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• Preserving Traditions as a Perspective for the Future? The Integration History of German Expellees in the Context of Current Discourses on Diversity

  7-31

  Tilman Kasten

  Views:

  99

  Diversity is a central keyword of our time that has found its way into the academic discussion of (historical) migration phenomena and their consequences. This also applies to the history of the forced migration of the German-speaking population from Eastern Europe as a result of the Second World War, which confronted both the refugees and expellees as well as the “host societies” with major challenges including those concerning “integration”. Based on a critical reading of a historically informed contribution to the debate on the evaluation of the integration history of the German expellees in the Federal Republic of Germany, the article reflects on the question of the extent to which orientation points for current debates on a social self-understanding under the guise of diversity can be derived from this history.

• The Recommendation of Ethnic Diversity in Late Habsburgian State and some Parallels in the Cultural Conception of the EU after 2004

  253-282

  Michael Prosser-Schell

  Views:

  52

  First of all, the article discusses that the ancient Habsburgian state (end of 19th – early 20th century), which had explicitly recommended and fostered ethnic diversity, gains a benevolent interpretation in some important academic presentations nowadays. This seems remarkable because the late Habsburgian monarchy after 1919 until ca. 2000 was examined as a failed state. The article analyses, based on the famous and popular-written applied geography „Die österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild“ (called „Kronprinzenwerk“, 1981–1902), how the recommendation of ethnic diversity was framed and expressed in that time. The article especially wants to show the arguments in which the strength of the pluriethnic and pluricultural Habsburgian empire generally had to be reasoned. Furthermore, the paper chooses 3 specific cases of an affirmative regional and ethnic description of the „Kronprinzenwerk“: Ruthens in Galicia, Serbs and Germans („svabians“) in Southern Hungary of that time. Nowadays, we see a strikingly similar argument in the European Union to recommend ethnic and cultural diversity to achieve a consolidated socio-economic grouping. An outstanding and prominent example is the speech of French President Emmanuel Macron in 2017 at Sorbonne University.