The GWZO Annual Conference 2021 was dedicated to the current state of comparative research on Eastern Europe, methodological challenges in the field and innovative approaches regarding the global dimension. The conference focused on ways of countering methodological shortcomings like the homogenisation and marginalisation of Eastern Europe, container thinking, euro- and west-centrism and methodological nationalism by taking approaches that decentre, de- and re-territorialise or provincialise Europe. One of the conference’s central discussion questions was how comparative studies are to treat obvious asymmetries without equating or reinforcing them. As CORINNE GEERING (Leipzig) pointed out in her introduction, the ongoing methodological debates on the comparative approach and the various efforts to integrate comparison into research on transfer, connection and entanglement show that the long-standing interest in comparative research has increased rather than ceased. Indeed, new fields in comparative research have been developed, not least because of increased interest in mobility and border crossings.

Researchers of diverse geographical origins working in various disciplines referred to empirical studies demonstrating the importance of including multiple perspectives and considering dynamic networks, spatial overlaps, connections and entanglements in comparative research on Eastern Europe.

The first panel examined the blind spots that allow asymmetrical frameworks and source materials to shape conceptions of world regions and remarked the need for methodological answers to this problem. Retracing the Eastern European tradition of map-making since the 12th century, CHRISTIAN LÜBKE (Leipzig) reflected on the crucial role maps played in shaping the western gaze on this region and setting the frame for western thinking on the East in the middle ages. Lacunar source materials have profoundly impacted our understanding of even the most researched transregional events and developments, especially the mid-14th century pandemic called the Black Death, which is less well documented than cartographical depictions might suggest. For instance, it is still unclear whether it really left Eastern Europe untouched. MARTIN BAUCH (Leipzig), THOMAS LABBÉ (Leipzig), UNDINE OTT (Leipzig) and ANNABELL ENGEL (Leipzig), who form the GWZO research group “The Dantean Anomaly,” have “de-westernised” our understanding of the Black Death’s regional impact by using Big Data Palaeoecology analyses of crop pollens to capture demographic declines among farmers. They found out that the Black Death devastated some areas but spared others, mostly in Central and Eastern Europe. Population density, political stability and prior famines might have been key factors in this heterogeneous pandemic behaviour.

Asymmetrical frames must and can be challenged. Thus, CLEMENS GÜNTHER (Berlin) asked whether and how late Soviet literature can be globalised. Literary scholarship on Soviet literature seems to be stuck in an asymmetrical epistemic framework dubbed the “deformation model”. Using the examples of the one-day documentary initiative den’ mira (1960) and Soviet authors’ reception of Latin American magical realism, Günther illuminated the receptivity and global range of late Soviet literature.

AUGUSTA DIMOU (Leipzig) retraced the development of legislation on intellectual property in Eastern Europe as a lens through which to highlight the region’s cultural organisation in modern times. Western concepts of intellectual property were received but did not replace the Eastern European distinctiveness in this important part of cultural life, where re-editing and circulation of cultural products were facilitated and necessitated by the multilingual society alone.

In his keynote, MARTIN MÜLLER (Lausanne) identified the place of what he calls Global Easts in global theory.1 He understands the Global East not as a region but rather as a concept that encompasses post-socialist legacies, neoliberal transformation, EU access and capitalism. Müller argued for theorising the East with researchers from the East and broadening geographical imagination to question empirical archetypes and diversify theoretical repertoires. Thus, the “Global East” reveals itself as an emancipatory project.

The second panel continued the discussion on how Eastern Europe is to be positioned in a global framework. How was and is Eastern Europe epistemologically connected to the Global South? STEFFI MARUNG (Leipzig) demonstrated that development historiography has long marginalised socialist Eastern Europe as backward. In contrast to this west-centric perspective, Marung offered examples of connections and cooperation between East and West as well as East and South in circulating models of development. In this light, Eastern Europe appears to be an active agent of international development. An example of cooperation between Soviet experts and US black activists illustrated overlapping projects and visions of modernity and socialism, as well as the intertwining of pan-Africanism, communism and modernisation projects. Comparison was shown to be an essential practice for international development, a powerful practice in which marginalised actors engaged as well.

The example of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), analysed by NATAŠA JAGDHUHN (Berlin), illustrated the interdependence and cooperation between states from the Global South and the Eastern bloc during the Cold War. Jagdhuhn presented a case of two museums founded in Yugoslavia during the Cold War which served as emancipatory political and educational platforms for decolonisation. Despite their central role in the theory of the “decolonisation of the museum”, western-centric histories of museology fail to notice them.

ZOLTÁN GINELLI (Budapest) and ESZTER SZAKÁCS (Budapest) looked at 20th-century historical relationships and parallels between the global periphery (Global South) and semiperiphery (Eastern Europe) via the concepts of coloniality, peripherality and migration. In presenting the Transperiphery Movement exhibition project, which they curated at the Off-Biennale Budapest 2021,2 Ginelli and Szakács stressed the need to counter centre-dominated, hierarchical views of history. Their exhibition project offered a de-centred, multi-focal, global perspective achieved by retelling histories of resistance strategies and emancipative possibilities of interperipherality.

