Historical Concepts Between Eastern and Western Europe [1 ed.] 9781789204193, 9781845452735

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Historical Concepts between Eastern and

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Western Europe

Historical Concepts Between Eastern and Western Europe, edited by Manfred Hildermeier, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2007.

New German Historical Perspectives Series Editors: Jane Caplan (Executive Editor), Timothy Garton Ash, Jürgen Kocka, Gerhard Ritter, Nicholas Stargardt and Margit Szöllösi-Janze Originally established in 1987 as an English-language forum for the presentation of research by leading German historians and social scientists to readers in English-speaking countries, this series has since become one of the premier vehicles for the dissemination of German research expertise. Volumes in this series examine contemporary academic debates and issues of broad topical interest to Germans and non-Germans alike. Their coverage is not limited to Germany alone but extends to the history of other countries, as well as general problems of political, economic, social and intellectual history and international relations.

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Volume 1 Historical Concepts between Eastern and Western Europe Edited by Manfred Hildermeier

Historical Concepts Between Eastern and Western Europe, edited by Manfred Hildermeier, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2007.

Historical Concepts between Eastern and

Western Europe

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Edited by Manfred Hildermeier

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

Historical Concepts Between Eastern and Western Europe, edited by Manfred Hildermeier, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2007.

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First published in 2007 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2007 Manfred Hildermeier All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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A C.I.P. catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 1-84545-273-9 (hbk): alk. paper British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed in the United States on acid-free paper

ISBN 978-1-84545-273-5 (hardback)

Historical Concepts Between Eastern and Western Europe, edited by Manfred Hildermeier, Berghahn Books, Incorporated,

Contents

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Editorial Preface Jane Caplan, Timothy Garton Ash, Jürgen Kocka, Gerhard Ritter, Nicholas Stargardt and Margit Szöllösi-Janze

vii

Introduction Manfred Hildermeier

1

1 National Socialist and Stalinist Rule: The Possibilities and Limits of Comparison Ulrich Herbert

5

2 Burgher and Town: Typological Differences and Functional Equivalents Manfred Hildermeier

23

3 Republicanism versus Monarchy? Government by Estates in Poland-Lithuania and the Holy Roman Empire, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries Michael G. Müller

36

4 The Impact of Religion on the Revolutions in France (1789) and Russia (1905/17) Martin Schulze Wessel

48

5 Dictatorships of Unambiguity: Cultural Transfer from Europe to Russia and the Soviet Union, 1861–1953 Jörg Baberowski

59

Historical Concepts Between Eastern and Western Europe, edited by Manfred Hildermeier, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2007.

6 Europe and the Culture of Borders: Rethinking Borders after 1989 Karl Schlögel

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7 Civil Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Comparison and Beyond Jürgen Kocka

85

101

Notes on Contributors

117

Index

121

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Bibliography

Historical Concepts Between Eastern and Western Europe, edited by Manfred Hildermeier, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2007.

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Editorial Preface The ‘German Historical Perspectives’ series was established in 1987 as an Englishlanguage forum for the presentation of research by German historians and social scientists to readers in English-speaking countries. Each of the volumes is devoted to a particular theme that is discussed from different points of view in separate essays by specialists. The series has taken up questions prominent in contemporary academic debate and of broad topical interest to Germans and non-Germans alike. It is not limited to issues within Germany alone but also includes publications and individual essays covering the history of other countries, as well as general problems of political, economic, social and intellectual history and international relations, and studies in comparative history. The editors hope that the series will help to overcome the language barrier that can obstruct the rapid appreciation of German research in English-speaking countries. The publication of the series is closely linked with the German Visiting Fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford. This Fellowship was originally funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung, later by the British Leverhulme Trust and by the Ministry of Education and Science in the Federal Republic of Germany. From 1990 the Fellowship has been supported by the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft, with special funding since 2000 from the Marga and Kurt MöllgaardStiftung. Each volume is based on the seminar series held annually in Oxford which the Visiting Fellow devises from his or her field of interest, in collaboration with the European Studies Centre at St Antony’s College. The editors wish to thank the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft and the Marga and Kurt Möllgaard-Stiftung for meeting the expenses of the original seminar series and for generous assistance with the publication. We hope that this enterprise will help to overcome national introspection and to further international academic discourse and co-operation. We are pleased to announce that the present volume inaugurates the ‘New Series’ of ‘New German Historical Perspectives’, which will henceforth be published by Berghahn Books. Berghahn was the original publisher of the series at the time of its establishment, and the editors are glad to renew this association. Jane Caplan (Executive Editor) Timothy Garton Ash Jürgen Kocka Gerhard Ritter Nicholas Stargardt Margit Szöllösi-Janze

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Introduction The guiding idea of the seminar series on which the present volume is based was to analyse in a comparative framework the different meanings and importance of key concepts in Western and East European history – the latter, according to the German convention, including Russia. More than a decade after the breakdown of the Soviet Empire and the reunification of Europe, historiographies and historical concepts on each side still are very far apart. To be sure, contacts became closer. Russian historians did what their Polish colleagues had been doing for decades: they took up Western discussions and methodologies and participated in them. But there have been no common efforts yet for joint interpretations and no attempt to reach a common understanding of central notions and concepts. Appropriate plans never realised, leaving the initial demand unsatisfied. The seminar series consequently tried to make at least a small contribution to such a comparative venture. Ulrich Herbert deals with an old problem, already brought up by the simultaneous development of both his themes: the problem of similarities and differences between National Socialism and Stalinism as variants of a dictatorialtotalitarian regime. In a meticulous comparative analysis, he scrutinises essential aspects of both regimes: in particular, their origin as answers to the crisis of prewar ‘bourgeois’ society; the character and moulding of the ideological elites; the methods and instruments of the implementation of the central authority; and, last but not least, the goals and forms of political terror. Herbert concludes that in the last resort – in spite of accommodating both regimes under the roof of totalitarianism – differences between them clearly prevailed. This becomes especially clear in the case of political terror. Though comparable in dimension, National Socialist terror was directed against predominantly non-German victims, whereas Stalinist terror, despite all attacks on Muslims and non-Russian minorities, mainly hit its own Slavic population. Thus the author concedes a certain ‘inner rationality’ to National Socialist terror, whereas Stalinist terror, despite its special campaigns against ‘class enemies’, was totally irrational in practice. Of course, one may continue to argue about such an interpretation, but the fact that a comparative approach can produce hypotheses of this kind puts its value beyond doubt. My own contribution reaches further back. Taking the city and townsmen as an example, it tries to tackle a fundamental problem of Russian history: the specificity of Russian society and the relative absence of initiative and selfgovernment. The burgher estate made paradigmatically clear what was the

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2

Introduction

precondition for autocracy and – according to a widely accepted interpretation – what in the last resort produced the revolutionary upheavals of 1905 and 1917: the weakness of (civil) society in relation to the state. My deliberations do not call into question the diagnosis of a ‘society as an organization of the state’ (Dietrich Geyer, Gesellschaft als staatliche Veranstaltung), but they try to prove on the basis of regional archives (which can now be consulted for the first time) that a fundamental change happened during the last third of the nineteenth century. Centring on the newly created self-government in the cities (1870), a new elite developed which overarched the traditional ‘estates’ (soslovie). Merchants (kuptsy) becoming entrepreneurs, noblemen choosing ‘bourgeois’ professions, and early representatives of the developing social layer of academically trained persons (physicians, pharmacists, lawyers, teachers) merged into a socio-cultural milieu which organised associations and clubs as places of encounter and discussion and engaged itself in communal politics. Thus, at the beginning of the twentieth century a liberal local public space and public opinion emerged which not only was a clear analogy to similar developments in Germany during the second third of the nineteenth century, but at the same time contained the potential to broaden itself into a state-wide phenomenon. Michael Müller discusses the received thesis that the development of the political structure of states in early modern Europe followed typical and different paths in Western and Eastern Europe. Comparing the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish rzeczpospolita, he is able to show that the conventional typologies advanced by Otto Hintze and others, which tried to distinguish each path from the other, discarded a lot of ‘disturbing’ similarities. Once we consider these similarities, the typologies lose a lot of their plausibility. Thus Müller is led to the conclusion that in the last resort it is hardly promising to base a comparison on the study of institutions. Much more important were the practices of political decision-making. When analysing these processes it becomes clear that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the idea of different developmental paths emerged, there was a tendency to mould the past according to the present and to construct differences which did not exist to the extent claimed for them. Therefore it seems more appropriate not only to pay more attention to the selfdescription of a given epoch, but also to look for ‘mental geographies’ which were specific only for certain sectors of historical reality and not for its totality. Martin Schulze Wessel turns to a problem which until the 1980s was certainly marginalised as a consequence of the priority of social history. To be sure, contemporaries already realised the inner links between religion and revolution, between church and state (the old as well as the new). Still, a fresh view informed by a new history of ideas that has inspired several monographs published since the 1960s was necessary in order to ascribe new relevance to this problem. As far as I know Schulze Wessel is the first to consider it within the framework of a comparison between East and West by including the Russian Revolution. He analyses the role of religious minorities during the last decades of the Anciens régimes in both France and Russia, the relation of the church and the clergy

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Introduction

3

towards the old and the new states, and the religious mood and trends outside the churches. As a result it becomes clear that the impact of religious motives, even in the Russian Revolution, has been underestimated. The intelligentsia’s specific sense of mission, as well as the utopian thought of Bolshevism, clearly show characteristic traits of a quasi-eschatology. Moreover, the Russian church was split by an oppositional group which tended towards the new regime and was used by it. Though the comparison also reveals many differences, it helps to consider them as variants of similar basic dispositions. Jörg Baberowski concentrates on the cultural and political relations between centre and periphery in late Tsarism and the early Soviet Union. He interprets them as a forced and violent export of European civilisation, the norms and practices of which the Bolsheviks borrowed while adding a specific radicalism to them. Modernisation transformed itself into a politics of imposing foreign ways of thinking, norms and forms of behaviour. It merged with repression and terror, which could produce only opposition and resistance rather than consent and acceptance. Baberowski sees this perversion of cultural transfer not as an aspect of Russian imperialism and Soviet totalitarianism but as an example of Western arrogance which disqualified ‘otherness’ as backward. Modernity exhibited the characteristics of Western Europe and could not be separated from the attempt to subjugate and destroy it by assimilation. West and East, centre and periphery, not only remained isolated from each other; forced Europeanisation also prevented them from peaceful coexistence. Karl Schlögel is interested in the effect and relevance of borders. Central and East Central Europe were an area of frontiers. Nowhere else were borders so close to each other; nowhere else did they change so often. Europe was used to borders, especially to a specific kind of them: territorial dividing lines which at the same time were mostly cultural and ethnical lines as well. During the second half of the twentieth century Europe discovered that more borders had vanished than were newly created, the most important case being the breakdown of the Soviet bloc. Deep caesuras of this kind not only changed the political maps and mental horizons: in the same vein, they changed the significance of borders. They had always existed, but the fact that they had not always been prominent, so to speak, came to the fore. Borders developed into border areas, more connecting than dividing; they widened into areas of common experience, as places of special means and intensities of communication. It is Schlögel’s thesis and belief that these new borders need a new culture and a new practice binding East and West together. Jürgen Kocka deals with the notion of ‘civil society’. After tracing the development of its meaning he points out that in the nineteenth century civil society came to be seen as the opposite of ‘state’, but at the same time was directed against the dominance of the market and the retreat of the individual into privacy. Against this, the concept accentuates the notions and values of work, education and emancipation. The twentieth century brought further changes, adding to this meaning another two central aspects: the rejection of violence as a means of political dispute and the acceptance of difference. In contrast to the ‘logic of the

Historical Concepts Between Eastern and Western Europe, edited by Manfred Hildermeier, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2007.

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Introduction

market’, the ‘logic of civil society’ required the recognition of pluralism and the elaboration of a specific form of communication which would be able to reconcile different interests in a peaceful and constructive way. Pursuing this goal the concept of ‘civil society’ always contained a utopian ‘surplus’. In the nineteenth century it displayed a growing affinity towards the bourgeoisie and bourgeois culture, excluding peasants and workers; at the same time it kept aiming at integration. Later on, in the twentieth century, the concept did not conceal its Western European origins, but experienced a renaissance in Eastern Europe during the 1970s and 1980s, thus evolving into useful and promising tool of comparison. Presenting the efforts mostly of others, I should thank all contributors for the papers. I extend my gratitude to St Antony’s College and Oxford University for their hospitality and especially to Jane Caplan who (with additional editorial help from Danielle Barbour) helped to transform German English into real English. My special thanks go to Gerhard A. Ritter, who has looked after the German Gastprofessur at St Antony’s from its beginning, and to the Stifterverband für die deutsche Wissenschaft which supports it so generously.

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Manfred Hildermeier

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1 National Socialist and Stalinist Rule: The Possibilities and Limits of Comparison

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Ulrich Herbert Comparing National Socialism to Stalinism is as old as these ‘movements’ or regimes themselves. It is therefore almost pointless to engage in a general discussion of either the necessity, or the advantages and disadvantages, of comparing these two dictatorships in a scholarly context. In two European Great Powers, at almost the same time, extremely repressive regimes arose. They were politically and ideologically antithetical, yet related to each other. These regimes unleashed a previously unknown potential for destruction and annihilation. Their rise so obviously invites comparison that one avoids doing so only under penalty of intellectual, political, or scholarly isolation.1 Since the 1920s, however, political agendas or social experiences have generally underlain the various theoretical models for the systematic comparison of these dictatorships. This is true not only of the variants of totalitarianism theory that thrived in the West both before and during the Cold War and that also flourished in former Warsaw Pact countries after 1989.2 It applies equally to schools based on Karl Dietrich Bracher’s concept of anti-liberal dictatorships, and to approaches antithetical to this idea, including Marxist orthodoxy, the ideas of the Berlin historian Ernst Nolte and those of the American historian Arno Mayer. These scholars, all of whom agree that National Socialism should be interpreted as an extreme form of anti-Bolshevism, nevertheless draw divergent and far-reaching conclusions.3 These highly aggregated concepts, intensely charged with contemporary political relevance, sometimes avail themselves of empirical data quite eclectically, in relation both to the history of National Socialist rule and to the history of the Stalinist regime of the late 1920s to the early 1950s. This may be due to the historiographical objects themselves, each of which has brought forth a library of literature. There is almost no one who is thoroughly and equally familiar with the histories of both regimes. Moreover, system theoreticians and ‘historical thinkers’

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Ulrich Herbert

often find empiricism fundamentally uncongenial, including out of a sense of self-preservation. But it is neither intellectually fruitful nor stimulating for research merely to continue the politicised move of putting National Socialism and Stalinism in parallel from the era of bloc confrontation into the ‘posttotalitarian’ age, yet remaining on the level of ideological comparisons or of secular grand theory. The result of such comparisons is always already secretly determined and, without empirical underpinnings and differentiation, is also much too global to be valid beyond the level of a newspaper editorial. The comparative approach in the study of history generally aims at two levels of results. First, there is the attempt to isolate essential individual elements of historical processes or complex systems. This process aims to discover similar basic structures that identify the two phenomena under examination as subspecies of an overarching constellation. In the example here, this consists of abstractly recognising certain aspects of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as variants of a common principle: the ‘Great Leader’ structure, rule by a party, mandatory world-view, etc. are seen as characteristics of the species ‘totalitarian regime’. Or, second, we may see their reciprocity of action and pre-emptive reference to each other as expressing their mutual involvement in the ‘World Civil War’ of the twentieth century, as Nolte has suggested. Some of the frequently emphasised disadvantages of both approaches are quickly enumerated. Totalitarianism theory does not distinguish the regimes that committed millionfold mass murder – Stalinism and the Nazi dictatorship – from regimes that, while illiberal and undemocratic, were still not massmurderous. Thus, like fascism theory, it downgrades genocide to a secondary category. On the other hand, the theory of the World Civil War and the orthodox Marxist school both contrast the communist challenge with the various forms of ‘bourgeois rule’, thus levelling the structural differences between National Socialism and Western-style liberal democracies. By contrast, an approach that is comparative in the sense suggested above would have to stress the specific traits that both regimes shared, differentiating them from other dictatorships as well as from liberal democracies and other forms of rule and government. The second goal of comparisons is to weigh similar objects against each other, analysing common traits and differences in order to strengthen the analysis of each object respectively. Though this comparison does not elaborate a common fundamental structure, it does eliminate blindspots and unreflected assumptions. For example, knowledge of the chaotic structure of rule in Stalinism guards against the assumption that the polycratic structure of the Nazi regime is unique and can be attributed solely to Hitler, the Nazi ideology, or the social composition of the National Socialist movement. Similarly, analysing the Hitler myth will identify unrecognised aspects of the Stalin cult. Additional examples are easy to find. Both approaches are legitimate and, when suitable questions are pursued, promising. Comparing the two systems within the scope of general questions focusing on totalitarianism, by contrast, is possible. However, it is inadequate to

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deal with the peculiarity that distinguishes both regimes from all other dictatorships of the twentieth century (except China and Cambodia), namely their policies of organised mass murder which affected millions of people.4 In the rest of this essay, I attempt to address some ‘mid-range’ elements that seem interesting enough to me, as an historian who has studied the history of National Socialism and the Nazi dictatorship in detail, to subject them to a comparative assessment. I do this somewhat unsystematically and subjectively. I want to restrict myself to six points that I have noticed when reading recent research on Stalinism, on the basis that it may be possible to project these points back onto the Nazi regime: (1) the reality and perception of the crisis of bourgeois society; (2) ideological elites; (3) dynamics, the pace of change, the ability to mobilise; (4) loyalty and dissent in the supporting social strata; (5) personal dictatorship and institutional chaos; and (6) the functionality and dynamics of terror.

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The Reality and Perception of the Crisis of Bourgeois Society In the temporal and political environment of the First World War, two ideologically contrary, although in some respects similar, radical political movements emerged in Germany and Russia. They burgeoned after the lost war and became unprecedented terrorist-like regimes in the 1930s and 1940s. Characteristic of both, despite their differences, was a radical rejection of the parliamentary-industrial liberal world – the ‘bourgeois society’ of the ‘West’. At least in Russia, however, this world did not really exist at all, aside from individual islands of development. That bourgeois society was in crisis in the developed industrial states of the West at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was certainly a widely shared public sentiment. However, the real crisis must be distinguished from the experience of crisis, which vastly exceeded the crisis itself. That ‘modern society’ (a term I will henceforth avoid) was a dead end – that it had brought mass unemployment and immiseration, urbanisation and crime, the dissolution of traditional structures and ties, individualisation and atomisation, and the loss of traditional values and morals – corresponded with the experiences or feelings of extraordinarily broad circles. However, the proposed explanations for these fundamental symptoms of crisis clearly differed, and the development of the modern party system in Western Europe mirrors the spectrum of these answers.5 But to what extent can the ‘sounding boards’ of the radicalism in question in Germany and Russia be understood as ways of expressing criticism of bourgeois society, and to what extent are they comparable on this level? In accordance with the extent and comprehensiveness of the societal and political changes triggered by industrialisation, the radical critique developing there assumed that the project of bourgeois society, which was at least partly based on the ideas of 1789 and 1848, had failed completely, and that a completely new project had to be established against it. In a greatly abstracted form, one could say that the right-

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Ulrich Herbert

wing radical counter-project to 1789 was based on ethnic descent and nationalism. Not the individual, but the Volk, or people, in a definition tied specifically to blood, was declared the subject of history. In contrast, the left-wing radical counter-project was based on the category of social inequality and internationalism. It declared the classes in general, and currently the working class, the subject of history. Common to both was the conviction that, with the aid of these sets of tools, they could explain the phenomena of bourgeois society. But they also felt that they had recognised the historical or natural laws underlying these phenomena. In Germany from the 1890s, and especially after the turn of the century, an escalating radical conservatism took up these symptoms of crisis, whether they were understood as the experience of the loss of pre-modern identities or as specific fruits of industrialism. This conservatism tried to explain them through such pre-modern models as the eighteenth-century authoritarian society organised in estates, by attributing blame to specific ethnic or political groups, or by invoking a specific German path of development that deviated from that of the West. In the course of further development up to the turn of the century, these individual components were gradually consolidated ideologically. A process of systematisation and scientisation ensued that amounted to a gradual clarification and standardisation of the German Right’s basic ideological positions. Thus, the claim that Nazi ideology is eclectic and unoriginal is not a convincing critique. Rather, the political convictions of National Socialism are better understood as the result of a long process of ideological consolidation and radicalisation in the camp of conservatism and nationalism. This is the site on which they developed their attractiveness.6 In Russia, this process unfolded differently, in that there was no developed bourgeois society there at all. The essentials of the Marxist critique could not apply there. However, this is one of the peculiarities of twentieth-century Marxist-Leninist regimes overall: they have been able to develop only in premodern societies, from Cuba to China. In developed industrial countries, they could only be established as regimes of occupation. The critique of bourgeois society took effect in turn-of-the-century Russia in an indirect way: the critique of the authoritarian feudal and bureaucratic structures (for example, of Tsarism) was cast in the form of criticism that could appeal to the masses; and the demands of the emerging urban proletariat were tied to those of the radical peasants’ movements, thus taking the peculiar radical shape that distinguished this critique from parallel developments in the Western Left. The practical reference point of leftist radical agitation in Russia was the poverty, misery, and oppression of the masses under Tsarism. But the theoretical reference point of the Russian Revolution was developed bourgeois society, particularly Germany, and this is the context of Lenin’s question, ‘Are we permitted to conduct the Revolution?’7 Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks’ point of departure resembled in many ways that of the Right in Germany. This is hardly surprising, considering the political socialisation of the Bolshevik leaders in the gravitational field of the West’s

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National Socialist and Stalinist Rule

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intelligentsia. The conviction that bourgeois society of the Western type was at its end took nourishment from the same symptoms of crisis in Western European societies as those that the Right, especially the German Right, had perceived since the turn of the century. Both were firmly convinced that this crisis was so fundamental and radical that it could be overcome only through revolutionary upheavals as mighty as those that had accompanied the bourgeois and industrial revolution itself. This conviction lent historical-political legitimacy to their ruthlessness and to their willingness to engage in violence. Unlike the Right in pre-war Germany, the Left (including the Left in the Soviet Union) possessed a theoretical worldview in the form of a popularised Marxism. Since the collapse of the capitalist states, as prognosticated by Marx, indeed seemed to be happening, Marxism, especially in the Bolshevist reduction created by Lenin, changed permanently from an historical-critical theory to a machine for explaining the world. It held extraordinary suggestive power.8 However, inherent to developments in both Germany and Russia is that the radical answers to the societal crises in the years before the war remained basically marginal phenomena. In Russia, dissatisfaction with the Tsarist system was widespread, but the Bolsheviks remained a fairly small minority. The feeling of crisis in Germany was a predominant characteristic of the pre-war years, but the radical answers from the Right were those of minorities, even if they found connections in particular to the country’s leading strata. It is obvious that only the First World War created the preconditions that enabled these radical marginal phenomena to become dominant movements, and ultimately dictatorial regimes. In Germany, three aspects should therefore be emphasised. The first point is the mass experience of violence in war, which manifestly changed this hitherto basically peaceful society and its means of settling conflicts. Second is the involvement of the masses as a political factor of the first rank. The third point is the military defeat itself. The latter, above all, seemed to underscore the decrepit nature of the old regime and confirm the core tenets of the rightwing radical world-view. This view held that defeat had been caused by internal class oppositions supplanting the national community. It also argued that defeat by the ‘West’ brought the ‘un-German’ principles of party democracy and internationalism to Germany. In connection with native representatives of various forms of internationalism (such as socialists, capitalists, Jews, and the Catholic Church), these principles worked against autochthonous German interests. Finally, it held that the ceding of German-populated territories, symbolically congealed in the Versailles Treaty, confirmed the völkisch idea. Anti-Semitism always integrated the various individual components. In the eyes of even those who had earlier stood apart from the right-wing radicals or Völkische, the war had lent the latter’s main tenets a quasi-empirical validity. This was really the far-reaching difference between the German development and that in the states of the West, where the right-wing extremist potential, though equally present, did not receive comprehensive upgrading and confirmation through the experience of defeat and collapse.9

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In Russia as well, military defeat seemed in some ways like a quasi-empirical confirmation of the radical theorems that had been in the air even earlier. In particular, it seemed to confirm the outmodedness of Tsarism and of the need for an overwhelming change. That the Bolsheviks prevailed in this situation, however, expressed not their ideological but their organisational strength, which of course was based in the cadres’ absolute conviction. However, more important for the further development here was the Civil War, and the ultimate dominance of the political force that proved to be the most organisationally united, ideologically radical, and modern in terms of the technology of rule. The Civil War’s de-civilising and brutalising effect on Russian society as a whole, and on the fighting youth in particular, resembled the World War’s effect in Germany. Thus the experience of violence as an effective means in political conflict shaped a whole generation.10

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Ideological Elites Two aspects of the rise of National Socialism from the early 1920s should be emphasised and distinguished from each other. First, the National Socialist party’s rise between 1930 and 1932 from one of many völkisch splinter groups to become the strongest party in the German parliament (Reichstag) essentially expressed the desperation of that segment of the population which (rightly) felt that their disastrous social situation and existential worries were not understood or represented by the country’s political leadership. Groups not firmly integrated in a social-moral milieu – like the Social Democratic workers’ movement or the Catholics – found much in the National Socialists. On the one hand, it was the party whose election quite obviously found the greatest echo among the public and among the political and social elites. But, on the other hand, its incessant activism, loudness and propaganda gave the impression of great dedication without contradicting the interests of individual groups by committing itself to a particular platform. In comparison, the ideological principles of National Socialism played a minor role in its gaining a mass following.11 A counter-model to the liberal world of 1789 and 1848 (which, after the First World War, was regarded as a clear failure) had developed especially in the years after the war. It was based on the traditional ideas of the Right, which had gradually consolidated since the 1890s. It was especially prevalent among the bourgeois-academic youth in Germany. This counter-model was based on the people and race and on political biology, anti-Semitism, and territorial expansion, rather than on the rights and dignity of the individual, tolerance, internationalism, and a consensual balance of interests. It offered an ideological foundation that seemed able both to explain the most recent historical developments and to promise, in principle, to trace all the problems and disturbances of the modern world to one fundamental, underlying pattern.

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Such an overall ideological view seemed to render all problems rapidly soluble, if only the proper prerequisites were fulfilled. The conviction that participation in such a world-explaining doctrine put one in harmony with the laws of nature and of history lent political practice after 1933 great dynamism, but simultaneously gave it its characteristic ruthlessness and brutality. This fundamental ideological conviction gave the protagonists the feeling of being not only entitled, but indeed duty-bound to extreme hardness and ruthlessness – after all, softness and restraint toward internal and external political and biological opponents violated not only the interests of one’s own people, but also the ‘laws of nature’. By the start of the Second World War at the latest, the generation of bourgeois youth shaped by the First World War and by post-war revolutionary upheavals moved into the regime’s positions of leadership, especially in the terror apparatus of the Nazi regime.12 Russia exhibits interesting parallels to this development. First, with the Bolsheviks, a movement came to power whose world-view was felt to be selfcontained. The Marxist-Leninist doctrine seemed fascinating partly because it had a concise answer to all immediate problems, an answer deducible from the primary contradictions and from history. In addition, and above all, it seemed able to determine future directions with scientific precision. The resulting conviction that the Bolsheviks and their followers stood on the morally superior side and were following history’s laws of motion was not only an extraordinarily powerful stimulant. It also served as a protective shield against all doubts arising from the observation of reality. Not least, it was a constant factor of radicalisation. Second, while Bolshevism’s first group of leaders was shaped by exile and by their own experience within a peaceful world, the generation that sustained Stalinism was not. Rather, it had been politically socialised primarily in the Civil War, in which the combination of the ideological certitude of salvation and the application of violence had brought success.13 An essential factor in both regimes therefore seems to be the existence of generationally homogeneous ideological elites, shaped by specific experiences in the context of war and civil war and profoundly suffused with ideology, who served as emerging leaders and were characterised by extreme brutality in achieving their political goals. This factor is especially important for the analysis of their respective policies of annihilation.

Dynamics, the Pace of Change, the Ability to Mobilise Common to both ‘ideological elites’ was the conviction that a tremendous effort could now, in a very short time, introduce developments that would immediately solve many, if not all societal problems for a long time and possibly forever. This belief had a wide variety of effects. First, it was connected with the idea that the problems themselves could be made to disappear along with the people who supposedly caused them. This began with the conviction that the German ‘ethnic body’ – perceived as a cultural-biological organism – was endangered by inner

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degeneration and by the influence of negative elements from outside. Political opponents were the first to be pushed out of the way. Then, members of the Volk who were designated ‘pests’ (e.g., the ‘antisocial’, mentally ill and feeble-minded) were initially incarcerated and, from 1939 on, killed. They were followed by those regarded as an external ‘danger to the blood’ of the Germans, in particular Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs.14 In the Soviet Union, this dynamic initially took forms that were in some ways quite similar. The elimination of the kulaks, or landowning peasants, especially in the Ukraine, through a process of controlled and then self-perpetuating starvation, can be seen as a programmatically motivated measure, or as land reform via mass murder. Although the practice of mass murder of the farming population, especially in the western regions of the USSR, was a process that was completely unregulated, arbitrary, and mostly removed from its original intentions, it had long-lasting catastrophic effects on the Soviet economy, such as the desertification of huge, formerly agriculturally productive regions, the rearchaisation of farm production, and the emergence of a huge army of homeless refugees.15 In terms of its original motivation, the terror against so-called ‘traitors’, ‘enemies of the people’, and ‘Trotskyites’, rapidly promoted since the mid-1930s, resembles the starving out of the kulaks. The certainty of the Bolshevik leadership group and of its political supporters that their own convictions were scientifically founded and in essence incontrovertible meant that the regime’s many setbacks in various fields were not attributed to the measures of the regime itself or to its associated goals and methods. Rather, the cause had to be sought either in ‘mistakes’ in implementing a goal that was in principle correct, or in the influence of enemies and traitors, whether internal or external. And as a rule, every internal enemy was recognised immediately as an agent of the external enemy.16 To the degree that failures accumulated, the terror also increased, but now not only clearly definable social (or ethnic) groups fell victim to it. Rather, it threatened more and more Soviet citizens, in particular everyone who had in any way taken on responsibility or leadership functions or who had merely been politically active in the young Soviet Union. If the failures of the regime were not traceable to ‘mistakes’ or ‘enemies’, then the project of the Bolshevik Revolution itself would be in question. Incidentally, this belief, and not only interrogations and torture, explains the willingness of many condemned old Bolsheviks to accuse themselves of treason before the tribunals, against their own better knowledge. Second, connected with this conviction that they could initiate developments that would solve society’s problems all at once, they were confident that they also could and had to implement these changes with the greatest possible speed. Of course, this idea defines the character of revolutionary movements as such – the conviction that indispensable changes could not be achieved through reforms, or that such changes would be too slow, was the precondition for a rapid, revolutionary solution. It was also the decisive difference from the Social Democrats and the German Nationalists.

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In Germany, Hitler himself was particularly obsessed with the idea that his country had to seize the unique historical opportunity given to it during his own leadership. But quite aside from the charismatic Führer figure, the idea that there might be a historically unique opportunity to carry out changes on a grand, worldwide scale was widespread among the leaders as well as among followers of the regime. This was not the least of the causes of the extraordinary dynamism and ability to mobilise that characterised the regime until its end, but which also led to its deficits and failure. For, unlike Bolshevism, National Socialism proved to be a pure mobilisation regime that, throughout its life, never managed to transform itself into a static form of dictatorship.17 In the Soviet Union, similarly, the ‘campaign’ – the short-term dedication of all means for a goal otherwise unreachable or reachable only much later – stands for the dynamic and shortterm focus of the regime. Many projects, including agricultural reform, electrification, the construction of new heavy industry conglomerates, or the great canal and railway projects, were not content to wait for development by organic processes. Rather, they proceeded through great leaps, primarily through propagandistic mobilisation, with little thought to the victims and costs entailed. The ‘campaign’ can be regarded as the characteristic element of Stalinism. But here too, the conviction that the favorable opportunity or the historical moment had to be seized to push through irreversible changes to society was widespread, although in a manner characteristically different than in National Socialism.18 Where National Socialism saw the favourable historical moment as something tied primarily to the appearance of the charismatic Führer, in the Soviet Union, the same moment was reached with the coming to power by the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks knew that the majority of the population did not support them. However, as a dictatorship of a basically very small minority, they had to try to compel changes in society as fast as possible, making a return to the old situation impossible. The pressure of time thus arose from different constellations of forces, but it was characteristic of and fundamental to both regimes, and an important factor in the unleashing of mass crimes.

Loyalty and Dissent in the Supporting Social Strata In contrast to what was argued in the early 1980s, we cannot adequately describe the appearance of the Nazi regime with the paired terms ‘Seduction and Violence’ (Thamer).19 Rather, it is clear that, after the phase of the NSDAP’s seizure of power, even segments of the population that had not voted National Socialist before 1933 at least no longer rejected the regime, in view of its foreign policy and economic successes. In addition, the terror of National Socialism proved to be for the most part value-neutral and calculable. Most of the German population was never even remotely endangered by state repression in the years of Nazi rule. Only at the end of the war did repression notably expand. Here two aspects should be emphasised.

