Suchergebnisse

"The authors of this book retell the political and economic history of East-Central Europe, the post-communist Balkans, and the Baltic states and speculate about their future from the vantage point of three competing forces operating in the region: territorial imperialism, globalization, and nationalism. Exposed to imperial aspirations, the geographic area from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea has in the past 150 years been subject to alternating waves of globalization and nationalism. The nineteenth century Eastern European empires were open to forces of economic globalization, but all collapsed at the end of World War One. Emerging nation-states embraced the logic of Western-led globalization but were subjugated by Nazi and Soviet empires, which pursued policies of economic autarchy. The demise of the Soviet empire marked the revival of pre-1939 nation-states and the re-entry of forces of liberalism and globalization into the region, with multiple crises of economic transition, ethnic militancy, new forms of authoritarianism, and external security threats. By 2010 negative, nationalist-populist reactions against crises that globalization brought to Eastern Europe became the dominant political trend. The analysis involves the consideration about the very contemporary factors of Brexit and COVID, as well as Russia's and China's influences, and their effects on Eastern Europe"--

Chapter 1 Introduction -- Nationalism, Imperialism, and Globalization in the Shaping of Eastern Europe -- Background of Theories -- Chapter 2 Dialectics of Globalization: Empires and Nationalism -- Control by Empires Prior to WW I, 1815-1914 -- Emergence of Nation-States after 1918 -- Nazi/Fascist Empire, 1930s and 1940s -- Communist Empire, 1945-89 -- Post-communist Expressions of Nationalism after 1989 -- Chapter 3 Liberalism and Anti-Liberalism -- The Spread of Liberalism and Its Discontentment -- Successes of Liberalism and Persistence of Anti-liberalism -- Conclusion: Eastern Europe between Nationalism and Globalization -- Chapter 4 Ethnic Challenges from Within and Without -- Ethnic Warfare and Conflict within the States -- Migratory Pressures from the External Environment -- Theoretical Conclusion -- Chapter 5 Domestic and Global Security Challenges -- Terrorist Threats inside the State -- Russian Imperial Challenges after Crimea Takeover, 2014 -- Theoretical Conclusion -- Chapter 6 The Cloud of COVID-19 as a Global Pressure on the Region and Its Individual States, 2020 and After -- Key Historical Differences -- Impact of COVID-19 on Democratic Ratings -- Selected Case Studies of Political and Administrative Decisions during the 2020-22 Virus -- Election Outcomes during the Crisis Years -- Theoretical Conclusion -- Chapter 7 Conclusion: Imperialism, Globalization, and Nationalism in Eastern Europe in the Twenty-First Century -- Imperialism -- Globalization -- Nationalism -- Theoretical Conclusions

"Imagining Far-right Terrorism explores far-right terrorism as an object of the narrative imagination in contemporary Western Europe. Western European societies are generally reluctant to think of far-right violence as terrorism, but the reasons for this remain little understood. This book focuses on the extraordinarily complex case of the National Socialist Underground (NSU) in Germany, and high-profile instances of racist violence in Sweden and Norway. The author analyses the narratives surrounding far-right violence, drawing on a broad range of empirical sources. Her account attributes the limits of imagining violence as far-right terrorism to elite practices of narrative control that maintain positive images of the liberal-democratic order in counterpoint to its two constitutive 'others' - the far-right and racialised minorities. Situated broadly within the scholarly tradition of critical terrorism studies, the book breaks new ground in research on far-right terrorism by following its narrative traces across time, public spaces of contestation, and national borders. It also draws on material and findings on far-right terrorism originally written in German, Swedish, and Norwegian, which were previously not available in English. This much-needed volume will be of particular interest to students and researchers of terrorism and political violence, right-wing extremism, European politics, and communication studies"--

This article examines relationships between historical administrative systems and civil service politicization across Europe. I argue that to appreciate when and how history matters, we need to consider public service bargains struck between politicians and senior bureaucrats. Doing so complicates the relationship between historical and current administrative systems: a bureaucratic, as opposed to patrimonial, 18th-century state infrastructure is necessary for the depoliticization of ministerial bureaucracies in present-day Western Europe. However, the relationship does not hold in East-Central Europe since administrative histories are tumultuous and fractured. Combining data from across the European continent, I provide evidence in support of these propositions. Points for practitioners This article addresses policymakers dealing with reforms of personnel policy regimes at the centre of government. It considers the importance of history for politically attractive reforms, as well as the limits of this importance. I argue that 18th-century state infrastructures shape the extent to which political appointments are politically attractive tools for administrative control. I show that only in countries that feature a bureaucratic, as opposed to patrimonial, 18th-century infrastructure are ministerial top management occupied by a permanent, as opposed to politically appointed, staff. However, in East-Central Europe, a ruptured administrative history ensures that the distant past does not similarly shape the extent of political appointments.

Europe at the millennium -- Agriculture and rural life -- Trade 1000-1350 -- Cities, guilds, and political economy -- Economic and social thought -- The great hunger and the big death -- The calamitous fourteenth century -- Technology and consumerism -- War and social unrest -- Fifteenth century portraits

This book describes the way in which landscape and landscape heritage have been - and still are - used to define national identities. It shows how national narratives use different types of landscapes. Some nations use nature as their main point of reference, partly to circumcise conflicts between different ethnic groups. Other nations use agrarian landscapes, that are often describes as timeless and 'rooted'. Again other nations use history as a major sources for defining identities. In these cases, myths of origins, 'Golden Ages' or wars and conflicts deliver the materials for national narratives. The final section describes how nation states developed new urban as well as rural landscapes as national showpieces. As landscapes are an important but under-researched aspect of nation-building, this book fills a gap in the study of nationalism

This introductory essay reviews recent debates on social history, with a focus on the revival of this field of studies in post-communist East Central Europe and its potential impact on rejuvenating approaches to the social history of Europe. The first part of the essay provides a brief overview of the emergence of social history as a reaction to the dominant political history of the nineteenth century and its crystallization in different national schools, and highlights recent responses to the poststructuralist and postmodern critiques of "the social." The second part focuses on traditions of social history research in East Central Europe, taking Poland and Romania as main examples. The third part summarizes the main claims of the articles included in this issue and evaluates their implications for future research. It is argued that, at first glance, post-communist historiography in East Central Europe provides the picture of a discipline in transformation, still struggling to break up with the past and to rebuild its institutional framework, catching up with recent trends and redefining its role in continental and global historiography. The recent attempts to invigorate research in traditional fields of social history might seem largely obsolete, not only out of tune with international developments but also futile reiterations of vistas that have been for long experimented with and superseded in Western Europe. At closer scrutiny, however, historiography in East Central Europe appears—unequal and variegated as it is—as a laboratory for historical innovation and a field of experimentation, and interaction of scholars from various disciplines and scholarly traditions, in which old and new trends amalgamate in peculiar ways. It is suggested that the tendency to reconceptualize the "social" that we currently witness in humanities and social sciences worldwide could be not only reinforced but also cross-fertilized by the "social turn" in East Central Europe, potentially leading to novel approaches.