Torsello, Davide - Pappová, Melinda: Social Networks in Movement. Time, interaction and interethnic spaces in Central Eastern Europe - Nostra Tempora 8. (Somorja-Dunaszerdahely, 2003)
Introduction
Introduction 27 Introduction This book collects the contributions to the workshop “Social Networks in Movement", held in Galanta (Slovakia) on October 6th, 2001. The central idea of the workshop was to bring together scholars from different countries to share views and research results on one common theme, the postsocialist question. As we thought and still think that dealing with postsocialism remains a fruitful approach for analysing the features of Central Eastern Europe's post-1989 transformation, the choice of Slovakia as the hosting country of the workshop was not random. The history of Slovakia, due to its geographical position, "in the heart of Europe" as some local tourist pamphlets like to emphasize, is inextricably linked to that of the whole central Eastern Europe. It is a young country which was for centuries part of Hungary and the Habsburg monarchy, it was constituted as part of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918 and gained independence after the peaceful split with the Czech Republic in 1993. It is of no surprise, then, that this country exemplifies some of the features that have historically distinguished Central Eastern European countries: ethnic mobility, frequent geo-political changes, interethnic turbulence and the development of nationalist discourses. As the contributions in this volume testify, some of these features have not been eradicated by the over forty years of socialism. Rather, the discussions raised in the workshop suggested that current discourses about time, space and the configuration of interpersonal relations often assume powerful emotional connotations that endanger the objectivity required by scholarship (see Pine, this volume). The Galanta workshop had two aims. The first was to bring together scholars from different countries and here preference was given to local (Central and Eastern European) scholars. The workshop was held in four languages (English, Hungarian, Slovak and Czech) with simultaneous interpreta-
