The Rise and Fall of the Green International: Stamboliiski and his Legacy in East European Agrarianism, 1919-1939

At the height of his power in 1923, the head of the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BANU), Alexander Stamboliiski, summed up the significance of his politics for European history in the following way: "Today there are only two interesting social experiments: the experiment of Lenin and my own." Taking the aspirations reflected in the quotation above seriously and rescuing the agrarian project from the enormous condescension of posterity is the foundation of this dissertation. Briefly, it is about unpacking and restoring the significance of the Golden Age of the European Peasantry between the two world wars by focusing on the paradigmatic cases of Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. The dissertation proposes a novel synoptic approach with regards to interwar agrarianism as a counterpoint to ideology driven classifications or structuralist synthesis. Its thematic chapters alternate between strategic probes of evocative micro histories and broader theoretically informed overviews in order to illustrate and clarify the analytical frame. The most radical expression of interwar agrarianism, that of Bulgaria, and the man responsible for it, Alexander Stamboliiski, serve as the center of this dissertation. The juxtaposition of this center to the development of agrarianism in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, as well as to various oppositional formations such as the Communist International Peasant Union allows this dissertation to overcome the national parochialism that has contributed to the sidelining of the study of agrarianism. The innovative structure of the dissertation is above all a demonstration of the rich possibilities still open to researchers in this field to reinsert the study of agrarianism into contemporary theoretical debates and developments in the historiography. The dissertation explicitly engages agrarianism with the theoretical literature on nationalism, corruption, the subaltern, as well as makes possible the connection to the problematics of modernity, politics as systemic change, transnational and global history

Contacts of languages and peoples in the Hittite and Post-Hittite world

Ever since the early 2nd millennium BCE, Pre-Classical Anatolia has been a crossroads of languages and peoples. Indo-European peoples – Hittites, Luwians, Palaeans – and non-Indo-European ones – Hattians, but also Assyrians and Hurrians – coexisted with each other for extended periods of time during the Bronze Age, a cohabitation that left important traces in the languages they spoke and in the texts they wrote. By combining, in an interdisciplinary fashion, the complementary approaches of linguistics, history, and philology, this book offers a comprehensive, state-of-the-art study of linguistic and cultural contacts in a region that is often described as the bridge between the East and the West

Europe and the Black Sea Region

When the scientific study of the Black Sea Region began in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, initially commissioned by adjacent powers such as the Habsburg and the Russian empires, this terra incognita was not yet considered part of Europe. The eighteen chapters of this volume show a broad range of thematic foci and theoretical approaches - the result of the enormous richness of the European macrocosm and the BSR. The microcosms of the many different case studies under scrutiny, however, demonstrate the historical dimension of exchange between the allegedly opposite poles of `East' and `West' and underscore the importance of mutual influences in the development of Europe and the BSR

Transforming identities in Europe: Bulgaria and Macedonia between nationalism and Europeanization

This dissertation offers an investigation of the discursive function of national identity in the project of European integration. Its focus is the discursive dynamics created in the context of European Union Enlargement to the former communist states, and its geographical locus is the Balkan region. Exploring the transformations of national identity narratives in two Balkan states – Bulgaria and Macedonia – the analysis aims to uncover the discursive mechanisms of accommodating national identity in the process of empowering Europeanization. In the theoretical and meta-theoretical frame of poststructuralist discourse theory and within the structure of a small-number comparative case study, the investigation selects six narrative groups. They are centred around key elements in the narration of national identity: nationhood, territory, purpose, statehood, language, minorities. Traditionally interpreted within the hegemony of nationalism, these elements are identifiable in the national identity constructs of both of the studied states. Using qualitative methodology based on discourse analysis, the empirical study traces variations in these narratives in the course of the democratic transition and the preparation for EU membership at the macro level – the state. The purpose of the investigation is to reveal the logic of reading national identity within the empowering discourse of Europeanization. The findings demonstrate that the discursive space of the European project upholds a positive, emancipatory, optimistic vision of national subjectivity. Marginalizing antagonistic interpretations of national identity narrated in the discourse of nationalism, Europeanization reveals the potential to significantly increase the credibility of national identity as a source of collective self-iden tification at the level of the state. This can stabilize the discursive space of European integration and ensure the political relevance of the European project. Where nationalist readings of identity succeed in challenging the hegemony of Europeanization, national identity appears more antagonistic and less compatible with the progress of integration in Europe. In this sense reading national identity emerges as the touchstone of the integration project

Non-Isochronous Meter: A Study of Cross cultural practice, analytic technique, and implications for jazz pedagogy

This dissertation examines the use of non-isochronous (NI) meters in jazz compositional and performative practices (meters as comprised of cycles of a prime number [e.g., 5, 7, 11] or uneven divisions of non-prime cycles [e.g., 9 divided as 2+2+2+3]). The explorative meter practices of jazz, while constituting a central role in the construction of its own identity, remains curiously absent from jazz scholarship. The conjunct research broadly examines NI meters and the various processes/strategies and systems utilized in historical and current jazz composition and performance practices. While a considerable amount of NI meter composers have advertantly drawn from the metric practices of non-Western music traditions, the potential for utilizing insights gleaned from contemporary music-theoretical discussions of meter have yet to fully emerge as a complimentary and/or organizational schemata within jazz pedagogy and discourse. This paper seeks to address this divide, but not before an accurate picture of historical meter practice is assessed, largely as a means for contextualizing developments within historical and contemporary practice and discourse. The dissertation presents a chronology of explorative meter developments in jazz, firstly, by tracing compositional output, and secondly, by establishing the relevant sources within conjunct periods of development i.e., scholarly works, relative academic developments, and tractable world music sources. Bridging the gap between world music meter sources and theoretical musicology (primarily, the underlying perceptual and cognitive model which represents a topology of the structural premises of meter) the research acts to direct and inform a compositional process which directly accounts for an isomorphic link between structurally similar meters

Europe and the Black Sea Region

When the scientific study of the Black Sea Region began in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, initially commissioned by adjacent powers such as the Habsburg and the Russian empires, this terra incognita was not yet considered part of Europe. The eighteen chapters of this volume show a broad range of thematic foci and theoretical approaches - the result of the enormous richness of the European macrocosm and the BSR. The microcosms of the many different case studies under scrutiny, however, demonstrate the historical dimension of exchange between the allegedly opposite poles of `East' and `West' and underscore the importance of mutual influences in the development of Europe and the BSR