A quarterly scholarly journal and news magazine. From the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm
Looking for back issues of Baltic Worlds? Download as PDF here.In this essay there is a discussion whether the recent developments in the Serbian and Croatian legislations on minority rights represent one occasion on which the EU’s informal engagement has exerted a beneficial influence. It is also noted that, throughout the last decade, the roles of Serbia and Croatia as kin states to ethnic Serbs in Croatia and ethnic Croats in Serbia has been constructive.
The history and sociology of the telephone in Russian society have only slowly become the object of serious study. The scope of this essay is limited to the following two topics: first, the forms of use, in pre-revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union, of the telephone as a means of communication, potentially universally available and “horizontal” but actually restricted by “vertical” forces; and second, the symbolism that accumulated around this means of communication in Russian and Soviet culture.
Interviews from three communities in a Russian region illustrate that there are many new opportunities for potential women entrepreneurs, while there are also many at times unpredictable obstacles to overcome.
About Estonia’s endeavors to become part of the staid but stable Scandinavia – an effort based on the belief that the country actually has a special affinity with Scandinavia. One sign of this, Pärtel Piirimäe points out, is the use of the word jõul (cognate to English “Yule”). The Estonians, like the Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, and Finns, thus live in Yule Land.
Infrastructure forms a link between the open global economic space and the non-public Russian political space. The question of how to manage the most important trade flows and understand their social importance is not, of course, solely seen as a matter of Russian politics. The research on Russia is also connected to the recent debate on the importance of increasing globalization and the mutual dependence of societies.
Maria Janion is Poland’s undisputed intellectual authority – but she is relatively unknown abroad. Maria Janion is a professor emeritus of literature. Her studies of Romanticism led Janion to see the specificity in Poland’s cultural development. As a public intellectual, Janion has always intervened in the political discourse. In recent years, she has put her authority to use to support the feminist movement and the reawakened new Left.
The Polish professor in literature, Maria Janion, writes on Polish identity, and its interpretation and reinterpretation, its crisis and the process of shaping a new Polish imagery. There is a ongoing dialog between the past and the present and a constant struggle between the free Poland and the posthumous life of Romanticisim.
The authors here argues that the total picture of what the Scandinavian countries really received and what it meant can only be established when the “Rosenholz”-files are generally available. Fundamental questions however still remain to be answered, like who did the HV A register and on which grounds? How was the HV A networks constituted over time? And how did they develop over time? How did they communicate? And how did the secret logistic function work? The answers to these questions would certainly reveal new insights of how foreign intelligence functioned on the operative level in a not so distant past.
The author argues that, despite the disastrous effects of the enormous brain drain for Russia’s development, the emergence of Russian communities abroad can also be seen as an indicator of a normalization resulting from the opening up of the country after a long period of isolation. For Berlin, it is the regeneration of the mixed and more cosmopolitan society of the pre-Nazi and prewar epoch.
Dag Hammarskjöld died on the night of September 17, 1961 after a still unexplained crash landing in the border area between the former Belgian Congo and Northern Rhodesia, when he was on his way to negotiate during the Congo Crisis. The author argues that Dag Hammarskjöld as a cosmopolitan is the trailblazer of a way of thinking that is still totally absent despite economic globalization: respect for those who are different.