“Layers and Connections of the Political”

International Conference of the Association for Political History

14-25 June 2021 – LUISS Guido Carli University Rome, Italy

Politics has changed a lot, in the last half-century – and so has political history. The boundaries of the political have been redrawn. The large social and political bodies of the mid-twentieth century have grown weaker or have dissolved. Public institutions have become both less insulated from society and less effective in controlling and guiding it. Therefore, defining what is political has become more difficult. Political historians have confronted this challenge, and in the process have gained a deeper understanding of their object of study, have enlarged their scope and refined their methodologies, and have entered into closer dialogue with the “other” histories and the social sciences.

The fragmentation of the political and the increasing uncertainty of its boundaries have made political historians more acutely aware that politics does not exist only “high up” and on the macro level, but reaches deep into private lives, shapes people’s identities and perceptions, interferes with their thoughts and emotions, regulates and modifies their behaviour. Actions and reactions performed on the micro level can in turn not only determine how initiatives from the top are received, reinterpreted and remoulded, but also condition, constrain and change the institutions and subjects that act on the macro level.

For its 2020-2021 conference (14-25 June 2021 – LUISS Guido Carli University, Rome, Italy), the Association for Political History presents a program that considers, in a historical perspective, examples of how the multiple layers of the political have connected and interacted with each other during the last three centuries. We welcome senior researchers, but also encourage PhD candidates and young scholars to participate in our conference.

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Monday, 14th June

Session 1 – 9.00-10.30 CET (Webex) | Roundtable – Layers and Connections of the Political

Chair: Henk te Velde (Leiden University)

Discussants: Giovanni Orsina (Luiss)

Participants:

• Hagen Schulz-Forberg (Aarhus University)
• Marnix Beyen (University of Antwerp)
• Irene Hermann (University of Geneva)

Session 2 – 10.30-12.00 CET (Webex)  | Panel – Revolution and the language of feelings in Italy: from Mazzini to 1970s terrorism

Chair: Marc Lazar (Sciences Po)

Discussant: Paolo Pombeni (Università di Bologna)

Participants:

• Arianna Arisi Rota (Università degli Studi di Pavia) | Collateral Effects. Emotional and Material Costs for Political Engagement in Mazzini’s and Garibaldi’s Followers
• Giovanni Mario Ceci (Università degli studi Roma Tre) | The “True Believers” of the Revolution: Italian Left-wing Terrorists during the Seventies
• Andrea Guiso (Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza) | “A class struggle fought within ourselves”. War and revolution in the moral world of Italian communists during the early years of the Cold War
• Elena Papadia (Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza) |Becoming “sovversivi”: how personal suffering and compassion inspire the choice to be a revolutionary

Session 3 – 14.00-16.00 CET (Webex) | APH Forum for young scholars on “Concepts”

Discussants:

• Hagen Schulz-Forberg (Aarhus University)
• Henk te Velde (Leiden University)

Participants:

• Cíntia Martins (FCSH-UNL) and Pedro Ponte e Sousa (FCSH-UNL) | Globalization as process and foreign policy as agency? The agent-structure debate and ‘policy’ versus ‘process’ approaches to the history-globalization nexus
• Luka Nikolić (Charles University) and Igor Milić (University of Trento) | ‘Frenmity’ as a Political Concept
• Alessandra Antonella Rita Maglie (UniTo) | Towards a “bourgeois” ethics. Liberalism, conservatism and communitarianism in Deirdre McCloskey’s work

Wednesday, 16th June

Session 4 – 9.00-10.30 CET (Webex) | Panel – The culture of debate in and beyond parliament: a comparison of Britain, Germany and The Netherlands, c. 1870-1990

Chair: Pasi Ihalainen (University of Jyväskylä)

Discussant: Marnix Beyen (University of Antwerp)

Participants:

• Anne Heyer (Leiden University) | Giving New Meaning to the Rules of the Game? New Political Parties and Parliamentary Debate, 1870-1940
• Malte Fischer (Humboldt University) | Democracy on Air: The Radio Show “Prominente Zu Gast” and Political Discussion Culture Beyond Parliament, West Germany 1950s-1980
• Jamie Lee Jenkins (Radboud University) | A “Mirror” up to Society? Popular Expectations of Democracy in the Daily Mirror, 1945-1979
• Solange Ploeg (Radboud University) | The people’s platform? The voice of the people and its debut on Dutch television, 1960s-1970s

Session 5 – 10.30-12.00 CET (Webex) | Panel – Beyond Traditional Cold War Understanding: Economic and Cultural Elements in East-West Interactions

Chair: Norbert Götz (Södertörn University Stockholm)

Discussant: Mauro Campus (University of Florence)

Participants:

• Mattia Ravano (The Graduate Institute, Geneva) | Politics through economics: The G7 approach to East-West economic relations, 1975-1989
• Olga Dubrovina (University of Molise) | International policy in its cultural dimension: from Lenin to Putin
• Severyan Dyakonov (The Graduate Institute, Geneva) | Soviet Public Diplomacy Campaign of Influencing Indian Politics in the 1960s

Friday, 18th June

Session 6 – 9.00-10.30 CET (Webex) | Panel – Delegitimizing party democracy: Italy as exception or harbinger of change in European democracies (1978-1994)?

Chair: Giovanni Orsina (LUISS)

Discussant: Paolo Mattera (Università degli studi Roma Tre)

Participants:

Lucia Bonfreschi (Università degli studi Roma Tre) | Sawing off the branch they were sitting on: the Radicals and the anti-partitocracy stance

Martin J. Bull (University of Salford) | The Italian Communist Party and the Denouement of the Party System in the Early 1990s

Pepijn Corduwener (Utrecht University) | The PSI and the crisis of party democracy. Transformation, de-ideologization and delegitimation with the Italian socialists, 1978-1992

Gerardo Nicolosi (Università degli Studi di Siena) | The PLI and the crisis of the First Republic. A long-term analysis (1968-1994)

Session 7 – 10.30-12.00 CET (Webex) | Panel – Places of politics in the Kazakh steppes

Chair: Hagen Schulz-Forberg (Aarhus University)

Discussant: TBC

Participants:

Xavier Hallez (EHESS, Paris) | The evolution of Kazakh political structures and practices under Tsarist colonization: studies around the elections in the Semireč’e region (Turkestan, 1868-1917)

Sultangalieva Gulmira (Al Farabi Kazakh National University) | Kazakh nobility of the Russian Empire: civil service, scientific and political life

Tenlik Dalayeva (Abai Kazakh National Pedagogical University) | Management apparatus of Kazakh volosts (1824-1868): from traditional institutions to imperial forms

Shi Yue (Peking University) | The 1822 Statute of Siberian Kirgiz and the Beginning of Russian administrative system in the Kazakh Steppe

Session 8 – 14.00-16.00 CET (Webex) | APH Forum for young scholars on “Institutions”

Discussants:

• Ido de Haan (Utrecht University)
• Marc Lazar (Sciences Po)

Participants:

• Michael Loader (University of Glasgow) | The Shadows of Staraya Ploshad’: The Central Committee apparatus as a Soviet ‘Deep State’    
• Lorenzo Castellani (LUISS) | Alberto Beneduce, a technocrat in the Fascist era
• Ermes Antonucci (LUISS) | The expansion of judicial independence in Italy (1948-1978)
• Cheng Li (University of York) | Jeremy Bentham in the early nineteenth century English law reform politics
• Adriejan van Veen (Radboud University Nijmegen) | Explaining depoliticization: local civil society as an alternative to politics in the post-revolutionary Netherlands, c1800-1848

Monday, 21st June

Session 9 – 9.00-10.30 CET (Webex) | Panel – ‘Political Participation’ in Democracy History: A Contested and Ever-Changing Concept and Practice?

