Südosteuropaforschung. Indienstnahme und Verwissenschaftlichung – Theorien und Paradigmen

From its onset, Southeast European Studies (Südostforschung) have always been a “political science”. Serving and mobilizing political interests stood next to its claims as an academic discipline. When “Südostforschung” was re-institutionalized after World War II, by and large under the auspices of personnel and conceptional continuity, it defined itself as an independent discipline. Only since the 1970s did it start to free itself from the Procrustean bed and the isolation of “regional studies”. Having increasingly integrated itself in the theories and concepts of the general Historical and Social Sciences, Southeast European Studies have become much more pluralized in its conceptional approaches to the region and its history. Due primarily to the influence of a post-structuralist and post-colonial critique this development contributed to a neglect of “society” as a conceptional category while questions of Southeast-European “path-dependencies” as a European “history region” were overlooked.