Interwar Europe Research Articles

The value within multiform commodities: North African phosphates and global markets in the interwar period

AbstractPhosphates mined in France’s North African empire fed interwar Europe’s voracious appetite for chemical fertilizers. In critique of histories vesting commodities themselves with the agency to make the modern world, I trace not the substance but the value embedded within it. By following value, I argue that the ‘commodity’ is not a stable unit of analysis. Rather, commodities are multiform. They can acquire myriad properties when the value embedded within them changes across time and place. During the interwar period, phosphates’ character as a commodity transmuted in relation to flows of other goods, movements of labour, global financial exigencies and imperial considerations. As phosphates assumed new forms, the geographic scales over which they operated changed too. Through North African phosphates, I explore value-making processes that perpetuated capital-intensive farming, allowing for a history not of the commodity-as-substance but of the commodity-as-historical-object whose analytical boundaries and forms shifted across contexts.

Mykhailo Rudnytskyi vs Dmytro Dontsov: Two Visions of Europe and the West

The paper provides an overview of formation images “Europe” and the “West” in the texts of two prominent Ukrainian publicists in interwar Lviv – Mykhailo Rudnytskyi and Dmytro Dontsov. The article focuses on interwar discussions about the image of Europe, the West, and the East, liberalism, and nationalism. Given the fact that all these and related issues, having entered the Ukrainian public space at the beginning of the XX century remains relevant today, it appears reasonable to analyze these interwar discussions, which represent different ways of imaging European culture. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to clarify the sources of formation of these images, their content, and discussions around them. The author elaborated on the similarities and differences of these images in the texts of Rudnytskyi and Dontsov. The key element in Mykhailo Rudnytsky's worldview in the interwar period was liberalism or rather “cultural liberalism.” The three main ideological blocks for him were “freedom”, “individuality” and inclusiveness (openness) of cultures. Mykhailo Rudnytsky's image of “Europe” was rather amorphous, without clear boundaries, and took the liberal culture of the nineteenth century as examples of liberal figures. “East” occupied a very little place in the worldview of Michael, and was superimposed on the oriental axis “West (Europe) – civilization”, “East (Asia) – barbarism”. At the same time, geographical boundaries were not particularly important, and European movements, if they did not correspond to the ideal liberal model, could be considered barbaric and “Asian”. Dmytro Dontsov's image of Europe was focused not on the liberal Europe of the XIX century, but the radical right movements in interwar Europe. If Rudnytsky emphasized the ideas of liberalism of the XIX century, individual freedom and synthesis of cultures, and these ideas he wanted to see in the image of “Europe”, for Dontsov “Europe” and European thinkers had value in the context of ideas of expansion, struggle as the basis of the people's spirit. At the same time, in the worldview of Mykhailo Rudnytsky and Dmytro Dontsov, “The East” acted as a barbaric antithesis of the “West”, the personification of all the wild and backward, which made their worldview in this sense oriental. Given the above material, we can state that the images of “Europe” and “West” in the interwar period remained extremely ambivalent and heterogeneous, and their content depended on the worldview of the authors.

The Transatlantic Dynamics of European Cultural Diplomacy: Germany, France and the Battle for US Affections in the 1920s

The article explores the role of cultural diplomacy in Weimar Germany and France's competing efforts to win the sympathies and support of the United States after the First World War. In the post-war United States, both France and Germany used cultural initiatives to pursue their opposing visions of the new international order: France to maintain and extend wartime cultural alliances beyond the armistice and implement the provisions of the peace treaty; Germany to overturn these very alliances and build a desirable transatlantic ‘friendship’ in line with its efforts to revise the Versailles Treaty. By focusing on the Franco–German rivalry for US affinities, the article calls attention to the transatlantic dynamics of interwar cultural diplomacy. It shows that the emergence of German cultural diplomacy was strongly shaped by French competition for the affections of politically isolationist Americans and that, in general, the rapid expansion of cultural diplomacy in interwar Europe arose from mutual feelings of crisis, starkly competing ambitions as well as the rapid circulation of ideas and practices.

