New Books in European Politics
Alle afleveringen
600 afleveringen, van nieuw naar oud
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Kaius Tuori, "Empire of Law: Nazi Germany, Exile Scholars and the Battle for the Future of Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
30 november 2020 · 52 min
In his new book Empire of Law: Nazi Germany, Exile Scholars, and the Battle for the Future of Europe (Cambridge UP, 2020), Kaius Tuori examines the inherent unity of European legal traditions that extend to ancient Rome. This book explores the invention of this tradition, tracing it to a group of legal scholars divided by the onslaught of Nazi terror and totalitarianism in Europe. As exiles in Britain and the US, its formulators worked to build bridges between the Continental and the Atlantic legal traditions, incorporating ideas such as rule of law, liberty, and equality to the European heritage. Others joined the Nazi revolution, which promoted its own idea of European unity. At the end of World War Two, natural law and human rights were incorporated into the European project. The resulting narrative of Europe, one that outlined human rights, rule of law, and equality, became consequently a unifying factor during the Cold War as the self-definition against the challenge of communism. Lees meer
Kaius Tuori is Professor of European Intellectual History at the Centre for European Studies at the University of Helsinki.
Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on Twitter @craig_sorvillo.
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Mark Gilbert, "European Integration: A Political History" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020)
20 november 2020 · 38 min
“Awareness of the EU's undeniable past and present importance can - and has - led to complacency and hubris. There is nothing inevitable about European integration". Lees meer
So writes Mark Gilbert in European Integration: A Political History (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), a compact, narrative history of the European Communities and the European Union pitched at both political-science students and the general reader.
Sympathetic to the integration process but critical of “Whig” histories of unstoppable federal progress, Gilbert makes a case for traditional “villains” – Charles De Gaulle and Margaret Thatcher – as simply advocates of alternative models of governance.
Mark Gilbert is resident professor of international history at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Bologna and Associate Editor of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies.
Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.
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Ewald Nowotny, "Money and Life" (Braumüller Verlag, 2020)
5 november 2020 · 44 min
In September 2008, Ewald Nowotny joined the governing council of the European Central Bank. Just two weeks later, Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy in US history - so triggering a global financial crisis and recession. In September 2019, he retired just before the coronavirus pandemic struck. Lees meer
This book charts the political and literary development of a young Social Democrat economist in postwar Vienna, his education in Austria and the US, and his experience in banking in the pre-Lehman stage of the crisis.
For "ECB-watchers", Geld und Leben (Braumüller Verlag, 2020) provides a fascinating insight into the contrasting presidencies of Jean-Claude Trichet and Mario Draghi, into how council meetings are conducted, and the ruses used by members to influence the markets.
Now a self-styled "independent economist", Ewald Nowotny was a professor of economics at Vienna and Linz universities, a member of Austria's parliament, a vice-president of the European Investment Bank, and governor of the Austrian National Bank.
Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.
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Cynthia Miller-Idriss, "Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right" (Princeton UP, 2020)
2 november 2020 · 1 uur 12 min
Hate crimes. Misinformation and conspiracy theories. Foiled white-supremacist plots. The signs of growing far-right extremism are all around us, and communities across America and around the globe are struggling to understand how so many people are being radicalized and why they are increasingly attracted to violent movements. Lees meer
Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (Princeton University Press, 2020) shows how tomorrow's far-right nationalists are being recruited in surprising places, from college campuses and mixed martial arts gyms to clothing stores, online gaming chat rooms, and YouTube cooking channels.
Instead of focusing on the how and why of far-right radicalization, Cynthia Miller-Idriss seeks answers in the physical and virtual spaces where hate is cultivated. Where does the far right do its recruiting? When do young people encounter extremist messaging in their everyday lives?
Miller-Idriss shows how far-right groups are swelling their ranks and developing their cultural, intellectual, and financial capacities in a variety of mainstream settings. She demonstrates how young people on the margins of our communities are targeted in these settings, and how the path to radicalization is a nuanced process of moving in and out of far-right scenes throughout adolescence and adulthood.
Hate in the Homeland is essential for understanding the tactics and underlying ideas of modern far-right extremism. This eye-opening book takes readers into the mainstream places and spaces where today's far right is engaging and ensnaring young people, and reveals innovative strategies we can use to combat extremist radicalization.
Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes St…
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Ian Buruma, "The Churchill Complex" (Penguin Press, 2020)
30 oktober 2020 · 54 min
From one of its keenest observers, The Churchill Complex: The Curse of Being Special, from Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit (Penguin Press) is a brilliant, witty journey through the "Special Relationship" between Britain and America that has done so much to shape the world, from World War II to Brexit. Lees meer
It's impossible to understand the last 75 years of American history, through to Trump and Brexit, without understanding the Anglo-American relationship, and specifically the bonds between presidents and prime ministers. FDR of course had Churchill; JFK famously had Macmillan, his consigliere during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Reagan found his ideological soul mate in Thatcher, and George W. Bush found his fellow believer, in religion and in war, in Tony Blair. And now, of course, it is impossible to understand the populist uprising in either country, from 2016 to the present, without reference to Trump and Boris Johnson, though ironically, they are also the key to understanding the special relationship's demise.
There are few things more certain in politics than that at some point, facing a threat to national security, a leader will evoke Winston Churchill to stand for brave leadership (and Neville Chamberlain to represent craven weakness). As Ian Buruma shows, in his dazzling short tour de force of storytelling and analysis, the mantle has in fact only grown more oppressive as nuanced historical understanding fades and is replaced by shallow myth. Absurd as it is to presume to say what Churchill would have thought about any current event, it's relatively certain he would have been horrified by the Iraq War and Brexit, to name two episodes dense with "Finest Hour" analogizing.
But The Churchill Complex is much more than a reflection on the weight of Churchill's legacy and its misuses. At its heart is a series of shrewd and absorbing character studies of the president-prime minster dyads, which in Ian Buruma's gifted hands serve as a master class in politics, dipl…
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M. Sobolewska and R. Ford, "Brexitland: Identity, Diversity and the Reshaping of British Politics" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
28 oktober 2020 · 45 min
What are the identity conflicts that define contemporary society? In Brexitland: Identity, Diversity and the Reshaping of British Politics (Cambridge UP, 2020) Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford, professors of politics at the University of Manchester, explore the long term, structural changes in British society that underpinned the 2016 referendum on EU membership, the 2017 and 2019 general elections, as well as contemporary political debates and future questions such as voting on Scottish independence. At the heart of the book is the identification of new identity groups- both liberal and conservative- that have been shaped by changes in education and diversity, as well as by politicians’ and political parties’ behaviours. Offering historical analysis of immigration and public opinion, as well as a rich and detailed engagement with contemporary social attitudes, the book is essential reading both in the UK and in other nations seeing the rise of similar forms of social change and attitudinal conflicts. Lees meer
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Anthony L. Gardner, "Stars with Stripes: The Essential Partnership between the European Union and the United States" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)
23 oktober 2020 · 39 min
If the US is – in the words of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright – the "indispensible nation" then the economic, democratic and institutional alliance between the US and the EU is the “essential partnership”. So argues Tony Gardner, Barack Obama’s ambassador to the EU and advisor to Joe Biden’s campaign for president in his new book Stars with Stripes: The Essential Partnership between the European Union and the United States (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Lees meer
The EU-US partnership has its frustrations and failings, he writes, but has quietly delivered on trade liberalization, data management, defense and law enforcement, leverage against Russia and Iran, and energy security. If Biden wins in November, these joint projects will be expanded and the fight against climate change brought to the forefront but “time will be short and pressure will be really high” to prove that working with allies achieves more than unilateralism.
