[KS] CfP "The Vanguard of Class and Nation"

[Lee, Kyonghee]

Dear colleagues,


We are currently inviting historians of East Asian political history or political thought to send in chapter proposals for an edited volume, as part of a research project on broader Eurasian history at Heidelberg University. You will find detailed information on the planned volume, titled "The Vanguard of Class and Nation: Parties as Governments in Eurasia, 1920s-1990s", here:

https://www.hsozkult.de/event/id/termine-42827


The focus is on one-party regimes and specifically on parties as new organizations which take over state functions and replace state institutions. Modernization is hence important not per se but as justification for the takeover and as the main program claim. The issue of nation-building (including multi-ethnic nations) through the party is also of great interest, especially since class rhetoric was either secondary to nationalism from the onset (for instance, in Korea) or the collective political subject, allegedly represented by the party, was extended to include the whole population (for instance, the USSR).

The global and comparative aspects are also very important. In the discussions of the 1900s-1910s in Eurasia, which we explored together with colleagues working on the Russian, Qing, and Ottoman Empires, the liberal approach to post-imperial and post-colonial transformations predominated, with parliaments and constitutions being key to political modernization. This changed, however, very quickly and already in the 1920s a number of parties (which started as elements of the constitutional parliamentary designs) started claiming the whole states (again, the Soviet Union, China, and Turkey have striking similarities). In all cases of one-party regimes, however, nominal constitutions and parliaments were in place, which means that these novel (for Eurasian contexts) institutions were seen as necessary for legitimizing the parties' claims to modernization. The parties themselves often included assemblies as the supreme bodies, replicating parliamentarism, but these assemblies also became nominal in most cases. The genres would hence be intellectual, conceptual, and political history.

We want to take the concept of the ruling party outside of national histories and area studies. The dominant narrative focuses on Eastern Europe and still has an idea of the end of story in 1989-1991, which is obviously not the case. We are not excluding the USSR and Eastern Europe but do not want to make them the main area, as most comparative histories of political parties do.

Ideally, the paper would cover a period after WWII in South or North Korea, as well as China and / or Taiwan.


Best regards,

Kyonghee Lee

Project Member, ERC Project "Entangled Parliamentarisms: Constitutional Practices in Russia, Ukraine, China and Mongolia, 1905-2005," Department of History, University of Heidelberg, https://www.uni-heidelberg.de/fakultaeten/philosophie/zegk/erc-project/Index.html


Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies

Voßstr. 2, Building 4400

Room 008

69115 Heidelberg

Germany

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