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摘要
<jats:p>T<jats:sc>he title</jats:sc>“C<jats:sc>ooperative</jats:sc>E<jats:sc>mpires</jats:sc>”<jats:sc>may seem contradictory</jats:sc>—or even provocative—to many historians of empire. It is widely believed that one of the defining characteristics of an empire is the presence of little or no cooperation among its individual provinces. More than that: there is a deliberate separation between the provinces that can go so far as to become a prohibition against cooperation. In theory, at least, each province must communicate with the imperial center, but not with other provinces. This contradiction between empire and cooperation is neatly illustrated by a true family story. The story is set in the 1970s in Prague, on the western edge of that space that historians today describe as the Soviet Empire. My mother, an East German from East Berlin, was then working as an interpreter in Prague. She was sitting on the tram on the way to visit some Czech friends who shared her love of jazz music. A queasy feeling began to come over her as she recalled that she was in fact forbidden to visit Czech friends, precisely because she was working in the German Democratic Republic's (GDR) embassy in Prague. It suited both the Soviet Union and the GDR that their foreign workers should not come into private contact with other nationalities, even if they belonged to allied fraternal countries. This was a sort of socialist version of the “divide and rule” principle as it was practiced in the nineteenth century.</jats:p>
- 出版日期2016
