Concepts of Diversity in the Time of Sigismund of Luxembourg (1368–1437): Introductory Remarks and Conceptual Approaches*

Julia Burkhardt

Faculty of History and the Arts, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

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Paul Schweitzer-Martin

Faculty of History and the Arts, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 13 Issue 2  (2024):153-171 DOI 10.38145/2024.2.153

On January 20, 1438, a memorial service for Sigismund of Luxembourg was held in the cathedral of Ragusa (now Dubrovnik). Sigismund, who had been king and emperor of many realms, had died a few weeks earlier, and in many regions of Europe, he was commemorated with church services, the ringing of bells, and solemn speeches.1 Ragusa was no exception: here, in front of an exclusive audience, the Italian scholar Philip Diversi († 1452) spoke in memory of the deceased.2 Philip first referred to his unworthiness and then outlined Sigismund’s connection to Ragusa before moving on to the emperor’s greatest achievement: Sigismund’s commitment to unity in the Church, evident in his efforts against the Ottomans and Hussites. Whole countries, including “Italy, Germany, Spain, Gaul, England, all the transalpine regions, all peoples and nations” even the very “earth and all the seas [...], the rivers, mountains, valleys, and finally all elements”3 had born witness to Sigismund’s achievements. The emperor had traveled to all “places, coasts, the most remote regions and the whole world, as well as to kings, leaders, princes, and Christian peoples”4 with tireless commitment and prudence. If this picture of imperial omnipresence did not convince the members of Philip’s audience, they should compare their own deeds with those of Sigismund. They would then clearly see that their achievements hardly bore any comparison with his, “neither with regard to the variety of regions, nor the effort to travel all over the world, nor the speed of their execution, the dexterity of warfare, the number or size of battles, or the conclusion of peace and alliances.”5 Thus all the peoples of all the many languages of Europe should commemorate the great emperor’s passing.

Similarly, almost four years earlier, Isidore of Kiev († 1462) had commented on Sigismund’s praiseworthy character and accomplishments. Isidore had traveled to the Council of Basel as a delegate of the Byzantine Emperor John VIII Palaiologos to negotiate the union of the Latin and Greek churches.6 En route, he stopped at the Imperial Diet in Ulm, where he held a panegyric speech and managed to persuade Sigismund of the importance of future cooperation. Isidore also praised Sigismund’s commitment to the unity of Christendom throughout Europe (only logical in view of his efforts to bring about Church union). Sigismund, Isidore insisted, was well equipped to do this. He was, after all, fluent in Latin, German, Hungarian, Czech, and Italian.7 In addition, Isidore claimed, Sigismund had shown a sense of justice and foresight. He had stayed awake “through whole nights in concern for the state [... and had taken care] with foresight of peoples, cities and people, and everything that concerned them!” Isidore also noted that if the emperor’s presence was necessary somewhere, “then [he did] not allow [himself] any rest, without thinking even in the least about postponement or rest for the body. As if on wings, [he seemed] to fly here and [was] always on the move [...].”8 Isidore expressed his astonishment at the emperor’s devotion and accomplishments with an exclamation rich with pathos: “Who has as much power and rulership and who commands as many vast peoples [...] as you, Your Majesty?”9

Ruling Diverse Realms and Territories: The Case of
Sigismund of Luxembourg

Sigismund of Luxembourg (1368–1437) not only ruled over an impressive array of territories but also reigned for a long period of time. From the perspective of diversity, Sigismund of Luxembourg’s reign represents a fortunate but also challenging case study. Fortunate because immensely rich and varied sources have survived from Sigismund’s long reign in Hungary, the Holy Roman Empire, and Bohemia. These sources provide detailed insights into the significance and roles of categories of difference, social affiliations, group identities, and negotiation processes. The two examples introduced above only give a small glimpse of these kinds of bonds and processes. Challenging, however, because Sigismund was confronted with very different cultural and political conditions in each of his kingdoms. The reality of a personal union across several kingdoms therefore consisted less of a centrally organized power structure and more of different spheres of influence with their own structures and methods of exerting influence. The rule of Sigismund as a cosmopolitan figure who governed vast territories led to a multiplication and differentiation of monarchical centers.10 Resilient alliances, effective communicative strategies, and a considerable degree of everyday political pragmatism were constitutive for the period of Sigismund’s rule. Depending on the situation and the local balance of power, Sigismund, his allies, and his opponents alike had to renegotiate or reconfirm interests, power relations, and coalitions in different regions, depending on the temporal, spatial, and social contexts.

The territories ruled by Sigismund and the neighboring regions significantly influenced by him served as the framework and the focal points of case studies for the international and interdisciplinary conference “DIVERSITAS (Sigis)MUNDI – Politische, soziale, religiöse und kulturelle Vielfalt in der Zeit Sigismunds von Luxemburg (1368–1437)“ [DIVERSITAS (Sigis-)MUNDI. Political, social, religious, and cultural diversity in the time of Sigismund of Luxembourg (1368–1437)], which took place in Munich in February 2023.11 The conference aimed to reveal dynamics, conflicts, regional peculiarities, and the significance of various affiliations in the time of Sigismund of Luxembourg by focusing on a range of case studies. In addition to questions of political history, issues involving social and economic history, migration history, gender history, religious history, object and art history, personal history, and spatial history were considered. Presentations and joint debates were dedicated to the question of how religious, cultural, and linguistic diversity influenced local practices of rule and governance. Furthermore, we considered the extent to which categories of difference (such as religion, social status, gender, and ethnicity) established politically relevant group constellations. We also discussed whether specific practices and semantics were developed to cope with diversity. Finally, we considered the ways in which the various categories of difference overlapped or reinforced one another.

In order to provide a forum for discussion of these questions, the conference focused on the period of Sigismund of Luxembourg (1368–1437). But more importantly, it considered the meanings and applicability of diversity as an analytical term for Medieval Studies. The conference panels were structured around four fields: political, social, religious, and cultural diversity. These fields enabled the participants to focus on a variety of types of diversity, e.g. religious practices, concepts of the unity both of the Church and of empires. Other issues were discussed, including multilingualism, the roles of learned men and women, multiple cities, and propaganda and conflicts.

This special issue of the Hungarian Historical Review presents selected case studies from the 2023 conference. Instead of providing a summary of the papers or retracing the four conference sessions, our introduction focuses on the various possible meanings of the term diversity, methodological approaches to the study of diversity, and the relevance or applicability of these approaches to the field of Medieval Studies.12 We discuss ways in which we can study political, social, religious, and cultural differences in the Middle Ages through the prism of diversity and the terminological and methodological challenges this presents.

Modern and Historic Meanings of “Diversity”: Approaching
a Challenging Term and Its Usages in Medieval Studies

The term diversity can be understood in a variety of ways, as current debates concerning social/gender/class equality and sociological discussions about social orders aptly demonstrate.13 In historical research, however, there seems to be no fixed definition. For this reason, the conference concept used a broad understanding of this term, defining diversity simply as any potential system of differentiation.14 Some conference papers noted that diversity is not merely an analytical term, as one does indeed find the Latin term diversitas in numerous medieval sources.15 However, more than once it became clear that this term does not translate to a modern concept of diversity, especially not to diversity as “celebration of difference.”16 This first impression, if perhaps vague, is confirmed by the definition of diversitas provided by the Oxford Latin Dictionary:

dīuersitās, -ātis f.

1. A state of being apart, separateness, distance.

2. The condition or fact of being different, diversity, difference; difference

of method.

3a. Difference of opinion, disagreement (between).

3b. a contradictory state, inconsistency.17

These observations lead us to two questions. First, is it misleading to use the term diversity in studies on the Middle Ages despite the fact that it may well have meant something else in the sources? Second, is diversity a useful neutral and methodologically convincing term?18 Numerous papers of this special issue highlight that the term could have an ambiguous or even negative nuance in the Middle Ages.19 Does that mean we should draw distinctions between positive and negative connotations of diversity in historical research?

To provide some idea of how these two questions can be handled, we should first discuss conceptual and terminological aspects regarding diversity. Today, the concept of diversity is of growing importance and finds itself at the center of political and social debates (e.g. political/religious/social/ethnic/gender diversity, diversity management in work environment, biodiversity, etc.).20 For the most part, the term is used to refer to issues of race, class, and gender, but it is not limited to these aspects.21 The Merriam-Webster Dictionary provides recent examples on the web for each dictionary entry.22 These examples suggest that American newspapers and magazines tend to use the term diversity together with the word inclusion, so the term indeed leans towards aspects of race, class, and gender.23

This certainly is not the way Sigismund of Luxembourg or his contemporaries (the case study for this special issue) would have understood diversity. However, recent trends and debates have clearly reflected on academic research and on study programs taught at history departments and other university institutes.24 In January 2023, for example, the History Department at the University of Münster advertised a permanent position (open to historians of all historical periods) as lecturer with a focus on diversity.25 They were seeking someone who could teach “in the field of ‘diversity’ (including culture, religion, ideology, ethnic or social origin, gender, age, disability),” understood as “a social phenomenon as well as a key concept and field of research in historical studies.”26 According to this text, the department’s concept of diversity is quite broad. Compared to the focus fields of our conference, it additionally comprises ideology, ethnic origin, gender, age, and disability.27 Overall, this advertisement testifies to a growing academic interest in this field, independent of specific periods, as much as it shows how extensive and vague the very concept of diversity is.

Drawing on this example, we pondered the extent to which the term is relevant (or increasingly relevant) to the field of Medieval Studies in particular. Without claiming completeness, we tried to establish a first impression based on findings generated by searches in the bibliographical databases RI-Opac (Regesta Imperii-Opac) and IMB (International Medieval Bibliography). According to our statistical analysis, the term diversity (or “Diversität” in German) has only come into use for publications by medievalists since the late 1990s. If one counts all entries using the term “Diversität” or “diversity” in the title of a book or article without, however, counting titles that were indexed with the term diversity, the number of results is limited: about 90 in the IMB and about 30 in the RI-Opac. Compared to many other key words of medieval studies, these are fairly low numbers. As is so often the case, there are various explanations. Mostly, this topic has a lot to do with labels. There has been considerable research and scholarship on social and religious difference in the Middle Ages, but often this scholarship is part of studies focused mostly on other topics and therefore does not show in the databases if one considers only the titles of publications. Examples include studies focused on the crusaders or on pluri-religious cultural contact zones.28

What, however, do authors mean when they use the label diversity for their publications? Diversity is often used as a synonym for “variety” or “plurality,” and vice versa.29 These terms are not quite the same in English and German, but they have clear overlaps. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary describes diversity as “the condition of having or being composed of differing elements (especially the inclusion of people of different races, cultures, etc. in a group or organization).”30 Plurality is defined as “a) the state of being plural, b) the state of being numerous, c) a large number or quantity,”31 while variety is “the quality or state of having different forms or types.”32 While we cannot discuss the manifold studies on plurality in the Middle Ages here,33 we would like to suggest the use of diversity as an analytical tool for Medieval Studies. This is not a political agenda that seeks to highlight or promote diversity in history. Rather, compared to terms such as plurality and variety, diversity as a concept seems to offer the clearest focus on individuals and groups, and this makes it an attractive concept for the study of social groups and their structures and forms of identity.

Diversity as an Analytical Tool for Medieval Studies?
Conceptual and Terminological Suggestions

Accordingly, the levels of meaning and areas of application of this term vary considerably. Diversity is often used to describe very different areas, ideas, and social practices. Cultural scientist Margit E. Kaufmann even characterizes diversity as a “tense dispositive of the Zeitgeist.”34 According to Kaufmann, the widespread use of the term diversity can be understood as a reaction to tensions within Western societies. Cultural anthropologist Steven Vertovec even states that our time is not necessarily “characterized by a higher degree of social difference than earlier times, but […] discourses about diversity are ubiquitous in the contemporary era.”35

From a historical perspective, on the other hand, Thomas Bauer, professor of Islamic and Arabic Studies, recently noted a significant loss of diversity and ambiguity in modern times under the catchphrase of the “disambiguation of the world” (“Vereindeutigung der Welt”). Bauer suspects that this development is a trait of modernity, which is characterized by a trend toward the annihilation of diversity and the rejection of ambiguity. In contrast, Bauer attests to the exemplary character (from the perspective of diversity) of pre-modern societies, because they were “tolerant of ambiguity” (“ambiguitätstolerant”) and thus well versed in modes of dealing with social, cultural, and religious differences. In contrast to countries in Africa, the Near East, or Asia, which he contends offer examples of “real multiculturalism” (“wirkliche Multikulturalität”), Bauer considers pre-modern Europe monocultural due to the homogenizing effect of Christianity: “In the pre-modern era, no continent was as religiously and culturally uniform as Europe.”36

A medieval monarch like Sigismund of Luxembourg or his contemporary observers like Philip Diversi and Isidore of Kiev would probably have been surprised by this assessment. After all, Sigismund ruled and influenced large parts of Europe. Sigismund was always confronted with diverse day-to-day political disputes, different groups, differing concepts of belonging, and a differentiation of participatory structures, whether these differences were consequences of the “Great Western Schism,” the war against the Hussites, debates concerning the power of disposition in his kingdoms, efforts to unify Christendom, or defense measures against the Ottomans.

But do we need the concept of diversity for research on Sigismund and his time? Does the study of historical constellations through the prism of diversity really yield new or different findings? Or is diversity just a buzzword synonymous with variety, plurality, or multiculturalism? And does the term, which is used today primarily in reference to race, class, and gender, possibly direct our gaze away from forms of alterity in medieval societies? The aim of this special issue is not to impose modern notions of diversity on medieval societies. Nevertheless, it seems that a term that is primarily used with political and social connotations and implications has great potential for academic discussions, less as an empirical than as an analytical category.

At the heart of diversity lie “different conceptions of social difference.” It is thus a relational concept which highlights differences in terms of social categories and can be applied to relational structures within a social space. Consequently, as Steven Vertovec suggests, an important basic assumption is “the recognition of social difference,”37 regardless of which aspects are brought into focus. This is also where Moritz Florin, Victoria Gutsche, and Natalie Krentz started in 2018 when they made the first systematic attempt to make diversity applicable to historical case studies. They understand diversity as a “system of differentiations”38 that could be pronounced and asserted differently depending on historical constellations. First, a broad reservoir of categories of difference is to be assumed (e.g. religion, language, gender, social position, etc.), which can become visible and effective in different ways. Then, we must ask for forms of dealing with these social differences. In addition to the marking of otherness, the resulting options for perception and action are crucial. These include both observable positioning by means of clothing, symbolic external presentation, and use of language or religious practice and discursive positioning within a social hierarchy.39

Depending on the context, differentiated categories can lead to social inequalities, disparate distribution of resources, and different opportunities for participation. They can but do not necessarily have to contribute to the consolidation of social hierarchies. At the same time, the categories that are used to define and legitimize differences are variable in terms of their content or use, and thus the practices and semantics of differentiation are similarly variable. Categories of difference can be used to legitimize or negate claims to resources or to create new normative orders.40

Diversity as a historical category of analysis thus does not serve as a means of tracing static forms of inclusion or exclusion.41 Rather, according to our hypothesis, it can further more nuanced contextualization of political, social, cultural, and religious differences and hierarchies historically in their relevance to processes of social negotiation and also reveal semantic or narrative changes in the ways in which these differences were reified, challenged, or exploited.42 Whether “plurality” (“Vielfalt”) is an adequate synonym for diversity or whether, as in recent migration research, terms such as “multiplicity” (“Vielheit”)43 or alternatives are more appropriate remains a matter for discussion.

The papers in this special issue consider which sources reveal information about social differences and hierarchies. They thereby show that a variety of sources and phenomena can provide knowledge about forms of social dif­fe­rentiation. One can easily state that it is possible to study diversity in the Middle Ages and that this study of diversity is fruitful. However, not everything we can study has to be studied or has the same importance. Without any doubt, the concept of diversity offers new perspectives on social groups and phenomena that have not been given the attention they deserve. At the same time, we need to discuss whether and how the modern concept of diversity is applicable to the Middle Ages. The easy answer would be yes, it is applicable, but we have to be cautious and precise. It is important to understand the study of diversity not solely as analysis of markers of difference, such as race, class, and gender, but also as the study of concepts, definitions, and uses of variety, understanding contemporary assessments of such variety and its social functions and contexts.

Baring this in mind and based on the papers of the conference and the articles in this special issue, we would like to highlight four aspects that struck us as good reference points to show why it is important to focus on diversity as a concept. First, when applying the concept of diversity, many case studies also found notions of unity and uniformity. These concepts are certainly essential to any understanding of groups and societies, and thus they are of great importance to the field of medieval studies. In some cases, unity and uniformity seem to be opposed to social differentiations. In other cases, these differentiations can be part of unity. Thus, as an analytical tool, diversity can further a more nuanced understanding of how various forms of unity were understood and how they functioned.44

Second, differences and hierarchies typically can be found in processes of inclusion and exclusion used by self-fashioning social groups. This becomes visible in the cases of numerous religious groups and subgroups but also in uses of language (understood broadly also as discursive styles), forms of symbolic expression, and communication strategies.45 At the same time, the papers discuss how social groups were imagined, for instance in the case of individual cities, knights, the nobility, and possibly even heretics.46 If we analyze these constellations through the prism of diversity (within a realm or outside it), we can arrive at a richer grasp of how these groups were constructed and how they functioned.47

Third, we can ask whether positive and negative conceptions of diversity can be handled analytically the same way. Negative and positive connotations of diversity certainly are closely linked to processes of inclusion and exclusion and can even be used as tools in these processes. As a term, diversity has a number of meanings, ranging from separateness and the condition of being different to a difference of opinion. And scenarios of diversity are conceived in multiple ways. If possible, in our analysis we should make clear how diversity was assessed at the time in its specific context to preclude misconceptions by modern readers.48

And last, what role do differences and imaginations play in learning and imitating in art and scholarship, in connecting people, and in establishing opportunities for cultural exchange? Contact zones (understood both spatially and socially) seem to be especially fruitful for these questions.49 These contact zones can include regions such as the Adriatic or the Mediterranean,50 assemblies such as councils or parliaments,51 and cities and even courts.52 We can study both the intellectual works and artifacts produced in these milieus and contact zones and we can focus on individual people and their motives and interests.

These four spotlights highlight only some aspects and debates of this special issue. In many cases, the focus on diversity puts social groups, social practices, social discourses, and forms of identity building or interactions with these forms of identity into focus. This seems to be a promising way of broadening our perspective on the period of Sigismund of Luxembourg beyond the emperor and the nobility surrounding him. Analyzing modes of differentiation in the Middle Ages thus means applying the analytical category of diversity, which furthers a more nuanced understanding of social groups, their practices, and how they interacted with and conceived of one another.

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* We would like to thank our anonymous reviewers for their remarks, which helped clarify our argu­menta­tion.

Jakša Kušan’s Forgotten Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in Croatia*

Josip Mihaljević

Croatian Institute of History

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 13 Issue 1  (2024):107-132 DOI 10.38145/2024.1.107

Croatian journalist and writer Jakša Kušan (1931–2019) was one of the most prominent Croatian émigré dissidents. By editing and publishing the non-partisan magazine Nova Hrvatska (New Croatia), he tried to inform the global public about the suppression of human rights and civil liberties in socialist Yugoslavia, even under constant threat of being attacked by the Yugoslav secret police. After the fall of communism, he returned to Croatia and continued his work in the media and the civil sector for a brief time. In this article, I offer an overview of the most relevant of Kušan’s oppositional activities during the period of communist rule in Croatia and Yugoslavia and consider the roles and impact of his activities. I also venture some explanation as to why his life and work have mostly been forgotten in today’s Croatia. One possible answer to this question could be his complex relationships with the Croatian dissidents who won the first multiparty elections in Croatia in 1990. My discussion is based on the findings of the COURAGE project (Cultural Opposition – Understanding the Cultural Heritage of Dissent in the Former Socialist Countries), oral history sources, and archival documents of the Yugoslav secret police.

Keywords: Jakša Kušan, Croatian émigré, dissent, socialist Yugoslavia, Croatia, democracy, COURAGE project, Yugoslav secret service

Introduction

The life of Jakša Kušan is a relevant topic in the history of dissent and non-conformism in the former socialist countries of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. Kušan, who spent much of his life in exile, was one of the most prominent journalists and publishers of the Croatian diaspora. From 1955 to 1990, he propagated a vision of a democratic and pluralistic Croatia. By publishing the non-partisan newspaper Nova Hrvatska (New Croatia), he sought to inform not only the Croatian emigrants but also the Yugoslav and Western public about the suppression of human rights and civil liberties in socialist Yugoslavia and to emphasize the precarious position of the Croatian nation in the federal Yugoslav state. The communist authorities in Yugoslavia attempted to hinder his activity in exile by creating an extensive network of agents and informants around Kušan. Despite the efforts of the Yugoslav State Security Service (UDBA/SDS),1 however, Kušan managed to publish the journal for more than three decades. The journal earned the epithet of the most respected political magazine among Croatian émigrés. Although Kušan was emotionally attached to the idea of creating an independent and sovereign Croatia, he believed that in the political struggle, one should avoid indulging in the emotions that led many Croatian émigrés to political radicalism. He believed that Croatian émigrés would not gain the support of the Western world if they showed any willingness to use terrorist methods.

Croatian political emigration would significantly contribute to Croatia’s independence from Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kušan strongly supported many of the Croatian dissidents and oppositional figures who eventually won the first multi-party elections in Croatia in 1990. However, Kušan’s connections with the people who formed the new government were severed very quickly, and he found himself on the margins of political life. Although he performed some public duties in the 1990s, mostly in the civil and NGO sector, Kušan did not participate actively in political life, and he wrote less and less and stopped publishing. Gojko Borić claims that Kušan was marginalized from the moment of the establishment of the Republic of Croatia as an independent state and that today he has been almost completely forgotten and his legacy has become a matter of debate.2

This paper has two main goals. The first is to emphasize the most relevant of Kušan’s oppositional activities during the period of communist rule in Yugoslavia and consider the roles and impact of his activities. The second is to venture some explanation as to why his life and work have mostly been forgotten in today’s Croatia. The discussion is based primarily on the findings of the COURAGE project (Cultural Opposition – Understanding the Cultural Heritage of Dissent in the Former Socialist Countries),3 oral history sources (interviews), and archival documents. The COURAGE project researched Kušan as a significant oppositional figure to socialist Yugoslavia, describing his private collection of books, photographs, and letters related to the activities of Croatian émigrés.4 As part of this project, two long interviews were conducted with Kušan in 2016 and 2018.5 For this article, a dossier (intelligence file) on Kušan created by the notorious UDBA (the secret service of socialist Yugoslavia) was also analyzed. Files of the Croatian branch of the UDBA, including the file on Kušan, are held today at the Croatian State Archives in Zagreb and recently became available to researchers.6 In this research, I have used various books from the fields of history, political science, and diaspora studies, as well as various articles from scientific and other journals and online sources.

