Le Centre Marc Bloch sera représenté au 4e Congrès européen d´Histoire mondiale et globale qui se déroule du 4 au 7 septembre 2014 à l'Ecole Normale Supérieure à Paris et dont le thème principal est Rencontres, Circulations, Conflits. La question de l'opposition entre centres et périphéries, cruciale dans la recherche en histoire, sera au cœur des problématiques. Le congrès se conçoit comme un espace de discussion sur le sens et la pertinence des relations, comparaisons, transferts et implications entre les États, les communautés et les individus, ainsi que sur les effets destructeurs d'une connectivité globale dans le long terme.
Le nouveau directeur adjoint du Centre Marc Bloch, Emmanuel Droit, organise le samedi 6 septembre entre 9h et 15h30 un double panel consacré à une approche transnationale du Bloc de l'Est comme espace de rencontres, d'échanges et de circulations, entre identités nationales et internationalisme prolétarien.
Ce double panel dont la modération est assurée par Nadège Ragaru (Sciences Po Paris) réunit des historiens français et allemands ainsi que la sociologue française Martine Mespoulet (Université de Nantes). Sandrine Kott, Professeur d'histoire contemporaine à l'Université de Genève et chercheuse associée au Centre Marc Bloch ainsi que deux anciens doctorants passés par le Centre Marc Bloch, Michel Christian et Simon Godard, participent à cette manifestation.
Ce panel constitue de surcroît une nouvelle occasion de développer une coopération scientifique avec le Centre de Recherches historiques du Temps Présent de Potsdam (Jens Gieseke) mais aussi l'Institut Historique Allemand de Varsovie (Jens Boysen) et l'Institut pour l'étude des régimes totalitaires de Prague (Muriel Blaive).
Présentation du panel
Abstract
The term "Eastern Bloc" belongs to the vocabulary of the Cold War and since its beginning there have been several approaches towards analysing the region concerned. The first approach consisted in considering these countries principally as the result of the violent diffusion of the political, economic, social and cultural model of Stalinism between 1947 and 1953. For many observers, especially in the 1950’s, the creation of the Cominform in 1947, the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance in 1949 (CMEA), and finally the Warsaw Pact in 1955 were all evidences of the homogeneity of the Eastern Bloc. This approach tends to explain the stability of the Eastern Bloc by a permanent Soviet coercion that was made possible by the domination of the different socialist "party-states" – as Soviet ‘transmission belts’ – on societies. In this perspective, East and Central European countries were nothing but a "kidnapped West" (Milan Kundera). A second approach was developed at the beginning of the 1960s, when socialist regimes unexpectedly turned out to be stable in the long run. Western political scientists began identifying national variations of “real socialism” and thus questioning the homogeneity of the Eastern Bloc. Especially since 1989 they showed with archive support that the so-called "Eastern Bloc" was not so monolithic and that the official friendship between "brother countries", imposed by the Soviet “big brother”, masked real national tensions that were due to current interests but also to historical legacies. This research trend also showed that the Eastern Bloc although it was a politically closed space was also subject to Western influences in various fields. Here, however, any coherence between these states tended to be neglected. As a consequence, until the end of the 2000’s, studies on communism showed little interest for the transnational dimensions of the “Eastern Bloc”, such as processes of circulations and transfers. Instead, they favoured a national approach articulated with a totalitarian interpretation. In contrast, this panel, drawing on the results of the mentioned two approaches and dealing critically with them, favours a transnational perspective on the “Socialist camp”. We contend that it cannot be simply understood as a number of national states and that the totalitarian interpretation is not suitable for explaining how transnational relations may have developed through the agency of many individuals both inside and outside the state and party apparatuses. Here, it is suggested that the “East” did after all have, independently from the hollow rhetoric of “proletarian internationalism”, real and (to a point) functioning transnational communities that should be seen as elements of cohesion and stabilization. Addressing different fields (the security organs like political police and army, the state parties, the intellectual and economical elites, etc.), the goal of this panel is to pay attention to interactions both at the level of institutions and through “people-to-people contacts”, the circulations of knowledge, ideas, know-how and technologies. The transnational scale is understood not as a practice of history "above ground", but rather as a dialectical movement between different levels of analysis (from local to transnational through the national one). This set of scales can be used in a number of areas to study the cooperation and crystallization process of a possible transnational professional culture common to different kind of collective actors.
Convenor
NadègeRagaru (Science Po, Paris) tbc
Chair
Emmanuel Droit (University Rennes 2)
Commentators
Sandrine Kott (University of Geneva)
Muriel Blaive (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights, Vienna)
Jens Gieseke (Center for Contemporary History Potsdam)
Panelists
Jens Boysen (German Historical Institute, Warsaw)
Michel Christian (LAHRHA/ Institut des Sciences de l'Homme)
Emmanuel Droit (University Rennes 2)
Simon Godard (University of Geneva)
Martine Mespoulet (University of Nantes)
Venue: Amphithéâtre Rataud, 45 rue d'Ulm - NIR 1st basement
