Dieter Gosewinkel – författare

Citizenship was the most important mark of political belonging in Europe in the twentieth century, while estate, religion, party, class, and nation lost political significance in the century of extremes. This is shown by examining the legal institution of citizenship, with its deciding influence on the limits of a political community, on inclusion and exclusion. Citizenship determined a person's protection, equality, and freedom and thus his or her chances in life and very survival. This book recounts the history of citizenship in Europe as the history of European statehood in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It does so from three vantage points: as the development of a legal institution crucial to European constitutionalism; as a measure of an individual's opportunities for self-fulfilment ranging from freedom to totalitarian subjugation; and as a succession of alternating, often sharply divergent political regimes, considered from the perspective of their inclusivity and exclusivity, and its justification. The European history of citizenship is discussed in this book on the basis of six selected countries: Great Britain, France, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Russia. For the first time, a joint history of citizenship in Western and Eastern Europe is told here, from the heyday of the nation state to our present day, which is marked by the crises of the European Union. It is the history of a central legal institution that significantly represents and at the same time determines struggles over migration, integration, and belonging. One of the central concerns of this book is what lessons can be learned when it comes to the future chances of European citizenship.

The history of modern Europe is often presented with the hindsight of present-day European integration, which was a genuinely liberal project based on political and economic freedom. Many other visions for Europe developed in the 20th century, however, were based on an idea of community rooted in pre-modern religious ideas, cultural or ethnic homogeneity, or even in coercion and violence. They frequently rejected the idea of modernity or reinterpreted it in an antiliberal manner. Anti-liberal Europe examines these visions, including those of anti-modernist Catholics, conservatives, extreme rightists as well as communists, arguing that antiliberal concepts in 20th-century Europe were not the counterpart to, but instead part of the process of European integration.

Now more than ever, “recognition” represents a critical concept for social movements, both as a strategic tool and an important policy aim. While the subject’s theoretical and empirical dimensions have usually been studied separately, this interdisciplinary collection focuses on both  to examine the pursuit of recognition against a transnational backdrop. With a special  emphasis on the efforts of women’s and Jewish organizations in 20th-century Europe, the studies collected here show how recognition can be meaningfully understood in historical-analytical terms, while demonstrating the extent to which transnationalization determines a movement’s reach and effectiveness.

Die Staatsbürgerschaft ist eine Institution des Rechts, die tief in der Geschichte Europas wurzelt. Sie markiert mit Mitteln des Rechts die Grenze zwischen Zugehörigkeit und Nicht-Zugehörigkeit und erfüllt damit eine elementare Funktion politischer Ordnung. Warum und mit welchen Folgen für die historische Praxis wird die Staatsbürgerschaft zum Austragungsort politischer Kämpfe um Rechte, die nach Teilhabe, individueller Freiheit, Sicherheit und kollektiver Identität streben? Dieser Frage geht der vorliegende Band in der deutschen und europäischen Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts nach. Staatsbürgerschaft dient dabei als rechtshistorischer Schlüssel, um Bedingungen von Binnen-, Aus- und Einwanderung in modernen Gesellschaften von der Hochzeit des Nationalstaats bis zum Zeitalter des Kalten Krieges, der Entkolonialisierung und der europäischen Einigung zu erschließen. Dabei wird der tiefe Wandel von Formen der Zugehörigkeit in den Blick genommen, der die Rechtsinstitution der Staatsbürgerschaft zu einer Sonde der Analyse moderner Gesellschaften macht.