Kušan’s Life before Exile

Kušan was born in Zagreb on April 23, 1931 to a middle-class family. During World War II, when he was still a boy, his family did not sympathize with the Ustasha regime in the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, or NDH), which was a fascist puppet state supported by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Kušan’s family was Western-oriented, appreciating parliamentary democracy and liberalism. They listened to Western radio stations, such as the BBC.7 Nevertheless, hopes for the establishment of democracy were dashed after the end of the war. After the overthrow of the fascist regime of the NDH, another form of totalitarianism, the communist one, rose to power in the new Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia (Federativna Narodna Republika Jugoslavija, or FNRJ).8

Kušan finished high school in 1950 in his hometown. As a high school student, he corresponded with members of the International Friendship League.9 He also came into conflict with philosophy professors over the issue of ideology, and similar conflicts arose when he pursued the study of law at the University of Zagreb. Unlike most of his colleagues, who wrote essays and seminar papers based on texts by Karl Marx, Kušan took an interest in subjects associated with the works of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky, authors who were not widely promoted at the time. Due to his nonconformist views, he soon came into conflict with the communist party nomenclature at the university.10

During his student days in Zagreb, he was part of a circle of young intellectuals who were dissatisfied with the political situation in Yugoslavia, especially with the oppressive methods used by the regime and the lack of cultural ties to the Western world. In 1953, they began to hold regular gatherings, and they started entertaining the idea of establishing a political organization, which was prohibited by law. In 1954, they organized an illegal organization called the Croatian Resistance Movement (Hrvatski pokret otpora, or HPO).11 They illegally procured newspapers published by Croatian emigrants, but they were disappointed by these publications, which did not meet their expectations or standards. In their assessment, the Croatian émigrés were uninformed and did not have close enough ties with their homeland. Kušan felt that the émigrés were more concerned with relations among the Croatian émigré communities (and the differences that divided these communities) than they were with the fate of the people in Croatia. The first proclamation made by the HPO, which was written in 1954 and bore the title “Message of the Croatian youth from the homeland to Croats in exile,” was an appeal to Croatian emigrants to set aside their petty disputes and problems and work together for the sake of Croatia.12 Kušan was the main founder of HPO and also the person who authored all the organization’s documents.13 The group was also dissatisfied with the attitudes of the Western states, many of which supported Josip Broz Tito and his communist regime in Yugoslavia because of his dispute with the Soviets. They therefore decided that someone from the group should go to the West and engage in journalistic work there. Kušan volunteered to be that person, in part because he was already under police surveillance.14 Kušan had caught the attention of the authorities because he had defended a friend, a student at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, at the Disciplinary Court of the University of Zagreb. His friend had been accused of having publicly expressed political beliefs that were not in line with party propaganda.15 The case turned into a strong demonstration against the communists, who led the student organization at the faculty.16 Partly in response, at the beginning of 1954, students who were members of the party organizations began to take revenge on Kušan and forbade him to attend lectures and exams. They soon initiated disciplinary proceedings against him at the Faculty of Law. As a consequence of these proceedings, Kušan was given a comparatively lenient punishment for having “exceeded his right to defense,” but this meant that he was subjected to police interrogations and also received death threats. Kušan decided to move to Belgrade to continue his law studies. According to him, the atmosphere in Belgrade was completely different, and he was not under the same strict control that he had been put under in Zagreb.17

Fleeing Yugoslavia and Founding the Magazine Nova Hrvatska

In Belgrade, while pursuing his studies, Kušan worked as a tourist guide for English-speaking groups of tourists. At the end of April 1955, he received a Yugoslav passport, and he left Yugoslavia in May. He crossed the border with Austria and traveled to Italy, where he stayed for a short time before moving to The Hague via Rome, where in 1955 he received a scholarship at the Academy of International Law. One of the judges of the Hague Tribunal, Dr Milovan Zoričić, helped him obtain the scholarship. In early 1956, he settled in Great Britain, where he was given political asylum. In London, he continued his education at the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1957 to 1961, but he did not complete his studies because he was too busy working as a journalist and editor.18 In 1956, HPO, his organization in Croatia, was discovered by the Yugoslav authorities. Its members were arrested and, in 1957, were sentenced to prison.19

In 1958, Kušan received a scholarship from the Free Europe University in Exile (FEUE), which had been founded in 1951 by the American National Committee for Free Europe.20 At this university, especially during its summer seminars held in Strasbourg, respectable members of the liberal academic community from the United States, as well as many prominent European emigrant intellectuals gave lectures. At the same time, it was a gathering place for refugee students from countries under communist rule, who were educated at the institution in a liberal democratic spirit. The Yugoslav communists contended that it was a school for CIA informants.21

In Strasbourg, Kušan connected with many young intellectuals from Europe, and especially with his compatriots. He began to cooperate with some of them in efforts to further the political education of society as a whole and to call attention to the harmfulness of totalitarian rule in Yugoslavia. Kušan continued to maintain contacts with like-minded people from his homeland, and he soon created a network of associates to work together on efforts to inform the public. In 1958, he founded the magazine Hrvatski bilten (Croatian Bulletin) in London.22 In 1959, the magazine was renamed Nova Hrvatska (New Croatia, or NH). The primary goal of the periodical was to inform the Croatian public abroad about the events in their homeland and to reveal the truth about the undemocratic practices of the communist regime in Yugoslavia. One of the aims of the magazine was to set aside the ideological differences within the Croatian émigré communities and work together for Croatian independence. The desire to unite the various political currents in the Croatian diaspora is clearly evident from the slogan at the top of the front page of the first issue of the magazine: “Croats of all parties, unite!”23

From the mid-1960s, NH became the most influential polemically oriented magazine in which discussions concerning solutions to the Croatian question were held. It was initially published monthly, but from 1974 until it was discontinued in 1990, it transitioned to a bi-monthly publication schedule. In the beginning, it was distributed through its trustees, and later it was sold in public places.24 It had the largest circulation of publications among the Croatian diaspora (some editions ran up to 20,000 copies). As an editor-in-chief, Kušan advocated democracy and the freedom of the individual and freedom of peoples. He believed that only a politically informed and educated individual could be an active factor in his social environment, and he saw this principle as a shield against political manipulation of individuals and political parties.25 About Kušan’s work as editor-in-chief, Borić said that he adhered to the principle of objectivism, which meant drawing a strict distinction between information and commentary and taking into account different views on the contents of his reporting. That was an especially hard task, because it was difficult to gather reliable information from totalitarian Yugoslavia.26 According to Gojko Borić, one of the founders of NH, the magazine differed significantly from other Croatian émigré publications, which tended only to report on news from the homeland that confirmed their political views.27 Kušan’s main goal was to educate Croatian emigrants politically, in part to make them less susceptible to the false promises made in the propaganda of some radical Croatian emigrants.

The NH often published news that the Yugoslav government did not want to get out, and the comments NH gave when interpreting certain news and events were negative towards the communist regime in Yugoslavia. The editorial also received confidential information, mostly from anonymous senders, and that information was published or rejected, depending on the assessment of its credibility. The editorship was always at risk of falling prey to false claims, which happened in some cases, which is why some Croatians in exile criticized the magazine and declared such rare failures as hoaxes contrived by the Yugoslav secret services.28

The correspondence with associates from the country was handled through encrypted messages. Thus, for example, in correspondence with one of his friends and associates who he did not know was a UDBA informant with the code name Rajko,29 Kušan wrote at the end of 1964 that he was interested in the Congress of Lawyers in Belgrade, which meant the Eighth Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (Savez komunista Jugoslavije, or SKJ). Kušan also wrote that he “expects a baby in a few days,” which was a coded message to indicate that he was expecting a new issue of NH.30 For the transmission of messages and information, the editorial board of NH used people who occasionally traveled from Yugoslavia to the West. The NH associates and informants were most often people from the closest family circle of the NH journalists.

The Yugoslav authorities were also bothered by the fact that NH was smuggled to and illicitly distributed in Yugoslavia. Kušan also sent NH to his homeland by mail to the many ordinary citizens whose addresses had been made public, for example, as part of some prize games in the newspapers. Through secret channels, a pocket-size edition (14.5 x 10 cm) of the magazine the articles in which could only be read with the use of a magnifying glass was usually sent to Yugoslavia.31 Kušan also sent NH to numerous political leaders in Croatia, such as members of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Croatia.

The Yugoslav secret services constantly followed the writing of NH and tried to prevent the publication of the magazine, which is evident from the UDBA file on Kušan. As early as the beginning of 1958, the UDBA learned from Tihomil Rađa’s conversation with a UDBA informant that in the summer of 1957 in Strasbourg Kušan and Rađa had agreed to launch Hrvatski bilten.32 In the mid-1960s, the UDBA stated in its reports that “the editorial office of this paper is one of the main centers of subversive-propaganda and anti-Yugoslav activity.”33 The UDBA tried to gain access to Kušan’s store of documents and the magazine’s archives, which included files on contributors and associates. They never succeeded, although they managed to get some of the documents.34

Kušan’s Political Views and His Activities in the Diaspora: A Thorn in the Side of the Yugoslav Communist Regime

Throughout his life in exile, Kušan continuously raised the question of Croatian national independence and spoke openly about the suppression of human and civil rights in socialist Yugoslavia, which is why he was constantly under the surveillance of the Yugoslav secret services.35

From the documentation of the UDBA, one can learn a lot about Kušan himself. According to the reports from the early 1960s, Kušan initially worked under difficult conditions. This is clear from the report of UDBA’s informant Rajko, who visited Kušan in London in 1964. He states that Kušan was not making any profit from NH and that the Kušans lived off the salary of his wife, Zdenka:

He worked day and night, ate almost nothing, and looked like a biblical ascetic—thin, pale, bloodshot eyes, badly in need of a shave, hollow. Usually, they don’t eat enough: they drink tea in the morning, and then she goes to work, and he works in the apartment, and they take the main meal only when she comes and prepares it around 6 o’clock, and even that meal is less than our average lunch.36

Another UDBA informant (code name David) offered similar reports concerning the difficult living conditions of Jakša Kušan in October 1965. He reported that Vinko Nikolić, one of the most prominent Croatian émigré intellectuals, said that Kušan lived under comparatively modest, even meager circumstances and that he edited his magazine on an old-fashioned typewriter.37 He also noted that another Croatian emigrant, Jure Petričević, had said that Kušan lived in poverty and that he depended mainly on the help of some Englishmen.38

Nevertheless, in the second half of the 1960s, Kušan was better off financially because he got a job as an associate to Viktor Zorza.39 In September 1967, Rajko talked to Kušan’s brother, Zlatko. They touched on Jakša’s activities in London. Zlatko told him that Jakša had secured regular employment with the prominent English liberal newspaper The Manchester Guardian and that he worked as a close assistant to the editor for Eastern Europe, the Polish Jew Victor Zorza, one of the most respected journalist experts on Eastern European politics and a man with strong ties to the Liberal Party in Britain. Kušan allegedly collected and systematized news and data on which Zorza wrote his articles and comments.40 The UDBA’s agents considered him a man close to the British Foreign Office. Consequently, it was assumed that Kušan was also leaning on the British secret services.

Kušan sympathized with the left in Britain. Thus, one UDBA informant reports that Kušan, as an English citizen, consistently voted for the Labor party.41 From his youth, Kušan had been a sympathizer of the Western form of political rule, especially the British. However, when he left Yugoslavia as a young man in 1955, he was not against socialism. He considered that, due to the character of the regime, it was impossible to expect the introduction of pluralism, but that a big step would also be to allow a faction within the Party.42

From the very beginning of his activities in London, Kušan stood out as someone who espoused different views regarding the realization of Croatian independence. Although he harshly criticized the communist regime in Yugoslavia, he thought that the liberalization process within the League of Communists of Yugoslavia could expand the space of freedom in the country.43 He advocated for reconciliation between nationalists and communists and felt that the radical methods used by some organizations in the Croatian diaspora were not good or effective as means of fulfilling Croatian goals. He claimed that terrorism was unacceptable both to the Western and the Eastern blocs, which were already inclined to preserve Yugoslavia. He advocated a strategy of gradually building democratic consciousness and cooperation among Croatian emigrants with the liberal wing of Croatian communists. In this sense, in the second half of the 1960s, one of the missions of his journal was to encourage democratization processes within the League of Communists of Croatia and to promote the Croatian reform movement (Croatian Spring) in the West in the hopes of gaining foreign sympathy and support.44 He believed that through the liberalization of the regime in Croatia, the situation in the whole of Yugoslavia could be liberalized. He believed that the League of Communists of Croatia could eventually turn into some kind of socialist or social democratic party. In such a democratic environment, Croats would then be free to decide in a referendum whether to stay in Yugoslavia or secede.45 Because of his conciliatory attitudes towards the communists, Croatian émigrés with more right-wing leanings were suspicious of Kušan, and some of them even called him a communist and a UDBA man.46

Kušan was constantly under surveillance by the UDBA through its numerous agents, collaborators, and informants,47 and his correspondence was secretly controlled. Due to his activities in exile, the District Court in Zagreb opened an investigation into his activities in February 1965.48 The Yugoslav Embassy in London invited him several times and sought to persuade him to stop his political activities in exile while promising him some privileges. Kušan refused, although he had to bear in mind that his family (parents and brothers) still lived in Yugoslavia, and they were also under surveillance by the UDBA.49 Zlatko was arrested in 1959 and charged because he had corresponded with his brother. He defended himself at the hearing, saying that maintaining a written relationship with his brother was not a criminal offense.50 He was forced to explain the way in which they corresponded. They sent messages encrypted in Braille, and Zlatko received the letters from his brother at the address of one of his friends who was blind, and he would send a letter to Jakša addressed to one of Jakša’s English friends.51 Zlatko was later invited by the UDBA to take part in “informative interviews” several times, and in 1972, he was even detained and interrogated for 10 days.52 The UDBA also conducted “informative interviews” with Jakša’s other brother, Petar, in 1975, and his passport was confiscated because he once visited his brother Jakša during his travels abroad.53 In 1977, they confiscated the Jakša’s mother’s passport, and they only returned it seven years later, in 1984.54 The return of the passport was just another UDBA setup. They gave her passport back, but in return, during her visit to London, she was expected to try to persuade Jakša to stop his anti-Yugoslav activities.55 The UDBA failed in its endeavor.

The UDBA speculated that Kušan had maintained contacts with the British intelligence service while still a student in Yugoslavia, because during his stay in Italy in 1955, he had received a British visa “in an unusually short time” and “some photos and other published materials in Nova Hrvatska indicate that Kušan has access to British diplomatic and intelligence sources.”56 The UDBA suspected that the British intelligence service was providing scholarships offered by Kušan to young and talented students abroad who had distinguished themselves through their hostile activity against Yugoslavia.57 However, after reviewing all the documents in his UDBA file, I did not come across any documented evidence of his alleged collaboration with the UK services. The only thing the UDBA had were reports submitted by its informants, who said that some of Kušan’s associates had said that he had connections to the British services.58 In an interview for the COURAGE project, Kušan pointed out that his choice of London as a place to work and publish was a complete success because it was an open environment that received refugees from all around the world and provided him with full protection from the Yugoslav secret services. “The UDBA did threaten us,” he said, “but the English authorities always gave police protection whenever we reported threats. That is why the authorities in Belgrade often said that we were collaborators with some British secret services, and in the end, they never touched us.”59

The editorial office of NH was originally located in a small basement room in London and was constantly struggling with a lack of money for publishing. Moreover, in the second half of the 1960s, the periodical almost went out of publication, because Kušan himself was too busy with his work as an analyst for The Guardian. In 1969, no issues of NH were published. In 1970, one regular issue and one double issue were published, and in 1971 only one was released. In addition to financial difficulties and lack of time, the reason for the reduced publication is that Kušan himself wondered if NH was needed at all. Kušan believed that, in the more liberal atmosphere in Croatia in the late 1960s, and early 1970s, the local magazines and newspapers were freeing themselves from the shackles of communist censorship and were presenting the situation in the country more and more objectively.60 During the Croatian reform movement, better known as the Croatian Spring (1967–1971), Kušan nurtured sympathy for the movement because it was a process he had hoped for.61 Jakša was delighted with Većeslav Holjevac, a former high-ranking partisan officer and long-time mayor of Zagreb, who, since the mid-1960s, had advocated in support of cooperation between the homeland and Croatian émigrés. Kušan described Holjevac’s book Hrvati izvan domovine (Croatians Abroad), which was published in 1967, as the first real step towards buildings ties with the Croatian émigré communities, and he noted that Holjevac had enabled several associates of the Emigrant Foundation of Croatiato come into contact with Croatian émigré organizations, including associates of NH.62 Kušan believed that during the Croatian Spring, especially within the League of Communists of Croatia, a process of democratization was taking place that would eventually lead to the disintegration of the communist regime and, ultimately, the democratization of the whole of Yugoslavia. He was more than disappointed when the Croatian reform movement was suppressed in late 1971 and early 1972.

Although he was disappointed with the collapse of the Croatian spring, this event meant new life for Kušan’s magazine. Communist censorship once again shackled the media in Croatia, so NH became more important. Ironically, communist censorship indirectly saved the journal. Censorship in Croatia reached such a level that the Hrvatski pravopis (Croatian Orthography) written by Stjepan Babić, Božidar Finka, and Milan Moguš, published in 1971, was banned by the Yugoslav authorities for political reasons shortly after it went into print. The Yugoslav authorities destroyed the entire print run of 40,000 copies. Only a few internal copies were preserved. This act of censorship was part of the Yugoslav authorities’ confrontation with the Croatian Spring at the end of 1971, because the Croatian orthography was created within the Matica hrvatska, the most important cultural-oppositional institution in socialist Croatia. However, the editorial board of NH, headed by Kušan, managed to get a copy and publish it in London in 1972. For many years, this book was a best-seller in the Croatian diaspora because it was a symbol of the Croatian Spring.63 The financial success of this book, as well as the contributions from about 20 friends of NH who donated money, enabled the editorial board of NH to buy a house in London which provided a new home for the editorial office. According to Kušan, it was the best investment in the history of NH.64

Kušan and NH constantly reported on fabricated lawsuits against Croatian intellectuals who were tried after the collapse of the Croatian Spring. NH tried to make news of these people’s fates reach the Western public and the Croatian émigré communities. In this regard, they also worked closely with Amnesty International, which they provided information and from which they also received information.65 Kušan also maintained contacts with and published articles and books by Croatian dissidents and oppositionists who could not publish in their homeland. UDBA informants reported that Kušan said that this way a “Croatian Solzhenitsyn could be created.”66 Kušan may have seen some kind of Croatian Solzhenitsyn in Franjo Tuđman, a Croatian historian and communist dissident who was expelled from the party in 1967. Kušan was involved in the publication of Tuđman’s book The National Question in Contemporary Europe in 1981,67 and Kušan’s wife Zdenka translated into English the court documents from Tudjman’s trial, which were also published in London in 1981.68 For the promotion of Croatian dissident writers, Kušan did the most, working together with Vinko Nikolić, when they decided to exhibit together at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Nikolić was the editor-in-chief of the cultural magazine Hrvatska revija (Croatian Review) and the head of the publishing house that bore the same name. Since 1973, they had been exhibiting in Frankfurt every year, and their exhibition stand was always well attended, although they knew that UDBA agents and informants were among the visitors.69 Yugoslav authorities even used the diplomatic apparatus in their attempts to ban Kušan’s participation in the Fair,70 but they did not succeed. Moreover, Kušan and Nikolić expanded their exhibition stand every year.

In addition to his connections with Croatian dissidents, UDBA’s informants also talked about Kušan’s connections with dissidents of other nationalities, such as the famous Milovan Đilas.71 Because he cooperated with Đilas, other Croatian émigrés criticized Kušan.72 In his work against the communist government in Yugoslavia, Kušan also collaborated with Serbian and Albanian dissidents and émigrés, and he took part in some anti-Yugoslav demonstrations organized in European cities.73

The collapse of the Croatian Spring and police clashes with the liberal and national currents in Croatia gave additional impetus to those in exile who believed that Croatian national goals could only be achieved by violent means.74 To acquaint the Western public with the position of Croats in Yugoslavia and to gain international support for the overthrow of the communist regime in Yugoslavia, a small number of Croatian émigré organizations advocated terrorism and were particularly active in the 1970s.75 Kušan believed that the terrorist actions did more harm than good to the Croatian struggle for independence, and in that sense, he also commented on the terrorist actions that some Croatian emigrants carried out in Germany and other European countries.76 He had no sympathies for the action of the Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood (Hrvatsko revolucionarno bratstvo, or HRB), a Croatian revolutionary organization founded in 1961 in Australia that used terrorist methods, and their guerrilla incursion into Yugoslavia in June 1972. He believed that such actions were doomed to failure and would lead to unnecessary bloodshed, and he felt that the Croatian émigré communities would thus get a bad reputation in the world.77 The Croatian terrorist actions worked in favor of the Yugoslav government. The Yugoslav missions abroad and the secret services worked continuously to create a negative image of Croatian émigrés, trying to portray them as fascists and terrorists. The Yugoslav security and intelligence apparatus occasionally encouraged the radicalism of Croatian extremists in exile to discredit the political émigré community as a whole.78

The collapse of the Croatian Spring also affected numerous Croatian émigré organizations and individuals who were increasingly convinced that they had an obligation to take up the fight for Croatian interests and unite for this cause. In this sense, there were more attempts to unite all Croatian émigré organizations, which was accomplished with the establishment of the Croatian National Council (Hrvatsko narodno vijeće, or HNV) in 1974 in Toronto. It was an umbrella association of the Croatian diaspora which coordinated various émigré organizations that sought to present the case for Croat independence to the international community.79 In 1975, some of the most prominent magazines published by members of the Croatian émigré community, such as Hrvatska revija, Nova Hrvatska, and Studia Croatica joined the HNV. In 1975, Kušan also became a member of the HNV’s Congress and the Head of its Press and Advertising Department (1975–1977, 1979–1983).80 During the preparations for the elections for the Third Congress of the HNV, which were to be held in Australia in 1979,81 Kušan visited Australia and gave an interview for the national television there in which he spoke about the current case of the so-called Croatian six, who were six Australian citizens of Croatian descent who had been accused of attempting to carry out several terrorist attacks in Sydney in early 1979, which involved putting poison in the city’s water supply and planting a bomb in a theater. After a long trial, six Croatian-Australian men were sentenced to 15 years in prison in 1981 for a conspiracy to conduct terrorist attacks. The whole case was the result of the operation organized by the Yugoslav state security service to portray the Croatian-Australian community as extremists using Australian intelligence and police services as its tools.82 It was one of the methods of operation of the Yugoslav secret services, which sought to discredit the Croatian political émigré community. Before the trial was over and many years before the setup was revealed, Kušan told Australian television that it was a setup by the Yugoslav secret services.83

Since the late 1970s, Croatian émigrés had increasingly focused on calling attention to human rights violations in Yugoslavia.84 After the Helsinki Final Act was signed in 1975 at the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), in which the communist countries pledged to respect human and civil rights, the issue of violation of these rights became one of the main means with which to exert pressure on the communist regimes in Europe. Croatian émigré organizations had increasingly warned Western institutions and the public about the position of political prisoners in Yugoslavia, and they had emphasized the right of Croats to national self-determination. In this sense, they were especially active during the CSCE in Belgrade (June 1977–March 1978) and Madrid (November 1980–September 1983). The UDBA noted Kušan’s particularly strong anti-Yugoslav activity during these conferences.85 Kušan always sought to portray the issue of human rights violations against Croats within the Yugoslav communist regime as an integral part of a transnational problem.

Return to the Homeland and Displacement to the Margins

After the fall of communism in Croatia in 1990, the editorial board of NH felt that there is no reason to publish the journal abroad. They planned to transfer the journal to Croatia and publish it from there. However, by returning to Croatia, Kušan became aware of the numerous problems in a society that suffered the consequences of almost half a century of communist rule. The prevailing spirit of materialism and the lack of idealism stunned Kušan. In his memoirs, he spoke about the atmosphere in which inherited habits and the mentality of censored journalism prevailed.86 In the newspaper business, he faced theft, corruption, and embezzlement, and he soon gave up publishing his journal.87 The Serbian uprising and open aggression against the Republic of Croatia in 1991 had an additional negative impact on the development of the media in Croatia at the time.

