6th Core Group Meeting

The meeting, hosted by the Belgrade Open School, occasioned a discussion with Serbian experts – Olga Manojlović-Pintar, Radmila Radić, Vladimir Petrović, Srđan Milošević and also with Ferenc Laczó from CEU Budapest, focusing mainly on the interwar and post-1945 Communist contexts. This meeting was also the first official encounter of the whole group with two research associates of the project, Chavdar Marinov (working on Macedonia) and Kaarel Piirimäe (working on Estonia).

In the meeting we agreed on the following:

• In the weeks following the Belgrade meeting, the list of primary sources will circulate again among the core group members and external experts. We will fill in the gaps pointed out in the discussion according to our geographical and historical fields of expertise both in the primary and secondary reading lists. Following this, individual communication between the concerned members of the group should follow, clarifying missing references and gaps in the given chronological entities.
• By the next meeting, each core group member should write a tentative narrative sub-chapter of his/her choice which will be discussed at the next meeting.
• The next meeting will take place in Amsterdam in the last week of November, organized jointly with Professor Joep Leerssen’s SPIN Project. The meeting will be joined by Western European experts on 19^th century. The interaction will take place in the form of a workshop, in which the participants will be asked to prepare a short position paper, followed by extensive open discussion on the issue.
• According to our agreement, the following meetings will take place in Sofia (late March or early April 2010), focusing mostly on the fin-de-siècle, communist, and post-communist periods. In early June, a meeting will be held in Bucharest, coordinated with a workshop on interwar anti-modernist discourses in the Balkans (with a focus on Romania). In early October 2010, we shall meet in Warsaw.
• Each of us should continue writing a sketch (with an implied narrative) of the history of political thought in our own national (or regional) context. In doing so, we should be particularly careful to include the texts which were framing the contemporary discourse (economic, legal texts, etc.), but which have fallen out of the canon. We will discuss it in the Sofia meeting. We should also continue compiling the list of influential foreign thinkers for our context.
• The core group members will continue their primary research on the chronological units allotted to them in the chapter order, while the external experts will continue working mainly on the short narratives of the history of political thought in their countries and also pursue their research on their chosen case study in communication with members of the group whose expertise is linked to the topic.

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