Call for Papers - "Phantom borders and legal regionalism. The legal culture in post-imperial and post-national contexts in East Central Europe 1919 – 1945 – 1989"

During the interwar period, legal literature examined three ways of establishing legal unification within a state: a) a legislative “zero hour” via the rewriting of all basic legal codes and statute books; b) a complete and immediate extension of a body of laws to the new provinces; and c) the fundamental extension of a body of laws to the new provinces accompanied by a temporary and material retention of some regulations from the new provinces. However, processes of legal unification also have a transnational dimension in that they took place in the legal and political context of “legal families” and subsequently of socialist law. Since the watershed of 1989, these processes have been influenced by the adaptation to the aquis communautaire of the European Union. No matter how fascinating legal experts may find this legal dogma, this panel is primarily concerned with the intellectual frame of legal unification on the part of elite actors. Which actors put forward which arguments in favour of selecting and implementing one or other modus and direction of legal unification?

The laws on marriage, divorce, inheritance and guardianship belong to the areas of the legal system that most directly link the normative and institutional side of the state system with the everyday reality of the population. It is this fact in particular that makes the transfer of legal norms and adaptation both by professional elites and by the historical actors whose lifeworlds are directly affected by the regulations a worthwhile topic of research. On the one hand, we are interested in the micro-historical processes of adoption that result from concrete superimposition of legislation by the legal institutes. On the other hand, we wish to address the discourses of the professional elites in order to show how the transfer of legal norms – and the prevention of this transfer – was and is used to construct distinct identities. Periods of radical change such as 1918, the post-1945 period and the post-1989 era reveal the simultaneity of the need to legally regulate apparently continuous social relations on the one hand and the partially radical social redesigns that were upheld or furthered by the legislative process on the other.

Property, as well as the institutions and professions that deal with it, belong to the legal-cultural phenomena that have a very high potential to create phantom borders and to establish regional associative relationships. In highly agricultural economies, property rights to land are central elements of subsistence and identity, which means that systems of land ownership proof, such as land registers and cadastres, become very important. The same applies to professions such as land surveyors, lawyers, land register officials and notaries, whose role is however not restricted to safeguarding ownership, but is also played out at the regional level in the political scene. This panel will provide a forum for papers that analyse macro processes such as land reforms, collectivisation and de-collectivisation / reprivatisation on the three above-mentioned property levels and present regional and identity discourses and practices.

The reconfiguration of nation states following the First World War led to regionalist movements in many East Central and Southeast European societies. These movements frequently expressed cultural and political gravamina against the new centres. Under the influence of both Marxist and national-patriotic historiography, regionalisms were dismissed as entirely backward-looking phenomena. Only recently has a new type of interpretation based on terms such as “small fatherland” or “open regionalism” revealed the integrative and emancipatory potential of the formation of regional associative relationships. It is no coincidence that the new way of viewing the region of East Central and Southeast Europe in particular coincided with the watershed of 1989-1991, which on the one hand led to a casting off of the shackles of the imperial block, but on the other to a merely apparent blossoming of the nation state, given that integration in the European Union involves ceding sovereignty once again. This panel will discuss regionalist parties, publications, movements and practices. The construction of regional identities in the field of tension between the national and imperial or European centres is of particular interest.