The Transnational Co-production of Interwar ‘Fascism’: On the Dynamics of Ideational Mobility and Localization

Interwar fascism achieved sensational international reach through the appeal and circulation of a set of generic ideological norms and political practices. Therefore, models of analysis must accommodate alternative local interpretations, adaptations, and a wide range of varied outcomes in the process of its diverse local translations. In this article, I propose the new trans-disciplinary mobility paradigm as a productive methodological extension of the transnational approach in fascism studies. I focus on the fluid dynamics of transnational circulation of ‘fascist’ ideas and political innovations, as well as on how these were perceived, (re-)interpreted, adopted/adapted by a wide set of local agents in interwar Europe. I employ a decentred, anti-literalist, and multi-directional mobility approach that analyses the history of interwar ‘fascism’ as the messy net force of diverse, multivalent agencies, of interactions and frictions, in the end of creative translation and trial-and-error. I argue that a focus on this mobility dynamic offers three advantages: first, it promotes the re-integration of diverse fragmented histories of interwar fascism; second, it is capable of exposing the dynamic co-production of the political history of ‘fascist’ over time and space; and third, it fosters a far better understanding of the reasons for the ideological travel and political traction of radical ideas and politics in interwar years.

Reckoning with refugeedom: refugee voices in modern history

ABSTRACT This article outlines an agenda to relocate refugees to the centre of historical enquiry by recovering and analysing their voices, in the form of letters and petitions sent to authorities within the refugee regime. We adopt a comparative approach by using evidence from four distinct incarnations of the refugee regime: the League of Nations in interwar Europe; the early post-1945 era represented by the International Refugee Organization (IRO); the era of the newly established Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR); and the quarter century following Partition in India, specifically its impact in West Bengal. The article demonstrates how refugees’ voices were shaped by the social, cultural and administrative contexts within which they wrote, and that understanding these contexts can help us see why refugees framed their claims in particular ways. The article suggests that Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of ‘polyphony’ provides a means of understanding how refugees understood their predicament and engaged with the refugee regime from often contradictory and ambiguous viewpoints.

"Us" vs. "Them". Communist Dialectical Images from Interwar Europe and Soviet Russia

Brawny male workers vs. bulging bourgeois men. Working-class mothers burdened by the hardship of poverty and childcare vs. elegant upper-class women enjoying a lifestyle of privilege. Such juxtaposed images of workers and the rich were prevalent in the visual culture of communism throughout the twentieth century, appearing on posters, illustrations, and other genres of political propaganda across countries and continents. Although these didactic propaganda images have rarely been considered in histories of modernism and the avant-garde, this article argues that they were among the key visual inventions of twentieth-century communist visual culture given their highly innovative aesthetics and juxtaposed structure that provided them a potential to become dialectical. Drawing on examples from interwar Europe and Soviet Russia, this article examines how didactic juxtapositions could become dialectical images, triggering political transformations while also making revolutionary class consciousness visible for the viewer.

Visual Music and Kinetic Ornaments

This essay traces the theorization of interwar animation through period analogies with painting and dance, paying special attention to the valorization of concepts such as dematerialization and embodiment, which metaphors of visual music and physical kinesthesis were used to promote. Beginning in 1919, and exemplified by her feature-length film Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (1926), Lotte Reiniger directed numerous silhouette films animated in an ornate style that embraced decorative materiality. This aesthetic set her in uneasy relation to the avant-garde, whose strenuous attempts to distance abstraction from ornament took the form of absolute film, and were screened together at the Absolute film Matinee of 1925. However, their claims for aesthetic integrity were staked on territory these artists largely had in common. By adopting a feminist approach that examines networks of collaboration, publication, and artistic production in Weimar Berlin, this essay reveals Reiniger as an early proponent of haptic cinema in interwar Europe and one of animation's earliest and most perceptive theorists.

