Charles Explorer logo
🇬🇧

Central Europe: Ideologies and Politics (1700's - present)

Class at Faculty of Social Sciences |
JTM335

Syllabus

 Course supervisor: David L. Robbins, PhD  

Instructors: Mgr. Marcela Janíčková, prof. David L. Robbins, PhD, Blanka Maderová, PhD  

Recommended number of ECTS credits: 6   

Grading procedure:  

- midterm: 40% of the final grade

- final exam: 40% of the final grade

- presentation: 20% of the final grade

- make-up exams are possible   

Attendance:  

Two absences are permitted. If you are absent more times, you will be asked to write a paper to make up for the class(es) missed.    

COURSE CONTENT  

Session 1         Introduction 

Session 2         Lecture: Enlightenment in theory                        

Session 3        Enlightenment in practice: reforms under Maria Teresa and Joseph II

Session 4         Romanticism as a backlash against Enlightenment

Session 5         Birth of Nationalism; its growth during the Napoleonic wars 

Session 6         Czech national revival and its phases: development of language, synthesis of the Czech cultural tradition including the history of the Czechs,                       creation of works that institutionalized Czech culture and formed Czech identity.

                      Weaknesses of the Czech national revival and gradual self-critique

Session 7        Springtime of Nations in the German Confederation – consequences of German unification movement on the relations between Bohemian Czechs and Bohemian Germans.

                       Plans for revamping of Austria                         

Session 8          Aftermath of the revolution of 1848 – Francis Joseph’s and Bach’s absolutism and its erosion

                        From constitutional monarchy to Austria-Hungary; beginning of the (Czech) political life in the Austrian Empire                                                      

Session 9           Czech politics and culture in Austria-Hungary from Ausgleich to 1910’s

                       Encounter of the "national culture" with cosmopolitan modernism  

Session 10           Jews in Austria-Hungary (18th and 19th ct)  

Session 11           WWI and Czech striving for independent Czechoslovakia  

Session 12       Midterm exam

Session 13       First Czechoslovak Republic: experiment in building a pluralist society

                      State Right argument vs. right to national determination; Idea of the Czechoslovak nation state with minorities;                       geography, demographics,  political system, economic situation.                    

Session 14       Continuation: First Czechoslovak Republic: experiment in building a pluralist society  

Session 15        Attitudes of Slovaks to Czechoslovakia and Czechs: from establishment of the republic to the Munich agreement of 1938  

Session 16           Attitudes of Bohemian Germans to Czechoslovakia and Czechs in the 1920's: from refusal to acceptance, from negativism to activism.

                          Bohemian Germans in the 1930's: from autonomist goals to destruction of the First Czechoslovak Republic.  

Session 17       WWII in the Czech lands: the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia  

Session 18       Post-war changes in Central Europe and Czechoslovakia – crafting a welfare state:                         changes of the political system, expulsion and resettlement of populations, coping  with the past (retribution decrees and amnesty law), first nationalizations in the  economy.   

Session 19       Communist seizure of power in February 1948, Construction of the Communist Utopia

                         Attractions and realities of life in the communist society in the 1950's        

Session 20       Causes and the program of the Prague Spring reform movement  

Session 21       Czechoslovak experience under Normalization  

Session 22           Velvet Revolution of 1989; political transformation  

Session 23       Break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1993, establishment of the Czech Republic

                       Economic transformation and its crisis  

Session 24       European Integration  

Final Exam

Annotation

ANNOTATION

European students may have an impression that they went over the period of 17th – 20th centuries in Central Europe in great detail.

However, the purpose of the course is to provide novel interpretations of Central Europe and its dynamics.

The study of Central Europe has been misleadingly neglected in both Western Europe and the U.S. Prior to 1945, the cultural and geo-political construct of "Central Europe" comprised Germany, the (former) Hapsburg Empire (Austria, the Czech lands, Hungary, Slovenia), and Poland. After 1945, the Cold War displaced this "Central Europe" concept by redividing the continent into Communist "Eastern Europe" and non-Communist "Western Europe," Even now, decades after the end of the Cold War in 1989, the older conceptual formation of "Central Europe" has not quite been recovered as a geographic, cultural, and analytic category. Instead, we often hear about "East Central Europe" or "East Europe and the Balkans."

Yet Central Europe, through its multiculturalism, resistance to political consolidation, and other characteristic regional dynamics, has foundationally influenced the shape of 21st-century Europe.

There, in "Enlightenment" ideas were institutionalized in state structures and practices. There, ethnic nationalism arose and prospered, and from there spread continent- and world-wide. There, the practices of the paternalistic welfare state were initiated and tested. There, Marxism and Communism first provided a popular alternative to economic, political, and diplomatic exploitation by "capitalists" who through unrepresentative institutions maintained control over their states and some even over entire empires.

We shall examine the above by focusing on the Austrian Empire and interactions between the "ruling" ethnicities and the secondary ones, the division being that the language and culture of the ruling nations was the language and culture of the state (in our case German vs. Czech).

Students can also participate in the following trips at their own cost:

TRIPS

March 2 imperial castle Karlštejn and a hike in the vicinity (trip to Great America and Mexico limestone quarries)

March 15 concentration camp Terezín (day trip)

March 29 Dresden, Germany

April 5 medieval silver-mining town Kutna hora and a Bone chapel (Ossuary) in Sedlec

April 13 - 14 two/three-day trip to Southern Bohemia: medieval town of Cesky Krumlov, Cistercian monastery Golden Crown and a nice hike through the countryside

April 27 hiking trip to Bohemian Paradise (Rock town of Hruboskalsko)

May 2 - May 5 4-day trip to Vienna, capital of Austria