Ramparts of the Nation? National armies and State- and Nation-Building in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, 1918–1938

Anotace přednášky:

The presentation is part of a larger project looking at the role of national armies in state- and nation-building in Southeastern and East-Central Europe in three critical post-conflict and post-imperial periods, namely, Southeastern Europe after the Russo-Turkish war (from 1878), Central Europe after the First World War (from 1918), and Finland and the Baltic states after the Russian civil war (from 1921).

The paper will focus on the national armies in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia in the interwar period, and it will interrogate the space between intention and historical reality. In interwar Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia the intention of political and military elites vis-à-vis the creation of national armies was clear: to create institutions not just of national defence but also as vehicles of institutional consolidation and of nation-building - primarily through the creation of a professional officer corps and through universal conscription. The reality was quite different: officer corps did not fully integrate and seriously unbalanced civil-military relations in favour of the latter. Universal conscription did not serve as a ‘school of the nation’ but was in practice resented and resisted by significant parts of the population. The paper will analyse these failures and ask if and how they contributed to the dramatically different political trajectories taken by Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia in the interwar period.

Přednáší John Paul Newman (Maynooth University). Seminář proběhne v angličtině.

Semináře se konají v sídle MÚA na adrese Gabčíkova 10, Praha 8, v konferenčním sále v suterénu budovy B a jsou kromě pracovníků ústavu bezplatně přístupné také dalším zájemcům.