Workshop “Internal Enemies and the State in the Interwar Period,” 9th July 2026
In the wake of the first socialist revolution and the post-WWI crisis of empire, the interwar period witnessed particularly high levels of distrust in the population’s loyalty and manageability. The workshop “Internal Enemies and the State in the Interwar Period,” organized by Paula Simon, Masato Tanaka, and Fabian Baumann, brought together researchers from the RTG “Ambivalent Enmity” and selected guests to discuss comparative cases from four macro-regions: Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and East Asia.
The first panel of the workshop centered political surveillance and prosecution across borders. Fabian Baumann analyzed Czechoslovakia’s efforts to police and prosecute the propaganda of radical Slovak nationalists who operated out of a hostile neighboring state, Poland. Ruihao Zhang (Heidelberg) examined a similar case from a different continent: the attempt of Japanese authorities to intervene against “blasphemous” articles that denigrated the Japanese emperor in the Shanghai press during the 1930s. The second panel centered reactions to the Russian revolution: Anastassiya Schacht (Heidelberg) spoke about the common propagandistic endeavors of anti-Bolshevik emigrés from Central Asia and the Caucasus, while Andrew Peak (University of Northumbria) evaluated the writings of Turkish communists in Soviet exile about Armenians in Anatolia and the Caucasus.
The third panel focused on the conceptualization of internal enemies as deviants: Paula Simon evaluated the criminalization of mobility in interwar Yugoslavia that was at the core of an increasingly racialized “Gypsy category”, whereas Henrike Scharff (Heidelberg) elaborated on gender and class aspects of the perception of female imposters in Weimar Germany. Finally, the fourth panel centered the competition between national and class conflict in colonial contexts. Masato Tanaka demonstrated how Lebanese economic elites and French colonialists found common ground in the opposition to working-class agitation. Meanwhile, Prateek Pankaj (Heidelberg) analyzed debates about national liberation and socialism in India’s Congress Socialist Party.
Despite the dissimilarity of local contexts, the workshop uncovered structural similarities and time-specific elements in the treatment of internal enemies by various states. The proliferation of new state structures and new borders after the Paris peace conference also brought forth groups that contested the new order, as well as a clearer sense that the international order was subject to debate and revision. Despite the shared interest of states to preserve order and the theoretical recognition of the League of Nations as an arbiter in such disputes, geopolitical tensions often impeded international cooperation against those marked as internal enemies.
Moreover, several of the states under discussion struggled to find reliable personnel, because many potential bureaucrats were linked to earlier imperial regimes or, vice versa, because colonial populations were not seen as a reliable recruitment pool. This led to a perceived precarity of the state and to a high susceptibility to potential security threats. Beyond the openly political threats of territorial revisionism and social revolution, these also included groups that undermined the state’s ontological security by overstepping borders of class, gender, or race.
In his keynote lecture, David Petruccelli (Dartmouth College) brought many of these themes together. He demonstrated how the International Criminal Police Commission as a manifestation of illiberal internationalism constructed the “transnational criminal” as a common enemy to all of humanity, laying the groundwork for authoritorian policing methods that united otherwise rivaling states in a common fight.