Nevertheless, in late 1990, Kušan decided to return to his homeland permanently and continue his struggle for a better society. In 1993, he became a chairperson of the board of directors of the Open Society Institute of Croatia. Given that the society was funded by Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros, Kušan was criticized by the Croatian right and the conservatives. However, Kušan responded to his critics, saying that Soros gave more money for humanitarian purposes than for political purposes.88 In 1995, Kušan was a co-founder of the Association of the Homeland and Diaspora for a Democratic Society. This association was renamed the Association for a Democratic Society, and Kušan was its president in 2004.89

In the 1990s, Kušan was disappointed by political developments in modern Croatia. He did not participate actively in political life. Moreover, in the public sphere, he was largely marginalized and has practically been forgotten in today’s Croatia. One of the main questions this paper raises is why he was marginalized. It is difficult to give a precise and clear answer to this question. Relevant historical sources, such as archival documents from the period after 1990, are still unavailable, so I can only venture tentative answers based on data concerning his political views until 1990, his memoirs published in 2000, and statements made by some of his close contemporaries.

Historian Wollfy Krašić considers Jakša Kušan the first Croatian intellectual to sketch the idea of so-called Croatian reconciliation or the all-Croatian peace.90 It is the idea of the necessity of cooperation among former enemy sides from World War II, Ustashas and Croatian partisans, and their descendants in the creation of an independent Croatian state. At the time of the fall of communism, the aforementioned former communist dissident Franjo Tuđman achieved great political success and won the first multi-party elections in Croatia in 1990. Although Tudjman’s idea of reconciliation generally coincided with Kušan’s vision, after the independence of Croatia, the two of them had practically no mutual relations. Perhaps the relationship between Kušan and Tuđman was a crucial factor in the process of Kušan’s marginalization in Croatian public life. After the death of Kušan in 2019, Vladimir Pavlinić, his long-time close associate and also one of the editors of Nova Hrvatska, said that Tuđman was the one to blame. He claimed that Tuđman had begun to establish secret contacts with Kušan’s circle in the mid-1970s. Tuđman had sent documents concerning his trials and his new books to the editorial board of Nova Hrvatska, and they had published and translated them into English so that the global public would be able to read about him and his case.91 However, Pavlinić believes Tuđman shifted his circle of confidants in exile to Canadian-Australian radical organizations in the late 1980s. According to Pavlinić, Tuđman discarded the once very useful Kušan even before Kušan returned to Croatia. Pavlinić says that Tuđman invited Kušan from London to Zagreb in June 1990 to talk about founding a Croatian news agency and that at one point he had asked Kušan why he was writing hostilely about him and his political party, Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica, or HDZ).92 Tuđman referred to an article Kušan had published in Nova Hrvatska in March 1990. Kušan had commented extensively in the article on the First General Assembly of the HDZ, which had just been held. Kušan had claimed that the assembly had not touched on real political issues and that the gathering had resembled communist congresses, where it was not important what was said but only who was speaking.93 Kušan had been critical in the article of the HDZ, perhaps even more so because he advocated that the anti-communist opposition in Croatia act together as a united coalition. As the HDZ decided to run in the elections on its own, Kušan sympathized with its rival, the Coalition of People’s Accord (Koalicija narodnog sporazuma, or KNS). Pavlinić believed that Kušan’s libertarian thinking was enough for Tuđman to label Kušan an enemy of the people and that this had been a stigma that Kušan had carried until his death.94 Another one of Kušan’s former associates, Gojko Borić, had a similar view. He believed that any members of the émigré communities who had not been close to Tuđman had suffered great disappointment and failed in anything they had undertaken after the collapse of communism in Croatia.95

A few years before his death, Kušan mentioned that the change in his relations with Tuđman took place after the founding of the HDZ in June 1989.96 It is difficult to say what disrupted the relationship between the two. Perhaps the answer to that question lies in another question: why did Tuđman turn to Canadian-Australian circles of the Croatian émigré world?

If we observe the development of Kušan’s attitudes regarding the struggle for Croatian independence, a certain evolution of attitudes is noticeable. Although Kušan advocated the necessity of Croatia’s exit from communist Yugoslavia, in the 1980s his attitudes softened, and on several occasions, he said that Croatia could remain in Yugoslavia if Yugoslavia were to become a real liberal democracy. One of the reasons why Kušan was marginalized in the 1990s may be that, while supporting the struggle of all dissidents in Yugoslavia in the 1980s, he insisted less on Croatian independence and more on the democratization of Yugoslavia. Perhaps this shift, the milder approach of Kušan’s circle to the question of the existence of Yugoslavia, was why Tuđman turned to the Canadian and Australian part of the Croatian émigré world, which was more nationalistic and hardline. Perhaps Tuđman turned to the émigrés in Canada and Australia because they were also wealthier than those from Kušan’s circle, and he hoped to get stronger financial support from them for his political activities.

On the other hand, Kušan was disappointed with the achievements of democratic Croatia in the first decade of its existence. He believed that the ideals that he and other émigrés gathered around Nova Hrvatska had fought for had not been realized.97 Kušan was also disappointed with the new government’s attitude towards the Croatian émigré communities. He believed that the government had embraced members of these communities who had never had much influence and who, in his assessment, had no real grasp of the true values of freedom and democracy.98 He believed that the HDZ’s policy was guided by short-term goals and that the émigré communities were important to the party only as a source of financial and material resources with which the party would be better positioned to win elections and resist Serbian aggression. He believed that the UDBA in Croatia had changed sides overnight and joined the new government. In his memoirs, he expressed these concerns:

In this way, human rights violators from the previous regime, including notorious criminals, were not brought to justice. In return, and for balance, mostly extreme elements from the émigré world were brought home, and they were given high political, military, and police duties. The former UDBA agents and “the greatest Croats” found themselves side by side in many places... Essentially, this only confirms what we often emphasized, namely that there was never a significant difference between totalitarian communists and national extremists.99

Kušan believed that this was why many respectable Croatian émigrés distanced themselves from the new government. He believed that the HDZ had chosen this path to facilitate its consolidation and because of a lack of democratic sense at the top of the party. Furthermore, the political inexperience of voters and the apparent weakness of the domestic media, both as a direct consequence of the half-century one-party system and the war that soon followed, facilitated the undemocratic practice and delayed democratization processes.100 According to Kušan, these negative developments had psychological causes. The high degree of materialism which prevailed in all post-communist societies had further accelerated the spread of corruption and the overwhelming alliance between tycoons and politicians.101

This hypothesis requires further study, which will only be possible when archival sources from the 1990s are fully available. In this sense, it is worth mentioning the personal archive of Franjo Tuđman, which is still inaccessible to the public. It would also be useful to see and research the editorial archive and correspondence of the magazine Nova Hrvatska, which Kušan handed over to the National and University Library in Zagreb. Unfortunately, although more than a quarter of a century has passed since Kušan turned these documents over, they are still inaccessible to the public. This can also be seen as an indication that Kušan is a forgotten figure in Croatian political and cultural history. On the other hand, Kušan’s private collection, which he kept in his apartment in Zagreb, is also important for future research. According to his wishes, his private collection will be handed over to the Franciscan monastery in Visoko in Bosnia and Herzegovina.102

Nevertheless, it is a telling fact that only after Tuđman’s death did Kušan become more present in public life, and he also performed some public duties. This was the time of the new left-liberal coalition government, which ruled Croatia for several years after the death of Tuđman. From 2000 to 2004, Kušan was a chairperson on the board of directors of the Croatian Heritage Foundation, and from 2001 to 2002, he was a member of the Council of the Croatian Radio and Television.103

Conclusion

Although most of the East European diasporas which originated from areas that were subjected to communist rule were antagonistic towards communism and were preoccupied with the question of national identity and national independence,104 within these diasporas, there was a diversity of ideas and political views. One of the atypical representatives of the Croatian political diaspora was journalist and publicist Jakša Kušan.

Kušan distinguished himself from the majority of Croatian political emigrants through his persistent endeavors to broaden his network of resistance. Already as a student at the Free Europe University in Exile, he encountered and connected with various intellectuals, including the renowned writer Czesław Miłosz.105 He maintained a long-standing collaboration with the distinguished journalist Viktor Zorza, and through his journalistic and editorial work, he established connections with various democratically oriented intellectuals and organizations, such as Amnesty International. In building his network of resistance, he collaborated with other ethnic and national groups, not only those originating from the Yugoslav region but also with Poles and Estonians, for instance.106 Through years of participation at the Frankfurt Book Fair, he emphasized the importance of culture as a primary form of resistance against authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. Alongside democracy and freedom, he regarded culture as one of the main pillars of the new democratic Croatia.

This article presented the most important of Kušan’s activities during the period of communist rule in Yugoslavia, bringing to light new information concerning his life and work. The archives of the Yugoslav secret services are a fascinating source of data which can fill numerous lacunae in our knowledge of Kušan’s oppositional activities. This article shows that Kušan was a ubiquitous figure in the Croatian émigré world who was involved in many of most important events and organizations in Croatian diaspora, such as the Croatian National Council, and who was also important transnationally. In the diaspora, he stood out because of his constant struggle for democratic principles and pluralism, as well as the idea of reconciling the Croatian right and left, which, he felt, was a prerequisite for the creation of a modern democratic and pluralistic Croatia. In that sense, he had a significant influence on numerous actors in the émigré world and among dissidents and oppositional figures in Yugoslavia. Recent historiography has already noted that the idea of all-Croatian reconciliation, first outlined in the mid-1950s by Kušan, was eventually advocated by communist dissident Franjo Tuđman, who in the late 1980s became one of the main representatives of the opposition to communism in Croatia and won the first democratic multi-party elections in 1990 and became the first president of the newly independent Croatia. Kušan may have been somewhat surprisingly marginalized after his return to Croatia in the early 1990s in part because of his relationship with Tuđman. It is possible that in the context of the struggle for political power in Croatia, Kušan, who had been a long-term supporter and promoter of Tuđman, became a political enemy. Although this hypothesis requires further study and substantiation with sources which remain inaccessible, it certainly does not seem implausible. In the 1990s, Kušan was close to Tuđman’s political opponents, and he wrote critically about the new democratically elected government.

Kušan was thus not simply an archetypal representative of the transnational struggle against communist dictatorships but also a non-conformist who persisted in the fight for democracy and human rights even after the communist dictatorship had fallen. He continued his “Battle for a New Croatia,” which was also the title of his memoirs published in 2000.107

Archival Sources

Hrvatski državni arhiv, Zagreb [Croatian State Archives] (HDA)

HR-HDA-1561, SDS RSUP SRH The State Security Service of the Republic Internal Affairs Secretariat of the Socialist Republic of Croatia

Intelligence Files, 229528 Kušan Jakša

Oral history (interviews)

Bing, Albert, and Josip Mihaljević. Interview with Jakša Kušan, May 26, 2016. COURAGE Registry Oral History Collection.

Mihaljević, Josip. Interview with Jakša Kušan, April 05, 2018. COURAGE Registry Oral History Collection.

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Kušan, Jakša. “Najveći borci za Hrvatsku došli su upravo iz bivših udbaških redova!” [The greatest fighters for Croatia came from the former UDBA ranks]. Jutarnji list (online edition), December 19, 2016. Accessed August 11, 2021. https://www.jutarnji.hr/vijesti/hrvatska/najveci-borci-za-hrvatsku-dosli-su-upravo-iz-bivsih-udbaskih-redova-5401727.

Kušan, Jakša. “Nakon saborovanja HDZ” [After the HDZ assembly]. Nova Hrvatska 32, no. 5 (1990): 4.

McDonald, Hamishl. Reasonable doubt: Spies, Police and the Croatian Six. Bondi Junction, NSW: Doosra Media, 2019.

Mihaljević, Josip. “Jakša Kušan Collection.” COURAGE Registry, 2018. Accessed September 15, 2021. doi: 10.24389/39098

Mihaljević, Josip. “Stjepan Babić, Božidar Finka, Milan Moguš. Hrvatski pravopis (Croatian Orthography), 1972. Book.” COURAGE Registry, 2018. Accessed September 12, 2021. http://cultural-opposition.eu/registry/?uri=http://courage.btk.mta.hu/courage/individual/n52777&type=masterpieces.

Mihaljević, Josip. “Summer Courses of the Free Europe University in Exile, 1957. Brochure.” COURAGE Registry, 2018. Accessed September 17, 2021. http://cultural-opposition.eu/registry/?uri=http://courage.btk.mta.hu/courage/individual/n21734.

Na suđenju dr. Tuđmanu sudilo se Hrvatskoj [Croatia was tried at Dr Tuđman’s trial]. London: United Publishers, 1981.

Palić-Kušan, Jasna, trans. Croatia on trial: the case of the Croatian historian dr. F. Tudjman. London: United Publishers, 1981.

Pavlinić, Vladimir. “Jakša Kušan – čovjek kojemu je u slobodi oduzeta slobodna riječ” [Jakša Kušan - a man who was deprived of free speech in freedom]. Autograf.hr, July 31, 2019. Accessed September 7, 2021. https://www.autograf.hr/jaksa-kusan-covjek-kojemu-je-u-slobodi-oduzeta-slobodna-rijec/.

Perušina, Valentina. “Hrvatska politička emigracija – sigurnosna prijetnja socijalističkoj Jugoslaviji” [Croatian political emigration – a security threat to socialist Yugoslavia]. Polemos 22, no. 44–45 (2019): 13–37.

Scott-Smith, Giles. “The Free Europe University in Strasbourg: U.S. State-Private Networks and Academic ‘Rollback’.” Journal of Cold War Studies 16, no. 2 (2014): 77–107.

Tokić, Mate Nikola. Croatian Radical Separatism and Diaspora Terrorism during the Cold War. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2020.

Trošelj Miočević, Tanja. “Hrvatsko narodno vijeće od 1974. do 1990” [Croatian National Council 1974–1990]. Obnovljeni život 75, no. 2 (2020): 229–44.

Vlašić, Anđelko. “List Nova Hrvatska 1958–1962” [The paper Nova Hrvatska, 1958–1962]. In Disidentstvo u suvremenoj povijesti [Dissent in contemporary history], edited by Nada Kisić Kolanović, Zdenko Radelić, and Katarina Spehnjak, 291–314. Zagreb: Hrvatski institut za povijest, 2010.

Wright, Michael. Victor Zorza: a life amid loss. Lancaster: Observatory Publications, 2006.

* The research is conducted within the project “Exploring emotions in the (re)construction of diaspora identity: Croats in Australia and New Zealand (1945–1991),“ funded by the Croatian Science Foundation.

Smokescreens and Smear Campaigns: The Dutch Communist Party in Times of Crisis

Thomas Buijnink

Doctoral School of Sociology, Eötvös Loránd University

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 13 Issue 1  (2024):80-106 DOI 10.38145/2024.1.80

This article seeks to establish how different crises in the Eastern Bloc affected the political standpoints of the Communist Party of the Netherlands, Communistische Partij Nederland (CPN), through an analysis of publications in affiliated party magazines between 1953 and 1981. This analysis is conducted within a framework consisting of party change theories and the literature about Eurocommunism as a Europe-wide phenomenon. The analysis indicates that the CPN went from supporting military interventions in Germany, Poznan, and Hungary to condemning them in Czechoslovakia, initially while maintaining ideological distance from political opponents in the Netherlands. This changed in 1981, when the CPN seemingly without restraint joined the mainstream political parties in condemning the introduction of martial law in Poland and the Socialistische Partij (SP), the Socialist Party of the Netherlands, took over the CPN’s position as a political outsider. This indicated a shift in the party’s stance from a niche to a mainstream positioning against Moscow.

Keywords: Communist Parties, Eastern Bloc, Eurocommunism, Netherlands

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union largely lost its previous exemplary function for communist parties outside of the Eastern Bloc.1 Communist parties in western and southern Europe underwent political, ideological, and organizational changes which have been characterized as a transformation into Eurocommunism. Eurocommunism could be described as a modernization attempt by such parties to appeal to a broader electorate. A new course fit for such purposes practically meant a step away from Moscow with a renewed focus on national circumstances. Armed interventions by the Soviet Union against protests and social movements in its satellite states, such as during the East German Uprising or the Hungarian Revolution, were met with heavy criticism in Western Europe. Scholars have attributed different levels of significance to the effects such events had on the development of communist parties in Europe. The secondary literature puts considerable emphasis on the communist parties in France and Italy,2 both of which were countries in which the communists at one point came close to parliamentary majorities. It is thus important to note that Eurocommunism is a broad umbrella term which hardly does justice to the differences among the various communist parties of Europe.

What makes the Dutch case interesting in comparison to France and Italy is that within the Dutch political landscape the CPN had always remained a small but constant factor. After World War II, the CPN performed relatively well and acquired ten seats in the national parliament.3 This success was due to the role of the Soviet Union in the war and to the CPN’s resistance to the German occupying forces. In the postwar years, the CPN even became the biggest party during the municipal elections in Amsterdam. During this period, the CPN was known as anti-German, anti-American, and also as a vocal supporter of Moscow. Since the mid-1960s, the CPN became more detached from Moscow due to the Sino-Soviet split until its ties with Moscow were renewed in the 1970s. During the Cold War, the CPN became less and less popular. In 1989, the CPN merged with other parties into GroenLinks, the Green Left.4

The secondary literature on Eurocommunism and party change theories could shed interesting light on the developments within and evolution of the CPN. The whole premise of Eurocommunism falls in line with party change theories. These theories indicate that the political standpoints of mainstream political parties are rationally altered to suit changing external circumstances. The literature on Eurocommunism proposes a narrative in line with this assumption, as communist parties all over Europe changed their political standpoints as a reaction to changing national political circumstances. However, this would require that communist parties be defined as mainstream parties. If not, party change theories would lack explanatory power for the emergence of Eurocommunism, since, if communist parties were to be defined as niche parties, they would theoretically remain unaffected by changing external circumstances and stick to their predetermined policy positions. By addressing the specific policy changes of the CPN towards the crises in the Eastern bloc, this article only addresses a fraction of an array of factors which could indicate a shift to Eurocommunism. Singling out crises in the Eastern Bloc as an explicitly party external factor offers the benefit that party change theories can indicate if a shift to Eurocommunism correlates with a shift from a niche to a mainstream political course. This leads to the fundamental question I address in the discussion below: How did the CPN react to political crises within the Eastern Bloc, and did its political standpoints develop as a response to these events?

Table 2. An overview of the election results of the CPN in general elections in relation to the crises in the Eastern Bloc

Source: PDC. “CPN en de Tweede Kamerverkiezingen tussen 1946 en 1986.” Reference work Dutch Parliament. Accessed 25 June 2021, https://www.parlement.com/id/vhsdgb8b3t09/cpn_en_de_tweede_kamerverkiezingen.

Literature Review

In a substantial article about the Hungarian Revolution and anti-communism in the Netherlands, Duco Hellema addresses the Hungarian Revolution and the Dutch response from an international relations perspective. In general, the political attitudes of Western European states towards the Hungarian Revolution could be described as rather passive. Hellema attributes the overall lack of action to a sense of cautiousness due to the constant threat of nuclear war. A second factor is that in November 1956, France and Britain were preoccupied with the Suez Crisis. The Dutch attitude became something of an exception.5 Hellema states that the Dutch public reacted “vehemently,” as in comparison to other European states, the Dutch had a more outspokenly anti-communist reputation. According to Hellema, this came from a sense of conservatism which had its roots in a widely shared sense of discontent with the rapid modernization and societal changes after World War II. A factor which led the Dutch government to practice a cautious foreign policy was the loss of its former colonies. As a result of this, the Dutch government was forced to redefine its position on the international playing field and had no firm or predetermined Ostpolitik. In the postwar period, the Netherlands was governed by a Roman-Red coalition (a coalition of the Dutch labor party De Partij van de Arbeid, or PvdA and the Catholic People’s Party, or KVP), the foreign policy of which was characterized by an anti-communist attitude and could be summarized as cautious. The developments in the Eastern Bloc were therefore not followed with great interest but rather with suspicion. As soon as the situation in Hungary escalated, the Netherlands had no specific criteria or Ostpolitik to fall back on. Eventually, the Hungarian revolution was considered a window of opportunity to reduce the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. The attitude of the Dutch government thus became impatient in comparison to the other Western European states. At the same time, the Dutch government acknowledged that it could only wait and see. The military intervention which brought the Hungarian revolution to an end was sharply condemned by the Dutch press and prompted large demonstrations. One of the main targets of indignation was the CPN.6 Ultimately, no major sanctions were imposed on the Soviet Union. Hellema concludes that the Dutch people reacted fiercely to the events in Hungary and that this was somewhat reflected in the choices made by the Dutch government.7

The assumption that Dutch anti-communism has its roots in conservatism could be challenged. According to Revel, the staunchest anti-communists in Europe have always been the social democrats.8 The anti-communist sentiments in the Netherlands and in other northwestern European states could therefore be explained by the strong presence of social democratic parties. This is important for the framing of the rise of Eurocommunism in the 1970s and 1980s: “The fundamental controversy about Eurocommunism in Europe is thus not a debate between the Right and the Left but between two Lefts. The question is which trend of European socialism, the Leninist or the social-democratic, will prevail.”9

In West European Communism after Stalinism. Comparative Approaches, Maud Bracke and Thomas Ekman Jorgensen offer an overview of the different ways in which Eurocommunism has been addressed by various scholars.10 In the late 1970s, many articles and books were published about the political and ideological changes which Western European communist parties underwent in the 1970s and the 1980s. Consequently, much of the literature on this topic suffered from the political burden of being directly linked to the Cold War. According to Bracke and Ekman Jorgensen, this context made it difficult for many scholars to approach the topic from a neutral perspective. Contemporary studies in Eurocommunism thus could benefit from a different and more neutral approach.11 A second observation they make is that Eurocommunism has mainly been studied in countries where communist parties were more influential. Thus, within the literature on Eurocommunism, there is a strong focus on southern Europe.12

According to the same authors, one of the main motivations behind the transition to Eurocommunism was an increasingly critical attitude towards the lack of internal democracy in communist parties. At the same time, many party members realized that communist parties would not be able to obtain a leading role in modern protest movements which emerged outside of the working class, such as student protest movements and women’s rights movements. The sense of insecurity within communist parties peaked in the 1960s because of the Sino Soviet split and because the New Left was increasingly winning political terrain. It must be noted, however, that the development of Eurocommunism cannot be entirely generalized due to large differences between communist parties.13 In the 1960s, when it became increasingly urgent for communist parties to adapt to changing social circumstances, some of these parties were already far removed from their origins. Unique party cultures, histories, and circumstances gave each of them a unique societal dimension. In Italy and France, the communist parties in particular emerged as influential political actors after World War II, a position which they initially managed to maintain in the 1950s. By comparison, the communist parties in the Scandinavian states were small and marginal.14

Scholars have attributed different levels of significance to the effects of the Hungarian Revolution and the Prague Spring on the development of Eurocommunism. The Hungarian Revolution is considered a turning point by some authors, but other scholars argue that the ideological crisis for communist parties began no earlier than the 1970s. Gombin argues that the 1950s were formative for the French Communist Party and the emergence of the New Left.15 This was partly due to the Hungarian Uprising but also to the Algerian War: “Marxism lost its doctrinal primacy among an entire generation of young intellectuals and workers concerned with politics.”16 Jane Jenson draws a similar conclusion and considers 1956 a pivotal year for the communist party in France and “a high point between rise and decline.”17 Nevertheless, other authors claim the opposite. Roy Macridis18 and Hadley Cantril19 conclude that consternation within the French Communist Party was not particularly relevant for most of its members but mainly for its intelligentsia and leadership.

