Introduction: The experience
of total wars and world
revolutions
Csaba Szaló
Changing Political and Social Identities ...
26.2.2009 10:00
Classical sociological and anthropological
approaches:
The construction of collective identity is either naturally given or
historically formed.
Collective identity is an independent ontological reality
Collective identity is secondary to power relations
The perspective of cultural sociology
The construction of collective identity constitutes a basic
component of social life, like power or economic relations.
The social construction of boundaries
The social construction of trust and solidarity among the
members of collectivity
Seminar reading
Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes (Vintage, 1996) pp.
21-53
The context
Total wars and the cold war
World Revolution:
political, social, cultural
Economic Crisis and the fall of Liberalism
The end of Empires: Third world
The imperative of modernization
The Age of Total War
The society of C19 crumpled in the flames of a 31 years world
war.
From July 1914 to August 1945 Europe was in war. The period
between 1918-1938 was not really a peace. Europe lived and
thought in terms of war in this period, too.
Discontinuity experienced in Central Europe (see Joseph Roth)
The trauma of the WW I
See Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire
German Blitzkrieg as a necessary strategy was blocked and
the front became a massacre machine
Soldiers lived like rats, parapets, barbed wire, machine guns
(Ernst Junger: "hurricane of steel")
Verdun, 1916 February-July 2 mil. Men battle 1 mil. Died
60000 Brits died on 1th day.
Cultural consequences
The experience of massacres helped to brutalize both warfare
and politics
The shared experience of living with death created two
"incommunicable" identities
A sense of meaninglessness and hatred of the war
A sense of courage and superiority to women and those who
not fought
A penal peace: the Treaty of Versailles
Making the world safe from social revolution
The support of anti-Bolshevik nationalist local elites
Re-mapping Europe after the collapse of the Russian, Habsburg
and Ottoman Empires
Creation of de jure nation-states which were de facto
multinational states and multi ethno-linguistic societies
Fascist movements
The mobilization of masses
Reclassifying victims to superiors
Total transformation of society: adaptation of revolutionary
rhetoric
The resentment of the little men
Anti-modernism and pro-technology
The World Revolution
Belief in universal emancipation and in the alternative path of
modernization
Russia: vast, rural, pre-industrial country
The avant-garde of professional revolutionaries
Unconditional loyalty as alternative to mass parties
Urban intellectuals