Jena Team

Professor Joachim von Puttkamer

The Long Shadow of Interwar Authoritarianism

Joachim von Puttkamer will investigate references to the interwar regimes and their institutional setup in the political discourse of Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary, both in public and internal debates, and their impact on providing the new democracies of the 1990s with a presumed national tradition.

Such references can be traced on various levels, starting with administrative and legal terminology and going all the way to basic constitutional principles. Attempts to reestablish presumed national continuities tended to reach out to the 1930s rather than the 1920s and therefore to emphasize authoritarian rather than democratic elements. The Hungarian debate on how to properly label the Horthy regime’s character is a case in point. While public discourse on collective memory and summary assessments have been well researched, the project will investigate specific debates in the legal, administrative and constitutional fields and analyze them in a comparative framework.

Dr Jakub Szumski

From Socialist Legality to Illiberal Democracy? Legal Thinking in East-Central Europe Revisited

The period of state socialism in East-Central Europe is often associated with the instrumentalization of law for political purposes. At the same time, attitudes towards the law evolved over this era and the various countries of the Eastern bloc developed their own legal ideas. Some of these concepts were deeply rooted in socialist ideology and politics, but others openly corresponded with older traditions and were grounded in international debates and discourses. My project traces this complicated historical development in order to reflect on the rule of law crisis in contemporary East-Central Europe. It explores how socialist notions of legality and internationalism evolved in the region, and how they encountered and engaged with their counterparts around the world, especially liberal ones. This project asks how legal scholars, practicing lawyers, intellectuals and politicians dealt with these concepts during and after the fall of state socialism and what consequences it had on the establishment and the subsequent crisis of the liberal order in the region.