According to A. J. Liehm, the intended reforms proposed during the Prague Spring reflected and to a certain degree represented the ideal of Eurocommunism. Liehm concludes that the military interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, together with the general rejection of fundamental freedoms in Eastern Europe, were major reasons for the schism between eastern and western communist parties.20

Theoretical Framework

The circumstances under which political parties change their views are addressed widely within the field of political science. Several major studies have been bundled by Andreas Fagerholm in his 2015 article, Why Do Political Parties Change their Policy Positions? A Review.21 Among the studies on policy position change, two traditions can be distinguished. The first tradition was initiated by Robert Harmel and Kenneth Janda.22 Their general assumption is that political parties are conservative organizations which are averse to any form of change. If a political party changes policy positions, this is most likely because of internal party factors, such as leadership change. Alternatively, change could occur because of factors outside the party, such as disappointing electoral results or a shift in public opinion.23 The second tradition, heavily influenced by the work of Ian Budge,24 assumes that political parties rationally change their standpoints based on the political and societal circumstances they encounter while they engage in active political competition with one another. Budge identifies several factors which could indicate how likely it is for political parties to change their political standpoints.25 These include external factors, such as change of public opinion, undesirable electoral performance, creating distance between ideological rivals, and position within government or opposition. Also, internal factors are addressed, such as change of party leadership and internal party structures.

It is important to note that niche and mainstream parties have different tendencies when it comes to how they react to these factors. Adams et al. address changes in political standpoints in the context of Western European niche parties. This research concludes that while mainstream political parties’ policy shifts correspond to shifts in public opinion, niche parties do not display similar tendencies to adjust their policy preferences. A potential explanation for this phenomenon is that niche parties might have established their policy positions beforehand in such a way that they are already aligned with their rank and file.26 While there is consensus that there are relevant differences between niche and mainstream political parties, the literature is more ambiguous about how niche political parties should be identified. This leads to an important question in this theoretical framework, namely if in a Dutch context the CPN should be defined as niche or mainstream. Fagerholm emphasizes that an important distinction between niche and mainstream political parties is the degree to which they seriously compete during elections. However, a second definition is also widely used; Adams et al. argue that a party should be qualified as niche based on its ideology. If a party adheres to a niche ideology, such as communism or a far-right ideology, it should be qualified as a niche party. In the case of the CPN, both definitions of a niche party are applicable to a certain degree. One of the key features of the CPN is that it initially related itself to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in an outspoken manner, which is something no other political party in the Netherlands did. In an ideological sense, as hardline communists, it should be defined as a niche party. However, when it comes to electoral performance, a different categorization might be appropriate. Even though the CPN had never become a serious candidate for government, they were consistently represented in the Dutch parliament. In the postwar years, the CPN was represented in the opposition with ten seats. Its popularity slowly declined until it was disbanded, while over the years maintaining between two and eight seats. As such, the CPN had something to lose during the national elections and therefore had to compete seriously. In this sense, the CPN might have been sensitive enough to external circumstances to adapt its political standpoints under the influence of factors indicated by Fagerholm, even though, in an ideological sense, the party could still be considered niche.

Research Methodology and Case Selection

This article seeks to establish how such crises in the Eastern Bloc affected left wing party politics in the Netherlands and specifically the political standpoints of the CPN. This will be done through a discourse analysis of articles related to this topic from party affiliated newspapers and magazines. These publications mainly originate from the CPN newspaper De Waarheid, but they are contextualized with publications from Socialisme en Democratie and Paraat from the PvdA) as well as articles from de Tribune from the Socialist Party Socialistische Partij (SP). The analysis of such documents offers multiple benefits in comparison to other options. The first benefit is that during the twentieth century, these party magazines and newspapers were published on a regular basis and formed an important means of communication. Most party magazines were issued at least monthly, and some party-affiliated newspapers were even published on a daily basis, allowing the parties to reach out to their electorates regularly. This regularity enabled political parties to address the issues of the day quickly and react to developments as soon as they occurred. As these publications were an important way to communicate with the masses, any changes in a party’s political and ideological stance to appease public sentiment are also likely to have been addressed here.

I have not collected or analyzed the data in accordance with a strict code book. The reason for this is that the data has been selected from fundamentally different sources covering a span of almost forty years with large time intervals. The analysis of data focusses on five reoccurring elements during each moment of crisis. These elements partly fall in line with some of the relevant factors listed by Fagerholm.

1. Close attention is paid to how the uprisings against the socialist regimes were addressed.

2. Attention is also devoted to the attitudes expressed towards the initial reaction by the national government. The analysis considers which desires were expressed by the Dutch political parties towards the national authorities of the state in which the crises took place.

3. Indications of support for or criticism of military interference are also considered. Each of the political crises was brought to an end by military interference, always backed up by or under pressure from Moscow.

4. Attention is paid to whether political parties expressed a preference for a hardline or a more liberal approach to state socialism.

5. The dynamics between Dutch political parties are also taken into consideration, as is the question of whether they supported or reprimanded each other for their responses to the crises.

The East German Uprising of 1953

During the East German uprising in 1953, demonstrations against work quotas developed into mass protests against the East German government. After the Soviet forces stationed in East Germany intervened, it took until June 24 before the situation was fully deescalated.27

The protests in East Germany, consistently described in De waarheid as provocations, were addressed for the first time on Wednesday, June 17, 1953.28 The claim was made that the social unrest in East Berlin had been organized by the West German government under Adenauer in cooperation with the United States. According to De Waarheid, the “provocateurs” were inhabitants of West Berlin to whom the East German authorities responded in a measured and appropriate manner.29

De Waarheid considered the protests an attempt to divert attention away from the conciliatory measures proposed by the East German government. The local correspondent claimed that the following alleged circumstances had been essential factors in the outbreak of open conflict or clear signs of provocation from the West: the visit of Jakob Kaiser (minister of all-German affairs) to Berlin; the spread of propaganda from West to East Berlin; wounded insurgents having been taken to West Berlin; and the fact that the provocations had taken place near the Western border. The actual inhabitants of East Berlin were reported to have defended their city against the provocateurs.30 According to De Waarheid,the unrest among workers due to higher labor norms was immediately exploited by Western sabotage agencies, even though the East German government had acted quickly and adequately by altering their plans.

On June 18, it was stated by De Waarheid that American officers had been involved to such an extent that that they had walked through East Berlin in uniform and distributing orders. This was explicitly associated with Germany’s Nazi past. People were reported to have sung the Horst Wessel song and chanted, “We want Hitler back!”31

The events in Berlin were also addressed by Marcus Bakker, a board member of the CPN. He stated that the Soviet Union had made many proposals which would further a peaceful solution to global issues. A peaceful foreign policy and potential German reunification, Bakker continued, were against the interests of the United States. The recent economic and political successes of East Germany had rendered the West German smear campaign irrelevant. This smear campaign, according to Bakker, had been conducted by the United States and West Germany to provoke conflict. This plan has failed because the DDR government had recognized and addressed its previous mistakes, and the provocateurs had shown their fascist nature.32

In Socialisme en Democratie, distributed by the PvdA, J. in ‘t Veld considered the turmoil in the Eastern bloc as an indicator of success for the West’s cautious foreign policy.33 In the following edition, J. Barents addressed the geopolitical implications of the East German Uprising.34 The death of Stalin and the “workers revolt in Eastern Berlin” were interpreted as factors which could indicate an approaching change of the status quo: “One of the clichés destroyed by the East German uprising was the assumption that nations living under police and state terror could never rise up against their oppressors.”35 Barents considered the East German Uprising confirmation of Adenauer’s insistence on free elections and the withdrawal of Soviet troops.

1956 Poznan Protests

The Poznan uprising was the first full uprising which occurred after Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956. A peaceful strike in Poznan grew into a two-day fight between insurgents and the Polish army. Later that year, some of the demands which had been made by the insurgents were met. The uprising caught a lot of international attention, as a large number of representatives of the foreign press had been attending an international fair in Poznan.36

In its reports on the Poznan Uprising, De Waarheid contended that imperial agents and reactionaries had attempted to exploit Poland’s economic difficulties.37 Implying that the disturbances were prepared provocations by foreign actors, De Waarheid characterized the demonstrations as unjust, as the Polish government had already addressed the grievances voiced by the protestors.

The next day, it was alleged in De Waarheid that it was foreign provocateurs who had motivated the workers to go on a strike. “The situation escalated when provocateurs and underground groups started to shoot near the security police building.”38 The correspondent reported that order had been quickly restored after the army had opened fire on the provocateurs. Reportedly, the real workers had not been harmed, as they had nothing to do with the outbreak of violence.

In the article Workers and terrorists, the uprising in Poznan was linked to the protests in Berlin: “We have to say that it is easier to get a general overview of the events in the Polish city of Poznan than was the case in 1953 with the riots in Berlin (…) This is because the number of proponents of the Cold War has reduced since then.”39 The fact that there were economic and administrative issues in Poland was acknowledged, but the contention was also made that the government had devoted considerable effort to solving these issues. Looting and arson were considered indications that the disturbances had been instigated or carried out by professional foreign provocateurs. The Polish government was reported to have met the provocations with a continuation of “international and domestic détente.”40 In the next edition of De Waarheid, the American offer to supply Poznan with food was condemned as “malicious propaganda.”41 The disturbances in Poznan allegedly could be traced back to the United States, which had “a hundred million dollars on their budget for sabotaging socialist countries.”42

In the July 4 issue of De Waarheid, the contention was made that most of the workers had left the protests as soon as the provocateurs had become violent.43 CPN member F. Baruch argued that the American involvement in Poznan had been hinted at by Dulles himself, as he had implicitly mentioned the Poznan uprising before it had taken place, and the whole provocation had been part of an effort to create a smokescreen to hide the USA’s failing foreign policy.44

In the PvdA magazine Paraat,the Poznan uprising was explicitly addressed by Alfred Mozer.45 Mozer interpreted the protests in Poznan as an event of great importance because they had led to significant internal changes in Poland and pushed back the Russian sphere of influence. However, he stated that the situation might be more complicated than it initially seemed.46 According to Mozer, the death of Stalin implied that the conditions for the Stalinist model had ceased to exist, and this has led to an attempt by Moscow to ease relations with its satellite states by allowing them to liberalize to a certain extent. However, this attempt would always fail, Mozer suggested, since “hunger comes while eating.”47

In PvdA’s Socialisme en Democratie, Dedeijer expressed his faith in Władysław Gomułka’s ability to solve the issues at hand: “Not only in his political postulates, but also in his behavior as a man, in his intellectual integrity and his rationality.”48 De Kadt stated that the pretenses of communism had been utterly destroyed, and the ideology had been reduced to what it truly was: “An enforced system that by an immense waste of human lives, human happiness, and human dignity reaches only meagre results.”49 Goedhart took a critical approach to the concessions made by Moscow in 1956, as the easing of strict policies in Poland and Hungary could not be considered a logical outcome of the communist system and therefore could not be used as an argument in defense of communism.50

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956

On October 23, 1956, students gathered in Budapest to demonstrate against one-party rule and demand more political, economic, and democratic rights. The protests soon escalated, and fights broke out countrywide between the insurgents and the army. The revolutionaries believed they had succeeded, as the Soviet troops retreated from Budapest, to which the government responded by requesting military support from the Soviet Union and the reinstalment of Imre Nagy as the prime minister. Nagy’s decision to resign from the Warsaw Pact did not have the desired effect. In early November, Khrushchev crushed the revolution by sending the Red Army to Hungary. The international response which Nagy had hoped for did not come. After the revolutionaries were defeated, the government fell into the hands of the reorganized and purged Hungarian communist party.51

On October 24, 1956, the disturbances in Budapest were mentioned in De Waarheid. It was reported that counterrevolutionary gangs had conducted bloody attacks on soldiers and civilians. This allegedly had led the Hungarian government to announce martial law and to ask the Soviet troops to help restore peace.52 In a second article, Imre Nagy was paraphrased: “hostile elements joined the peaceful demonstration of Hungarian young people. They misguided the working people and acted against the popular-democracy and power.”53

The next day, De Waarheid addressedthe situation in Hungary, recognizing that the demonstrations had been provoked by the irresponsible behavior of leading politicians. Therefore, they expected the new Hungarian government to introduce far-reaching reforms once peace had been restored.54 Marcus Bakker blamed the Dutch media for not expressing solidarity with the Egyptians during the Suez Crisis, as they done with the Poles and Hungarians: “We are also deeply affected by the events in Hungary: while a people rose for a changed and improved construction of socialism, irresponsible elements made use of the situation to turn the desire for progress into a contra-revolution.”55 The Hungarian attempt to leave the Warsaw Pact was criticized the next day, as the only opponents of this pact would be “Adenauer and his Hitler-generals.”56 This assumption was illustrated by the example that fascists were reported to have sung “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.”57

On October 30, the CPN offered a statement about the situation in Hungary and the alleged anti-communist campaign in the Netherlands: “The party administration makes a call for all peace-loving Dutch citizens to recognize the true and dangerous character of the events and to take a stand against the campaign of incitement.”58 The CPN also claimed that even though there was no clear overview of the situation in Hungary, all available data pointed towards a putsch. It linked “this counterrevolutionary adventure” and the interests of “American pro–Cold War politicians.” The Dutch reaction to side immediately with this “counterrevolutionary coup d’état” showed the hypocrisy of other political parties: “The lament for the faith of the Hungarian people sounds especially false from the mouths of those who prepare an atomic war against the peoples of Eastern Europe and assist the rearmament of the SS in West Germany.”59 The worries about Hungary were interpreted by the CPN as “having the goal of diverting attention away from the deteriorating economic circumstances in the Netherlands and creating a false sense of unity.”60

On November 2, it was reported that there had been Western intervention in the events in Hungary, as planes from the Red Cross had dropped weapons and supporters of the previous Horthy regime had crossed Hungary’s Western border.61 A similar interpretation could be found the next day: “Under the cover of smokescreens of talking about a ‘heroic uprising’ and ‘Soviet Troops,’ Western circles do everything in their power to restore the old reactionary regime in Hungary.”62

On November 5, it was announced in De Waarheid that the new Hungarian government, under the leadership of János Kádár, along with the socialist forces of Hungary and the Soviet Union, had succeeded in their task.63 Any attempts to discuss the situation in the forums of the United Nations were deemed unlawful, as the uprising had been a strictly domestic affair. Assaults on the properties of the CPN in the Netherlands were also addressed: “It had nothing to do with an indignant crowd, but everything with organized destruction commandos.”64 On November 6, the alleged underlying motivations of the anti-communist riots in the Netherlands were addressed in more detail: “They attempt to conceal the dangerous situation, which is the result of the British-French aggression against Egypt, behind the curtain of Hungary hysteria.”65 The PvdA was especially blamed for this, with their “unreasonable disruptions about Hungary.”66

The tenth edition of PvdA’s Paraat from 1956 was dedicated entirely to the events in Hungary and Poznan, obviously siding with the revolutionaries: “For the first time in history an oppressed people, by its own force, has triumphed over a modern dictatorship while the same people has been handcuffed again by brute military force.”67 The author asks how the situation will develop and whether Moscow would “[u]nashamedly, brutally, and cynically lower the Iron Curtain over Hungary again (…) Moscow does not believe in tears, blood, and freedom. A people is being suffocated under the chokehold of Communism.”68 In another article, the authors of Paraat stated that the CPN had always been a “slavish imitation of the foreign communist parties that remain a slavish imitation of the Russian communist party.”69 The PvdA explicitly presented itself as an anti-communist party: “Now the terrible events in Hungary have united the PvdA, together with all other democratic parties, to take a stand against communism; to us this is a confirmation of our principal standpoint that we have drawn a line, which we have always followed as long as we have been democratic socialists.”70

The Prague Spring 1968

In 1968, Alexander Dubček introduced far-reaching reforms which opened the way for a ten-year transition plan. His intention was to re-popularize socialism by removing its most oppressive features. In practice, this led to the socialist government and the Soviet Union being openly criticized. The Soviet Union perceived the Prague Spring reforms as a threat to the unity of its bloc. On August 20, WTO forces occupied Czechoslovakia. Immediately, all reforms were undone, and Czechoslovakia entered a period of “normalization.” Within one year, the government re-established full censorship.71

In April, De Waarheid addressed the reforms of the Prague Spring. Its attitude towards these developments was positive under the precondition that the reforms would help build a stronger socialist state and the new foreign policy would remain in line with the foreign policies of other WTO members.72 On August 21, it was reported that WTO troops had unannouncedly entered Czechoslovakia and occupied the most important political centers. De Waarheid mentioned that the Soviet press bureau reported that these troops had come to Czechoslovakia’s aid only after the Czechoslovak government had requested armed support.73 Directly next to this article, a commentary by the CPN was placed in which the CPN distanced itself from the armed intervention: “Over the course of recent months, the Communist Party of the Netherlands has repetitively and with great emphasis expressed its stance against any sort of intervention, military or anything else, in the affairs of Czechoslovakia.”74 The CPN was convinced that this intervention would have “harmful consequences to the necessary battle against American capitalism and West-German revanchism.”75 The CPN also stated, however, that the Western press had done everything in its power to escalate the conflict. In a later article, the CPN announced that, “[i]t is up to the Czechoslovak people and the Czechoslovak communists to decide how the affairs of their country should be dealt with in the continuing construction of socialism. Interference, in whatever form, can only do damage and lead to great harm.”76

A week later, the front page of De Waarheid was covered by a manifesto of the CPN in which it strongly condemned the use of military force in Czechoslovakia: “The administration of the CPN declares with great emphasis that such conduct is unacceptable, that it has nothing to do with communist principles, and that it violates all decisions and declarations of the international communist movement.”77 The CPN stated that the crisis in Czechoslovakia had been caused by the former government under Antonín Josef Novotny, which Moscow had always supported. The Soviet Union thus had failed to deliver any justification for its interference. This made it the “most shameful breach of the principles of Leninism yet committed.”78 They stated that this interference took place with the silent approval of American imperialists, who seized the opportunity to nurture and inflame anti-communist sentiments. The CPN called for the Dutch working class not to be misled by the pro-Czechoslovak front of Dutch political parties. They felt that the other parties had used the situation in Czechoslovakia to cover up their support for the American war in Vietnam and German revisionism. However, the CPN also continued to present itself as a critic of the Soviet Union: “For years, the Communist Party of the Netherlands has been criticizing the leadership in the Soviet Union, much to the dismay of all anti-communists and the ‘official circles’ in our country.”79 The CPN then announced that they had cut off all ties with the leadership of the Soviet Union and its supporters: “The CPN insists that the current leadership in the Soviet Union cannot and should not in any way be identified with the Soviet Union or with the ideas of communism.”80 The CPN expressed the conviction that it was “the only party in the Netherlands with the moral right to stand up to the violation of communist principles being committed by the current Soviet leadership.”81

The Prague Spring was addressed in two articles in Socialisme en Democratie. Cees Laban spoke of the Czechoslovak people and politicians with great sympathy, concluding that

it is clear that one is looking for a form of communism that is in line with humanism and the principle of freedom, which is rooted in the people, and which also has an economic effect that will give the population greater prosperity (…) Therefore, the moral duty rests on us to provide support for this people cautiously and by using all appropriate, however limited, resources at our disposal.82

In another article, another PVDA politician strongly condemned the Soviet intervention but simultaneously argued in support of continuation of the détente policy: “It is the only policy that can lead to real cooperation between East and West.”83

Martial Law in Poland 1981

In the early 1980s, the Polish governing party (PZPR) was in crisis and rapidly losing influence. The opposition was gaining strength in the form of the Solidarność trade union and political movement under the leadership of Lech Wałęsa. The PZPR perceived Solidarity as the cause of the economic recession and accused its supporters of leading Poland into a civil war. The prime minister, Wojciech Jaruzelski, believed that the only way to maintain control and avoid Soviet intervention was to introduce martial law, marking a period of severe repression of the opposition and other far-reaching restrictions. Despite the severe measures, martial law did not achieve all the goals set by the PZPR, as Solidarity managed to remain active underground.84

On December 13, De waarheid stated on their front page that the Polish army had seized power and had announced a state of martial law.85 On the same page, the CPN condemned the coup d’état by the Polish army: “This seizure of power underlines the bankruptcy of the Polish United Workers Party and the urge to innovate as was expressed by the population and the trade union movement in Poland.”86 The CPN was convinced that this provided proof of “the failure of a one-party system, and that broad coalitions, separation of powers, and a deepening of democracy are necessary prerequisites for socialism.”87

In the December 15 issue of De waarheid,it was announced that the Amsterdam departments of the CPN and PvdA, together with three other progressive parties, had published a response to the coup d’état by the Polish army.88 Only a democracy, it was stated, could lay the foundations for political solutions.

On the next day, it was mentioned that a petition had been sent to the Polish ambassy in The Hague signed by the CPN, the PvdA, and, remarkably enough, three conservative political parties. Marcus Bakker, by then the leader of the CPN faction in the Dutch Parliament, was quoted: “In Poland, the point is that there was an opportunity to create real democratic socialism; but instead of seizing this opportunity, they intervened by military means. That is contrary to what we consider socialism.”89

In Paraat, political relations between the PvdA and CPN were explored. The discussants addressed the CPN’s political standpoints towards Eastern Europe and specifically their standpoint regarding the introduction of martial law in Poland. It was stated that the CPN had lost many members to the PvdA because its attitude towards Moscow had not been rectilinear. According to one of the discussants, the CPN had sometimes been critical of Moscow in the 1960s, but in the 1970s, the CPN had reorientated itself towards Moscow, and this had been something, the discussants contended, that the CPN’s electorate had not found encouraging. The discussants did not believe that the CPN being critical of Moscow was necessarily very substantial: “I miss a story from the side of CPN about the current situation in Eastern Europe, what the balance of power there is. A cohesive story, and not a sum of incidents.”90

In Poland: an “internal affair” for democratic socialism, Paul Kalma and M. Krop suggested that the PvdA had reacted reasonably to the introduction of martial law. Immediately, a statement of protest was written, and two demonstrations were organized. “However, this position does not undo the lukewarmness and half-heartedness that have characterized the reactions in the party to the events in Poland for the last year and a half.”91 One of the reasons for a lack of support, the authors supposed, was that the PvdA still had an old-fashioned concept of détente politics. It was therefore suggested that practical support of liberation movements in the Eastern Bloc should be taken more seriously: “Such support undoubtedly increases the tension between East and West, but that is the price which must be paid.”92 They argued that it would be key for successful détente politics to differentiate between the relaxation of relations between East and West while simultaneously acknowledging the changes to the European status quo. This way, a political course could be followed by the PvdA which would fall more in line with that of the United States.

