‘Sword and plough’: settling Nazi stormtroopers in Eastern Europe, 1936–43

ABSTRACT

Most histories of the National Socialist stormtroopers (SA) come to a close with the Night of the Long Knives in the summer of 1934. For the remaining eleven years of National Socialist rule, the stormtroopers are usually regarded as a peripheral ‘nostalgic drinking companionship’ of early Nazi activists who, apart from their involvement in the persecution of the Jews, did not wield much influence. In contrast to such views, this article argues that the SA remained an important mass organization in the Third Reich that not only helped to stabilize the Nazi regime within the boundaries of the German heartlands but also contributed importantly to German expansionist policies from 1935 onwards. My argument is developed in three stages. First, I assess the SA’s contribution to the German settlement movement in the 1930s that was originally concerned with the ‘inner colonialism’, the population transfer within the existing borders of the German Reich in order to stimulate agriculture and economy in disadvantaged German regions, in particular in the northern and eastern provinces. Second, I concentrate on the analysis of the plans and initiatives of the so-called ‘commissioner of the SA Chief of Staff for the placement of new farmers and matters of ethnicity’ between 1938 and 1942. In a third and final part, I discuss these plans and the actual developments in the light of the expansionist Nazi policies of de- and reterritorialization during the war years, advanced in particular by the SS. Although the SA’s extensive pre-war ambitions in ‘Germanization’ suffered a serious backlash with the outbreak of the war, it still contributed in important ways to the formation of the Volksgemeinschaft in the occupied territories.     

Post-politics,crisis, and Ireland's ‘ghost estates’

This paper argues that the global economic recession provides an instructive point to reconsider recent theorisations of post-politics for two reasons. First, theories of the post-political can help us to understand the current neoliberal impasse, and second, current transformations provide us with an empirical basis to test the limits of these explanatory frameworks. While the resurgence of neoliberal policies, evidenced through the state-sponsored rescue of the financial sector and the introduction of harsh austerity measures in many countries, appear to confirm post-politics, various protest movements have testified to a concurrent re-politicisation of the economy. Furthermore, crises constitute periods of disruption to the discursive and symbolic order, which open a space for hegemonic struggle, however fleeting. We focus our analysis on Ireland's ‘ghost estates’ – residential developments left abandoned or unfinished after the property crash – and their treatment within mainstream print media. We argue that in the context of crash, the ‘ghost estate’ functioned as an ‘empty signifier’ through which hegemonic struggles over how to narrate, and thus re-inscribe, the event of the crisis were staged. We explore the double role played by ‘ghost estates’: firstly, as an opening for politics, and secondly, as a vehicle used to discursively contain the crisis through a neoliberal narrative of ‘excess’. We argue that our analysis offers an instructive example of how post-politicisation occurs as a process that is always contingent, contextual, and partial, and reliant on the cooption and coproduction of existing cultural signifiers with emergent narrations of crisis.     

‘Safe spaces’ and ‘bad’ girls: ‘child marriage victims’’ experiences from a shelter in Eastern India

This article interrogates the politics of safety that underpin rehabilitative practices in a state-funded shelter run by an anti-trafficking NGO in Eastern India. It focuses on the experiences of a group of female adolescents, categorised as ‘child marriage victims’, residing at the shelter. The analysis of in-depth life history interviews collected over a two-week period in October 2014 reveals that the adolescents contest the legislative victimhood imposed on them. For them, their marriages and pre-marital relationships are an expression of romantic and sexual agency, in contravention of familial norms. In this context, the adolescents perceive the shelter as a punitive space and interpret their enforced stay for ‘protection’ and ‘rehabilitation’ as an extension of familial control and regulation of their lives. The protectionism-as-safety discourse rewrites their agency as victimhood and transforms the shelter into a site where everyday forms of gendered power inequalities within social relations in the household are authorised and reproduced by the state and NGO. The adolescents perceive themselves as ‘bad girls’ and adopt various strategies to insist on their rehabilitation into ‘good girls’ to secure release from the shelter often by enacting the ‘victimhood’ expected of them. This allows for unique expressions of agency in an otherwise constrained context but hinders relationships of solidarity with other residents. Overall, the article highlights the need to challenge the ways in which patriarchal norms continue to spatially govern and discipline the expression of female sexuality and agency through 'safe spaces' in India.     

Who Grows Food in Russia and Eastern Europe?

Drawing upon an innovative program of surveys in Russia and Eastern Europe, a prominent Western public policy specialist and Russian geographer present an important empirical study demonstrating a wide diffusion of subsistence food production by both urban and rural households in Eastern Europe and by urban households in Russia. With access to land, rather than occupational specialization, determining who grows food in the stressful 1990s, the paper, based on an extensive survey in 1991 and 1992 with 3,550 Bulgarian, Czechoslovak, and Polish respondents and 2,100 Russian, reveals that most people in the post-Soviet realm consume the food that they produce. 1 diagram, 7 tables, 25 references.     