Tony Gardner was US ambassador to the EU from 2014-2017 and a member of Bill Clinton’s National Security Council in 1994-1995. He is now a managing partner at Brookfield Asset Management, a board member of Iberdrola, and senior counsel in the law firm Sidley Austin where he works on trade, data privacy and cybersecurity.
Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.
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H. Shelest and M. Rabinovych, "Decentralization, Regional Diversity, and Conflict: The Case of Ukraine" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)
19 oktober 2020 · 54 min
The articles presented in Decentralization, Regional Diversity, and Conflict: The Case of Ukraine (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) aim to explore the current political and administrative challenges that Ukraine is facing. Lees meer
The volume draws particular attention to the issues that have been escalated and intensified since the inception of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. From a diversity of perspectives, the contributors explore the nature of the current challenges, as well as possible ways for dealing with them. One of the central points and issues that the volume highlights is regional diversity. As the editors and contributors make it clear, diversity can be used as an advantage and a disadvantage on both political and legal levels: the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia illustrates a number of ways in which regional diversity can be manipulated and misused. The volume emphasizes that Ukraine is a multiethnic country which has always hosted a diversity of ethnic groups, with a number of linguistic traditions: this factor should be presented as one of the aspects for managing the consequences of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, in which ethnic issues have been extensively manipulated by the Russian authorities. One of the largest contributions of the volume lies in the terminological clarification, with an emphasis on the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, including the Crimea annexation, which produces an effective legal platform for the integration of Ukrainian issues into the European and global contexts.
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Stephen Wall, "Reluctant European: Britain and the European Union from 1945 to Brexit" (Oxford UP, 2020)
9 oktober 2020 · 39 min
In January 2020, the UK became the first country to leave the European Union after a troubled 47-year membership. Lees meer
What was at the core of the country’s semi-detachment to the EU? Was the UK’s eventual inevitable or was it a tragedy of errors and misunderstandings borne of divergent political cultures? What does the future hold for the relationship?
In his new book Reluctant European: Britain and the European Union from 1945 to Brexit (Oxford UP, 2020), Stephen Wall provides unique insight with this narrative political history, having served in the foreign office from 1968, worked for two prime ministers, and ended his career as the UK’s Permanent Representative to the EU in Brussels then as head of the European policy for Tony Blair.
Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.
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Patrick Honohan, "Currency, Credit and Crisis: Central Banking in Ireland and Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
8 oktober 2020 · 46 min
For readers – including non-economists – who want to get to grips with the nature and scale of the last financial crisis, how it was managed and mismanaged, and its particular impact on a small, open economy, Patrick Honohan's book Currency, Credit and Crisis: Central Banking in Ireland and Europe (Cambridge UP, 2020) Lees meer
This is, in part, because it covers complex issues yet is written for a non-specialist audience. But mostly it’s because, as Olivier Blanchard says, this is “financial crisis, seen from the driver’s seat". Honohan is not just an accomplished monetary economist with a lot to say but he was also, from 2009 to 2015, the governor of the Central Bank of Ireland and a member of the Governing Council of the European Central Bank.
His book combines a monetary and financial history of Ireland since independence, theory and history around the formation of the Euro Area, an assessment of lessons learned from the crisis, and a behind-the-scenes memoir of how the crisis was fought.
Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.
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Sheri Berman, "Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day" (Oxford UP, 2019)
6 oktober 2020 · 54 min
At the end of the twentieth century, many believed the story of European political development had come to an end. Modern democracy began in Europe, but for hundreds of years it competed with various forms of dictatorship. Now, though, the entire continent was in the democratic camp for the first time in history. Lees meer
But within a decade, this story had already begun to unravel. Some of the continent's newer democracies slid back towards dictatorship, while citizens in many of its older democracies began questioning democracy's functioning and even its legitimacy. And of course it is not merely in Europe where democracy is under siege.
Across the globe the immense optimism accompanying the post-Cold War democratic wave has been replaced by pessimism. Many new democracies in Latin America, Africa, and Asia began "backsliding," while the Arab Spring quickly turned into the Arab winter.
The victory of Donald Trump led many to wonder if it represented a threat to the future of liberal democracy in the United States. Indeed, it is increasingly common today for leaders, intellectuals, commentators and others to claim that rather than democracy, some form dictatorship or illiberal democracy is the wave of the future.
In Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day (Oxford University Press, 2019), author and Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Sheri Berman, traces the long history of democracy in its cradle, Europe.
She explains that in fact, just about every democratic wave in Europe initially failed, either collapsing in upon itself or succumbing to the forces of reaction. Yet even when democratic waves failed, there were always some achievements that lasted. Even the most virulently reactionary regimes could not suppress every element of democratic progress.
Wide in scope, Berman takes readers through three centuries of turmoil: revolution, fascism, civil war, and - -finally -- the emergence of liberal democratic Europe…
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David R. Marples, "Understanding Ukraine and Belarus: A Memoir" (E-International Relations, 2020)
2 oktober 2020 · 56 min
David R. Marples' new book Understanding Ukraine and Belarus: A Memoir (E-International Relations, 2020) describes the author's academic journey from an undergraduate in London to his current research on Ukraine and Belarus as a History professor in Alberta, Canada. It highlights the dramatic changes of the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods, his travel stories, experiences, and the Stalinist legacy in both countries. It includes extended focus on his visits to Chernobyl and the contaminated zone in the late 1980s and 1990s, as well as a summer working with indigenous groups in eastern Siberia. Visiting Belarus more than 25 times since the 1990s, he was banned for seven years before the visa rules were relaxed in 2017. In the case of Ukraine, it chronicles a transition from a total outsider to one of the best-known scholars in Ukrainian studies, commenting on aspects of the coalescence of scholarship and politics, and the increasing role of social media and the Diaspora in the analysis of crucial events such as the Euromaidan uprising and its aftermath in Kyiv. Lees meer
David R. Marples is a Distinguished University Professor of Russian and East European History, University of Alberta.
Steven Seegel is Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado.
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Marlene Wind, "The Tribalization of Europe: A Defence of our Liberal Values" (Polity, 2020)
24 september 2020 · 55 min
The European Union is arguably facing the greatest existential threat in its history. One of its big four member states has left and the main opposition parties in France and Italy flirt with leaving, while Hungary and Poland drift away from liberal democracy, and the Russian and US presidents openly seek the union’s destruction. Lees meer
In The Tribalization of Europe: A Defence of our Liberal Values (Polity), Professor Wind identifies a common theme: tribalization, and a common remedy: an end to defeatism among liberal democrats. The majority isn’t always right, she says, and minorities need protection. Europeans – people as well as politicians – should stop taking the peace, prosperity and freedom they enjoy for granted and fight back against the populists.
