Open Access

In the three essays of the newly established JECES “forum” in issue 2/2018, three col-leagues posit contemporary East Central Europe as “interwar period 2.0” and emphasize the significance of references to interwar history in contemporary memory politics. Their contributions point out the importance of these historical references for nation and state building after 1989/90 and for contemporary national identities. Building on this diagnosis, we would like to propose a methodological framework that looks at state-building in East Central Europe from a different perspective: by taking as an object of study the broad range of different—and often negative—views on the performance and capabilities of the states of East Central Europe from the nineteenth century until today. We argue that if we want to understand the various conflicts that affected—and continue to affect—the devel¬opment of states in this region, we need to understand how views on states shape activities towards states. If we achieve this, we can challenge deeply entrenched narratives—both popular and historiographical—that center around the idea of the inevitable collapse of states in East Central Europe, be they the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Habsburg and Romanov Empires, the interwar states or the states of the Warsaw Pact.

Examining the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO) and its research on forest-water relations, the article investigates the relation between scientific internationalism and national expertise. It juxtaposes existing arguments regarding the paradigmatic character of 19th century arguments about deforestations. In particular, in 1999, Christian Pfister and Daniel Brändli argued that, in Switzerland during the second half of the 19th century, forestry administrators forged an argument that deforestations in mountainous regions lead to floods in the valleys. As this argument helped to install new Swiss forest legislation in 1876, forbidding deforestations in the mountains, Pfister and Brändli called it a ―deforestation paradigm‖. In contrast, sources of the IUFRO provide a different picture. At IUFRO meetings, i.e., at the international level of debate, no such paradigm existed. Instead, IUFRO participants discussed various conclusions that could be drawn from research on deforestations. Regarding the outcome of IUFRO projects, participants reported partly in opposing ways about the results of the research projects in forestry journals in their respective countries. Exploring these reports, the article provides an explanation for these different national representations of international research projects.

For many decades Soviet and post-Soviet collective memory of the Second World War has been closely tied to the song 'Bukhenval'dskii nabat' (Alarm Bell of Buchenwald), performed at both official and private commemorations across the former Soviet Union. The article traces the origins of the song and critically discusses the various transformations it undertook from being an anti-nuclear peace song to becoming a central element of the antifascist 'Great Patriotic War'-memory.