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First, the regime’s domestic policy measures always took the mood and morale of the German population into account. Especially during the early years of the war, the regime lived in great fear of a repeat of the revolt of November 1918. Second, the experience of Germany’s economic and foreign policy resurgence under Hitler apparently had such deep and lasting effects on large segments of the German population that not even the burdens that ensued with the war and that greatly increased in 1942–43 led to any marked decline in loyalty or acceptance. Loyalty remained strong as long as the inner strength of the regime and its police apparatus seemed insuperable, and as long as the existing administrative structures were still able to ensure an appearance of normality in the midst of the spreading chaos of bombing and wartime shortages.20 Researchers do not agree on whether and the degree to which Stalinism had a kind of social basis in the Soviet Union. Some see a regime-buttressing stratum in the younger generations who flooded into the cities and joined the industrial proletariat after the rural population was violently expelled from the land. Some claim that this stratum profited from the dynamics of industrialisation and the gradually developing system of basic social security and education. Opposed to these researchers are others who limit the supportive stratum of Stalinism to basically the rapidly expanding apparatus of the party and state – that is, to the stratum of functionaries appearing as a new elite and privileged caste on the central, regional and local level. According to these researchers, no broad politically motivated or socially based approval of Stalinism ever emerged in the population, and the regime governed solely and uninterruptedly through surveillance and terror.21 However, we need to consider the changed situation during the war, when the Stalinist regime shifted to both a politically and patriotically motivated defensive war, and was therefore accepted as a defender of the motherland, even by those who had suffered the worst persecution under the regime. Overall, however, the primary difference is unmistakable: the Stalin regime was the dictatorship of a minority, and found no reliable support from any significant parts of its own population, except when defending against the external aggressor. Correspondingly, its terroristic power was aimed primarily at its own population. The Nazi regime was initially supported by a minority, but soon by a probably overwhelming majority of its own people. Its dynamic of annihilation was aimed primarily at the populations in the conquered countries of the East and at Europe’s Jews, who were persecuted for racial reasons. The differing targets of the terroristic energies of the two regimes mirror the differing coordinates of their basic ideological stance.

Personal Dictatorship and Institutional Chaos One of the essential elements of the National Socialist system of rule is generally seen as its consistent avoidance of any of the strategies that liberal systems characteristically employ to balance political and social interests. These strategies

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help bring equilibrium to the various demands and claims of societal groups, and find the consensus and compromises required for the diversity of modern societies. Instead of a complicated weighing of interests, Nazi ideology promoted a unified will, which was to take effect from the top down and which was embodied by the charismatic Führer. But this did not eliminate the existing conflicts of interest in the society, and there were no practicable forms or sites for working out such conflicts. Therefore, the task of balancing conflicts of interests shifted into the departments and agencies of the regime itself, and created an opaque confusion of competency rivalries and Darwinistic competition among agencies. This development, characterised by both traditional administrative activity and institutional administrative anarchy, and often much further differentiated through local and regional centres of power, intensified during the years of National Socialist rule, producing existential contradictions that could be mediated only by the Führer himself, who stood above daily squabbles. In practice, however, the resulting accumulation of competency paralysed the central authority. When Hitler personally chose even the metal alloys to be used for the anti-tank cannon, one could no longer speak of a hierarchical structure of responsibilities; the selection of individual decisions was purely arbitrary.22 The resulting formation of ever-new special agencies with bundled responsibilities intensified this trend even further. This made it possible to achieve extraordinary short-term mobilisation effects, but it increasingly hindered strategic planning, long-term co-ordination, and division of labour in administrative activity. Most of what was common to both regimes is traditionally located in this arena – the increasing dysfunctionality of the system of rule, the process of the party dictatorship taking on a life of its own, and the erosion of the state and of the rule of law as a whole. But a closer look does not confirm this; precisely here, one can see more fundamental and structural differences than parallels or partial commonalities. For, unlike the Soviet Union, Germany had a highly differentiated and efficient state apparatus, a bureaucracy with division of labour, a comprehensive legal and financial system that was professionalised early, a fullfledged social system, and a multi-layered and federal government apparatus, up until the last days of the war. In the Soviet Union, all this was lacking, either totally or for the most part. The Stalinist system lacked the characteristic infrastructure of a modern administrative state. As a consequence, it contained a totally centralised system of command with little or no intermediate hierarchical stages, and a far-reaching detachment of whole societal areas and spatial territories from the grasp of the central authorities. To make up for this deficit, the party, along with the army, was the only instrument of rule that was spatially and technically differentiated enough to enable the central authority’s will to prevail. Basically, however, this could function only by means of the campaigns, which were imaginable only as exceptional measures and not as a constant and ubiquitously available standing administrative apparatus of the modern kind.23

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In comparison with the Nazi regime, the Stalinist regime turns out to be by far the more polycratic, if only because there was no possibility to proclaim, much less enforce, the central authority’s decisions throughout the country. The farranging terror of the secret police should be seen as a reaction to this, and as an attempt to manifest the central authority’s claim to power, at least in episodic bursts of repression. It seems to me that precisely the example of the Soviet Union relativises the thesis of the Nazi regime’s polycracy. In this comparison, the German dictatorship, at least until 1943, appears to have been efficiently and rationally organised. But a glance at the deep contradictions and rivalries in the British system of government or economy raises doubts about the specificity and primary significance of the supposed anarchy of competencies in National Socialist Germany. However, this comparison is less stark when considering the German administration of occupied Eastern Europe. Ian Kershaw has pointed out that Stalin came out of and always remained a man of the party apparatus, while Hitler was never integrated in, much less ruled by, party-bureaucratic structures: ‘Stalin was the product of a system, Hitler the embodiment of one.’24 This is certainly true, but it is interesting to see it in connection with the existence of a fully developed state apparatus. Stalin’s leadership cult integrated and symbolised the claim to power of the central authority, or ‘state’, because there was no omnipresent state apparatus and the central authority therefore needed a visible symbolic figure. In contrast, Hitler did not embody the existing and much more differentiated state apparatus. He distanced himself from it and symbolised the ‘idea’ for whose realisation the state ought to be used, as well as a readiness for action that the slow administrative apparatus tended to impede. The term ‘dual state’ developed by Ernst Fraenkel but coined by the leadership of the Gestapo itself, underscores this situation. Along with the rule of the ‘prerogative state’ which proceeded in accordance with political-ideological standards and which rescinded legal traditions, Germany also had until 1945 the ‘normative state’, which proceeded in accordance with general and impartial standards and thus guaranteed legal security for a circumscribed region and the defined group of the German Volk. In contrast, to employ Fraenkel’s language, there had never been a traditional ‘normative state’ in the Soviet Union. For many seemingly unpolitical areas, there were no existing forms and institutions for resolving conflicts.25 Thus, in comparing the two systems, it is less important to underscore the parallels in relation to personal rule and chaotic power structures than the essential differences in relation to the existence of a ‘state’ and the consequences thereof.

The Functionality and Dynamics of Terror National Socialism focused its potential for repression and annihilation primarily on external ‘enemies’. The proportion of German citizens, including German

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Jews, among the victims of the National Socialist policies of persecution and annihilation by the end of the war was probably well below 10 percent of all the victims of the Nazi regime. Of the six million murdered Jews, no more than 150,000 were Germans; at the end of the war, the proportion of German prisoners in the concentration camps was less than 5 percent. This corresponded to National Socialist ideology, which did not differentiate humanity and the individual societies horizontally (by social groups or classes), but vertically (in relation to the competition, regarded as inherent in Nature, between individual peoples or races). Disregarding the final phase of the war, one must note that the terroristic measures of the National Socialists were characterised by a certain degree of internal rationality. Within the German population, it was thus relatively clear who was counted among the persecuted groups. First were those who, being politically motivated, actively resisted the rule of the Nazi regime. Their number became very small after 1936. Second were those persecuted for reasons of ‘racial hygiene’ (i.e., the handicapped and socially maladapted as well as the ‘asocial’ and homosexuals). Third were those who belonged to what was regarded as a ‘harmful racial minority’, especially the German Jews and the Gypsies. Anyone who did not belong to these groups, which comprised in total perhaps 5 percent of the German population, lived relatively securely and fairly undisturbed under the Nazi regime. The mass terror and mass annihilation policies were aimed instead at European Jews and the inhabitants of the conquered territories, especially in the East.26 In contrast, the terror of the Stalinists was directed almost exclusively at the USSR’s own population, and the persecution measures grew less internally rational as the regime’s failures increased. The terror took on a self-directing dynamic – to the point where arrest quotas were established for the security organs, which then hunted people down indiscriminately in the attempt to fulfil them.27 However, the term ‘own population’ is a problematic category in relation to the Soviet Union. Very much in the tradition of Tsarist imperialism, the Stalinist regime stood for the rule of the Russians over the rest of the nations and ethnic groups gathered within the Soviet empire. Similarly, the Nazi leadership’s attempt to establish and secure German rule in Central and Eastern Europe through the mass deportation of undesired ethnic groups must be seen as one of the most important prerequisites for the launching of the mass-murder projects overall, and of that aimed against the Jews in particular. Here the parallels to developments in the Soviet Union are impossible to overlook. These involved the deportation to the ‘East’, carried out with unbelievable brutality, of those national groups and ethnic minorities in the South and West of the Soviet Union that were seen as potential collabourators of the Germans, as political troublemakers, or merely as undomesticable. This makes it clear that the Gulag Archipelago was erected as a system of repression against political and social but also ethnic ‘enemies’.28

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On the other hand, the persecutory systems of National Socialism and of Stalinism were bound up in systems of rationality that must be distinguished from each other. The forced labour system of the Gulag, for example, clearly conformed to the line of the Stalinist ‘campaign politics’. With no regard for losses and death tolls, specific projects were carried out here, even if they made no macro-economic sense. The ‘consumed’ labourers could always be replenished; the Stalinist system was apparently unwilling, and above all unable, to develop a more efficient and more productive use of individual labourers, at least in the forced labour camps.29 In contrast, the leaders of the National Socialist regime viewed the use of concentration camp prisoner labour, especially the Jews, as merely a temporary measure demanded by the exigencies of war. The actual importance of the prisoners’ labour was macro-economically insubstantial, if we ignore the final phase of the war when concentration camp prisoners were used in the underground production of rockets and aircraft. The primary goal in relation to the concentration camp prisoners remained their neutralisation and humiliation and, in relation to the Jews, their murder. In the Stalinist Gulag, the deaths of millions of prisoners were an accepted side-effect of their use as replaceable forced labourers. For the National Socialists, the exploitation of part of European Jewry in forced labour (usually only for a short time) was not a goal, but a warconstrained concession, and a detour before their murder.30 The camp systems themselves, in the early years, can hardly be imagined as more disparate. This emerges from comparing prisoners’ reports, and especially in the stark contrast in recollections of the German communists who experienced incarceration in both Gulag and German concentration camps. Germany was a hell of physically incarnated order, where even the worst of the pre-war concentration camps, Mauthausen, was fitted out with rectangular flower beds lined up in formation. The Soviet Union, by contrast, was an inferno of arbitrariness, dilapidation, neglect and normless accidentalism. However, the situation in the German concentration camps changed rapidly in the second half of the war, when overcrowding, under-supply, neglect, and death rates of more than 30 percent of the prisoners per year became characteristic. The situation, wrote Margarete Buber-Neumann, increasingly approached those she had come to know in the camps of the Soviet Union.31 Thus, in comparing the terror and annihilation policies of the two regimes, the decisive factor is what aspects are chosen for comparison. If one compares the political repression during the Nazi period in Germany with that during the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union, the differences are fundamental. However, if one compares the havoc the Germans wrought in the occupied territories of the East, then the picture changes, and far-reaching parallels become visible.

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Conclusion The most important difference between the two regimes is often seen in the fact that Stalinism, as one recent formulation puts it, still carried a ‘reflection of the emancipatory goals of the workers’ movement’, and this cannot be said of National Socialism. In addition, National Socialism was not a sustainable regime, but ended as a system with Hitler’s death, while Stalinism developed into a more moderate form of dictatorship after Stalin’s death. These arguments do not convince me. The premise of the first argument is dogmatic. With the same justificatory move, one can see in the National Socialist genocide against the Jews a reflection of the defence of Europe against the Bolshevists, as indeed Ernst Nolte and his cohorts argue.The other argument is counterfactual and a matter of faith. The ability of a victorious Nazi Germany to survive with troops spread throughout Europe and an unpacified border in the East is indeed doubtful, but it cannot be ruled out. At any rate, this is useless as an argument for analysing National Socialism as it actually existed. The counter-argument, that National Socialism and its crimes were an answer to Bolshevism’s threat to the German and (by implication) to the European bourgeoisie, thus a kind of putative self-defence, is equally unconvincing. National Socialism and Stalinism were not related to each other as each other’s precondition, but as equally radical alternatives to Western-style bourgeois society, which was regarded as failed. This is the context in which they develop their annihilating dynamic; their logic was not primarily to destroy each other, for each saw the other merely as the extreme form of their primary enemy. In addition, to take up a third chain of argument, the essence of both regimes is not exhausted in their totalitarian character. Indeed, it is doubtful whether National Socialism was really a totalitarian system in the sense of Friedrichs and Brzezinski or in the sense of Hannah Arendt, especially when one considers the National Socialist system of rule and the regime’s relationship to its own population. On the other hand, the differences are more conspicuous the more precisely one considers the systems of rule themselves, especially the economic and social situations and the stages of industrial and societal development. The difference between a wealthy and developed industrial society and a developing country is so great that it tightly confines the limits of any meaningful comparison (as addressed in the title of this essay) that aims further than shortterm political debate. In summary, a comparison between National Socialist and Stalinist rule that is empirically informed and that does not disdain the details as disturbing deviations from the Grand Theory, is an analytical instrument that offers important explanations. Not least, it focuses new attention on supposedly selfevident aspects of what is already known, thus enabling new questions and evaluations. Nevertheless, one must not overestimate the scope of such comparative attempts, nor overvalue the results. The comparison uncovers differences and similarities, things quite disparate and conspicuous parallels, and

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attempts to explain them. It is neither ethically and morally inadmissable, nor does it relativise the mass crimes in any way. In terms of the structure of each regime, its prerequisites, and its form of rule, the differences seem to me more marked than the parallels. Nevertheless, both regimes are characterised by the fact that, on the path to realising a radical alternative to Western bourgeois society, they brought death to millions of people, and justified these deaths as necessary to achieve their goals.

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Notes 1. Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (eds), Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Ian Kershaw, ‘Totalitarianism Revisited: Nazism and Stalinism in Comparative Perspective’, in Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 23 (1994), pp. 23–40. As proof of the very early debate, see Erwin von Beckerath, ‘Faschismus und Bolschewismus’, in B. Harms (ed.), Volk und Reich der Deutschen. Vorlesungen, gehalten in der Deutschen Vereinigung für Staatswissenschaftliche Fortbildung, vol. 3 (Berlin: Hobbing, 1929), pp. 134–53. 2. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951); Franz Neumann, ‘Notizen zur Theorie der Diktatur’, in idem (ed.), Demokratischer und Autoritärer Staat. Studien zur politischen Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1986), pp. 224–47; Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956); Karl Dietrich Bracher, Die totalitäre Erfahrung (Munich: Piper, 1987). For an overview on the debate see Eckhard Jesse (ed.), Totalitarismus im 20. Jahrhundert. Eine Bilanz der internationalen Forschung (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 1996). 3. Karl Dietrich Bracher, Zeit der Ideologien. Eine Geschichte politischen Denkens im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: dtv, 1985); idem, Die totalitäre Erfahrung; Ernst Nolte, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917–1945. Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin: Propyläen-Verlag, 1987); Arno J. Mayer, Why did the Heavens not Darken? The ‘Final Solution’ in History (New York: Pantheon, 1988). 4. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka (eds), Geschichte und Vergleich. Ansätze und Ergebnisse international vergleichender Geschichtsschreibung (Frankfurt am Main, New York: Campus-Verlag, 1996); Hartmut Kaelble, Der historische Vergleich. Eine Einführung zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, New York: Campus-Verlag, 1999). 5. Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1866–1918, 2 vols (Munich: Beck, 1990, 1992); Mai, Gunther, Europa 1918–1939. Mentalitäten, Lebensweisen, Politik zwischen den Weltkriegen (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2001); August Nitschke and Detlef Peukert and Rüdiger vom Bruch (eds), Jahrhundertwende. Der Aufbruch in die Moderne, 1880–1930, 2 vols (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1990). 6. Hans Mommsen, Die verspielte Freiheit. Der Weg der Republik von Weimar in den Untergang 1918 –1933 (Berlin: Propyläen-Verlag, 1989); Ulrich Herbert, ‘Extermination Policy: New Answers and Questions about the History of the “Holocaust” in German Historiography’, in idem (ed.), National-Socialist Extermination Policy: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999), pp. 1–52; Gerhard Schulz, Der Aufstieg des Nationalsozialismus. Krise und Revolution in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Vienna: Propyläen-Verlag, 1975).

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7. Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, ‘Afterthoughts’, in idem (eds), Stalinism and Nazism, pp. 343–58; Hermann Weber (ed.), Lenin. Ausgewählte Schriften (Munich: Kindler, 1963), p. 602 (‘are we allowed to win?’). 8. Vladimir I. Lenin, Staat und Revolution. Die Lehre des Marxismus vom Staat und die Aufgaben des Proletariats in der Revolution (Berlin: Verlag Die Aktion, 1918). 9. Uwe Lohalm, Völkischer Radikalismus. Die Geschichte des Deutschvölkischen Schutz- und Trutzbundes 1919 –1923 (Hamburg: Leibniz-Verlag, 1970); Stanley Payne, ‘The Impact of World War I’, in idem, A History of Facism, 1914–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), pp. 71–79. 10. See Markus Wehner, ‘Stalinismus und Terror’, in Stefan Plaggenborg (ed.), Stalinismus. Neue Forschungen und Konzepte (Berlin: Verlag Spitz, 1998), pp. 365–90. 11. See Mommsen, Die verspielte Freiheit; idem, Der Nationalsozialismus und die deutsche Gesellschaft. Ausgewählte Aufsätze, ed. by Lutz Niethammer and Bernd Weisbrod (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1991); Payne, A History of Facism, pp. 149–76. 12. Ulrich Herbert, Best. Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989 (Bonn: Dietz, 1996); idem, ‘“Generation der Sachlichkeit”. Die völkische Studentenbewegung der frühen zwanziger Jahre in Deutschland’, in Frank Bajohr et al. (eds), Zivilisation und Barbarei (Hamburg: Christians, 1992), pp. 115–44; Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten. Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2002). 13. Moshe Lewin, ‘The Social Background of Stalinism’, in idem, The Making of the Soviet System, (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 258–85. 14. Hans-Walter Schmuhl, ‘Rassismus unter den Bedingungen charismatischer Herrschaft. Zum Übergang von der Verfolgung zur Vernichtung gesellschaftlicher Minderheiten im Dritten Reich’, in Karl Dietrich Bracher and Manfred Funke and Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (eds), Deutschland 1933–1945. Neue Studien zur nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft, Bd. 23 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1992), pp. 182–97; Michael Zimmermann, Rassenutopie und Genozid. Die nationalsozialistische ‘Lösung der Zigeunerfrage’ (Hamburg: Christians, 1996); Ulrich Herbert, ‘Traditionen des Rassismus’, in Lutz Niethammer et al., Bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1990), pp. 472–88. 15. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 16. Gábor Tamás Rittersporn, Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications: Social Tensions and Political Conflicts in the USSR, 1933–1953 (Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1991), pp. 101ff.; William J. Chase, Enemies within the Gates? The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934–1939 (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2001). 17. Hans Mommsen, ‘Ausnahmezustand als Herrschaftstechnik des NS-Regimes’, in Manfred Funke (ed.), Hitler, Deutschland und die Mächte. Materialien zur Aussenpolitik des Dritten Reiches (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1976), pp. 30–45; Norbert Frei, National Socialist Rule in Germany: The Führer State 1933 –1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). 18. Lynne Viola, The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 19. Hans-Ulrich Thamer, Verführung und Gewalt. Deutschland 1933–1945 (Berlin: Siedler, 1986). 20. Christoph Buchheim, ‘The Nazi Boom: An Economic Cul-de-Sac’, in Hans Mommsen (ed.), The Third Reich Between Vision and Reality: New Perspectives on German History, 1918–1945 (New York, Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp. 79–94; Ulrich Herbert, ‘Arbeiterschaft

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21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

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30. 31.

Ulrich Herbert

im “Dritten Reich”. Zwischenbilanz und offene Fragen’, in Geschichte und Gesellschaft 15 (1989), pp. 320ff; Götz Aly, Hitlers Volksstaat. Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2005). Viola, The Best Sons of the Fatherland; Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘Stalin and his Stalinism: Power and Authority in the Soviet Union, 1930–1953’, in David L. Hoffmann (ed.), Stalinism: The Essential Readings (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 13–36. Differing: Ian Kershaw, ‘Nationalsozialistische und stalinistische Herrschaft. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen des Vergleichs’, in Eckhard Jesse (ed.): Totalitarismus im 20. Jahrhundert, pp. 213–22. Hans Mommsen, ‘Hitlers Stellung im Nationalsozialistischen Herrschaftssystem’, in Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettenacker (ed.), Der “Führerstaat”. Mythos und Realität (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), pp. 43–70; Ian Kershaw, Hitler (London: Penguin Books, 2000). Moshe Lewin, ‘Bureaucracy and the Stalinist State’, in Kershaw and Lewin, Stalinism and Nazism, pp. 53–74; Gábor Tamás Rittersporn, ‘Society and the State Apparatus in the USSR: Contradictions and Interferences in the 1930s’, in idem, Stalinist Simplifications, pp. 30–64. Ian Kershaw, ‘Totalitarianism Revisited’, p. 37 (discussing Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel lives (New York: Knopf, 1992)). Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State (New York, London: Oxford University Press, 1941). Egbert Jahn, ‘Zum Problem der Vergleichbarkeit von Massenverfolgung und Massenvernichtung’, in Dittmar Dahlmann and Gerhard Hirschfeld (eds), Lager, Zwangsarbeit, Vertreibung und Deportation. Dimensionen der Massenverbrechen in der Sowjetunion und in Deutschland 1933 bis 1945 (Essen: Klartext-Verlag, 1999), pp. 29–51, esp. 50f. Oleg Khlevnyuk, ‘The Objectives of the Great Terror, 1937–1938’, in Hoffmann, Stalinism, pp. 81–104. Nikolaj Bugaj, ‘Die Deportationen der Völker aus der Ukraine, Weissrussland und Moldavien’, in Dahlmann and Hirschfeld, Lager, pp. 567–81. Elena A. Tjurina, ‘Die Rolle der Zwangsarbeit in der Wirtschaft der UdSSR. Eine Quellenanalyse’, in Dahlmann and Hirschfeld, Lager, pp. 267–78. Ulrich Herbert, ‘Labour and Extermination: Economic Interests and the Primacy of “Weltanschauung” in National Socialism’, in Past and Present 138 (1993), pp. 144–95. Margarete Buber-Neumann, Plädoyer für Freiheit und Menschlichkeit. Vorträge aus 35 Jahren, ed. by Janine Platten and Judith Buber Agassi, (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1999), pp.109–26, esp. 115.

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2 Burgher and Town: Typological Differences and Functional Equivalents

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Manfred Hildermeier The subject of this paper has implications that reach further than its comparative and perhaps somewhat abstract title suggests. Since the underdevelopment of towns and ‘bourgeois society’ has been interpreted as a key factor in the explanation of the two (or three) Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the violent and tumultuous collapse of the ancien régime is at stake. Both so-called ‘liberal’ historiography in pre-revolutionary Russia and Marxist historiography have argued along these lines. Other formulations that would spell out these corollaries – if only with a question mark – could be: was there a liberal alternative to the October Revolution? And did the emergence of a ‘liberal milieu’ in the principal Russian cities at the beginning of the twentieth century have more in common with other European experiences than is usually assumed? My argument will develop these ideas, and will proceed in two steps: First, I will briefly describe the old Russian city, contrasting its most common typologies and main features with that of the typical (middle) European city. I will also discuss some arguments that have countered this traditional view since the 1970s. Second, I will summarise the main reasoning of my current research on the new elites in selected provincial capitals of central Russia. Here I will attempt to demonstrate that there were developments towards a liberal and pluralistic version of the Tsarist political structure, including a constitution, a multi-party system, a parliament, city and local self-government, basic civil rights, and the formation of public opinion, mainly embodied in a relatively free press. The traditional view of the Russian city or town as it existed roughly from the seventeenth century until the middle (or in remote provinces, even until the end) of the nineteenth century still arises from Max Weber’s typology. He sets this out in his famous treatise on the city, which for decades appeared in his classic work, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft under the title of ‘non-legitimate rule’. In the new historical-critical edition of Max Weber’s Collected Works (Gesamtausgabe), published under the auspices of the Bavarian Academy of Science, the treatise finally forms a totally separate section, which surely is more appropriate.1

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The old title, however, makes it clear that the main criterion for defining the ‘occidental’ city and distinguishing it from, among others, the Russian city, is a legal one. Russian cities were not, in the strict sense of the term, ‘autonomous’: they did not have their own laws and courts, they were not exempt from the surrounding seigniorial rule, there was no legal barrier between cities and villages, and Stadtluft did not grant ‘freedom’. To be sure, it is well known that there were thousands of central European cities that did not fit this pattern. Many medievalists argue that Weber’s definition is outdated, given the high number of important cities founded by princes and other territorial rulers.2 It is beyond my competence to intervene in this discussion. Yet it seems that as an ideal type, and as a general description of the ‘Western’ and Russian city, this element of the definition holds true: no Russian city was autonomous or independent in any respect (the one exception being Novgorod until Ivan III conquered it in 1472).3 As a kind of alternative position it could be argued that the well-known under-government of the Russian territory – the central government’s inability really to enforce its legislation in remote places – amounted to the same thing. But this was an exception, not the rule. It is perhaps more important that Russian cities also differed in most of the other criteria recently used to define a city or town. The typical Russian city did not differ significantly from the countryside in its socio-economic and demographic features. It did not serve as a centre of commerce, handicrafts or business in a more modern sense, including banking transactions. It was not densely populated. Except for the two capitals and a few provincial centres, cities were hardly more culturally developed than villages.4 There are, of course, many reasons for this. Among them, the following seem to be crucial. First, the high level of taxation. The primary purpose of cities in the eyes of the Tsars was always to fill the state’s ever-empty coffers. This would not have been devastating had the rulers been modest or wise like many medieval Western princes, who bestowed commercial privileges on their cities in order to profit from a flourishing trade. Russia, however, followed more or less the example of the old Roman Empire, exploiting the provinces as much as possible. It is well known that in the Roman Empire, former consuls who had spent a fortune to secure their election were sent into the provinces to replenish their coffers. In Russia, the principle of the so-called kormlenie (derived from the word kormit, meaning ‘to feed’) was practised during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.5 The term tells its own story: the province had to maintain the administration, the military and, above all, the ever-needy governor, his family and his large entourage. When Peter the Great (at the beginning of the eighteenth century) and Catherine the Great (at its end) tried to change this sad state of affairs, acting like the wise peasant who feeds the cow that he wants to milk, the change came either too late or too early, but ultimately in vain. During their lifetime and until the middle of the nineteenth century, the misery of Russia’s average city continued. The reasons were obvious: Peter only replaced a crude form of exploitation with

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a more sophisticated or modern one that corresponded to the new levels of administrative institutionalisation in contemporary Western states. At least, he attempted to do so. Similarly, Catherine omitted from her famous reform of 1785 (the charter to the towns) the most important reform: the grant of a monopoly on commerce and trade to the cities, which would have relieved them from the competition of rural areas that was overwhelming them.6 This leads to the second non-legal difference from Western Europe: Russian cities remained economically weak and financially destitute. The great majority of the roughly 600 cities in European Russia at the beginning of the nineteenth century hardly differed from villages. Their inhabitants made their living from agriculture. They had gardens and small plots. The few existing crafts only served the needs of the local population. There was almost no specialised production for a wider market and no source for higher incomes, let alone for higher state revenues. Russian cities were utterly impoverished. It is no surprise, then, that in general no culturally significant functions could be attributed to Russian cities. This is a third non-legal argument for their specific character. There were no universities outside the capitals before the nineteenth century, and no other major educational or professional institutions. Commercial schools and secular knowledge spread into the provinces only in the course of the century. Not only the urban way of life but also urban ways of thinking and social conduct hardly differed from the agrarian. There was no ‘shell’ within which there could develop the Bürgertugenden, or civic (rather than bourgeois) virtues that were tied to the city and to the legal and social status of a burgher. Such virtues have become central to the debate about the development of a strong, selfconscious and self-regulating civil society. Catherine the Great tried to implant this kind of spirit and virtues, renaming the former posadskie liud (tax-paying subjects who happened to live in a town and not in a village) as grazhdane, or ‘burghers’ who could be proud members of this estate. But she soon failed.7 Culturally and socially, Russian cities hardly had any influence on society at large. Russian culture was a noble culture – or rather, it was a peasant culture. Of course, there are objections to this traditional view of the Russian city that date from liberal historiography of the late nineteenth century. These counterarguments have been put forward since the 1970s as a reaction to the renewal and extension of the liberal interpretation offered by émigré scholars primarily at American universities. At the same time, they served as a fundamental critique of Alexander Gerschenkron’s theory of ‘relative backwardness’, which was reproached for being overburdened with normative judgements and for measuring Russian socio-economic conditions by the yardstick of an idealised ‘Western’ development. This critique, however, dissipated rather quickly. It fell victim to a fundamental change of interest arising from the cultural turn in historiography and related disciplines. Problems of modernity and backwardness were no longer interesting, and the whole discussion ceased in the mid-1980s. The notion of ‘backwardness’ became a taboo. But the problem remains that the sources clearly show that the condition that this term attempted to describe,

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albeit in a biased way, was interpreted as such by the historical actors, from Peter the Great to Stalin. So historians now need to replace the notion with less flawed concepts, instead of merely discarding it. This has yet to be done. Instead, criticism has confined itself to a shift of perspective. The comparative perspective has shifted from the West to the East and South. In this context, the special Western characteristics of a city, such as its communal and privileged legal status, lose their significance. At the same time, similarities with other non-Western ‘urban networks’ increase.8 In comparison with these conditions, Russian cities seem neither backward nor poor, and seem to have served the same purpose as cities almost everywhere outside Central Europe. The only purpose of such cities was to represent the central power and carry out administrative and military tasks in the provinces. The question remains whether this change of perspective improves our understanding of Russian cities. I do not want to invoke the ‘facts’ or the ‘reality’ as a counter-argument,9 because the epistemological problem of how to define the ‘veto-power’ of the sources (R. Koselleck) is quite tricky. Instead, my answer is very simple: it depends on one’s question. Neither of the two types of comparison,10 one which stresses the contrasts and one which stresses similarities, comes closer to an alleged truth. Both are equivalent, and their appropriateness can be judged only in relation the original question. This dilemma is one more reason to tackle the problem in a different way. This is possible only for a later period – the last third of the nineteenth century, and then especially the decade between the ‘first’ Russian Revolution of 1905 and the beginning of the First World War. It has always been acknowledged that this period was a time of transformation, especially in the cities. Yet at the same time standard wisdom claimed that the traditional submissiveness of ‘society’ did not change substantially. The rising class of entrepreneurs in the major cities and their broadening middle class remained obedient and, as the title of a muchquoted German article puts it, ‘a product of the state.’11 This basic assumption is shared not only among contemporary liberal historians and politicians such as Alexander Kizevetter and Pavel Miliukov, but also in the works of Marxists, most notably Trotsky.12 New research on an old topic has become popular after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Post-communist Russia is seeking a different history, as are all successor states of the Soviet Union. Some of this ‘acceptable’ past may be no more than the ‘invention of a tradition’,13 but mostly it brings to light phenomena that did exist but that had been buried for ideological reasons. Moreover, the new interest can be a kind of probe that helps us to uncover new things. Thus, as always, it provides the foundation for new interpretations. What is emerging are the contours of a new image of civic life, the public sphere, and approaches to methods and structures of civil society in the last decades of the Tsarist Empire before the outbreak of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. What follows is an outline of the basic colours and shapes of this image.