Fascism Has an American History, Too

Fascism Has an American History, Too Olivier Burtin (bio) The specter of fascism is once again haunting the United States. After the victory in the 2016 presidential election of a candidate who showed clear affinities with authoritarian leaders abroad and white supremacists at home, many Americans realized that their country was not as immune to such forces as they had thought. On the night of the election, “fascism” was the most searched word on the Merriam-Webster online dictionary.1 While the term had always been popular as a throwaway epithet to condemn one’s political opponents, the publication of a few monographs on the topic in the aftermath of the election marked its return as an important scholarly category in its own right. In Fascism: A Warning (2018), former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright cautioned her readers that the new president had anti-democratic “instincts” and was leading a “herd” of other like-minded authoritarian rulers “in a Fascist direction.”2 The same year, philosopher Jason Stanley dissected the various elements of fascist politics, from the use of a mythical past to the vocabulary of victimhood, in a call for Americans to reject this type of right-wing nationalism.3 It was not a coincidence that both authors were children of Central European émigrés who had fled to the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. Almost three-quarters of a century later, they feared that history might repeat itself. Not everyone agreed that fascism was the right term to express these anxieties, however. On the right, most voices dismissed such language as yet another attempt by the left to prevent a healthy exchange of ideas by marking its opponents as beyond the pale. Perhaps more surprisingly, fascism also received mixed reviews in liberal and progressive circles. Historian Samuel Moyn argued, for instance, that the concept hid more than it revealed: not only did it obscure the profoundly American roots of the 45th Presidency, but it also “[spared] ourselves the trouble of analyzing what is really new about it” by focusing only on what it had in common with a distant past.4 Historian David Bell joined him in discarding the label, pointing to differences between the present situation and the 1930s as well as to the fact that fascism was for most Americans “an alien, foreign ideology” whereas Donald Trump was a [End Page 494] very American phenomenon.5 Other scholars have also raised the concern that using this term could serve to delegitimize participatory politics as a whole and to give new surveillance powers to the “security state.”6 In rejecting the term “fascism,” these critics seemed to share the common assumption that this phenomenon had never taken roots in America. Here I demonstrate the opposite. This essay reaches beyond contemporary politics in order to assess whether this form of political behavior is really as alien to U.S. history as we often assume it to be. Bringing together recent works in a variety of subfields, I argue that the relative absence of fascism from historiographical debates after the mid-twentieth century tells us less about the historical record than it does about the blinders that hinder historians’ vision. Though fascism as a term was invented in interwar Europe, the kind of politics that it describes could be found as early as the mid-nineteenth century in the United States. After paving the way for the collapse of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, fascist groups continued to play an active role in American politics throughout much of the twentieth century. Scholars have failed to take this phenomenon seriously for a number of reasons. The first has to do with the long debate about the U.S. populist tradition, which was defined to a large extent in opposition to fascism from the 1960s onwards. The second is related to the strength of American exceptionalism, which has made many historians of the United States reluctant not only to compare their country’s past with that of others, but more importantly to import analytical tools initially developed abroad (especially when those were associated with darker episodes of the past). Finally, the U.S. victory in the Second...

Система недержавних закладів освіти українського селянства у Східній Галичині та Волині в 20-30 рр. ХХ ст

Introduction. At the present stage of Ukrainian-Polish relations and the establishment of both states inthe world and European communities, the lessons of the restoration of national statehood, the formation anddevelopment of the Polish state in the diffi cult conditions of interwar Europe are becoming especially relevant.The study of the history of the Second Polish Republic is important for domestic historians in terms of the long stayof part of the Ukrainian lands as part of Poland. The processes that took place in the relations between the twopeoples during the interwar period are quite complex and require detailed coverage.The purpose of our study is to clarify the features of the system of non-governmental education of theUkrainian peasantry in Eastern Galicia and Volhynia in the 20-30s of the twentieth century.Results. Highlighting the state of Ukrainian education in the Ukrainian lands of the Second Polish Republic,we note the infl uence of the Greek Catholic Church and the clergy on the development of educational processes.Due to the fact that all public schools of different levels of training were only with the Polish language of instructionand access to them was diffi cult for Ukrainian youth, the church was actively involved in the formation of a networkof Ukrainian educational institutions. Institutes at the monasteries of the Basilian Sisters played a signifi cant rolein the upbringing of young people. These institutions were similar to dormitories in their organization.Conclusion. During its existence in the Polish state, the Ukrainian education system did not lose its nationalfeatures, which became possible due to the active activity and cooperation of the intellectuals, cooperatives andthe Greek Catholic clergy. “Ridna Shkola” and “Prosvita” became the basis of a system of non-governmentaleducational institutions in which Ukrainian youth and peasants had the opportunity to study in the Ukrainianlanguage. Despite the objective challenges, Ukrainian societies have managed to organize at the appropriate levelthe educational process in preschools, people’s schools, teachers’ seminaries, gymnasiums and vocational schools.“Ridna Shkola” and “Prosvita” conducted training courses and lectures for the illiterate, engaged in library andpublishing affairs.

