We are happy to announce the next presentations of the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA. Join the event in the Archivum, or online by following the link below!
The presentations will be held at 2:00 p.m. on Tuesday, April 25, 2023, in the Meeting Room of the Blinken OSA Archivum, and online. The Zoom link of the meeting is: https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/98035443242?pwd=UjNiZUNtMFRudUg5TEpNMEgvcmwxQT09
Authoritarianism with Human Face?
by Tomas Sniegon, PhD in History, Associate Professor in European Studies, Lund University, Sweden
In his current research, Tomas Sniegon focuses on the period of the Cold War and the so-called de-Stalinization. His latest project is called Authoritarianism with a Human Face? A New Analysis of the Czechoslovak “Prague Spring 1968” and Its “Lessons from History.” In his presentation, he will talk about hitherto unexplored aspects of the reforms of Communism in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and about a comparative research that has not yet been carried out, which offers new perspectives on the “Prague Spring of 1968,” despite the fact that a huge number of books have already been published about these events. Given that the events in the former satellite states of the Soviet Bloc are now being updated again in Russia in connection with the condemnation of “color revolutions,” even the actions of the Soviet Union in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968 can be evaluated in a new context.
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Historicizing Constitutional Illiberalism in Poland: The Ehrlich–Kaczyński Link
By Naum Trajanovski, Assistant at the Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw
The governmental change in Poland in 2015 and the constitutional crisis that followed triggered many depictions of the prehistory of Polish illiberal constitutionalism. The name of Stanisław Ehrlich (1907–97), the academic mentor of Jarosław Kaczyński, hence came forth as the usual suspect: a renowned professor of state and law theory, a leading editor, and one of the initiators of the Polish political sciences (both as a discourse and a professional network), Ehrlich was also one of the most prominent proponents of the Vyshinsky-like radical legal anti-positivism in the early post-Second World War years. However, he departed from these positions early in the course of the Polish Thaw of the mid-1950s, and started articulating criticism against centralization in law and politics. Drawing upon the materials from the Blinken OSA Archivum, this presentation will contextualize these arguments within the thriving debates over Socialist legality in popular outlets (Nowa Kultura, Przegląd Kulturalny, Po Prostu) and academic journals (Państwo i Prawo) during the Polish 1950s and early 1960s. The research is part of the project Towards Illiberal Constitutionalism in East Central Europe: Historical Analysis in Comparative and Transnational Perspectives.