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I begin with ‘society’ in the Russian sense, which always meant only the high society of property and education, not the rabble or everything between the family and the state in the broad sociological sense. Thus the title of a wellknown book published in the 1950s, The Rise of Democracy in Prerevolutionary Russia,14 promised more than it could fulfil: it was less a descriptive report than the expression of a wish arising from the liberal tradition in Russian historiography. The author understood ‘democracy’ to mean no more than political parties and programs of bourgeois-noble society. The branch of research this represented soon led to a dead end. Historians worked through the parties and associations and concluded that they had little effect on the central level of the state – the only level visible to them. Since then, historiography has changed substantially. Fashionable subjects include not only the February 1917 regime and its political bulwarks, but also the societal strata, groups and intellectual orientations that were connected with them or are considered its precursors. These include parties and associations, but above all the captains of industry, bankers, wholesalers and successful entrepreneurs of every kind who lived at the end of the Tsarist Empire. The economic elite is not just coming back into visibility, however: its specific way of thinking and acting and its own culture are also attracting closer attention. The cotton industrialist Pavel M. Tret’iakov, founder of the world-famous gallery in Moscow, along with other well-known collectors such as Sergei Shchukin, Picasso Collection, and Savva Morozov, Impressionists,15 no longer appear as eccentric mavericks who, motivated by a love of art, assembled priceless collections. They are also seen as representatives of a very wealthy, non-noble upper class that had grown selfconfident and who used their wealth to support the arts, theatre, and scholarship. By doing so, they not only documented their status but also took on a traditional function of the nobility. Soviet socialism had to disappear before the necessary freedom from pre-judgement could arise, allowing the extent of civic life that developed even in the Tsarist Empire to be fully recognised. Research, especially outside Russia, has revived a concept of the time that was used to designate this newly rediscovered phenomenon: obshchestvennost’, which translates approximately as ‘society-ness’. This is becoming a key concept to designate the autogenetic and public involvement in a wide variety of associations that no civil society can do without. Such involvement is neither entirely selfless nor entirely egoistic. Its motivation is assumed to be a search for intellectual and practical self-location, as an element of social identity. Values, ideas and desires take the place of mere interests and material impulses. The latter, however, do not disappear, but are subsumed into the former. Obshchestvennost’ is as classless as local identity; in principle, like a religion, it stands open to all who share its goals and norms.16 It is surely no coincidence that the study of Russian history is currently recalling the ‘forgotten class’,17 focusing more on civic life than on the bourgeoisie. This accommodates not only the reorientation of general interest toward mentalities, experience, and the symbol-suffused world of the ‘objectivised

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spirit’ (N. Hartmann), but also specific conditions of Russian society. As long as civic culture and civic politics required a more or less clear and bounded social substrate, looking for them in the Tsarist Empire was hopeless. What traces of this stratum could be found were limited to one or two dozen Moscow and St Petersburg dynasties of industrialists and businessmen. Historians noted that Moscow’s third- and fourth-generation entrepreneurial families in particular shed their inferiority complexes toward the nobility, and developed a decidedly ‘bourgeois’ self-confidence with growing power to shape society. However, there was no avoiding the conclusion that, as a social stratum, the bourgeoisie was neither very important nor politically influential. It remained a vague social category between ‘caste and class’.18 Of course, this finding changes when we examine ‘mental’ rather than social elements. Such a change of perspective directs our gaze to the educational system and the educated strata, and with new objectives. Active participation in public affairs of the most various kind, from cyclists’ clubs through art societies to municipal political factions, presupposes a measure of understanding and information that existed only in the cities and among a small elite. In this way too, new light is cast on a familiar group in Russian social and political history that was the bearer of civic life (and the values of civil society): the intelligentsia. Here this refers not to the ideological community of the oppositional intelligentsia but to the functional group of the academically qualified. ‘Professionalisation’19 is therefore a related keyword in this context. An increasingly broad and strategically significant educated elite took shape that was predisposed to promulgate new values and to realise obshchestvennost’. It served the gouvernements’ self-administration organisations, the zemstva, which were founded in 1864. New research on both reveals one thing in particular: it was not primarily the zemstvo employees (also known as the rural intelligentsia, or petite intelligentsia) who demanded this new political involvement in the provinces, but the nobility active in the upper levels. Put another way, the new involvement of ‘society’, which under the existing political conditions could only be oppositional, however moderately, was borne by the most important social bulwarks of the ancien régime itself.20 Such a rediscovery of previously marginalised findings is not enough to justify a complete turnaround in interpretation. This would require new concepts and objects of study. Yet as it happened, ideas and reality converged: when questions arose that could no longer be answered with the usual materials, the Soviet Union fortunately collapsed, permitting access to the regional archives. Local case studies of the pre-war decades have revealed a previously unknown process which had at least had the potential to create decisive prerequisites for a new form of community: the ‘networking’ of segments of disparate estates and groups into a new kind of elite. Especially in the cities, this leadership stratum could no longer be described as members of corporative-legal, social or institutional groups. They were neither exclusively nor primarily nobles and/or businesspeople, nor can they aptly be called a ‘collection of dignitaries’ in the classical sense of voluntary work. They included

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Burgher and Town

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most council members, mayors and committee personnel. At the same time, the group also included out-of-office or not-yet-in-office representatives of the locally emerging press, schools, universities and other educational institutions. The group’s new quality seems to have been that it was ‘trans-estate’, or based on common ideas and material interests in community and regional matters. Also, it increasingly drew in ‘educated’ people.21 If this finding holds for the majority of gouvernement cities, which I assume it will, we could say that much more individual initiative developed on a local level than was previously believed. In many ways, this fragile new growth was nourished and supported by a new surge of individual initiative in society. This came through the achievement of a public sphere that arose from the first Russian Revolution in 1905–6. This public sphere took at least two forms. First, thanks to a new law, associations and clubs experienced an unprecedented upswing. In part, this defied the law, which was passed at the height of the unrest and left all powers in the hands of the Governor as the monarch’s representative. But the law had unintended effects. Since the rule of law was taking hold in Russia, it required that, if the government rejected a would-be association’s application for a permit, it had to provide a justification; and the decision would no longer be made by the Governor alone, but by a newly created commission. Representatives of the state clearly dominated this commission, but it also included not only the president of the regional court, but also the chairman of the gouvernement zemstvo and the mayor of the gouvernement capital.22 Such regulations helped limit the number of rejections. Statistics often do not say much, and in this case they are incomplete, but they can illuminate general developments. So, it is significant that the total number of associations founded in 1898 (269) rose to 821 in 1904. Then, in the four years after the Revolution, from 1906 to 1909, it rocketed further to 4,800.23 Even if most of these associations were devoted to charity or the cultivation of music, theatre, and the arts in general, they still displayed a new level of involvement that could turn political. It was no coincidence that the political police kept a close watch on such activities. In their view, doctors who cared for the poor in municipal hospitals and attorneys who worked as legal advisors to the new enterprises stood all too close to the liberal and sometimes even revolutionary parties. In addition, another legacy of the 1905–6 Revolution was a politicaljournalistic public sphere that was broader and more active than had previously been thought. This sphere highlights another distinction that is a kind of functional equivalent to the distinction between bourgeoisie (Bürgertum) and bourgeois values and culture (Bürgerlichkeit):24 the distinction between the written constitution and laws on the one hand and constitutional and legal reality on the other. In the Russian situation, as it was constituted literally, no public space was free from the control of state offices, and no political public sphere even approached autonomy. But the findings are different when we look at constitutional reality and concrete debates on important political decisions. This is true on the central level, which is the only one investigated so far. However, as my studies suggest, it is even more true for the provinces.25

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Legal historians have long argued that the transition to a constitutional monarchy is not a kind of ‘quantum leap’ with a precise date based on written documentation. Instead, they argue that tying the ‘monarchical principle’ to a constitution and parliament was a gradual process everywhere.26 Viewed this way, the phrase ‘illusory constitutionality’ (Scheinkonstitutionalismus), as Max Weber formulated it in his articles on the first Russian Revolution,27 appears inappropriate for the period after 1906. This is even more true when we consider the reality created by the revolution. Here, it is clear that despite the revolution’s defeat, it led to the emergence of a journalistic-political public sphere both within and outside parliament that had not existed in this form before 1905. This sphere was not necessarily a lasting, critical or oppositional ‘check’ to state activity. After regaining its authority, the old regime was strong enough to ward off such efforts. But organs and institutions survived, and their mere presence was a kind of control – if only because they made it necessary for draft laws and imminent decisions to be taken out of the arcanum of the cabinet. This public sphere was embodied in the Duma, the (legal) parties and especially the press. Even though the revolutionary ‘days of freedom’ ended in 1906 and censorship was not abolished in Russia until 1988 (and is now gradually being reintroduced by Putin), a large number of newspapers could promulgate a wide variety of standpoints. Noteworthy was that these included periodicals that stood at some distance from the monarchy. Aside from revolutionary publications, which remained banned, this led to the unfolding of a limited pluralism of opinion (including in literature), which is one of the essential preconditions and agencies of the politics of democratic civil society.28 We still confront the problem of cultural norms and mental status, without which a new kind of public involvement on the part of proto-bourgeois strata is certainly unthinkable. Even before the ‘cultural turn’ reached it, research on Russian history was concerning itself not only with material culture but also with shifts in values and norms in the half century before the outbreak of the First World War. In the 1950s, when the so-called ‘optimists’ searched for embryonic forms of democracy and civil society (without using this term), they assumed that these forms would be found primarily in ideas. In this view, the bearers of a liberal way of thinking were the heirs of the academic elite, whose ideal type was represented by Pavel Miliukov, a professor of history and for many years a political leader of the Constitutional Democrats.29 The reconsideration of the ‘Middle’ in the late Russian Tsarist Empire30 is now expanding this viewpoint. What can be called a socially emancipated and autonomous concept of culture makes it possible to link together widely divergent phenomena that have been frequently noted, but whose internal kinship has hardly ever been recognised. One of the most important of these phenomena is the secularisation of everyday life in the cities. It is well known that, in the worlds of businessmen and entrepreneurs, the church was no longer the centre of public life. Where faith did not give way to indifference, it retreated into

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private life and the interior. Even the Old Believers, or dissenters from the Orthodox Church, whose persecution as a minority tied them especially closely to their religion, gave precedence to worldly goals and pleasures. At the same time, the pursuit of wealth and a work ethic oriented toward material success penetrated at least the larger cities. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the arriviste descendants of the (usually) peasant and Old Believer founders of textile enterprises looked back with pride on their three- to four-generation family history, and on the path they had taken from the village workshop to the urban art nouveau palace in Moscow.31 They provided insight into the mental and moral foundations of this Russian version of the American dream. The values praised here are astonishingly uniform and similar to Western Europe’s well-known civic virtues (whether ‘Protestant’ or not). Moreover, a phenomenon emerged that can be considered the endpoint of this psychological or mental change of costume: a new self-confidence, which was bourgeois in that it was clearly directed against the nobility. The new millionaires no longer felt any need to adopt the values of the nobility. The new civic state of mind in the capitals and the new trans-estate elites with local identification in the larger provincial cities had a similar goal. A ‘society’ emerged that, unlike the nobles, no longer waited for authority to issue directives for action, but initiated its own activity ‘civically’. With this development, the search for the beginnings of societal selforganisation and autonomous public involvement (albeit restricted to the local community) leads to another question: to what degree did these processes unfold as part of the development of civil-society structures in Russia on the eve of war and revolution? And to what degree were they similar to developments elsewhere, for example in Germany? An initial answer to both questions is: more than research during in the last three decades has thought. Since the abolition of serfdom in 1861, a free, capitalistic market economy had developed, with unusual dynamism in some sectors. Not only a labour force but also a new socio-economic and municipal-political elite arose. This elite was characterised (admittedly with substantial regional differences) by the fusion of the higher functionaries of municipal self-administration and state administration with the new stratum of college graduates. It appears that these groups formed the core of something like a ‘local society’ that not only identified with regional affairs but also took part in them. In the capitals, the weight of the small but growing and increasingly self-confident ‘money aristocracy’ seems to have been greater. The zemstva and the cities constructed a ‘counter-state’ within the administrativepolitical framework, and under the burden of war it functioned better than the ancien régime. The parliament won a secure place, although it had limited rights, and, as Duma President and industrial captain Alexander Guchkov put it in 1910, ‘despite all hostility, no one can any longer imagine’ its elimination. Similarly, a spectrum of parties had become a stable component of the political process, despite the absence of its left-wing third (or more). It would have been even harder to eliminate the journalistic public sphere, with its broad spectrum of

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newspapers and journals. At the same time, procedures appropriate to the rule of law and incompatible with the usual understanding of autocracy began to prevail in the relationships between state and non-state organisations,32 and between the state and its subjects. Finally, the new urban elite was increasingly oriented toward the ideal of a kind of disinterested public participation. The upper strata in the capitals developed a programmatic bourgeois culture and new guiding values like individualism, rationality, and the pursuit of worldly possessions, while general secularised ideals began to prevail throughout the entire society. On the other hand, balance requires giving another answer as well. Some basic conclusions of historical research between the 1960s and 1980s retain their validity, despite recent reevaluations and new discoveries. Among these is the well-known finding that an ‘active society’ (A. Etzioni) arose not only belatedly but also in fragments. To put it metaphorically: one must decide whether the glass is half-full or half-empty. Until now, it was regarded as half-empty, because attention was paid almost exclusively to the central level of state and society. Now we can take a look at conditions in the provinces, and may conclude that it would be just as appropriate to call it half-full. This conclusion suggests an answer to the question whether the new research returns us to 1950s or late Tsarist interpretations of prerevolutionary developments. On the one hand, it is true that research is taking up the old question of a liberal alternative. On the other hand, it is approaching it in very different ways. The new approach takes a closer look at the provinces because here, at a certain distance from the capital, developments could unfold which were blocked at the centre. Also new is the attention given to the formation of a ‘trans-estate elite’ aligned not along common social features, but along common cultural norms, values and ways of interaction. It is new (for Russia) to focus on associations and clubs as institutions based on similar values and tastes and on the voluntary decision to join them. Another new finding is that the overlapping circles of the ‘trans-estate elite’, associations and self-government formed the nucleus of a developing municipal politics. Similarly, it becomes clear for the first time that a new public opinion arose almost simultaneously in the form of local newspapers. It is a new insight that the basis for all these processes was a consensus on the need for voluntary involvement in public affairs on a regional level, or on the ideal of an obshchestvennyi deiatel’ – the person active in public affairs. Last but not least, this argument also concludes that these processes were but late variations of similar and comparable processes, such as that in Germany in the middle third of the nineteenth century. These were investigated by a research group at Frankfurt and also in Bielefeld during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The general title of these processes could read ‘vom alten zum neuen Bürgertum’,33 or from the city-estate of ‘Bürgertum’ to a modern ‘bourgeoisie’, defined less by common socio-economic features than by common norms, values and tastes.

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Notes 1. Latest and best edition: Max Weber, Gesamtausgabe, Abt. I: Schriften und Reden. Bd. 22: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen Ordnungen und Mächte. Nachlass. Teilbd. 5: Die Stadt, ed. by Wilfried Nippel (Tübingen: Mohr, 1999). 2. Summarised by E. Isenmann, Die deutsche Stadt im Spätmittelalter. 1250–1500 Stadtgestalt, Recht, Stadtregiment, Kirche, Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft (Stuttgart: Ulmer, 1988). 3. See my argument in more detail in M. Hildermeier, ‘Max Weber und die russische Stadt’, in H. Bruhns and W. Nippel (eds), Max Weber und die Stadt im Kulturvergleich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), pp. 144–65. 4. See for many details M. Hildermeier, Bürgertum und Stadt in Russland 1760–1870. Rechtliche Lage und soziale Struktur (Cologne: Böhlau, 1986); I.I. Ditjatin, Ustroistvo i upravlenie gorodov Rossii, 2 vols (St Petersburg, Iaroslavl’: Merkul’ev, 1875, 1877); A.A. Kizevetter, Posadskaia obshchina v Rossii XVIII stoletii (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1903). 5. For details see J. M. Hittle, The Service City: Town and Townspeople in Russia 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979). 6. Text and a short bibliography: D. Griffiths and G.E. Munro (eds), Catherine II’s Charters of 1785 to the Nobility and the Town (Bakersfield: Charles Schlacks, 1991). 7. See e.g. J. Hartley, ‘Town Government in Saint Petersburg Guberniia after the Charter to the Towns of 1785’, in Slavonic and East European Review 62 (1984), pp. 61–84, as well as several contributions to the collection of conference papers: C. Scharf (ed.), Katharina II, Russland und Europa. Beiträge zur internationalen Forschung (Mainz: von Zabern, 2001). 8. See: G. Rozman, Urban Networks in Russia, 1750–1800, and Premodern Periodization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). 9. As Richard Evans did: In Defence of History (London: Granta Books, 1997). 10. See as a survey on a ‘typology’ of comparisons: H. Kaelble, Der historische Vergleich. Eine Einführung zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Campus-Verlag, 1999). 11. See D. Geyer, ‘ “Gesellschaft” als staatliche Veranstaltung. Sozialgeschichtliche Aspekte des russischen Behördenstaates im 18. Jahrhundert’, in idem (ed.), Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft im vorrevolutionären Russland (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1975), pp. 20–52. 12. E.g., in the introduction of his well-known history of the Russian Revolution: L. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (London: Gollancz, 1933). 13. Cf. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 14. See J. Walkin, The Rise of Democracy in Prerevolutionary Russia: Political and Social Institutions under the Last Three Tsars (New York: Praeger, 1962). 15. Cf. W. Bayer, Die Moskauer Medici. Der russische Bürger als Mäzen 1850–1917 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1996). 16. For a rediscovery of this concept see e.g.: E.W. Clowes, S.D. Kassow and J.L. West (eds), Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 17. Cf. V.T. Bill, The Forgotten Class: The Russian Bourgeoisie from the Earliest Beginnings to 1900 (New York: Praeger, 1959). 18. See A.J. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); idem, ‘The Sedimentary Society’, in Clowes, Kassow and West, Between Tsar and People, p. 343–66. 19. Cf. H. Balzer (ed.), Russia’s Missing Middle Class: The Professions in Russian History (Armonk: Sharpe, 1995); C. McClelland, S. Merl and H. Siegrist (eds), Professionen im

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20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

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28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

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modernen Osteuropa – Professions in Modern Eastern Europe (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1995). Cf. M.S. Conroy (ed.), Emerging Democracy in Late Imperial Russia: Case Studies on Local Self-Government (the Zemstvos), State Duma elections, the Tsarist Government, and the State Council before and during World War I (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1998). For first case studies see L. Häfner, Gesellschaft als lokale Veranstaltung in Russland. Städtische Eliten und Öffentlichkeit in Kazan’ und Saratov 1870 bis 1914 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004); G. Hausmann (ed.), Gesellschaft als lokale Veranstaltung. Selbstverwaltung, Assoziierung und Geselligkeit in den Städten des ausgehenden Zarenreiches (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002); M. Hildermeier, ‘Liberales Milieu in russischer Provinz. Kommunales Engagement, bürgerliche Vereine und Zivilgesellschaft 1900–1917’, in Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 51 (2003), pp. 498–548. For details see A.S. Tumanova, Samoderzhavie i obshchestvennye organizatsii v Rossii: 1905–1917 gody (Tambov: TGU, 2002). See A.D. Stepanskii, Samoderzhavie i obshchestvennye organizatsii Rossii na rubezhe XIX–XX vv. (Moscow: Moskovskii Gosudarstevenyi Istoriko-Arkhivnyi Institut, 1980) p. 28; Häfner, Gesellschaft p. 201. See J. Kocka, ‘Das europäische Muster und der deutsche Fall’, in idem (ed.), Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert. Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich, vol. 1, (Munich: dtv, 1988), p. 18. Cf. M. Hagen, Die Entfaltung politischer Öffentlichkeit in Russland 1906–1914 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1982). Cf. M. Szeftel, The Russian Constitution of April 23, 1906: Political Institutions of the Duma Monarchy (Brussels: Les Éditions de la Librairie Encyclopédique, 1976). Cf. M. Weber, ‘Russlands Übergang zum Scheinkonstitutionalismus’, in idem, Gesamtausgabe, Abt. I: Schriften und Reden. Bd. 10: Zur Russischen Revolution von 1905. Schriften und Reden 1905–1912, ed. by W. J. Mommsen and D. Dahlmann (Tübingen: Mohr, 1989), pp. 281–684. Cf. Hagen, Entfaltung. As a first case study: K. Bönker, ‘Akteure der Zivilgesellschaft vor Ort? Presse, Lokalpolitik und die Konstruktion von “Gesellschaft” im Gouvernment Saratov 1890–1917’, in A. Bauerkämper (ed.), Die Praxis der Zivilgesellschaft. Akteure, Handeln und Strukturen im internationalen Vergleich (Frankfurt am Main: Campus-Verlag, 2003), pp. 77–104. Best biography: M.K. Stockdale, Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia, 1880–1918 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). Cf. S.D. Kassow, J.L. West and E.W. Clowes, ‘Introduction: The Problem of the Middle in Late Imperial Russian Society’, in Clowes, Kassow and West, Between Tsar and People, pp. 3–14. Cf. e.g. I.A. Petrov, Moskovskaia burzhuaziia v nachale XX veka: predprinimatel’stvo i politika (Moscow: Mosgorarchiv, 2002); J.L. West and I.A. Petrov (eds.), Merchant Moscow: Images of Russia’s Vanished Bougeoisie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); T.C. Owen, Capitalism and Politics in Russia: A Social History of the Moscow Merchants 1855–1905 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs. Cf. P. Liessem, Verwaltungsgerichtsbarkeit im späten Zarenreich. Der Dirigierende Senat und seine Entscheidungen zur russischen Selbstverwaltung (1864–1917) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1996). 33. Cf. L. Gall (ed.), Vom alten zum neuen Bürgertum. Die mitteleuropäische Stadt im Umbruch 1780–1820 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1991).

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3 Republicanism versus Monarchy? Government by Estates in Poland-Lithuania and the Holy Roman Empire, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries

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Michael G. Müller The Holy Roman Empire and its political culture in the early modern period, seem to occupy little space in German collective memory. The Weimar Republic was identified primarily as the successor state to the Hohenzollern Kaiserreich of the nineteenth century; post-1945 as well as post-1989 democracy in Germany built on the heritage of the 1848 revolution rather than on the distant parliamentary tradition of the Holy Roman Empire prior to 1803. Even scholarly historiography in Germany came surprisingly late to the study of the constitutional structures and political thought of the Empire. The debate over the concept of a Reichsstaat is quite recent, and involves only a comparatively narrow circle of specialists.1 The majority of historians continue to conceptualise the early modern history of ‘the Germanies’ as a history of monarchical rule, executed by the Kaiser and in the princely territories. In East Central Europe, by contrast, national traditions of pre-modern republicanism have always played a remarkably prominent role in historical discourses of civil society and statehood, even outside academic historiography. Poles and Hungarians feel particularly strongly about being the heirs of a century-long national tradition of constitutional rule prior to the French Revolution. They consider that heritage (the tradition of so-called ‘noble republicanism’) to be a crucial factor in the shaping of modern nationhood, whether in a positive or negative sense. The ‘optimists’ would argue that historical experience allowed the Poles and Hungarians to survive as civic nations through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and to re-integrate into the world of Western democracies more smoothly than others after 1989. By contrast, ‘pessimists’ tend to identify

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the premodern tradition of ‘noble republicanism’ as one, if not the most important, reason for some critical shortcomings in the modern history of their national societies. These problems include the prevalence of aristocratic over bürgerlich patterns of political behaviour; economic performance; and a latent disrespect among citizens for state authority. At the same time, both optimists and pessimists seem to agree that the early modern systems of government by estates in East Central Europe – the model of ‘noble republics’ – was unique in the history of the continent.2 The fact that Western (German) and Eastern (Polish and Hungarian) memories of their respective early modern traditions of government by estates differ so widely may be one of the reasons why historians have rarely compared their historical experiences systematically.3 There was too much difference in what seemed to be the essential features of the two models of constitutional development. In the Holy Roman Empire, early modern state-building appeared to be intimately linked to the process of ‘territorialisation’ (institution-building and political centralisation on the level of regional rule), a development unknown to PolandLithuania or the lands of the Hungarian crown. The dynamics of ständischer Dualismus (the competition between princes and estates in the struggle over control of statehood) seem to have resulted, in the German case, in a complicated but nevertheless ‘inevitable’ development towards absolutism on the level of the Reichsterritorien. In East Central Europe, on the other hand, the estates defended themselves very successfully against princely centralisation of power. In short, constitutional development in the Holy Roman Empire is generally seen as having followed ‘classical’ European patterns in the context of the emergence of ‘modern’, or monarchical, systems of centralised government. By contrast, East Central Europe seems to have embarked on a constitutional Sonderweg by resisting monarchical state-building from the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries. This essay challenges this view of ‘East European exceptionalism’ in early modern constitutional history. It argues that the essentialist distinction between Western monarchism and Eastern (noble) republicanism in the early modern period is inadequate, and should be read as an invention of the century and of later historiography. Moreover, historians should ask where, and to what extent, Eastern and Western models and experiences of government by estates in the early modern period overlapped or at least remained comparable. Poland-Lithuania and the Holy Roman Empire and its territories will serve as examples. The comparison will deliberately emphasise political thought and political language as well as political actors, rather than institutions. The choice to focus on political thought and actors rather than institutions requires explanation, since most of the literature in the field is focuses on the latter. Generations of historians since Otto Hintze have elaborated typologies of early modern institution-building and institutional change, primarily to explain the parting of ways in the development towards absolutism and estate parliamentarism, or the Sonderweg of noble republicanism.4 Most historians today would agree, however, that the classical typologies ultimately had little

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explanatory power. The more thorough mapping of institutional structures, as undertaken by comparative researchers since the 1970s and 1980s, has made us more aware of similarities than of differences. For example, it is now well known that there was never a clear-cut distinction between two-chamber systems of representation and three-curia systems, as suggested by Hintze. Instead, all systems of territorial rule in early modern Europe combined in some way the representation of certain privileged estates with that of individual territories. Almost all of them were constructed to allow for a triple partition of power among the crown, the ‘country’, and some sort of mediating body (for example, a Senate or an upper house).5 Nowhere in Europe was there, in institutional terms, anything like absolutist monarchy (with the exception of perhaps Denmark and Russia), or pure noble republicanism. Monarchs and princes had to negotiate with ‘the country’ on questions of budget, foreign politics or warfare; this is true even for autocratic Russia. However, nowhere could the estates function without monarchical leadership of some sort. As Wolfgang Reinhard recently stated, government by estates was essentially a monarchical project, since the estates, by definition, represented particularist interests. They could not formally ‘concur’ on matters of the state unless summoned by a prince and directed by mediating groups or bodies.6 In the case of Poland-Lithuania and the Reich, historians thus find it increasingly difficult to identify fundamental differences on the institutional level.7 In both systems, the early modern apparatus of central power had developed out of the ‘Carolingian tradition’ of a curia regis that eventually differentiated into administrations of the royal household and of the ‘country’. Both systems of government relied on the existence of advisory bodies, chancelleries and courts – institutions that came into being either as structures of political representation or as instruments of monarchical rule competing with estate participation. The estate assemblies of Land- and Reichstage, sejmiki and sejmy in the Polish-Lithuanian case, were in turn designed to represent both the ‘country’ and individual groups with rights of participation. None of these assemblies ever gained full autonomy from the king or the Kaiser and the Kurfürsten respectively. Not even the Polish nobility’s privilege of electing their king can be considered unique in institutional terms. The Polish ‘rex electus’ was not merely the highest office-holder in the state, but, very much like the Kaiser, the only legitimate embodiment of maiestas. Yet why should an analysis of political theory, and an inquiry into the relationships among the political actors of government by estates, provide more a valid comparison? The answer is that we can learn more about the functions and meanings of political systems by enquiring into the ways in which political actors interpreted institutional orders and what use they actually made of institutions. This helps us understand why diverging political cultures emerged from common institutional roots. For example, why did monarchical rule on the level of the Reich develop in a different direction than on the level of the Kurfürstliche Territorien? How could the Polish-Lithuanian diet, or sejm, acquire what in the eighteenth

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century qualified as the ‘summa potestas’, while similar representative bodies, like the Brandenburgian or the Bohemian Landtag, always remained in the shadow of monarchical legislation? Finally, why did the king, council and country in PolandLithuania successfully cooperate as parliamentary estates in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but act as permanent opponents to each other’s political initiatives in the eighteenth century, even though the institutional framework remained unchanged? These types of questions will be addressed below. I approach this comparison from the Polish side, and begin with a piece of Polish political writing that could be read to prove precisely the opposite of what has been said in earlier criticism of the Sonderweg concept. Stanisl/aw DuninKarwicki’s treatise De ordinanda republica, published in 1707, describes the PolishLithuanian commonwealth as nothing less than the single remaining ‘pure republic’ in Europe. It was seen as the only res publica in which the nation of nobles, after a century-long struggle between maiestas and libertas, had safeguarded the ‘cardinal rights’ of free citizenship: personal inviolability, religious freedom, equal rights, the ‘free vote’ and free election of the king. The PolishLithuanian republic was, as Karwicki claimed, unique in its origins, since it owed its culture of civic freedom to the heritage of the ancient Sarmates, of whom the Polish szlachta were the immediate ethnic descendants. He furthermore described it as unique in its way of functioning. Unlike any other system of government in Europe, the Sarmate Republic existed and flourished due to the absence of rule, or ‘non-government’ (nierz¸ad), as one of Karwicki’s contemporaries phrased it.8 By no means did Karwicki’s text mark an outsider position. Many equally popular panegyric descriptions of Sarmate liberty followed over the first half of the eighteenth century. More importantly, this type of political language became increasingly prominent in the rhetoric of the sejmy and sejmiki. The problem with understanding Karwicki, however, is that his status in the history of Polish political thought has mostly been misinterpreted. He was not one of the last representatives of traditional political theory in premodern Poland; on the contrary, he was an early representative of a new, ‘neo-Sarmate’ discourse of Polish politics. Karwicki not only aimed to fundamentally reinterpret the Polish traditions of government by estates against the background of eighteenth-century political experiences. He also directly contested the legitimacy of the existing institutional framework. For example, the traditional idea that three estates (the king, senate, and lower chamber) constituted the sejm was deliberately abandoned in favour of the argument that the lower chamber should represent the summa potestas. The principle of the citizen’s ‘free vote’ (libera vox) was redefined to legitimise a comparatively new parliamentary practice without any legal foundation – the so-called liberum veto that now, quite arbitrarily, was interpreted as the customary right of any member of the lower house to veto decisions of the chamber. Strictly speaking, the eighteenth-century language of new ‘republicanism’ was not about re-thinking the existing system of government by estates, but about the idea of abolishing the system altogether. It reflected the

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political, economic, and military crisis that, since the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had actually paralysed the traditional mechanism of political negotiating and decision-making.9 Therefore, the great protagonists of Polish political theory of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would barely have understood even the basic categories on which eighteenth-century republicanism was built. The representatives of ‘classical’ Polish political theory certainly did not conceive ‘monarchy’ and ‘republic’ as mutually exclusive concepts, although they unanimously defended the model of monarchia mixta against that of dominium absolutum. The felt strongly about the need for rational state-building on the basis of legally controlled bureaucratic institutions, and they were far from associating libertas with anarchy. The project of a ‘noble nation’ was therefore entirely alien to them, as was the idea that the humanist narratives of the allegedly Sarmate origins of the Poles could truthfully be incorporated into a theory of Polish statehood. Instead, they conceptualised the res publica more or less along the same lines as their contemporaries in the European West, because they tried to provide answers to basically the same set of challenges to early modern statehood as were faced by the majority of the Europeans. Andrej Frycz Modrzewski, intellectually the most important political theorist in mid-sixteenth-century Poland, may provide an example.10 For him, and for the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth of his time, the most challenging question was how to re-establish the balance between the crown and the estates at a time when the regulating role of the ‘state’ had rapidly gained importance. In this context, historians have mainly read Modrzewski’s De republica emendanda libri quinque of 1554 as a polemic in favour of strengthening the monarchical power. This is partly true, since he did argue in favour of restoring to the crown some of the prerogatives that it had lost by the time of the Jagiellonian kings (namely in the late fifteenth century). He also argued for providing the king with the necessary instruments to re-secure internal peace and defence. However, he stressed the subordination of the king to common law and to legal control more explicitly than most of his European contemporaries. He also defended the principle of an elected king by emphasising the Erasmian argument that ‘any prudent man would select the captain for his ship on the basis of the candidate’s nautical skills rather than the glamour of his descent’. The majority of Polish contemporaries probably endorsed Modrzewski’s definition of the royal prerogatives, which was, after all, conventional. They might have read as provocative, however, his critical assessment of the performance of the szlachta as born members of the two chambers of the sejm: ‘I am not sure whether szlachta and knight are the same thing. Obviously, one may be born as a Polish szlachcic, but not as a knight. Just as it makes a difference whether one is a scholar or the son of a scholar, there is also a difference between a knight and the son of a knight.’ What Modrzewski had in mind was a concept of meritocracy avant la lettre. Even the ‘plebeians’, he argued, should be

