Abstract:

Balkan societies have undergone extraordinary processes of de-institutionalization and reinstitutionalization since the end of the Ottoman rule. The institutional framework of the post-Ottoman nation state, socialism and the post-socialist democracies have had a deep, however differentiated impact on the character of "power" and "rule". The lecture will take a long-dureé perspective, reaching from the nineteenth century to the present, and ask how the changing political orders have affected people's everyday-life and how societies have developed strategies to cope with the power imposed on them. It thus tries to contribute to the hotly debated question of "continuity" and "change" within Balkan societies on their way to "modernity".

Wolfgang Höpken is Professor of East and Southeast European History at the University of Leipzig. He studied history, Slavic studies and Political Sciences in Hamburg, Ljubljana and Belgrade. After earning his PhD from the University of Hamburg, he worked as a University Assistant at the same institution and as a Researcher at the Southeast-Institute in Munich. In 1995/96 he was appointed Professor for East- and Southeast European History at the University of Leipzig. From 2000 to 2006, Höpken was also Director of the Georg-Eckert-Institute for International Textbook Research in Braunschweig and from 2002-2016 he was the Vice president of the Southeast Europe Association.