Research Project Description

The purpose of the proposed research is to explore the role of the state in conjunction with models of collective action as practiced through the organisation of cooperative movements in the inter-war period. Representing a form of corporate organisation at the intersection between the economy, society and politics, cooperatives provide for an ideal laboratory to ‘revisit' the notion of the state as the institutionalisation of a complex and dynamic power nexus. The project thus wishes in the first place to contribute to modernisation debates on Southeast and Central Europe by historicising models and practices of social organisation and economic activity. In the second, it aspires to readdress a European phenomenon and evaluate the particularity or universality of its adaptation in the specific contexts of Southeast and Central Europe from a comparative perspective. Finally, due to post-1989 developments, scholarly attention has focused overwhelmingly on the Communist period, ignoring in a certain way its prehistory. The current work wishes to bridge this historical gap by re-examining the configuration of state and society relations in the dramatic and ideologically loaded inter-war period.

The research is based on a comparative analytical framework, taking the case of inter-war Bulgaria as its pilot study with the intention to include the case of the first Czechoslovak Republic as a contrasting case study. Methodologically, it attempts to build a link between social, cultural and economic history by embedding the emergence and organisation of collective action in its multiple, inter-related contexts.