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considered potentially valid members of the civic society – a proposal that Jean Bodin, in his Six livres de République, directly rejected as naïve, if not ‘silly’.11 Nevertheless, Modrzewski’s successors followed his agenda. They all sought to accommodate the existing system of divided prerogatives to the need to allow for professionalisation and legal rationalisation in the process of internal statebuilding. They also sought, under the conditions of confessional diversity, some kind of religious legitimacy and moral control, preferably in the framework of a national church. The problem was not monarchy as such, or an imminent threat of a dominium absolutum in particular. Rather, they faced the dilemma that the new tasks of state-building could not be transferred to the agencies of royal power, the bodies of noble representation, the estates or the existing confessional churches without substantially affecting the existing distribution of power. In any case, a critical attitude towards szlachta particularism was common to most political theorists in Poland of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Stanisl/aw Orzechowski radicalised Modrzewski’s plea for a social opening of citizenship in the rzeczpospolita towards the burghers and the peasantry, as well as towards religious dissidents and non-Polish-speaking communities. His project was to restructure estate participation so to revitalise the ideal of joint government in an Aristotelian sense. In contrast, the Jesuit Piotr Skarga, who wrote roughly a generation after Modrzewski and Orzechowski, opted for directly overcoming the discordia among the estates by restoring religious unity on the one hand and, on the other, by conceptualising the king as above the law (legibus solutus), along the same lines as Bodin.12 Ironically, Skarga’s writings, after being thoroughly revised following his death, eventually became the credo of late seventeenth-century Polish anti-royalists. Once the explicitly pro-absolutist messages were eliminated, his famous ‘sermons in parliament’ could be read as a moral appeal to the political nation to reunite on the basis of its traditional values, such as nobilitarian citizenship and Catholicism. However, the success of this kind of reinterpretation must be explained against the background of the fundamental changes in internal power relations that occurred in 1569, 1572 and 1607. In 1569, Poland, Lithuania and the other lands of the Polish crown were finally integrated into a commonwealth jointly governed by the estates. The institutionalisation of the royal elections occurred in 1572; and in 1607, the civil war ended. Those opposed to the king had fought for the rights of the lower aristocracy and the freedom of religious dissidents, and the war ended with a rather vague compromise between szlachta and magnates, and between Catholics and ‘dissidents’. The union of 1569 and the decisions of the interregnum after 1572 ultimately defined the limitations of the royal prerogatives in Poland-Lithuania. It also effectively ruled out forever the possibility of a coalition between the crown and non-nobilitarian strata. The conflict between magnates and gentry, which had fuelled the fronde of 1605–07, remained unresolved. The effects were paradoxical in at least two respects. First, although, in the seventeenth century the magnates’ quest for power constituted the primary

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challenge to Poland’s political order, public debate remained focussed on the question of monarchical power. Legitimising or challenging oligarchic aspirations was the hidden agenda of a debate in which both sides emphasised the threat of royal despotism. Also, although in legal terms monarchical influence on commonwealth politics was steadily declining, the king seemed to return to the political stage through the back door. He served as an informal partner to competing magnate power groups, none of which managed, in either the seventeenth or the eighteenth century, to run the tripartite estate parliament entirely on their own authority. This explains why, from the early seventeenth century onwards, two seemingly contradictory projects of Res publica developed. Political leaders like chancellor Jan Zamoyski or publicists like Dunin Karwicki worked to provide the nation of citoyens actifs with a new political self-consciousness. They tried to do this by reinterpreting Polish republican tradition in a way that reconciled the szlachta majority with magnate leadership, justified by the nation’s common commitment to defending the principle of libertas. On the other hand, more academic political theorists like Szymon Starowolski or Aaron Aleksander Olizarowski continued along Modrzewski’s lines, ‘translating’ the great European debates over monarchical sovereignty (from Bodin to Hobbes and Bossuet) into the language of the traditional Polish discourse of monarchy under common law. Essentially, they argued in defence of the same institutional framework as the self-declared ‘republicans,’ but as the protagonists of a renewal of the monarchia mixta.13 At the end, in the mid-eighteenth century, the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth was still a monarchy governed by the estates, and by no means a republic of nobles. It also reinvented itself as a monarchy in the Enlightenment period by proclaiming the constitution of 3 May 1791.14 The text of the constitution may have paid tribute to the language of szlachta neo-Sarmatism at several points. Yet in essence the last reform led Poland to basically the same model of statehood that prevailed in the west: a monarchical and bureaucratic Anstaltsstaat controlled by law and governed by the estates with a hereditary king at their head. How can developments in Poland-Lithuania be compared to those in the Holy Roman Empire? The following sections briefly discuss two aspects of this question. I first ask how German debates over monarchy and government by estates related to the interests of specific groups of political actors in the Holy Roman Empire. I also examine where, and for what reasons, German and Polish experiences might represent different paths of development. The first and most obvious difference lies in the Holy Roman Empire’s double structure of princely rule and estates.15 The estates of the Empire, or Reichsstände, acted both as vassals to and electors of the Emperor. At the same time, they ruled over the Reich’s territories and their respective estates. The parameters for estate participation on the two levels differed widely in four respects. First, on the upper level the politics of the realm were very much considered a joint affair of the higher Reichsstände. However, estate participation on the lower level remained, as a rule, restricted to negotiations over matters that specifically concerned

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individual estates. Second, the territorial estates could only rarely actively set a political agenda, yet this was the rule for the higher Reichsstände. Third, the Reichsstände and their territorial state apparatus provided virtually the only direct link between Kaiser and Reich; however, the estates in the territories mostly coexisted and competed with agencies of princely power (a more or less elaborated bureaucratic apparatus). Finally, the imperial court had had to mediate between the confessional churches since the Augsburger Religionsfrieden and the Treaty of Westphalia. Thus most territorial rulers were able to establish confessionally homogeneous territorial Eigenkirchen, a development that reinforced the process of political territorialisation. Many other and far more complex differences between the ‘higher’ and the ‘lower’ levels could of course be identified. Moreover, what we define here as the ‘lower level’ was far from representing a homogeneous structure. The quite numerous Reichsritterschaft consisted of vassals to the German king who never disposed of the material and political resources necessary for territorial statebuilding. Small and large Reichsterritorien differed vastly in terms of resources, power and relative sovereignty. Nevertheless, the suggested distinction between the upper and the lower levels of Reichspolitik helps elucidate the parameters for contemporary debates over political order. How princely rule or monarchy were each conceptualised depended, in the case of the Reich, primarily on who conceptualised monarchy and on which level. The differences may not have mattered as much before the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Since the Reformation, however, all political actors in the Reich had confronted the dilemma that supporting, or contesting, the idea of maiestas indivisibile had contradictory implications in relation to the Reich and the territories. In his writings, Philipp Melanchthon remained rather vague about where to end obedience to legal rulership, and it took a long time to persuade Martin Luther that he should openly support the political fronde of the protestant Reichsstände. As a footnote, neither in Germany nor in Poland did confessional dissent leave theologically specific marks on political thinking. The overall political context, rather than theology, gave specific direction to the political writings of Luther, Calvin, and Piotr Skarga.16 Only at the end of the sixteenth century, or after the reception of Jean Bodin’s writings, did the debate over monarchy in the Reich become more heated and polarised. This was not only due to Bodin’s provocative concepts of sovereignty in general, and of ‘absolute power’ in particular. He also raised major concerns in Germany by explicitly classifying the Reich’s political system as ‘aristocratic’. Of course, neither proposal could be accepted in Germany as an adequate interpretation of the Reichsregiment. The response was the vivid Reichspublizistik, which had (since around 1600) aimed to reconcile the new vision of sovereignty with German realities. Some authors, like Philipp of Chemnitz or, a generation later, Samuel Pufendorf, tended to follow Bodin by attributing to the emperor a very limited mediating role in a commonwealth whose members had already drifted far apart politically. However, in relation to the Reich the majority

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suggested solving the problem of defining sovereignty by distinguishing between maiestas and imperium; that is, by suggesting that the Kaiser and the Reichsstände had equal shares in representing and administering the Reich.17 These new visions of ‘shared sovereignty’ again brought German political theorists close to the interpretation of monarchy that Modrzewski had suggested for Poland two generations earlier. In the second half of the seventeenth century, however, German and Polish discourses of monarchy and state again drifted apart. As mentioned before, in Poland-Lithuania this was the time of the neo-Sarmate reinvention of the res publica. Yet in the lands of the Holy Roman Empire, political attention shifted from Reichspolitik to the ‘second level’, territorial state-building. As imperial power was reduced after 1648 to provide little more than an informal ‘roof ’ to the Reich (as observed by Samuel Pufendorf ), the debate over the legitimacy and necessity of absolute power as a prerequisite for state-building in the territories reopened unhindered. Moreover, by the mid-seventeenth century, the truly revolutionary message of Macchiavelli’s 1513 Prince could be understood and adopted to productive effect. After the end of open confessional conflict in the Reich, and after territorialisation became a political and administrative reality, political actors were more easily persuaded that both monarchical power and the estates had their paramount justification in the state.18 The criteria for assessing ‘good government’ were redefined: justice, peace and – most importantly – ‘gute Policey’. In the German case, the territorial rulers entered the competition for control of the state with a significant advantage over the bodies of estate representation. They (the Kurfürsten, the kings and the Kaiser) had the backing of a rapidly growing bureaucratic apparatus in which the estates were involved passively, if at all. They were in a position to reinvent themselves as magistratus superior (highest office holder), even ‘first servant of the state’. In contrast, the Polish-Lithuania szlachta, despite claiming to represent the summa potestas, did not develop any strong sense of collectively ‘serving the country’, at least not before the mid-eighteenth century and the emergence of the reform movement.19 In the German context, the increasingly influential concept of European political theory that ‘quod omnes similiter tangit, ab omnibus comprobetur’ (‘what concerns all alike should be approved by all’) thus found a very narrow interpretation: all estates could rightfully claim to be concerned in matters of taxation. The gravamina of the estates instead were understood as covering matters that concerned each estate individually, and thus were subject to ‘particularist’ interests. The materiae statu – such as defence, international relations or warfare – often did not appear at all on the agendas of estate deliberations. The provincial estates and their representatives in territorial assemblies did not necessarily consider this a disadvantage. As an example, consider the Ritterschaften of Mecklenburg or Pommern. The competencies of the respective provincial estate assemblies (older, and formerly much more influential in political matters than the Brandenburgian estates) decreased steadily as the political and administrative integration of the Hohenzollern lands progressed. At the same time, however, the

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provincial nobilities’ integration into a ‘Prussian’ aristocracy opened up new opportunities: access to military and civil careers, the privilege of ‘immediate’ access to the king, and guarantees for the preservation of local Adelsherrschaft over the peasantry. To preserve or extend aristocratic privileges, the nobility of the German lands often consciously neglected their right of Landtag representation, and instead integrated into the structures of a centralised state apparatus. The Polish-Lithuanian szlachta, especially the middle and higher strata of the nobility, did the opposite. Since the sixteenth century, they had successfully fought for conferring increasing competences and responsibilities onto the sejmiki and the sejm. In the seventeenth century, they ultimately shifted the balance between the three parliamentary estates in favour of the lower house. The Polish-Lithuanian aristocracy’s opportunities thus remained directly linked to estate institutions, not to the agencies of centralised state power. Comparing the political practices of estate assemblies in the Hohenzollern lands and Poland-Lithuania in the nineteenth century, one would therefore hardly recognise any similarities, despite the fact that the basic rules of deliberation were almost identical. In both cases, the monarch had the exclusive right to summon the estate assembly and to define the agenda for the deliberations (ius proponendi). In addition, the criteria for eligibility of representatives to both assemblies were strictly defined and thoroughly controlled. Neither assembly followed rigid procedural rules. There was no formalised principle of decision-making by majority vote, nor did the customary law explicitly require unanimity. For the rest, however, the two milieus of estate politics were wide apart in terms of agendas, political language and habitus, and not least in terms of the political risks from a possibly negative outcome of deliberations. In the Hohenzollern realms, the elector or, since 1701, the king could consider himself free to act in his own right in cases where the estates failed to concur or to offer valid consilium to the crown. In Poland-Lithuania, by contrast, the failure of the two chambers of the sejm to reach a common conclusion (constitutio) automatically implied that all formal political action was suspended, and that the competing political parties would feel encouraged to pursue their own political aims informally.20 It is no wonder that, from some time in the seventeenth century, Germans and Poles tended to perceive each other as representing fundamentally different political cultures. Political writers on both sides increasingly emphasised the uniqueness of the Polish-Lithuanian model. Yet what the protagonists of eighteenth-century Polish ‘republicanism’ praised as ‘Sarmate liberty’ was later denounced by German (in particular Prussian) commentators as ‘Polish anarchy’. Only later, in the eighteenth century, in the light of the first partition of Poland in 1772, did Polish and German political writers reconsider the similarities between the Reich and Poland-Lithuanian traditions of government by estates. This occurred as both the Polish-Lithuanian res publica and that of the Holy Roman faced the threat of destruction through arbitrary action by absolutist states.21

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Obviously, the ideas presented here on how to compare ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ models of government and statehood in the early modern period have not offered a comprehensive discussion of the relevant issues, but have raised only a few of the questions involved. Nevertheless, our tentative comparison between the Holy Roman Empire and Poland-Lithunia seems to justify at least two conclusions. First, a discussion of political theory and political practices, rather than of institutions in the traditional sense, seems to grant new insights in a comparative perspective. Although it is obvious that legally defined institutions always vary substantially from one territory to the other, the relative similarity of institutions cannot be taken as evidence of similarity in the paths of constitutional development. What matters is how political actors used, interpreted and sometimes reinterpreted the existing institutional framework. In this case, the question of how the political cultures of the Holy Roman Empire and of PolandLithuania actually differed cannot be answered on an institutional level. Second, even on the basis of a very general account of developments in the field of theories and practices of government by estates, one can conclude that the experiences in East Central Europe cannot adequately be described as representing an East European Sonderweg. Most historians have used, and continue to use, the concept of East European exceptionalism to describe the specificity of East Central European experiences in early modern constitutional history. Yet such interpretations draw primarily on concepts (like ‘noble republicanism’ or ‘szlachta democracy’) that were defined retrospectively by eighteenth-century critics of the ancien régime and by historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They have no support in the source evidence. In fact, there is no substantial reason to suggest that the constitutional history of the ‘West’ and ‘East’ of early modern Europe differed in structural terms. Rather, we should consider the discourse of ‘East European exceptionalism’ to be part of the process of inventing eastern Europe since the age of Enlightenment. This process occurred in the context of, among other factors, the fundamental changes in European power relations that Larry Wolf has comprehensively analysed. Generally speaking, conventional typology – the definition of ideal types of European state-building – seems to have contributed little to a better understanding of European history. Instead, the emphasis should be on attempts to map individual phenomena of structural change in European history according to their specific chronological and geographical bearings. The Europe of the Humanists had a different geography from that of the European Enlightenment. The process of industrialisation divided Europe along different geographical lines from those defining the emergence of modern democracies. Not least, the borderline between ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ models of early modern state-building was certainly not the same as the imagined border between western and eastern political civilisations as invented in the late eighteenth century. As a final thought, historians inquiring into the diverging geographies of structural change in European history could benefit, in methodological terms, from current debates in social anthropology. It may prove useful, for example, to consider Arjun

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Appadurai’s proposal for studying processes of global change in the context of specific structural ‘landscapes’,22 such as ethnoscapes, technoscapes and ideoscapes. One might also add ‘power-scapes,’ which always developed under different parameters, and should be studied separately.

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Notes 1. Johannes Kunisch (ed.), Neue Studien zur frühneuzeitlichen Reichsgeschichte (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1987, 1997); Volker Press, Das Alte Reich. Ausgewählte Aufsätze (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1997); Georg Schmidt (ed.), Stände und Gesellschaft im Alten Reich (Stuttgart: Steiner-Verlag, 1989). 2. As classics: Oskar Halecki, Borderlands of Western Civilisation: A History of East Central Europe (New York: Ronald Press Company, 1952); Jenö Szücs, Les trois Europes (Paris: Édition l’Harmattan, 1985), in German: Die drei historischen Regionen Europas (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1990). 3. For a comprehensive overview of the relevant historiography cf. the special issue of: Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropaforschung 53/1 (2204), ed. by Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg (Marburg: Verlag Herder-Institut). 4. Otto Hintze, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, 3 vol.s, 3rd ed., (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964–1970). 5. Günter Barudio, Das Zeitalter des Absolutismus und der Aufklärung, 1648–1779 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Bücherei, 1981). 6. Wolfgang Reinhard, Geschichte der Staatsgewalt. Eine vergleichende Verfassungsgeschichte Europas von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: Beck, 1999), pp. 210ff. 7. Rudolf Jaworski and Christian Lübke and Michael G. Müller, Eine kleine Geschichte Polens (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), pp. 211ff.; Michael G. Müller, ‘Nicht für die Religion selbst ist die Confoederation inter dissidentes eingerichtet. Bekenntnispolitik und Respublica-Verständnis in Polen-Litauen’, in Luise Schorn-Schütte (ed.), Strukturen des politischen Denkens im Europa der Frühen Neuzeit, special issue of Historische Zeitschrift 39, (2004), pp. 311–328. 8. Stanisl/aw Dunin-Karwicki, De ordinanda republica, ed. by Stanisl/aw Krzy˙zanowski (Cracow: Typis Officianae Ephemeridum, 1871). 9. Michael G. Müller, Polen zwischen Preussen und Russland. Souveränitätskrise und Reformpolitik, 1736–1752 (Berlin: Colloquium, 1983). 10. Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski, Opera omnia, vol. 1 (Warsaw: Pan´stwowy Institut Wyd., 1953). 11. Cf. Waldemar Voisé, ‘Polish Renaissance Political Theory: Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski’, in Samuel Fiszman (ed.), The Polish Renaissance in its European Context (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 174–88. 12. Piotr Skarga, Kazania sejmowe, 3rd ed. (Wrocl/aw et al.: Zakl/ad narodowy im. Ossoli´nskich, 1972). 13. Andrzej Walicki, ‘The Polish Political Heritage of the sixteenth Century and its Influence on the Nation-Building Ideologies of the Polish Enlightenment and Romanticism’, in Fiszman, The Polish Renaissance, pp. 34–57. 14. For a comprehensive discussion of constitutional reform in the late eighteenth century Poland: Bogusl/aw Les´nodorski, Dziel/o Sejmu Czteroletniego, 1788–1792 (Wrocl/aw:

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15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Zakl/ad narodowy im. Ossolin´skich, 1951); cf. also Samuel Fiszman (ed.), Constitution and Reform in Eighteenth Century Poland: The Constitution of 3 May 1791 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). For the following cf. Reinhard, Geschichte der Staatsgewalt, pp. 100ff. Heinz Schilling, ‘Die Konfessionalisierung im Reich. Religiöser und gesellschaftlicher Wandel in Deutschland zwischen 1555 und 1620’, in Historische Zeitschrift 246 (1988), pp. 1–45. For a reassessment of the confessionalisation paradigm in the view of Central and Eastern Europe see Joachim Bahlcke and Arno Strohmeyer (eds), Konfessionalisierung in Ostmitteleuropa (Stuttgart: Steiner-Verlag, 1999). Reinhard, Geschichte der Staatsgewalt, pp. 106ff. Herfried Münkler, Im Namen des Staates. Die Begründung der Staatsraison in der Frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1987). Robert Frost, The Northern Wars, 1558–1721 (Harlow et al.: Longman, 2000). For the period of crisis in the first half of the eighteenth century cf. Müller, Polen zwischen Preussen und Russland, pp. 115ff. Tadeusz Cegielski, Das alte Reich und die erste Teilung Polens (Stuttgart: Steiner-Verlag, 1988). Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, in idem, Modernity at Large: Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 27–47.

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22.

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4 The Impact of Religion on the Revolutions in France (1789) and Russia (1905/17)

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Martin Schulze Wessel For the observers and historians of revolutions in the first half of the nineteenth century, it stood to reason that religion played a vital part in the fundamental political changes of their times. Whether they were orthodox, like Henri de Bonald and Joseph de Maistre, or vehement critics of the church, like Jules Michelet and François Charles-Roux, all of them explored the ambivalence and complexity of the relationship between revolution and religion. By contrast, in the twentieth-century historiography of the French or Russian Revolutions, religion was allowed only a minor role, while socio-economic questions were at the centre of attention. Only the success of revisionist interpretations of the French Revolution (by François Furet, Keith Michael Baker and William Doyle) and post-Soviet readings of the Russian Revolution (by Richard Stites, Nina Tumarkin, Benno Ennker, Aleksandr Etkind, Igor Narskii and others) ended the primacy of the socio-economical point of view.1 However, the new cultural history of 1789 and 1917, which also embraces the history of religion, has tended to isolate these two approaches in the historiography. Social science methods of studying socio-economic and political issues have continued to see the theory and comparison of revolutions as an essential field of research, whereas the cultural-historical approach to revolutions has not adopted the same comparative perspective. My attempt to bring comparative and cultural-historical research closer together is based on a concept that defines revolution as an exchange of legitimations. This move places the legitimising of institutions at the centre of attention, and it was this purpose that was served by the state churches for the Anciens régimes of both France and Russia: in both cases, the unity of faith and statehood played an important role in establishing and stabilising the old order. Consider Bodin’s phrase, ‘un roi, une loi, une foi’, and the parallel official definition that was developed as late as the mid-nineteenth century in Russia. According to the

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Russian version, the Tsarist realm was founded on ‘autocracy, orthodoxy and narodnost (nationhood). In both systems, state and church mutually legitimated each other. The politicisation of the state church meant that both institutions faced questions of legitimacy in case of crisis, whether of the state or the church. Secularisation became a political factor. Thus the change in religious mentality which Michel Vovelle identified in France as beginning in the 1750s and which was reflected in increasing numbers of divorces and of illegitimate children,2 belongs properly to the antecedents of the revolution. The same is true of the corresponding phenomena in Russia from 1890 on, and particularly from the first revolution of 1905.3 The revolutions of 1789 and 1917 can be described in three phases, according to their institutional legitimisation through religion. They were first transformed from the old state church systems to the loyalist revolutionary churches. This followed, respectively, the French clergy’s mandated constitutional vow in 1790, and the foundation of a Soviet-friendly church, or ‘Living Church’, in Russia in 1922. The third phase saw the establishment of de-Christianised revolutionary cults. In France, the cult of the Highest Being was established in 1793–4, and in Russia, the emphatically political Lenin cult was established after 1924. This essay discusses the religious dimension of modern revolutions, which are defined as ‘modern’ in contrast to pre-modern, medieval revolutions – for example, the fifteenth-century Hussite revolution in Bohemia, which occurred within the horizon of Christian eschatological expectations. In modern revolutions, ‘salvation [shifted] into the perspective of a politically feasible and historically achievable future’.4 That is, both the bourgeois and the socialist revolutions promised happiness and freedom from domination on earth. I do not intend to focus on the (much discussed) structural analogies between Christian and secularised systems of symbols. Rather, I want to ask how the religious and ecclesiastical conveyance of this transformation took place: Did the church and religion itself provide an impetus for this upheaval? Was religion a structuralising principle within the revolution? Did the revolutionary passion originate in religion? The radical protagonists of the revolution, the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks, would doubtless have answered this question in the negative, because their self-image was modern, meaning non- or anti-religious. It is nevertheless worthwhile to search for the religious aspects within the revolutions, or for the pre-modern within the modern. Linked to this comparison is the question of whether the long-term non-emancipatory effects of the Russian Revolution, and the emergence of Stalinism, can also be attributed to its specifically religious origin. The discussion will focus on three fields: religious minorities, the former state churches, and religiosity outside the churches.

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Religious Minorities The argument that certain denominations suppressed during the ancien régime supported the revolution from religious motives is highly plausible. If we look at the two largest religious minorities in France and Russia, the Protestants and the Old Believers, we can generally agree with this thesis. In France, the Protestants in both Alsace and Southern France were at first important supporters of the revolution. They owed it the conferral of their civil rights on Christmas Day, 1789.5 For the Russian Old Believers, there is a provable connection between their religious dissent with the orthodox state church and their tendency toward political protest. The industrial area of Ivanovo-Voznesensk, a stronghold of the Old Believers, stands out among other industrial areas because of the political activism of its workers, which had clear religious motivations.6 However the suggested correspondence and connection between religious dissent and statistically visible support of the revolution in both cases is only superficial. If we examine the minorities’ political-religious programme and the coherence of their actions during the revolution, serious differences between them appear. From the religious war in the mid-sixteenth century, the Calvinists had formulated the right of resistance, which influenced John Locke’s political theory and led to the first justification of the revolution in Europe.7 Just as important as the theoretical religious foundation of their religious commitment was the convergence of religious and revolutionary conflicts. For the Calvinists, confessional and modern political conflicts were often inseparable, as in Nîmes in Southern France. There, the revolution sustained the existing discord with Catholics, which is why the Catholic anti-revolutionary oligarchy of Nîmes accused the Calvinists of pursuing their true concerns under the cover of their advocacy of the revolution and their native country. From this point of view, the revolution was nothing more than a religious conflict embellished with political rhetoric. The effects of pre-modern confessional conflicts were obvious.8 The Russian Old Believers headed into the revolution under completely different preconditions. Since the schism from the orthodox state church, they had had much experience of resistance, but they did not foster a politically functional right of resistance. The fact that, unlike the French Protestants, they were not politically present in the revolution was to some extent linked to the lack of coherence in their teachings. As early as the revolution of 1905, fundamental divergences had emerged among them. The Old Believers in the secluded Russian areas (in the North and Siberia) observed a practice of renouncing the world, while Old Believers in the central parts of Russia engaged in political development. They hoped this would help them shape Russia according to their ideas.9 The minorities in France and in Russia did not represent a crucial political potential. The French Revolution was no more a complot protestant than the Russian Revolution was a conspiracy of the Old Believers. The same is true for the Jews in both countries, especially when we consider the Jews as a denomination. But because of their confessional persuasion, the Protestants in France, unlike the

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Old Believers in Russia, were a politically important group within regional and (temporarily) state-wide developments during the early phase of the revolution.

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The Former State Churches More important factors in the relationship between religion and revolution were the state churches and their clergy. The revolutions benefited from the clergy of the state churches to a considerable degree. Although both revolutionary states aimed their anti-clerical policy mainly against the former state churches, their priests became to some extent pillars of the new order. If the priests approved of the revolution, then in both cases it was for similar reasons: the parish priests were separated from the church hierarchy, or episcopate, by insurmountable social barriers. In France, the episcopate came from the aristocracy; in Russia, it came from the monastic clergy. The secular clergy were closer to other classes, whether peasants or bourgeois, than to the church hierarchy. In 1789, as in 1917, then, the clergy of both countries were forced to choose loyalty to either the heads of the church or to the revolution. The following section explores the extent to which the clergy itself participated in the revolution, and which religious attitudes were determining factors in this regard. For the French clergy, the revolution began with the introduction of a civil constitution. In January 1791, every single clergyman was supposed to vow loyalty to the nation and the constitution – as opposed to the hierarchic church leadership, in other words. This vow was to be taken publicly, in front of parishioners. In many parishes, the decision for or against the oath was held as a plebiscite for or against the revolution. In some places people enthusiastically celebrated the oath with bells and parades; in other places, they indignantly refused it or even revolted. For supporters of the oath, the civil constitution was much more than a law to be obeyed. It had a religious dimension. A commonly repeated reason for introducing the civil constitution was that it meant a return of religion to the spirit of Jesus. It seemed to be based on the principles of early Christianity, in that it returned simplicity to the church. This theological transfiguration of the civil constitution nourished a political utopianism in favour of the revolution. Clergymen saw it as a God-given sign, and some priests even regarded the constitution as a ‘second religion’.10 The fact that this popular theology did not come from pure opportunism, but had a background in the history of religion and the church, is substantiated if we look at the geography of the oaths that were sworn or refused. Willingness to take the oath on the constitution was very high in all areas that had a long history of conflicts between the parish clergy and the church hierarchy. These conflicts included the resistance of parish clergy against the episcopate, marked by Jansenism in the first half of the eighteenth century, and the conflict between the church hierarchy and the clergy, which often had economic roots in the decades

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immediately before the revolution. These same parishes later brought forth supporters of the oath. Even before the revolution, these priests had postulated the principle of complete equality for all ranks of the clergy. Now, the priest did not so much see it as his duty to impart God’s grace. Rather, he wanted to be the ‘people’s priest’ and felt responsible for the ‘happiness’ of the nation and the ‘progress’ of religion.11 Such reinterpretations of religion and the priesthood underlay the support of perhaps half of the French clergy for the second stage, or de-Christianisation. This involved establishing revolutionary cults, the cult of reason and the cult of the Highest Being. The same clergymen who had- previously celebrated masses now officiated at the newly dedicated ‘altars of the nation’ as ‘apostles of freedom’, or priests of a new cult. Russian clergy also participated in the revolution. However, the presumptions they brought with them were not as strong as in France. In Russia, the tradition of clerical protest does not go back as far, and was geographically limited largely to St Petersburg and Moscow. The secular clergy had joined forces against some of the church leaders for the first time during the revolution in 1905. However, from a programmatic point of view, there was a striking similarity between the Russian and the French movement of the clergy. In 1905, priests from St Petersburg had drawn up an ‘ideal of freedom from dominion and equality’, and were therefore attacked as ‘clerical Jacobins’ by their opponents within the church.12 In its conflict with the church hierarchy, the Russian clergy outlined a new self-image that shared a remarkable resemblance with the French clergy’s before 1789. If previously monastic values – like asceticism – had been valid for the Russian parish clergy, the pre-revolutionary clerical movement now claimed the role of ‘people’s priests’, whose main functions within the parish were pastoral and educational (rather than liturgical).13 To begin with, the question of loyalty to the revolution did not polarise the Russian clergy. Until the summer of 1917, its support for the revolution was almost universal. During a congress of the clergy in June 1917, the 1,200 participants almost unanimously declared themselves in favour of the revolution: ‘As citizens, we honour the memory of the heroic martyrs for the rights of the nation and bless the names of those who stood in the forefront when the old power was overthrown.’14 Even before October, this avowal had a pronounced social-revolutionary accent. The union of the clergy, established in June 1917, officially proclaimed the slogan, ‘Christianity sides with the workers, not with violence and exploitation.’ Yet at first only a small minority of clergymen, mostly deacons, supported the Bolshevik Party before the October Revolution.15 It was not until 1922 that the Russian clergy were tested as the French clergy had been in 1790. This time, it was not by means of an oath, but by the order that every clergyman had to hand over valuable sacral objects in the church’s possession under the pretext of fighting hunger. The clergy had to choose whom to obey: the canonical regulations that ruled out the desecration of sacral objects, or the party’s demand for help against hunger. This choice led Bolshevik clergy to

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construct a quasi-theological alternative: a magic religion or a Christianity of charity? It divided the Russian clergy into two groups of equal size; from this schism the so-called ‘Living Church’ developed. The new church’s declared purpose was to bring churchgoers closer to socialism. It tried to achieve this by means of a social-emancipatory theology and, symbolically, by using sacral objects made of wood. But it contributed to the Bolshevik culture not least by transporting the antagonism between the classes into the ecclesiastical sphere. As the church of the ‘working’ parish clergy, it saw itself in a battle against the supposedly idle and conspiring monks, who were generally mentioned in the same breath as the Kulaks or other enemies of the working classes. Nevertheless, the revolutionary clergy was not yet involved in the second state – the dechristianisation that had started in 1922. The Living Church remained excluded from the establishment of the Lenin cult, even though it wanted to participate.16 In summary, there were many clergymen within the two state churches of the Ancien régime who defined both their theology and their duties in accordance with the revolution. The French clergy’s higher degree of revolutionary action, even during the stage of de-christianisation, can be explained partly by its coherent tradition of religious-political protest against the church hierarchy. The difference is also due to the Bolsheviks’ deliberate postponement of the religious question. The Bolsheviks had learned from the French Revolution that an internal battle within the church, staged on a local scale, could mobilise clergy and laypeople both for and against the revolution.

