Post-Imperial and Post-Socialist Legacies in today’s populisms in Eastern Europe

In line with the GWZO Leitthema, "Cultural change and social order", the workshop examines the changes in political cultures and structures in East Central Europe against the background of transregional upheavals and developments in politics and society. The workshop focuses on populism as a global phenomenon with strongly context-bound features. The topic of the workshop is also closely linked to the research area of the  GWZO department “Entanglements and Globalization” and the GWZO junior research group “Contrasting Eastern Europe”.

Populism has become a supra-regional phenomenon leading researchers to re-evaluate the positioning of national societies and regions in globalization processes. The variety of populisms that can be observed in East Central Europe tend to re-establish national societies with an emphasis on isolation against immigration and to reconstruct a criticism against a globalization that is perceived as neoliberal.

The re-interpretation of national and regional socio-historical processes of the post-imperial and post-socialist times combines with criticism to the response of West to global crisis, resulting in a geopolitical repositioning of East Central Europe as a historical region between Russia and the West, and with regard to other regions of the world.

With a comparative and contextualizing approach, the workshop aims at examining the ways in which historical legacies combine with the witnessed rise of populist movements and parties in the Visegrad societies, Croatia and Ukraine. In some cases (i.e. PiS in Poland, Fidesz in Hungary) populism links with Eurosceptic and “anti-imperialist” themes. The event is developed with an intraregional orientation that compares case studies, offering an approach to establish a transregional comparison with case studies from other parts of the world, so to contribute to the understanding of populism as global phenomenon.

The research work of The Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) focuses on the region between the Baltic Sea, Black Sea and Adriatic Sea from the Early Middle Ages to the present. Research scholars from different humanities disciplines investigate peculiarities, changes and interrelationships in an increasingly global world and make past and current developments in Eastern Europe easier to understand. The wide geographical range of the GWZO research programme requires a specific research approach linking comparative studies, interdisciplinarity and transnationality as well as including the complete historical profundity of the region from the passage of the ancient to the medieval world up to the present time.

www.uni-leipzig.de/gwzo

Venue

This is an online event. To participate in the event "Post-Imperial and Post-Socialist Legacies in today’s populisms in Eastern Europe" on December 14, 2021, please register at the following link:

https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcrcu6hrTwjHN1etizZfS8QzNz63J_nJ_N-  

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information about attending the meeting.

Concept and Coordination

Hana Rydza (GWZO Junior Research Group “Contrasting East-Central Europe”)

Paolo Zucconi (Research Institute for Social Cohesion - FGZ, Leipzig)

Organization

Ines Rößler (GWZO, Department “Knowledge Transfer and Networking“) ines.roessler@leibniz-gwzo.de