In its third panel, the conference turned from the effort to de-centre the analysis of the Global East and South towards discussing new approaches in comparative research on social margins. Taking a wider cultural context into account, LUCIAN GEORGE (Oxford) presented a comparative study of rural political cultures in interwar Poland and Czechoslovakia, thereby uncovering unremarked differences between the particular rural politics. Why, he asked, did the Polish and Czechoslovak agrarianisms follow completely different paths – leftward in Poland, but toward right radicalisation in Czechoslovakia – despite their shared historical and ideological roots? A comparative semantic analysis between connotations of political discourse about “farmers” and “peasants” revealed that in Czechoslovakia, adapting the agrarian movement’s political agenda to the changing socio-political context while also expanding industrialisation, the movement was forced to expand the agrarian constituency.

IGOR STIPIĆ (Regensburg) presented a comparative study on the construction of national identity in Bosnia and Chile that shed light on postcolonial and post-socialist entanglements. Stipić demonstrated how deeply the constructions of national subjectivities in both Southeast Europe and South America are embedded within the modern colonial project and a global history of coloniality. Perceiving racialisation as an integral part of the nation-state body politic can reveal how racial profiling has influenced the configuration of imagined communities in Bosnia and Chile. The decolonial theory approach enables a critical examination of Eurocentric modernity in today’s Bosnia and Chile. From there, Stipić identified a core element of the Chilean and Bosnian racial projects: the (claimed) identification with the European idea.

In the area of informal housing studies, UDO GRASHOFF (Leipzig) denounced the dominant bipolar perception of a world divided into a Global North and Global South and the attendant neglect of socialist-bloc countries. Grashoff attempts to overcome these shortcomings by relating the Eastern dimension to the dominant South-North divide through the lens of literature on informal housing, a “marginal practice” that is ubiquitous across the globe. His presentation focused on urban squatting in East European cities (Prague, Vilnius, St. Petersburg) during the socialist and post-socialist periods, comparing squatting to Western, Latin American and Central Asian forms of informal housing. By demonstrating both overarching similarities and local specifics, he managed to dismantle the stereotypical and superficial assumptions that are commonly the consequence of a bipolar perception of the world.

Asymmetrical frameworks lead to epistemic injustice that often hits minorities first by ascribing identity to them. To counter this, the fourth panel questioned the origins of knowledge and identity of minorities. JÜRGEN HEYDE (Leipzig) discussed migrant Armenian minorities in the premodern era (16th and 17th c.) in Lviv and Kamjenec-Podilskyj. As Heyde demonstrated in his lecture, the study of Armenian chronicles allows researchers to dive under the surface of (foreign) group identification categories such as “Armenians” or “Catholics” and analyse the construction of a group’s self-image. Taking up the thread, NADIA BUREIKO (St. Gallen) presented a comparative study on self-identification of the two biggest ethnic minorities in the multicultural borderline territory of Bukovina. Taking a quantitative approach, Bureiko and her co-worker TEODOR MOGA (St. Gallen) investigated how Romanians in Ukraine and Ukrainians in Romania position themselves in relation to the state of their ethnic origin and the state of their current residency, emphasising the importance of local, national and supranational contexts and cross-border entanglements for the study of ethnic minorities. Instead of adopting a state-centred perspective, Bureiko and Moga used an approach that made it possible to capture complex perceptions at the individual level.

DIANA HITZKE (Gießen) examined the construction of minorities in literary narratives, asking how minority narratives become world literature. She responds to the problems of methodological nationalism by comparing minority narratives in three languages (English, Russian, Sorbian) from different regions of the world (Nigeria, Tatarstan, Lusatia). Thus, while offering a decentralised perspective on Eastern Europe, she also contributed to a comparative practice that includes Russophone and “small” European literatures in the analytical framework of world literature.

Peripheries are socially created, often by faraway centres, and are quickly identified and later unquestioned, a conclusion that can be drawn from the fifth and last panel. CHECHESH KUDACHINOVA (Altai Republic) pointed out that “Siberia” is a social invention. Its conceptualisation has shifted over time, mainly according to Muscovite political needs and ultimately marginalising and objectifying the region. Starting from new spatial history, area studies and postcolonial studies, Kudachinova retraced the mental mapping of this region, focusing on the Russo-centric imperial gaze that has shaped the concept to this today by ways of questionable etymology (Siberia as a Tartar word for “won”) and Soviet geographers’ attempts in the 1920s to rename and reframe the region as “Northern Asia”.