Marlene Wind is Professor of Political Science, Director of the Centre for European Politics at Copenhagen University, and is currently advising the European Commission of rule-of-law issues.
Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.
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Roman Deininger, "Markus Söder: The Shadow Chancellor" (Droemer Knauer, 2020)
23 september 2020 · 38 min
Next year, Germany goes to the polls. For the first time in 15 years, Angela Merkel will not be a candidate for chancellor. Lees meer
Although a leadership election is underway inside Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, all eyes are on the CDU’s Bavarian sister party and its leader Markus Söder as her likely successor.
A “shameless” self-publicist and political chameleon, Söder first rose to national prominence in 2015-17 as a conservative opponent of Merkel’s refugee policy. Yet, three years on, he has redefined himself as a Green-friendly moderate whose national popularity has soared in response to his sound pandemic management.
Who is the 53-year-old Bavarian first minister and, if he does succeed Merkel next year, what should Germany’s geopolitical partners expect? In Markus Söder: The Shadow Chancellor (Droemer Knauer, 2020) Roman Deininger explains.
Few people know better than Deininger, a longtime political reporter for Süddeutsche Zeitung in Munich who has been stalking this wily politician for two decades.
Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.
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Jeremy Black, "A History of Britain: 1945 to Brexit" (Indiana UP, 2017)
8 september 2020 · 1 uur 8 min
According to the influential French commentator and scholar, Raymond Aron, one the great un-answered questions of the post-1945 period is how and why the British went from being ‘Romans to Italians’. In an endeavor to answer this question and much more is Professor of History Emeritus at Exeter University Jeremy Black’s book A History of Britain: 1945 to Brexit (Indiana UP, 2017) Lees meer
Spanning the period from Attlee’s surprise victory over Winston Churchill in 1945, to the equally surprising decision to leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum, Black’s book is a masterpiece of informed scholarly analysis and opinion. Coming from one of the historical profession’s great polymath. Black’s book is a treasure to behold for both the professional historian and the lay educated reader. Black not only deals expertly with the high politics of the period but also with the social changes, economic strains, and cultural and political upheavals that brought Britain to Brexit. This sweeping and engaging book traces Britain's path through the destruction left behind by World War II, Thatcherism, the threats of the IRA, the Scottish referendum, and on to the impact of waves of immigration from the European Union. Black overturns many conventional interpretations of significant historical events, provides context for current developments, and encourages the reader to question why we think the way we do about Britain's past.
Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.
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J. Herbst and S. Lovegrove, "Brexit And Financial Regulation" (Oxford UP, 2020)
4 september 2020 · 32 min
The UK’s transition from legally withdrawing from the EU to leaving the union’s single market will come to an end at midnight on December 31 with no successor trade agreement yet in place. Lees meer
For the UK’s financial sector, which accounts for 7% of the country’s economy and a million of its jobs, whether there is such an agreement and what shape it takes really matters.
In Brexit and Financial Regulation (Oxford University Press, 2020), co-editors Jonathan Herbst and Simon Lovegrove have corralled 26 lawyers from 12 leading firms and chambers to explain why.
Between them, they cover the history of the withdrawal process, the likely impact of Brexit on regulations of everything from how bankers are rewarded for success to how insolvent banks are wound up, and what could happen next in the negotiations.
Jonathan Herbst is Global Head of Financial Services Regulation at law firm Norton Rose Fulbright.
Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.
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Olli Rehn, "Walking the Highwire: Rebalancing the European Economy in Crisis" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)
28 augustus 2020 · 53 min
Walking the Highwire: Rebalancing the European Economy in Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) tells the story of the Eurozone’s crisis from the perspective of an insider who now sits on the European Central Bank’s governing council. Lees meer
Part-policy proposal, part-autobiography, and part-political memoir, at the heart of Walking The Highwire are the four critical years from 2010 to 2014 when Olli Rehn served as European Commissioner for economic and monetary affairs.
The book tells us what took a football-mad boy from Southern Savonia to Brussels – via Oxford and Minnesota – and reveals the behind-the-scenes fights and compromises that shaped the crisis and pulled the euro from the brink.
Olli Rehn has been governor of the Bank of Finland since 2018, was Finnish minister of economic affairs (2015-2016), European Commissioner for economic and monetary affairs (2010-2014), and commissioner for enlargement (2004-2010). He holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford in international political economy.
Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.
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Paul De Grauwe, "Economics of Monetary Union" (Oxford UP, 2020)
13 augustus 2020 · 43 min
First published in 1992 before the creation of the euro, Paul De Grauwe’s Economics of Monetary Union (Oxford University Press, 2020) has become a standard text for undergraduates seeking to understand this remarkable but “fragile” project. Lees meer
Updated every two years and now in its 13th edition, the book can hardly keep up with economic and policy developments in the 19-nation Euro Area.
But De Grauwe, who is still teaching at the London School of Economics after retiring from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, can always be relied upon to plug the gaps with policy ideas. In the latest of these, he made the case for the European Central Bank to monetize governments’ pandemic-related deficits.
Paul De Grauwe is the John Paulson Chair in European Political Economy at the LSE’s European Institute.
Tim G. Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.
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Costas Lapavitsas, "The Left Case Against the EU" (Polity, 2018)
7 augustus 2020 · 1 uur 4 min
Many on the Left see the European Union as a fundamentally benign project with the potential to underpin ever greater cooperation and progress. If it has drifted rightward, the answer is to fight for reform from within. Lees meer
In this iconoclastic polemic, economist Costas Lapavitsas demolishes this view. In The Left Case Against the EU (Polity, 2018), he contends that the EU's response to the Eurozone crisis represents the ultimate transformation of the union into a neoliberal citadel that institutionally embeds austerity, privatization, and wage cuts.
Concurrently, the rise of German hegemony has divided the EU into an unstable core and dependent peripheries. These related developments make the EU impervious to meaningful reform. The solution is therefore a direct challenge to the EU project that stresses popular and national sovereignty as preconditions for true internationalist socialism.
Lapavitsas's powerful manifesto for a left opposition to the EU upends the wishful thinking that often characterizes the debate and will be a challenging read for all on the Left interested in the future of Europe.
Costas Lapavitsas is Professor of Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His research during the last few years has focused on the Eurozone and the financialization of capitalism. He has published widely in the academic field and writes frequently for the international and the Greek press. In January 2015 he was elected in the Greek Parliament with the incoming SYRIZA party, but left in August 2015 when the third bail-out of Greece was signed.
His most recent books include Capitalism in the Ottoman Balkans, with P. Cakiroglu, I.B.Tauris, 2019, The Left Case Against the EU, Polity Press, 2018, Against the Troika: Crisis and Austerity in the Eurozone, with H. Flassbeck, Verso, 2015, and Profiting Without Producing, Verso, 2013.
