The Allure of Totalitarianism
The Roots, Meanings, and Political Cycles of a Concept in Central and Eastern Europe
CALL FOR PAPERS
International Conference and Workshop
Jena/Dornburg, 6–8 October 2016
The term ‘totalitarianism’ has experienced a remarkable comeback in political, historical, and
social science discourses of the last half century. Having served as a key concept in the
dissident critique of state socialist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe during the 1970s
and 1980s, the term took on new life after 1989, losing its associations with the opposition
and becoming widespread in the media and public sphere – alongside ‘nation’ and ‘the
return to Europe’ – as part of a vocabulary used to legitimize the new system. This has been
codified, too, with the terms ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘totalitarian’ being integrated into new
laws and appearing in the names of state-funded institutions. Finally, in the new millennium,
new meanings – half-derogatory, half-ironic – have emerged. The term has been adopted,
for instance, by some civil rights organizations as a label for criticizing the mass surveillance
of citizens as practiced by both state and commercial entities (i.e. ‘chip totalitarianism’). In
the international arena the term is used increasingly to criticize the global spread of religious
fundamentalisms; and in the form of ‘inverted totalitarianism’ it is regularly directed at the
‘managed democracies’ at home.
This planned conference aims to investigate the roots, meanings, and political cycles of the
concept of totalitarianism, one of the most contested intellectual concepts in the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries. A proper history of it, one that would combine the analysis of the
types of political projects described by the term with reflections on its changing semantics
and political uses, has yet to be written. The Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena hereby invites scholars
to a workshop dedicated to the attempt to do the first step in such an endeavor. Invited
speakers at the conference include, for instance, Dietrich Beyrau, Holly Case, Georgiy
Kasianov, Lutz Niethammer, Jacques Rupnik, Dariusz Stola, and Aviezer Tucker. A collective
volume based on the gathering is planned.
The project draws on a series of lectures held at the Imre Kertész Kolleg in 2013. Titled
“Dependent Totalitarianism,” the series sought to explore the meanings, contexts, roots, and
uses of the concept and slogan of totalitarianism in the respective cultures of Central and
Eastern Europe.
In an attempt to historicize the concept, the organizers propose that the conference be
arranged in a handful of chronologically and conceptually defined panels. However, paper
proposals that go beyond this schema are also encouraged.
I. On Novelties and Similarities: Early Concepts of Totalitarianism in Central and
Eastern Europe
Many have noted the fundamental novelty of the political experiments of the early
twentieth century. This panel focuses on the pioneers in the region, who were the first to
discuss the innovative nature of the communist, fascist, and National Socialist movements
and regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. How were these movements and regimes, their
agendas and realities, perceived in the interwar period and during the Second World War?
How and by what theoretical or ideological references (forced modernization, authoritarian
political cultures, backwardness etc.) do these theories explain the phenomenon of
totalitarianism? Who were the first intellectuals in Central and Eastern Europe to compare
the different forms of totalitarianism and what were their intentions and conclusions? In
what ways did critical reflections on these new regimes influence the understanding of
modernity prior to 1945?
II. Stalinization, De-Stalinization, and the Problems of Totalitarianism: Central and
Eastern Europe in the Early Postwar Period
As a consequence of the Second World War, Central and Eastern Europe became part of the
Soviet sphere of influence, with political and socioeconomic systems of the Stalinist type
being introduced by local communist parties on the road to absolute power. This panel
explores the heuristic validity of the notion of ‘dependent totalitarianism’ as well as the
contemporaneous usage of the notion of ‘communist totalitarianism,’ or ‘totalism,’ as a
discursive tool in local political conflicts. What role did these unsuccessful struggles against
the communists play in developing the concept during the semi-democratic period of 1945–
1948? How was this historical experience processed in the anti-communist emigration
during the Cold War? When and how did totalitarianism emerge as a term of political
classification and how were the specificities of local political cultures articulated with
reference to the concept? What was the genealogy of conceptualizations of totalitarianism
by the early dissidents – and later the Marxist revisionists – of the 1950s and 1960s? What
role was played by official, state-socialist research on fascism and Nazism in the criticism of
and implicit comparison with the recent Stalinist past?
III. Consolidated Communist Regimes, Oppositional Thought, and the Uses of
Totalitarianism Before 1989
The term ‘totalitarianism’ was one of the primary discursive and analytical tools of the
anticommunist democratic oppositions during the last two decades of communist
dictatorship. But the range of its uses, its intellectual roots and theoretical underpinnings,
and thus its analytical implications as well, differed not only from one country to the next,
but also within the diverse milieus of each community of dissidents or exiles. The concept of
totalitarianism often ran counter to other crucial elements of oppositional political and
strategic thinking, such as the politics of dialogue with power, legalism, and historical
reconciliation, and the critique of Western notions of the state socialist East. What were the
key contradictions in the concept’s rise to prominence in dissident political language before
1989? What were the major intellectual influences and strategic incentives in this process?
How did it relate to the broader discursive embeddedness of ‘totalitarianism’ in
transnational and comparative research as well as in democratic activism? How did this
development relate to the increasing importance of ‘human rights talk’ in the wake of the
Helsinki Final Act? What were the reactions in official communist historiography, memory
politics, and political agitation to the anti-totalitarian, anti-communist crusade at home and
abroad?
IV. A New Anti-Totalitarian Consensus? Agendas, New Semantics, and Politicization
After 1989
After the fall of communism, the history of totalitarianism in Central and Eastern Europe has
emerged as a central object of scholarship of the recent past. At the same time,
totalitarianism has been used politically as a counter-concept helping to legitimate the new
emerging liberal democracies. It has also emerged as a key concept in various conservative
and nationalist milieus, where it serves as a conceptual tool in spreading new forms of anticommunism and anti-socialism. Does the term now operate simply as a political slander or
has it remained an analytical tool as well? What is the relation between research projects
related to totalitarianism in the post-communist period, the changing semantics of the
concept, (especially as compared with dissident understandings of it), and its political uses
for liberal democratic and conservative-nationalistic purposes? Has the term had a palpable
resonance in popular memory or has it, in the form of a ‘usable totalitarianism,’ been made
into a prefabricated tool, formatting the identity discourse of the neoliberal transformation
era? In what ratio have the communist and fascist/Nazi pasts influenced the conceptual
evolution of the concept in this period?
V. Totalitarianism after Totalitarianism: The Uses of the Concept in Twenty-FirstCentury Europe (Roundtable)
According to influential current narratives, Central and Eastern Europeans have brought
totalitarianism back onto the European stage. This has had important consequences for
memory politics in individual European states as well as on the level of Europe as a whole,
with imagery of the Gulag, for instance, challenging the singularity of the Holocaust as the
greatest historical trauma of twentieth-century Europe. What have been the motivations,
approaches, and achievements of national and regional attempts to canonize totalitarianism
internationally in the early twenty-first century? What role has been played in this process
by the broader European reception as well as by cultural-political struggles in individual
European countries? How have Central and Eastern European understandings of the
experience of totalitarianism contributed to the changing image of Europe in the twentieth
century?
Organization
Please send, no later than 15 March 2016, an abstract of 300–500 words and a short CV to
[email protected]
Organizational questions may be sent to Daniela Gruber ([email protected]),
academic queries to Michal Kopeček ([email protected]).
Subsidies for travel and accommodation are available, but we ask potential participants to
explore funding opportunities at their home institutions as well.
Contact Info:
Imre Kertész Kolleg
Leutragraben 1
07743 Jena
Germany