De Tribune,the magazine of the SP, dedicated a large article to the introduction of martial law in Poland. In their view, Solidarity had become the mouthpiece of economic dissatisfaction. However, the Polish government had met most of the economic demands which could justifiably be made by a trade union. They did not consider Solidarity to be in the position to make any demands other than economic ones.93 According to De Tribune, the establishment of Solidarity as the third power beside the Church and state would inevitably lead to political confrontations. After martial law went into force, the army became the fourth power: “A drama is unfolding in Poland, let’s face it. A drama that for all progressive people will be experienced as a setback. But that is not yet a reason to cry with the CDA [Christian Democratic Appeal] and VVD [People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy] wolves” 94 (as the CPN allegedly had done). De Tribune concluded that none of these four powers in Poland had the mandate or the popular power to solve Poland’s economic issues. It therefore recommend that “Poland can only be drawn out of the economic swamp by an utmost concerted effort of these four powers, supported by the population.”95 In the article Washington, it was reasoned that while the situation in Poland dominated the news, many North American misdeeds had not been properly addressed.96 A similar way of reasoning can be found in a later article: “Poland is met with hue and cry, while Minister Haig97 praises Turkey, (…) They are using the Polish crisis to start a new anti-communist smear campaign and as a reason to sweep the disarmament talks off the table.”98

Analysis

An analysis of the discourse used by each of the political parties reveals that during each of the crises, all parties took clear and unambiguous positions. The PvdA systematically condemned all Soviet interventions in the Eastern Bloc. Among the many parties, the standpoints of the CPN changed the most significantly, as they went from fully supporting military interventions to completely condemning them. However, there were some steps in between. Regarding the East German Uprising, the CPN did not take the political and economic discontent of East Germans (except for the workers of the Stalin-Allee) strongly into consideration. Most of the uprising was framed as the work of fascists and foreign agents, which the East Berlin workers allegedly had nothing to do with. During the protests in Poznan and Budapest, the CPN already acknowledged to a larger extent the possibility that political and economic discontent existed among workers and citizens. However, the CPN still insisted that the Polish and the new Hungarian government had already solved or would soon solve the issues that had given rise to expressions of discontent. Initially, the CPN put trust in Nagy’s government to get hold of the situation in Hungary. However, as soon as Hungary left the Warsaw Pact, Nagy’s revolutionary government could no longer count on the CPN’s sympathy. The suppression of the Prague Spring was the first military intervention which was fully condemned by the CPN. The CPN supported the liberal policies of the Prague Spring, under the precondition that they would help further the construction of a better socialism. The CPN sympathized with the government of Czechoslovakia and stated that only the Czechoslovaks could solve the problems at hand, without any meddling by the WTO or Western powers. The CPN did not believe Moscow’s claim that Prague had asked the Soviet Union to remove fascist elements from the Czechoslovakian elite circles, so the CPN considered the intervention illegitimate. This led it to condemn the invasion of Czechoslovakia sharply and to cut ties with Moscow. However, the CPN still insisted that the situation had escalated due to Western Powers, which had put up another smokescreen to cover up German rearmament and the Vietnam War. During each of the four crises, the CPN repeatedly argued that the events in Eastern Europe were being used as smokescreens to hide American misdeeds and as part of smear campaigns to discredit communism. The introduction of martial law in Poland was therefore the second intervention which was fully condemned by the CPN but the first during which the CPN did not accuse any Western Powers of being involved. It is also important that, in contrast to its response to the events of the Prague Spring, during the introduction of martial law in Poland, the CPN contended that a democratic system was a prerequisite for socialism, not a one-party state. The SP interpreted the introduction of martial law as the result of the Poland’s poor economic circumstances and Solidarity, as a trade union, having intervened too much in politics instead of focusing on labor policies. It observed that none of the actors involved (the army, the Church, the state, and Solidarity) had either the popular support or political mandate to solve Poland’s (economic) issues. Therefore, the SP proposed that all actors cooperate. Despite this seemingly neutral position, it was still suggested in Paraat that the situation in Poland was being used by the Western Powers to start an anti-communist smear campaign to sweep disbarment talks off the table.

When the dynamics between the political parties in the Netherlands are considered, a few significant observations can be made. During the East German Uprising, the Poznan Protests, and the Hungarian Revolution, the dynamics remained largely consistent. The PvdA condemned military intervention and supported a more liberal and democratic political course. The CPN blamed the Western powers for allegedly organizing the crises and vocally supported the Soviet Union. On a national level, the CPN blamed the other political parties for utilizing the crises in the Eastern Bloc for their own gain, either to start anti-communist smear campaigns to divide the Dutch working class or to create smokescreens to hide the failing policies of the Dutch government. Simultaneously, the PvdA emphasized its anti-communist stance and called out the CPN for being a slavish imitation of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This dynamic changed with the end of the Prague Spring in 1968. This time, even the CPN distanced itself from Soviet intervention, though it was not yet willing to take a collective stance towards Moscow with other political parties. The CPN stressed that it was the only political party in the Netherlands with the moral authority to condemn the WTO intervention. The other Dutch political parties were considered hypocrites for meddling in these affairs, as they did not even support the Dutch working class. Therefore, the CPN was unwilling to cooperate with initiatives and demonstrations organized by other political parties. The only crisis which the PvdA and CPN interpreted and acted on in the same manner was the introduction of martial law in Poland. Both parties considered this crisis symptomatic of a failing one-party state and acknowledged that the introduction of a multiparty system was much needed. The PvdA and CPN not only reached the same conclusion, they also acted in unity.

In 1981, the CPN adopted a very conventional and mainstream political standpoint towards the introduction of martial law in Poland. On this specific matter, the party acted together with the PvdA and even with conservative parties, such as the VVD and CDA. The SP explicitly placed itself outside of this cooperation. It also condemned the introduction of martial law, but the SP still did not want to work together with the other Dutch political parties. In fact, the SP framed the other parties as hypocrites and considered the international outrage little more than a smokescreen to get disarmament talks off the table. The SP publicly called out the CPN for its alleged hypocrisy on this issue. In this specific context, the SP in 1981 willingly took over the CPN’s position as a political outsider. It is therefore clearly the case that left-wing political parties in the Netherlands did strongly react to political crises within the Eastern Bloc. In particular, the CPN’s political standpoints towards these crises changed drastically over the years.

Conclusion

At the beginning of this discussion, I proposed to consider how the CPN reacted to political crises in the Eastern Bloc and whether its political standpoints developed in response to these events. An analysis of how the CPN presented itself in De Waarheid offers reason to assume that the party was motivated by the desire to appeal to a broader electorate, as it called public attention to its changed political standpoints. The CPN made considerable efforts to communicate its firm condemnation of the oppression of the Prague Spring and the introduction of martial law in Poland. It did this by placing elaborate statements in De Waarheid, which sometimes even covered full front pages, or as was mentioned in De Waarheid, by making a television appearance to express support for Solidarity.

The desire to keep ideological distance from political rivals seems to have played a role in how the left-wing parties in the Netherlands positioned themselves towards one another and the crises in the Eastern Bloc. In 1968, the CPN put in a lot of work into its efforts to underline its ideological distance from the PvdA, even though both parties condemned the Soviet Union’s response to the Prague Spring. However, as the standpoint of the CPN towards the introduction of martial law in Poland became mainstream and the CPN started to act accordingly, the SP took its place as the political outsider. The suggestion that the PvdA should adopt a more pro-active stance towards détente politics also fits the narrative of creating ideological distance. A bolder approach towards crises in the Eastern Bloc would have distanced the PvdA further from the new course of the CPN. Simultaneously, the PvdA took a critical stance towards the new course of the CPN by doubting its substantiality and integrity.

As is addressed in the literature on Eurocommunism, many factors led communist parties in Western Europe to change their political standpoints in the 1960s and 1970s. Therefore, it remains difficult to say whether the CPN’s political standpoints changed as a reaction to the crises in the Eastern Bloc or the CPN’s reactions to these crises reflected earlier changes in political standpoints. However, within the framework of party change theories, the CPN seems to have become increasingly reactive to the reoccurring crises by changing its policies towards Moscow. It thus acted more like a mainstream party to appeal to a broader electorate, as the literature on Eurocommunism presumes.

This tendency can also be observed when the election results are coupled with the analysis of policy change in the CPN towards Moscow.99 The CPN lost four seats during the 1959 elections, which were held two years after the Poznan protests and the Hungarian uprising. During the election of 1977, the CPN lost five seats. Therefore, it is remarkable that large electoral losses during the elections of 1959 and 1977 were followed by significant changes in the CPN’s political standpoints during the subsequent crises in the Eastern Bloc, which occurred in 1968 and 1981. This indicates that the changes in political standpoints of the CPN towards the crises in the Eastern Bloc were seemingly affected by disappointing electoral results. Again, this indicates that the CPN acted in line with the presumptions in the theoretical literature on Eurocommunism in an attempt to appeal to a broader electorate.

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The First Generation of Architectural Historians in Modern China: Their Studies and Struggles

Shanshan Liu

Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 13 Issue 1  (2024):59-79 DOI 10.38145/2024.1.59

This paper examines the intellectual history of the first generation of architectural historians in China, with a focus on the activities of Liang Sicheng and his colleagues from the 1920s to the 1950s. It analyzes the various oppressive forces they encountered during this period. Initially, they challenged Western and Japanese hegemonies in Chinese architecture research. Following World War II, they faced off against Soviet Union experts to safeguard China’s architectural heritage. The paper evaluates their successes and failures in achieving academic and social goals, their impact on the preservation of Chinese heritage, and their ongoing influence in academic and societal spheres. Additionally, it explores how professional ethics were utilized to dismantle colonial narratives and perceptions in China, suggesting that professionalism can serve as a mode of intellectual opposition.

Keywords: Modern China, intellectual history, architectural historian, Liang Sicheng

The intellectual history of architectural historians in China from the 1920s to the 1950s, particularly focusing on the endeavors of Liang Sicheng and his contemporaries, reveals a dynamic interplay between scholarly pursuits and sociopolitical contexts. This period witnessed the multifaceted engagement of these historians with various oppressive forces, from the challenges they issued to Western and Japanese hegemonies in Chinese architectural research to confrontations with Soviet Union experts in the immediate postwar era in their efforts to safeguard China’s architectural heritage. By examining the successes and failures of their academic and social initiatives, as well as their enduring influence on the preservation of Chinese heritage, this paper sheds light on the intricate relationship between professional ethics and intellectual opposition.

Western and Japanese Hegemonies in Chinese Traditional Architecture
Research before the 1930s

When the first generation of Chinese architectural historians started their academic research at the beginning of twentieth century, they faced two different hegemonies, Western hegemony in the international academic community and Japanese hegemony in the East Asian academic community.

Both colonial powers attempted to reconstruct the history of Chinese architecture by promoting their own favorable historical narratives in part to diminish the historical achievements and artistic status of Chinese architecture and gardens, thus serving their agendas of cultural oppression. Western hegemony, for instance, sought to discredit the evolutionary development of Chinese architecture, criticizing it as an ahistorical style and thus denying the significance of Chinese architectural culture in world architectural history. Meanwhile, Japan aimed to elevate the artistic value of Tang and Song architecture, indirectly elevating the status of Japanese architecture and positioning itself as the heir to the highest achievements in Eastern architectural art.

In the second half of nineteenth century, in the context of the political, economic, and cultural confrontation between the East and the West, Western scholars devalued Asian arts as a whole. This situation had partially changed at the beginning of the twentieth century because of the propaganda of the Japanese government. Western society had begun to appreciate Japanese art and Chinese art before the Tang and Song Dynasties (960–1279 AD).

However, Chinese architectural historians found themselves under the second culture hegemony caused by this situation. Japanese scholars had a reason for placing emphasis on the importance and value of Chinese art before the Tang and Song Dynasties. It was impossible to deny the Chinese origins of many aspects of Japanese culture, so they emphasized that Japan, instead of China, was the heir to the Chinese culture of the Tang and Song Dynasties. Thus, they sought to establish the dominance of Japanese culture in Asia. As a result, Chinese architectural historians needed to challenge the dual hegemony, in the world of scholarship, of the West and Japan when starting research on the history of Chinese architectures.

Western Hegemony before the Twentieth Century

Before the twentieth century, the international image of Chinese architecture and garden arts underwent several transitions. The Western world first learned of Chinese architecture and gardens from the writings of explorers and missionaries. Before the sixteenth century, The Travels of Marco Polo introduced the cities and architecture of China to the West. This was the first work to offer Westerners detailed impressions of Chinese architecture.

From the sixteenth century to the eighteenth, Westerners were full of curiosity about Chinese architecture and gardens. In the seventeenth century, Western missionaries developed a strong interest in Eastern art and culture, and they naturally paid attention to the unique Chinese architecture and garden art. Texts and drawings depicting Chinese architecture and gardens were brought to the West. Westerners loved the naturalistic styles, and they imitated these styles in architectural design and gardening practices. Designers from the United Kingdom absorbed the aesthetic elements of Chinese gardens and created English landscape gardens characterized by structured informality, which made free layout garden design increasingly popular across Europe. Between 1757 and 1763, Swedish-Scottish architect William Chambers caused a sensation in Europe by introducing Chinese architecture into the garden during the renovation of Kew Gardens in London.

At the end of the eighteenth century, Chinamania began to cool down. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the deepening of the western invasion of China, Western opinion on Chinese culture changed from positive to negative. Western attitudes towards Chinese architectural arts also changed from admiration to derogation.

In 1793, the Macartney Embassy visited China. All the members of the embassy described Chinese architecture and gardens in their travel notes. The accompanying painter William Alexander depicted Chinese cities along the way in watercolors. Mission member John Barrow made negative comments on Chinese architecture and cities in his book Travels in China, arguing that Chinese architecture is not as grand or artistic as the architecture of European countries. He commented in his book that “their architecture is void of taste, grandeur, beauty, solidity, or convenience; that the houses are merely tents, and that there is nothing magnificent, even in the palace of the Emperor.”1

In 1896, British scholar Banister Fletcher (1866–1953) published his masterpiece of world architectural history A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method.2 In this book, he included an illustration that reflects the genealogy of the world’s architectural development, which is the famous “Tree of Architecture.” Fletcher regarded ancient Greek and ancient Roman buildings as the main trunk of this “tree,” from which the Romanesque style developed. After the development of Gothic and Renaissance styles, the tree of architecture finally flourished in Europe and the United States. At the same time, Fletcher placed the styles of Chinese and Japanese, Peruvian, Mexican, Indian, and other non-European styles on the branches roughly in the same period as ancient Greece, thus implying that these styles did not evolve over time.

Before the twentieth century, the West lacked an in-depth understanding of the true characters of Chinese architecture. The Western attitude towards Chinese architecture was constantly changing as the various imaginative visions of China changed. These shifts were driven first and foremost by changes in the political and economic relationships between China and the West, but also by competition between China and Japan.

Japanese hegemony at the beginning of twentieth century

In the late nineteenth century, Western interest in Chinese art gradually began to diminish, while interest in Japanese art increased. This situation continued until the 1930s. This understanding of the differences between Chinese art and Japanese art was partially the result of intentional propaganda by Japanese political and cultural figures. Since the Meiji Restoration period, Japan had strategically propagandized Japanese culture in the West to build its international status. Under the guidance and promotion of Fukuzawa Yukichi’s(1835–1901) “Theory of Civilization,” Japan looked for elements in traditional culture to compete with the West. Japanese politicians and literati constructed the conditions that could make Japan a “civilized” country. They sought to reexamine traditional Japanese culture from a modern perspective, and they actively carried out activities in the public sphere to shape the national image.3

However, for Japan, which came from the East Asian cultural context, Chinese culture was a rather awkward rival. Japan had the advantage over China of having started the process of westernization before China and thus having a more active presence in the international discourse earlier. The Japanese government recruited and hired foreigners to carry out cultural construction in Japan. When these people returned to the West, they became the authorities on Eastern art, and they took with them the prejudice that Japanese culture was superior to Chinese culture. At the same time, Japanese critics also took advantage of their relationship with these orientalists to further propagate the alleged superiority of Japanese culture. Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908), who was recruited by the Japanese government to teach at Tokyo Imperial University at the end of the nineteenth century, was one of the representative figures. Fenollosa’s student Okakura Tenshin (1863–1913) went a step further, advocating the “leadership” of Japanese culture in East Asia.

In the propaganda of Japanese critics and Western critics, the rhetoric of contrast was repeatedly used. Chinese art was always used as a foil to Japanese art. Although no one could deny that the origins of numerous elements of Japanese art lay in Chinese art, this did not in any way enhance the status of Chinese art in the international discourse. Western critics often criticized the alleged stagnation of Chinese art after the Song Dynasty. They claimed that only the Chinese art from the period before the Song Dynasty merited praise, while Japan had avoided stagnation by learning from the nature and thus had become the successor of the culture of the Chinese Tang and Song dynasties. This argument mirrors the image of China being closed and conservative and Japan’s westernization and progressiveness at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it had many negative consequences from the perspective of the protection of and research on traditional Chinese architecture for Chinese scholars.

Japanese architectural historian Itō Chūta (1867–1954) argued that, “[t]he culture in the Tang dynasty (618–907 AD) is not only the culmination of Chinese civilization, but also the successor of Central Asian, Indian, Greek and Roman civilizations, while Japanese culture combines native Shintoism with Tang culture, thus representing the essence of Asian culture. Therefore, the Japanese culture is sufficient to lead Asia.”4 Chinese architectural historian Lai Delin incisively pointed out the intentions of Japanese scholars at that time: “If Chinese architecture begin to decline after the Song Dynasty (960–1279 AD), then what were the representatives of East Asian architecture in the Ming and Qing Dynasties? (Japanese architecture).”5

The First Generation of Chinese Architectural Historians and Their Studies from the 1920s to the 1940s

The first generation of Chinese architectural historians, represented by Liang Sicheng(1901–1972), Lin Huiyin(1904–1955), Tong Jun(1900–983), and Liu Dunzhen (1897–1968), started pursuing research on and make efforts to protect traditional Chinese architecture and gardens in this unfavorable international cultural context.

Having received systematic professional education in the West, these architects had a clear understanding of the value of architectural historical narratives for national cultural identity and the international status of culture from the outset. Liang Sicheng, Lin Huiyin, and Tong Jun all graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. They received a systematic education on Western architecture. While pursuing studies in the United States, they were deeply influenced by Western history, culture, and aesthetics. But they did not agree with the Western views on traditional Chinese architecture and garden arts.

During their stay in the United States, they realized that European countries attached great importance to the study of their own architectural history and achieved fruitful results. A group of architectural historians also emerged in Japan. They made great achievements in the study of the ancient architecture of their country and extended their range of study to Chinese architecture. This situation brought a sense of urgency for Chinese scholars. They started research on Chinese architecture and gardens in part out of fear of leaving this field of research under the domination of Western and Japanese hegemony.

Liang Sicheng was the eldest son of Liang Qichao, a prominent politician and historian in modern China who was one of the leaders who advocated for the Hundred Days’ Reform. Liang Qichao deeply understood the importance of architectural history in national culture. Therefore, he had high hopes for Liang Sicheng and his daughter-in-law Lin Huiyin’s research on Chinese architectural history. During their studies in the United States, Liang Qichao sent them the recently rediscovered Chinese traditional architectural technical treatise Yingzao Fashi (Treatise on Architectural Methods or State Building Standards), first printed in 1103. He inscribed a message on the title page, urging them to conduct in-depth research: “This masterpiece from a thousand years ago can be a great treasure for our cultural heritage.”6 Therefore, during their studies in the United States, Liang and Lin had already begun to attempt to create a modern Chinese national and social identity through their research on traditional Chinese architectural history.

Lin Huiyin hailed from a distinguished background and had already established herself as a celebrated poet, novelist, and literary figure prior to her engagement to Liang Sicheng. During their studies at the University of Pennsylvania, she encountered barriers in pursuing the study of architecture due to its male-dominated nature at the time, leading her to enroll in the art department while auditing courses in architecture. In contrast, Liang Sicheng faced no such impediments in the architecture department. Despite encountering discrimination, Lin excelled academically and was appointed as a teaching assistant in the architecture department. As the sole woman in the field of modern Chinese architecture, Lin endured unfair treatment throughout her life, yet her exceptional talent ensured that her accomplishments were not overshadowed by her husband. Her exceptional literary abilities and profound insights rendered her writing accessible to the public, and her scholarly works and essays contributed to the heightened recognition of ancient Chinese architectural art among the broader public.

Northeastern University and Chinese architecture education

When the first generation of architectural historians came back China from their studies abroad, they built education in modern Chinese architecture from its foundations. In 1928, Liang and Lin returned to China after having graduated. They joined the architecture department at Northeastern University in Shenyang. The department had been founded a month earlier, and Liang and Lin became the only two teachers in the department for the first academic year. In 1930, Tong Jun also returned from the United States, and joined them as a colleague.

The three earliest teachers at Northeastern University graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. They built the architectural curriculum on the basis of the fine arts Beaux-Arts traditions in the United States. Meanwhile, they began to construct the discipline of Chinese architectural history. In the following years, they started three courses for East Asian arts studies: History of Oriental Architecture, History of Oriental Sculpture, and History of Oriental Art.

Liang Sicheng also started to survey and study traditional Chinese architecture in this period. He believed that, in order to sort out the development process of Chinese architecture, modern architectural theories and methods must be adopted. He therefore attached great importance to the investigation of architectural heritage. In one article, he made the important statement concerning methodology that, “[t]he study of traditional Chinese architecture cannot be conducted without field investigation, surveys, and mapping.”7 Moreover, he sought to confirm the descriptions and records in historical architectural documents such as Yingzao Fashi by discovering evidence.

Shenyang had once been the capital of the Manchu Qing Dynasty. There were many royal buildings in the city, which undoubtedly provided rich cases for Liang Sicheng’s study of traditional architecture. Liang’s first survey subject was the Northern Mausoleum of the Qing Dynasty, the Zhaoling Mausoleum, located in the suburbs of Shenyang. The experience he gained from this project became the foundation for his future fieldwork in architecture investigation and research.

He also began his efforts to further the preservation of traditional architectures in China in this period. According to Fei Weimei,8 the mayor of Shenyang decided to demolish the old Bell and Drum Towers on the grounds that it was a hindrance to traffic. When Liang heard this news, he approached the municipal authorities, hoping to preserve the ancient buildings and find another solution to the traffic problem. However, his proposal was rejected. This incident became one of the considerations that prompted Liang to resign from Northeastern University.

In the winter of 1930, Lin Huiyin returned to Peiping (Beijing) to recuperate due to a relapse of tuberculosis. In February 1931, Liang Sicheng handed over his work in the Architecture Department to his colleague Tong Jun. He left Northeastern University in June, returned to Peiping and joined Yingzao Xueshe (The Society for the Study of Chinese Architecture).

A mere three months after Tong Jun had taken over as dean of the department, Japanese troops invaded northeast China. Tong strove to meet his responsibilities during the war. He led the teachers and students of Northeastern University into exile in the south. He endeavored to give lectures to the remaining students until they graduated.

Yingzao Xueshe and the study of traditional Chinese architecture

Yingzao Xueshe, or the Society for the Study of Chinese Architecture, was founded by Zhu Qiqian (1872–1964) in 1930. It was the first academic group in modern China for the study of traditional architecture. Liang and Lin became the leading members of the society after they had fully enrolled in 1931. Another leading member was Liu Dunzhen.

The scholars of architectural history had a clear understanding that their work could serve as a means of resistance against colonial narratives. In 1932, Lin Huiyin published an article titled “On Several Characteristics of Chinese Architecture,” in which she pointed out that

Chinese architecture is the most prominent independent system in the East, with profound origins and a simple evolutionary process. Throughout the ages, it has maintained a consistent inheritance and orderly development, without undergoing complex changes due to external influences. ... Compared to architectural styles from various Eastern and Western traditions, it represents an exceptionally unique and coherent system. ... However, the national history of this architecture is not simple, and it is not lacking in various religious, ideological, and political transformations.