Daniel Lucas is a student at the University of Groningen, studying European and International law. Plea…
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Tamar Herzog, "A Short History of European Law: The Last Two and a Half Millennia" (Harvard UP, 2019)
22 juli 2020 · 1 uur 33 min
To many observers, European law seems like the endpoint of a mostly random walk through history. Certainly the trajectory of legal systems in the West over the past 2,500 years is far from self-evident. In A Short History of European Law: The Last Two and a Half Millennia (Harvard UP, 2019), Tamar Herzog offers a new road map that reveals underlying patterns and unexpected connections. By identifying what European law was, where its iterations could be found, who was allowed to make and implement it, and what the results were, she ties legal norms to their historical circumstances, and allows readers to grasp their malleability and fragility. Lees meer
Herzog describes how successive European legal systems built upon one another, from ancient times through the establishment and growth of the European Union. Roman law formed the backbone of each configuration, though the way it was understood, used, and reshaped varied dramatically from one century and place to the next. Only by considering Continental civil law and English common law together do we see how they drew from and enriched this shared tradition.
Expanding the definition of Europe to include its colonial domains, Herzog explains that British and Spanish empires in the New World were not only recipients of European legal traditions but also incubators of new ideas. Their experiences, as well as the constant tension between overreaching ideas and naive localism, explain how European law refashioned itself as the epitome of reason and as a system with potentially global applications.
Tamar Herzog is Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor in the History Department at Harvard University, and Affiliated Faculty Member at Harvard Law School.
Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.
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Catherine Belton, "Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West" (FSG, 2020)
23 juni 2020 · 34 min
The Russian state is back. That may not be a big surprise to Russia watchers. The degree to which it is a KGB state, however, is documented in great detail in Catherine Belton's new book Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2020). Certain elements of the KGB were playing a "long game" as early as the 1980s and saw the need for an alternative to the sclerotic late Soviet system. And they were going to be part of that post-Soviet regime. Fast forward 20 years later, these security and intelligence officials are still playing a long game financially, moving billions of dollars around off-shore to forward the interests of the Russian state, and their own. Lees meer
Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @HistoryInvestor or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com
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Gavriel Rosenfeld, "The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
10 april 2020 · 50 min
In his new book, The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Gavriel D. Rosenfeld reveals, for the first time, these postwar nightmares of a future that never happened and explains what they tell us about Western political, intellectual, and cultural life. He shows how postwar German history might have been very different without the fear of the Fourth Reich as a mobilizing idea to combat the right-wing forces that genuinely threatened the country's democratic order. He then explores the universalization of the Fourth Reich by left-wing radicals in the 1960s, its transformation into a source of pop culture entertainment in the 1970s, and its embrace by authoritarian populists and neo-Nazis seeking to attack the European Union since the year 2000. This is a timely analysis of a concept that is increasingly relevant in an era of surging right-wing politics. Lees meer
Gavriel Rosenfeld is Professor of History in Judaic Studies at Fairfield University.
Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on twitter @craig_sorvillo.
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Mathias Haeussler, "Helmut Schmidt and British-German Relations: A European Misunderstanding" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
19 maart 2020 · 35 min
The former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt grew up as a devout Anglophile, yet he clashed heavily and repeatedly with his British counterparts Wilson, Callaghan, and Thatcher during his time in office between 1974 and 1982. Helmut Schmidt and British-German Relations: A European Misunderstanding (Cambridge University Press, 2019) looks at Schmidt's personal experience to explore how and why Britain and Germany rarely saw eye to eye over European integration, uncovering the two countries' deeply competing visions and incompatible strategies for post-war Europe. But it also zooms out to reveal the remarkable extent of simultaneous British-German cooperation in fostering joint European interests on the wider international stage, not least within the transatlantic alliance against the background of a worsening superpower relationship. By connecting these two key areas of bilateral cooperation, Mathias Haeussler of the University of Regensburg offers a major revisionist reinterpretation of Anglo-German bilateral relationship under Schmidt, relevant to anybody interested in British-German relations, European integration, and the Cold War. Lees meer
Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.
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Jonathan Hopkin, "Anti-System Politics: The Crisis of Market Liberalism in Rich Democracies" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
6 maart 2020 · 50 min
Should we understand the rise of Trump or the success of Brexit in terms of populism? Culture? Xenophobia? Do the same political forces produce Sanders and Trump? In his new book Anti-System Politics: The Crisis of Market Liberalism in Rich Democracies (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Jonathan Hopkin provides case studies of Spain, Italy, Greece, the US, and UK to argue that the election results in rich Western democracies are not the result of populism or hostility to migration – but opposition to the inequalities brought on by the economic policy of neo-liberalism. Hopkin’s finely grained qualitative study emphasizes the ways in which economics fuels movements from both left and right. Anti-systems candidates attack the ways in which neo-liberal institutions and politics distribute benefits and risks. For Hopkin, the greater the impact of economic inequality and hardship, the higher the vote share for anti-systems candidates and policies. Lees meer
Hopkin looks back to look forward. As nations abandoned the post-war model of egalitarian capitalism in the 1970s, they triggered an erosion of democratic process in favor of technocratic government that left little room for voters – or their leaders – to influence policy. After the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, voters rejected candidates associated with an economic system that favored bailing out banks yet imposed austerity on citizens. Anti-Systems Politics provides clear and compelling case studies that provide insights on contemporary politics from Europe to the US.
Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013).
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Aliide Naylor, "The Shadow in the East: Vladimir Putin and the New Baltic Front" (I.B. Tauris, 2020)
27 februari 2020 · 51 min
The Baltics are about to be thrust onto the world stage. With a 'belligerent' Vladimir Putin to their east (and 'expansionist' NATO to their west), Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are increasingly the subject of unsettling headlines in both Western and Russian media. But how real are these fears, subject as they are to media embellishment, qualification and denial by both Russia and the West? What do they mean for those living in the Baltics - and for the world? Lees meer
In The Shadow in the East: Vladimir Putin and the New Baltic Front (I. B. Tauris, 2020), Aliide Naylor takes us inside the geopoltitics of the region. Travelling to the heart of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania she explores modernity in the region that birthed Skype, investigates smuggling and reports of troop movements in the borderlands, and explains the countries' unique cultural identities. Naylor tells us why the Baltics matter, arguing persuasively that this region is about to become the new frontline in the political struggle between East and West.
Aliide Naylor is a freelance journalist focusing on Russia and eastern Europe, her writing has appeared in The Guardian, New Statesman, POLITICO Europe, frieze, Vice, among others. Naylor has travelled to all corners of the Baltic states and has also lived in both St. Petersburg and Moscow, where she served as Arts Editor at The Moscow Times.
Steven Seegel is professor of history at University of Northern Colorado.
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Magnus Nordenman, "The New Battle for the Atlantic: Emerging Naval Competition with Russia in the Far North" (Naval Institute Press, 2019)
17 januari 2020 · 44 min
In The New Battle for the Atlantic: Emerging Naval Competition with Russia in the Far North (Naval Institute Press, 2019), Magnus Nordenman explores the emerging competition between the United States and its NATO allies and the resurgent Russian navy in the North Atlantic. This maritime region played a key role in the two world wars and the Cold War, serving as the strategic link between the United States and Europe that enabled the flow of reinforcements and supplies to the European Allies. Nordenman shows that while a conflict in Europe has never been won in the North Atlantic, it surely could have been lost there. Lees meer
With Vladimir Putin’s Russia threatening the peace in Europe following the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the North Atlantic and other maritime domains around Europe are once again vitally important. But this battle will in many ways be different, Nordenman demonstrates, due to an overstretched U.S. Navy, the rise of disruptive technologies, a beleaguered NATO that woke up to the Russian challenge unprepared for high-end warfighting in the maritime domain, and a Russia commanding a smaller, but more sophisticated, navy equipped with long-range cruise missiles. Nordenman also provides a set of recommendations for what the United States and NATO must do now in order to secure the North Atlantic in this new age of great power competition.
Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.
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Diplomacy in Brexit: Is Britain Left Out in the Cold? (Part 1)
10 januari 2020 · 6 min
The new political sciences journal Diplomatica, published by Brill, explores the theme of diplomacy in international relations with special focus on Brexit and its implications for Britain, through some insightful articles. Lees meer
Dr Giles Scott-Smith, professor of New Diplomatic History at Leiden University and editor of Diplomatica, discusses these articles and the overall implications of Brexit for Britain. Listen to Part 1 of this podcast now!
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Diplomacy in Brexit: Is Britain Left Out in the Cold? (Part 2)
10 januari 2020 · 16 min
The new political sciences journal Diplomatica, published by Brill, explores the theme of diplomacy in international relations with special focus on Brexit and its implications for Britain, through some insightful articles. Lees meer
Dr Giles Scott-Smith, professor of New Diplomatic History at Leiden University and editor of Diplomatica, discusses these articles and the overall implications of Brexit for Britain. Listen to Part 2 of this podcast now!
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Stephanie Malia Hom, "Empire's Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy's Crisis of Migration and Detention" (Cornell UP, 2019)
31 december 2019 · 38 min
Italy's current crisis of Mediterranean migration and detention has its roots in early twentieth century imperial ambitions. Stephanie Malia Hom's new book Empire's Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy's Crisis of Migration and Detention (Cornell University Press, 2019) investigates how mobile populations were perceived to be major threats to Italian colonization, and how the state's historical mechanisms of control have resurfaced, with greater force, in today's refugee crisis. Lees meer
What is at stake in Empire's Mobius Strip is a deeper understanding of the forces driving those who move by choice and those who are moved. Hom focuses on Libya, considered Italy's most valuable colony, both politically and economically. Often perceived as the least of the great powers, Italian imperialism has been framed as something of "colonialism lite." But Italian colonizers carried out genocide between 1929–33, targeting nomadic Bedouin and marching almost 100,000 of them across the desert, incarcerating them in camps where more than half who entered died, simply because the Italians considered their way of life suspect. There are uncanny echoes with the situation of the Roma and migrants today. Hom explores three sites, in novella-like essays, where Italy's colonial past touches down in the present: the island, the camp, and the village.
Empire's Mobius Strip brings into relief Italy's shifting constellations of mobility and empire, giving them space to surface, submerge, stretch out across time, and fold back on themselves like a Mobius strip. It deftly shows that mobility forges lasting connections between colonial imperialism and neoliberal empire, establishing Italy as a key site for the study of imperial formations in Europe and the Mediterranean.
Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch
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Paul Robinson, "Russian Conservatism" (Cornell UP, 2019)
24 december 2019 · 58 min
Professor Paul Robinson's new book, Russian Conservatism (Cornell University Press, 2019) is a comprehensive examination of the roots and development of the hardy strain of conservative political thought in Russian history. Lees meer
Robinson begins by tackling the thorny question of how to define conservatism in the Russian context and introduces readers to the "principle of organicism." The use of natural metaphors by Russian conservatives to define their fundamental beliefs is potent: change and development must be organic, and, as Nikolai Berdiaev asserted, "…consist of a healthy reaction to violation of organic nature."
Armed with this definition, Robinson expertly guides us through the development of conservative thought in Russia, beginning with the reign of Alexander I and ending with Vladimir Putin. Along the way, Robinson pauses to introduce the Slavophiles, Pan Slavs, Eurasianists, and the emigre thinkers such as Ivan Ilyin, now enjoying a return to favor amongst Russian elites.
Unlike many historians who bring the narrative to a screeching halt in October 1917, Robinson offers us a through-line for the continued development of Russian conservatism during the Soviet century from the heady days of revolution to the return of more “traditional” values and trappings in the run up to World War II. This approach offers a new perspective on the topic, as does Robinson's deft division of each period into a separate and thorough examination of the cultural, political, and socio-economic branches of the movement.
Professor Robinson writes fluidly and engagingly about his topic; "Russian Conservatism" is a magisterial work, and a must-read for students of Russia's past as well as those of her present, and certainly those eager to divine her future.
Paul Robinson is Professor of History of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. He is author of several books, including The White Russian Army in Exile, 1920–1941, and Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, …
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Giuliana Chamedes, "A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe" (Harvard UP, 2019)
18 december 2019 · 1 uur 8 min
Giuliana Chamedes' new book A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe (Harvard University Press, 2019) explores how World War I galvanized the central government of the Catholic Church to craft its own variety of internationalism, which was intended to rival both liberal and communist internationalism. From 1918 up through the mid-1960s, the Vatican’s ‘Catholic International’ made novel use of international law, public diplomacy, and new forms of communications to deepen the ties between the Catholic Church and different countries and weaken perceived ideological and geopolitical rivals. Lees meer
Drawing on new archival research conducted in eight countries, the book aims to show how the Vatican’s internationalist activities decisively shaped European reconstruction after both the Great War and World War II, and left a lasting mark on global politics, culture, and society. A Twentieth Century Crusade is an avowedly revisionist interpretation of the existing literature on the Holy See in the 20th century. Not all scholars by any means will agree with some or indeed much of what Professor Chamedes has to say. However, no one can gainsay her attempt to re-envisage the politics and diplomacy of the Vatican in the period covered by her book. Henceforth, no one will be able to examine the history of the Holy See in the 1914 to 1965 period without dealing with her new and challenging interpretation.
Giuliana Chamedes is Assistant Professor of History and a faculty affiliate of the Religious Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.
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Jelena Subotić, "Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism" (Cornell UP, 2019)
12 december 2019 · 49 min
In her new book Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism (Cornell University Press, 2019) Jelena Subotić asks why Holocaust memory continues to be so deeply troubled―ignored, appropriated, and obfuscated―throughout Eastern Europe, even though it was in those lands that most of the extermination campaign occurred. As part of accession to the European Union, Subotić shows, East European states were required to adopt, participate in, and contribute to the established Western narrative of the Holocaust. This requirement created anxiety and resentment in post-communist states: Holocaust memory replaced communist terror as the dominant narrative in Eastern Europe, focusing instead on predominantly Jewish suffering in World War II. Influencing the European Union's own memory politics and legislation in the process, post-communist states have attempted to reconcile these two memories by pursuing new strategies of Holocaust remembrance. The memory, symbols, and imagery of the Holocaust have been appropriated to represent crimes of communism. Lees meer
Yellow Star, Red Star presents in-depth accounts of Holocaust remembrance practices in Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania, and extends the discussion to other East European states. The book demonstrates how countries of the region used Holocaust remembrance as a political strategy to resolve their contemporary "ontological insecurities"―insecurities about their identities, about their international status, and about their relationships with other international actors. As Subotić concludes, Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe has never been about the Holocaust or about the desire to remember the past, whether during communism or in its aftermath. Rather, it has been about managing national identities in a precarious and uncertain world.