Gain Weight, Have Fun, Discover the Motherland: The German–Polish Children's Summer Camp Exchange and Interwar Era Revisionism

This article examines a previously un-researched aspect of nationalist politics, borderland contestation, national indifference and the politicisation of youth and cultural diplomacy in interwar Central Europe: the German–Polish ‘summer vacation exchange for children’ (Ferienkinderaustausch). The Versailles territorial settlement, which left nationalists in both countries in discontent about territories and minority groups remaining in the hands of the neighbour, formed the basis for this venture in cultural diplomacy. Each party gave the other the right to rally ‘its youth’ living on the other side of the border to travel to its ‘motherland’ for summer camp. Focusing on the case study of the heatedly contested industrial borderland of Upper Silesia, this article examines the German–Polish children's exchange on two levels. On the local level it examines how youth were rallied and transported to their ‘motherland’ for the summer and what treatment and experience they received. On the international level it explores the paradox of German–Polish cooperation and the conflict that was an inherent aspect of this venture.

Pilgrims and Missionaries of Social Peace: Geneva and Pontigny as Sites of Scandinavian Internationalism in Late Interwar Europe

This article investigates two interlinked sites of Scandinavian socialist internationalism in continental Europe: the Nordic folk high school in Geneva and the humanistic centre created by French philosopher Paul Desjardins in Pontigny. Locating and situating these two nodes on the cultural-political map of late interwar Europe allows for a study of how actors from the popular movements in Denmark, Norway and Sweden mobilised educational ideals and practices to internationalise the experience of Scandinavian social democracy. The analysis shows how the transnational activities of the Nordic folk high school’s study course opened up new spaces for Scandinavian internationalism. In this way, the article argues, the school represented an experiment in internationalism from below where Nordism was deployed as a cultural strategy to create international understanding for working-class Scandinavians; and created new arenas for Nordic encounters with French political and intellectual milieus that admired Scandinavian democracy and social peace.

The legacy of Sarah Schenirer and the rebuilding of ultraorthodox society after the holocaust

ABSTRACT While the revival of the Torah world among Jewish men after the Holocaust has been studied, the reconstruction of Orthodox Jewish women’s society has been given short shrift. This study focuses on Bais Yaakov teachers and their reverence towards their teacher, Sarah Schenirer (1883–1935). Particularly after the Holocaust, Schenirer’s legacy became a central concept in rebuilding a social, religious, and educational framework for Ultraorthodox Jewish women. In many ways, the memory of Sarah Schenirer, taken by Ultraorthodox society as representing the entire Jewish world of interwar Europe, served to some extent as a substitute for Holocaust memory.

Levinas, Ionesco o el arte de “se débarrasser” del ser

During the interwar period Europe experienced a crisis of traditional modes of political and social legitimacy, which soon provoked the search for an “exit” and renewal of the old foundations of sovereign power. In “De l'évasion” (1935) Levinas was able to recognize this epochal feeling and simultaneously warn about the underlying dangers of new salvific projects. The present article aims to analyze the Levinasian reflections of 1935, based on a joint study over his Talmudic Readings “Desacralization and Disenchantment” and “Damages Due to Fire” (1971), as well as the work Amédée ou Comment s'en débarraser (1954) by Eugène Ionesco. This will allow to comprehend the meaning granted by Levinas to the elemental atmosphere that penetrated the interwar Europe, as well as the Levinasian commitment to the work of art as a model of thinking an escape or evasion from that epochal atmosphere.

