0604778 - ÚSP 2025 RIV DE eng M - Část monografie knihy
Agha, P. - Géryk, Jan
Introduction: Political Imaginaries in Central and Eastern European Modernity.
Political Imagination and Utopian Energies in Central and Eastern Europe. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2024 - (Agha, P.; Géryk, J.), s. 7-36. ISBN 978-3-631-88728-8
Institucionální podpora: RVO:68378122
Klíčová slova: Central and Eastern Europe * modernity * political imagination * utopias * centre-periphery relations
Obor OECD: Law

The introduction of the collective volume maps the spectrum of political imagination in the modern and contemporary history of Central and Eastern Europe. It begins with characterizing modernity as having the future as a dominant temporality. Modern opening of the future, enabled to a considerable extent by the Enlightenment rationalism, brought with itself not only new ways of utopian energies, but also new social cleavages. Modern history of Central and Eastern Europe witnessed a particularly strong tension between imported/state-centered/artificial and local/society-centered/organicist, the latter being a significant anti-utopian force in the region. With the beginning of the 20th century, the notion of the progressive evolution of society was supplemented by the scientific control of society as a means of achieving it. Such an imagination was present in both Western democracies and Communist regimes in the 20th century. In the Communist bloc, especially the post-Stalinist period from 1956 to 1968 was characteristic by innovations in thinking about society and societal steering. However, the year 1968, with the Warsaw pact troops invading Czechoslovakia, is characterized as a symbol of the fall of utopias. Since then, large collective projects have been replaced by the individualist utopia of human rights. After the fall of Communism in 1989, the political landscape of Central and Eastern Europe follows the historical experiences of the region. The main imaginaries of the time were the neoliberal one connected with the project of European Union, but also, on the other hand, the anti-establishment one, criticizing a lack of responsiveness of European elites. The centre-periphery dichotomy strengthens in such a constellation with Central and Eastern Europe representing (semi-) periphery. The examples of the centre-periphery tension were present during the process of implementation and enforcement of the EU’s rule of law policies, with the populist imaginary being a counter-power in this process. In addition to all of this, there is an ongoing project of making both Central European and European identity, both with the traumatic experiences of the Holocaust and Stalinism still in the background. All these introductory thoughts are complemented by the paragraphs describing the particular chapters from the collective volume.
Trvalý link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0362275