Jelena Subotić is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Georgia State University (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2007).
Steven Seegel is professor of history at Univ…
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Brittany Lehman, "Teaching Migrant Children in West Germany and Europe, 1945-1992" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
30 september 2019 · 1 uur 6 min
In her new book, Teaching Migrant Children in West Germany and Europe, 1945-1992 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Brittany Lehman examines the right to education for migrant children in Europe between 1949 and 1992. Using West Germany as a case study to explore European trends, the book analyzes how the Council of Europe and European Community’s ideological goals were implemented for specific national groups. The book starts with education for displaced persons and exiles in the 1950s. Then it compares schooling for Italian, Greek, and Turkish labor migrants. Finally, the monograph circles back to asylum seekers and returning ethnic Germans. For each group, the state entries involved tried to balance equal education opportunities with the right to personhood, an effort which became particularly convoluted due to implicit biases. When the European Union was founded in 1993, children’s access to education depended on a complicated mix of legal status and perception of cultural compatibility. Despite claims that all children should have equal opportunities, children’s access was limited by citizenship and ethnic identity. Lees meer
Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018.
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Keir Giles, "Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West" (Chatham House, 2019)
3 september 2019 · 32 min
From Moscow, the world looks different. It is through understanding how Russia sees the world—and its place in it—that the West can best meet the new Russian challenge to the existing world order. Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West (Chatham House, 2019), by Chatham House Senior Russian expert, Keir Giles provides the sophisticated and curious reader a primer to help explain Putin’s Russia. Lees meer
As per Giles, Russia and the West are like neighbors who never seem able to understand each other. A major reason, this book argues, is that Western leaders tend to think that Russia should act as a “rational” Western nation—even though Russian leaders, Tsars, Commissars and Presidents alike for centuries have thought and acted based on their country’s much different history and traditions. Russia, through Western eyes, is unpredictable and irrational, when in fact its leaders from the Tsars to Putin almost always act in their own very predictable and rational ways. For Western leaders to try to engage with Russia without attempting to understand how Russians look at the world is a recipe for repeated disappointment and frequent crises.
Keir Giles, describes how Russian leaders have used consistent doctrinal and strategic approaches to the rest of the world. These approaches may seem deeply alien in the Western world, but understanding them is essential for successful engagement with contemporary Russia. Giles argues that understanding how Moscow’s leaders think and act—not just Vladimir Putin but his predecessors and eventual successors—will help their counterparts in the West develop a less crisis-prone and more productive relationship with Russia.
Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplo…
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Kristen Ghodsee, "Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism" (Duke UP, 2017)
27 juni 2019 · 1 uur 14 min
I am a child of the so-called transition in Bulgaria and growing-up I could never understand why my parents and grandparents would spend our family gatherings talking about the socialist past. It wasn’t until much later that I realized how much socialism and its end are imprinted on my grandparents’, my parents’ and my generation and that such dramatic changes cannot just be bygones. Kristen Ghodsee, an ethnographer and professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent many years digging into the layers of East European socialist and post-socialist experience trying to give voice to more nuanced narratives about this time, and I was very happy to once again have the chance to talk with her, this time about her book Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism (Duke University Press, 2017). In this very personal book with essays and short stories, Ghodsee describes the post-socialist realities of the victims of the greedy neoliberalism that has dismantled their social safety nets and expresses her frustration about the continuing tendency to reduce the twentieth-century East European state socialisms to Stalinism and the Gulags. While acknowledging the many crimes committed in the name of the communist ideal by these regimes, she insists that there were some good aspects and policies from which our present governments could learn, if they would be willing to leave aside the oversimplified and blackwashed tale they cherish so much. “After thirty of years of nursing this terrible hangover from the experience of twentieth century state socialism in Eastern Europe maybe it’s time that we take a little sip and start to clear our heads and figure out where we go from here” Ghodsee says. I invite you to listen and read what she has to say about our need for the proverbial hair of a dog* to sober us up after the heavy drinking of socialism in the twentieth century. Maybe a little bit more of the same could paradoxically hel… Lees meer
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Timothy A. Sayle, "Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order" (Cornell UP, 2019)
28 mei 2019 · 50 min
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization regularly appears in newspapers and political science scholarship. Surprisingly, historians have yet to devote the attention that the organization’s history merits. Timothy A. Sayle, an Assistant Professor of history at the University of Toronto, attempts to correct this. His fascinating new book, Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order (Cornell University Press, 2019), examines the history of NATO from its founding in the late 1940s through to its expansion in the post-Cold War era. Sayle shows how NATO wasn’t just any organization; it was, he writes, “an instrument of great-power politics and the basis for a Pax Atlantica.” Lees meer
Taking his readers deep into the decision-making of NATO and its member states from the 1940s to the 1990s, Sayle provides a new, innovative international history of the second half of the twentieth century. Enduring Alliance should interest historians and scholars from across subfields—military history, U.S. foreign policy history, Cold War history, and global governance studies.
Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie.
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Catherine Baker, “Race and the Yugoslav Region: Postsocialist, Post-Conflict, Postcolonial?” (Manchester UP, 2018)
21 februari 2019 · 1 uur 3 min
Catherine Baker’s fascinating new book poses a deceptively simple question: what does race have to do with the Yugoslav region? Eastern European studies has often framed the region as unimplicated in global formations of race, while still remarking on the conditional positioning of Eastern Europeans as the “Other” of Europe, “white but not quite.” Baker traces a cultural history of Yugoslavia that purposefully foregrounds race, and embraces the many new questions that such a shifting of frameworks enables. From the non-aligned movement, to the rhetoric of “returning” to Europe, to highly racialized 1990’s dance music, Baker’s new book forces us to reconsider how it was ever possible to claim that race has nothing to do with the Yugoslav region. Lees meer
Jelena Golubovic is a PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University.
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Dagmar Herzog, "Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe" (U Wisconsin Press, 2018)
25 januari 2019 · 40 min
In her new book, Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), Dagmar Herzog examines the relationship between reproductive rights and disability rights in contemporary European history. In a study that appeared in the George L. Mosse Series in Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History, Herzog uncovers much that is unexpected. She analyzes Protestant and Catholic theologians that were pro-choice in the 1960s and 1970s; the ways in which some advocates of liberalized abortion access displayed hostility to the disabled; the current backlash against women’s reproductive rights in Europe fueled in part by activists presenting themselves as anti-eugenics and pro-disability; and the impressive advances in disability rights inspired by submerged, contrapuntal strands within psychoanalysis and Christianity alike. An outstanding contribution to the histories of religion, sexuality, and disability rights, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in post-1945 Europe. Lees meer
Michael E. O’Sullivan is Associate Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018.