This argument was a candid refutation of Fletcher’s “Tree of Architecture,” and Lin Huiyin also noted that,

[b]ecause the subsequent Chinese architecture reached a level of complexity and exquisite artistry in structure and art, its external appearance still presents a simple and unadorned atmosphere. Ordinary people often misunderstand Chinese architecture as fundamentally crude and underdeveloped, inferior and immature compared to other architectural styles. This misconception originally stemmed from the careless observations of Westerners toward Eastern culture, often leading to hasty and rash conclusions that influenced Chinese people themselves to excessively doubt or even disdain their own art. ... The contributions of outsiders to the discourse on Chinese architecture are still very few, and many areas still require urgent attention from our architects to pursue material research, correction of misconceptions, and valuable exploration, thus rectifying many misunderstandings and errors made by outsiders.9

These scholars were always patriots, and their love of their country was intertwined with their dedication to their work. Their research on Chinese architecture was aimed at glorifying their motherland and resisting the Japanese.

In June 1932, Lin Huiyin wrote to Hu Shi,10 mentioning Liang Sicheng’s departure to investigate the Baodi Guangji Temple, saying, “[w]e are waiting eagerly for his detailed survey maps and reports to be published, which will surely astonish the Japanese scholars.” In 1935, when the Japanese brutally shut down the Da Gong Bao (Impartial Daily) newspaper and launched the Asian People’s Newspaper, she was outraged and wrote to Shen Congwen11 to encourage him to condemn the Japanese.12

That year, Japan’s imperialist ambitions in China had become apparent, and the situation was increasingly tense. Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin felt immense pressure to complete the survey of ancient buildings in northern China before the aggressors invaded on a large scale, fearing that once the war had broken out, the essence of these national cultural treasures would be reduced to ashes in enemy fire. Liang Sicheng said, “[o]ur days of working in northern China are numbered. Before we are stopped from doing so, we have decided to make full efforts in this area.” The Japanese claimed that there could not possibly be Tang Dynasty wooden structures in China, and Chinese people could only go to Nara to see them, but Liang and Lin always believed that there must still be Tang Dynasty wooden structures in China, and he decided to go on a difficult search. After the Lugou Bridge Incident in July 1937, Lin wrote to her nine-year-old daughter, telling her that “the Japanese are coming to occupy Peiping, and we are all willing to fight” and asking her “not to be afraid of war, not to be afraid of the Japanese.”13

From 1932 to 1937, the members of the Society led by Liang Sicheng and Liu Dunzhen conducted a large-scale survey of traditional works of architecture. With the results of the survey, they conducted in-depth research on important issues related to the history of Chinese architecture, and they made many achievements that have had an important impact on the field. Before the Second Sino-Japanese war broke out in 1937, the members of the Society led by Liang and Liu had successively investigated 1,832 works of traditional architecture in 137 counties and cities, surveyed 206 groups of works of traditional architecture in detail, and completed 1,898 survey drawings.14

The first field investigation led by Liang was for the Mountain Gate of the Du Le Temple Kuanyin Pavilion in Ji Count in 1932. The research was published in the Bulletin of the Society for the Research in Chinese Architecture (vol. 3, no. 2).15 After the report was published, it attracted great attention among academic circles at home and abroad. It was the first time that Chinese scholars had studied a work of traditional Chinese architecture with modern scientific methods, and it thus become a milestone in the study of traditional Chinese architecture.

The survey by Liang’s team confirmed that the mountain gate of the Du Le Temple had been built in 984 AD under the Liao Dynasty. It was the oldest wooden structure in China known at that time. Liang analyzed the dimensions of the building structures in the Du Le Temple, and he compared the construction dimensions of the buildings with the recordings from the era of the Song Dynasty in Yingzao Fashi. The structures intuitively show the basic patterns of architecture from the Song Dynasty. Thus, on the basis of the evidence found in the Du Le temple, the written records in Yingzao Fashi had been interpreted clearly and accurately. Thus answered many questions which, until then, had puzzled scholars.

In 1937, Yingzao Xueshe accomplished another important achievement. The team led by Liang and Lin discovered and surveyed in detail the wooden structure of the Fo Guang Temple in Wutai Mountains, which had been built in 857 AD under the Tang Dynasty.

Tang Dynasty architecture represents the highest achievements of ancient Chinese wooden architecture. At the time, no one knew whether there were any remaining examples of wooden structures from the Tang Dynasty in China. Japanese scholars asserted that there were no wooden structure remains from the Tang Dynasty in China, and they claimed that wooden structures from the Tang Dynasty had only been preserved in Nara, Japan.

Liang believed that there were still Tang Dynasty structures in China. When he was sorting out the materials of the Mo Kao Grottoes in Dunhuang in the Gansu province, Liang noticed a temple in the murals painted under the Song Dynasty in cave No. 61. He realized that the edifice might still exist because of its remote location. With this hope in mind, Liang took the Fo Guang Temple as his first choice for investigation when he was planning his fourth visit to Shanxi. Their investigation found that the main building of the Fo Guang Temple was well-preserved, and its wooden structure was a typical example of the Tang Dynasty architectural style.

Precisely when Liang and Lin set out to survey the Fo Guang Temple, Japan intensified its war against China. Liang and Lin had to end their project in a hurry and return to Peiping. After that, the Yingzao Xueshe was temporarily dissolved. The members left Peiping and began to live in exile in the southern provinces. After the Yingzao Xueshe began to function again in Kunming, Yunnan province, Liang and his colleagues continued their research under extremely difficult circumstances. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, members of the Society lacked funds and research materials, and it was difficult for them to ensure their own personal safety. These difficulties notwithstanding, they kept on with their academic research. The Society carried out surveys of works of traditional architecture in southwest China another three times.

The research findings concerning the Fo Guang Temple were not systematically published on schedule because of the outbreak of war. In July 1941, Liang published an article in English in Asia Magazine titled “China’s Oldest Wooden Structure.”16 The article focuses on the investigation process of the Fo Guang Temple, which did not include the surveying data. Although the research findings were not fully revealed, Liang confirmed that the main building of Fo Guang Temple is a wooden structure from the Tang Dynasty, and this revelation came as a shock to academic circles. In 1944 and 1945, Yingzao Xueshe published the last two issues of the Bulletin of the Society for the Research in Chinese Architecture (vol. 7, no. 1 and 2) in Lizhuang, Sichuan. In these two issues, the discovery of the Fo Guang Temple discovery and related research findings were finally announced.17

At the same time, the focus of the work of the Society shifted to research on previous documents. Liang and his colleagues pursued penetrating research on Yingzao Fashi. They sorted out the development process of traditional Chinese architecture and compiled The History of Chinese Architecture, which included the findings of their investigations. The History of Chinese Architecture18was completed in 1944. At the same time, Liang began to write the English version of the book, A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture: A Study of the Development of Its Structural System and the Evolution of Its Types,19 which was published in the United States in 1984. In the book, Liang specifically drew several illustrations to show the evolution of Chinese architecture, in part as a protest against Fletcher’s contentions concerning Chinese architecture.

The research by Chinese scholars surpassed the work of their foreign peers. Architectural historian Fu Xinian later commented on the survey report of the Du Le Temple, saying, “[t]his work not only surpassed the level of European, American and Japanese research on ancient Chinese architecture at that time, but also surpassed the depth of Japanese research on Japanese architecture at that time, it was the in-depth exploration of ancient architectural design pattern through form.”20

Before Liang Sicheng and his colleagues began to study traditional Chinese architecture, Japanese researchers made several contemptuous comments concerning the efforts of Chinese scholars. Japanese architectural historians Ito Chuta21 and Tadashi Sekino both contended that the study of Chinese architectural history could only be done by the Japanese, since Chinese scholars allegedly lacked the skill for scientific surveys and investigations (Ito Chuta, Chinese Architecture History, 1925; Tadashi Sekino, Relics of Ancient Chinese Culture, 1918).22 However, after the publication of research conducted by the Chinese architectural historians, they no longer made these kinds of comments. And in their study of Chinese architecture, they often cited publications by Chinese researchers.

The protection of traditional cities during World War II

In the later stages of World War II, Liang Sicheng and his colleagues began to use their professional literacy to help further the protection of traditional cities from the destruction of war. During the final stage of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Liang Sicheng and his colleagues helped the Allied and People’s Liberation Army compile catalogues of cultural relics on many occasions. Many sites in cities in China and even in Japan were spared damage as a consequence of their efforts.

In 1944, the Allies planned to strike back against Japan in a comprehensive, devastating manner. In the summer, Liang went to Chongqing to help mark culture relics on military maps. His work included not only maps of mainland China, but also maps of Japanese cities, including Kyoto and Nara.

In order to ensure that the cultural relics and historical sites were not damaged during the attack, Liang marked the locations of historical sites on the maps and compiled a catalogue of cultural relics and buildings in both Chinese and English. The complete catalogue consists of eight volumes, including nearly 400 buildings which are important cultural relic buildings, covering 15 provinces and cities in the occupied area.23 He also included a note on the “Principle of Identification of Ancient Buildings” at the beginning of each volume.

In the spring of 1949, in order to protect the cultural relics from damage during the civil war, Liang Sicheng was commissioned by the People’s Liberation Army to organize the teachers in the Department of Architecture of Tsinghua University to compile a “Brief List of Important National Cultural Relic Buildings.” This was the first important document on the history of cultural relics’ protection in the People’s Republic of China. Most of the participants were members of the Yingzao Xueshe, and they used the survey data accumulated by the Society. Therefore, this document should still be regarded as the last academic achievement under the name of the Yingzao Xueshe.24

Protection of Chinese Traditional Cities after World War II (1950s)

A failed reform of architecture education

In October 1946, Zhu Qiqian, Liang Sicheng, and Tsinghua University signed an agreement to merge the Yingzao Xueshe into Tsinghua University. The materials and collections of the Society were also transferred to the Architecture Department of Tsinghua University. This marked the end of the history of Yingzao Xueshe as an independent academic research institution.25

From 1946 to 1947, Liang was invited to serve as a visiting professor at Yale University and to attend the International Symposium on Far Eastern Culture and Society hosted by Princeton University.26 After returning to China from the United States, Liang proposed reforming architectural education according to the new trends in modern architectural education in Europe and the United States. He advocated abandoning the traditional “Beaux-Arts” curriculum, which approached architecture as one of the fine arts, and using the Bauhaus method for teaching.27

In the 1920s and 1930s, architecture theories in Europe and the countries of North America changed dramatically. An approach based on a classicism aesthetics was replaced by modernist trends. The Bauhaus method was a new teaching method which adapted to this new trend and was widely accepted. It became the mainstream in architecture education. Liang believed that the Bauhaus method represented the new direction in international architectural education, and in his assessment, it was more suitable for educating the future architects for the reconstruction of postwar China. He suggested that Tsinghua University adopt the new Bauhaus education system.28

His new curriculum plan also reflected strong liberal education characteristics. It included social science courses, such as Sociology, Economics, Physical Environment and Society, Rural Sociology, Urban Sociology, Municipal Management, and courses on architectural history and art history, such as the History of European and American Architecture, the History of Chinese Architecture, the History of European and American Paintings and sculpture, and the History of Chinese Paintings sculptures.29 Together with more narrowly specialized courses in the profession, these courses offered a comprehensive curriculum which offered students a rich knowledge in the fields of society, engineering, and art. The new curriculum was intended to stimulate the modern architect’s research interests and enhance his or her sense of social responsibility.30

Liang’s education reform only lasted from 1947 to 1952. After 1952, the Soviet model of higher education gradually became dominant in China. The mainstream architectural style in the Soviet Union during this period changed from constructivism to classicism. And the Soviet architectural education program also completely returned to the traditional system resting on an approach to architecture as one of the fine arts.31

Soviet experts such as A. S. Mukhin and E. A. Ashchepkov came to China and brought with them the concepts of Soviet architectural education. Soviet experts’ opinions became decisive in the formulation of the syllabuses in departments of architecture. Many colleges and universities adopted the architectural education system of the Soviet Union. The Department of Architecture at Tsinghua University gave up the newly adopted Bauhaus teaching mode and focused on principles of classical aesthetics.

Ashchepkov came to the Department of Architecture at Tsinghua University in 1952. He had developed an architecture curriculum in the Soviet Union in 1948, and he specified a new teaching plan with the reference to the “plan proposed in the summary of the Tenth Congress of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1951.”32 Drawing on the Soviet model, Tsinghua University revised the curriculum according to the template of the Moscow Institute of Architecture. The exploration of modern architectural education in Tsinghua was suspended.

Struggles to protect architectural heritage

Another one of Liang Sicheng’s contributions in the 1950s was to call for the protection of architectural heritage, particularly the old city of Beijing, also named Peiping before 1949. Since the tenth century AD, the city had served as the capital of China for five different dynasties. After having been chosen as the capital of the People’s Republic of China, Beijing faced the challenges of large-scale urban renewal to cope with the pressure of the official entry of the Central People’s Government.

In January 1949, Peiping was peacefully liberated, and most of the traditional architecture was saved from damage. What was even more valuable was Beijing’s overall layout as a traditional ancient capital. Liang repeatedly emphasized that Beijing’s special value lies first and foremost in its urban layout as a whole. For this reason, he suggested “first recognizing the excellent structure of Beijing City’s layout, and the architectural monuments in Beijing should be protected as a comprehensive system. They are the world’s best-preserved, most special, and most precious masterpieces of art.”33

After the government agencies moved into the city, the urban area of Peiping became crowded. Many palaces, temples and old buildings were in danger of being requisitioned by the government. Due to the lack of systemic regulations, the new construction work in Peiping was also in a disorderly state.

The protection of the old city of Beijing in the urban renewal plans was a foremost issue among Chinese experts and scholars. As a member of the newly established Peiping Urban Planning Committee, Liang wrote to the new mayor of the city in 1949, expressing his concerns about the disorderly development and putting forward suggestions on how to solve this problem.

In May 1949, the Peiping Municipal Government organized a meeting to discuss the plans for the new urban area in the western suburbs of Peiping. Liang Sicheng and other scholars were invited to the meeting. Liang pointed out that the administrative center of Peiping and the central government should be positioned in the new urban area in the western suburb. The old city of Beijing would thus be surrounded by the city wall, and the Forbidden City, which would be the center, would remain intact. The future development of Beijing, he felt, should be founded on this idea. The municipal government showed keen interest in the plan for the new western suburb at the meeting.

However, the situation changed when Soviet experts arrived in Peiping. In September 1949, the Soviet Union sent a group of 17 municipal experts led by P. V. Abramov to Peiping. Their goals were to guide the urban construction in Beijing, drawing on the experiences gathered during the construction or reconstruction of Soviet cities. The Peiping Municipal Party Committee and Municipal Government quickly changed their opinion on the plan provided by Chinese scholars and agreed with the urban plan proposed by Soviet experts. One of the key changes made by the Soviet experts was the choice of the location of the administrative center. The new administrative center was set within the original urban area, more specifically, the new urban plan was set with the Forbidden City as the center.

At the city planning report meeting in November 1949, Liang Sicheng and other Chinese experts had an intense discussion on the report submitted by the Soviet experts. Liang Sicheng did not agree with the Soviet experts on multiple issues. The Soviet experts also expressed their opinions on the reports of Liang and sharply criticized him. Abramov claimed that his design ideas were based on the opinions of the leaders of the Communist Party of China. He criticized the European and American urban planning and heritage protection concepts reflected in Liang Sicheng’s speech. And he cited in particular the case of the reconstruction of Moscow as his supporting example to criticize Liang Sicheng’s idea of putting the new administrative center in the western suburbs in order to protect the old city of Beijing.

Liang Sicheng did not agree with the Soviet experts at the meeting. Regarding the importance and urgency of formulating an urban plan for Beijing, Liang and planning expert Chen Zhanxiang felt that it was necessary to express their understanding comprehensively in a detailed counterproposal. In February 1950, Liang and Chen completed the “Proposal on the Location of the Administrative Central District of the Central People’s Government,” which was later called the “Liang-Chen Proposal.” In this proposal, they offered a detailed urban plan for the new administrative central district in the western suburbs of the city.

To win more support, Liang and Chen printed more than 100 copies of the proposal at their own expense and distributed the copies among the officials of the Beijing Municipal Government. However, two months passed and they did not get any feedback. In April, Liang wrote to the Premier Zhou Enlai, hoping to gain an opportunity to introduce the proposal to him. He did not get any reply.

Over the course of the next few months, the Liang-Chen proposal drew criticism from different parties. The main accusation was that it was an objection to the opinions of Soviet experts. The attempt to build the new administrative center outside the old urban area of Beijing failed. In 1952, Soviet experts became the main sources of decisive guidance in all professions. Chinese experts such as Liang were marginalized.

The construction of the new administrative center in the old urban area of Beijing caused massive, chaotic upheaval. Many buildings that were part of China’s architectural heritage in Beijing were at risk. One demonstrative example was the demolition of the city wall of Beijing.

In Liang’s opinion, the city wall of Beijing was an important part of China’s cultural heritage as a whole. Liang had once provided a design to transform the old city wall into a high-rise park around the city. In his design, the main body of the city wall was preserved as a recreational area for the citizenry, and new city gates could be opened to adapt to new transportation demands. Regarding the protection of elements of China’s cultural heritage under the new construction project, Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin raised a number of objections in different forms. However, they often failed in their struggle. The city wall and many traditional buildings in Beijing were demolished in the later years.

Conclusion

In the beginning of the twentieth century, the study and struggle of the first generation of architectural historians showed many respectable qualities of Chinese scholars. They started their research as part of an effort to challenge Western and Japanese hegemonies. They introduced modern architectural education in China from abroad. In the 1930s, they investigated and surveyed a large number of Chinese architectural monuments and gardens to fight against prejudices in the international academic world against Chinese culture.

After the beginning of World War II, they struggled to continue their teaching and research under Japanese occupation. While their personal safety was threatened by the war, they strove to pursue their research and professional practice. They also managed to transfer their students and to continue their teaching.

After the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, they started the reform of architectural education and called for protection of important elements of China’s architectural and landscape heritage in the industrialization movement in the 1950s. The Liang-Chen Proposal, Liang’s urban planning proposal to preserve old Beijing, was turned down due to the objections made by Soviet experts. Liang protested many times against the demolition of important historical works of architecture.

Whether oppression came from the West, Japan, or the Soviet Union, the first-generation architectural historians in China always kept their independent mind and professional attitudes. They faced many setbacks in their efforts, but their research saved many historical works of architecture and important elements of cityscapes from been ruined by the war, both in China and Japan. Their surveys and investigations offered invaluable documentation of tangible and intangible cultural heritage that disappeared in the war and in the subsequent industrialization movements. Their ideas still play an important role in Chinese cultural heritage conservation today. They established the modern discipline of architecture in China. Their persisting struggle revealed the unyielding independence and dignity of modern Chinese intellectuals.

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Historians Resisting Tyranny: A Preliminary Evaluation

Antoon De Baets

University of Groningen

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 13 Issue 1  (2024):39-58 DOI 10.38145/2024.1.39

Since time immemorial, dictators have censored the writing of history and persecuted its practitioners. This policy of history censorship has had many effects, some of which were unintended, such as the development of strategies to counter the distortion of history. This essay therefore opens with a summary overview of the intended and unintended effects of the censorship of the science of history. Against this backdrop, the essay then focuses on one unintended effect of this censorship: resistance to the distortion of history. A tableau is given of the repertoires of available types of resistance under dictatorships and, for comparative purposes, in democracies. The essay uses these repertoires to analyze the resistance of the historians under dictatorships from four perspectives: actors (historians and others); conduct (acts and omissions), motives (ethical, moral, professional, and political), and impact (short-term and long-term). The essay is intended as a tribute, both to historians who once resisted tyrannical power and to historians who retell their stories as an inspiration for present and future battles.

Keywords: actors of resistance, conduct of resistance, censorship of history, professional solidarity, repertoires of resistance.

History says, Don’t hope

on this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

the longed-for tidal wave

of justice can rise up,

and hope and history rhyme.

Seamus Heaney1

You did not survive in order to live

your time is short you must bear witness

have courage when reason fails have courage

in the last count only that matters.

Zbigniew Herbert2

Introduction

Over the course of the ages, dictators have often censored historians, and this policy has had multiple intended and unintended effects. Some of the intended effects of censorship have undermined historical writing directly. Censorship produces a shredder effect, when it leads to the destruction of data, a distortion effect, when it falsifies or invents data, and an omission effect, when it conceals data.3 The cumulative result of these three effects is a survivorship bias at the level of sources and their analytical treatment: censorship distorts the overall record of the past.4 The intended effects of censorship may also undermine historical writing indirectly via the impact on historians and their audiences: censorship produces a corrupting effect,when historians are co-opted or seduced into collaborating with the repressive system or into tolerating its propaganda and distortions; a chilling effect, when it intimidates and deters the expression of opinions, meanwhile encouraging obedience and self-censorship in censored and third parties; an elimination effect, when it removes unwelcome critical actors from the historiographical scene, either temporarily or permanently; and a sterility effect, when the caricatural history created by censorship and propaganda discourages openness, diminishes creativity, and creates a credibility gap, provoking a crisis of public trust in historical writing which can last far beyond the abolition of the dictatorship and its censorship apparatus.

Censorship has unintended effects as well, that is, unintended by the dictators and their censors. These effects emanate from the targets of censorship and counter the intended effects. The most important direct unintended effect is the backfire effect, which emerges spontaneously when the weak credibility of official versions of history in nondemocratic regimes directs collective curiosity toward the historical taboos created by these regimes. Other direct unintended effects are less spontaneous and are rather a calculated product of individual and collective decisions to form counterstrategies to stop the assaults launched by power. They include a resistance effect, when historians oppose censorship privately or publicly, passively or actively; a solidarity effect,whenthird parties start supporting censored historians openly or covertly, materially or morally; a substitution effect, when novelists, poets, and filmmakers take the place of censored historians and become vicarious messengers of history; and a rescue effect, when censorship triggers attempts to save manuscripts, books, archives, and heritage at risk of destruction. Some direct unintended effects appear immediately after the collapse of a dictatorship, such as a restitution effect, when censored works are republished in their original versions, and a survival effect, when censored historians are rehabilitated after the abolition of censorship, leading to at least a partial restoration of the previous situation.

In the longer term, unintended indirect effects may also emerge: an integrity effect, when the distortions of history are exposed, thereby restoring intellectual honesty and protecting the integrity of history; a memory effect, when stories of resistance and courage in the face of censorship are told and retold and inspire; a therapeutic effect, when these stories suggest remedies to act; and, finally, a preventive effect, when the cumulative unintended effects of censorship help safeguard responsible notions of historical truth, reestablish public trust in history and prevent the recurrence of censorship.

