Publications

Leonid Brezhnev was Chairman of the CPSU from 1964 to 1982 and shaped the development of the Soviet Union for almost two decades. Contrary to what had long been claimed in the West, Brezhnev was not a hardliner or restalinizer, but had himself suffered under Stalin and seen so much suffering that he declared prosperity for all to be the general line of the party. The horrors he had experienced in the Second World War led him to seek a balance with the West. Brezhnev mimicked the Western statesman and was accepted by his partners as one of their own. But when Georges Pompidou died in 1974 and Willy Brandt and Richard Nixon resigned, Brezhnev found himself faced with the ruins of his policy of détente. For, as no one in the West suspected, there was no change of policy in the Kremlin. Stress and insomnia led Brezhnev into a pill addiction that further ruined his peace efforts: the invasion of Afghanistan by Soviet troops in 1979 was decided by a Politburo troika without him.
A man in his time: Based on numerous previously inaccessible sources, Eastern European historian Susanne Schattenberg presents the first academic biography of Leonid Brezhnev on the 35th anniversary of his death in November 2017.

In Kasten, Ingrid & Laura Auteri (eds.) Transkulturalität und Translation. Deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters im europäischen Kontext, 243–252. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110556438-017

Mittelweg 36. Zeitschrift des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung 2(2016) ISBN: 978-3-86854-736-8

Martin Nonhoff/Frieder Vogelmann: Editorial (Seite 3); Regina Kreide: Das Schweigen des politischen Liberalismus (Seite 5); Martin Nonhoff: Krisenanalyse und radikale Theorie der Demokratie (Seite 21); Jörg Schaub: Luftschloss Liberalismus. Warum das Denken in Krisenzeiten keinen Halt findet (Seite 38); Frank Nullmeier: Politische Theorie des Komparativs. Soziale Vergleiche und gerechte Gesellschaft (Seite 56); Frieder Vogelmann: Liberale Subjekte Eine affirmative Streitschrift (Seite 74); Wolfgang Kraushaar: Aus der Protest-Chronik: 24./25. März 1977, Buenos Aires (Seite 91)

This article describes the historical context that was decisive in Saharov’s commitment to warning party leaders of the dangers of the H-bomb and calling on them to respect human rights. He also attempts to explore the different ways in which Hruščev and Brežnev approached Saharov’s criticisms. Not only does he examine the three stages of the KGB model – educate, warn and only finally arrest renegades – he also sheds light on Andropov’s repeated appeals to Brežnev to speak with Saharov. Although Saharov, too, was keen to talk to Brežnev, the meeting between the two men never took place. In the end, it was against the backdrop of the Cold War that the Politbjuro decided on the best time to get rid of Saharov, doing as little damage as possible to the prestige of the Soviet Union, and thus re-establishing the limits of the dictable.

This article focuses on the question, which kind of diplomacy we have to deal with within the Warsaw pact states. Taking the invasion in Czechoslovakia in 1968 as an example, three theses are discussed: (1) Brezhnev transferred his inner-party concept of „trust in cadres“ and his „scenario of power“ based on trust to foreign politics and treated Dubček as a client whom he addressed in a patrimonial and familiar way. (2) He lost faith in Dubček when the latter established a new democratic discourse denying the central power of the party. (3) The diplomatic language within the Warsaw pact states referred more to socialist common values and party discipline than to the language and setting of international meetings with third party states.

Few political thinkers have influenced the international political and social science theory discourse of recent years as much as Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau – across paradigm boundaries. Both combine neo-Gramscian, (post-)structuralist and psychoanalytical theoretical elements and thus enable an explanation of political-discursive events, in particular the formation of hegemonies, on the one hand, and a normative theory of agonal democracy on the other.
The contributions in this volume provide an overview of Laclau’s and Mouffe’s key figures of thought, critically examine them and point out methodological and empirical connections.
This volume contains original texts by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, among others.

How do dominant political language and thought patterns emerge and how are they related to social power relations? This volume aims to get to the bottom of these questions about the functioning of discursive hegemonies by linking political science and discourse studies. The political-discursive characteristics and strategies of successful hegemonies are reconstructed on the basis of an examination of the hegemonic project “social market economy”. In addition, the exemplary analysis of the West German economic policy discourse of the post-war years illustrates how political science can benefit from discourse studies research.

In Bluhm, Harald & Jürgen Gebhardt (eds.) Politische Ideengeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert, 223–242. Baden-Baden: Nomos. ISBN: 978-3-8329-2181-1

Putting contradiction center stage, this series aims at challenging simplistic conceptualizations of the contradictive. The series editors agree that contradictions are not necessarily about being resolved but that they rather provide starting points for polyphonic conversations.