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Sarah Thomsen Vierra, "Turkish Germans in the Federal Republic of Germany: Immigration, Space, and Belonging, 1961-1990" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
14 januari 2019 · 1 uur 6 min
After years of being overlooked, there has been a growing interest among academic historians in the history of Turkish Guest Workers in West Germany. In her new book, Turkish Germans in the Federal Republic of Germany: Immigration, Space, and Belonging, 1961-1990 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Sarah Thomsen Vierra examines the experience of Turkish immigrants in Berlin. Focused on social history, she synthesized evidence from oral histories, archives, memoirs, and newspapers. Building upon research from a dissertation that won the German Historical Institute’s Fritz Stern Prize, the book analyzes how the first and second generations of Turkish Germans created local spaces where they belonged despite feelings of disillusionment with nationalist xenophobia. It also includes much analysis about the role of women in the guest worker program and its aftermath. Thomsen’s book is essential for anyone interested in the modern history of European migration. Sarah Thomsen Vierra teaches at New England College. Lees meer
Michael E. O’Sullivan is Associate Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018.
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John B. Judis, "The Nationalist Revival: Trade, Immigration, and the Revolt Against Globalization" (Columbia Global Reports, 2018)
21 december 2018 · 30 min
Donald Trump in the United States, Brexit vote in the U.K., various anti-EU parties in Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, and Hungary, as well as nativist or authoritarian leaders in Turkey, Russia, India, and China—Why has nationalism suddenly returned with a vengeance to the political front stage? Are we headed back to the type of conflicts between nations that led to two world wars and a Great Depression in the early to mid-20th Century? What are nationalists so angry about concerning free trade and immigration? Why has globalization suddenly become a dirty word for many people? In his new book, The Nationalist Revival: Trade, Immigration, and the Revolt Against Globalization (Columbia Global Reports, 2018), author, Talking-Points Memo editor-at-large, and commentator John B. Judis, explores in his usual expert fashion these intricate and complex issues. Lees meer
Based on his own travels in America, Europe, and Asia, Judis found that almost all people hold some degree of nationalist sentiments. That per contra to the usual liberal, bien-pensant nostrums, in fact nationalism can be the basis of vibrant democracies as well as repressive dictatorships. Today’s outbreak of "us vs. them" nationalism is a plausible reaction to the utopian cosmopolitanism, which advocates open borders, free trade, rampant outsourcing, and has branded unfairly nationalist sentiments as bigotry. As he did for populism in The Populist Explosion, Judis looks at nationalism from its modern origins in the 18th and 19th centuries to the present to help try to find answers to these very important questions.
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Aleksandr V. Gevorkyan, "Transition Economies: Transformation, Development, and Society in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union" (Routledge, 2018)
7 december 2018 · 43 min
We spoke with the author Aleksandr V. Gevorkyan. His book Transition Economies: Transformation, Development, and Society in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (Routledge, 2018) is a very interesting contribution to the understanding of Soviet economies and their transition, or transformation, as Aleksandr argues. In his book he also discusses the aspect of human transition. I started our conversation asking ‘transition towards what?’ Towards western market economies? Is the field of transition economics affected by the emergence of the successful Chinese model? We briefly discussed the variety of models among the soviet and eastern European nations and how differently they completed their transition. Lees meer
His interdisciplinary study offers a comprehensive analysis of the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Providing full historical context and drawing on a wide range of literature, this book explores the continuous economic and social transformation of the post-socialist world. While the future is yet to be determined, understanding the present phase of transformation is critical. The book’s core exploration evolves along three pivots of competitive economic structure, institutional change, and social welfare. The main elements include analysis of the emergence of the socialist economic model; its adaptations through the twentieth century; discussion of the 1990s market transition reforms; post-2008 crisis development; and the social and economic diversity in the region today. With an appreciation for country specifics, the book also considers the urgent problems of social policy, poverty, income inequality, and labor migration.
Gevorkyan believes that the transformational experience of the “transition” economies must be studied objectively and needs to be more fully integrated within the broader field of economic development. It cannot be reduced to examples of economic models, which is the tendency in literature, b…
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Richard Ivan Jobs, “Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe” (U Chicago Press, 2017)
24 juli 2018 · 57 min
Ever go backpacking through Europe? In Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Richard Ivan Jobs traces the postwar cultural history of the making of Europe through the stories and perspectives of the young people who moved across the continent’s borders. A history of European integration from the end of the Second World War to the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht, the book emphasizes the roles that young people played in postwar recovery and reconciliation efforts, their participation in Europeanization, the upheavals of 1968, and the ways that young people’s movements were circumscribed by the Cold War and transformed by its end. Lees meer
Backpack Ambassadors examines the emergence of a “community of practice” defined by young people themselves, a community complicated by gender, class, race, and other differences. While youth are the key agents in this history, the book also considers the policies, programs, and regulations of the states that sought to encourage and manage the movement of young travelers across Europe in various ways. Transnational in subject and method, the chapters of the book draw on multiple archives and sources from several countries, including interviews with former backpackers and the experiences of the author himself. Absorbing in its myriad stories and compelling in its analysis, Backpack Ambassadors is a must-read for anyone interested in research and writing that connects culture and politics while pushing past the limits of national history. Highly readable and human in its approach, the book is also a fantastic resource for those teaching European integration at the undergraduate or graduate levels.
Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest …
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Adis Maksic, “Ethnic Mobilization, Violence, and the Politics of Affect: The Serb Democratic Party and the Bosnian War” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
5 juli 2018 · 52 min
Within the space of only six months in 1990, the Serb Democratic Party (SDS) managed to win the majority of the Serb vote in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In his new book, Ethnic Mobilization, Violence, and the Politics of Affect: The Serb Democratic Party and the Bosnian War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Adis Maksić Lees meer
traces the rise of the SDS and the collapse of socialist Yugoslavia. Combining discourse analysis with a theoretical focus on affect, Maksic describes how the SDS created a regime of feeling that gave rise to ethnicized modes of identity.
Jelena Golubovic is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Simon Fraser University.
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Jennifer A. Miller, “Turkish Guest Workers in Germany: Hidden Lives and Contested Borders, 1960s to 1980s” (U Toronto Press, 2018)
4 juli 2018 · 57 min
During the 1960s, West Germany eagerly courted workers from Turkey to manage a labor shortage during the country’s Economic Miracle. This program caused one of the most consequential migrations in Cold War Germany. In her new book, Turkish Guest Workers in Germany: Hidden Lives and Contested Borders, 1960s to 1980s (University of Toronto Press, 2018), Jennifer A. Miller revises several assumptions about the men and women who arrived in West Germany from Turkey during this era. She traces the guest worker experience from recruitment in Turkey through the train ride to Germany, the search for housing, and attempts at social integration. Revising many traditional narratives, Miller uses oral histories as well as state documents to shed light on West German policies, guest worker agency, and gendered experiences. Miller’s work adds much nuance to scholarly understanding about the social history of the guest worker program. Lees meer
Michael E. O’Sullivan is Associate Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He will publish Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in the fall of 2018.
