Conflict regions in Eastern Europe

In addition to the current Ukraine-Russia crisis, the project network analyzes the history and present of other conflict regions in Eastern Europe. Which actors and media construct conflicts? How do the conflicts manifest themselves? What dynamics characterize the course of conflicts and how should competing interpretations be evaluated?

The researchers are investigating these and other questions in a total of 12 postdoctoral and doctoral projects. The focus is on “Conflict regions in Eastern Europe” and the research projects are deliberately thematically broad and interdisciplinary. The fields of Eastern European history, Slavic studies, Turkish studies, political science and sociology are involved in the project, which dynamics characterize the course of conflicts and how should competing interpretations be evaluated?

The qualification projects are accompanied by a transfer project that provides for numerous high-profile measures such as media partnerships, East-West tandem authorships and East-West dialog symposia. Here, knowledge is offered as interpretative knowledge for politics and the media. The LOEWE focus makes use of the new digital communication possibilities and supports reflection on the competing interpretations in East and West through corresponding teaching measures in the international project network.

The ongoing research is also significant with regard to the fact that this LOEWE focus will give the Leibniz Research Alliance “Crises in a Globalized World” and the expertise on Eastern Europe, which is already strongly represented both in the Leibniz Association and at the University of Giessen, a new quality and can lead to further project initiatives.

Subproject leader: PD Dr. Christian Lotz
Editing: Adrian Mitter M.A., Dorá Hollstein

To this day, placing a conflict region under international control is accompanied by the expectation that existing confrontations will not escalate further and that long-term peace will be achieved. After World War I, the actors in the League of Nations, founded in 1920, also expected that the dispute between Poles and Germans over the city of Danzig could be resolved in this way. Until now, research has primarily focused on the ideological and propagandistic confrontations over Danzig's national affiliation to the German or Polish state and the League of Nations' strategies for defusing them. In contrast, governance concepts on the German, Polish, and international sides with regard to the practical challenges for transport, trade, economy, and ecology of the Free City of Danzig between the world wars have received little attention. The subproject therefore uses Danzig as an example to (a) explore the relationship between local, national, and transnational scope for action and governance concepts, and (b) analyze the interplay of political, economic, and ecological factors in the escalation or de-escalation of the conflict.
 
The subproject focuses on the Free City of Danzig, a narrowly defined area, so that it can analyze the intertwining of local and transnational elements. It is the only subproject to deal with the League of Nations, an international organization that existed before 1945 and whose achievements, but also failures, had a decisive influence on the establishment of similar organizations after the Second World War and their demands on the performance of various governance concepts. Finally, it broadens the spatial perspective by not only examining another region, but also considering the interrelationships with other European and non-European regions through Gdańsk's trade relations.

Subproject leader: PD Dr. Heidi Hein-Kircher
Research assistant: Vera Volkmann, M.A. 

This dissertation project analyzes the effects of the founding of the Latvian nation state as a political turning point on minorities and their loyalty, as well as their interactions with state minority policy at the local and regional levels, using the examples of the cities of Daugavpils and Aizpute. The two cities belong to two different regions of Latvia, Latgale and Courland, which were historically part of different states and therefore had different minority situations and developed specific traditions. It is interesting to see how loyalties were reshaped under changing political and social conditions, thereby altering the relationships between ethnic and religious groups at the local level as well as the mutual relationships between minorities and the state. The question of loyalty is particularly exciting because it is directly related to changes in the social and political status of groups during periods of radical change, such as the founding of a nation state, and the emergence of competing loyalties and demands for loyalty. Furthermore, unlike “identity,” the term is less emotionally charged and can be better measured in terms of the behavior of individual groups and the relationship between minorities and the state. The relationship of minorities to the state, to the “majority population,” to other minorities, to their co-national state, and within various social, political, and religious groups of minorities must be examined. Through a detailed classification in the overall historical context and a comparison of two cities with different conditions, changes in loyalty, but also conflict situations, can be explored in greater detail.

Subproject leader: Dr. Anna Veronika Wendland
Editing: Irena Remestwenski, M.A., Anastasiia Lytvynenko

Conflicts over the interpretation of Ukrainian history have accompanied the country's recent and contemporary history since the establishment of the modern Ukrainian national movement. Due to the long-standing affiliation of Ukrainian territories with the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, these conflicts have always involved the interpretation of the intertwined history of Ukraine and Russia. Certain forms of historical memory in the field of tension between Ukrainian and Russian history have been privileged depending on political constellations and the associated integration projects, while others have been discriminated against. Historical-political controversies about Ukraine's role in a Russian-dominated Eurasia or in a newly defined European space also fuel geopolitical discourses about the persistence of global cultural lines of conflict in Eastern Europe.

 With regard to the task of providing interpretative knowledge about the mechanisms of the genesis of conflict areas in Eastern Europe, the subproject formulates two working hypotheses about the role of historical politics in the generation of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict area. These are to be tested empirically and systematically.
Hypothesis 1 states that historical-political conflicts in the Ukrainian-Russian discourse are grouped around certain fields of historical terminology that act as condensers and markers for controversial content. These, in turn, often refer to different concepts of political integration.

These include 1) the mutually influential but also conflicting imperial self-concepts of the Little Russians (maloross) in the 19th century and the Soviet people in the 20th century, as well as the national-cultural self-concept of the Ukrainians,
2) Ukrainian statehood and territoriality in the field of tension between the attempt at nation statehood (1917-1920), Soviet Ukraine (1922-1991), and independence since 1991,
3) the experiences of war and violence from 1930 to 1945 in the tension between victim/perpetrator, resistance/collaboration (with reference to the Nazi occupation), and liberation/occupation (with reference to the restoration of Soviet rule), and
4) the Soviet Ukrainian experience since 1945 as modernization vs. Russification.

Hypothesis 2 is based on the assumption that political actors use such controversial areas either with the aim of participating in political power or with that of retaining power, adapting them to their own purposes and enriching them. The aim is to provide historical interpretative knowledge about political fault lines between Ukraine and Russia.

Subproject leader: Prof. Dr. Peter Haslinger
Researchers: Dr. Eszter Gantner (until August 2019), Dr. Tatsiana Astrouskaya (from April 2020), Iryna Dolnytska

Even today, we find numerous examples in Eastern Europe of the dynamic intertwining of political, interethnic, and memory-related conflicts. In these conflicts, minority issues are negotiated alongside competing interpretations of historical developments and foreign and geopolitical orientations. The subproject therefore aims to examine how, under the conditions of a changed scientific and media landscape, the representation of the past of conflict regions can be captured in scientific literature and in popular historical accounts. This should clarify for the overall purpose of the LOEWE focus how interpretive knowledge is provided and positioned in the media in cross-border dialogue situations and negative interrelationships. Mass media contexts (newspapers, television, Internet sources) will also be included for some representative examples.

The project focuses on three regions, namely western Ukraine, Transylvania, and southern Slovakia, which have the following characteristics: