Towards a transnational Labour History?
"Labour History beyond borders" reviewed / The 'civilizing' function of the Labour movement.
Interim results of the conference cycle "Labour History beyond borders"
The Linz Conference 2009 will discuss the results of ITH's
three year's programme. In summary, it will take up the most promising and
original results of the previous conferences 2007/2008 that could contribute
to a tangible basis for a "Labour history beyond borders", including
the borders of a perspective centred on the nation state, the borders of
a specific actor or methodological borders. The conference will focus on
findings about Labour and social protest movements in Asia and Latin America,
especially on their forms of communication and interaction with "classical"
Labour movements.
The overall aim of the conference is to include impulses from the global
"South", in order to stimulate historiography in Europe and in
North America – by showing essential topics, problems and methods
for an analysis of a global and transnational history of Labour.
The conference could also evaluate to which degree the previous conferences 2007/2008 made up a stringent and coherent cycle on "transnational Labour history". Which new approaches and which new methods led to which new findings? Which conditions and which organisational and financial frameworks for the production of "transnational Labour history" can be discerned? Where and by whom is this history produced?
The second part of the conference shall be devoted to a comparative
view of the historical role of Labour movements in Europe and of Labour
movements in "emerging countries":
The "civilizing" function of the Labour Movement
will be examined in a twofold perspective:
1. The "civilizing" impact on organized workers: This includes
the whole complex of educational and "cultural" efforts in a broad
sense.
2. The "civilizing" impact on elites in society. This includes
efforts to "domesticate" existing elites by a social-democratic
economic policy as well as efforts towards their elimination by certain
currents of the communist movement.
Both these political currents have in their specific way contributed to
the emergence of comparatively homogeneous societies in Europe, and thus
generated bases for the building of the welfare state in the past and present
– e.g. regarding "transitional societies" in Central/Eastern
Europe.
An aim of this second part of the conference is to re-integrate this achievement
of the Labour movements into the scope of a "European memory"
under construction, where the "Labour experience" is up to now
largely absent. What has been in this sense the contribution of Labour to
the emergence of the European welfare states, and thus to this layer of
European identity? Can the role of Labour in today's "emerging countries"
be usefully compared to the historical "civilizing function" of
Labour in Europe?
Potential coordinators:
Feliks Tych (Warsaw), Berthold Unfried (Vienna)