Status Updates From The Great Cauldron: A Histo...

curently reading part four 😮‍💨

V.1. Building Communism.

- advance of the Red Army, partisan fronts and newfangled governments
- a balanced breakfast of collaborationists, allies and former general secretaries
- the Soviet party & constitution (reproduced)
- multinationalism? eh.
- the new economy: collectivisation, industry, 5y plans
- the new man, the new woman: education, emancipation, two steps back
- nationalism! (this will never bite us!)

IV.13. The Balkans in WWII

- Appeasement, small death of the small Entente
- attempts at neutrality (in MY revanchist cauldron of nations!?)
- occupation and colonialism
- projects of forced nationhood
- local architectures of The Holocaust
- collaboration, fascism, or just twiddling your thumbs
(gaswagon, gatekeep, gauboss)
- resistance turned civil war
- Stalin's Machiavelism & Tito, left to rot; early fractures

IV.12. Bucharest 1939

- "Balkan is... other people *SCHNIFF*"
- a city, expanding like an oil spill
- contradictions, status discrepancies, the face of a capital

IV.10. Interwar Deglobalization.

- agrarian reforms
- collapse of pre-WWI trade interdependance
- Mihail Manoilescu's Protectionism Theory (=> paths to Prebisch's Dependance Theory (¿?))
- economic nationalism in the Balkans: state stopgaps, export/import control, monopolies & nationalisisation
- poisoned fruits of the Clearing treaties - NS Germany's control and self-sufficiency schemes

IV.10. Dog Days of the Summer of Nations. The Great Depression.

- the Balkans = farmer societies (except for Albania, who hasn't gotten to ditching feudalism yet), disadvantages in the wake of the Great War
- you can't catch up to your colonizers
- debt crisis
- protectionism as a tool for rapid industraliasation (still not enough)
- dealing w/ devils: increasing trade dependence of Balkan States on NS Germany

IV.9. All the world is a stage and even poor players strut their hours upon it: The League of Nations & Internationalism

- post-war refugee crisis
- the bloom of successor states' intelligentsia, strutting their stuff in Geneva
- multilateral financial standards & socio-political reforms
- legitimisation, protection, revanchism
- humanitarian efforts
- the mouth of law must have tooth and claw, or else die (it ded.)

IV.8. Between Democracy & Dictatorship, Action & Reaction

(statecraft struggles in the wake of empire dissolution)
>patchwork infrastructure & peoples
>nationhood, advocacy for the diaspora
>we just don't do this... 'trusting in governments' thing
>post-war economical ruin
>predominacy of agrarian parties
>conservative reaction-> monarchic dicatorships, from Zogu to Carol II
>fashism is born of the middle classes

IV.(II.)7. 1912/13-1923: War.

-inertias of the age of nations; the perfect (ethno)state
- occupation
- ethnic cleansings no one will be held responsible for
- Innate fault lines and hypocrisies of the self-determination doctrine
- post-war treaties: no-one liked this
- hey, let's swap populations
- can i haz byzantion?

(if I am not inane and irreverent I will have to be miserable and angry, or worse, a nationalist)

IV.6. Belgrade 1913

(a wild Trotsky appears)
- the Balkan Wars; hysteria, militarism, triumph, exhaustion
- the city within the city: westernized elite & poverty-stricken conditions of working emigrants, rural Serbian and Bosnian
- the hive of culture and revolution
- Princip, the Black Hand & radical authoritarian undercurrents of Serbian politics
- the turn of the century time of the anarchist assassinations