The end of the Great War in 1918 signified the end of centuries-old multinational empires and at the same time the beginning of the creation of new national states and state communities. The hundredth anniversary of the end of the First World War is an opportunity for a re-consideration and re-evaluation of the various processes whose beginnings or ends were in 1918, moving from the existing views towards new approaches and new possibilities of interpretation.
The intention of this volume is to establish communication between Croatian historiography and researchers dealing with various aspects of the history of Central and South-Eastern Europe in order to avoid unilateral national views on these complex and integral themes and accentuate the different aspects of collectiveness in the experience of post-war transition in the Balkans and the Danube region.
We would also like to look at the anniversary of the October Revolution, an event with deep ramifications for the history of Central and South-Eastern Europe, which should be re-evaluated as a collective experience of this area. Besides, the imprint of October Revolution is clearly evident in the various revolutions in Central and South-Eastern Europe during 1918.
Transition, emotions and memory are the three key concepts that should steer and connect the contributions to this volume. As is often the case with major global milestones, the year in which the Habsburg Monarchy disappears and the new national state communities emerge, is also the year of great emotions, not only among political elites but also among wider masses. It is therefore not only “the year of victory”, but also a time of great expectations and illusions, as well as sobering disappointments. Such a strong turning point has been deeply engraved, forming, on the one hand, a “memory culture” of the vanished Empire, but also directing and influencing the future dominant narratives of the new states: historians will therefore often mark the year 1918 as the year of the final definition of new states and national identities. Additionally, all Central European countries were in some way in transition, which reflected on political, cultural and economic life, showing that in 1918 certain processes continue or stop. The volume is therefore open both to the experts for the “long 19th century”, as well as to those for “the short 20th century” – “the era of extremes” (E. Hobsbawm), but also to historians of transition, understood as the time after the fall of the Berlin Wall for Central and Eastern Europe. Finally, the question is what kind of the beginning the year 1918 was, and more so if the time marked by the events of 1918 is even over.
The “1918: The Beginning and the End” volume will be published as a special edition of the journal Radovi Zavoda za hrvatsku povijest. Entries and summaries of approx. 2000 characters should be submitted by February 10, 2018. The preparatory committee of the journal will decide which applications will be accepted. The working languages are English and Croatian. Articles will be subjected to reviews which that the deadline for submitting the articles is June 30, 2018. The maximum length of articles (with notes) is 40,000 characters (Times New Roman / 12).
Topics to be considered are, for example:
- breakup of great empires and sentiment towards past regimes;
- memory of great empires and writing of their history;
- experience of transition: expectations and results;
- aspects of social, economic, political, cultural transition;
- impact of the First World War on the process of democratization in Central Europe at the local and state level;
- role of veteran organizations in political life;
- analysis of economic processes and their impact on new states;
- role of former political elites / the fate of elites in newly-emerged states;
- influence of the ideas of the October Revolution on the new states in Central Eurioe and the Balkans and their political climate;
- experience of war/end of war and milestone events at the level of everyday life and/or memory;
- gender history and experience of the end of war;
- influence of war/postwar propaganda on the daily sentiment of certain social strata;
- visions of the future in 1918.