The Practice of Socialist Internationalism


Book Description

How did the early-twentieth century socialist parties of Britain, France, and Germany cooperate with each other to create a united vision on international issues? Talbot Imlay offers a new perspective on how European socialists 'practised internationalism', addressing issues such as post-war reconstruction, European integration, and decolonization.




Empire of Friends


Book Description

The familiar story of Soviet power in Cold War Eastern Europe focuses on political repression and military force. But in Empire of Friends, Rachel Applebaum shows how the Soviet Union simultaneously promoted a policy of transnational friendship with its Eastern Bloc satellites to create a cohesive socialist world. This friendship project resulted in a new type of imperial control based on cross-border contacts between ordinary citizens. In a new and fascinating story of cultural diplomacy, interpersonal relations, and the trade of consumer-goods, Applebaum tracks the rise and fall of the friendship project in Czechoslovakia, as the country evolved after World War II from the Soviet Union's most loyal satellite to its most rebellious. Throughout Eastern Europe, the friendship project shaped the most intimate aspects of people's lives, influencing everything from what they wore to where they traveled to whom they married. Applebaum argues that in Czechoslovakia, socialist friendship was surprisingly durable, capable of surviving the ravages of Stalinism and the Soviet invasion that crushed the 1968 Prague Spring. Eventually, the project became so successful that it undermined the very alliance it was designed to support: as Soviets and Czechoslovaks got to know one another, they discovered important cultural and political differences that contradicted propaganda about a cohesive socialist world. Empire of Friends reveals that the sphere of everyday life was central to the construction of the transnational socialist system in Eastern Europe—and, ultimately, its collapse.




Internationalisms


Book Description

This book offers a new view of the twentieth century, placing international ideas and institutions at its heart.




Internationalism and Nationalism in European Political Thought


Book Description

The political history of modern Europe may be seen in terms of continuous interaction between rivalling forms of internationalism and diverse kinds of nationalism. This book distinguishes, analyses and presents the different kinds and varieties of internationalist and nationalist ideology that have played significant parts in the international politics of the region, particularly since the Second World War. It indicates the origins of each pattern of thought, traces its development, brings out its relationship with other strands of thought and outlines its major political influences. The emphasis is on internationalist support for and nationalist opposition to the principal regional international organizations.




Jean Jaurès


Book Description

Jean Jaurès was a towering intellectual and political leader of the democratic Left at the turn of the twentieth century, but he is little remembered today outside of France, and his contributions to political thought are little studied anywhere. In Jean Jaurès: The Inner Life of Social Democracy, Geoffrey Kurtz introduces Jaurès to an American audience. The parliamentary and philosophical leader of French socialism from the 1890s until his assassination in 1914, Jaurès was the only major socialist leader of his generation who was educated as a political philosopher. As he championed the reformist method that would come to be called social democracy, he sought to understand the inner life of a political tradition that accepts its own imperfection. Jaurès's call to sustain the tension between the ideal and the real resonates today. In addition to recovering the questions asked by the first generation of social democrats, Kurtz’s aim in this book is to reconstruct Jaurès’s political thought in light of current theoretical and political debates. To achieve this, he gives readings of several of Jaurès’s major writings and speeches, spanning work from his early adulthood to the final years of his life, paying attention to not just what Jaurès is saying, but how he says it.




Internationalist Aesthetics


Book Description

Winner, 2022 AATSEEL Best Book in Literary Studies, American Association of Teachers of Slavic and European Languages Honorable Mention, 2022 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, Modern Language Association Following the failure of communist revolutions in Europe, in the 1920s the Soviet Union turned its attention to fostering anticolonial uprisings in Asia. China, divided politically between rival military factions and dominated economically by imperial powers, emerged as the Comintern’s prime target. At the same time, a host of prominent figures in Soviet literature, film, and theater traveled to China, met with Chinese students in Moscow, and placed contemporary China on the new Soviet stage. They sought to reimagine the relationship with China in the terms of socialist internationalism—and, in the process, determine how internationalism was supposed to look and feel in practice. Internationalist Aesthetics offers a groundbreaking account of the crucial role that China played in the early Soviet cultural imagination. Edward Tyerman tracks how China became the key site for Soviet debates over how the political project of socialist internationalism should be mediated, represented, and produced. The central figure in this story, the avant-garde writer Sergei Tret’iakov, journeyed to Beijing in the 1920s and experimented with innovative documentary forms in an attempt to foster a new sense of connection between Chinese and Soviet citizens. Reading across genres and media from reportage and biography to ballet and documentary film, Tyerman shows how Soviet culture sought an aesthetics that could foster a sense of internationalist community. He reveals both the aspirations and the limitations of this project, illuminating a crucial chapter in Sino-Russian relations. Grounded in extensive sources in Russian and Chinese, this cultural history bridges Slavic and East Asian studies and offers new insight into the transnational dynamics that shaped socialist aesthetics and politics in both countries.




Architecture in Global Socialism


Book Description

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Abbreviations -- Chapter 1 Introduction Worldmaking of Architecture -- Chapter 2 A Global Development Path Accra, 1957-66 -- Chapter 3 Worlding Eastern Europe Lagos, 1966-79 -- Chapter 4 The World Socialist System Baghdad, 1958-90 -- Chapter 5 Socialism within Globalization Abu Dhabi and Kuwait City, 1979-90 -- Epilogue and Outlook -- A Note on Sources -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Image Credits.




Under the Socialist Banner


Book Description

Recent years have seen a massive growth of interest in socialism, particularly among young people. But few are fully aware of socialism 's revolutionary history. For this reason, an appreciation of the Second International--often called the "Socialist International"--during its Marxist years is particularly relevant. From 1889 to 1912 resolutions of the Second International helped disseminate and popularize a revolutionary aim: the overturn of capitalism and its replacement by the democratic rule of the working class, as a first step toward socialism. Despite weaknesses and contradictions that led to the Second International 's collapse in 1914, its resolutions during these years remain a resource for those studying the socialist movement 's history and objectives. Many of the topics dealt with--war and militarism, immigration, trade unions and labor legislation, women 's rights, colonialism, socialist strategy and tactics--remain just as relevant today. This book is the first English-language collection ever assembled of all the resolutions adopted by congresses of the Second International in its Marxist years.




Competition in Socialist Society


Book Description

This book explores how the concept of "competition", which is usually associated with market economies, operated under state socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, where the socialist system, based on command economic planning and state-centred control over society, was supposed to emphasise "co-operation", rather than competitive mechanisms. The book considers competition in a wider range of industries and social fields across the Soviet bloc, and shows how the gradual adoption and adaptation of Western practices led to the emergence of more open competitiveness in socialist society. The book includes discussion of the state’s view of competition, and focuses especially on how competition operated at the grassroots level. It covers politico-economic reforms and their impact, both overall and at the enterprise level; competition in the cultural sphere; and the huge effect of increasing competition on socialist ways of thinking.




Socialism


Book Description

Socialism as a political system may be on the wane, yet no one can doubt that its cultural legacies will make themselves felt for years to come, and on a worldwide scale. The contributors to this volume adopt a variety of anthropological approaches to illuminate changes which have removed socialists from power in many countries. Presenting detailed ethnographic accounts across a wide range of countries, they bring out the factors which have given socialism such a profound worldwide impact, including a substantial impact upon the discipline of anthropology itself. The first sustained and wide-ranging investigation of socialism by social anthropologists, this volume will enable readers to understand better how socialism has been experienced by millions of people and thereby to now better understand how they may cope with post-socialist dilemmas.