Restytucja i przekształcenia ugrupowań agrarnych w państwach Europy Środkowej i Wschodniej

<p>Artykuł omawia kwestie ewolucji ugrupowań agrarnych w państwach Europy Środkowej i Wschodniej. Przedmiotem analizy politologicznej poczyniono: Bułgarię, Rumunię, Węgry oraz dwa państwa postjugosłowiańskie – Słowenię oraz Chorwację. W odniesieniach pojawia się również casus polskich ugrupowań agrarnych. Partie te odgrywały znaczną rolę na scenie politycznej w międzywojennej Europie. Z jednej strony wyrażały interesy społeczno-gospodarcze oraz polityczne ludności wiejskiej, a w omawianym regionie reprezentowały istotną część społeczeństwa. Z drugiej – stanowiły ważny element systemów partyjnych, uczestnicząc w kolejnych wyborach lokalnych i parlamentarnych oraz tworząc gabinety rządowe. Zmiany modernizacyjne, ustrojowe i społeczno-gospodarcze po 1945 roku zmieniły znaczenie ugrupowań agrarnych. Po zdobyciu władzy w omawianych państwach przez partie komunistyczne ugrupowania agrarne były traktowane jako najpoważniejszy rywal. W rezultacie niezależne ugrupowania ludowe zostały zdelegalizowane, a ich przywódcy – St. Mikołajczyk w Polsce – musiał uciekać z kraju w obawie przed aresztowaniem, a inni – I. Maniu w Rumunii czy N. Petkow w Bułgarii – zostali aresztowani i skazani w sfałszowanych procesach. Sytuacja ugrupowań agrarnych uformowała się w dwóch modelach – zachowano satelickie ugrupowania agrarne skupione wokół monopartii komunistycznej (Polska, Bułgaria) lub zdelegalizowano ugrupowania agrarne (Węgry, Rumunia). Ich działalność była kontynuowana przez część działaczy na emigracji. Po demokratycznych zmianach w 1989 roku zaistniała możliwość wznowienia legalnej działalności przez te ugrupowania. Artykuł omawia zróżnicowane scenariusze zmian organizacyjnych, a w mniejszym stopniu programowych. Partie ludowe ubiegały się o miejsca w wyborach lokalnych i parlamentarnych pod „własnym szyldem” (Polska, Węgry, Słowenia) bądź wybierały strategię budowy szerszej koalicji parlamentarnej – casus Konwencji Demokratycznej Rumunii czy partii w Chorwacji. Należy również wspomnieć o procesach zjednoczeniowych i dezintegracyjnych w omawianych ugrupowaniach, które skutkowały postępującą marginalizacją ruchu agrarnego na scenach politycznych.</p>

What is Popular? Studies on the Press in Interwar Europe: Popular Print as Historical Artefact

The notion of 'popular' as a determinant in the study of the interwar periodical press lies at the centre of this special issue. The question posed in its title places the subject matter in a specific historical timeframe and context but also addresses a universal cultural publishing phenomenon, that of the popular press, as it is seen and analyzed by scholars from different countries in Europe and beyond. Popular periodicals were widely published across the globe in vernacular languages that were freighted with region-specific but often contested cultural meanings. Whilst retaining distinctive national features, however, they also incorporated many common elements that were freely transferred across national borders and between languages, particularly in relation to their aesthetic appearance, subject themes, and format and writing styles. The current growth of interest in the comparative study of this hitherto neglected category of the ‘popular’ thus further enriches a literature which has, to date, remained markedly Anglophone in its orientation. Finally, by juxtaposing the specific approaches adopted by the contributors to this special issue, the guest editors, Fabio Guidali and Gioula Koutsopanagou, seek to start a wider conversation about the value of historical perspectives and methodologies in strengthening the collaborative work of the Journal of European Periodical Studies and of the activities of the European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit) more generally. In that sense, this issue is offered as an example of the ways in which international collaboration by historians may contribute to the growing field of periodical studies.