Franco Venturi's ‘crisis’ of the Old Regime

This paper discusses Franco Venturi's concept of a general European ‘crisis’ in the period 1768 – 89, which is covered in volumes III, IV and V of Settecento riformatore. With this concept Venturi allied himself with R. R. Palmer, A. Sorel, J. Juarès and others who sought to explore the larger context of the Enlightenment and French Revolution. Critics of the English translation of Venturi's volumes III and IV (1989?–?91) have failed to perceive a European political crisis in this period. However, Venturi's concept also involved a birth of European public opinion, a development that has been affirmed in English, French and Italian studies more recently, despite a tendency to substitute a cultural for a political history of the Enlightenment.     

Chile,October and November 2019: ‘Feel’ and field-work in times of crisis

One of the most important social upheavals in Chile since the end of the dictatorship started in October 2019, and continued until the coronavirus outbreak in March 2020. The event affected the ethnographic fieldwork that we, four anthropologists, were conducting at that time. This article draws on the recognition that, while being in different geographical locations, our respective experiences involve similar affects. Drawing on feminist epistemology, we have utilized these emotional experiences as a methodological tool to spark curiosity and open up a space for reconsidering fieldwork as ‘feel-work’. Our respective positioning, in terms of national and emotional feelings of belonging as well as physical location, created affective dissonances that raised uneasiness while at the same time opening up a productive space to think about fieldwork as an experience of ‘out-of-place’ bodies and ‘out-of-place’ feelings.     

Agrarian restructuring and gender – designing family farms in Central and Eastern Europe

This article attempts to describe the gender dimensions and aspects of agrarian transition/transformation in post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe with a focus on family farms. This farming model is characterised by a conflation of labour, land, capital, management and human bonding and was promoted by the privatisation policy of post-socialist restructuring. Several problems of the new family farms are looked at with a gender perspective, singling out ideological, social and economic parameters.     

States of difference: Refiguring ethnicity and its ‘crisis’ at India's borders

This article critically rethinks the possibilities and paradoxes of identity at the interstices of South Asia. Through ethnographic and historical analyses, I chronicle the varying forms, (dis)contents, and failures of ethnic identity in the geo-politically sensitive region of Darjeeling, India. In this Himalayan corner of the nation-state, borders have proven simultaneously generative yet undermining of identity and its politics—at once amplifying communities' desires for national inclusion, while rendering them largely unable to meet the Indian state's criteria for national recognition. As is the case along India's other borders, anxieties over national belonging have subsequently spawned violent subnationalist agitations in Darjeeling, as well as more legal quests for right, recognition, and autonomy. But to little avail. A perennial ‘identity crisis’ thus haunts (and charges) the people and politics of this Himalayan borderland. Refiguring the crisis at hand, this paper asks how certain forms of human difference become viable identities in India, while others do not. Doing so, I locate the crisis not within the realm of identity, but rather its rightful recognition. The paper accordingly develops ‘states of difference’ as an analytic for understanding the accentuated, paradoxical interplays of identity, state, and difference at the borders of South Asia and beyond.     

The crisis before the crisis: the ‘problems of modern society’ and the OECD, 1968–74

‘Economic crisis’ is conventionally understood as the absence of economic growth. However, far from being straightforward and self-explanatory, this understanding is itself an expression of a very particular ensemble of statistical techniques, economic theory, state practices and broader societal beliefs; it is not adequate for the historical analysis of what people have historically perceived as economic crises. This article aims at illustrating this divergence by analysing debates within the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on the so-called ‘problems of modern society’ from 1968 to 1974. These problems, which occurred at a time of comparatively robust economic performance, were perceived by contemporaries as a crisis closely related to the economic system. This debate led to a new impetus to recast the formerly dominant quantitative-growth paradigm in terms of environmental policies and qualitative growth. It was spearheaded by critical intellectuals within the OECD Secretariat and the OECD's Committee on Science and Technology Policy, who were at the same time launching the Club of Rome. In this article I will draw out the main arguments, actors, relevant contexts and effects of this discussion to highlight some of the characteristics of the intellectual uncertainty so distinctive of this period. The author argues that a historical understanding of this ‘crisis before the crisis’ demands a broader conception of economic crisis, one that is able to grapple with the divergence of economic growth, human welfare and environmental sustainability.     

‘Europe’: What Kind of Idea?

