainly it is impossible to record all instances of public attention to or commemoration of historical events and personalities in a certain country in a certain period. However, what can be gauged and discussed is the prominence or absence of, in our case, Jewish history in general and the Holocaust in particular in the public sphere in Hungary. The Jewish dimension was absolutely central in the modernisation of Hungary between 1867 and 1914, that is, the historical period that preceded the epoch of the Holocaust.3 The Polish scholar Antonina Kloskowska has suggested the concept of ‘bivalence’ to denote ‘non-conflicting interlinking of elements selected from two cultures, possessed, approximately, in the same degree and accepted as close to one’s value system’.4 Kloskowska refers to two ethnic — confessional or linguistic — categories in a state and an (any) individual’s ability to identify with both. Is it possible for a political culture in a state to be bivalent in the sense that it incorporates narrations and sites of memory of two ethnic categories?

Book Review : Julian Lider: The Political and Military Laws of War. An Analysis of Marxist-Leninist Concepts. Swedish Studies in International Relations, Vol. 9. Farnborough, Saxon House, 1979. 276 pp

The Stalin Years: A Reader. Edited by Christopher Read (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), xv + 241 pp. €14.99 paper. The Russian Revolution from Lenin to Stalin, 1917–1929. By E. H. Carr, with a new introduction by R. W. Davies (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), xxxix + 200 pp. €14.99 paper.

The Baltic states and the end of the Soviet empire

fortuity as a component part of necessity, that they hold that the laws are active also when counteraction stops them from materializing, and that they often speak of laws that should be labelled qualitative and probabilistic without indicating criteria for measurement and testing. According to Lider, all general laws of war in Soviet theory should be regarded as ’hypotheses with different, and indeterminate, degrees of probability’ (p. 78). Lider has found that the Soviet way of ’testing’ the so-called laws is to select examples from history that might ’confirm’ them. Furthermore, ’if the given law serves the implementation of the political and military doctrines of the Soviet Union and Soviet military policy, then it is valid’ (p. 156). One of the Soviet laws of war, i.e. the law of the correlation of forces, says that only superiority over the adversary permits victory in