In the following reflections, I examine ways in which historians have organized resistance to censorship under dictatorships all over the world since 1945, often at great risk. When battling tyranny, historians have of course been active in other roles, for instance as academics, journalists, politicians, and human rights and peace activists, but these kinds of roles are only relevant here to the extent that they have a clear link with the past. In addition, it is worth keeping in mind that resistance to censorship in the historical profession was usually the affair of a minority. This does not mean that the majority was a homogenous and willing mass. Some actively collaborated with the dictator, while others merely acquiesced to their fates. As we shall see, the historians who remained silent were the hardest to gauge.5

Readers who are looking for specific examples of acts of resistance by historians will be disappointed. I have given examples of such acts in abundance elsewhere.6 This time, my purpose is different. I reflect on the evidence on a global scale and embark on a preliminary attempt to evaluate the results of the resistance to the distortion of history, discussing in the process whether acts of resistance actually furthered the ultimate goal: saving the integrity of memory and history. First, I give an overview of the repertoires of available types of resistance to the distortion of history under dictatorships.7 In order to put this into a comparative context, I also review the repertoires of types of resistance used by historians against the distortion of history in democracies. I then discuss the resistance of historians from four perspectives: the actors of resistance (historians and others); the conduct of resistance (acts and omissions), the motives for resistance (ethical, moral, professional, and political), and the impact (short-term and long-term) of resistance.

Repertoires of Resistance to the Distortion of History under Dictatorships

In the following overview of the repertoires at the disposal of dissident historians to resist the distortion of history under dictatorships, twenty-five types of resistance are distinguished.8 They cover a broad range of activities in four concentric layers: resistance from prison, private resistance outside prison, public resistance outside prison, and, finally, outsider shows of solidarity, usually by actors living in democracies but sometimes also by people living under other dictatorships. The general line is to start with the more invisible and private activities and move gradually to more public and defiant ways of resistance, although it proved difficult to catch the diverse reality of resistance on a simple scale from invisibility to publicity.

Table 1. Repertoires of resistance to the distortion of history under dictatorships9

Resistance from prison. Prison may seem an unlikely place to start an overview of repertoires of forms of resistance, but there are relatively numerous reports about historians who read history in their cells and kept diaries or notebooks in which they penned thoughts of a historical nature. Some inmates who were not historians, when given the opportunity, were able to obtain history degrees through correspondence courses. A few authors drafted historical novels in prison, and others were able to conduct some historical research and work on historical manuscripts. A few also knew of channels with which they could smuggle their writings out of prison. Next to these usually solitary activities, there were also more interactive moments, for instance when detainees taught history to their fellow inmates. However, this happened only rarely.

Private resistance outside prison. One cannot save a profession when its professionals are left in the dark. Many historians living in repressive contexts have demonstrated solidarity with their persecuted colleagues and discreetly supported them. The Czechoslovak philosopher of history Jan Patočka, one of the dissident intellectuals who deeply thought about the phenomenon of resistance, called this the “solidarity of the shaken.”10 I call it “insider solidarity.”

At the level of historical knowledge, academics, teachers, and students were sometimes able to organize petitions to rescue innovative history textbooks or to protest against biased ones. When circumstances allowed, historians who were internally displaced in times of civil war helped set up refugee campuses in remote areas of their home countries. Occasionally, archival information was smuggled abroad. Undercover teaching and unofficial lectures during secret seminars were options in several countries. This secret teaching and lecturing sometimes spilled over into unofficial discussions held on a small scale in private homes. These informal gatherings were the metaphorical oxygen which sustained underground historical writing in many dictatorships.

Dissident historical research could take different shapes. Some historians witnessed the repression unfolding before their eyes and documented it as eyewitnesses in real time to rescue sources and create a basis for future study. Another mode of resistance was the secret collection and analysis of data, for example by copying documents clandestinely. Not surprisingly, such covert research concentrated on the blank spots of history. In semi-repressive or politically hybrid contexts, it was sometimes even possible to publish reports about the repression experienced by the historical profession. A few historians became attracted to the gray zones, blank spots, and black holes of censorship and shifted their research toward the historical taboos, or if they had already made these areas the focus of their work, then they stubbornly refused to shift away from them or to withdraw into safer spaces of research. Writing about the past to critically comment on the present was a frequent technique of historical analogy which was intended to call telling precedents to mind to arouse historical consciousness and briefly create a sense of connection over time. Numerous historians preferred to publish their manuscripts in self-made editions and distribute them in small underground circles.

Public resistance outside prison. Some historians opted for public confrontation with tyranny by attacking, if not destroying, the historical myths that buttressed dictatorial power. They openly doubted the authenticity of ancient legends that supported the legitimacy of the authoritarian political system, and they endured much hostility for having done so. Others criticized the official rewriting of history with its blank spots by publicly and directly advocating a right to historical truth and by defending the intrinsic value of the methodical search for such truth. Another powerful public tool was the organization of peaceful public commemorations, for example, at the foot of a well-known monument, on a significant historical anniversary, or during the funeral of a colleague or public figure. If these kinds of commemorations served as rallying points for political opposition, they were frequently perceived as threats to the public order.

Sometimes, historians secretly collected sources to indict the leaders of their countries in the hopes of someday even seeing them actually be prosecuted. In some countries, appeals were issued to prosecute deceased leaders for the human rights violations that they had ordered or committed during their rule. Though legally impossible (since the dead cannot be indicted or prosecuted), such appeals were nevertheless powerful history lessons. Surprisingly enough, there were several such calls to indict deceased leaders, and some even led to posthumous trials against deceased heads of state.11

On multiple occasions, dissidents emphasized the unbreakable bond between a free and responsible historical profession and democracy, arguing that a democratic society alone respects the human rights necessary to allow the historical profession to thrive. Some even sent dramatic appeals to the head of state with complaints about the deplorable conditions of the historical profession. If the letters were private, they could be neglected, though they could also spark harassment of and persecution against their authors; if these letters were (or became) public or when they were cast and distributed as public memoranda, they often made retaliation against their authors unavoidable if the regime did not want to lose face, though this was a risky strategy that could backfire.

Some historians defied the repression of their craft by making gestures of disobedience calculated for maximum symbolic impact. They usually proceeded by surprise, and mostly at great personal sacrifice. In this sense, giving public talks with a critical approach to history was often an act of bravery. Resigning from one’s job or position or refusing to sign a loyalty declaration or take a loyalty oath to the ruling elite or ideology were other signs of courage.

Sometimes resistance came with a delay, when a single copy of a book believed to be entirely destroyed suddenly emerged after years or decades and led to reprints. Likewise, now and then, manuscripts that had been thought lost were rediscovered. Although often the product of coincidence but not infrequently also of secret rescue plans, such discoveries offer us glimpses of the survival and rescue effects and the subtle satisfaction of delayed revenge. We could call this resistance after the fact.

Outsider solidarity. If historians living under dictatorial regimes dared take advantage of international conferences abroad as platforms to publicize their plight, they faced expulsion or charges of “enemy propaganda” or “treason” upon their return, if they were allowed re-entry at all. When we turn our attention to the historians who lived in exile, we see that many of them smuggled sources and works from abroad back home or stayed discreetly in contact with those left behind via networks of messengers. A significant minority of these exiled historians established publication outlets and historical institutions abroad, including study centers and universities in exile, to make the critical voices about the history of their home countries heard. Much of this work was public and sometimes highly visible. The same could be said about signs of moral or material solidarity by diaspora historians with their persecuted compatriots, such as signing petitions in protest against the dictatorship’s history politics or as part of efforts to boost the morale of those left behind.

Many of these types of resistance to dictatorships were strengthened by tokens of professional solidarity in democratic or even in other dictatorial countries. This outsider solidarity was not free of risk. The harshest punishment for historians living in democracies who wished to help repressed colleagues living under dictatorships was to end up on a visa blacklist, which in many cases forced them to change specialisms or even careers. As a sign of moral solidarity, some waged campaigns for their persecuted colleagues, for instance by signing petitions and statements or writing letters of protest to repressive authorities.12 National history associations sometimes refused to send their delegates to conferences in problematic countries, and international history associations could block certain countries from acting as hosts for their congresses. Some scholars resigned their membership in foreign academies or returned distinctions. And many historians used their freedom to write or teach uninhibitedly about the controversial aspects, blank spots, and falsified histories of tyrannical regimes. These gestures were signs of moral and symbolic solidarity.

Some went further and organized forms of material solidarity by creating safe havens in democratic countries. Much cultural heritage was safeguarded in this way, including archives. Material solidarity also extended to people. When they were lucky, refugee historians were offered a welcome and sometimes employment upon arrival in their host countries. In short, transnational networks of solidarity played their own role in the history of resistance.

The repertoires of resistance under dictatorships presented above need further refinement and are far from exhaustive. Nevertheless, as they are based on dozens of post-1945 examples collected from all over the world, they should give a reliable picture of the tools available to historians living under repressive regimes. How many historians actually used them depended on many variables, such as the intensity and duration of the dictatorship, the strength of its repression apparatus, the population size and mobilization power of the historical community and institutions, and the connections this community had with the outside world. In the case of the more public activities identified above, we are certainly talking about a small minority of historians in any given dictatorship.

Repertoires of Resistance to the Distortion of History in Democracies

It would be a serious mistake to believe that democracies were immune to assaults on the integrity of history and memory—and that the historians in these democracies were therefore unfamiliar with the phenomenon of resistance. The difference with dictatorships is not that democracies endure fewer attacks on the historical profession but that these attacks are less devastating in their effects and are usually countered at an early stage and with less fear of retaliation. The paramount cause for this difference is, of course, the stronger position of the right to freedom of expression in democracies.

In myriad ways, historians living in democracies could and did actively contribute to the creation of a domestic and global climate in which history is studied responsibly. The following bird eye’s view of seventeen modalities gives an impression of the array of tools at their disposal.

Table 2. Repertoires of resistance to the distortion of history in democracies13

The search for historical truth so central to the work of historians harbors several dimensions of resistance. Some overlap, such as, for example, the refutation of historical myths, historical disinformation, and propaganda on the one hand and the fight against the intentional denial of corroborated past genocides and other crimes on the other. The uncontested proliferation of myth, falsity, and denial, especially online, undermines society’s trust in the reliable knowledge produced by responsible history practitioners. Another dimension starts from the premise that it is the task of the community of historians to study the past in its entirety, including its dark episodes. If this premise is valid, it follows that it is historians’ collective duty to pay due attention to the taboos of history and areas of history shrouded in secrecy.

Explicit and structural attention to the ethical and moral dimensions of historical scholarship is often still lacking in scores of academic history curricula, yet where it is taught, it can contribute powerfully to a climate of responsible history. Part of this dimension lies in developing an awareness of the presence of abuses of history and of the different modes of opposing them: prevention, investigation, disclosure, and sanction.

Campaigning for effective laws that encourage freedom of expression, freedom of information, and archival access is a long-term legal strategy which requires perseverance. Denouncing laws with provisions that unreasonably limit access to records is usually part of this strategy. More generally, any laws that produce chilling effects on the freedom of expression about the past (for example, defamation laws that impose criminal sanctions or disproportional damages) should be denounced. The tendency of states to promulgate memory laws that prescribe the desired content of historical debate and/or proscribe alternative views of the past also inhibits a broad understanding of the past from multiple perspectives. It is a sign of the judicialization of historical content and should be opposed.

Action can shift from the legal to the political level. Attempts of the government to interfere with history works it has itself commissioned should be and have been opposed. The refusal to sign loyalty declarations or take loyalty oaths was another strategy. Historians living in emerging democracies that have to deal with a repressive past of lies and secrecy may fulfill a political duty by participating in initiatives that foster transitional justice (historians’ commissions, truth commissions, tribunals, reparation and reconciliation efforts). One poignant part of this effort could be a soul-searching operation into the role of the historical profession in the previous era of repression and violence accompanied, if need be, by public apologies for its mistakes and distortions.

Recent historical injustice can be tackled with measures that fit the United Nations Reparation Principles. These principles distinguish five types of reparation: restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, prevention, and satisfaction.14 The last type, satisfaction or symbolic reparation, in particular is relevant to the field of memory and history. It includes measures such as truth-finding, the search for dead bodies, posthumous rehabilitation, official apologies, commemorations, and history education about the violent episodes of the past. The number of websites dedicated to historians who suffered political repression and lost their lives is increasing.15

Outsider solidarity with those persecuted under dictatorships connects resistance under dictatorships with resistance in democracies. Similarly, solidarity can also be openly shown with domestic colleagues who have been attacked or unjustly penalized or dismissed.

Scores of historians have participated in one or several of these resistance acts in democratic contexts. The democratic repertoire is discussed here mainly for comparative purposes, as the differences between forms of resistance under dictatorships and forms of resistance in democracies are large.

Actors of Resistance

The repertoires of types of resistance available under dictatorships will now be analyzed from four perspectives: agency, conduct, motivation, and impact. The purpose of this analysis is to answer the question whether resistance to the distortion of history under dictatorships, as part of the wider history of resistance and freedom, made any difference. Let us first look again at the actors in the four layers of resistance: resistance from prison, private resistance outside prison, public resistance outside prison, and outsider solidarity.

Resistance from prison constitutes a special category. Doing historical research and writing history from prison, if tolerated at all, were survival strategies first of all, devised as a means of somehow giving long and tedious prison years a purpose. Resistance to the system was usually a secondary effect here. Teaching history in prison, because of its direct effect upon other inmates, served resistance purposes most. If works written in prison had any resistance effect after their publication outside prison, it was usually unintended at the moment of their creation, and the effect always came later. This did not prevent some historical works from causing a stir upon publication, not the least because of the special appeal that works written in prison have. Some became bestsellers.

Outside prison, modalities for resistance were greater, although in repressive societies the margins of freedom remained narrow and fragile. It is difficult to tell whether resistance to censorship performed outside prison generally made a difference. Private resistance was often invisible except among the smallest of circles. This makes any evaluation of its frequency and importance impossible. Public resistance regularly produced a rescue effect: the mission to safeguard sources, works, and monuments could be fulfilled in a variety of ways. When publicly protesting historians were silenced, often the substitution effect came into play. Novelists, playwrights, journalists, storytellers, and singers then took care of suppressed historical interpretations, sheltering them and keeping them alive when collective memory was in danger of extinction because the silenced and silent historians were not able to refute the heralded truths of official historical propaganda.

In addition, historians sometimes acted without intending to be part of any form of resistance, although their conduct could be or was interpreted as such. Many historians who were in prison or who remained in the privacy of their homes did not particularly identify themselves as opponents of the system. In a dictatorial context, however, merely performing the role of a professional scholar (methodically and responsibly collecting and analyzing past data, no matter where this led) was already a very political act. This is so because the scholar’s findings, when disclosed, are received in a nervous political atmosphere in which they risk rejection, regardless of the scholar’s intentions. All historians, including the most apolitical, knew that they were putting themselves in danger merely by practicing their profession in an uncompromisingly responsible manner.

If we leave the repressive context and look at outsider solidarity (i.e. gestures of moral and material solidarity made in other countries), we can speculate with a little more certainty. The success of outsider solidarity was heavily influenced by factors such as the strength of the historical craft in the country before it succumbed to tyranny; the continuity, once the dictatorship was installed, of pre-existing networks with the outside world; and the historical ties between assisting and receiving countries. But displays of solidarity always had something unpredictable: depending on political or other fashions, some countries, some historiographical traditions, some individuals, and some works aroused more sympathy than others.

If we look at the four groups of resisters more generally as intellectuals, they can enrich typologies and theories about intellectuals,16 whether or not the latter are construed according to criteria such as independence from authorities, visibility in public forums, intentionality and intensity of activity, or levels of professional, political, and social engagement. This is so because the repertoires do not show that resistance is necessarily the opposite of the ruling power. Rather, it can pervade all segments of society, including government itself. Leading intellectuals, court historians, and official historians often had small margins of freedom and criticism, and some skillfully exploited these margins, tweaked too much rigidity, or tolerated niches of resistance in and outside the official historiographical bureaucracy. Purely instrumental views of these historians as willing tools of the regime fail. Even intellectuals close to the centers of power could operate in a resistance mode now and then.

Conduct of Resistance

Any analysis of the conduct of resistance should begin with some caveats about the role of silences, the selectivity of data, and the low comparability of resistance types. To begin with, the notion of “conduct of resistance” should not be interpreted too narrowly. Resistance is usually expressed as an act. However, precisely in situations of repression, disagreement and resistance can also be expressed as an omission rather than an act, for example, when historians refuse to comply with an order or when they meet dictatorial orders with indifference, if not passive resistance. Now and then, silences are telling.17

In the same way, not all conduct of resistance is analyzed here. Many stories were not included in the database that constitutes the basis for this evaluation because they were unknown (either generally or by me). The low-profile character of private, anonymous, or pseudonymous resistance is the primary reason why much relevant conduct remains invisible. In addition, many historians very likely took care to erase all or most traces of their resistance out of safety concerns. Were these unnoticed gestures of resistance done in vain and doomed to oblivion? Do acts of resistance have to be witnessed in order to be meaningful? The answer is that every act of resistance is witnessed by at least one person, namely the actor. Any act, however small and difficult to trace, could linger on, sometimes for a fleeting moment, sometimes for years, in the mind of its creator at least, who may have felt heartened by it. Or it may have been noticed by a few others and inspired them instantly or long after the fact. Therefore, even hidden or quasi-invisible acts or gestures of resistance are meaningful. Despite this, it remains true that a regime paradox is at work: given the unequal tolerance of criticism in different regimes, there is less information about more resistance in dictatorial societies and more information about less resistance in democratic societies.

Finally, types of resistance are difficult to compare, as they span a multi-faceted spectrum of private and public activities, from silent support for clandestine acts to symbolic gestures and occasional contributions to acts of open defiance. Some acts consisted of small offstage acts done without fanfare and often hidden behind a screen of ambiguity or silence, while others required public bravery or quixotry. Some were spontaneous, occurring in a flash, while others were carefully planned or deliberately provocative and continued for years.

With these caveats in mind, it is possible to draw three cautious conclusions about the conduct of resistance. The first regards the specificity of history as compared to other scientific disciplines. Although the types of anti-dictatorial resistance presented here were deployed in the realms of history and memory, most could serve mutatis mutandis as resistance formats for other scientific disciplines as well. Helping someone flee a country, for example, basically involved a range of acts regardless of whether the refugee was a historian, a sociologist, or another type of scholar. Very few types of resistance seem unique to the historical profession, though these types include the subversive use of historical analogies to convey covert criticism of present-day politics, the brave exposure of historical taboos and myths, the courageous plea in defense of the basic principle of historical truth, and the somewhat odd practice of bringing accusations or charges against deceased leaders. These types of resistance are difficult to replicate in other disciplines.

A second conclusion is that inspiration for resistance can circulate among countries and across eras. An excellent example illustrating both is the organization of clandestine history classes or underground history seminars. This was a typically Polish medium of resistance under Russian rule before World War I, under German rule during World War II, and under Soviet rule between 1977 and 1989. In neighboring countries of the post-1945 Eastern European bloc, similar initiatives popped up. Likewise, the samizdat version of resistance, while not absent in the rest of the world, is typically associated with anti-communist resistance in the USSR and its satellite states.

Finally, the question arises as to what extent the modes of resistance under dictatorships and democracies were comparable. Undoubtedly, a similar spirit of courage and perseverance pervades the acts in both regime types, although the risks were evidently extremely unequal. Under dictatorships, the main problem for resisters is to invent ways to circumvent the repressive apparatus. The suppression of history not only engenders infertility (referred to as the sterility effect in the introduction) but also stimulates its opposite, the creativity to escape control, although sometimes only at the cost of a huge investment of effort. The preferred environment to perform acts of resistance seems to be a small community or network, either clandestine or not, with a minimum of interaction with the outside world.

In democracies, the threat of repressive power is generally low (but certainly not non-existent) and the challenges are comparatively less exacting. The spheres of action the study of which is complicated under dictatorships (prison and private activities) are less important in democracies, because there are fewer historians in prison and people have fewer reasons not to speak in public. Paradoxically, however, the larger freedom in democracies seems to generate a greater variety of forces that can impose restraints upon historians. Under dictatorships, the pattern is clear, at least in principle: the powers that restrict the historians’ work are the dictator and his apparatus of formal institutions (including the parliament, the courts, the leading political party, the police, military, and security, and the censorship bureau) and informal means (thugs and death squads operating in the shadows). In democracies, states can impede historians directly or indirectly (although in less violent ways and less unchecked than their counterparts under dictatorships), but the censorial role of semi-public and private lobbies, groups, and individuals is potentially larger. The paramount difference between the two regime types for the successful organization of resistance in the fields of memory and history, then, is the degree of freedom of expression, including the ability to conduct open, adversarial debates about the past.

Another thought worth pondering is the plight of historians in societies that are in transition from dictatorship to democracy. A counterintuitive observation is that the life of a historian in a time of transition may be riskier than in a time of dictatorship. Entrenched dictatorships, because they wield ruthless power, firmly deter and block incriminating historical research. In contrast, freer conditions in emergent democracies prompt or encourage bold historical research into the crimes of previous dictatorships or into past instances of systemic violence. However, in these transitional times, the safety conditions are usually weak, transforming historians into targets of the military and allies of the military who seek to install or restore authoritarian rule. Consequently, strategies of resistance are precarious even under circumstances in which expectations and perspectives for better professional lives rapidly increase.

Motives for Resistance

When we ask why some historians feel the need to express criticism under circumstances of persecution and censorship, many motives play a role or act together, but the most important ones are ethical, moral, professional, and political.18 Each motive serves different purposes, but the boundaries between them are fluid.

Ethical motives reflect the question of how to live a good life. Resisters have ethical motives if they follow their conscience and act regardless of how others behave. At a certain moment, they have decided that the situation is unbearable, and they want to express their protest (cautiously or recklessly) even if they are the only ones and regardless of examples, followers, and consequences. Some perform small gestures to illustrate principles, while others risk their jobs or lives.

Moral motives reflect the question of how to behave toward others. Resisters have moral motives if they aim to inspire and mobilize others to support them silently (passive resistance) or to follow their example openly (active resistance) and together form an expanding pool of protest.

If historians act for what they call professional motives, these motives are usually a combination of ethical and moral reasons applied to the historian’s craft. Resisters have professional motives if they think that professional duties (such as sincerity and accuracy), professional standards of methodology (such as following the rules of logic), and professional procedures (such as peer review and debate) have to be respected and protected at all costs and/or to set an example for present and future generations. Convinced of the professional and social importance of a responsibly produced history or judging that the attack on the integrity of memory and history or the injustice done to historians has become unbearable, they act out of principle and/or with the intention of inspiring others.

Sometimes, political motives come on top of the other reasons. They reflect the determination to influence and change the political system. Resisters have political motives if they aim to criticize the political system with a view to change it radically. Whereas in a democratic context change means perfecting the system, in a dictatorial context, change means replacing it.

Impact of Resistance

Given the heterogeneity in terms of agency, conduct, and motivation, how can we evaluate the impact of resistance to the distortion of history under dictatorships? A necessary step is to distinguish immediate and remote impact. It is too simple to evaluate resistance only in the short term, that is, when the dictatorship is nascent or unfolding or at the moment of its downfall. We should also measure the less visible long-term impact on the psychological condition of all those involved, including contemporaries and future observers.

Turning to the short term, one can take the pessimistic or the optimistic view. One must admit that, from a pessimistic perspective, resistance did not (and simply could not) counterbalance systemic violence and organized attacks on the historical profession. Dictatorships ruined much of the historical profession with ruthless power. We will never know which historical sources and facts, and which innovative interpretations and arguments about the past, were lost forever when and because historians were persecuted.19 In many cases, it took years, if not generations, to rebuild only partly what was torn asunder. And often losses and disappearances were irreparable.

From an optimistic perspective, the harvest of resistance is rich: in the end, much was also saved at the material level of archives, manuscripts, works, monuments, and education, as well as at the symbolic level of principles and values. Attacks were countered, secrets uncovered, distortions denounced, indifference neutralized, sterility fertilized, distrust disarmed, and principles affirmed, with timidity or with confidence.