Salman Rushdie posed the question, “What kind of idea are you?” We have borrowed his provoking question and held it up to ‘Europe.’ In this article, we suggest that ‘Europe’ cannot be primarily identified or located in terms of geographies, histories, religions, cultures or values, and that attempts to do so diminish the idea of ‘Europe.’ We also contest the vision of ‘Europe’ as a series of concentric circles emanating from Brussels and suggest that this conception indefensibly marginalizes vital portions of ‘Europe.’ We propose that, while the European Union (EU) is attempting to define core concepts of ‘Europe,’ ‘Europe's’ frontiers and borders (wherever or whatever they may be, inside or outside ‘Europe’) are actively constructing, contesting and resisting ‘Europe.’ The peripheries and perimeters are no less important than the core. On the contrary, they give substance to the idea of ‘Europe.’ Finally, we argue that ‘Europe’ can best be understood as a non-teleological construct, a narrative à la Roland Barthes. Inspired by Barthes, we propose a ‘Europe’ Theory of Classification operating at the levels of functions, actions and narration.     

‘Germanje’: Dutch empire-building in Nazi-occupied Europe

ABSTRACT

Recent historiography on Nazism has taken what has been coined ‘the imperial turn’. The key issue at stake is to what extent Germany’s expansionist policy between 1939 and 1945 could be considered a variant of the more general historical phenomenon of (modern) imperialism. Over the course of the last two decades, all sorts of continuities and parallels between traditional European colonialism and Nazi imperialism have been analysed. In these studies, a top-down approach is prevalent, concentrating on ‘Berlin’, Nazi politics and leaders. This article chooses a different perspective, bringing actors of a lower level to the fore. The focus is on the Dutch contribution to the Nazi policy of ‘Germanization’ of the occupied East. Between the summers of 1941 and 1944, over five thousand Dutch civilians voluntarily left their homeland to be employed in the so-called German occupied eastern territories. Although their contracts were often temporary, they were seen (and saw themselves) as the first group of ‘pioneers’ of a giant colonizing project. This article investigates the Dutch organizations coordinating their recruitment and employment, and zooms in on the expectations and experiences of individual recruits. With the Dutch case as an example, the article points at the broader historical context of the Dutch efforts. At the same time, it shows that this junior partner of the German had his own colonial agenda. The incompatibility of both agendas inevitably led to false expectations, caused a general sense of disillusionment on both sides and led to many frictions ‘on the spot’.     

‘Green cities’ going greener? Local environmental policy-making and place branding in the ‘Greenest City in Europe’

A growing number of cities around the world have taken advantage of their green image of the purpose of place branding. In the research literature, it is suggested that these practices are motivated by place-based competition over financial and social capital, combined with more holistic motives of sustainable urban development. However, although an increasing number of green cities are engaged in place branding, few studies have researched the impact of place branding on environmental policy-making in a city, building up to the question: how is local environmental policy-making affected by green place branding? Addressing this issue, this paper critically investigates how the continuity of local environmental policy-making is affected by place-branding practices. To tackle this task, the paper firstly develops an analytical framework aiming to understand how green cities emerge and become famous based on their policy-making. Secondly, using that framework, this paper present an in-depth case study of a city branding itself as the ‘Greenest City in Europe’. Drawing on the growing body of work on green cities, this paper investigates the ‘understudied’ practice of using policy for the purpose of place branding as well as the impact of place branding ‘on the environment’.     

‘Now’, ‘now’, ‘even now’: temporal deixis and the crisis of the present in some Northern Irish poems of the Troubles

The problem of how to describe and account for the present can be identified as a particular preoccupation of poets of the so-called Northern Irish renaissance. This article examines how the temporal deictic ‘now’ functions in some well-known poems by Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon. All three poets explore how to combine the plausibility of lyric derived from an individual consciousness with the authority of narrative derived from social interactions. This article will do three related things. First, it will argue that discussing ‘now’ as a temporal deictic enables us to appreciate the full ambiguity and complexity of some poems written at the height of the Northern Irish Troubles. Second, the article will argue that these poems reveal that ‘now’ actually functions in poetry more complexly than some theorists of deixis have allowed. Finally, the article will suggest newly fruitful ways of combining literary stylistics with more conventional close reading.     

Cape Verdean women on the move: ‘Immigration shopping’ in Italy and Europe

The central theme of this article is the notion that migrants ‘shop’ for opportunities of work, income and social advantages in different countries. Taking the case of Cape Verdean women migrants, the research is based on 25 in‐depth interviews carried out with domestic workers in Rome and Rotterdam. I explore ways in which these women have negotiated mobility, employment and family and household responsibilities within the context of a largely independent female migration which is well established from Cape Verde. Italy has a nodal role in channelling mobility from Cape Verde to various destinations in the global Cape Verdean diaspora. But while opportunities for stable employment as domestic workers in Italy have been a constant factor encouraging Cape Verdean women to migrate to Italy, difficulties over pay, working conditions, welfare and family reunion have led to much onward movement to the Netherlands and elsewhere.