The Difficulty of ‘Letting-Be’

Elizibeth and her husband Milad are among the Iraqi families who took out a loan to buy a little house outside of Nitra. But while the family feels very comfortable in their own home, it comes with new challenges: the villages around Nitra are predominantly commuter areas. People commonly travel into town by car to work. Elizibeth's husband, however, works in Germany for several weeks at a time, taking the family car with him. Not just jobs, but also education and health facilities are concentrated in Nitra. Elizibeth has to travel from their settlement to the center almost every day, to attend driving classes and to bring her four-year-old daughter Lana, who has Down syndrome, to a daycare and rehabilitation center.

Having her long-term adaptation and ‘functioning’ in mind, social workers wanted to teach Elizibeth to go to Nitra by bus. They showed her where the bus stops were, and explained to her the connection, schedule, and where she had to change. Elizibeth was unenthusiastic about the proposal, to say the least. The bus goes only once an hour and takes, unsurprisingly, significantly longer than the car. But the social workers argued that many Slovaks rely on public transport daily, so they could expect Elizibeth to tolerate the inconvenience and do the same. Elizibeth claimed that the bus ride was a stressful and straining experience for Lana and that her daughter's restlessness could affect the other passengers. Anyone who ever accompanied Elizibeth and Lana on the bus (including me) got a rather different impression, namely that Lana, generally of calm and introverted nature, was not too bothered by the ride and the other passengers. “If a doctor or health professional confirms that it is bad for Lana's development to go by bus, then that's a different issue, of course,” Jakub explained, immediately adding that he was rather inclined to see it as an excuse. Elizibeth also complained that she had to carry Lana in her arms due to her difficulties with balance and coordination. The NGO promptly addressed this problem by providing Elizibeth with a secondhand stroller. Once, Elizibeth missed the bus but elegantly saved the day by calling her acquaintances from the village, asking them to give her a lift.

Negotiating Trust and Mistrust

During an integration meeting, Mohamed was asked whether he had any opportunity to talk Slovak in his day-to-day life. Mohamed answered through his interpreter that he had Slovak friends he could practice with. “Slovak?!” Sofia commented incredulously, looking at the others with raised eyebrows. After the meeting, Nina told me she also had a funny feeling about these ‘friends.’ She expressed worries that they might be associated with the local drug scene. At the next meeting with Mohamed, Nina tried to find out more about the mysterious friends. Casually, she asked him how often he met them and how old they were. Mohamed answered her questions and added with a giggle that they shared a joint sometimes.

The revelation that Nina's immediate suspicion was not too far beside the point made me painfully aware of my own subconscious assumptions. The team's intuition that those people accepting Mohamed as a friend could not be entirely kosher seemed cynical to me. I had brushed off Nina's scenario of him spiraling into drug abuse and petty crime as too pessimistic—and it probably was. Yet it still astonished me that Nina's instinct about the involvement of illegal substances, the possession and consumption of which is punishable by severe penalties in Slovakia, was correct.

My misjudgment both of Mohamed's integrity and of Nina's intuition was one of those fieldwork moments that made me acutely aware of the delicacy of “negotiated trust” (Loizos 1994): How to approach the refugees’ and NGO workers’ accounts and my own assumptions with some caution while building trust at the same time? Trust is the basis of ethnographic fieldwork, especially in organizations. A modicum of trust needs to be there to build any kind of relationship; if we cannot believe that people's accounts of themselves hold at least some value, and that the information they convey is by and large in consonance with what they take to be true, ethnography as a method would essentially be worthless. Participant observation, with close attention to the thoughts, speech, and actions of those in the field, can approximate knowledge, but never produce certainty.

Individuals in Charge

Whenever I was addressing the state of the Slovak refugee care system with my interlocutors, the workers at the NGOs, schools, and even the state institutions opened up really quickly and did not hold back with their frustrations and complaints. Often, they delivered a crushing critique of the formal procedures, only to express their discomfort about the informal means (involving rule-breaking and their own over-engagement) they applied to make up for these deficits.

Katka, the manager of the state-led integration project, which had been implemented by Charita and had already ended by the time of my fieldwork, elaborated:

Renata, the vice president of a school that accepted two Syrian refugee girls, explained:

When I started doing fieldwork in Slovakia in the summer of 2017, two years after the events usually referred to as ‘refugee crisis,’ refugees and asylum were still ubiquitous topics of conversation, causing emotional discussions wherever I went. Three days into my stay in Bratislava's eastern district of Ružinov, seemingly out of nowhere, my landlady Sára suddenly burst into a long, agitated monologue on the refugee situation. She was convinced that the recent ‘exodus’ was being controlled by someone with an agenda, maybe destabilizing Europe. She did not believe that all refugees were threatened by war, and even if they were, they should rather stay where they were and fight for their country. “A man who abandons his family is not a man in my eyes,” she declared resolutely. “When there was war in Slovakia, no one left, we all stayed here. Indeed, we had the Slovak National Uprising!” she added with pathos.

I was stumped by the raw animosity in her words. Sára was a skilled potter in her midsixties with Jewish roots. She had told me that when anti-communist protests started taking place in her hometown in 1989, she stood in the front row. I had got to know her as a passionate democrat and an astute observer of national and international politics. Yet she went into a downright tirade of derogatory and generalizing comments on how “the Muslims” were ungrateful and incompatible with “our” advanced and civilized European culture.

