Individual projects

Project Outline

Despite several decades of intensive research, the study of fascism as a major political phenomenon of the twentieth century is still far from reaching its endpoint. While the literature on paradigmatic cases such as the Italian or the German one is abundant, ‘peripheral', yet salient cases, such as Romanian fascism remain ess researched. The current research focuses on the nature and manifestations of Romanian fascism, by positioning it in the history of regenerative, evolutionary projects that matured in the interwar period as an alternative to what was considered the decaying system of fin-de-siècle liberalism, while xamining how they were rooted in the intellectual milieu around 1900.

The starting research hypothesis assesses fascism as a ‘coherent body of thought', a ‘form of political modernism in its own right', which presented itself as a revolutionary deology, that put forward the necessity to reshape the ‘national self' and regenerate ‘the decay' of the national body by bringing about a ‘new man' and  ‘new temporal order'. Analysing fascism from within, and considering it as a solid ideological construct, the project expects to better understand the diverse intellectual and social support it garnered, and the mass appeal that assured its political success in various contexts.

The primary focus of the research is an indepth look at what I have termed ‘the other green intellectuals', who sympathised with, and in some cases even joined, the Iron Guard (the most important fascist movement in interwar Romania) and had a genuine impact on its development. The project looks at their radical response to he temporal crisis that interwar Romania had to face, how that time horizon shaped their political views, and their ideas for an alternative extreme right-wing revolutionary ay towards modernity.

The path that the study intends to pursue is an analysis of the public stands these intellectuals took in relation to Romania's past, present and future, and how they envisaged the interplay between modernity and historicity. The kind of stand may be tracked down in some underexplored primary sources, such as the legionary and pro-legionary press and pamphlets from late 1920s to early 1940s.

The project also looks into the external intellectual influences that marked the discourse of this cohort, given the fact that, with few exceptions, most of them
were trained by, or were in close contact with academic institutions based especially in Germany, Italy, and France. By adding the analysis of their interaction in certain groups such as the ‘Axa' group, the ‘Criterion group, or the ‘Rânduiala' group, the research hopes to develop their comprehensive intellectual biographies while mapping their common views of the role of historicity in the debate focused on modernity and nation building.

Project Outline

My research investigates two ideologies of modern national citizenship which emerged in early twentieth century Bulgaria (ca. 1900-1939) as alternatives to the official ideology of liberal, individual citizenship. These framed citizenship as the contractual agreement among the main socio-economic sectors in the nation-state, on the one hand, and as negotiated cultural autonomy for the two main ethno-religious groups (Bulgarian Christians and Turkish Muslims) respectively.

The research addresses three major issues, namely:

• It explores how the prominent critiques of the official Bulgarian national project of modernity - Agrarianism and Muslim reformism - shaped national citizenship and ethno-religious relations in the post-Romantic period;
• It contextualises Agrarianism and Muslim reformism in the general framework of the European crisis of modernity, and seeks to illuminate the links between imperial past and national present, between tradition and progress which Agrarians and Muslim reformers forged in search of a viable future and empowered collective identity;
• By illuminating alternative visions of modernity in Bulgaria, it hopes to provide ground for qualified comparisons between the crises of modernity in other post-imperial, national societies in Southeastern and East-Central Europe.

By analysing the conception of property adopted by Bulgarian Agrarians and the Turkish-speaking minority in Bulgaria, and their respective efforts to change the underpinnings of modernity from liberal individual to ‘corporatist’, the project inquires whether this was a specific Bulgarian problem or whether such efforts could be interpreted as signaling of a wider crisis within European liberal modernity, in general.

Project Outline

In the period after 1918, a public debates on eugenic ideas was initiated in Bulgaria, falling in the framework of what was perceived as an interwar cultural crisis. It encompassed a large number of ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ eugenic measures with regard to healthcare, marital and sex hygiene, criminal justice, professional legislation and education. Though the most radical projects for ‘hygienisation’ of the nation were never put into practice, the Bulgarian eugenics discourse nevertheless carried a considerable rhetorical burden, and certain eugenic initiatives were partly institutionalised after the First World War.

The study aims at examining the cultural relevance of the eugenic argumentative strategies and practices in Bulgaria, in the way they were developed by adopting and emancipating Western bio-political models from the beginning of the 20th century until the 1940s. It explores the Bulgarian eugenic projects as versions of a multiform hygienic utopia, which, in turn, implied a more general project for national identity.

The research focuses on the temporal modes of a medicalised crisis of modernity and identity, transcribed as ‘degeneration’, i.e. an ‘illness’ of the ‘national organism’. It addresses the culture which the Bulgarian eugenics discourse reflected, the past historical times which it (d)evaluated, and the utopian national future which it projected. In lines with it, the analysis attempts to clarify the system of strategies and techniques for ‘naturalising’ the culture-historical continuities, applied by the eugenics discourse. It hopes to ‘map’ the symbolic register of the so-called ‘degeneration stigmata’, and question the cultural reasoning behind the selective readings of the ‘morbid’ national past, which tended to ascribe different historical periods to the decay of the ‘national organism’.

Finally, the project examines how the ‘regeneration’ of the ‘degenerated’ people was conceptualised as a target result from the synthesis of ideological visions and expert practices, i.e. of national integration theory and the instruments of state bio-politics.

Project outline

The principal aim of the Project is a synthetic volume on the history of modern political thought in East Central Europe. It is not meant to be compartmentalized according to national sub-chapters but based on a diachronic analysis especially sensitive to transnational discursive phenomena, and being equally open to supra-national and sub-national (regional) frameworks, where different national projects were interacting.

The project entails the task of “redescription” and conceptual transfer, i.e. finding a trans-culturally acceptable set of analytical categories, as well as new knowledge-production – answering questions about the basic components of European political thought, formulated on the basis of a regional and trans-regional comparative analysis. It also necessitates the “trading” of concepts: both in the direction of inserting specific historical experiences and analytical categories into European circulation, and also testing the value of the interpretative models linked to such notions as “populism”.

The project thus aims neither at a compendium of case-studies nor at a deductive Area Studies-type of approach that tends to eliminate differences to forge a general narrative. What it seeks to produce instead is a cross-cultural “synthesis”– the work of a compact team of multi-national composition, skilled in comparative research and drawing on the recent upsurge of transnational historiography. By shifting the reference point of historical thinking from the “West” to the cross-European experience with a special emphasis on East Central Europe, in other words, the project seeks to rethink the history of the “negotiation of political modernity,” moving from “moral ethnocentrism” and oversimplification towards a more encompassing notion of what constitutes the European intellectual heritage.