CREEES Professional Resources Forum

Deadline: February 15, 2025

Spaces of Negotiation in Post-imperial Orders
5 – 6 May 2025 Bucharest (Romania)

Conveners: Wiktor Marzec, Daniela-Maria Stanciu-P?sc?ri?a

The post-Versailles arrangements sanctioned the redesign of states along the burgeoning projects of national self-assertion, or allowed existing units to significantly extend their borders. Many had hopes to make these emerging states their own. However, the reality was often far from expectations. The bygone continental empires, characterised by a high level of ethnic, language and religious diversity, had sported hybrid state designs. In contrast, the new states were much more compact and aspired to the unitary sovereignty of a centralised nation state. But in fact they were actually “empires writ small”, and in lieu of diversity management initiated nationalisation efforts, trying to reduce ethnic heterogeneity through assimilation or “voluntary expulsion”. The birth of eastern European states brought about a double transformation when far-reaching democratisation coincided with forceful nation-building. These acute challenges were further intensified in composite states, emerging on the territories shaped under different empires (or their distinct parts). Such tributary regions had undergone the vast bulk of political modernisation in different imperial states. Distinct populations had been socialised institutionally in many empires, themselves state spaces with multiple legal designs. Moreover, local national movements had promoted divergent versions of incumbent national identities and visions of statehood.