Call for articles: Assist and Unify? Nation Building and Welfare in the Upper Adriatic and Eastern Baltic Sea Region in the 20th Century

Call for papers for a monographic issue of «Qualestoria. Rivista di storia contemporanea»

Assist and Unify? Nation Building and Welfare in the Upper Adriatic and Eastern Baltic Sea Region in the 20th Century

edited by Andrea Griffante

Scholarly literature on the emergence, development and spread of welfare practices during the 20th century has long been focused on the national dimension of the phenomenon. Over the last decade, however, increasing attention has been payed to the multidimensional nature of welfare practices and of the networks in which welfare actors have operated. Even if welfare practices have generally been acknowledged as tools of nation-building, their particular role in state’s border and multinational areas has been neglected.

Questioning the primacy of the nation-state, a special issue of Qualestoria to be published in December 2022 aims to analyze how different welfare practices (from large-scale humanitarian actions to vernacular expressions of humanitarianism) have represented – by will of their own promoters or of some of the actors involved in welfare networks – a tool of nation-building in territories contested by various national groups or states. In particular, the issue seeks to investigate how welfare practices have fulfilled this function in peculiar historical caesurae such as wars and their immediate aftermath, when the need to demobilize the army and society not only posed a renewed demand for social cohesion, but also paved the way for the emergence of (re)new(ed) concepts and practices of citizenship. In the light of recent historiography, the issue will analyze welfare practices as actions whose meanings and results have been the outcomes of continuous renegotiation between givers and recipients of aid.

We invite contributors to examine the aforementioned cluster of problems and propose case studies related to two specific areas in Central and Eastern Europe: the eastern Baltic Sea region and the Upper Adriatic. In both areas, which belonging to a ‘national territory’ was sanctioned by the collapse of European multinational empires at the end of the First World War, the dialectic between titular nation and minorities has represented one of the main elements through which citizenship has been constructed and continuously renegotiated up to the present day. But to what extent have different political contexts affected the use of welfare for nation-building purposes? What role have welfare practices played in strengthening the position of the titular nation or in attempting to integrate/assimilate minorities? And how many “bottom-up” initiatives have succeeded in proposing models contesting dominant public practices and discourse?

We invite contributions that pick up on or extend, among others, the following topics:

-The role of international humanitarian networks;

-The interconnection between local and international humanitarian actors;

-Conflicts between welfare actors and local political classes (divergences);

-Reactions of local political classes to national welfare practices/international humanitarian intervention;

-Genealogies of international aid and relationship with local communities;

-Gender, border and welfare;

-National welfare: aid coming from the center vs. aid coming from the suburbs?

-Relation between social status, welfare and nation building (reception);

-Alternative welfare networks (‘aid from above’).

A limited number of case studies relating to other areas of Central and Eastern Europe may be considered.

Please send abstracts (500 words) and a short CV to lucagiuseppe.manenti@gmail.com and griphusrex@yahoo.it by 10 November 2021. Accepted proposals will be notified by 1 December 2021. Finished articles (10,000 words) in Italian or English will be due by 1 April 2022. The special issue of Qualestoria will be released in December 2022. All submitted articles will be double blind-peer reviewed.