Forthcoming

IDEA OF ORDER: Perspectives from Central and Eastern Europe (1989-2022)

Rakesh Batabyal

In 1989, many countries of Central and Eastern Europe came out of the socialist order and began moving into a new world defined by neoliberal economic and political systems. The experience of rupture from the past and the desire to become part of a new and more secure socio-economic order have excited critical intellectual and political imaginations. The book examines how these imaginations help construct Ideas of Order in these national locations.

The idea of the order has its social location and variables, i.e., political (nation, empire), and cultural (religion) and the book shows how they colour articulation of an order. The Book examines the way a ‘national order’ emerges at a time when global financial and European transnational orders are celebrated. Similarly, despite the rhetoric of Christian Europe, secularization of the continent goes unabated. The importance of Russia’s national assertions also, as the book examines, looms large in the region’s political imagination. Written by a trained historian with insight into the contemporary history of the region and the world, the book, based on intensive fieldwork, presents some of the major frames shaping the Idea of Order influenced as they are by the socio-economic and cultural histories of different intellectual and academic locations in the Centre and Eastern Europe.

Rakesh Batabyal

An alumnus of Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he presently teaches History and Theories of Media at the School of Social Sciences, Rakesh Batabyal’s works on Communalism in Bengal from Famine to Noakhali (1943-1947) (Sage 2005), Penguin Book of Modern Indian Speeches (Penguin, 2007) JNU The Making of a University (Harper Collins 2014) and The Modern School (1920-2020): A Century of Schooling in India (Amazon Westland, 2020) are significant contributions to the Institutional and Intellectual History of Modern India. The Inaugural India Chair at Tokyo University, Rakesh Batabyal has a diploma in Romanian Language and Civilisation from Bucharest University and contributes to discussions on the contemporary history of East and Central Europe in Europe and India. He organised the centenary conference for Mircea Eliade in 2007 and was invited to the Thirty Years Commemoration of the Solidarity Movement in Poland. He presented a Keynote on Democracy and Media at the XI Annual Conference of the Association of Political History at Stockholm in 2024.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Figures

1. Thinking of An Order
2. The Ideas of Order: Imperial, National and Others
3. Framing 1989: A New Historical Period
4. The Coming of a New Order
5. An Emergent ‘National Order’?
6. A European Order of Things
7. Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, and the World Order
8. Invoking a Christian Order
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index