Looking at the long term, a surprising number of acts of resistance inspired and became examples or precedents of moral courage. Two types in particular, it seems to me, have this special potential. The first is when the resisters proceeded as they thought they should in order to exercise their craft responsibly with reckless disregard of warnings and consequences and without chasing any effects. The second special type of resistance which gets easily etched in memory occurs when the act was performed with a certain bravado, for example, when daring historical analogies were used or when historians began reorienting their work toward the eras and topics considered taboo. Something extraordinary happens when a given conduct transforms into example and precedent: the epistemological status of that conduct alters under the gaze of those watching it because more information on how to live can be extracted from it.

Once instances of moral courage are perceived as examples or precedents, they comfort those who otherwise feel alone and powerless in the same or in similar repressive contexts. Likewise, they can enlighten future generations as precedents long after the events to which they refer have disappeared. As long as stories of commitment and integrity are told and retold or even only fleetingly referred to, they inspire hope and pride, not only in the spur of the moment but also over time. In short, they create a memory effect. One then feels part of a proud tradition of holding the standards of scholarly integrity aloft in the face of likely censorship. This is a tradition to be aware of, to care for, and to strengthen. The memory effect of resistance, either in its immediate or remote form, is an underestimated force. This article aspires to be part of that memory effect: it is a tribute both to those historians who once resisted tyrannical power and to those who retell their stories as an inspiration for present and future battles.

Bibliography

Apor, Péter, Josip Mihaljević, and Cristina Petrescu. “Collections of Intellectual Dissent: Historians and Sociologists in Post-1968 Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia.” In The Handbook of Courage: Cultural Opposition and Its Heritage in Eastern Europe, edited by Balázs Apor, Péter Apor, and Sándor Horváth, 369–90. Budapest: Hungarian Academy of Sciences Institute of History, Research Center for the Humanities, 2018.

Berger, Stefan, ed. The Engaged Historian: Perspectives on the Intersections of Politics, Activism and the Historical Profession. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2019.

De Baets, Antoon. Crimes against History.London: Routledge, 2019.

De Baets, Antoon. “Resistance to the Censorship of Historical Thought in the Twentieth Century.” In Making Sense of Global History: The 19th International Congress of Historical Sciences, Oslo 2000, Commemorative Volume, edited by Sølvi Sogner, 389–409. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2001.

De Baets, Antoon. Responsible History.New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2009.

Dworkin,Ronald. Justice for Hedgehogs. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011.

Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power.” In Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordon, 109–33. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.

Heaney, Seamus. The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes.London: Faber and Faber, 1991.

Herbert, Zbigniew. “Mr. Cogito’s Envoy.” Index on Censorship 6, no. 3 (1977): 37.

Network of Concerned Historians. https://www.concernedhistorians.org. Accessed 16 January 2024.

Norton, Claire, and Mark Donnelly. Liberating Histories.London: Routledge, 2019.

Patočka, Jan. Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. Originally Czech samizdat, 1975. Translated by Erazim Kohák. Chicago–La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1996.

Provisional Memorial for History Producers Killed for Political Reasons (from Ancient Times to the Present).https://www.concernedhistorians.org/memorial. Accessed 16 January 2024.

Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts.New Haven– London: Yale University Press, 1990.

Smeeth, Ruth. “The Silent Minority.” Index on Censorship 51, no. 2 (2022): 80–81.

Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.2nd ed. New York: Random House, 2016.

Taleb, Nassim. Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets.2nd ed. New York: Random House, 2016.

Tilly, Charles. “Speaking Your Mind without Elections, Surveys or Social Movements.” Public Opinion Quarterly 47, no. 4 (1983): 461–78.

Tucker, Aviezer. The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence: From Patočka to Havel.Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000.

United Nations General Assembly. Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law – Resolution Adopted by the General Assembly (UN Doc. A/RES/60/147). 2005.

Viola, Lynne. Contending with Stalinism: Soviet Power and Popular Resistance in the 1930s. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018.

Staying in the Family? The Role of the Vienne Kinship in Reclaiming the Neapolitan Heritage under King Charles I    

Gergely Kiss

University of Pécs

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 13 Issue 1  (2024):3-17 DOI 10.38145/2024.1.3

Recent years of research have provided a much clearer understanding of the diplomatic relations of King Charles I. In the dynastic relations of the Angevin rulers of Hungary, the building and exploitation of kinship ties can be seen as an important tool. In this context, previous studies have completely neglected the role of Charles I’s two sisters, Beatrix and Clementia, although the former, as the wife of John II, dauphin of Vienne, and the latter, as the wife of the French king Louis X, had considerable diplomatic potential. The present study examines in more detail the network of relationships that developed through Beatrix. Beatrix is perhaps the more significant of the two sisters in part relations with Clementia were much more limited and also because attempts to recover the Neapolitan inheritance were more indirect in the relations with Clementia. This was not the case with the kinship of Vienne, through which Charles I tried to assert the interests of the Angevins of Hungary in the Neapolitan throne. The present study aims to show the role played by Beatrix’s husband, John II, lord of Tour de Pins, dauphin of Vienne, and his younger son, Humbert II, in achieving the objectives of the Angevins of Naples in Hungary.

Keywords: Angevins, Árpád dynasty, Naples, Dauphiné of Vienne, Hungary, dynastic relations, kinship

Introduction

In the last years of the thirteenth century, fateful events took place in Naples. Two of the three children of Charles Martel and Clementia of Habsburg, Charles (Caroberto) and Beatrix, orphaned by the sudden deaths of their parents, were to experience a decisive change in their lives. In both cases, the already aged grandfather, King Charles II of Naples (1285–1309), and his son Robert played a decisive role in the events. On May 25, 1296, Beatrix was married to John II, dauphin of Vienne and lord of Tour de Pin (1306–1319).1 Shortly afterwards, in early 1297, Caroberto was excluded from the succession to the throne of Naples in favor of his uncle Robert and, as is well known, was soon afterwards sent on his way to take possession of his future inheritance in Hungary.2 Three events also took place in the first half of the fourteenth century that require further explanation. These events were also closely linked to Hungary and Naples, and they involved the Dauphiné playing an important, even leading role. In 1317, Caroberto, already king of Hungary as Charles I (1301–1342), asked his brother-in-law, Dauphin John II of Vienne (1306–1319), for help reclaiming the heritage of Naples, and a decade and a half later, the younger son of the latter was involved in Charles I’s negotiations in Naples in 1333, the aim of which was to secure the rule of the Angevins of Hungary over Naples by marrying Prince Andrew and Joan, the granddaughter of Robert I king of Naples (1309–1343). The dauphin also played a major role in the negotiations. Humbert II, who in the meantime had become lord of the Dauphiné, subsequently intervened in the “affairs of Naples.” In light of the events described above, it is reasonable to assume that the Dauphiné, in the vicinity of Provence, was in some way an active participant in relations between Naples and Hungary from the end of the thirteenth to the mid-fourteenth century. The only obstacle to this, at least so far, has been the scarcity of knowledge about one of the actors, the dauphin of Vienne. There are many relevant sources, so the neglect in the secondary literature of the role of the province is due not to a lack of information, but rather to a lack of interest.

In the case of Charles I, who succeeded the kings of the Árpáds, the dominant opinion in the secondary literature is still that the first Angevin ruler of Hungary, amid the struggle against the oligarchs to gain the Hungarian royal throne, had no real opportunity to claim his right to Naples. Fortunately, the situation is now much clearer as regards the ruler’s apparent inactivity in this area of foreign policy.3 In relation to Naples, it is important to note that Charles I had already attempted to recover his paternal inheritance before the negotiations between him and his uncle Robert I started after 1328. In Charles I’s attempts to gain control of Naples, the possibility of diplomatic mediation through dynastic kinship relations is evident. As we shall see below, the dauphins of Vienne played an important role in this.

Many of the details concerning the events discussed below were previously unknown due to a lack of research. This is not the only reason they merit our attention, however. They are also interesting because they shed some light on the diplomatic tools that were used to promote certain dynastic interests. Indeed, kinship ties allowed the parties to use the most natural means possible to further their goals, whether these aims concerned staking a claim to the Neapolitan inheritance of the Angevins in Hungary or forming or strengthening any kind of political alliance. The members of the dynasty, particularly the three children of Charles Martell, Charles, Beatrix, and Clementia (who were geographically very distant from one another), nevertheless actively helped one another, thus furthering the cause of the dynasty. This was also different from classical diplomacy in that the parties did not take the traditional route: they did not send diplomats or envoys to one another’s courts but rather sought to achieve their goals informally by winning each other over within the family. It is hardly necessary to go into detail concerning Caroberto’s career, and the real novelty lies with his two sisters, Clementia and Beatrix, and especially one of the latter’s sons, Humbert. In the following, only the latter will be discussed, so it is worth briefly outlining the main stages of his life.

Relatives Distant but Connected

The betrothal of Charles Martell’s daughters was in the diplomatic interests of the Angevins of Naples. Long after her siblings had been married, Clementia of Hungary4 became the wife of King Louis X of France (1314–1316) in 1315.5 She had a career that could have helped her brother a lot, but their relationship was rather casual.6 The queen of France was widowed a year after the marriage, and her political influence was severely reduced. Still, there was a strong bond between Clementia and the Dauphiné of Vienne in maintaining family ties and in the persistent cultivation of dynastic memory. In the years before her death in 1328, Clementia took several measures to preserve the dynastic memory of the Angevins of Naples, the Capetians, but in terms of direct personal relations, the Angevins of Hungary played little part, in contrast to their relatives in Vienne.7 Clementia’s sister, Beatrix of Hungary, lived in Dauphiné from 1296, as we have seen.8 She gave birth to a son, Guigues, in 1309 and a second child, Humbert, three years later.9 After the death of her husband, John II (1319), Beatrix became a Cistercian nun at Val-de-Bressieux. In 1345, she continued her life in the Beauvoir castle granted to her by her son Humbert II until 1349. She died in 1354 in the Abbey of Saint-Juste-en-Royans.10

Her son Humbert was born in 1312. Not much is known about his youth, he gained the title of Lord of Faucigny and the income that went with it. In 1328–1329, his mother Beatrix sent him to the court of King Charles I of Hungary, probably with the support of his aunt, the dowager Queen Clementia of France. He stayed there until 1332, when he was moved to the court of Robert I of Naples. In the autumn of 1333, he returned from here to Dauphiné to take over the government of the province after the death of his brother Guigues VIII (1319–1333). The last dauphin of Vienne, balancing among neighboring powers, made several attempts to sell the province. Finally, in 1349, Humbert II abdicated in favor of the French Valois dynasty. In 1345–1347, he took part in a crusade. On his return home, after the sale of the province, he joined the Dominicans and became a friar. In 1350, Clement VI appointed him patriarch of Alexandria. Two years later he became administrator of the Archdiocese of Reims, and in 1355 he was traveling to Avignon to be transferred to Paris when he died on route on May 22 at Clairmont.11

Dynastic Identity and Diplomatic Opportunities

It was extremely important for a dynasty to define itself, mainly by highlighting its links with related ruling families. From this point of view, one of the main elements of dynastic representation was the expression of identity. The instruments of this could be textual, as can be clearly seen in Beatrix’s case with the consistent use of the adjective “Hungarian.” With Clementia, it was expressed more indirectly. Another possibility was the use of visual elements for this purpose, whether in the form of symbols of authority on coins or in the most varied forms of coats of arms. The interpretation of these forms of symbolic expression can be based on research on numismatics and the history of art and heraldry, but it is also worth looking beyond the mere representational nature of these elements to their role in diplomacy. The most obvious use of the latter was to mobilize kinship relations to achieve diplomatic ends. This could be achieved either through recourse to a dynastic relative or through the gift or bequest of easily transported objects to various family members (gift-giving).12

But how did this all work for Clementia, Beatrix, and, especially, Humbert? It is relatively easy to trace the origins of these forms of symbolic expression and representation in the case of Clementia, because the sources regularly note that she was the daughter of the Hungarian king Charles Martel, who could have claimed the land of the Árpáds through his mother, Mary of Hungary (†1323). As the wife of Charles II of Naples and daughter of Stephen V of Hungary, she was the most active player in the propagation of representations of the Hungarian royal dynasty abroad. One need merely think of the frescoes and tombs of Santa Maria Donnaregina in Naples or the paintings of Simone Martini, who worked for the court of Naples.13 Mary “served as a mother” to Clementia, and they remained in contact even after Clementia left Naples.14 This is also important because in 1319, Clementia, Mary, Robert I, his wife Sancia of Mallorca were present at the translatio of the relics of St. Louis of Toulouse. Charles II’s son, who had entered the Franciscan Order and had been canonized shortly before, was a central figure in the establishment of the dynastic sanctity of the Angevins. St. Louis of Toulouse was the Angevin saint around whom the dynasty’s kinsmen, the Capetians and the Árpáds, clustered. The two ruling families were then surrounded by dynastic sanctity. But the interconnections involved much more than that, since close kinship ties were woven between the dynasties that were held up as models.15 These kinship ties were expressed in dynastic representation, resulting in the dual heraldic representations that appear regularly in both Naples and in the patrimony of Clementia, but also in that of the dauphin of Vienne, Humbert II. In any case, the point of origin must have been Naples, and it was due to their aspirations and efforts that this dynastic representation appeared and remained both in the Capetian court and in the Dauphiné. This additional aspect of kinship, the idea of dynastic sanctity, was embedded in all the courts concerned and was present in Naples, in the daily life and patrimony of Clementia, in the Dauphiné, and even in Hungary. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that it did not remain a mere representational accessory, but rather, in addition to its obvious prestige and prestige-enhancing character, it was used for its diplomatic potential.

Dauphiné at the Service of the Interests of the Angevins in Hungary

John and Beatrix’s marriage16 was clearly intended to reinforce the alliance of the Dauphiné with the possessions of the Angevins of Naples in Provence, the Kingdom of France, and important territories in northern Italy and neighboring the empire, the preparation for which can be traced back to 1292.17 Later, first Humbert I (1282–1306) and then his son John II became vassals of King Charles II of Naples.18 With the marriage of 1296, the Angevins of Naples strengthened their position in northern Italy, on the eastern and northeastern frontiers of their own Provencal territories.19 In addition to Naples, the central and northern parts of Italy and the provinces of the former Kingdom of Arles played a key role in the plans to build the “Angevin Empire.” Provence and Forcalquier, as parts of this empire, could be seen as a secure hinterland in the 1260s–1280s, and the Angevin influence was strong in Piedmont, so the time had come to forge closer links with Dauphiné. But this alliance was also needed by the dauphin of Vienne, Humbert I, who, despite existing kinship ties,20 was facing territorial disputes with his cousin, Amédée V, count of Savoy.21 The settlement of these conflicts continued over the course of the following decades, and the relationship between the two provinces was characterized by a fragile peace and recurrent skirmishes.22

In close connection with this, a more serious system of confederation slowly developed around the Dauphiné in the first decade of the 1300s. From the reign of Rudolf I onwards, the dauphins of Vienne, whether John I (1263–1282) or Humbert I, had been on good terms with the Habsburgs. This did not change during the reign of John II, although King Henry VII of Germany (1308–1313) tried to gain the latter’s favor.23 This is mainly due to the fact that the Dauphiné already had influential allies in the early 1310s. John II had the support of the French royal family (Philip IV, Charles of Valois) and was not without the help and alliance of King Robert I of Naples. Their support from the French side is explained by an undoubted Savoy-Plantagenet alliance. Henry VII’s efforts to restore imperial power in Italy had a very serious effect on the political ambitions of Robert I, who, like his predecessors, was, on the contrary, interested in maintaining formal imperial supremacy. It is therefore not surprising to find Dauphiné among the important allies of Naples in the 1310s.24

Therefore, looking at the development of the dynastic political relations of the dauphin of Vienne at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Dauphiné was part of a Neapolitan-French alliance and also had good relations with the Habsburgs. It thus can be assumed that two decades after the marriage of John II and Beatrix in 1296, King Charles I of Hungary may have considered the dauphin of Vienne a suitable intermediary to secure his own claims in Naples. Because of the apparent strengthening of relations between Naples and Vienne in the early 1310s and in particular a six-year military alliance concluded in 1314,25 it is understandable why Charles I should have turned to his brother-in-law to assert his rights. Accordingly, on February 22, 1317, Charles I entrusted John II with the task of representing his interests as procurator and obtaining from King Robert of Naples the rights to the principalities of Salerno and Mont Sant Angelo. These rights originally had been granted to Charles Martel by his father as a hereditary fief, but in 1304, they were transferred by Charles II of Anjou to Robert, his third son, which is why the King of Hungary claimed his inheritance on the basis of the previous legal situation.26 The situation seemed all the more favorable, since at that time King Robert I of Naples had just managed to forge a Guelf alliance against the Ghibellines. He married his own son Charles to Catherine of Austria, daughter of Albert I of Habsburg (1316), and took action against the Visconti in Genoa. King Charles I of Hungary was also on good terms with the Habsburgs.27

Unfortunately, the sources reveal nothing about the consequences of this request. We do not know whether John II took any action on behalf of his brother-in-law or whether he even contacted Robert I. In addition to the request of the Hungarian king, there is only one report (of dubious credibility) according to which the Hungarian King Charles I would have asked the dauphin of Vienne to send one of his sons to him, who he would take care of in his court. There is no evidence that this request was actually made at the time, and it is more likely that this source preserved a memory of a later event, namely when John II’s younger son Humbert spent an extended period of time in the court of Charles I just over a decade later.28 Even if John II’s invitation did not lead to a decisive breakthrough, it is noteworthy that Charles I sought to exploit the diplomatic potential of family ties by involving his brother-in-law, the head of a strategically placed province. What is certain, however, is that Charles I did not win the rights he wanted, and it was more than a decade before any substantial progress was made on the Neapolitan succession.

Charles, son and heir of Robert I, Prince of Calabria, died in 1328. The consequences of his death are familiar from the secondary literature: negotiations began between the Kingdom of Naples and Hungary, leading to the betrothal of Robert I’s granddaughter Joan to Charles I’s son Prince Andrew in Naples in the autumn of 1333. The aim of the marriage was to regain the Neapolitan inheritance with the planned coronation of Andrew.29 Although Humbert, the youngest son of Beatrix, the widowed dauphine, could hardly have been involved in the preparatory diplomatic negotiations, it is worth noting that from 1329 he was at the court of his uncle, Charles I. The 17-year-old son had probably come here with the aim of acquiring knowledge of politics and preparing himself for his future reign. In the 1320s, his brother Guigues further strengthened his alliance with the French crown, and this was not altered by the fact that in early 1328, the last male descendant of Capetian lineage, Charles IV (1322–1328), was succeeded on the throne by Philip VI (1328–1350), the first Valois monarch.30 The strengthening of the French connection not only meant an alliance between the two monarchs, Charles IV, then Philip VI, and Guigues VIII, but also a new and more intense phase of relations between the relatives. Indeed, the fact that both Beatrix and Humbert figured so prominently in Clementia’s will and bequest can only be explained by the increase in the intensity of the relationship.31 And this was also the case with the relationship between Clementia and King Charles I of Hungary. In 1322–1323, the confessor of Clementia, Jacobus de Corvo, was apparently appointed bishop of Zagreb by Pope John XXII (1316–1334) at the intervention of the dowager queen, but this was ultimately rejected by Charles I, who supported his own candidate, Ladislaus Kaboli.32 There was only indirect contact between brother and sister at the time, probably through Roger Clarot of Clementia’s court.33 This could be seen as an isolated event. However, Humbert was on his way to the court of Charles I at the turn of 1328–1329, and several members of the Druget family, who were Clementia’s servants and kinsmen, appeared at the Hungarian court almost the day after the death of the dowager queen. This suggests that links between the courts of Paris, Vienne, and Hungary had always existed, but that they intensified rapidly in the second half of the 1320s.34 This is certainly remarkable and, in my opinion, explains why Beatrix’s younger son, the nephew of Clementia and King Charles I of Hungary, became the focus of diplomatic relations.

The question now is the extent to which the young and inexperienced Humbert could have been of any help to his uncle, Charles I. It seems that, for the time being, the first Angevin monarch of Hungary welcomed his nephew to his court more because of his future potential and close family ties. Humbert, who had good French and Neapolitan connections, could still be useful in the negotiations on the Neapolitan succession, which were just beginning at the time. The moment to take advantage of this opportunity came in 1332, when Charles sent his nephew to Naples. Robert I, who, like the Hungarian king, welcomed him, provided him with the benefits appropriate to his status and, as Charles had done, did not hesitate to employ Humbert for his own purposes. To achieve this goal, the king of Naples married Humbert to Marie des Baux, the daughter of one of his closest confidants, Bertrand III des Baux, Count of Andria. The mother of Humbert’s wife’s was none other than Beatrix of Anjou, daughter of Mary of Hungary. In this way, the dynastic links between the Angevins of Naples and of Hungary and the dauphins of Vienne were further strengthened. Humbert expressed this immediately in a typical manner. On the occasion of his marriage, he commissioned a tableau with the coats of arms of the Baux family and the Árpáds.35 He gave the name Andrew to his son, who was born shortly afterwards, a name which had no known tradition among the Angevins of Naples nor the dauphins of Vienne and was therefore due solely to the influence of the Angevin court in Hungary.36

In the light of all this, it is easier to understand why Robert I entrusted Humbert with the task of welcoming Charles I and his son Andrew to the court and accompanying them to Naples in September 1333.37 The presence of a well-known relative, who had previously spent time at the Hungarian royal court, obviously contributed to the success of the negotiations to settle the important question of the succession of Naples. However, Humbert was soon called away by the affairs of Dauphiné. On August 26, his brother Guigues VIII died unexpectedly, and he had to return as soon as possible to take over the government of the province, which was temporarily being administered by his mother, Beatrix of Hungary.38

As for Humbert’s activities in Italy, it may be concluded that Charles I was able to use him to promote his dynastic interests in Naples. Robert, for his part, did not let this opportunity pass unused either, for he had found in Humbert both a natural “family” intermediary for Charles, who was obviously anxious to inherit Naples, and an important ally in a province neighboring Provence. The fact that Humbert’s relations were cordial with both the Neapolitan ruler Robert and his maternal uncle Charles I explains why the last dauphin of Vienne figures so frequently in later Neapolitan-Hungarian relations.

Conclusion

The reclamation of the Neapolitan heritage was apparently one of the most important elements of the dynastic policy of King Charles I of Hungary. To achieve his goal, however, he mobilized almost exclusively the diplomatic potential of his kinship relations. In 1317, his brother-in-law John II, dauphin of Vienne, and in 1332–1333 his son, the Hungarian king’s nephew Humbert, served in this role. The Vienne kinship was valued by the Angevin monarch because of his good relations with the court of Naples. In addition to the fact of kinship, both of Charles I’s sisters, Clementia and Beatrix, promoted the dynastic identity of the Angevins and the Árpáds and emphasized it in the various ways in which they gave expression to their ties and their positions of influence. In addition, in the late 1320s, relations between these geographically distant relatives were strengthened again, when Charles I’s claim to the throne of Naples was renewed after 1317.

Archival Sources

Archives Départementales d’Isère, Grenoble (ADI)

Archives Départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône, Marseille (ADBR)

Archivio Apostolico Vaticano [former Archivio Segreto Vaticano] (AAV)

Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris (BNF)

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