European History Quarterly

In 1667, Andrzej Maksymilian Fredro, political thinker and senator of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, argued that fewer sejms should be held to prevent the royal court's corruption of the szlachta from the lower chamber. He feared that envoys, tempted by a political career in the ambit of the court, would seek royal patronage and neglect their local and military responsibilities. This article thinks Fredro's concerns through spatially, considering how the blurring of parliamentary and courtly spaces was manifest at Wawel in Kraków and the royal palace in Warsaw, the royal residences where sejms took place. Limited space necessitated improvisation to facilitate the political processes of parliamentary monarchy. There were occasions when parliamentary activity spilled over into the royal apartments, which could be used as breakout rooms for ‘private discussion’, the work of commissions or deputations, and, crucially, by the king seeking to manage parliamentary conflict away from the public forum of sejm. This was vital given that the system was based on common consent, rather than a majority vote. At the same time, parliamentary space could be used for the entertainments and displays of royal favour associated with the royal court. Furthermore, parliamentary debates were open and public, meaning that courtiers were able to come in and out of parliamentary spaces, exerting influence over parliamentarians. The Polish-Lithuanian monarchy was parliamentary, but this article shows how its sejm was monarchical. To an extent, the king could manage parliamentary processes through the use of space and tempt the szlachta to strive for his favour. Drawing on Fredro's writings and parliamentary and szlachta diaries, which include accounts of the king hosting ‘convivial sessions’ in parliament, this article provides a new perspective on the entangled nature of courtly and parliamentary cultures in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The article uses Yehuda Elkana's theory of images of knowledge to link the ideological demand for industrial counterespionage in interwar Czechoslovakia with the shifting legitimacy of what was then considered publicly beneficial corporate research. Using industrial counterespionage as an example, the article traces continuities in the discourse on the security of technology transfer, while at the same time analysing the related state interventions during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The premise of the article is that in Czechoslovakia, between the 1920s and 1930s, the importance of such images of knowledge, whose content was ‘security’ and the ‘protection’ of society from foreign (and domestic) threats gradually increased. External influences such as the Great Depression and the threat to Czechoslovakia's territorial integrity by its neighbours in the 1930s accelerated these shifts but did not cause them. There was a growing ideological need for protection in society, which reinforced the security-oriented images of knowledge and, through the implementation of industrial counterespionage, ultimately led to restrictions on the technology transfer in corporate research. This is well illustrated by the expert debates on the Economic Espionage Act of 1935, which are examined in this article.

This article is a case study of social mobility in the Bulgarian industrial city of Pernik in the 1950s. Exploring the mechanisms that regulated individuals' social advancement, it argues that the communist state brought about a sort of radical devolution. The system established to control social mobility provided an unprecedented number of recipients with one particular type of power: that over the life paths of their compatriots. The article argues that social status, ascent, and descent in communist society remained guided and controlled by state politics, though subject to continuous negotiations on multiple levels and with multiple players. Control rested in the hands of a network with blurry borders–ever-shifting and connected by virtue of its participants’ closer ties to the Communist Party and, importantly, to one another. In the process of negotiations, those with detrimental political pasts experienced major setbacks. Yet a convincing – and convincingly negotiated–narrative of zealous support for the party-state trumped origin. It became both a tentative survival strategy for outcasts and a lurking peril for those with ideologically flawless profiles. Males of Bulgarian ethnic origin, who were prepared to be demonstratively loyal to the Communist Party, clearly benefited the most from the established social mobility system–and they were its gatekeepers. This case study renders irrelevant the dispute over whether communist society should be studied from above or from below. Instead, it proves fruitful to consider it as a system in which players interact and affect or change one another, one which can regenerate itself over time. It shows how the social mobility system replaced terror as the foundation of the social system's autopoiesis.