Chair: Ido de Haan (Utrecht University)

Discussant: TBC

Participants:

• Anne Heyer (Leiden University) |When did the Masses become Political?
• Theo Jung (University of Freiburg) | Battling with Words or Fists? Changing Modes of Participation in Political Meetings in Britain and Germany (1867-1914)
• Carlos Domper Lasús (Universidad de Zaragoza) | The University Work Service. A politicizing experience under Francoism, 1950-1970
• Zoé Kergomard (German Historical Institute of Paris) | Is electoral abstention also a form of democratic participation? Rethinking the value of voting in the young Vth Republic (1960s-1980s)

Session 10 – 10.30-12.00 CET (Webex) | Panel – Environmental Policies as a Multi-Layered Discursive Phenomenon

Chair: Pasi Ihalainen (University of Jyväskylä)

Discussant: Hagen Schulz-Forberg (University of Aarhus)

Participants:

• Marij Leenders (Radboud University, Nijmegen) | Green consensus? Ideas about nature and environmental in Christian and right-wing political parties in the Netherlands (1970-nowadays)
• Jonne Harmsma (Radboud University, Nijmegen) | Dutch environmental debates and the concept of ‘selective growth’: Greening the economy in the 1970s
• Risto-Matti Matero (University of Jyväskylä) | From companionship with nature to green consumerism: A conceptual analysis of competing beliefs on human nature in Finnish and German green parties 1980-2002
• Atte Arffman (University of Jyväskylä) | Disasters in the Making: Intermingled Nature of Human and Non-human Agencies in U.S. Disaster Discourses
• Miina Kaarkoski (University of Jyväskylä) | Evolving political conceptions of the role of armed forces in Finland and Sweden within the context of climate-related conflicts, 2000-2019

Session 11 – 17.30-19.00 CET (Webex) | Panel – Speed date discussion on ongoing research

Please register at aph2020@luiss.it

Discussants:

• Giovanni Orsina (LUISS)
• Hagen Schulz-Forberg (Aarhus University)
• Henk te Velde (Leiden University)
• Pasi Ihalainen (University of Jyväskylä)
• Norbert Götz (Södertörn University Stockholm)

Wednesday, 23rd June

Session 12 – 9.00-10.30 CET (Webex) | Panel – The Conservative Party, Conservative Ideology and the Challenge of Change (co-sponsored by the British Political Studies Association Politics and History Specialist Group)

Chair: Giovanni Orsina (LUISS)

Discussant: TBC

Participants:

• David Jeffery (University of Liverpool) | Analysing patterns of ideological change amongst Conservative MPs and the response of voters: A study of Liverpool
• Adam Waddingham (University of Manchester) | Cradle of Conservatism? Lancashire, Toryism, and the modern British Conservative Party
• Andrew Crines (University of Liverpool) | The Rhetorical Construction of Brexit on the Right
• Tim Heppell (University of Leeds) | Ideology, Leadership and the Conservative Party

Session 13 – 10.30-12.00 CET (Webex) | Panel – The political life of things. Material culture and politics in Risorgimento Italy

Chair: Lucy Riall (European University Institute)

Discussant: Catherine Brice (Paris Est Créteil University)

Participants:

• Carlotta Sorba (University of Padua) | Revolutionary Fashion. Patriotic bodies in 1848 Italy
• Ignazio Veca (University of Pisa) | Two popes. Pius IX, religion and the power of objects in Nineteenth-century politics
• Alessio Petrizzo (University of Padua) | Return to order and material culture. Missing objects, anti-republican narratives and police practices in Rome after 1849
• Silvia Cavicchioli (University of Turin) | The second life of patriotic objects. Memories and politics from private heritage to the Nation on display

Session 14 – 14.00-16.00 CET (Webex) | APH Forum for young scholars on “Identities”

Discussants:

• Lucy Riall (European University Institute)
• Irene Hermann (Université de Genève)

Participants:

• Andrea Schmidt (University of Pecs) | Reshaped Borders Redefined Identities? Poland, Hungary and the Uncertain Central Europe
• Konstantin Dragaš (Institute for Balkan Studies) | The Political Ideology of the Risorgimento and the Serbian national movement in XIX century: the similarities and differences of the two political concepts and their heritage
• Nicola Degli Esposti (LSE) and Angelo Rinaldi (LSE) | The Politics of Peripheral Incorporation: Italy’s Mezzogiorno and Turkey’s Kurdistan
• Myroslava Lendel (Uzhhorod National University) | Locality and Ethnicity in the Periphery Border Region as the Separate Political Layer

Friday, 25th June

Session 15 – 9.00-10.30 CET (Webex) | Vladislav Zubok’s Keynote speech – Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union

Session 16 – 10.30-12.00 CET (Webex) | APH board meeting

Session reserved exclusively for APH board members.