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Religiousness Outside the Churches The clergy in France and Russia sought affiliation with the revolution by adapting their theological views and self-image. This suggests that perhaps the opposite tendency also existed: not only the rationalisation (or disenchantment) of religion, but also the de-rationalisation (or enchantment) of the revolution. In my third and final section, I will investigate the field of religiosity not bound to a certain faith. A variety of such ‘vagrant’ religiosity which was widespread during the late ancien régime, in France as in Russia, was to be found in esoteric societies. It was certainly a mere cliché of radical opponents of the revolution that the Freemasons in general were held responsible for the outbreak of the revolution in France as in Russia. Research by Charles Porset and Daniel Ligou, for example, has demonstrated very clearly that the Freemasons in France had no obvious political preferences, and the same has been proven for Russia.17 However, it is still worthwhile to investigate the politicisation of certain teachings. In pre-revolutionary France, this can be observed by using the example of the so-called ‘mesmerism’. Going back to the magical cosmology and teaching of salvation (which will not be examined more closely here) of the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer, mesmerism, as Robert Darnton has pointed out,

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intrigued the educated French more than any other topic in the decade before the revolution. It had ardent followers even at court, including Marie Antoinette. Mesmerism acquired a political dimension through the resistance it met from official institutions, such as the state church and the academy. By insisting that their members believe in God and in the immortal soul and by excluding all materialists, the mesmeric societies directly competed with the church. When the government started to persecute the mesmerists, the radical wing derived a kind of political theory from magic cosmology that not only postulated equality, but also foresaw the coming of a revolution. With the convocation of the estates, mesmerism suddenly disappeared. That there was nevertheless a connection with the revolution, is supported by the political theory of mesmerism, as well as by the continuity of personnel within regional circles of mesmerists and Jacobin clubs.18 It is also clear that before the revolution an esoteric and partly occult religiosity had gained a foothold in most social classes in Russia, and had called the discursive authority of the state church into question. Contemporaries felt compelled to compare the situation with that in France before 1789. A 1902 letter from Baron Rothschild to the Russian ambassador in Paris, Sergei Witte, explicitly referred to mesmerism and affirmed that ‘great events, especially of an internal nature, were everywhere preceded by a bizarre mysticism at the court of the ruler’.19 But esoteric tendencies, specifically mystic anarchism, were also found on the left; indeed, the American historian Bernice Rosenthal has tried to draw a direct line from pre-revolutionary esotericism on both right and left to Stalinism.20 Yet no matter how obvious these analogies seem to be – including the use of certain symbols and rituals, and not least the conspiracy mania – it is not possible to establish a firm connection. Transitions to the revolution in Russia came not from such tendencies but from a wider field of vagrant religiosity. As early as the 1860s, there was a clearly defined social class that combined religiosity and a revolutionary attitude. The group was the Popovichi, or sons of parish priests. According to the rules of their estate, they were supposed to become priests in their turn. However, since 1869, they had begun leaving the seminaries in large numbers without ordination. A group was recruited from this class who did not abandon their connection to religion, but dedicated themselves to the social revolution. In the 1870s, the Popovichi, who were a very small proportion of the total population, made up almost 20 percent of the members of the revolutionary movement.21 The religious impregnation of the Russian revolutionaries not only manifested itself in a social-revolutionary reinterpretation of the expectation of salvation, but also in a distinct asceticism. Through their asceticism, the Popovichi tried to make their social group superior to the bourgeois classes. Asceticism also distinguished them, as was their intention, from the revolutionaries in France. Unlike the Jacobins, according to the Popovich Elpatevskii, the Russian revolutionist was distinguished by his strict personal morals, his complete break with the past and an ascetic way of living.22 Asceticism became a norm for the entire intelligentsia. One of its leading members, Sergei Bulgakov, put it very well when he said that what his class had in common with

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the clergy was a shared ideal: ‘the self-confidence of martyrdom, the violent separation from life, the utopianism, the common detachment from the bourgeois ideal of material self-satisfaction.’23 Besides this secularised role of the clergy, there was another norm for the intelligentsia, which was open to both men and women. A specific martyr conscience had developed since the 1870s, orienting itself to the ‘sacrifice’ of the first rebels against Tsarist power – the Decembrists who were executed, and whose wives were banished, in 1825. As well as the example of the Decembrists, the testimonies given by the terrorists of the 1870s and 1880s evinced a politicised Christianity. Vera Zasulich described the Holy Scriptures as ‘material for sublime fantasies of heroism and martyrdom’, while Vera Figner invoked Jesus Christ to show that self-sacrifice was the highest act of which humans were capable. Not without good reason, the funeral of murdered revolutionaries in 1905 was described as an obsequy for saints.24 These social roles should be taken into account in attempts to explain the tendencies to mystify the revolution, especially after Lenin´s death. They were at least partly established long before the revolution, and were based on the Christian norms of asceticism and martyrdom, as well as on the first signs of a revolutionary cult of the dead that arose before 1917. Members of the intelligentsia, like Anatolij Lunacharskii, Leonid Krasin and Aleksandr Bogdanov, planned the establishment of a Soviet humanistic religion and devoted themselves to so-called bogostroitel´stvo (God-building), a kind of ‘religious atheism’.25 Although in Russia these plans did not lead to the establishment of a cult of the ‘Highest Being’ (as they had in France), this tendency cannot be regarded as marginal within Russian socialism. After Lenin’s death the circle of the Bogostroiteli (God-builders) spread cultic elements within socialism and founded the Lenin cult.26 Despite Stalin’s distance from the God-builders, his speech before the Second Soviet Congress documents the swing towards a mystified socialism. This speech, in which Stalin said that it was not given to everyone to fulfil Lenin’s testament, depicted the Bolshevik party as a kind of elite sect of Lenin’s successors. Yet the importance of vagrant religiosity for the history of Russian socialism rested even more in the widespread expectancy within the circle of the Bogostroiteli of a ‘spiritual revolution’ and their almost magical belief in science. The Bogostroiteli defined science as a ‘realm of miracles’, and from this miraculous realm they expected a re-creation of the world and of a new humankind. The utopianism and maximalism of the Bolsheviks did not arise solely from their religious roots, which can not alone explain the extraordinary nature of the Russian Revolution. Unlike the bourgeois revolutions, the Russian Revolution had to produce the socio-economic conditions for a new society, as Stalin himself admitted in 1926, and this required a much larger vision of utopia. Yet the revolutionary intelligentsia who had left the church, but who in many cases had not forsaken their beliefs, obtained much of their vision from an eclectic religiosity.

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In summary, the following conclusions can be drawn. First, 1789 and 1917 were not only – to quote Tocqueville – ‘political revolutions that proceeded like religious revolutions’. They also arose from religious roots. Second, in France, it was mainly sections of the Catholic secular clergy who helped bring about the revolution, through a long history of conflicts with the church hierarchy, and thereby secularised the clergy. Third, The Russian Revolution followed an analogous but weakened version of this path. Here, a vagrant, ascetic religiosity, already decidedly anti-bourgeois before the revolution, had a long-lasting influence on the revolution. It supplied the Bolsheviks with the motivation and symbolic order to establish a theocracy without God.

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Notes 1. François Furet, La Révolution (Paris: Hachette 1965); William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1980); Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution. Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990); Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 1983); Benno Ennker, Die Anfänge des Leninkults in der Sowjetunion (Cologne: Böhlau, 1997); Stefan Plaggenborg, Revolutionskultur. Menschenbilder und kulturelle Praxis in Sowjetrußland zwischen Oktoberrevolution und Stalinismus (Cologne: Böhlau, 1996); Aleksandr M. Etkind, Chlyst. Sekty, literatura, revoljucija (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 1998); Roy R. Robson, Old Believers in Modern Russia, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996); William B. Husband, Godless Communists: Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia 1917–1932 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000). For a comparison between the revolutions: Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Further: ‘Forum: Comparing Revolutions: On Arno Mayer’s “The Furies”, French Historical Studies 24 (2001): 549–600. Also: JeanClaude Favez, Les révolutions en France et en Russie (Brussels : Bruylant, 1995). 2. Michel Vovelle, La Révolution contre l’église. De la raison à l’être suprême, (Paris: Éd. Complexe, 1988). 3. Sergej Firsov, Pravoslavnaia tserkov‘ i gosudarstvo v poslednee desiatiletie sushchestvovaniia samoderzhaviia v Rossii (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Russkogo Khristianskogo Gumanitarnogo Instituta, 1996). 4. Reinhard Koselleck, ‘Revolution, Rebellion, Aufruhr, Bürgerkrieg’, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 5, ed. by Otto Brunner and Werner Conze and Reinhard Koselleck, (Stuttgart: Klett, 1985): 653–788, esp. 655. 5. Burdette C. Poland, French Protestantism and the French Revolution: A Study in Church and State, Thought and Religion, 1685–1815 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). 6. Dave Pretty, ‘The Saints of the Revolution: Political Activists in 1890s IvanovoVoznesensk and the Path of Most Resistance’, in Slavic Review 54 (1995): 276–304. 7. Quentin Skinner, ‘The Origins of the Calvinist Theory of Revolution’, in Barbara C. Malament (ed.), After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter (Philadelphia:

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University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), pp. 309–30; Dale van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791 (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1996). 8. James N. Hood, ‘Permanence des conflits traditionnels sous la révolution. ‘exemple du Gard’, in Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 24 (1977): 602–40. 9. Roy R. Robson, Old Believers, pp. 127–28. 10. Timothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 69–70. 11. From the strongly adopting writings of the priest Henri Reymond, Les droits des curés, 1776. Quoted from Tackett, Religion, pp. 139f.; Dale van Kley, The Religious Origins. 12. ‘Gruppa Peterburgskikh sviashchennikov, O neotlozhnosti vosstanovleniia kanicheskoi svobody pravoslavnoi tserkvi v Rossii’, in Gruppa Peterburgskikh sviashchennikov, K tserkovnomu soboru (St Petersburg: Merkusev, 1906), p. 108. 13. See for example S. Zagrebin, ‘O dobrom pastyre. Kriticheskaia zametka’, in Tserkovnoobshchestvennaia zhizn’ 1907, no. 37 (14 September, 1907): 1136–39. 14. Quoted from: Boris V. Titlinov, Tserkov‘ vo vremia revoliutsii (St Petersburg: Byloe), 1924, p. 63. 15. Martin Schulze Wessel, Revolution und religiöser Dissens. Der römisch-katholische und russisch-orthodoxe Klerus als Träger religiösen Wandels in den böhmischen Ländern bzw. in Russland 1848–1922 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005). 16. Anatolii Levitin-Krasnov and Vadim Shavrov, Ocherki po istorii russkoi tserkovnoi smuty (Moscow: Krutitskoe patriarshee podvor’e, 1996); Edward Roslof, Red Priests: The Renovationists Response to the Russian Orthodox and Soviet Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Schulze Wessel, Revolution und religiöser Dissens. 17. Daniel Ligou, Franc-maçonnerie et Révolution française. 1789–1799 (Paris: Chiron-Detrad, 1989); Charles Porset, Franc-maçonnerie, Lumières et Révolution (Paris: Éd. Maçonnique de France, 2001); idem, Hiram Sans-Culotte? Franc-maçonnerie, Lumières et Révolution, trente d’études et de recherches (Paris: Champion, 1998); Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (ed.), The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). 18. Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1968). 19. Robert Warth, ‘Before Rasputin: Piety and the Occult at the Court of Nicholas II’, in Historian 47 (1985): 323–37. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, ‘Political Implications of the Early Twentieth-Century Occult Revival’, in idem, The Occult, pp. 379–418, for the quotation see p. 394. 20. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, ‘Introduction’, in idem, The Occult, pp. 1–17. 21. Laurie Manchester, Secular Ascetics: The Collective Mentality of Orthodox Clergymen’s Sons in nineteenth Century Russia (Ann Arbor: Univ. Microfilms International, 1995), p. 594; Laurie Manchester, ‘The Secularisation of the Search for Salvation: The Self-Fashioning of Orthodox Clergymen’s Sons in Late Imperial Russia’, in Slavic Review 57 (1998): 50–76; Reginald E. Zelnik, ‘To the Unaccustomed Eye: Religion and Irreligion in the Experience of St. Petersburg Workers in the 1870s’, in Robert P. Hughes and Irina Paperno (eds), Christianity and the Eastern Slavs, vol. 2, Russian Culture in Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Simon Dixon, ‘Reflections on Modern Russian Martyrdom’, in Diana Wood (ed.), Martyrs and Martyrologies (Oxford et al.: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 389–415. 22. Laurie Manchester, Secular Ascetics, p. 543.

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23. Sergej Bulgakov, ‘Geroizm i podvizhnichestvo’, in idem, Dva grada. Issledovaniia o prirode obshchestvennykh idealov, vol. 2 (Moscow: Mamontov, 1911), pp. 176–222, esp. 180–82, 200. 24. Simon Dixon, ‘Reflections of Modern Russian Martyrdom’, in Diana Wood, Martyrs and Martyrologies, pp. 389–415. In Moscow, the Bolshevik N. E. Baumann, murdered by the Black Hundreds in October 1905, was buried with a spectacular demonstration of the opposition. The procession at his burial was accompanied by many pseudo-orthodox rituals and showed biblical references. In December 1905, a solemn burial of two revolutionaries was held in Baku, which had the slogan ‘Two more victims’. The burial rites depicted the collective immortal future of the proletariat. The festivities were a fusion of the secular festivals of the socialists and the religious ceremonies of the Muslims from Azerbaijan. See: Michael G. Smith, ‘The Russian Revolution as a National Revolution: Tragic Death and Rituals of Remembrance in Muslim Azerbaijan (1907–1920)’, in Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 49 (2000): 363–88, see p. 371. For burial rites in the Bolshevik culture refer to: Richard Stites, ‘The Origins of Soviet Ritual Style: Symbol and Festival in the Russian Revolution’, in Claes Arvidsson (ed.), Symbols of Power (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1987); Catherine Merridale, ‘Death and Memory in Modern Russia’, in History Workshop Journal 42 (1996). 25. Anatolii Lunacharskii and Leonid Krasin and Aleksandr Bogdanov: ‘Ateizm’, in Ocherki po filosofii marksizma. Filosofskii sbornik, (St. Petersburg: Bezobrazov 1908): 148–57. 26. Christopher Read, Revolution and the Russian Intelligentsia, 1900–1912: The Vekhi Debate and Its Intellectual Background (London: Macmillan Press, 1979); Jutta Scherrer, ‘L’intelligentsia russe: sa quête de la vérité religieuse du socialisme’, in Le temps de la réflexion 2 (1981), pp. 113–52; Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams; Nina Tumarkin, ‘Religion, Bolshevism, and the Origins of the Lenin Cult’, in The Russian Review 40 (1981): 35–46; Robert C. Williams, The Other Bolsheviks: Lenin and His Critics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); M. Laskovaja, Bogoiskatel’stvo i bogostroitel’stvo prezhde i teper‘ (Moscow: Moskovskii Rabochii, 1976).

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5 Dictatorships of Unambiguity: Cultural Transfer from Europe to Russia and the Soviet Union, 1861–1953

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Jörg Baberowski In his recently published book ‘Gruzinskii al’bom (‘Georgian album’), the Russian writer Andrej Bitow wrote: ‘It is only in Russia that one can be homesick without leaving the country. A great advantage.’1 He also could have said that one does not need to leave Russia in order to be a stranger, since the one who feels like a stranger is homesick. Nowadays, we do not have to leave Germany or Great Britain to be homesick. Being a stranger has become second nature to us. Ambivalence is an integral part of our lives. The order of the other remains alien, but it is no longer a ‘wrong’ or irrational order that needs to be eliminated. We can live with difference. These kinds of experiences tend to make us forget that the symbols of European modernity were unambiguous. The modern state considered itself to be a gardening state. The gardening state turned Nature into well-ordered parks, subordinated people to a rationally designed order, and counted, defined, classified and named them. The pre-modern state knew little about the subjects it tried to dominate. Mental maps to locate the population were missing, as were measures to translate the state’s knowledge of its subjects into standardised terms. The pre-modern state did not even know why it should know who and what its subjects were. Pre-modern man was the expression of the divinely ordained world. Modern man, however, could act according to the orders that defined him, and could alter them, for he saw himself as their creator. The Enlightenment had freed the subject by objectifying Nature, and by objectifying our own nature, insofar as we are objects to ourselves, therefore separating the subject from the outside world.2 As Zygmunt Bauman put it, ‘We can think of modernity as a time when order – of the world, of the human habit, of the human self, and of the connection between all three – is reflected upon; a matter of thought, of concern, of a practice that is

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aware of itself, conscious of being a conscious practice and wary of the void it would leave were it to halt or merely relent.’3 In other words, order as a vision and as a means could not have been expressed without the idea that the existing world represented nothing but ambivalence, randomness and chaos. It is the dilemma of the modern quest for order that it creates disorder in the course of eliminating it. To resolve such disorder, to overcome ambivalence and to create unambiguity was the raison d’être of the modern state. Therefore, the territory and the land that the subjects lived on and cultivated needed to be surveyed. The state also had to introduce uniform weights and measures, standardise languages and legal systems, and construct cities and settlements. The population was assigned to categories and put into hierarchies of languages, religions and habits.4 Modern categories, however, did not merely reflect the social order that they defined. The categories were notional simplifications of the complex world, and they represented a new world by negating the existing one. The modern state needed to obtain knowledge to transform chaos into order. Public officials described those whose way of life did not fit into this order as backward and barbaric. From this perspective, anything that was important to those leading a different way of life lost its meaning. This process proved successful when people benefited from the state’s need to exercise power, especially when the experiences of a society were not only reflected in strategies of power, but shaped them. What historians have called ‘European modernity’ could be described in this way. However, there are as many ‘modernities’ as cultural contexts that generate them. The ways into modernity are different. They are neither wrong nor detours, but simply different ways. Some have led to catastrophe. In Seeing Like a State, James Scott offers four intertwined causes of the failure of state-guided modernisation projects in non-European contexts:5 1. The attempt to structure Nature and society from above. 2. The impact of a high modernist ideology that trusted in the world’s infinite feasibility, irrespective of people’s everyday ways of life. 3. The means of coercion that an authoritarian state applies, enforcing its idea of a modern world regardless of resistance. 4. The inability of society to defend itself from such demands. Regarding the modernist regimes, one must add that the strategies of social engineering reached their limits in contexts of heterogeneous ethnicity and religion especially, where they not only had to make themselves heard but also had to gain acceptance.6 I try to illustrate this relation by taking the Russian Tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union as an example. To reach the heart of the problem, I will speak about the colonial context. Russian peasants were part of this context.

The Tsarist Empire When Dostoevsky declared in 1881 that it was Russia’s mission to bring Europe to Asia, he formulated a doctrine that conservatives as well as liberals and radical

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socialists could have agreed upon without hesitation.7 The elite of the Tsarist Empire shared a belief in the ‘civilising’ force of the European project, regardless of other ideological differences. Russia’s image of Europe was unambiguous. It consisted of ethnically homogeneous nation-states governed by bureaucracies and standardised bodies of rules and regulations, and defended by armies comprised of citizens. The longing for Europe, however, arose above all from the experience of absence and isolation. Europe was a reality that existed only in the minds of the elite. It was the cultural counterdraft to ‘Russian’ reality. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, Europe (or what might be called Europe) was nothing but a construction that lacked influence beyond the elitist centre of the Tsarist Empire.8 The autocracy and its higher-level officials represented themselves to the public as conquerors who had to defend themselves in a culturally alien environment against competing visions of order. Their wardrobe, language, and court ceremonies, as well as their encounters with foreign diplomats, presented them as European rulers. The enlightened bureaucrats of the early nineteenth century legitimised their reform fantasies by referring to imported symbolic orders. One could describe such behaviour as a yearning to overcome the multiethnic empire, or as longing for an order to which the elite could relate and that corresponded to their conceptions. However, those seeking to homogenise different ways of life must define those who have to be excluded. Such attempts are no more than pure acts of exclusion if they do not take into account the local contexts, which had to be restructured. This holds true for the late Tsarist Empire. The Tsarist bureaucrats turned familiarity into strangeness by applying new measures to common ways of life. The multi-ethnic empire and its ways of indirect and indigenous exercises of power, which differed from place to place, expressed nothing but chaos. Normality turned itself into chaos. Those who did not fit into the new orders were from then on considered strangers, savages and backward people.9 The discourse of the dark, non-enlightened masses that altered the elite’s habit of speaking and self-representation arose from the idea that ‘modern’ was only what corresponded to the imported cultural orders. The peasant subjects and ‘foreign’ elites at the periphery of the Tsarist Empire lost their status as ‘others’, and were now regarded as strangers who could not retain their own orders. Roughly speaking, the enlightened bureaucrats alienated Russia’s population. They burned the bridges that connected them to their subjects. They created exclusiveness and distance between themselves and the remaining empire. The imported cultural orders, however, reassured the elite in their belief that they were isolated and powerless. They could escape from their isolation only by imposing their symbolic order on the population, and by writing themselves into the subjects’ souls. The centralised state reforms served as a means to this end. They were implemented from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards in order to transform the Tsarist Empire into a homogeneous nation-state after the European example. A modern nation-state consisted of a modern bureaucracy with rules and regulations that applied to the whole empire, and of a legal system that was

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based upon the European rule of law and that adjusted the common laws that varied from place to place. The judicial system, local self-administration, schools and compulsory service army turned former serfs into loyal citizens. ‘Grazhdanstvennost’ (civilité) was the magic word that characterised the New Man’s state of mind. The New Man was a creature of the state and of its institutions, which shaped and altered him.10 As a result of this process, the autocratic scenarios of absolute power continued into the late nineteenth century without interruption. As conquerors whose power was legitimised by their European origins, there was no alternative for the Romanovs but to hold on to the absolute power of the autocracy. Richard Wortman has described this situation in Scenarios of Power as follows: ‘The alternative to absolute power was disintegration, anarchy, and international humiliation. The conquest motif expressed the domination of an Imperial elite with foreign origins or associations that elevated them above the subject population, whether Russian or other nationality.’ Even Nicholas II, who considered himself a ‘national’ ruler, ‘saw the nation invested in himself and the numerous symbols of his personal life’.11 Every representation of the autocracy was a representation of absolute power as expressed in the love of the people for the Tsar. To abandon absolute power would have meant refraining from the project to homogenise the multicultural and multi-ethnic empire. The autocratic reforms were not only implemented from above. As the judicial and administration reforms of 1864 demonstrate, these reforms also came from the outside, and showed no respect for the needs of different people and societies of Imperial Russia. The reformers viewed the law and the legal institutions mainly as instruments to bring about a social and cultural change.12 Courts not only administered justice, but educated subjects and peasants to be good citizens. Therefore, the reform of the judicial system had almost no impact from the very beginning, for it neither complied with the enforcement needs of the administration nor articulated the people’s legal consciousness. The reformers constantly referred to ‘Russian’ traditions and to the will of the absolute ruler. However, these imagined and invented ‘traditions’ had nothing to do with the people’s will. The reformed judicial system and the spirit behind it had their origins in the realm of European Enlightenment – a sphere that was inhabited by the reformers, but not by subjects, and that was dominated by belief in the force of reason.13 The spiritus rector of the judicial reforms, Zarudnyi, put it in a nutshell by declaring: ‘A reasonable law can never cause evil’.14 Therefore, the enlightened bureaucrats were only concerned with enacting laws that complied with the notions of reason. Consequently it only took a few months to enact the entire reform programme. As soon as the reformers had convinced the Tsar of the need for reforms, no-one could forestall the implementation of their plans.15 The judicial reform had to accomplish the task of turning the legal consciousness of the reformers into the legal consciousness of all. In other words, the European rule of law as the reformers understood it led to the levelling of the empire and its diverse cultures.16 However, the quest for homogeneity – with the

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aid of the judicial system – remained nothing but an unfulfilled dream. Laws that do not express consensus can be enacted but not enforced. Russian law was imported law that ignored the long-standing traditions and myths that normally legitimise legal traditions. Its notions were mostly directed at judges and officials, not at the population. For most people, the law was either unattainable or incomprehensible. To insist under these circumstances on norms that could not be enacted undermined respect for the law. If the state did not remind its subjects of its claims and demands, they fell into oblivion. Where the government tried to influence and alter peasants’ legal culture by forcing them to act as jurors in courts, it also had no success. Peasant jurors decided cases in criminal procedure in the same manner as they would have done in their villages. 17 In the villages and worker settlements at the outskirts of the big cities, the centralised state reforms left no trace, because here the state and its civil servants were absent. Thus the state lacked the means to transmit the content of reforms. Peasants and workers lived in self-governed, segregated spheres of violence. They came in contact with state-run institutions only when the state collected taxes, recruited soldiers or punished disobedience. The visions of the modern state contradicted the cultural apartheid that characterised late Tsarist Russia. Where elite and peasant met – in the local self-administration, in court or in the army – they regarded one another as representatives of an alien world. Not even the compulsory military service that was set up in 1874 could create a sense of belonging, or a sense that all were citizens of one state. The Russian army reflected and represented the conflicts of the empire by separating peasant soldiers from officers. The army was a big prison, self-governed by its inmates and the peasant soldiers, and guarded by the officers. It did not contribute to refashioning the empire. In fact, the army represented the empire.18 Nevertheless, the centralised state reforms and ordering ambitions were not without consequences. In the end, they made the elites more aware than ever of Russia’s diversity. Especially where the empire revealed its ‘darkest’ side, where ‘foreign’ languages were spoken and ‘strange’ habits existed, where indigenous elites administered justice and exercised power over peasants in local administration, the enlightened bureaucrats considered this not only as different, but as a fundamental threat to their modern concepts of order. The orders based on social estate as they existed in the western and Baltic provinces, and the sharia and nomadic common laws were now labelled anachronistic. They needed to be overcome. Therefore, during the course of the nineteenth century, the centralised state reforms spread out in a concentric circular motion from the centre to the periphery. Along with the administration and the rules and regulations of the state, the Russian language and Russian officials arrived in the periphery. Now only those who spoke Russian and who dedicated themselves to the new orders could serve in local administration, in schools and in courts. Whoever held on to his ‘backward’ way of life and traditions stood outside the legal order and administrative system, and outside of what the Tsar’s officials deemed to be civilisation.19

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Thus, by successively replacing the indigenous elites that served leading functions in the administration, the central power lost its translators. The state failed to translate its modernisation project into the languages and cultures of the periphery, especially in the Islamic regions. Therefore, the indigenous elites and peasants that were confronted with the central state’s vision of order regarded it as cultural tutelage. Senator Reinke from St Petersburg, who was sent off in 1911 to examine the judicial and administration departments in Tiflis, remembered that ‘two mutually exclusive views of the world’ met in the courts. He spoke about a ‘cultural drama’ that the Tsarist modernisation strategy had inflicted upon the Caucasus.20 In other words, the Tsarist version of modernisation caused the separatism it sought to overcome. The quest for modern order turned the indigenous elites into enemies, because the state did not allow them to invest the ‘modernisation’ process with their own meaning. Thus, from the perspectives of the subjects, one would be free and emancipated not by supporting the new order, but by withstanding the central state’s projects. Last but not least, the alienation between centre and periphery resulted from the rise of population statistics carried out by military statisticians, ethnographers and judicial anthropologists, following the European example. The building of a nation-state could succeed only if the state knew who needed to be excluded. Surmounting ethnic segregation therefore required its production. From the beginning of the nineteenth century on, the Tsarist elites described the population of the empire not only in religious categories or in categories of social estate. The empire now consisted of clans, peoples and nations. One could distinguish them by their language, religion, customs and manners. The Tsarist reformers integrated the romantic concept of ‘Kulturnation’ (or ‘ethnic nation’) into a historic teleology that differentiated between ‘old’ and ‘new’, or ‘backward’ and ‘civilised’ peoples. The nomadic tent, for instance, was not only an uncomfortable dwelling but was also older and more primitive than the house. Nomadism and Islam became synonyms for backwardness and fanaticism. Nomads turned into carriers of diseases and epidemics, into criminals and vagabonds. Muslims who maintained ‘backward’ ways of life were deemed fanatics. By contrast Christian peoples turned into the bearers of the new civilisation. The Imperial elite represented the empire as a place of religious and national unambiguity. Members of the Imperial nationstate could only be those who aspired to a higher cultural level and abandoned all the customs of their ancestors.21 The subjects who were confronted with such ethnic ascriptions and stereotypes were forced to react to these ascribed identities. Their actions reinforced the perception of the elite, because the subjects responded by using ethnic categories. As a result, conflicts between the resident population and nomads, or between Jews, Muslims and Christians, were now also conflicts between ‘modern’ and ‘pre-modern’ ways of life, and between the ‘civilised’ and ‘barbaric’ populations. The Petersburg bureaucrats thought these conflicts threatened the empire’s integrity. However, it was the central power’s strategies of ethnicisation that provided the dynamic for the conflicts.22

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The discourse of modern societies and their enemies arose from the colonial context in Europe as well as in Russia. The techniques of ‘modernisation’ through ethnic homogenisation have to be seen within the spectrum of European colonialism. The Tsarist generals, other military leaders and bureaucrats shared a lively interest in the colonial practices of other European powers. For example, they studied the colonial techniques employed by the British in South Africa and India, and those used by the French in Algeria and by the Spanish in Cuba. Many had personally observed the atrocious colonial wars in Algeria, South Africa and Cuba in order to experience how the progressive Western world created unambiguous order. The Russian elites who had viewed the multi-ethnicity of the Tsarist Empire as the embodiment of chaos now learned how to employ colonial techniques on a large scale and how to convert chaos to order. They also better understood what was deemed to be chaotic and alien, and learned to describe more precisely who must be excluded from the new order. Russia’s weakness, it was clear, resulted from its multi-ethnicity. In short, the German empire was successful because it was a nation-state with a culturally homogeneous population. Militarised nations would always defeat multi-ethnic and fragmented societies. Russia must therefore recreate itself as a nation state. ‘An ideal population is a mono-ethnic population, with one language’, as can be read in a textbook published in 1908 that was used in various military schools and authored by the General Staff. The textbook authors concluded that the ethnic composition of the Russian heartland was ‘reliable’ but that the composition of the empire’s peripheries was ‘undesirable’.23 ‘Ethnic cleansing’ was born in Russia, and it was a product of modern thinking about society. Systematic expulsions had already taken place during the wars in the Caucasus in the middle of the nineteenth century, when great numbers of Circassians and Chechens were forced to leave their homes. During the First World War, the idea of ‘ethnic cleansing’ was transported from the periphery into the centre of the empire, when streams of refugees, pogroms and massacres destabilised the western and Caucasus border regions. The commander-in-chief of the north-western front, Bonch-Bruevich, recommended to the General Staff in 1915 that all hostile ethnic groups from the ‘purely Russian provinces’ should be registered and deported. The chief of the General Staff, Janushkevich, responded immediately by ordering retreating troops to destroy the villages of German peasants and deport the Polish and Jewish populations from the border regions into the heartland of Russia. Nothing was to remain of the refugees; all traces of their existence were to be eliminated.24 The conquerors also displaced populations in Central Asia. Such measures were intended to expel the ‘barbaric’ Asians and to replace them with ‘civilised’ and reliable Russian settlers. When in 1916 Kazakh tribes revolted against the local military administration, the regime responded with extermination and systematic expulsion. Minister of War Kuropatkin already held in 1916 that Russians and Kazakhs needed to be separated. His goal was to create regions in Central Asia that were inhabited by homogeneous populations.25

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The impact of ethnic cleansing was without doubt greater than the reforms the Tsarist modernisers implemented. Millions of people lost their homes, streams of refugees shook the country, and the population was separated along ethnic lines. The symbol of Tsarist modernity was the refugee. He represented chaos and anarchy, and he opposed the order that the elites deemed to be European.26

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The Soviet Union The Bolsheviks continued this quest for order. However, their methods and means were somewhat more radical than those of their predecessors. Socialism did not contradict the modernisation project. In fact, socialism was considered its realisation.27 In the minds of the Bolsheviks, socialism was a social order that would annihilate the empire and its ethnic and social estate differences and turn ‘barbaric people’ into civilised Europeans. However, socialism was not only a social order but it also represented modern man’s consciousness. Modern man turned away from superstition and religion, emancipated himself from the prejudices prevailing in his surroundings, freed himself from his old self, and created a new self. A modern society consisted of townspeople who worked in factories and spoke the language of the Bolsheviks, celebrated the Bolsheviks’ festivals, listened to their music and wore their clothes. In short, the new world connected rulers to subjects insofar as the rulers had the same world perspective as their subjects. But the Bolsheviks did not trust exclusively in the power of ‘good’ laws and institutions. They wanted to possess their subjects’ souls; they strove to alter their thoughts, feelings and gestures. To reach their goal, they had to look for different ways to gain a hearing, and use different methods than the Tsarist modernisers.28 In contrast to the Imperial bureaucrats, the Bolsheviks structured the empire’s society along social lines. The class structure helped the Bolsheviks distinguish between friends and enemies.29 The latter were excluded from socialist society. However, the Bolsheviks could only reach the various peasant societies if they spoke their language and were part of their culture. This dilemma could only be solved by restructuring the empire according to religion, language and cultures. In short, the Bolsheviks believed that the civilising mission had to be exercised along national lines. Socialism was accessible only in national form: ‘National in form, socialist in content’, as Stalin described this concept to the Twelfth Party Congress in 1923. Both Stalin and Lenin pointed to European examples: Lenin had declared in 1914 that multiethnic empires were ‘backward’ and nation-states ‘progressive’; Stalin told his critics, who opposed the imitation of European national models at the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, that ‘You cannot go against history’.30 Unlike the Tsarist modernisers, the Bolsheviks spoke not about the empire as a nation-state, but about nations included in the empire and about classes that structured these nations. They adopted nineteenth-century romantic concepts of nations and restructured the Soviet space according to ethnic

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criteria.31 The Bolsheviks drew heavily from ethnographers, anthropologists and linguists, whose theories of the diversity of the empire’s people had not been heard in the ruling circles of Imperial Russia. They now helped to create new knowledge about nations that was used by the Bolsheviks for national separation, and helped to explain the empire’s multi-ethnicity.32 The Soviet Union has been described as a communal apartment, or as a house in which every nation had its own room.33 The Bolsheviks ranked ethnic groups according to their stage of development, differentiating between backward and civilised nations. Peasant nations, nomadic and Islamic nations could be distinguished by lack of class structure, their continuing belief in religion, their pre-modern ways of life and the subordination of women to men. However, although the Bolsheviks left no doubt that they despised such ways of life, they expected that they would dissolve as a result of economic progress, education and the sheer presence of modern life. To overcome ‘uncivilised’ habits and customs, the Bolsheviks privileged ‘backward’ nations. When it came to the distribution of jobs and admission into universities, ‘backward’ nations were favoured. In the Party, state organs, the educational sector and factories, the primacy of local languages was unquestioned. Where this was not the case, institutions had to be ‘nationalised’.34 The ‘indigenisation’ of Bolshevism in the Soviet Union enabled rulers to put their socialist modernisation project into practice. They reached the population because they gave the local elite and peasant communists a share in power that would have been impossible in Tsarist Russia. However, the national project of the Bolshevik modernisers resulted in the recreation of the Soviet Union as a pre-modern empire, with parts of it unfolding according to their own dynamics. Where local elites exercised power by using local languages and symbolic orders that excluded the Bolsheviks and contradicted the Bolsheviks’ order, the indigenisation contributed nothing to the Bolsheviks’ modernisation project. To the Bolsheviks, nation-building in the Soviet Union was a precondition for the cultural homogenisation of the empire. In reality, the socialist modernisation project had the opposite effect. Even in the Slavic heartland of the empire, the indigenisation of the rural administration led to its ‘peasantisation’, meaning it was shaped by peasants’ attitudes toward the world. In short, although the Bolsheviks’ social order was unambiguous, life in the multiethnic empire was ambiguous. Consequently, the Bolsheviks regarded their own creations as a threat.35 In the late 1920s, they tried to influence the lives of their subjects from the outside by introducing new holidays and celebrations, putting on revolutionary festivals and setting up campaigns for cleanliness and hygiene.36 In the Soviet orient, the Bolsheviks introduced dress codes and started unveiling campaigns intended to turn suppressed women into free Soviet human beings. In addition, they imposed bans that criminalised traditional ways of life and common laws, and threatened people who opposed these bans with repression and violence. The Tsarist modernisers excluded from society subjects who dared to oppose their

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visions of order, but the Bolsheviks wanted to exterminate them. The quest for cultural homogenisation of the empire was a fight for a monopoly on interpretation that the Bolsheviks had to win. The arrest and killing of priests and ‘bourgeois’ elites in the Slavonic heartland, of clan chiefs, mullahs and members of illegal national parties in the periphery, and the brutal anti-religious campaigns were attempts to get rid of competing interpretations and of those who brought them to the people. They represented an effort to empty peoples’ consciousness and fill it with new meanings.37 The collective farms (kolkhoz) and the factories served the Bolsheviks’ efforts to subordinate and civilise the population. They enabled rulers to step out of their isolation. Collectivisation and industrialisation have so far only been analysed with respect to their economic impact, not with respect to their civilising function in the context of the Bolsheviks’ modernisation project. Not only were new economic techniques employed in the collective farms and in the factories, but the ‘New Man’ was to be born there. The state could control, subordinate and shape the New Man at will. However, the project was not accomplished. To the contrary, it led to mass terror, as the indigenisation of Bolshevism gave rise to the destructive potential inherent in the culture of the peasant societies. Soviet Man emerged after Stalinism, although in the end, the New Man was nothing but a caricature of a model that the communist elite deemed to be European.38 In the peasant villages and at the periphery of the empire, the concepts of civilisation and nationalisation failed. By criminalizing customs and manners and depicting them as ‘barbaric’, by arresting and killing national elites, the Bolsheviks called into question the nations that were held together by these criminalised traditions. They even lost the support of indigenous elites who did not object to the Bolsheviks’ modernisation project and who could have functioned as translators by conveying the revolutionary message to their people. This happened in Iran and Turkey. It was the Bolsheviks’ dilemma that they talked about cultural homogenisation but insisted on the distinctiveness of ‘others’. It was therefore no surprise that – in response to the Bolshevist cultural revolution – the others defined themselves as ‘the other’. In the non-Russian regions of the empire, resistance to cultural revolution campaigns and to collectivisation and terror occurred as collective resistance, in particular where social conflicts that the Bolsheviks could exploit were absent.39 Therefore, the enemy revealed himself not only in the form of social collectives but also in the form of national collectives. Since the Bolsheviks saw enemies that acted as collectives, the failed cultural homogenisation project led to terror, not only against class enemies but also against enemy nations.40 The terror, of course, contributed nothing to the creation of unambiguity. In fact, it created new enemies and chaos that the rulers then had to eliminate by applying more coercion. The archaic modes of violence as expressed in the terror indicate that, ultimately, more was left of old habits than some would have thought.41 Zygmunt Bauman distinguishes between our world and the world of our fathers by writing that ‘Postmodernity is modernity reconciled to its own impossibility –

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and determined, for better or worse, to live with it. Modern practice continues – now, however, devoid of the objective that once triggered it off.’42 Yet even the Soviet Union changed after Stalin’s death. Soviet leaders learned to live with difference and to see diversity as a chance to stabilise society. But the people of the Soviet Union had to pay a somewhat higher price for the modernisation project than did societies in the Western world.

