Krawall in der Zionskirche: Skinhead Violence and Political Legitimacy in the GDR
In 1987, an East Berlin punk concert was attacked by Skinheads. This event and others like it provoked sustained outcry in the German Democratic Republic in the last years of the 1980s. The political opposition transformed public outrage over Skinhead violence into broader critiques about ‘real-existing socialism’, especially by using the Western media to circumvent the state's information monopoly. Thus dialogue opened up by violence going public helped to undermine the political legitimacy of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) by giving ordinary Easterners channels to express their disappointments over state policy. In the end, the SED felt compelled to make decisions concerning state youth policy which opened up new avenues for oppositional activity, pointing to the ways in which the SED responded to momentum from below in ways which only weakened its political hegemony further. By exploring how manifestations of public violence were used to chip away at the political authority of the SED, I suggest that the ‘Krawall in der Zionskirche’ and events like it help to explain why a small dissident movement was able to spread its message of discontent much more broadly.
Quelle: http://ehq.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/45/2/336?rss=1
Becoming Dangerous: Everyday Violence in the Industrial Milieu of Late-Socialist Romania
In this article, I examine the extent to which everyday violence was a matter of public order in the 1970s and 1980s in Romania's ‘industrial milieu’. Starting from the assumption that public order is an integral part of a monopoly on the use of physical force, I analyse unexceptional, nonlethal violence because, as a borderline phenomenon with both public and private aspects, it can illuminate our understanding of the implementation of legitimating practices in late socialism. Focusing mainly on cases of violence among male workers in the 1970s in Călan, a ‘mono-industrial’ town whose economy was dominated by a metallurgical plant, I examine how everyday violence was dealt with by various institutions, including the law enforcement system (the police, prosecutors and courts), the plant administration and various levels of the party structure. In this context, everyday violence was apparently linked to the private sphere and to stereotypical male normalcy, along with alcohol consumption, and consequently it was not deemed a matter of public order. The situation changed progressively in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when, after the worker protests in Lupeni (1977) and Motru (1981), the authorities began to infer a causal link between everyday violence and protest.
Quelle: http://ehq.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/45/2/315?rss=1
Order, Reputation and Narrative: Forms of State Violence in Late Socialist Macedonia
Taking the view that micro-historical approaches augment our understanding of how sweeping societal change is experienced and enacted ‘from below’ by human actors, this paper focuses on the largely forgotten ‘Vevčani affair’ (1987–1989) to illuminate some under-examined modalities of violence in the waning years of Communist Party rule in Yugoslavia. In particular, the paper seeks to trace how physical violence by security forces against residents of Vevčani, a village in Western Macedonia, in August 1987 (as well as an earlier confrontation in May 1987) was part of a larger framework of forces, which included three other modalities of violence here defined as existential, reputational and narratival. The paper also examines the degree to which this particular dispute in the Republic of Macedonia became part of broader political battles in Yugoslavia, and how the existence of differentiated ‘publics’ within an increasingly tenuous federation operated to accelerate the dramatic changes under way in the different republics.
Quelle: http://ehq.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/45/2/295?rss=1
Containing Conflict and Enforcing Consent in Titoist Yugoslavia: The 1970 Dockworkers‘ Strike in Koper (Slovenia)
The port of Koper (It. Capodistria) in the Slovenian part of the Istrian peninsula was built in the second half of the 1950s as a socialist modernization project. In 1970, it witnessed the only violently escalating dockers’ unrest in its socialist history. Using the personal archive of Danilo Petrinja, the port's second director, which has been preserved in the Regional Archive of Koper, the author takes a micro-historical approach to this incident, and views it at the historical moment in Yugoslavia between the student protests of 1968 and the ‘Croatian spring’ of 1971. She adds a perspective on the interconnectedness of the early 1970s and the late 1980s, when social unrest was an integral part of Yugoslavia's demise. The episode of public violence in the Yugoslav border city of Koper offers proof of the multi-layered nature of explanatory tropes: the border perspective from Koper is interwoven with the perspective of Yugoslavia as a whole, and a comparison with workers’ violence in neighbouring Trieste during the same years adds yet another twist to a reassessment of the applicability of the Cold War framework to an examination of labour relations and violence.
Quelle: http://ehq.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/45/2/275?rss=1
Violence against the Antiwar Demonstrations of 1965-1968 in Yugoslavia: Political Balancing between East and West
In the 1960s, Yugoslavia faced street violence and riots during demonstrations against the Vietnam War. These protests can be understood only in the context of Yugoslav foreign policy, as they represented political balancing between East and West. The state sponsored and organized demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, events at which strong anti-American sentiments were expressed, while on the other hand the state used violence to stop such demonstrations in order to maintain its good relations with the United States. Displaying sympathy with the Vietnamese people while playing the role of America's communist ally was part of Yugoslavia's political double game, which the country had played since its break with the Soviet Union in 1948.
Quelle: http://ehq.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/45/2/255?rss=1