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The revision of the history – European and worldwide – of what Hobsbawm called ‘The Short Twentieth Century’ (1914-1991) by means of equating Communism to Nazism has an impact on European integration in terms of fuelling nationalisms and the geostrategic conflict between the West – mainly the US –...
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The Balkan Peninsula has played a special role in Europe’s political imagination. For the greater part of contemporary history this region figured as a kind of barbaric wasteland. Barbaric in the original sense of the word, that is, of people speaking incomprehensible languages. Beyond this...
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Notes from a Gender History Perspective on the Current Debates Around Male Immigrant Attitudes Towards Women
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What is ecosocialism?
Ecosocialism is a political current based on an essential insight: that the preservation of the ecological equilibrium of the planet and therefore of an environment favourable to living species – including our own – is incompatible with the expansive and destructive logic of...
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Contemporary assumptions about democracy are still darkly shadowed by the whole process of post-Communist transition since 1989. In that Eastern European context, the prospects for democracy were thought to rest not on popular participation, but on two types of restructuring: one affecting the...
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Globalisation is increasingly influencing us. On the one side, it opens up new forms of a networked internet civilisation; on the other side, it entails irresolvable contradictions. The events of the recent period show that today, both for the West and for Russian society, it is not the challenge of...
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At the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the left in Europe is in such a state that it seems to have come to the end of a long history. Split up between different components, it appears to be headed for extinction. Not only observers but also some governmental representatives...
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The undermining of commodity production began one hundred years ago with a qualitative leap in the manipulation of market and consumption by corporations. No anti-cartel legislation can touch the market power of the largest capitals. Today the market does not primarily stimulate effectiveness but...
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Preparing for the year 2014 gave historians a lot of work to do. The centenary of the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 called forth many books on the character, origins, and consequences of this explosion of violence when the ‘lamps were going out all over Europe’. The war put an...
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On 24 March transform!europe organised a debate on the ‘European House of History’ (HEH) project in order to elaborate critical approaches to the public use of history and particularly the creation of HEH decided on and funded by the European Parliament in 2009 with the explicit aim of constituting...
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The following text is taken from the manuscript of Eric Hobsbawm’s opening address to the international conference organised by Espaces Marx on the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto and held at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in 1998. The text was subsequently included in slightly revised versions in books published in France, Germany and the UK. We thank Hinrich Kuhl for his support.
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In the discussion of an alternative economic order the terms “producers’ democracy” and “workers’ self-management” are inseparably bound up with the “Yugoslav experiment”. The “Third Way” of Yugoslav socialism acted as an important point of reference in the debates of the international left. When...
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In autumn 2008 the world experienced a financial crash, which brought the financial markets to the outer edge of collapse. Then peace returned (or more accurately: organised pacification), until another issue gave new cause for worry. Now it was the nation-states – because they (allegedly or really)...
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Between the end of feudalism and a future society, the bourgeois epoch is spread out like a battlefield on which everything is civic and cosy so long as the countries, between military wars, can revel in mere financial wars and economic crises.
Happily, the much vaunted bourgeoisie has lost its...
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On the background of this year’s 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution Jiří Dolejš contemplates the role of revolutionary turmoil and its impact on the human society as well as the requirements under which a real change can be achieved.
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After a long quarantine, “revolution” is back as a topic of historiographical debate. The upcoming anniversary of 1917 – arguably one of, if not the most momentous event of the 20th century – has further fuelled this renewed interest.
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Geoff Eley, Professor for Contemporary History at the University of Michigan, speaks of the crisis of hegemony and the crisis of representation, produced by the dislocations and de-legitimisations of the processes of capitalist restructuring and class recomposition. He also analyses the Left's challenges and the right's responses in addressing this dual crisis.
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The 51st ITH Conference (24-26 September 2015) investigates the topic of “work and non-work” in an interdisciplinary perspective, in particular, from the point of view of the political construction of work and non-work.
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On Friday, 14 February 2014, the AKADEMIA Network of transform! europe organised a workshop about the history of Europe. This workshop was a follow-up to the founding meeting organised in April 2013, which brought together historians working with various member organisations of our network and was supported by MEP Marie-Christine Vergiat from the GUE/NGL Group (Front de Gauche, France).
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The International Conference of Labour and Social History (ITH), Austria, announces the 50th Linz Conference, 25-28 Sept. 2014.
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On 24 March 2013, transform! europe organised a workshop with historians who collaborate with the member foundations of the network. The central question was how to elaborate critical approaches to the public usages of history and, more particular, vis-à-vis the creation of the House of European History (HEH), established by the European Parliament in 2009 with the explicit aim to constitute a public European identity.
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He survived the “short 20th century” by more than two decades. Eric J. Hobsbawm had been one of the great thinkers that past century gave birth to. By profession a historian, he was a story-teller and historical philosopher at the same time who practised historiography as social history. In the...
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New Journal on Labour and Social Conflicts