Religious, Class, and National Solidarity and Conflict in the Eastern European-Ottoman Borderlands, 1848-1939

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel probes the intersections of religion, class, and nationality across the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Eastern European-Ottoman borderlands. Centering case studies in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Poland, it asks how these three forces shaped the political trajectories of diverse regions subject to similar forces—including the emergence of modern nationalisms and the global socialist movement—and where they were instrumentalized (or could not be instrumentalized) against each other. First, Victor Taki addressed the criticisms of liberal constitutionalism in post-1859 Romania and the projects of the Balkan and Danubian confederations as alternatives to a small nation-state squeezed between three empires. Articulated by a “dissident” representative of Romania’s 1848 revolutionary generation, both themes serve as entry points into an intellectual counterhistory of modern liberalism, nationalism, and the Eastern Question. Next, Denis Vovchenko interrogates church responses to ethnic violence stemming from competing nationalist claims and the diminishment of Ottoman authority. In so doing, Vovchenko raises new questions on the autonomy of ecclesiastical authorities often assumed to have been agents of their respective states. Kayhan Nejad then interrogates the mobilization of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) in the Caucasus, where socialist revolutionaries sought to negotiate their pursuit of class liberation with the more pressing need to stem exclusionary and genocidal currents emanating from the Ottoman Empire. In response to the Bolshevik Revolution and early Soviet attempts at exporting socialism over the course of the next decade, the Orthodox churches in Eastern Europe and the Balkans sought to stifle Communist Party mobilization, in part by courting the sympathies of workers inclined toward socialism. Ionut Biliuta concludes this panel by interrogating these efforts in Poland and the Balkans, asking how various Orthodox Churches, acting in unison across borders against Soviet expansion, demonstrated a remarkable degree of operational autonomy from their respective state governments.

Sub Unit

• History: 1900-1945

Chair

• Tomasz Hen-Konarski, Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland) / HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities (Hungary)

Papers

• Fuel on the Fire?: Orthodox Church Reactions to the Guerrilla War in Macedonia and the Pogroms in Russia, 1905-1908 - Denis V. Vovchenko, Northeastern State U

• Armenian Revolutionaries’ Anti-Tsarist Mobilization in Northern Iran and the South Caucasus, 1912-1914 - Kayhan Aryan Nejad, U of Oklahoma

• After Empire: Michel Anagnosti’s Conservative and Confederative Critique of the Romanian Nation-State - Victor Taki, Concordia U (Canada)

Discussants

• Przemysław Pazik, HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities (Hungary) / U of Warsaw (Poland)

• Wiktor Marzec, U of Warsaw (Poland)/New Europe College, Bucharest