The Politics and International Relations programme is warmly inviting you to the following guest lecture:

Germany and Poland: Strangers on a Train or Participants of a Common Destiny?

Prof. Karl Cordell, Plymouth University

Tuesday, 25th November 2014

Lg16, 5pm

 As the Yugoslav Wars of Secession showed in the 1990s, this process of (imperial) collapse and concomitant nation and state building runs no more smoothly in Europe than it does elsewhere.  State and nation building is rarely achieved without causing significant social dislocation.  More often than not, the process involves both warfare and forced migration.  In some instances it involves contestation on the part of nationalist movements for the hearts and minds of people whose national belonging is disputed by rival nationalists, just as the territory to which nationalist movements lay claim involves dispute between nationalists who claim that a stretch of territory is incontrovertibly theirs and belongs no other claimant.  Such contestation is rarely, if ever solved through wholly pacific means.  The relationship between Germany and Poland illustrates these problems in a particularly sharp manner.