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The fall of communism in Europe is now the frame of reference for
any mass mobilization, from the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement
to Brexit. Even thirty years on, 1989 still figures as a guide and
motivation for political change. It is now a platitude to call 1989
a "world event," but the chapters in this volume show how it
actually became one. The authors of these nine essays consider how
revolutionary events in Europe resonated years later and thousands
of miles away: in China and South Africa, Chile and Afghanistan,
Turkey and the USA. They trace the circulation of people,
practices, and concepts that linked these countries, turning local
developments into a global phenomenon. At the same time, they
examine the many shifts that revolution underwent in transit. All
nine chapters detail the process of mutation, adaptation, and
appropriation through which foreign affairs found new meanings on
the ground. They interrogate the uses and understandings of 1989 in
particular national contexts, often many years after the fact.
Taken together, this volume asks how the fall of communism in
Europe became the basis for revolutionary action around the world,
proposing a paradigm shift in global thinking about revolution and
protest.
A substantial historiography has emerged across national and
linguistic boundaries documenting the Second Vatican Council. And
yet virtually no attention has been devoted to the links between
the Council and the Catholic faithful who had found themselves
living behind an iron curtain by the end of the 1940s. Historians
of the Catholic Church have, in fact, mostly rejected the
possibility that Communist countries played a role in the
Council’s story, or that the Council in turn shaped the
subsequent paths of those countries. The goal of this volume is to
begin writing Central and Eastern Europe back into the story of the
Second Vatican Council, its origins, and its consequences. This
volume assembles—for the first time in any language—a broad
overview of the place of four different Communist-run
countries—Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia—in
the story of the Council. Framing these is an account of how the
Cold War impacted the Council and its reception. The book engages
with both English-language scholarship and the national
historiographies of the countries that it examines, o ering a
global lens on the present state of research (covering all relevant
languages) and seeking to propel that research forward. All of the
chapters draw on both non-English secondary literature and original
primary sources—some published, some archival. In all four
countries, religious aggiornamento went hand in hand with waves and
spurts of political liberalization. Though short-lived in their
initial form, civic aggiornamenti magnified the impact of religious
aggiornamento. Every country behind the Iron Curtain was different,
yet even across such diverse situations, one finds evidence that
societies engaged with Vatican II—and, moreover, that the Council
furnished a set of norms and aspirations that would play a
significant role in the final years of the Cold War. The election
of St. John Paul II in 1978†…, a pope from behind the Iron
Curtain, lit a match, but the tinder had been set much earlier for
modernization, reform, and an embrace of pluralism—even among
Catholics living behind the Iron Curtain.
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