National Frameworks: Reflections on the Construction of National Interests and Political Agendas in Interwar Europe

This article explores the relationship that exists between ideology and political interest and applies it to the study of the international system that arose in Europe after the First World War. Following Alexander Wendt’s approach to identity as a socializing process, we have underscored the extent to which the principles of the Versailles system affected its member’s identities and goals. Because these assumptions derived from the national narratives that had become widespread in Europe during the previous decades, the new international framework became decisively modelled in accord to nationalist ideas. In turn, this meant that member states were socialised within an environment in which nationalist claims and interests could be perceived as legitimate. By depicting nations as the product of narrative practices, this research tries to shed light on the ways in which the institutionalised logic of national discourse influenced international developments after 1920. To do so, a general examination of some political instability issues in interwar Europe will be provided so as to analyse the degree to which nationalist assumptions shaped them. Finally, we argue that this framework had enormous consequences not just for minority and border populations which became increasingly regarded as factors of instability, but also for the broader objective of the Versailles system of maintaining a specific balance of power in Europe.

Piotr Wandycz as Historian of Diplomacy of the Reborn Poland (1918–1939)

Abstract This article is devoted to professor Piotr Wandycz’s (1923–2017) work in the field of history of diplomacy. The author tries to reexamine his main arguments and conceptions. Wandycz was first of all the historian of French-Polish-Czechoslovak and Soviet-Polish relations in the inter-war era, but not only. His major contribution to historiography was made in the research on Polish foreign policy (1919–1939). Wandycz’s thesis that the Polish policy of balance between Germany and Soviet Russia had no real strategic alternative seems to be one of the most convincing interpretations of the inter-war Poland’s diplomacy. The geopolitical situation of the reconstructed Poland was highly unfavorable. and Wandycz was convinced of it more than any other historian in the West. Working on international relations in the inter-war Europe, he preferred rather multilateralism than bilateralism. In his studies we can find more empathy for more moderate Polish ministers of foreign affairs like Aleksander Skrzyński (1922–1926) or August Zaleski (1926–1932) than Józef Beck (1932–1939). Wandycz’s excellent works require the special attention of historians.

Creating Ukrainian youth academic community in the interwar Poland: sources, tasks, centers, activity

The purpose of the article is to show the process of creating Ukrainian youth academic community in the interwar Poland. It is analyzed sources of the Ukrainian youth emigration, tasks put before the students (as the main part of young emigrants), foundation and activity of their organizations. Methodology is based on the use of general historical research methods, namely: historical-comparative, typology and system analysis. The article is based on numerous archival documents of the Czech, Polish and Ukrainian archives and also includes wide range of historiography. The most important sources for investigation were periodical issues of Ukrainian youth organizations in Poland, Czechoslovak Republic and other European countries. It is also pointed out in the article peculiarities of academic centers and types of emigrant organizations, influence on to the Ukrainians in the interwar Europe. It is analyzed cooperation between Ukrainian, European and international youth movement.

Paul Rosenstein-Rodan and the Birth of Development Economics

This paper, based on previously untapped archival sources, offers an assessment of the life and thought of Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, a pioneer of development economics and one of the first articulators of both the “Big Push” and “balanced growth” theories. In addition to documenting the early life of Rosenstein-Rodan, this paper discusses two critical junctures in the history of development economics, namely, the birth of the discipline in the late 1940s, and its decline approximately a quarter century later. Rosenstein-Rodan was a fundamental player in both instances. Through the lens of his experiences it is possible to understand the eclectic beginnings of development economics and locate some of its most important roots in the intellectual milieu of inter-war Europe, from Vienna to London via Eastern and Southern Europe. What’s more, Rosenstein-Rodan’s subsequent career epitomizes the arc of development economics, casting new light on the debates and practices that shaped the discipline during its rise, and on the unresolved issues that help explain its decline.

Tragedy or Betrayal? Interwar Europe and British Appeasement

No country posed a greater threat to Britain during the 1930s than Adolf Hitler’s Germany. In 1933, Germany officially withdrew from the League of Nations, and by 1935 the Third Reich had undertake...