Post-war Reconstruction in Europe

This volume stems from a large-scale project endowed by the Balzan foundation. It was awarded in conjunction with the Balzan prize in 2003 to Professor Eric Hobsbawm, who nominated the theme and time-period for the current programme of research. No historian in the world deserved this honour more than Eric Hobsbawm, who for seventy years tirelessly mapped out the changing contours of the modern human race, ranging from its ideologies, productive processes, social structures and mass organisations, through to the much more intimate settings of industrial workshops, protest movements, religious identities, and both mass and minority cultures. And, as Mark Mazower suggests in his introduction to the current volume, no period could have been more appropriate for exploring some of Hobsbawm’s characteristic themes and interests than the later 1940s, which embraced the end of the Second World War, the rise of the Cold War, and multiple eruptions of anti-imperialism and popular mass movements over several continents. Many of those populist movements were extensively commented upon at the time by historians, journalists, polemicists and imaginative writers. But the ending of the Cold War, the opening up of many closed historical archives, and a further tidal wave of trans-global mass-migration, all make this an appropriate moment for re-examining the hopes, realities, conflicts and political outcomes of the later 1940s—one of Hobsbawm’s own classic periods—from a fresh historical perspective. Moreover, many ideas and debates from that period—about human rights, market capitalism, mass migration and imagined political alternatives—continue to have a powerful resonance in the global uncertainties and economic crises of the present time

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Capitalism · Honour · Ideology · Media studies · Period (music · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Theme (computing · World War II · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · Gender Studies · History · Law · Polish Historical and Cultural Studies

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