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Notes 1. A. Bitow, Georgisches Album (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), p. 17; in Russian: Gruzinskii al’bom (Tbilisi: Meransi, 1985). 2. C. Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 3. Z. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 5, 17. 4. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, pp. 7, 18–52. 5. J. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 1–16. 6. I tried to show this in my recently published book on stalinism in Transcaucasia: J. Baberowski, Der Feind ist überall. Stalinismus im Kaukasus (Munich: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 2003). 7. F. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 27 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1984), pp. 36f. 8. J. Baberowski, ‘Auf der Suche nach Eindeutigkeit. Kolonialismus und zivilisatorische Mission im Zarenreich und in der Sowjetunion’, in Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 47 (1999): 482–504. 9. R. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1995, 2000); Y. Slezkine, ‘Naturalists versus Nations: Eighteenth Century Russian Scholars Confront Ethnic Diversity’, in D. Brower and E. Lazzerini (eds), Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 27–57; N. Knight, ‘Ethnicity, Nationality and the Masses: Narodnost’ and Modernity in Imperial Russia’, in D.L. Hoffmann and Y. Kotsonis (eds), Russian Modernity: Knowledge, Politics, Practices (New York, London: St Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 41f. 10. D. Yaroshevsky, ‘Empire and Citizenship’, in Brower and Lazzerini, Russia’s Orient, pp. 58–79; Knight, ‘Ethnicity’; Baberowski, ‘Auf der Suche’, p. 489; J. Baberowski, Autokratie und Justiz. Zum Verhältnis von Rechtsstaatlichkeit und Rückständigkeit im ausgehenden Zarenreich (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1996); D. Saunders, The Ukrainian Impact on Russian Culture (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1985), pp. 237–39. 11. Wortman, Scenarios of Power, vol. 2, pp. 524–28. 12. B. Kistiakovskii, ‘V zashchitu prava’, in Vekhi. Sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsii, (Moscow: Kusnerev, 1909), pp. 125–55. 13. A.F. Koni, Ottsy i deti sudebnoi reformy. K piatidesiatiletiiu sudebnykh ustavov (Moscow: I. D. Sytin, 1914); R. Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 197–234; W. B. Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform. Russia’s Enlightened Bureaucrats 1825–1861 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1982), pp. 102–38.

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14. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv (RGIA), Fond 1149, opis’ 6 (1865), delo 42, line 19. 15. Baberowski, Autokratie, pp. 39–60; F.B. Kaiser, Die russische Justizreform von 1864. Zur Geschichte der russischen Justiz von Katharina II. bis 1917 (Leiden: Brill, 1972), pp. 269–406; I.V. Gessen, Sudebnaia reforma (St Petersburg: Merkusev, 1905), pp. 31–129; V. Nabokov, ‘Raboty po sostavleniiu sudebnykh ustavov. Oshchaia kharakteristika sudebnoi reformy’, in N.V. Davydov and N.N. Polianskii (eds), Sudebnaia reforma (Moscow: Ob’edinenie, 1915), pp. 303–53; I. A. Blinov, ‚Khod sudebnoi reformy’, in Sudebnye ustavy s 20 noiabria 1864 g. za piat’desiat’ let, vol. 1 (St Petersburg, 1914), pp. 102–232. 16. Baberowski, Auf der Suche; Yaroshevsky, ‘Empire and Citizenship’; Wortman, The Development. 17. C. Schmidt, Sozialkontrolle in Moskau. Justiz, Kriminalität und Leibeigenschaft 1649–1785 (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1996), pp. 394–406; Baberowski, ‘Law and the Legal Profession’, in Cambridge History of Imperial Russia (forthcoming). 18. S. Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia, 1856–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 19–50, 243–75; C. Wynn, Workers, Strikes and Pogroms: The Donbass-Dnepr Bend in Late Imperial Russia, 1870–1905 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); H. Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbass: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s–1990s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); 19. Baberowski, Der Feind, pp. 28–83; R. G. Suny, ‘The Empire Strikes Out. Imperial Russia, “National Identity”, and Theories of Empire’, in idem and T. Martin (eds), A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 23–66. 20. RGIA, Fond 1485, opis’ 1, delo 2, line 44. 21. Slezkine, Naturalists versus Nations; Knight, ‘Ethnicity’; J. Baberowski, ‘Nationalismus aus dem Geist der Inferiorität. Autokratische Modernisierung und die Anfänge muslimischer Selbstvergewisserung im östlichen Transkaukasien 1828–1914’, in Geschichte und Gesellschaft 26 (2000): 371–406; J.W. Slocum, ‘Who, and when, were the Inorodtsy? The Evolution of the Category of “Aliens” in Imperial Russia’, in Russian Review 57 (1998): 173–90. 22. See, for example, T. Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863–1914 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois Press, 1996), pp. 92–130, 152–71; A. Kappeler, ‘Mazepintsy, Malorossy, Khokhly: Ukrainians in the Ethnic Hierarchy of the Russian Empire’, in A. Kappeler and Z.E. Kohut (eds), Culture, Nation and Identity: The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter, 1600–1945 (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2003), pp. 162–81; O. Andriewsky, ‘The RussianUkrainian Discourse and the Failure of the “Little Russian Solution”, 1782–1917’, in Kappeler and Kohut, Culture, pp. 182–214; P. R. Weisensel, ‘Russian-Muslim InterEthnic Relations in Russian Turkestan in the Last Years of the Empire’, in J. Morison (ed.), Ethnic and National Issues in Russian and East European History (London: Macmillan Press, 2000), pp. 46–63; Baberowski, ‘Nationalismus’. 23. P. Holquist, ‘To Count, to Extract and to Exterminate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia’, in Suny and Martin, A State of Nations, p. 115; J.A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation. Military Conscription, Total War and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), pp. 9–19; A.A. Brusilov, Moi vospominaniia (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001), pp. 73; V. V.

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25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

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30.

31.

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Shelokhaev, ‘Razrabotka kadetami natsional’nogo voprosa v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny’, in V.L. Mal’kov (ed.), Pervaia mirovaia voina. Prolog XX veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1998), p. 355. On patriotic propaganda during World War I in Russia see: H. Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). B.D. Gal’perina (ed.), Sovet ministrov rossiiskoi imperii v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny. Bumagi A. N. Jachontova. Zapisi zasedanii i perepiska (St. Petersburg: Bulanin, 1999), p. 147; Sanborn, Drafting, pp. 114–22; E. Lohr, ‘The Russian Army and the Jews: Mass Deportations, Hostages, and Violence during World War I’, in Russian Review 60 (2001): 404–419; A.B. Cfasman, ‘Pervaia mirovaia voina i evrei Rossii 1914–1917’, in I.V. Narskii and O. Nikonova (eds), Chelovek i voina. Voina kak iavlenie kul’tury (Moscow: AIRO, 2001), pp. 171–80; P. Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia During World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 15–32, 141–70; V. Dönninghaus, Die Deutschen in der Moskauer Gesellschaft. Symbiose und Konflikte 1494–1941 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2002), pp. 373–516; Baberowski, Der Feind, pp. 84–96. Holquist, ‘To Count’, pp. 121–22; D. Brower, ‘Kyrgyz Nomads and Russian Pioneers: Colonization and Ethnic Conflict in the Turkestan Revolt of 1916’, in Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 44 (1996): 41–53. Gatrell, A Whole Empire, pp. 171–96. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence. D. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity 1917–1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 15–56; S. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 67–88; St Plaggenborg, Revolutionskultur. Menschenbilder und kulturelle Praxis in Sowjetrußland (Cologne: Böhlau, 1996), pp. 73–86; G. Koenen, Utopie der Säuberung. Was war der Kommunismus? (Berlin: Fest, 1998), pp. 125–34; L. Trotskii, Literatura i revoliutsiia (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1924). S. Fitzpatrick, ‘Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia’, in Journal of Modern History 65 (1993), pp. 745–70; G. Alexopoulos, Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926–1936 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); J. Baberowski, Der rote Terror. Die Geschichte des Stalinismus (Munich: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 2004), pp. 114f. Desiatyi s’ezd RKP(B). Mart 1921 goda. Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1963), p. 213; Baberowski, Der Feind, pp. 200f.; T. Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 1–27; Y. Slezkine, ‘The USSR as a Communal Appartment, or how a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism’, in Slavic Review 53 (1994): 414–52. E.D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 51–68; A. Khalid, ‘Nationalizing the Revolution in Central Asia: The Transformation of Jadidism, 1917–1920’, in Suny and Martin, A State of Nations, pp. 145–62; D. Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 33–68; Baberowski, Der Feind, pp. 314–49; Sanborn, Drafting, p. 95; T. Martin, ‘Modernization or Neo-Traditionalism? Ascribed Nationality and Soviet Primordialism’, in S. Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism: New Directions (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 348–67; A. Krylova, ‘Beyond the SpontaneityConsciousness Paradigm: “Class Instinct” as a Promising Category of Historical Analysis’, in Slavic Review 62 (2003), pp. 1–23.

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32. F. Hirsch, ‘The Soviet Union as a Work-in-Progress: Ethnographers and the Category of Nationality in the 1926, 1937, and 1938 Censuses’, in Slavic Review 56 (1997): 251–78; idem, ‘Toward an Empire of Nations: Border-Making and the Formation of Soviet National Identities’, in Russian Review 59 (2000): 201–26; idem, Empire of Nations: Colonial Technologies and the Making of the Soviet Union, 1917–1939 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998). 33. Slezkine, The Soviet Union as a Communal Apartment. 34. Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, pp. 129–46; D. Northrop, ‘Nationalizing Backwardness: Gender, Empire, and Uzbek Identity’, in Suny and Martin, A State of Nations, pp. 191–220; Baberowski, Der Feind, pp. 316–49. 35. Baberowski, Der Feind, pp. 411–552. 36. M. Rolf, ‘Constructing a Soviet Time: Bolshevik Festivals and their Rivals during the First Five-Year Plan: A Study of the Central Black Earth Region’, in Kritika 1 (2000): 447–73. See also his forthcoming book: Das sowjetische Massenfest. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values, pp. 55f., 175–83; R. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Plaggenborg, Revolutionskultur. 37. Northrop, Veiled Empire, pp. 242–313; Baberowski, Der Feind, pp. 555–86; W.B. Husband, ‘Godless Communists’: Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000), pp. 130–58. 38. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values, pp. 175–83; L. Viola, ‘Popular Resistance in the Stalinist 1930s’, in idem (ed.), Contending with Stalinism: Soviet Power and Popular Resistance in the 1930s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 17–43; idem, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 205–33; Baberowski, Der Feind, pp. 691–752. 39. Northrop, Veiled Empire, pp. 209–41; Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, pp. 273–308. 40. T. Martin, ‘The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing’, in Journal of Modern History 70 (1998): 813–61; Weitz, A Century of Genocide, pp. 74–84. 41. This idea is articulated in Baberowski, Der rote Terror, pp. 179–208. 42. Z. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 98.

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6 Europe and the Culture of Borders: Rethinking Borders after 1989

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Karl Schlögel Crossing borders is part of everyday life in Europe, especially in Central Europe. As with any element of everyday life, crossing borders is not usually a subject for specific reflection. Rather, it is a more or less unnoticed, unspectacular practice, at least until the moment when something happens to change the entire situation and context.1 This is the case under certain historical circumstances, when a system of everyday routine has come to an end and we are urged to leave behind what we used to do. In short: we start to reflect about everyday phenomena in a time of great change. This has happened in many ways and in many forms since 1989. Borders which had defined the range of our activities, imagination and desires, the horizon in which we lived for over a generation, collapsed. We were forced or stimulated to find new paths. I am talking, of course, about the crumbling of the horizon that had been defined by the Iron Curtain or the Berlin Wall. For very many people, the opening of the wall was a shocking new experience to which they had to get accustomed. The withering away of lifelong limits, borders and walls changed an entire world. I remember travelling for the first time to Kaliningrad/Königsberg in 1992, coming from the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius via Kaunas to the border city of Sovetsk/Tilsit. Lithuania had just regained its independence; sovereignty was still quite fresh. The border patrols on the Lithuanian side of the river Njemen were still improvised: some concrete blocks across the road forced traffic to slow down, and two small cabins sheltered the newly recruited border guards wearing newly designed national uniforms. These ad hoc checkpoints symbolised the recently regained independence of Lithuania. The guards entered the bus to check passports. For most passengers, showing their passports was a new but fully expected procedure, but there were two women on the bus who did not understand what had happened and started to cry and scream: ‘What! Why should we show a passport? Why do we need a passport in our own country at all? There has never been a border, there has never been a guard or a control. This is unbelievable.’ These two Russian-speaking women on their way home to

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Kaliningradskaya oblast‘ finally had to leave the bus despite their protests. They had not yet realised that the Soviet Union, the empire, had dissolved, and that the old imperial realm or prostranstvo, the vast, endless space of the empire where nations, nationalities, and ethnic groups lived in cohabitation without sovereign states, borders and border patrols, had ceased to exist. To leave the bus and to recognise that borders had recently replaced boundless space was an absolutely new and shocking experience for these women in their fifties. They did not even know what borders were, because they had spent all their lives inside the empire without crossing borders. Now was the moment when they were forced to learn that there are borders, as well as controls and limits that they must recognise and respect. Travelling in Russia, I had always had the feeling that the vast space of the empire is a very ambiguous pleasure, and that many problems in Russia, past and present, are related to the infinity of its vast spaces which are difficult to master. These problems are related to the absence of inner borders and limits, and to the absence of strong and distinct regions which could function as autonomous entities in a Russian version of ‘checks and balances’. Thus, travelling with these women who experienced a boundary for the first time on the bus to Kaliningradskaya oblast‘, I thought that Russia finally had arrived at the point where modern nation-states arrived long ago. Like other modern states, it was discovering the advantages of smaller and structured units and the experience of ‘mastering space’ through internal structures and subdivisions. The falling apart of the imperial space of the Soviet Union produced new spaces with new borders. For many people in the former Soviet Union these new spaces were the realisation of lifelong dreams of national independence and sovereignty; for many others, this was the collapse of the natural frame in which they had spent all their lives. For some, the falling apart of the former empire was a tragedy with new and unexpected restrictions and limitations; for others, it meant the opening of a closed system and the establishment of their own world, where they could decide how to work and how to live.2 Back in the West, my friends could hardly understand my praise of borders. Do we not live in a time when everywhere in Europe frontiers and borders are withering away? Do we not move easily, whenever we want, from Berlin to Copenhagen or Brussels without any controls in trains and airports? Have we not almost forgotten, passing on the autobahn from Aachen to Liège or Lille, that there was a time when we were forced to show our passports for quick controls? Now we do not even know where exactly the border is. We have forgotten about borders and borderlines – at least in some regions of Western Europe, in the member-states of the European Union. The main discourse among enlightened people in Europe is about eliminating borders, transnational communication, the end of the limitations of the nation-state and the proclamation of the freedom of mobility everywhere, all the time. To talk about ‘a culture of borders’, let alone about its advantages in the age of globalisation, seems old-fashioned and obsolete. But if you go to some other places in Europe, you would be happy to pass a border in an ‘orderly and human manner’. There are places where one cannot pass

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– no-go areas, no-go borders, frontiers in the radical meaning of the word – because they are real front lines and mark militarily contested areas. In the last decade one had to cope with no-go areas in Europe, such as the former Yugoslavia and Chechnya. The people of Sarajevo, Pristina or Grozny would have been happy to have ‘normal borders’ without shooting and snipers, but with the possibility of transit without danger for life. Thus, there are some reasons to think about ways and modalities between the extremes – between an endless open space without any limitations on the one hand, and the radical shut-down of borders on the other. There must be a discourse about the chances and possibilities between the universalist idea of Immanuel Kant and the nightmare of Europe in war, between the controlled movement of goods and people and the fortification of Europe. The main idea of the following deliberations is that Europe – or any other country – has to live with and learn to handle its borders. The chapter will make clear that borders and boundaries are a kind of learning process, and that borders and the attitudes towards borders are a good indicator for mastering national and international relations. This idea seems in many ways trite, but this exercise in border studies will provide observations which are not so banal. Everyone entering the field of boundaries realises that there is a huge body of literature on borders, borderlands, boundaries, fronts and frontiers. There has even emerged a kind of academic discipline called ‘Borderland Studies’. It is a fascinating area of interdisciplinary work, where political scientists, anthropologists, historians, geographers and historians of logistics, migration and transport co-operate. The field is rapidly expanding, since the process of globalisation, with the de-territorialising effects of transnational migration, is undermining traditional understandings of borders and boundaries.3 As with any subject of a certain range of complexity, you can look at borders from many different points of view. You can have a purely political perspective, which sees borders as lines marking political entities and organisations, and delineating territories of a given state. Borders can also be a symbol and institution of political sovereignty, and an essential attribute of modern statehood and the modern nation-state.4 But one realises quite easily that the political dimension is only one of many dimensions. You can describe borders in geographical terms, as a part of a certain region or landscape, or even as forming a certain landscape.5 There are more abstract and invisible borders – those between different worlds, unspoken and invisible borders between social classes, and subtle lines of social distinction, inscribed in forms of behaviour or style rather than in physical terms.6 There are borders that can be analysed in political, anthropological, geographical, social, mental, cultural and psychological terms.7 Post-modern borderland studies are based on a long and solid tradition going back to the beginnings of modern geography in the nineteenth century, when Europe, in the process of expansion and colonisation, felt a strong need to map the world. It is not by chance that at the peak of European colonial expansion scholars like Friedrich Ratzel tried to conceptualise the new European experience

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with global space and developed new abstract categories, among them border, borderland, boundaries and frontiers. Ratzel called borders ‘peripheric organs of the state’.8 Frederick Jackson Turner, the author of the seminal text The Significance of the Frontier for Building America, demonstrated that the frontier can be analysed as the hard core of the entire history of a nation in the making.9 Another contemporary of Ratzel and Turner, the German sociologist and cultural historian Georg Simmel, devised a sociology of space and the sociological construction of boundaries.10 The popularity of discourses on boundaries and space at the turn of the century is demonstrated in two other prominent figures: Sir Halford Mackinder and Lord Curzon. The latter was not only a leading politician, later responsible for one of the most contested boundaries in East Central Europe, but also the author of a theoretical essay on ‘Frontiers’.11 Among the fathers of modern thinking and of the post-modern discourse on borders and boundaries we also find the great French tradition, represented by ‘geo-historians’ like Fernand Braudel and his school of the Annales, and Henri Lefebvre’s important contribution to the renewal of spatial thought.12 The newest literature reflects to a high degree the new phenomena of globalisation and deterritorialisation and their critical impact on the classic nation-state.13 This history makes clear that, firstly, borders are a serious topic for research if we understand their complex character as well as their mental and material constructions. The first step will be a kind of ‘phenomenology of borders’ in order to show what they are and why they are of interest for many disciplines and scholars from different fields. After this, I will focus on the German case, which shows some unique features. The next step will deal with the main caesuras – 1918, 1939, 1945, 1989 – in making borderlines and boundaries in twentiethcentury Europe. Last but not least, some comments on the future perspective of borders in an age of globalisation will conclude the chapter. Many definitions exist for terms such as borders, borderlines, borderlands, boundaries, demarcation lines, frontiers and fronts.14 In German, the word Grenze, derived from the Slavic word granica, is very rich in its semantics. It includes the entire history of shaping borders in the West, such as the struggle over the symbolism of the river Rhine as ‘the’ German national river and border. The entire drama of Germany’s relation to nations and states in the East is in a certain way semantically incorporated in the word Ostgrenze. I will come back to this.15

Phenomenology of Borders, Phenomenology of Power Central Europeans are specialists in borders and frontiers. They have spent their lives close to or facing borders. Borders are extraordinarily important places for field studies. Central Europeans have spent hours and days at transit points. Most Central Europeans are by life experience comparativists, because they have been trained to compare: the modes we used to cross Berlin-Friedrichstrasse differed significantly from the passage from Aachen to Liège; the ferry trip from Dover to

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Calais was very different from the trip from Odessa to Istanbul. We had enough time to observe and take notes about the ways we were processed at different borders. We easily understand the difference between traditional borders, well established over centuries, and borders which had been created overnight, entirely ‘artificial’ borders. We know the different stages in emerging borders and frontiers and we understand the difference between the emergence and the withering away of borders, because we have seen the former kind in the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 and the latter in the process of demolition in autumn 1989. We understand that borders can be drawn quite easily by command or by erecting a wall of bricks, but we know at the same time that borders need time to become a respected and accepted part of our lives. We also know that there are borders that will never be accepted. We saw walls built in a hurry and in fresh colours, and we saw walls that became old, grey ruins, a symbol of a doomed regime. We could observe at the Berlin checkpoints the experts of control, young men, who were quite nervous about confiscating a traveller’s book that was on their list of prohibited literature. We made the acquaintance of officials – Beamte – who were full of envy for the people crossing the border because they had passports and could go where they wanted, while the officials had to stay on duty as the unhappy holders of power behind the Wall. They were powerful, and they demonstrated their power by humiliating passengers, looking into every nook and cranny in a little car or forcing people to strip before their eyes in search of hidden documents. To cross the border was a veritable rite of passage. Not ‘Test the West’ but perhaps more like ‘Tested by the East’. We had more than forty years for field studies, that is, for studies in the longue durée. We could study the face of the epoch by studying the border. The border explained to us the various stages of the Cold War; the nuances at the border told us about the state of relations between the superpowers. Crossing borders is a rite of passage sui generis. We have to show who we are. Identity control: the border official compares our faces with the photo in the passport. He proves our identity; in some places he forces us to give our fingerprints, a practice imported to Europe from British India. The patrols are almost omnipotent: they have the right to let you pass or to keep you out. They define the limits of your mobility. They have the right to look into books which you might have in your luggage. They can even define your appearance. In Greece, after the coup d’état of the junta in 1967, young people with long hair were not allowed to enter the country of classical antiquity. In the late 1960s hippies were prohibited from entering Mexico unless they agreed to cut their hair. You had no chance of passing through the Berlin Wall if you were on a list of ‘persons with anti-Soviet-activities’. Borders are sites of inclusion or exclusion. For decades, millions of people were not able to visit their neighbouring countries or cities just because they lived on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. This is not the place to fully describe the multifaceted phenomenon of borders and border crossing. The essential thing is that a border is not just a line, but a field, institution and symbol. Border crossing procedures have something to do with

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the rituals of statehood and sovereignty, and borders reflect quite accurately the nature of power. Borders are in a certain way the periphery, or ‘skin’ of the power in the centre. In totalitarian regimes, they look essentially different from borders of liberal and open societies. The mood is as different as the procedure. All of us know that there are borders, demarcation lines and frontiers where crossing is a risky and even deadly adventure undertaken by many people with courage or in despair. We understand the worth of open societies and open borders. However, these remarks do not exhaust the phenomenology of borders. If we look at contemporary border studies, there is much discussion on ‘gendering’ or ‘sexing’ borders, on borders as constructions and imaginations and so forth. Here it may suffice to say that borders are complex, multidimensional objects of research and analysis. We can touch on only a few issues.

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Borders and Border Discussions in the German Context To the extent that borders are part and parcel of what Benedict Anderson has termed ‘imagined communities’, the discourse on German borders is central to the discourse on German nation-building, the formation of the territory of the German state and German identity.16 One can get a sense of how complicated this is by looking at a map that compares the borders of Germany or, more generally, of German lands over the past thousand years or so. There are enormous changes from the borders of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation up to the present day. Consider these changes: from the time when the limes sorabicus was built to the time when the Berlin Wall was established in approximately the same place; and from the time when the land of the Prussians was conquered and became the ‘Kingdom in Prussia’ to the time following the conferences of Yalta and Potsdam, when the former German provinces of East Prussia and Silesia became part of the Soviet Union and Poland. In the twentieth century alone, Europe saw the imperial grasp of the racist ‘Grossdeutsches Reich’ reach as far as the Volga river and the Caucasus on the one hand, followed by the forced withdrawal to post-war Germany, defined by the demarcation line along the Oder and Neisse rivers. The German case shows the extreme instability and fragility of borders, comparable only to the Polish case, to the forcible shifting of a state and its cultural centres some hundred kilometres westwards. It took until 1990 and the reunification of Germany for the borders provisionally established in Yalta and Potsdam to become officially and permanently recognised by Germany. The German case is relevant to the situation of most Central and East Central European states, where in contrast to the modern nation-states in the West – above all the United Kingdom and France – the triad of nation, state and territory did not coincide, and where ethnic nation, state and territory came to overlap only as the result of a long series of conflicts, wars and other violent interventions and transformations. The backwardness of the modern nation-state in the East, the remnants of the pre-modern imperial order which was not organised along

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ethnic lines, but predominantly along estates and hierarchies of autocratic power, were the main reason that territories had not been ‘homogenised’ and that territorial borders did not coincide with ethnicity, language and culture. Germans, as well as Poles, Magyars and other ethnic groups, lived for generations beyond the borders of the nation-state, if there was a state at all. Relatively late, in the age of nationalism, do we observe the powerful struggle aiming at the unification of all the Germans in one Reich. Not before the nineteenth century do we observe the Pan-Germanic tendency to bring together all German-speaking people from Central and East Central Europe into one state.17 Germans abroad (Auslandsdeutsche or Volksdeutsche, as opposed to Reichsdeutsche) have always been in the very ambiguous and even deplorable situation of being instrumentalised for the expansionist aims and ambitions of the German Empire. Sometimes they took an active part, as a so-called fifth column, interfering in the internal affairs of neighbouring states or even destabilising them.18 The German discourse on borders, at least in the east, was always ambiguous. There was a border of culture, language, people and folk, and there was a political and institutionalised international border. There was an entire system of different types of borders and boundaries: the cultural borderline (Kulturgrenze), the border of cultural soil (Grenze des Kulturbodens), the border of the folk or people’s soil (Grenze des Volksbodens) and the border of the empire (Reichsgrenze). There always was a fair amount of uncertainty in the notion of the ‘German East’ (Deutscher Osten) and ‘Germans in the East’ (Deutsche im Osten), and culture as a fluid medium always had a strong impact on politics. The notion of the border was always unclear and undecided, insofar as ‘border’ assumed that identity was defined by culture, language or ‘folk’ (ethnos). The idea of ‘Germanness’ as essentially defined by culture and language was simultaneously attractive and intimidating because it transcended political and administrative divisions.19 The pan-German idea became especially dangerous as a site of revisionism after the defeat in 1918 and after the secessions and territorial losses of the 1919 Versailles Treaty. This is not the place to discuss the entire complex of Ostgrenze, Ostland or ‘Land Oberost’, the ideology of a specific German orientalism which is still to be reconstructed by scholars. Superb work has already been done on this topic by scholars such as Guntram Herb, who has studied the mental mapping and cartography of the German East.20 Suffice it to say that it required half a century of the Cold War and armed peace to bring all border disputes arising from the collapse of Nazi Germany to a definite end. I have the impression that border or territorial questions in Germany heavily impact public discourse because there is a complex history behind them. That connects these questions to collective sensibilities. Past conflicts over border questions sometimes still resonate deeply in discussions of present-day questions.

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Changing World, Changing Borders: 1918, 1938, 1945, 1989 There are certain periods of turbulence in world history when empires and states come to an end, and when cartographers, statisticians, politicians and diplomats are busy establishing the new order. This is always the case after the collapse of states and empires and at the moment of redrawing and establishing new borders. All great peace conferences had their departments and working groups to elaborate and define the new borders. We all know the picture of the Enlightenment that shows Maria Theresia, Friedrich II, and Catherine the Great dividing Poland. In the twentieth century, the Paris Peace Conferences represent periods of finding, defining, and fighting for new borders. An entirely new world of independent states in Eastern and Central Europe was established on the ruins of the collapsed empires.21 But it was not only a question of diplomacy or of merely negotiating the new borders in Versailles, Sèvres, Trianon and Lausanne. Rather, it took time on the ground, in the contested areas, and in regions that had never been borderlands in the framework of the old empires. It took time, conflicts and clashes to decide and define the new borders. Often these struggles for new borders coincided with social and ethnic struggles, or even with civil war.22 It took years to establish the new borders of the Second Polish Republic. It took years of forced migration, and streams of people and refugees, before the Balkans were ‘pacified’. And it was quite clear that the ‘Fires of Hatred’ cited by Norman Naimark smouldered until the next outburst in order to ‘correct’ the borders. In the age of nationalism, and still more in the age of ethno-nationalism, borders were crucial, and almost all parties to these struggles were ready to pay any price, even the price of self-destruction. The year of Munich, from 1938–9, also saw the beginning of the Second World War. It was not just the continuation of traditional Weimar revisionism, but something new. A new order along the lines of race (or what was defined as such) was imposed by Hitler’s Germany, including new states and new puppet regimes. The borders of this vision of Nazi Europe were as fantastic as they were cruel: cleansing the Reich of everything and everybody who did not fit into the Nazi vision of man, and moving millions all over Europe by many means, including genocide.23 These politics resulted not only in the death of millions of people and in the destruction of European Jewry, but also in the destruction of the entire pre-war world of states. They led to redefined borderlines under the new conditions of the rise of America and Russia as the hegemonic powers in Europe. The result was a new map with states and nations redrawn: the Baltic Republics disappeared into the Soviet Empire, new borders shifted Poland westwards, and almost all states had to make some contributions to the new world order, established in Yalta and Potsdam. But the main outcome was the Great Divide, or the Iron Curtain – the line from Szczecin to Trieste. This order remained in place basically until the end of the Cold War and the breakdown of communism in 1989, which was followed by the end of Soviet hegemony, the fall of the Soviet Empire and the reestablishment of sovereign states, again with new

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borders. In some places this happened by redrawing borders in a humane and orderly way, as between the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In other places, it happened through ethnic cleansing, war and atrocities, as in the former Yugoslavia and in the south of the former Soviet Union. All this is well known. But if we take a closer look we may gain some additional insights. Imagine what the generations born and raised before the First World War experienced in their lifetime. Some, like Vladimir Nabokov or Stefan Zweig, recall in their memoirs what it was like to travel in Europe before the seminal year 1914.24 There was a time without passports and without complications at the borders between the great empires, at least for the members of the elite and the upper class. But Europe in its ‘thirty years’ war’ became a place of mass migration, expulsion and displacement. Millions were forced to leave their homes, their regions, and their countries because they did not fit into the framework of the redrawn nations and nation-states. They were moved across the borders, or into the hinterlands of the empires.25 Some regions, especially the contested areas with their mixed societies and cultures, underwent changes of rule many times. In some places of Europe one could have five or six different citizenships without moving from one’s place of birth. Areas where borders were continually delineated and redrawn include Upper Silesia, East Prussia, the cities of Memel/Klajpeda or Riga, provinces like Galicia, Bukowina or Bessarabia, the borderlands between Slovenia and Austria, the valleys of Transsylvania, parts of Slovakia and the Carpatho-Ukraine, Eastern and Central Europe. The human costs were so enormous that in the end one wonders how the Central European region has survived at all.

