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Workshop München

World Regions between Global History and Scenarios of Power and Civilization: China, Turkey, Russia and the USA in Comparison

24.07.2014 09:00  – 19:30 

Prof. Dr. Martin Aust, Prof. Dr. Martin Schulze Wessel (LMU München): World Regions between Global History and Scenarios of Power and Civilization: China, Turkey, Russia and the USA in Comparison

In history departments and on the book market global history had come to flourish within the last decade. Most advocates of global history stress the significance of a cosmopolitan approach to the study of the past. Around 1900, internationalization driven by European colonial powers created a global map of civilized, less civilized and barbarian countries. Nowadays academic discourse on global history refers to diversity of cultures and multiple modernities. Europe has been provincialized to pick up Dipesh Chakrabarty’s often-cited imperative.
Quite the contrary can be observed on the field of scenarios of power. Statesmen across the globe claim that their states embody chosen nations and advanced civilizations. Neo-Ottomanism championed by Erdogan, the ever-growing significance and global dominance of the Chinese nation highlighted by the recently installed new government in China, Putin’s vision of Russia as a great power and opponent of the West and Obama’s various scenarios of the US as a harbinger of freedom and pacific power: these visions display claims of a higher status vis-à-vis other countries and world regions. Consequently government-sponsored institutions as the Chinese Confucius Institute and the Russian Foundation Russkii Mir have been established as agents of cultural foreign affairs.
The conference will compare these exclusive visions of power. Further it will take a closer look at the state of the art of global history in China, Turkey, Russia and the US. To what degree has global history been adopted by historians in these countries? Are there different notions and pathways of global history writing in these four countries? And last but not least: is global history used either to underline or to deconstruct exclusive scenarios of power? Eight papers will address these basic questions and thus discuss states and world regions between cosmopolitan global history and exclusive scenarios of power.

Conference Venue: Maria-Theresia-Str. 21, 81675 Munich

9:00 Welcome and Introduction
Martin Aust and Martin Schulze Wessel
9:30 China

  • Confucius Institutes across the Globe - Hans van Ess
  • Global History in Chinese Historiography - Dominic Sachsenmaier

11:00 Coffee Break
11:30 Russia

  • Motive, Metaphern und "historische Werte" in russischen Geschichtsnarrativen für innen- und aussenpolitische Selbstrepräsentation - Ekaterina Makhotina
  • Russian Empireness and Russian Postcoloniality in a Global Context - Marina Mogil’ner

13:00 Lunch
14:30 Turkey

  • Global History in Turkish Historiography - Halil Berktay
  • “Strategic Depth” and Historical Shallowness: Usages of the Ottoman Past in Current Turkish Politics - Christoph K. Neumann

16:00 Coffee Break
16:30 USA

  • Positioning the USA on the Globe in the 20th Century and after 9/11 - Volker Depkat
  • Global History in American Historiography - Marcus Gräser

18:00 Final Discussion

 

Responsible for content: GS OSES/Krogner-Kornalik