Interconnected - Actors, Objects, and Ideas on the Move

GRAINES Summer School, St Andrews, 7-10 June 2015

Tag: Germany

The Left-Wing Terrorism and Political Violence in Western Europe in the 1970s

May 12, 2015 / / 0 Comments

My name is Mikuláš Pešta, I am a PhD candidate at the Institute of World History at Charles University in Prague. I am currently studying as an exchange student at the University of Hamburg. During my undergraduate years, I studied one semester at the University of Bologna, where I have researched the subject of Italian Left-Wing terrorism. I also took part in the short-term exchange program at the University of Cologne and University of Regensburg.

My thesis deals with the European Left-wing terrorism in the 1970s and the 1980s, especially with its origins within the New Left movement, with specifics of the development in Germany and Italy and with the positions of the most influential terrorists organizations. My goal is to find and define common features of the European terrorism and its ideological background – reinterpretation of the Socialist and Anarchist thinkers, methods of the fight of the Latin American and Vietnamese guerrilla units, and disillusion of the Soviet way of fighting the capitalism.
The project focuses on the comparison of the terrorist movements in Germany and Italy, where the violent organizations were strongest. The goal is satisfyingly mapping the extent of the cooperation (or even the coordination of the plans) of the anti-state movements in Italy and the Federal Republic of Germany. The thesis will also include a comparison of the origins, structure, and functioning of the clandestine groups, as well as the analysis of their language, methods, aims, or the relations to the “Old Left”. I will try to answer the question to what extent the terrorists were directly influenced by a student-worker movement and if the escalation of the violence was inevitable consequence of it.

Studying the terrorist organizations brings many complications; as the illegal formations, they do not archive the documents concerning their functioning. The analysis will have to be carried out indirectly, especially from the governmental and police documents which relate to the terrorism, newspaper articles and other contemporary reflections of their functioning, and subjective sources, such as the memoirs or interviews with the terrorists themselves.

I would like to contribute to the GRAINES Summer School with the mechanics of the transnational influence and cooperation of the clandestine organizations and their role in the European New Left movement. My motivation to participate is mainly to deepen the general knowledge about the processes of transnational networks, especially the about the transfers of ideas and know-how.

Selected bibliography:

1968 in Europe. History of protest and activism 1956-1977, KLIMKE, M., SCHAROTH, J. (eds.), New York 2008

STERLING, C., The terror network. The secret war of internaional terrorism, New York 1981

ALEXANDER, Y., PLUCHINSKY, D., Europe’ Red Terrorists. The fighting communist organizations, London 1992

COLVIN, S., Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism: language, violence and identity, New York 2009

TERHOEVEN, P., Deutscher Herbst in Europa. Der Linsterrorismus der siebziger Jahre als transnationales Phänomen, München 2014

How to be a global player. The Basel Mission between faith, trade and internationalism, 1910 – 1925.

May 11, 2015 / / 0 Comments

My name is Matthaeus Feigk, I’m a 2nd year PhD-candidate at the Basel Graduate School of History and the Institute for European Global Studies at the University of Basel. The research project I’m working on is entitled How to be a global player. The Basel Mission between faith, trade and internationalism. 1910 – 1925. I obtained my Bachelor as well as my Master degree at the University of Heidelberg (2013).

My PhD-project surveys the Basel Mission as a global stakeholder, respectively a participant in global networks during the investigation period from 1910 to 1925. This is from the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh to the Basel Mission’s return to the mission areas it had lost during the First World War. Rooted in Germany as well as in Switzerland, the society had by 1900 become one of the largest German-speaking protestant missions. It did not only maintain mission areas from Western Africa to China but also operated through its trading company, which played a crucial role in the cocoa trade as well as in industrial weaving and brick manufacturing in India.

QS-30.033.0006

The international line-up of the missionary meeting at Crans, Switzerland, June 1920. Third row, second from right, with sun glasses: Friedrich Würz, Mission Inspector of the Basel Mission. BMA QS-30.033.0006.

Owing to its Pietist origins, the Basel Mission was from the start part of existing international networks in the protestant world. Numerous supporting associations in Switzerland and Germany contributed to the transnational Swiss-German organizational structure within the missionary society. Moreover, the Basel Mission maintained strong personal connections to German and British missionary circles as well as to Switzerland’s political and financial elites.

E-30.29.032

King Njoya of Bamun, Cameroon, with Basel missionaries in 1908. Note the little boy’s prussian spiked helmet! BMA E-30.29.032. (Also shown in Jenkins, Paul: A short History of the Basel Mission, Basel, 1989)

My project analyzes the role of this organization and its members in the protestant internationalism emerging in the late 19th and beginning 20th century. It is therefore based on an approach in social sciences, which emerged during the last decade and emphasizes the relevance of religious non-state agents and their networks in shaping a global civil society beyond religious frame-works. Consequently this is not a doctoral thesis situated in theology or the religious studies. I consider the Basel Mission to be a globally operating organization and a transnational organization in itself, connecting not only colony and metropolis, but also personal and institutional stakeholders within Europe and across the Atlantic ocean with religious, scientific, administrative or commercial background.
How did the Basel Mission use this contacts to overcome the crisis of the First World War? To what degree was the Basel Mission involved in the new surge of internationalization within the European missionary community after the war? Did interdependencies and mutual influences exist between religious and secular internationalism?

Readings being essential to my project are for example Rebekka Habermas: Mission im 19. Jahrhundert. Globale Netze des Religiösen („Mission in the 19th century. Global networks of the religious“) as well as Abigail Green and Vincent Viaene: Rethinking Religion and Globalization, in: Id. (eds.): Religious Internationals in the Modern World. Globalization and Faith Communities since 1750. Both texts point to the vast transnational spaces created by religious actors in general (Green and Viane) and by missionaries from the German-speaking countries in particular (Habermas) through correspondence, journeys and exchange forums and highlight their thereby emerging relevance for the history of internationalism.

My investigation allows to engage in research debates such as 1.) a methodological definition of the parameters reproducing a network 2.) the role of religious motivations in this context and interdependences with the non-religious sphere, and 3.) a widened perspective on Switzerland as a “colonial power without colonies” (Purtschert, 2012) as well as an important hosting country of international organizations.

Bibliography:

Abigail Green and Vincent Viaene: Rethinking Religion and Globalization, in: Id. (eds.): Religious Internationals in the Modern World. Globalization and Faith Communities since 1750. Basingstoke et. al. 2012, pp. 1-19.

Habermas, Rebekka: Mission im 19. Jahrhundert. Globale Netze des Religiösen, in: HZ 287 (2008), pp. 629‐679.

Mettele, Gisela: Weltbürgertum oder Gottesreich. Die Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine als globale Gemeinschaft 1727–1857. Göttingen 2009.

Purtschert, Patricia et al. (eds.): Postkoloniale Schweiz. Formen und Folgen eines Kolonialismus ohne Kolonien. Bielefeld 2012.

Sluga, Glenda: Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism. Philadelphia 2013.

 

 

 

 

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