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1989, 2001 and Beyond: Borders and Frontiers in Europe With 11 September, there emerged new borderlines and frontiers: transnational, transcontinental and global, and frontlines from downtown Manhattan to Kandahar. It seems to me that despite ethnic strife and clashes of traditional civilisations, the main divide, even in Europe, will be the divide between the metropolitan corridors of the globalised world and the vast provinces beyond these corridors.26 In many ways, this remains the old divide between city and countryside and between metropolis and hinterland. However, the post-modern condition, with unprecedent technologies such as the internet and mobile phones, has sharpened this old divide into a digital gap, or digital divide. A new fragmentation is emerging, not between rich and poor nations, but between rich and poor regions, between rich enclaves and impoverished provinces. There is a growing transnational community in its own very specific networks that has lost contact with the surrounding social environment, but lives in complex interdependence with the global cities in the metropolitan corridor. The standard and style of life of Moscow, Warsaw and Berlin is much more similar than that of these cities and their hinterlands outside the metropolitan corridor, some 80 km

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beyond the urban strip. The metropolitan corridors and areas will become the battlefields of conflicts and ‘clashes of civilisations’ which are quite different from those Samuel Huntington outlined a decade ago. The provinces are going to attack the centres of modern civilisation – the hearts and routines on which modern, Western, open civilisation has been based. It was the provinces that seized the musical theatre Nord-Ost in Moscow and blasted the British Embassy in Istanbul. It is only a matter of time before other European cities will be targeted. The new divide in Europe may not be as sharp as in North America, Russia or Africa, given the high standard of life outside the big cities, but even in middle-class Europe the fragmentation will increase. That means that new borders, new frontiers and new border zones will emerge. We must make ourselves aware of this continued undermining and destruction of the nationstate, and the emergence and creation of new forms of transnational organisations, institutions and Lebenswelten. The defence of borders in the traditional sense will be only a hopeless reaction against the tide of new trends, against flows of people, money, goods and ideas. Finding ways of handling, negotiating and controlling the spontaneous, erratic and chaotic process which is taking place is the only way of mastering the transition to the new epoch. This is the reason why, in my view, we have to promote not the pointless defence of fortress Europe, but the lessons learned from Europe’s historical experience with borders. We cannot avoid the new situation, but we can learn to manage it.

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Notes 1. On everyday practices and routines cf. Michel de Certeau, Die Kunst des Handelns (Berlin: Merve, 1988); Allan Pred, Place, Practice and Structure: Social and Spatial Transformation in Southern Sweden, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, Oxford: Polity Press, 1986). 2. On Russia and Russian space: Vladimir Kagganskii, Kul’turnyi landshaft i sovetskoe obitaemoe prostranstvo (Moscow: NLO, 2001); John P. LeDonne, The Russian Empire and the World 1700–1917: The Geopolitics of Expansion and Containment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy, The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003); Mark Bassin, ‘Imperialer Raum/Nationaler Raum. Sibirien auf der kognitiven Landkarte Russlands im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Geschichte und Gesellschaft 3 (2002): 378–403. 3. For an overview of borderland studies see R. Strassoldo (ed.), Boundaries and Regions (Trieste: Edizioni, 1973); F.D. Almaraz Jr., ‘The Status of Borderlands Studies: History’, in The Social Science Journal 13, no.1 (1976): 9–18. 4. On borders between sovereign states see: Peter J. Taylor, Political Geography: WorldEconomy, Nation-State and Locality (Essex: Longman, 1985); the classic in defining borders and boundaries: Friedrich Ratzel, Politische Geographie oder die Geographie der Staaten, des Verkehres und des Krieges (Leipzig, et al.: Oldenbourg, 1897). 5. On the differences between borders, borderlines, boundaries, frontiers see John Agnew, Making Political Geography (London: Arnold, 2002).

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6. Pierre Bourdieu, Die feinen Unterschiede. Kritik der gesellschaftlichen Urteilskraft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003). A study on making a new fortified border, dividing Israel/Palestine is: Stefano Boeri, ‘Multiplicity, Border-Syndrome: Notes for a Research program’, in Klaus Biesenbach (ed.), Territories: Islands, Camps and other States of Utopia, Catalogue of the Exhibition in Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin June 1-August 25, 2003 (Berlin: Institute for Contemporary Art, 2003), pp. 52–64. On the effects of ethnic strive and conflict on creating new borders see: David Campbell, ‘Apartheid Cartography: the Political Anthropology and Spatial Effects of International Diplomacy in Bosnia’, in Territories, pp. 213–29; Brian Jarvis, Postmodern Cartographies: The Geographical Imagination in Contemporary American Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1998); David M. Smith, Moral Geographies: Ethics in a World of Difference (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). 7. On boundaries and frontiers: M. Anderson, Frontiers: Territory and State Formation in the Modern World (Oxford: Polity, 1996); M. Anderson and E. Bort (eds), Boundaries and Identites: The Eastern Frontier of the European Union (Edinburgh: International Social Sciences Institute, University of Edinburgh, 1996). 8. Friedrich Ratzel, Politische Geographie. 9. Frederick J. Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1920). 10. Georg Simmel, ‚Brücke und Tür’, in idem, Das Individuum und die Freiheit. Essais (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 1984), pp. 7–11; idem, ‘Soziologie des Raumes’, in idem, Schriften zur Soziologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), pp. 221–42. 11. Lord N.S. Curzon, Frontiers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1908), quoted after Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of identity, Nation and State (Oxford, New York: Berg, 1999), 43. 12. Fernand Braudel, ‘Géohistoire und geographischer Determinismus’, in M. Middell and S. Sammler (ed.), Alles Gewordene hat Geschichte. Die Schule der Annales in ihren Texten (Leipzig: Reclam, 1994); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991). 13. Donnan and Wilson, Borders. 14. See for definitions: Taylor, Political Geogaphy; S. Gupta (ed.), Disrupted Borders: An Intervention in Definitions of Boundaries (London: River Oram Press, 1993). 15. In detail: Alexander Demandt (ed.), Deutschlands Grenzen in der Geschichte (Munich: Beck, 1991). 16. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Growth and Spread of Nationalism (New York, London: Verso [reprinted], 1991); Roger Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Taylor, Political Geography. 17. On the noncoincidence of language, state, people in Germany and the function of the Pan-movements see Hannah Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft (Munich, Zurich: Piper, 1986), pp. 422–70. 18. On the cultural and political role of Germans in Eastern and East Central Europe see: Hartmut Boockmann (ed.), Deutsche Geschichte im Osten Europas, 8 vols (Berlin: Siedler, 1992). 19. I have tried to reopen the discourse on the meaning of ‘Deutscher Osten’ in Karl Schlögel, ‘Namen, die man wieder nennt’, in idem, Promenade in Jalta und andere Städtebilder (Munich: Hanser, 2001), pp. 262–71. 20. Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);

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21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

Guntram H. Herb, Under the map of Germany: Nationalism and propaganda 1918–1945 (London, New York: Routledge, 1997). The image and mental map of Poland in the West, is analysed in Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). Aviel Roshwald, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914–1923 (London, New York: Routledge, 2001). On the Nazi Plans for Eastern Europe see Mechthild Rössler and Sabine Schleiermacher (eds), Der ‘Generalplan Ost’. Hauptlinien der nationalsozialistischen Planungs- und Vernichtungspolitik (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993). On the contribution of German Geopolitik see: Mark Bassin, ‘Race Contra Space: The Conflict Between German Geopolitik and National Socialism’, in Political Geography Quarterly 6 (1987): 115–34. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, memory: An Autobiography Revisited (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967); Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von gestern. Erinnerungen eines Europäers (Düsseldorf: Artemis & Winkler, 2002). On forced migration see Eugene M. Kulischer, Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes 1917–1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948); Joseph B. Schechtman, European Population Transfers 1939–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946); idem, Postwar Population Transfers in Europe 1945–1955 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962); Klaus J. Bade, Europa in Bewegung. Migration vom späten 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2000); Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997). The concept of metropolitan corridors is borrowed from US-american historian John R. Stilgoe, Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1983). On globalisation and the consequences for the nation-state see Michael Peter Smith, Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); Charles S. Maier, ‘Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era’, in American Historical Review 105 (2000): 807–31; J. Borneman, Subversions of International Order: Studies in the Political Anthropology of Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).

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26.

Karl Schlögel

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7 Civil Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Comparison and Beyond1

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Jürgen Kocka The concept ‘civil society’ is widely used, in the social sciences and history as well as in public debate. But its meanings vary. It has been compared with a pudding that is impossible to nail down, and to a gas that is everywhere. Why bother with it? My interest in this concept has several roots. I have studied the history of the middle classes, the bourgeoisie and bourgeois culture for a long time. If one does this in German, the intellectual genealogy is easy to see: Bürgertum, bürgerliche Gesellschaft, Bürgergesellschaft or Zivilgesellschaft.2 However, I also work in institutional academic contexts which require concepts and related research interests that can connect historians and social scientists. ‘Civil society’ seems to be such a concept.3 In addition, I am politically interested in the promises of civil society, especially now, when the redistribution of tasks between state, society and market is urgent on the political and intellectual agenda. Finally, I think that the concept can be used for intra-European comparison. It can bring the history of Western and Eastern Europe together. It is one of those ‘Historical Concepts Between Western and Eastern Europe’ that this volume addresses.4

The Concept of Civil Society: Its History and Definition The concept has a long history. For centuries, it has been among the central concepts of European political thought. In the medieval and early modern period, up to at least the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Aristotelian concept of politiki koinonia, or polis, survived, and was translated as societas civilis, civil society, société civile and bürgerliche Gesellschaft (by Leibniz, for example). Notwithstanding its polymorphous use, three aspects of its meaning stayed relatively constant.

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First, societas civilis was seen as distinct from and transcendent to the sphere of the household (i.e., the sphere of work and reproduction). Second, there was no clear delineation between civil society and state. On the contrary, one spoke of societas civilis sive res publica; that is, of a community not yet internally differentiated by the distinction between society and state. Third, civil society usually had something to do with the ways in which houses, families, estates and individuals lived or should live together. Its meaning transcended the strictly particular. It related to common things: the common well-being, the commonwealth, general aims, virtues and vices and res publica, or ‘Politik’ in an emphatic sense. A redefinition occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Modern meanings emerged, as was the case with so many concepts central to our social and political language. Increasingly, civil society was understood as a process of civilising or civilisation, defined by a new type of difference: difference from nature, or difference from barbarism. This was intertwined with the emergence of new kinds of European self-understanding that were the opposite of those in non-European parts of the world, especially the Orient. These eighteenth-century discourses understood and defined ‘civilising’ and ‘civil society’ in various ways, related to different semantic fields. For example, in the writings of David Hume, Adam Smith and the French Encyclopédistes, these concepts had much to do with industry, commerce and property. Work, or travail, became a centrepiece in the social order that these authors hoped to promote, and which they called civil society. In the writings of Moses Mendelssohn, one finds beautiful remarks on civilising through education and culture, on Bildung of the intellect and of the senses. Taste, sociability and savoir-vivre played a role. In the writings of a third group of authors, Zivilisierung was related to overcoming particularistic restrictions, and to emancipation from the limits of birth, estate, business or even gender. Take Immanuel Kant as an example. For him, the concept bürgerliche Gesellschaft opened itself up towards the idea of mankind, towards ‘une société qui embrasse tous les hommes’. In all cases, civil society was seen as a contrast to violence, barbarism and chaos. Step by step, the normative dimension of the concept became dominant. ‘Civil society’ became a critical concept, critical of tradition and critical of the status quo. It was oriented towards somewhat utopian aims, a Bewegungsbegriff (Reinhart Koselleck) with an anti-traditional, anti-corporatist, modern flavour that was critical of the past and oriented towards the future. It stood for a project that was not yet fulfilled and that was to be approached in the future. At the same time, primarily in the eighteenth century, the concept was accentuated by separating civil society from the state, or even by posing it against the state. This happened primarily in the languages of countries with absolutist governments, that is, on the European continent, and less so in England. ‘Bürgerliche Gesellschaft’, wrote Kant, needs ‘Mitgenossenschaft’. One can freely translate: civil society needs the self-organised and voluntary cooperation of its members. According to this view, the Vereine, or voluntary associations, make a

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civil society, which cannot be founded on dominance and obedience (Oberherrschaft and Unterwürfigkeit), but only on self-organisation. Thus, ‘civil society’ became a polemical concept with an anti-absolutist thrust and with an orientation towards the autonomous citizen of the future, into which the dependent subject of the present would hopefully develop. As mentioned before, this anti-statist element of the concept was less visible in English, but more present in German and French. Even there, civil society’s relation to the state transcended a mere antithesis. On the one hand, changing government by due process of law, public opinion and parliamentary representation was a central aim of the programme and the liberal vision of which civil society had become a symbolic core. Civil society was defined by its relation to the public, and ultimately by its relation to government and the state. It implied citizen access to the political sphere, at least as an aim. On the other hand, it was clear that the kind of civil society it was hoped to achieve would need the support of law, representative institutions, the state – a more liberal state, of course, but still a state. In the nineteenth century, this eighteenth-century concept was again redefined. It was influenced by the spread of capitalism and early industrialisation, and by new forms of inequality and emerging class structures. It was particularly redefined in German, as in the works of Hegel and Marx. Now, the definition of bürgerliche Gesellschaft became even more clearly distinguished from Staat. It became understood as a system of needs, labour and markets, of negotiation and contract, and of particular interests, conflicts and contradictions. It was conceived more as a ‘middle class (bürgerliche) society’ of the bourgeoisie than as a ‘civil society’ made up of citizens (Bürger). In German, the terms Zivilgesellschaft and bürgerliche Gesellschaft had been used synonymously and with positive connotations. Now the term Zivilgesellschaft was pushed aside by the term bürgerliche Gesellschaft, which was increasingly used as a critical and polemical concept, both within and outside Marxist traditions, until very recently. The traditional, positive meaning of ‘civil society’ or ‘société civile’ was retained longer in English than in French, as in the work of Tocqueville. On the whole, however, the term ‘civil society’ receded into the background in other languages as well, playing only a marginal role until roughly 1980, though with some exceptions, chief among them Antonio Gramsci. However, in the late twentieth century the term ‘civil society’ has experienced a brilliant comeback. In the 1970s and 1980s, it became an important term in the anti-dictatorial critique, as expressed in East Central Europe (in Prague, Warsaw and Budapest). Here, dissidents such as Vaclav Havel and Bronislav Geremek and intellectuals like Iván Szelényi and György Konrád used the term in their respective languages to speak out against one-party dictatorship, Soviet hegemony, communism and totalitarianism and in favour of freedom, pluralism and social autonomy. It is useful to understand how this semantic revival of civil society took place in some quarters of the East Central European left in the 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps Gramsci’s use of the term as a revisionist tool played a role. There seems to

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have been some exchange among academic visitors from the West and intellectuals in the East Central Europeans cities. This exchange needs to be studied. There may have been other roots in Latin American and South African movements on the Left. From the early 1990s onwards, the term quickly spread. Now it is used worldwide, in various political climates, among political centrists, and on the Left by liberals, communitarians and anti-globalisation activists, and by authors such as John Keane, Charles Taylor and Jürgen Habermas – always with a positive connotation. When the term was translated back into German, Zivilgesellschaft was used to avoid the critical, polemical thrust of ‘bourgeois’ that was associated with bürgerliche Gesellschaft.5 ‘Civil society’ had become attractive again in the victorious struggles against dictatorships that represented the clearest negation of civil society in the twentieth century. However, in the non-dictatorial Western world as well, the term fits then and now into the general political and intellectual climate, at least in three respects. First, it emphasises social self-organisation as well as individual responsibility, reflecting the widespread scepticism towards being spoonfed by the state. Many believe that the interventionist state has reached its limits by overregulating and becoming overburdened. Second, ‘civil society’, as demonstrated by the use of the phrase by present-day anti-globalisation movements, promises an alternative to the unbridled capitalism that has been developing so strongly worldwide. The term thus reflects a new kind of capitalism critique, since the logic of civil society, as determined by public discourse, conflict and agreement, promises solutions different from those of the logic of the market, which is based on competition, exchange and the maximisation of individual benefits. Thirdly, civic involvement, or efforts to achieve common goals, are central to civil society, no matter how differently those goals may be defined. In the greatly individualised and partly fragmented societies of the late- and post-industrial periods, ‘civil society’ promises an answer to the pressing question of what holds our societies together at all. In short, there is a concern that the state and governments are overreaching themselves. There is the fear that markets are becoming over-dominant and allpervasive. There is worry about a possible over-individualisation of our social and cultural fabric, with unpleasant political consequences. These three concerns define the present mental situation and explain why the concept ‘civil society’ is so attractive today, at least in large parts of Europe. It should be clear that the concept’s opponents have changed over time, from uncivilised nature and barbarism through violence and war to the over-dominant state, capitalist dominance and fragmentation. With changing opponents, the meanings change too, at least slightly. The concept is hard to stabilise. Still, if one understands the reasons for its appeal, the contexts out of which it emerged, and the semantic associations that accompany it, one can offer a working definition. I would like to distinguish three dimensions in the meaning of ‘civil society’: first, civil society as a type of social action; second, civil society as a sphere or space

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between economy, state and the private sphere; third, civil society as the core of a project not yet fulfilled. First, as a specific type of social action, ‘civil society’ is characterised by orientation towards conflict, discourse and agreement in public, and by an emphasis on individual independence and collective self-organisation. It also promotes non-violence and the recognition of plurality and difference as legitimate, and is oriented towards general concerns, reaching beyond strictly particularistic interests and experiences. However, different actors always have different opinions of what constitutes the public good. Second, as a social sphere or social space, ‘civil society’ encompasses a multitude of initiatives, networks, associations and movements that are related to but distinguished from government (or the state), business (or the market) and the private sphere. It is a social space in which civil society (understood as a specific type of social action) dominates. Third, as a core element of a project not yet fulfilled, ‘civil society’ preserves part of its utopian thrust, and is defined by its Enlightenment heritage. This is where the descriptive-analytical concept becomes most clearly normative, and not everyone agrees. Definition is always partly a matter of decision, and there are many different shades of opinion. Some authors abstain from a clear definition and stress instead the historical fluidity, openness and ‘paradoxes’ of civil society.6 However, this approach is not intellectually satisfactory, and opens the door both to misunderstandings and to a certain degree of essayistic arbitrariness. Other authors, like John Keane, tend to see large corporations and other economic institutions as major parts or protagonists of civil society.7 In contrast, I have stressed the difference between the logic of the market and the logic of civil society. It is interesting to note that Adam Ferguson had already differentiated between commercial relations (in the market) and communicative relations (in civil society).8 I shall offer a slight modification of this analytical distinction later. Some scholars think that we should see family as part of civil society.9 I will also return to this point later. Finally, some define civil society in a more formal way, by seeing non-state and non-profit voluntary associations with or without political ambitions and functions as the defining element of civil society, and not more. This allows the Mafia, the Ku Klux Klan, the Italian fascist movements of 1920 and the Nazi Storm Troopers of 1930 to be seen as parts of civil society. For instance, along this line one can argue that it was the strength of civil society in Weimar Germany that contributed to its democratic instability.10 This stresses the ‘dark sides’ of civil society, like egotism, fragmentation and possible violence. In contrast, I think we should take seriously the long semantic and intellectual tradition that has associated civil society with civility, non-violence and the recognition of difference as legitimate. Seen and defined this way, violent, violence-prone, totalitarian and xenophobic hate groups cannot be regarded as elements of civil society. Rather, they violate central features of civil society while

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they fulfil and instrumentalise others. However, it should be admitted that in many cases it is hard to draw the line of distinction.

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Civil Society, Market, Family and Nation State I have distinguished the logic of civil society from the logic of the market. A modification must be added. There is not only tension but also affinity between the market economy and civil society. Clearly, the emergence and success of market economies are facilitated through structures of civil society. This is because a market economy presupposes a certain degree of social cohesion; it requires some levels of trust, and civil society offers these resources. Conversely, civil society needs the market. If the decentralisation of economic decisions and economic power that is typical for functioning market economies is lacking, the prognosis for civil society is not good. In centrally administered economies, civil society, in the long run, will not thrive, as exemplified by the social systems that existed in the eastern part of Europe until 1990. In a cross-national historical comparison, many parallels can be observed between the implementation of a market economy order and the intensification of civil society. This parallelism is illustrated by nineteenth-century towns and cities, where businessmen and their families were among the primary participants in civil society. They were active in local self-government, took part in social and cultural initiatives, and were prominent as donors and patrons supporting philanthropy, the arts and scholarship. Their economic independence enabled them to participate actively in civil society, while their involvement in the civic affairs of their cities (and beyond) might improve their business opportunities. In Germany, business-supported donations, foundations and other forms of civic engagement reached their maximum level in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They declined in the following decades, but have picked up again recently. Not every form of patronage by wealthy individuals and firms should be celebrated as civil engagement. Business people and their enterprises act, and must act, primarily according to the logic of the market. However, under certain conditions, this is compatible with a strong role in civil society, and both dimensions may be mutually reinforcing.11 On the other hand, there are variants of capitalism, types of capitalists and forms of capitalist entrepreneurship that do not lend themselves at all to civil social engagement and that erode social cohesion instead of strengthening it. This negative relationship between entrepreneurship and civil society is found primarily in forms of earlier and present-day enterprises that are especially mobile, spatially flexible and unsettled. Some forms of capitalism are parasitic with respect to civil society. Globalisation tends to loosen the ties between capitalism and traditional civil society. At the same time, it helps bring about new expressions of civil society. Consider the role of transnational corporations cooperating with international non-

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government organisations and acting in regions with weak or failing governments, sometimes with the help of the World Bank or International Monetary Fund.12 Analytically, there is a clear distinction between civil society and the private sphere. To the extent that the family is a private institution, it does not belong to civil society. However, recent research has shown for the middle classes what had always applied in another way for families of peasants and workers: namely, that the nineteenth and early twentieth-century family was not merely a private matter but also had public aspects. To that end, Gunilla Budde recently aimed to depict the middle-class family of the nineteenth century as a central institution of civil society. Even those who do not wish to go that far will not deny that the lives, particularly of larger middle-class families, extended far into civil society, enabling and strengthening it. Consider the diverse educational achievements of those families, aiming towards self-reliance and civic involvement, and of the semipublic living spaces of the middle-class families, especially in earlier times, where non-family members were invited into the home. Socialising was practised and civic representation took place. Consider also the civic engagement of middleclass women, especially in cultural, charitable and social fields, who at the same time maintained their roles in the home and did not separate from the family.13 At least in Western and Central Europe, family and kinship structures supplied important conditions for the rise of civil society in yet another way. Here, family bonds did not totally absorb the loyalty and involvement of their members to a degree that was so absolute and without gaps as to leave no room for civic engagement, or for a cause beyond family, kinship and clan. Not every kind of family and kinship has been equally suited for civil society. This is shown by comparing Western and Central Europe with the ethnic kinship and clan groups in South-eastern and Southern Europe. It seems that families with a medium degree of cohesion – which include but do not absorb individual actors – are most supportive of the rise of civil society. However, both weak and fragmenting families, and families with absolute claims for members’ loyalties, are not. But there does not seem to be much research, in historical terms, on the relationship between civil society and the family.14 It is sometimes claimed that civil society and the nation-state are twins, inextricably linked. But the matter is more complex, as I attempt to show in the following observations on inter-spatial comparison and on inter-temporal comparison. When comparing European countries in the nineteenth century, we can observe civil society activities in clubs, theatre groups, citizens’ movements and other social organisations, and movements that developed within the framework of established territorial sovereignties and nation-states, particularly in Western Europe. But in other cases, such activities did not develop within established nation-states. Sometimes they were even directed against the established state structure and developed in opposition to them, especially in East Central and South-eastern Europe. Until the founding of nation-states around 1870, this also

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applied to Germany and Italy. Here, politically committed athletes, singers and scientists built up national networks long before the nation-state was formed. In Bohemia, Poland, Hungary and the Balkans, educational, cultural, and language-oriented initiatives, clubs, reading societies, museums and opera associations became very numerous and energetic in the course of the nineteenth century. They were particularly energetic because of their opposition to the system of foreign imperial rule as practiced by the Habsburg, Tsarist and Ottoman Empires. In those countries, a civil society emerged partly against the existing state structure. It was strongly tied to the national cause, and deeply structured by ethnic criteria. As a consequence, it frequently displayed antipluralist features that contradicted the very idea of civil society. At the same time, these were initiatives, networks, associations and movements with tremendous energy and power due to the fact that they partly performed functions which, further west, were accomplished by authorities of the national state.15 The relation between civil society and nation-state differed widely in nineteenth-century Europe. If one aims at a typology of different variants of civil society in nineteenth-century Europe, the relation between civil society and nation-state may well be the most important distinguishing factor.16 If we compare over time and allow ourselves a bird’s-eye view, we should say first that there were early transnational forms of civil society before the classic age of the nation-state. Think of the international network of Freemasonry that existed in the eighteenth century. Consider the networks and correspondence between intellectuals and educated persons all over Europe during the Enlightenment. Think of the well-developed business of translating basic texts – like Ferguson’s History of Civil Society – and of the network of academies and academics that, around 1800, extended from London to St Petersburg and from Rome to Uppsala.17 In the nineteenth century, something like a nationalisation of civil society took place. These inter- and transnational networks did not weaken or crumble, at least not before the First World War. However, the huge waves of new civil society activities and organisations – voluntary associations, foundations, citizens’ initiatives and movements – which were a product of the nineteenth century, were mostly local, regional and national. They were central parts of the social fabric and culture that were increasingly framed and identified in national terms. The less elitist and the more widespread civil society became, the more likely it was to develop a national flavour as well as a local or regional one. This had much to do with the stuff out of which civil society is made, including communication, language, and some kind of loyalty and trust.18 The recent decades of European Union related Europeanisation and globalisation have witnessed trends towards a transnational, European, and sometimes even global civil society. This movement is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, it warrants two brief remarks. First, this recent wave of transnationalisation has its predecessors. There were civil social movements, networks, and other non-government organisations (NGOs) that extended beyond national borders in the ‘long nineteenth century’. These included the

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abolitionist movement, the struggle for women’s suffrage, the international labour movements, campaigns against prostitution or alcoholism and the advocacy of disarmament and peace. Transnational networks became particularly frequent between the 1880s and the First World War, for example amongst academics, scientists and professionals.19 The era of wars and dictatorships interrupted and distorted this wave of transnationalisation, which had largely occurred from the bottom up. The twentieth-century dictatorships turned out to be enemies of civil society, but at the same time they offered new and often dangerous opportunities for civil society endeavours to re-emerge underground and under semi-public conditions. The 1970s and 1980s in East Central Europe provide the most famous example. To freely develop and endure, civil society needs a functioning public space, and the protection of law and constitutional government with representative institutions and democratic control. On the other hand, it is worth noting that the programme of civil society started to emerge under absolutist rule and under very undemocratic conditions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The renaissance of the concept took place in the late decades of communist rule of east central Europe. Civil society does not only need a liberal system of government; it is also a dynamic force which helps to foster such a system.20

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Towards a Social History of Civil Society in Europe What were the energies that fuelled civil society? Who supported it during the nineteenth century? Which resources were prerequisites to a civil society? I want to approach this problem by looking first at the German case. Here the semantic ambiguity already noted may be a lead: Bürger stands for both citizen and bourgeois.21 This equivocalness does not seem to be a semantic accident, but the reflection of a social constellation. In Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the terms Bürgertum and bürgerlich referred to the small urban social formation of merchants, manufacturers, bankers and agents, or Wirtschaftsbürger, on the one hand, and educated, usually academically trained officials, professors, secondary school teachers, lawyers, physicians, clerics and journalists, or Bildungsbürger, on the other. Bürger in this sense were distinct from the nobility, common people and rural population. They were a small minority, about 5 percent of the whole population. The different bürgerliche milieus were held together by a common culture and worldview, and by cultural practices and values rather than by class or power. Typical traits included literacy, an emphasis on general education and respect for work, achievement and property. A specific family model was important for bourgeois life; a clear division of gender characterised the bourgeois family, which was a distinctive place where cultural capital was transmitted from one generation to the next. Bourgeois conduct of life implied planning and predictability, and presupposed peace and civil order. General education, literature

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and the arts were frequently more important than religion. These were milieus with much internal communication. They were in principle open to those who brought with them the appropriate qualifications. These qualifications were not ascriptive, like noble birth had been. However, these milieus were small and exclusive, clearly differentiated from the masses below and from the small traditional elites above. In those social milieus, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, reading societies, clubs, lodges and circles, friendship and correspondence networks, and eventually liberal associations, self-government bodies and other organisations developed. These groups brought forth and supported the ideas and cultural practices out of which the project of a civil society was built. This project emerged in the milieu of the urban bourgeoisie, because there existed a basic affinity between both the principles of the project and the culture of the bourgeoisie, which was based on self-reliance, education, achievement orientation and systematic conduct of life. It was a specific type of communication, which the project of civil society required to gain plausibility. At that time, this type of communication existed only in the urban bourgeoisie (including some members of the nobility and the petty bourgeoisie). Other social strata and classes dissociated themselves from that project. In fact, they were often virtually excluded from it. They profited little from it, and it meant little to them. These groups included the lower classes, some minorities and to some extent women. A remarkable tension emerged between the universalistic claims of the project civil society and its social exclusivity. In principle it aimed at freedom, equal chances and participation for all. In reality, both at its beginnings and throughout most of its history, the project was closely tied to small social groups that carried it and profited from it much more than others. This tension, or contradiction, was increasingly perceived and criticised. As a result, it became the driving force of political and social change, which in the long run helped to broaden the social basis of civil society and thus reduce the contradiction to some extent. The early affinity and alliance between bourgeois culture and the project of civil society – between bürgerliche Kultur and Bürgergesellschaft – loosened up during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Parts of the bourgeoisie became more conservative and defensive, turning away from essential aspects of civil society. On the other hand, the civil society project gained new sympathisers, advocates and supporters in social strata and classes that had previously had little involvement with it. These included women and large numbers of skilled workers. The Social Democratic labour movement became a decisive driving force in the further development of civil society without using the concept to describe its programme. The history of the bourgeoisie and that of civil society started going their separate ways. Even today, remnants of the former affinity between the bourgeoisie and civil society can be observed. Civil engagement in clubs, citizens’ initiatives and NGOs exists mainly in educated urban middle-class milieus. This is the case in Germany at least, although now the project of civil society and civic involvement is coming

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to be supported within many social strata and not only by the bourgeoisie, whose profile has become so blurred that it is even unclear how to identify them. In any case, in the past as in the present, certain social categories are more active in civil society than others. The capacity for civil society is distributed disproportionately, depending on time, availability of resources, communication networks, education and attitudes. Legal discrimination – against women, ethnic minorities and the poor – has made civil social engagement even more difficult. Civil society certainly does not presuppose social equality. But it emerged as a project opposing corporative inequality in the eighteenth century, and excessive economic and social inequality has frequently obstructed and damaged it.22 The role of religion and religiosity in the development or obstruction of civil society comes to bear differently depending on the situation. Community church life in non-conformist religious congregations, such as the English and American Quakers, was and is at the root of civic involvement. However, the principles and practices of the major state religions usually opposed the self-determination and built-in plurality of civil society. In other words, whether religion and church appear in the plural or in the singular is decisive.23 Even in the nineteenth century, the close connection between bourgeoisie and civil society did not exist everywhere. In Poland, Bohemia and Hungary, parts of the aristocracy took the place of the poorly developed, sometimes ethnically foreign bourgeoisie. Philipp Ther makes this point very well in his comparative research on theatre and opera associations in nineteenth-century cities like Leipzig, Prague and Lemberg. For the Czech and the Polish civil society initiatives, Jirí Koralka has stressed the role of Bildungs-Kleinbürger – among them elementary school teachers and priests. Within the very heterogeneous and not very numerous middle classes, the role of Jews needs to be mentioned, particularly for Hungary. The East Central European evidence supports the thesis that the social bases of civil society have varied over time and space. If one looks, from a German perspective, to France and England, it appears that bourgeoisie/middle classes and nobility/gentry were more closely intertwined, resulting in a broader social basis for the developing civil society. In Russia prior to the First World War, civil social tendencies were not lacking altogether. They existed especially among the urban middle classes, the petty and intermediate bourgeoisie, and particularly in the local politics of some cities. However, the bulk of the lower classes, the rural peasantry and the most established and privileged parts of the old elites stayed largely outside the spectrum of social groups that supported and nourished civil society.24 It is beyond the scope of this chapter, but certainly an interesting question, to ask where and what can take the place of the middle classes or bourgeoisie with respect to establishing a civil society in regions and countries that have either lost or diminished their middle classes, or that never really developed them strongly, such as post-communist Eastern Europe after 1990. Iván Szelényi, the Hungarian sociologist from Yale, has spoken of capitalism without capitalists in recent East Central Europe. Using the German categorisation, he speaks of a ‘second

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Bildungsbürgertum’ today: not capitalists and entrepreneurs, but former nomenklatura, educated persons, professionals, artists and intellectuals, who in his view supported what developed under the heading of civil society, for instance in Hungary after 1990.25

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A Concept Between West and East The idea or concept of civil society is a product of the West. Can it be fruitfully applied to the East, that is, to Eastern Europe? Some historians and social scientists argue that it cannot. Their argument is similar to the well-known criticism of the applicability of the Western concept of modernisation to nonWestern regions in the world. Measured by the yardstick of civil society, Eastern Europe has no chance. By necessity it appears retarded, backward, and deficient. Therefore, observers who are guided by this yardstick risk missing and overlooking other aspects of Eastern reality that may be more important. This way, so the argument goes, old West-East asymmetries are continued and reinforced by analytical categories that come from the West and overwhelm the East, giving a distorted picture.26 This criticism should not be easily dismissed. How can one answer it? It is true that if one follows this approach and uses this concept, many results point to a West-East decline within Europe. In many parts of the East there were hindering factors that were less effective or missing altogether in the West or the Centre. They ranged from the belated breakthrough of market economies and the low degree of urbanisation through the relative weakness and ethnic heterogeneity of the local variants of Bürgertum to the autocratic nature of the political system, the underdevelopment of a free public space, and the fact that during most of the nineteenth century the ultimate political authority was with foreign imperial powers. However, it is not enough to speak of ‘more’ or ‘less’ civil society when comparing West and East. Differences in kind are at least as important as differences in degree, which can be elicited through comparison. The distinction between more advanced and more backward regions does not capture the whole spectrum of complexities that comparative research on the history of civil society continues to discover. In this field, the historical study of civil society, a simple dichotomist distinction between West and East is not very helpful. There was much similarity all over Europe. The differences were of a graded, not dichotomist, nature. In many respects the differences between the South-eastern and the East Central regions of Europe, for instance between Serbia and Bohemia, were more pronounced than the differences between Hungary, Bohemia and Western Poland on the one hand, and the German-speaking part of Central Europe on the other. Most importantly, there were mutual observations, influences and entanglements all over Europe. To analyse East European developments in light of a West European concept like ‘civil society’ does not mean one is imposing a

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foreign concept onto a historical reality to which it is alien. Many actors in East Central, South-eastern and Eastern Europe took Western developments as their models, among them phenomena which we now subsume under ‘civil society’. Certainly this was a choice disputed by others. Still, the view from the West of the East is not completely alien to the East, but rather deeply built into its history.27 Finally, it should be stressed that although civil society started as a Western concept, it is not purely Western any more. It has migrated back and forth, and changed along the way. I cannot retrace this itinerary, but the basics are clear. By the early twentieth century, the concept of ‘civil society’ had become very marginal in just about every language, in social analysis and public discourse, and inside and outside academia. It was after 1968 that the concept was rediscovered by the non-orthodox Left inside and outside the communist milieu, by Left intellectuals who criticised communism, and finally by dissidents in East Central Europe. It was mainly from here that the concept was reintroduced and spread throughout Western discourses. From then on, in the process of spreading, popularising, contesting and redefining, the concept of ‘civil society’ had an important East Central European root. Although it has lost some of its attractiveness in Prague, Warsaw and Budapest, it has not regained the Western dominance which it originally possessed.28 This is why it is particularly suitable for broad comparison and the reconstruction of East-West entanglements.