Reacting to my acute discomfort, she contained her rage. Almost apologetically, she explained that her fear and skepticism came from her life experience and her experience of Slovakia as a nation. Slovaks were hostile toward Muslims almost innately; this was because Ottoman rule in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came with so much violence and deprivation for an innocent population.

Sára's argument against refugees, and my queasy reaction, shows the emotional capacity of the issue: it touches upon essential expressions of personhood—individual and national identity, and (collective) memory—and upon core values such as safety, continuity, and justice. It is very common in Slovakia to see one's stance on refugees, like Sára, not as a political opinion like any other but as a question of principle. Politics boosts this framing by tying the refugee issue tightly to essential needs such as national security and sovereignty.

Chapter 2 broadens the contextual setting of the miracle cycle by examining its role in the cultural production of the period, noting that its proliferation in visual art was not an isolated phenomenon. I locate the expanded imagery in its contemporary cultural milieu and literary production, looking especially at texts in the domains of historiography, hagiography, and poetry, by authors associated with the court, such as George Pachymeres, Nikephoros Gregoras, Theoktistos the Stoudite, Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos, and Manuel Philes. Literary commissions dealing with miracles are closely linked to the restoration and rededication of churches and monasteries and the reactivation of the healing powers of relics and shrines, demonstrating a new interest in, and emphasis on, the miraculous.

Here, I deal with the issue of Hitler’s belief in Jesus’ divinity and show that, in contrast to what modern scholarship has thus far claimed about this question, Hitler did indeed refer to Jesus as divine on many occasions throughout his life. He even spoke of Jesus as the Son of God. I argue that Hitler’s views cannot be explained away by claiming that his words were simply clever propaganda intended to draw Christians into the NSDAP. The particularities of Hitler’s religious views and his interpretation of Jesus were simply too odd for them to act effectively as a propaganda tool designed to gain the sympathies of mainstream Christians. This chapter builds on an article that was published in the Journal of Religious History in June 2021.

The conclusion that Hitler was genuinely inspired by Jesus in his antisemitic struggle against the Jews thus cannot be avoided. Hitler viewed Jesus as the original Aryan warrior who had begun an apocalyptic battle against the Jews, but who had been killed before he had had a chance to finish the job. Historians must start taking Hitler’s (and the other leading Nazis’) religious beliefs seriously if we wish to fully understand how Hitler and his followers could be so morally convinced that what they were doing was the right thing – indeed, the “good” thing – to do. It adds significantly to our understanding not only of how Hitler could sway so many Germans to do what he wanted, but also of how the Nazis’ ultimate crime – the Holocaust – was possible to undertake in one of Europe’s most “civilized” and culturally and economically developed nations. Hitler thought he was following in the footsteps of Jesus – an alleged Aryan warrior who had dedicated his life to fighting the Jews – and that the National Socialists had a duty to finish what he was convinced Jesus had started: the eradication of theof the Jewish people from the face of the earth.

Science and central, national political structures are the two greatest modern institutional forms of authority. They can sometimes align and sometimes clash. Science and technology policy has, in the UK, been seen since the twentieth century as an important lever to encourage innovation and ultimately economic growth. Some of the most challenging issues facing politicians depend, partly, on scientific understanding and advice. This chapter reviews and assesses the experience of policy-for-science and science-for-policy under the Coalition and Conservative administrations. It is a pattern of modified continuity and the articulation of the possibility of radical change. Ultimately both, in ways that will be described, were undermined by the tumultuous events of Brexit and Covid.

This chapter shows how Soviet policymakers thought about foreign trade and the role of natural resources in the early Cold War, focusing on the Khrushchev period and the conflicting views on the use of energy.

The Conservative effect is notable in education, with several reforms at the department, beginning with the most (and only) successful Education Secretary Michael Gove and continuing throughout the ten Education Secretaries over the remaining ten years. The rapid churn made for inconsistent policymaking, and a lack of long-term planning. It ends with the Conservatives’ role in guiding the education system through Covid, and the return to ambitious plans under the final PM, Rishi Sunak. The chapter will also scrutinise Conservative higher education and university policy, and whether there was an opportunity wasted with universities.

This chapter examines the emergence of an ever closer energy relationship between Western Europe and the Soviet Union in the late Soviet period, leading to the construction of the first major natural gas export pipeline from Siberia to Europe.

This chapter examines the role of oil in the early Soviet period, analysing the importance Lenin and Stalin attached to this commodity for domestic development and international trade.

How should we best characterise the UK party system in the wake of nearly a decade and a half of Conservative government? Has it undergone a significant and enduring realignment, or merely amounted to passing turbulence, after which things have returned to the seemingly eternal verities of stable two-party competition? The question for us to consider in this chapter is whether we can regard the period since 2010 in such terms: in particular, does the general election of December 2019 constitute a moment of critical realignment? Or is it more sensible to view this as the mere culmination of a relatively prolonged period of Conservative Party ascendancy based on a regular swing of the electoral pendulum – a swing which will inevitably reverse itself as the centre of electoral gravity shifts in favour of Labour once more? In other words, a simple affirmation of the age-old dynamics of the two-party system.