CORINNE GEERING (Leipzig) asked in her presentation how a globalising metropolis managed to harness and shape the rural periphery of empires like Great Britain and Russia at the height of the so-called first globalisation. In the name of rural development, Russian and British nobility used the Chicago World Fair of 1893 to sell products from home industry workshops. At the fair, rural space was represented by exhibiting not only products but also people – more precisely, selected girls from Ireland who were to perform “traditional” crafts. The transregional transfer and mobility of means, practices and knowledge flowed through networks woven by imperial elites around the globe, shaping images of the European “exotic” periphery.

The GWZO Annual Conference 2021 coincided with the 25th anniversary of the GWZO, giving FRANK HADLER (Leipzig) occasion to review the development of comparative regional studies since the 1990s in the concluding discussion. Comparative approaches for defining a region through its historical structures have been criticised ever since, producing alternatives such as Histoire croisé_e, _transfer culturel, entangled histories and finally, transnational history. The comparative approach, redefined, is still flourishing, he concluded. The participants advocated more transregional dialogue, more kinds of comparisons and more robust exchange with researchers from across the globe. The methodological discussion must also remain alert to the political use of comparison, especially as this type of approach was engrained in the practices of colonialism and imperialism and has contributed to the ongoing asymmetries shaping research on Eastern Europe.

All in all, this conference has spotlighted the desire for more comparative research, the need to include researchers from various regions, and even moves to “provincialise” the West. The innovative potential of a refined comparative perspective and methodology has become ever clearer. As some participants stressed, the approach considered here has been written off by some but is nonetheless still very much alive.

Conference overview:

Christian Lübke (Director of the GWZO, Leipzig) and Corinne Geering (Leipzig): Welcome and Introduction

Panel I: Asymmetrical Frameworks
Chair: Theo Schley (Leipzig)

Christian Lübke (Leipzig): The East as seen by the West: Perceiving, Visualising and Mapping from the Early Middle Ages to the Enlightenment

Martin Bauch, Annabell Engel, Undine Ott (Leipzig), Thomas Labbé (Dijon): The Black Death (1347–52) and Eastern Central Europe: A Transcontinental Pandemic in Regional Comparison

Augusta Dimou (Leipzig): No European History without Eastern Europe

Clemens Günther (Berlin): Can Late Soviet Literature Be Globalised? Comparative Perspectives beyond the ‘Deformation Model’

Comment: Katja Castryck-Naumann (Leipzig)

Keynote: in cooperation with the Leibniz ScienceCampus »Eastern Europe – Global Area« (EEGA)
Martin Müller (Lausanne): Go East: Thinking beyond North and South
Moderation: Sebastian Lentz (Speaker of the EEGA)

Panel II: Eastern Europe and the Global South
Chair: Aurelia Ohlendorf (Leipzig)

Steffi Marung (Leipzig): Comparing and Connecting: The Soviet and the American South as Models for International Development

Nataša Jagdhuhn (Berlin): The Non-Aligned Movement and the Decolonisation of the Museum Field: The Gallery of Art of the Non-Aligned Countries »Josip Broz Tito« (1984–1991)

Zoltán Ginelli and Eszter Szakács (Budapest): Transperiphery Movement: Global Eastern Europe and Global South

Comment: Beáta Hock (Leipzig)

Panel III: Social Margins
Chair: Hakob Matevosyan (Leipzig)

Lucian George (Oxford): Comparing Rural Political Cultures in Interwar Poland and Czechoslovakia

Igor Stipić (Regensburg): Rejected Bodies, Disowned Cultures: Race and Nation in Bosnia and Chile

Udo Grashoff (Leipzig): Informal Housing in East Europe in Comparative Perspective

Comment: Antje Dietze (Leipzig)

Panel IV: Minorities
Chair: Hana Rydza (Leipzig)

Jürgen Heyde (Leipzig): Reframing Locality: The Armenian Chronicles of Early Modern Lviv and Kamjanec Podilskyj

Nadiia Bureiko (St. Gallen): (In)visible Asymmetries in the Northern and Southern Parts of Bukovina: Comparative Analysis of Ukrainian and Romanian Minorities’ Self-Perceptions

Diana Hitzke (Gießen): Comparing Minority Narratives in English, Russian and Sorbian Literature

Comment: Adamantios Th. Skordos (Leipzig)

Panel V: From Centres to Peripheries
Chair: Gáspár Salamon (Leipzig)

Chechesh Kudachinova (Altai Republic): Neither East nor North: The Pragmatic Metageographies of Northeast Eurasia

Corinne Geering (Leipzig): Dialogue of Imperial Histories: Textiles and Regional Development in the Russian and British Empires

Comment: Jan Zofka (Leipzig)

Concluding discussion: Frank Hadler (Leipzig), Corinne Geering (Leipzig)

Notes:
1 The keynote lecture by Martin Müller is available on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQJP8qBZNCw (03.09.2021)
2https://offbiennale.hu/en/2021/projects/transzperiferia-mozgalom (03.09.2021)