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Notes 1. For a preliminary and shorter version cf. Jürgen Kocka, ‘Civil society from a historical perspective’, in European Review 12 (2004): 65–79. 2. Cf. Jürgen Kocka and Allan Mitchell (eds), Bourgeois society in nineteenth-century Europe (Oxford, Providence: Berg, 1993). 3. Dieter Gosewinkel et al. (eds), Zivilgesellschaft – national und transnational. WZBJahrbuch 2003 (Berlin: Edition Sigma, 2004), esp. 11–26 (‘Introduction’) and 29–60 (‘History meets sociology’). 4. The concept is central in the work of the Centre for Comparative European History Berlin which tries to connect the history of eastern and western Europe. Cf. Manfred Hildermeier et al. (eds), Europäische Zivilgesellschaft in Ost und West (Frankfurt am Main: Campus-Verlag, 2000); Arnd Bauerkämper, ‘Das Berliner Zentrum für Vergleichende Geschichte Europas. Ein Ort komparativer Forschung und wissenschaftlicher Kommunikation, in Jahrbuch für Europäische Geschichte 4 (2003): 277–84. The ‘Zentrum für vergleichende Geschichte Europas’ was transformed into the Berliner Kolleg für vergleichende Geschichte Europas’ in 2004. 5. For details and references see Jürgen Kocka, ‘Zivilgesellschaft als historisches Problem und Versprechen’, in Hildermeier, Europäische Zivilgesellschaft, pp. 14–20. For the conference ‘The Languages of Civil Society – Europe and Beyond’ at the European University Institute in Florence, 6–8 November 2003, three reports on the history of the concept were prepared (as part of the EU-sponsored network ‘Towards a European Civil Society’ with the Social Science Research Centre Berlin as its speaker institution) by Peter Hallberg and Björn Wittrock (Uppsala); by Shin Jong-Hwa, Jean Terrier and Peter Wagner (Florence); and by

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6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

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11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

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Jody Jensen and Ferenc Miszlivetz (Szombathely). They will be published. A basic survey: Manfred Riedel, ‘Gesellschaft, bürgerliche’, in Otto Brunner et al. (eds), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Klett, 1975), pp. 719–800, esp. 732–67 (749 Hume, 751 Mendelssohn, 757–59 Kant). Also: Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere (1929–35), 4 vols, ed. by Valentino Gerratana (Torino: Einaudi, 1975), pp. 751f, 800f, 1028. On this: Norbert Bobbio, ‘Gramsci and the Concept of Civil Society’, in John Keane (ed.), Civil society and the state: New European perspectives, (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 73–99; Andrew Arato, ‘Civil Society against the State: Poland 1980–81’, in Telos 47 (1981): 23–47; Bronis_aw Geremek, ‘Die Civil Society gegen den Kommunismus. Polens Botschaft’, in Krzysztof Michalski (ed.), Europa und die Civil Society. Castelgandolfo-Gespräche 1989 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991), pp. 264–73; John Keane, Civil society: Old images, new visions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), pp. 12–31; Frank Trentmann, ‘Introduction’, in idem (ed.), Paradoxes of Civil Society: New Perspectives on Modern German and British History, rev. 2nd edn (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003), pp. 3–8. As an example: Trentmann, ‘Introduction’, in idem, Paradoxes of Civil Society, pp. 3–46 (at the same time a rich overview of pertinent literature). Keane, Civil society, p. 6. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 208ff. Gunilla-Friederike Budde, ‘Das Öffentliche des Privaten. Die Familie als zivilgesellschaftliche Kerninstitution’, in Arnd Bauerkämper and Manuel Borutta (eds), Die Praxis der Zivilgesellschaft. Akteure, Handeln und Strukturen im internationalen Vergleich (Frankfurt am Main: Campus-Verlag, 2003), pp. 57–75. Sheri Berman, ‘Civil society and the collapse of the Weimar Republic’, in World Politics 49 (1997): 401–29. German examples: Lothar Gall, Bürgertum in Deutschland (Berlin: Siedler, 1989); Jürgen Kocka and Manuel Frey (eds), Bürgerkultur und Mäzenatentum im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1998); D.L. Augustine, Patricians and Parvenus: Wealth and High Society in Wilhelmine Germany (Oxford: Berg, 1994); Manuel Frey, Macht und Moral des Schenkens. Staat und bürgerliche Mäzene vom späten 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1999); Jürgen Kocka, ‘Die Rolle der Stiftungen in der Bürgergesellschaft der Zukunft’, in Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte. Beilage zur Wochenzeitung Das Parlament, B 14/2004 (29 March 2004): 3–7. Marina Ottaway, ‘Corporatism Goes Global: International Organizations, Nongovernmental Organization Networks, and Transnational Business’, in Global Governance 7 (2001): 265–92. For fundamental problems of global governance see: Robert O’Brien and Anne Marie Goetz and Jan Aart Scholte and Marc Williams (eds), Contesting Global Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Budde, ‘Das Öffentliche des Privaten’, pp. 57–76. The network ‘Towards a European Civil Society’ organised a conference, ‘The Languages of Civil Society – Europe and Beyond’ in November 2003 (see above note 4). At this occasion Paul Ginsborg, University of Florence, spoke about ‘Family and Civil Society’. See also the workshop within the same network Ton Nijhuis, Amsterdam, organised in January 2005. Cf. Holm Sundhaussen, ‚Chancen und Grenzen zivilgesellschaftlichen Handelns. Die Balkanländer 1830–1940 als historisches Labor’, in Manfred Hildermeier et al., Europäische Zivilgesellschaft in Ost und West, pp. 149-77; Iván Bérend, History Derailed: Central and Eastern Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Maciej Janowski, ‘Gab es im 19. Jahrhundert in Polen eine

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17. 18.

19.

20.

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21.

22.

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Zivilgesellschaft?’, in Bauerkämper, Die Praxis der Zivilgesellschaft, pp. 293–316; Philipp Ther, ‘Zivilgesellschaft und Kultur. Programmatik, Organisation und Akteure gesellschaftlich getragener Theater im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Bauerkämper, Die Praxis der Zivilgesellschaft, pp. 190–212. Without reference to civil society, but still interesting: Theodor Schieder, ‘Typologie und Erscheinungsformen des Nationalstaates in Europa’, in Historische Zeitschrift 202 (1966): 58–81. Different views in Ulrike v. Hirschhausen and Jörn Leonhard (eds), Nationalismen in Europa. West- und Osteuropa im Vergleich (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001), esp. pp. 11–45 (editors’ introduction). Cf. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Geselligkeit und Demokratie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003). Ernest Gellner, ‘The importance of being modular’, in John A. Hall (ed.), Civil Society: Theory, History and Comparison (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), pp. 32–55 (45–47, ‘friend or foe’) about the ambivalence of nationalism as a precondition for civil society. For the relationship between ‘civic nation’ and ‘civil society’ see: Christopher Bryant, ‘Civic Nation, Civil Society, Civil Religion’, in Hall, Civil Society, pp. 136–57. For the close relationship between associational life as a basis for civil society and the rise of the nation as an idea of political order see: Hoffmann, Geselligkeit und Demokratie, pp. 56–73, esp. 68; Robert J. Morris, ‘Civil Society, Subscriber Democracies, and Parliamentary Government in Great Britain’, in Nancy Bermeo and Philip Nord (eds), Civil Society before Democracy (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), pp.111–34. Cf. Arnd Bauerkämper and Christoph Gumb, ‘Actors of Transnational Civil Society: Europe from the Late Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century’, Conference Paper (Draft), 2004. John A. Hall, ‘In Search of Civil Society’, in idem, Civil Society, pp. 1–32, esp.19; Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Critical towards the close link between civil society and liberalism Frank Trentmann, ‘Introduction: Paradoxes of Civil Society’, in idem, Paradoxes of Civil Society, pp. 3-46 esp. 8–11. Cf. Jürgen Kocka, ‘The European pattern and the German case’, in Kocka and Mitchell, Bourgeois Society, pp. 3–39 (also for the following paragraphs); Manfred Riedel, ‘Bürger, Staatsbürger, Bürgertum’, in Otto Brunner et al. (eds), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Klett, 1972), pp. 672–725. A Silesian author remarked in 1792: ‘Das Wort “Bürger” hat im Deutschen mehr Würde, als das Französische bourgeois … Und zwar deswegen hat es mehr, weil es bey uns zwey Sachen zugleich bezeichnet, die im Französischen zwey verschiedene Benennungen haben. Es heisst einmahl ein jedes Mitglied einer bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, – das ist das Französische citoyen; – es bedeutet zum andern den unadlichen Stadteinwohner, der von einem gewissen Gewerbe lebt, und das ist bourgeois.’ (Christian Garve, Versuche über verschiedene Gegenstände aus der Moral, der Literatur und dem gesellschaftlichen Leben, vol. 1 [Breslau: Korn, 1792], pp. 302f ). Civil society is a post-class concept, but not unrelated to class. Cf. Paul Nolte, ‘Zivilgesellschaft und soziale Ungleichheit. Ein historisch-sozialwissenschaftlicher Problemaufriss’, in Jürgen Kocka (ed.), Neues über Zivilgesellschaft aus historischsozialwissenschaftlichem Blickwinkel, Discussion paper Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB), P 01-801 (2001): 22–44 (p. 24, social inequality as a precondition of civil society); Robert D. Putnam, ‘Schlussfolgerungen’, in idem (ed.), Gesellschaft und Gemeinsinn (Gütersloh: Verlag Bertelsmann-Stiftung, 2001), pp. 751–90 (787); Anthony

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23.

24.

25.

26.

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27.

28.

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Giddens, Die Frage der sozialen Ungleichheit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001); Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). John Ehrenberg, Civil Society: The critical history of an idea (New York, London: New York University Press, 1999), pp. 62–70. About the role of German reformation and the liberation of conscience for civil society: Victor Pérez-Diaz, ‘The Possibility of Civil Society: Traditions, Character and Challenges’, in Hall, Civil Society, pp. 80-109 (at 85–88). For the competition between traditional church, reformist catholicism and laicism in eighteenth-century Austria cf. Michael Pammer, Glaubensabfall und wahre Andacht (Munich, Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 1994). Cf. Philipp Ther, ‘Zivilgesellschaft und Kultur. Programmatik, Organisation und Akteure gesellschaftlich getragener Theater im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Bauerkämper, Die Praxis der Zivilgesellschaft, pp. 189–212; Kirsten Bönker, ‘Akteure der Zivilgesellschaft vor Ort? Presse, Lokalpolitik und die Konstruktion von “Gesellschaft” im Gouvernement Saratov, 1890–1917’, in Bauerkämper, Die Praxis der Zivilgesellschaft, pp. 77–104; Manfred Hildermeier, ‘Russland oder wie weit kam die Zivilgesellschaft?, in idem et al., Europäische Zivilgesellschaft in Ost und West, pp. 113–48; Jürgen Kocka, ‘The Middle Classes in Europe’, in Hartmut Kaelble (ed.), The European Way: European Societies in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), pp. 15–43. Gil Eyal and Iván Szélenyi and Eleanor Townsley, Making Capitalism without Capitalists: Class Formation and Elite Struggles in Post-Communist Central Europe (London: Verso, 2000). Elements of this view in Chris Hann and Elizabeth Dunn (eds), Civil Society: Challenging Western Models (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 1–26; Chris Hann, ‘Zivilgesellschaft oder Citizenship? Skeptische Überlegungen eines Ethnologen’, in Hildermeier et al., Europäische Zivilgesellschaft in Ost und West, pp. 85–109. Iván Bérend, History Derailed; John K. Glenn, Framing Democracy: Civil Society and Civic Movements in Eastern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). About ‘Western’ constitutional theory and constitution-making in Eastern and Central Europe after 1989 cf. Andrew Arato, Civil Society, Constitution and Legitimacy (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). Also see M.M. Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society in PostCommunist Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Methodological consequences: Jürgen Kocka, ‘Comparison and Beyond’, in History and Theory 42 (2003): 39–44. Alberto Gasparini and Vladimir Yadov (eds), Social Actors and Designing the Civil Society of Eastern Europe, vol. 1 (Greenwich: JAI Press, 1995); Glenn, Framing Democracy. For the importance of civil society and the special impact of nonprofit-organisations on the making of civil society in Central Europe cf. Annette Zimmer and Eckhard Priller (eds), Future of Civil Society: Making central European Nonprofit-Organizations Work (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2004).

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Voisé, W. 1988. ‘Polish Renaissance Political Theory: Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski’, in Samuel Fiszman (ed.), The Polish Renaissance in its European Context. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 174–88. Vovelle, M. 1988. La Révolution contre l’église. De la raison à l’être suprême. Paris: Éd. Complexe. Walicki, A. 1988. ‘The Polish Political Heritage of the Sixteenth Century and its Influence on the Nation-Building Ideologies of the Polish Enlightenment and Romanticism’, in S. Fiszman (ed.), The Polish Renaissance in its European Context. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 34–57. Walkin, J. 1962. The Rise of Democracy in Prerevolutionary Russia: Political and Social Institutions under the Last Three Tsars. New York: Praeger. Warth, R. 1985. ‘Before Rasputin: Piety and the Occult at the Court of Nicholas II’, in Historian 47: 323–37. Weber, H. (ed.). 1963. Lenin. Ausgewählte Schriften. Munich: Kindler. Weber, M. 1989. ‘Russlands Übergang zum Scheinkonstitutionalismus’, in idem, Gesamtausgabe, Abt. I: Schriften und Reden. Bd. 10: Zur Russischen Revolution von 1905. Schriften und Reden 1905–1912, ed. W.J. Mommsen and D. Dahlmann. Tübingen: Mohr, pp. 281–684. ———. 1999. Gesamtausgabe, Abt. I: Schriften und Reden. Bd. 22: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen Ordnungen und Mächte. Nachlaß. Teilbd. 5: Die Stadt, ed. W. Nippel. Tübingen: Mohr. Weeks, T. 1996. Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863–1914. DeKalb: Northern Illinois Press. Wehner, M. 1998. ‘Stalinismus und Terror’, in S. Plaggenborg (ed.), Stalinismus. Neue Forschungen und Konzepte. Berlin: Verlag Spitz, pp. 365–90. Weisensel, P.R. 2000. ‘Russian-Muslim Inter-Ethnic Relations in Russian Turkestan in the Last Years of the Empire’, in J. Morison (ed.), Ethnic and National Issues in Russian and East European History. London: Macmillan Press, pp. 46–63. Weitz, E.D. 2003. A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. West, J.L. and I.A. Petrov. 1997. Merchant Moscow: Images of Russia’s Vanished Bougeoisie. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wildt, M. 2002. Generation des Unbedingten. Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition. Williams, R.C. 1986. The Other Bolsheviks: Lenin and His Critics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wolff, L. 1994. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wortman, R. 1976. The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1995, 2000. Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wynn, C. 1992. Workers, Strikes and Pogroms: The Donbass-Dnepr Bend in Late Imperial Russia, 1870–1905. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Yaroshevsky, D. 1997. ‘Empire and Citizenship’, in D. Brower and E. Lazzerini (eds), Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 58–79. Zagrebin, S. 1907. ‘O dobrom pastyre. Kriticheskaia zametka’, Tserkovno-obshchestvennaia zhizn’ 37 (14 September 1907): 1136–39.

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Zelnik, R.E. 1994. ‘To the Unaccustomed Eye: Religion and Irreligion in the Experience of St. Petersburg Workers in the 1870s’, in R.P. Hughes and I. Paperno (eds), Christianity and the Eastern Slavs, vol. 2: Russian Culture in Modern Times. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 49–82. Zimmer, A. and E. Priller (eds). 2004. Future of Civil Society: Making Central European Nonprofit-Organizations Work. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Zimmermann, M. 1996. Rassenutopie und Genozid. Die nationalsozialistische ‘Lösung der Zigeunerfrage’. Hamburg: Christians. Zweig, S. 2002. Die Welt von gestern. Erinnerungen eines Europäers. Düsseldorf: Artemis & Winkler.

Historical Concepts Between Eastern and Western Europe, edited by Manfred Hildermeier, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2007.

Notes on Contributors Jörg Baberowski, born in 1961, is Professor of East European History at the Humboldt University, Berlin. He was an Assistant Professor at the University of Tübingen (Habilitation 2001) and taught at the University of Leipzig (2000–2). His publications include: Autokratie und Justiz. Zum Verhältnis von Rückständigkeit und Rechtsstaatlichkeit im ausgehenden Zarenreich 1864–1914 (1996); Der Feind ist überall. Stalinismus im Kaukasus (2003); Der Rote Terror. Die Geschichte des Stalinismus (2004); Der Sinn der Geschichte. Geschichtstheorien von Hegel bis Foucault (2005).

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Ulrich Herbert, born in 1951, is Professor of Modern History at Freiburg University. He was Senior Research Fellow at Tel Aviv University (1987–8) and Director of the Research Centre for the History of the Nazi Regime, Hamburg. His books include: Hitler’s Foreign Workers. Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany under the Third Reich (1997); Best. Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989 (1996, 1997); A History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 1880–1980 (1990); Wandlungsprozesse in Westdeutschland. Belastung, Integration, Liberalisierung, 1945–1980 (2002); National-Socialist Extermination Policy. Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies (1999); Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager 1933 bis 1945. Entwicklung und Struktur, 2 vols (1998, 2nd edn 2002). Manfred Hildermeier, born in 1948, is Professor of East European History at the University of Göttingen; he was Fellow of the Historische Kolleg in Munich and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and Chairman of the Association of German Historians (2000–4); among his writings on Russian and Soviet history are the books Die Russische Revolution 1905–1920 (1989); Geschichte der Sowjetunion 1917–1991. Aufstieg und Niedergang des ersten sozialistischen Staates (1998); Die Sowjetunion 1917–1991 (2001); Die Russische Revolution (2004) and the collective volumes Stalinismus vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Neue Wege der Forschung (1998); and Europäische Zivilgesellschaft in Ost und West: Begriff, Geschichte, Chancen (2000).

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Jürgen Kocka

Jürgen Kocka, born in 1941, received his Ph.D. in History in 1968 (Free University of Berlin), and his Habilitation in 1972 at the University of Münster. He is Professor of the History of the Industrial World at the Free University of Berlin, and since 2001 President of the Berlin Social Science Research Centre (WZB). He has published widely in the field of modern history, particularly social and economic history of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. He has also written on theoretical problems of history and the social sciences. His publications include: Unternehmensverwaltung und Angestelltenschaft am Beispiel Siemens 1847–1914 (1969); White Collar Workers in America 1890–1940 (1980); Les employés en Allemagne 1850–1980 (1989); Facing Total War. German Society 1914–1918 (1984); Arbeitsverhältnisse und Arbeiterexistenzen. Grundlagen der Klassenbildung im 19. Jahrhundert (1990); Vereinigungskrise: Zur Geschichte der Gegenwart (1995); Industrial Culture and Bourgeois Society. Business, Labor, and Bureaucracy in Modern Germany (1999).

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Michael G. Müller, born in 1949, is Professor of East European History at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, co-editor of the Zeitschrift fiir Ostmitteleuropaforschung, German chairman of the joint Polish-German Commission of Historians and Geographers. He was Professor of East European History at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy (1992–6). Among his publications are Polen zwischen Preussen und Russland, Souveränitätskrise und Reformpolitik 1736–1752 (1983); Die Teilungen Polens (1984); Zweite Reformation und städtische Autonomie im Königlichen Preussen. Danzig, Elbing und Thorn in der Epoche der Konfessionalisierung (1997) and collective volumes including Regional and National Identities in Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries (1998) and Die Nationalisierung von Grenzen (2002). He is co-author of Eine kleine Geschichte Polens (2000) and Rozbiory Polski. Z historii Polski i Europy w XVIII wieku (2005). Karl Schlögel, born in 1948, is professor of East European History at Viadrina University, Frankfurt (Oder). He was a researcher at the Bundes-Institut für Ostwissenschaftliche und Internationale Studien, Cologne (1979–82), a freelance writer and translator 1982–6 and he taught at the University of Konstanz in 1990–4. He was a visiting fellow at the Collegium Budapest in 2000–1 and at St Antony’s College Oxford, 2002. He is a member of the German PEN-Club and of the European Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been awarded several prizes (European Award Charles Veillon for Essay writing, 1990; Anna-Krüger-Preis des Wissenschafts-Kollegs zu Berlin, 1999; Georg-Dehio-Preis, 2004; Sigmund-Freud Preis der Deutschen Akademie für Sprache und Literatur, 2004). His books include: Moskau lesen (1984); Petersburg 1909–1921. Das Laboratorium der Moderne (1988); Das Wunder von Nishnij oder die Rückkehr der Städte (1991); (ed.) Der Große Exodus. Die russische Emigration und ihre Zentren 1917–1941 (1994); Go East oder die zweite Entdeckung des Ostens (1995); (ed.) Russische Emigration in Deutschland 1918–1941 (1995); Berlin Ostbahnhof Europas. Russen

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und Deutsche in ihrem Jahrhundert (1998); (ed.) Chronik russischen Lebens in Deutschland 1918–1941 (1999); Promenade in Jalta und andere Städtebilder (2001); Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit. Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik (2003); Marjampole oder Europas Wiederkehr aus dem Geist der Städte (2005).

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Martin Schulze Wessel, born in 1962, is Professor of Eastern European History at Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich. He is author of a study of the Russian perception of the Polish question in Prussian and German policy, Russlands Blick auf Preußen. Die polnische Frage in der Diplomatie und politischen Öffentlichkeit des Zarenreichs und Sowjetstaats, 1697–1947 (1995), and of a comparative study about the parish clergy as opinion leaders in the process of religious change during the revolutions of the Habsburg and the Russian Empires (Religion und politischer Dissens. Der römisch-katholische und russisch-orthodoxe Klerus als Träger religiösen Wandels in den böhmischen Ländern bzw. im Russischen Reich, 1848–1922, 2006). His current interest is the history of religion in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is director of the Collegium Carolinum (Institute for Czech and Slovak History) and co-editor of the journals Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas and Bohemia.

Historical Concepts Between Eastern and Western Europe, edited by Manfred Hildermeier, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2007.

Index of People Anderson, Benedict 78 Appadurai, Arjun 46 Baker, Keith Michael 48 Bauman, Zygmunt 59, 68 Bitow, Andrej 59 Bodin, Jean 40, 41, 42, 48 Bogdanov, Aleksandr 55 Bonald, Henri de 48 Bonch-Bruevich 65 Bossuet, (Jacques Bénigne) 41 Bracher, Karl Dietrich 5 Braudel, Fernand 76 Buber-Neumann, Margarete 18 Budde, Gunilla 91 Bulgakov, Sergei 54

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Calvin, (Johannes) 42 Catherine the Great 24n, 80 Charles-Roux, François 48 Curzon, Lord (George Nathaniel) 76 Darnton, Robert 53 Dostoevsky, (Fyodor Mikhailovich) 60 Doyle, William 48 Dunin-Karwicki, Stanisl/aw 38, 41 Elpat’evskii 54 Ennker, Benno 48 Etkind, Aleksandr 48 Etzioni, A(mitai) 32 Ferguson, Adam 89, 92 Figner, Vera 55 Fraenkel, Ernst 16 Friedrich II 80 Furet, François 48 Geremek, Bronislav 87 Gerschenkron, Alexander 25

Geyer, Dietrich 2 Gramsci, Antonio 87 Guchkov, Alexander 31 Habermas, Jürgen 88 Hartmann, N. 28 Havel, Vaclav 87 Hegel, (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich) 87 Herb, Guntram 79 Hintze, Otto 2, 36n Hitler, Adolf 6, 13–16, 19, 80 Hobbes, (Thomas) 41 Hume, David 86 Huntington, Samuel 82 Ivan III 24 Janushkevich 65 Kant, Immanuel 75, 86 Keane, John 88n Kershaw, Ian 16 Kizevetter, Alexander 26 Konrád, György 87 Koralka, Jirí 95 Koselleck, Reinhard 26, 86 Krasin, Leonid 55 Kuropatkin, (Alexei Nikolaevich) 65 Lefebvre, Henri 76 Leibniz, (Gottfried Wilhelm) 85 Lenin, (Vladimir Ilyich) 8n, 49, 53, 55, 66 Ligou, Daniel 53 Locke, John 50 Lunacharskii, Anatolij 55 Luther, Martin 42 Macchiavelli, (Niccolo) 43 Mackinder, Sir Haldford 76

Historical Concepts Between Eastern and Western Europe, edited by Manfred Hildermeier, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2007.

Index of People

Maistre, Joseph de 48 Maria Theresia 80 Marie Antoinette 54 Marx, (Karl) 9, 87 Mayer, Arno 5 Melanchthon, Philipp 42 Mendelssohn, Moses 86 Mesmer, Franz Anton 53 Michelet, Jules 48 Miliukov, Pavel 26, 30 Modrzewski, Andrej Frycz 39, 40n, 43 Morozov, Savva 27 Nabokov, Vladimir 81 Naimark, Norman 80 Narskii, Igor 48 Nicholas II. 62 Nolte, Ernst 5n, 19 Olizarowski, Aaron Aleksander 41 Orzechowski, Stanisl/aw 40

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Ratzel, Friedrich 75n Reinhard, Wolfgang 37 Reinke 64 Rosenthal, Bernice 54 Rothschild, Baron 54 Scott, James 60 Shchukin, Sergei 27 Simmel, Georg 76 Skarga, Piotr 40, 42 Stalin, (Joseph Vissarionovich) 6, 14, 16, 19, 55, 66, 69 Starowolski, Szymon 41 Stites, Richard 48 Szelényi, István 87, 95 Taylor, Charles 88 Ther, Philipp 95 Tocqueville 56, 87 Tret’iakov, Pavel M. 27 Trotsky, (Leon Davidovich) 26 Tumarkin, Nina 48 Turner, Frederick Jackson 76

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Peter the Great 24, 26 Philipp of Chemnitz 42 Porset, Charles 53 Pufendorf, Samuel 43

Historical Concepts Between Eastern and Western Europe, edited by Manfred Hildermeier, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2007.

Index of Places

Aachen 74, 76 Africa 65, 82 South Africa 88 Algeria 65 Alsace 50 America 31, 80, 95 Latin American 88 North America 82 Asia 60, 65 Augsburger Religionsfriede 42 Austria 81

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Balkans 80, 91 Berlin 73–78, 81 Bessarabia 81 Bielefeld 32 Bohemia 38, 49, 91, 95n Brandenburgian estates 43 British India See India Brussels 74 Budapest 87, 97 Bukowina 81 Calais 77 Cambodia 7 Carpatho-Ukraine See Ukraine Caucasus 64n, 78 Chechnya 75 China 7n Copenhagen 74 Cuba 8, 65 Czech Republic 81 Denmark 37 Dover 76

East Prussia See Prussia France 2, 48, 49, 50, 51–56, 78, 95 Frankfurt 32 Galicia 81 Germany 7–10, 13–16, 18n, 31n, 35, 41, 59, 76, 78–80, 89, 90n, 93n Great Britain See United Kingdom Greece 77 Grossdeutsches Reich 78 Grozny 75 Habsburg Empire 92 Holy Roman Empire [of the German Nation] 24, 35n, 41, 43, 45, 78 Hungary 91, 95n India 65 British India 77 Iran 68 Istanbul 77, 82 Italy 91 Ivanovo-Voznesensk 50

Kaliningrad/ Königsberg 73 Kandahar 81 Kaunas 73 Latin American See America Lausanne 80 Leipzig 95 Lemberg 95 Liège 74, 76 Lille 74 Lithuania 40, 73 London 92

Historical Concepts Between Eastern and Western Europe, edited by Manfred Hildermeier, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2007.

Index of Places

Manhattan 81 Mecklenburg 43 Memel/ Klajpeda 81 Mexico 77 Moscow 81n North America See America Novgorod 24 Odessa 77 Ottoman Empire 92 Paris 54, 80 Poland 38–44, 78, 80, 91, 95n Poland-Lithuania 35–38, 40, 41, 43–45 Pommern 43 Potsdam 78, 80 Prague 87, 95, 97 Pristina 75 Prussia 44, 78 East Prussia 78, 81 Riga 81 Roman Empire 24 Rome 92 Russia 1, 7–11, 23–27, 29–32, 37, 48–55, 59–63, 65, 67, 74, 80, 82, 95

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South Africa See Africa Sovetsk/ Tilsit 73 Soviet Empire See Soviet Union Soviet Union 3, 9, 12–18, 26, 28, 59n, 66–69, 74, 78, 81 Soviet Empire 1, 17, 80 USSR 12, 17, St. Petersburg 28, 52, 64, 92 Szczecin 80 Tiflis 64 Transsylvania 81 Trianon 80 Trieste 80 Turkey 68 Ukraine 12 Carpatho-Ukraine 81 United Kingdom 59, 78 Upper Silesia See Silesia Uppsala 92 USSR See Soviet Union Versailles 9, 79n Vilnius 73

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Warsaw 5, 81, 87, 97 Sarajevo 75 Serbia 96 Sèvres 80 Siberia 50 Silesia 78 Upper Silisia 81 Slovakia 81 Slovenia 81

Yalta 78, 80 Yugoslavia 75, 81

Historical Concepts Between Eastern and Western Europe, edited by Manfred Hildermeier, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2007.

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