Marie-Janine Calic Receives Scholarship from the Berlin Center for Cold War Studies for Academic Year 2017-2018

Marie-Janine Calic, Professor of East and Southeast European History at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and Principal Investigator of the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies, is a scholarship holder of the Berliner Kolleg Kalter Krieg (Berlin Center for Cold War Studies) in Winter Semester 2017/18.

Marie-Janine Calic will work in Munich and Berlin on her research project “Tito und die jugoslawische Politik ‘aktiver friedlicher Koexistenz’ im Kalten Krieg” (“Tito and Yugoslav Politics of ‘Active Peaceful Coexistence’ in the Cold War”). In the project, she analyzes the foreign policy of Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s and addresses the ideological, political, and cultural-historical dimensions of Yugoslavia's doctrine of "active peaceful coexistence".

What is needed is conditions, motives, and driving actors, as well as individual initiatives of moderation and mediation in the context of this new policy. What role was played by Tito himself, which function did his apparatus serve, and to what extent did internal developments affect the design of this policy? How was it anchored ideologically, institutionally and socially? Furthermore, the consequences of prevention and mediation strategies, as well as the establishment of multilateral systems for the non-aligned state and Tito's rule, are of interest. One must also ask to what extent "active peaceful coexistence" served to legitimize Tito as a national leader in multinational Yugoslavia, to decorate his personality cult, and to consolidate the state identity and integration of Yugoslavia.

In 2016, Marie-Janine Calic published her 700-page monograph entitled "Südosteuropa. Weltgeschichte einer Region” (“Southeastern Europe. World History of a Region"), which is already a new reference work on the history of the Balkans. The current issue (40-41/2017) of the journal “Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte” ("From Politics and Contemporary History") of the Federal Agency for Civic Education features a contribution from Calic, titled "Kleine Geschichte Jugoslawiens” (“Small History of Yugoslavia"), in which she summarizes and explains the main events of the (post) Yugoslav history.

Marie-Janine Calic has been a Professor of East and Southeast European History at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich since 2004. From 1992 to 2004, she worked as a research assistant at the Science and Politics Foundation in Ebenhausen and Berlin. She was a consultant to the UN Special Representative for former Yugoslavia in Zagreb and political advisor to the Special Coordinator of the Stability Pact for South-Eastern Europe in Brussels.

The Berliner Kolleg Kalter Krieg/The Berlin Center for Cold War Studies began its work in March 2015. It is a joint project of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich - Berlin, the Federal Foundation for the Study of the SED-dictatorship and the Humboldt University of Berlin.