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Ashoka Mody, “Eurotragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts” (Oxford UP, 2018)
8 juni 2018 · 1 uur 18 min
For decades the implementation of a single European currency was seen by its advocates as a vital step in the post-World War II movement toward greater European integration. As Ashoka Mody details in Eurotragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts (Oxford University Press, 2018), however, the euro that emerged was built on a dangerously flawed set of assumptions, ones which have made the euro a key factor in the continent’s ongoing economic problems. First proposed by French leaders in the 1960s, the idea of a single European currency was viewed by them as a way of shoring up their presence in the global economy. Though German politicians and bankers were initially resistant to implementing such a currency, this changed during the chancellorship of Helmut Kohl. As he grappled with the resistance to German reunification at the end of the Cold War, Kohl embraced the single currency as a symbol of Germany’s commitment to European cooperation and over the course of the 1990s he shepherded its creation over the objections of economists and growing popular discontent with the idea. These concerns proved prescient in the years following the euro’s introduction in 1999, as the single currency deprived participating nations of the ability to employ devaluation as a national response to global competition, creating added economic issues that have sharpened political tensions throughout the continent ever since. Lees meer
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Leah Bassel and Akwugo Emejulu, “Minority Women and Austerity: Survival and Resistance in France and Britain” (Policy Press, 2017)
27 april 2018 · 40 min
What is the impact of austerity on minority women? How has this impacted on already long standing forms of social inequality across England, France and Scotland? These questions are the subject of Minority Women and Austerity: Survival and Resistance in France and Britain (Policy Press, 2017), the new book from Dr. Leah Bassel, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Leicester, and Professor Akwugo Emejulu, a professor of sociology at the University of Warwick. The book foregrounds the narratives and understandings of minority women activists with regard to the current political moment. It challenges contemporary social policy analysis by using an intersectional approach to the impact of both state and third sector actions, as well as the political mobilizations associated with resistance. Drawing on a wealth of interview fieldwork, detailed policy analysis, and a deep but accessible theoretical framework, the book offers an important intervention on the failures of both right and left wing politics in response to the ongoing marginalization and poverty experienced by women of color. The book is an essential and important read for social policy, sociology, and politics scholars, as well as for anyone who seeks to understand the reality of the racialized and patriarchal contemporary state. Lees meer
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Benjamin Teitelbaum, “Lions of the North: Sounds of the New Nordic Radical Nationalism” (Oxford UP, 2017)
24 januari 2018 · 46 min
Music is frequently connected to leftist politics and seen as the soundtrack to social protest movements, most notably the civil rights movement. But the far right groups use music too. Benjamin Teitelbaum‘s Lions of the North: Sounds of the New Nordic Radical Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2017) explores how Swedish and Nordic far right parties deployed music in the 2000’s to expand the reach of their ideas. Consciously rejecting the sounds of White Power music and the image of skinheads in favor of pop music, hip-hop, and reggae, leaders of Sweden’s far right parties used the change in music to make in-roads into mainstream political discourse. Lees meer
In this podcast Teitelbaum discusses the shifting theoretical landscape that undergirds the radical nationalism and how this led to a variety of approaches toward music by far right parties. We explore how far right musicians and audiences came to use African-inspired musical forms in their effort to spread their ideas about Swedish nationalism. In addition to exploring questions of race, the conversation also examines the changing role of women in far right music and the vexed position of folk music. The podcast concludes with drawing some comparisons and contrasts between far right movements in the United States and Sweden.
Benjamin R. Teitelbaum is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Colorado. Teitelbaum’s commentary on music and politics has appeared in major European and American media outlets, in addition to scholarly venues. He has contributed as an expert for NPR, Swedish Radio, Norwegian Radio, the BBC, Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Helsinge Sanomat and Berlingske, and he has authored op-eds in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, Dagbladet and the Wall Street Journal. Teitelbaum is also a musician who specializes in Swedish folk music and Sweden’s unofficial national instrument, the nyckelharpa. More information about him can be found on his website.
The host for this episode is Ri…
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Sarah D. Phillips, “Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine” (Indiana UP, 2010)
14 december 2017 · 45 min
In Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2010), Sarah D. Phillips offers a compelling investigation of disability policies and movements in Ukraine after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Scrupulously studied and researched, the data that the author presents reflect social and political changes that have been taking place in the country. Most importantly, this study is centered around people, around the lives of people who change our perception of life, love, and care and our understanding of self and other. In this regard, Sarah Phillips explores how official policies and informal movements, connected with the framing of the concept of disability, shape the ways people with physical impairments are integrated into social consciousness. Lees meer
As Sarah Phillips’s study shows, the concept of disability in Ukraine has undergone considerable transformations which were conditioned and triggered by historical circumstances. A particular attention is given to the Soviet period when official terms for the defining of disability became part not only of the Soviet official language but also of Soviet mentality as well. “Invalid”—a term defining a person who has an impairment—was rather often understood as a social stigma, entailing detrimental consequences for the emotional and psychological health of the individual. This “labelling” contributed to the deepening of a gap, separating citizens without impairments and citizens with disabilities.
The current stage of the disability policies in Ukraine is to a large extent shaped by the challenges that were emerging during the Soviet period. As Sarah Phillips convincingly demonstrates, a number of profound changes in terms of the improvement of disability rights movement have taken place. Volunteering initiatives and individual endeavors to recover from injuries and find new ways of social activities considerably re-shaped the understanding of disability. This research recounts pe…
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Ana Miskovska Kajevska, “Feminist Activism at War: Belgrade and Zagreb Feminists in the 1990s” (Routledge, 2017)
1 juni 2017 · 50 min
In Feminist Activism at War: Belgrade and Zagreb Feminists in the 1990s (Routledge, 2017), Macedonian researcher, peace-worker, and activist Ana Miskovska Kajevska analyses the way feminists in Belgrade and Zagreb reacted to the (post-)Yugoslav wars, with an emphasis on their discourses and activities regarding (sexual) war violence and on each other. Using a Bourdieu-based methodology supplemented by interviews, she challenges common assumptions that were not subject to scholarly debate before. Lees meer
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Benjamin Martin, “The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture” (Harvard UP, 2016)
29 november 2016 · 59 min
Benjamin Martin’s The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture (Harvard University Press, 2016) examines the attempt by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to forge a European cultural empire out of their military conquests during World War II. Martin shows that the idea of Europe as a discrete political and cultural entity did not come from the postwar period (much less the European Union of the 1990s), but owes much to the cultural discourses of the 1930s. Germany in particular pushed for a kind of authentic “volkisch” cultural nationalism with a basis in folk traditions of central and eastern Europe. Germany’s initiatives in music, film, and literature appealed to the cultural sensibilities of Europe’s conservative cultural elite, offering a third way between American commercialism (epitomized by jazz and Hollywood films) and Soviet Bolshevism. Lees meer
With the Fall of France in 1940, the Nazi-fascist new order aimed to replace Anglo-French Civilization the universalist basis of European culture since the Enlightenment, with Kultur, a vision of culture that was transcendent and deeply rooted in national specificity. Nazi Germany’s attack on modernism created friction between its ally fascist Italy. Mussolini’s government promoted modernist experimentation in music and art as well the unconventional style of the futurists. Unlike Hitler, who abhorred modernism, Mussolini was a patron to modernism as well as more traditional artistic styles. Both coexisted in the fascist state. Martin shows that although Italy could scarcely compete with Germany militarily, the Italians believed they could export their culture in such a way as to build a kind of Italian-focused cultural hegemony in Europe, supplementing and even competing with Germany.
James Esposito is a historian and researcher interested in digital history, empire, and the history of technology. James can be reached via email at espositojamesj@gmail.com and on Twitter @james_esposito_
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