Session Abstract

Modernization, Jurgen Habermas argues, is a constellation of “cumulative and mutually reinforcing” goals of transforming individuals’ relations with the state. For Central and Eastern European elites in the nineteenth and twentieth century who sought the state-empowering benefits of modernization, this meant attempts to accelerate and shape the needed metamorphosis of society to produce the model citizen.

Each of the papers in this panel follows Giovanni Levi’s suggestion that by looking at the micro-level of the model community, we bring the macro-level of modernizationinto focus. How did modernizing state elites seek to create or redefine specific “model communities” in which to inculcate the model citizen? State agents might be motivated by a sense of “relative backwardness,” but the panel explores such diverse elements at the local level as security, ethnic homogenization, economic development and ideology. Noting the not infrequent failure of these model communities to achieve modernizing goals, the panel traces the negotiation of modernization between rival state institutions and between state elites and local inhabitants.

Jeffrey Wilson shows the effort by Prussian officials to reshape the landscape of the Tuchel Heath in the 1890s, and thereby reshape the local population into productive citizens and loyal Germans. Anca Glont looks at how the Hungarian ministries erected new planned coal towns in the Jiu Valley in the 1860s as part of an effort to transform the Transylvanian economy. And Bradley Moore examines how state agents of public health in Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1950s to the 1960s tried to create ideal hygienic communities. 

Collectively, these presentations provide both case studies and draw connections how states have envisioned model communities as part of a modernizing ethos, with suggestive continuities across both state boundaries and between (conflicting) ideologies.