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Making and Remaking the Balkans
With more than 25 years since the collapse of communism, the end of the wars and billions of dollars in aid, the Balkans are still characterized by corruption, state capture, and decidedly unmodern states that are often either weak or authoritarian. Taking the contemporary Balkans as a starting point, Making and Remaking the Balkans studies the region's history combined with observations based on more than twenty years of field experience. Primarily concerned with current issues in the Balkans since 1989, this book explains why the region has endured such a prolonged and fraught transition to democracy and eventual membership in the European Union. The young and educated have largely left. Governmental crisis and economic stagnation is the norm and much-needed regional cooperation has been suppressed by renewed nationalism. Wars on corruption have proved to be largely rhetorical. Making and Remaking the Balkans offers a systematic study of the issues the entire region faces as it struggles to complete the European integration process at a time when the European Union faces bigger problems elsewhere.
From War to Peace in the Balkans, the Middle East and Ukraine
This open access book focuses on the origins, consequences and aftermath of the 1995 and 1999 Western military interventions that led to the end of the most recent Balkan wars. Though challenging problems remain in Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Serbia, the conflict prevention and state-building efforts thereafter were partly successful as countries of the region are on separate tracks towards European Union membership. This study highlights lessons that can be applied to the Middle East and Ukraine, where similar conflicts are likewise challenging sovereignty and territorial integrity. It is an accessible treatment of what makes war and how to make peace ideal for all readers interested in how violent international conflicts can be managed, informed by the experience of a practitioner.
Framing History in East-Central Europe and Beyond
During the 1970s todays Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Forschung, BMBWF) supported the founding of the Center for Austrian Studies at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and the Austrian Chair at Stanford University in California. These foundings were the initial incentives for the worldwide `spreading' of similar institutions; currently, nine Centers for Austrian and Central European Studies exist in seven countries on three continents. The funding of the Ministry enables to connect senior scholars with young scholars, to help young PhD students, to participate in and to benefit from the scientific connec...
Postsocialist Memory in Contemporary German Culture
Scholarship on Eastern Europe after 1989 often focuses narrowly on the socialist past as authoritarian, dictatorial, or totalitarian. This collection, by contrast, illuminates an additional dimension of post-socialist memory: it traces the survival of hopes and dreams born under socialism and the legacy of the unrealized alternative futures embedded within the socialist past. Looking at contemporary German-language literature, film, theater, and art, the volume analyzes reflections on everyday socialist realities as well as narratives of opposition and dissent. The texts discussed here not only revisit the past, but also challenge the present and help us imagine alternative futures. Rather than framing the unrealized futures envisioned in the pre-1989 era as failures, this collection probes post-socialist memory for its future-oriented potential to rethink issues of community, equity and equality, and late-stage capitalism. Foregrounding the complexities of Eastern European legacies also helps us reimagine the relationship between East and West both in Germany and in Europe as a whole.
Migration, EU Integration and the Balkan Route
Contributing to our understanding of the impact of the 2015 migrant “crisis” on the future of EU integration, this book views the “crisis” as an accelerant to existing problems, namely Brexit, the growing popularity of anti-immigrant far right parties and the rise of xenophobic and antiliberal governments from the Baltics to the Balkans. Providing analysis at the national, regional level and EU level, this book shows how the countries on the migrant route have been affected according to their degree of integration with the EU and the specific socio-political and economic conditions of each country. The volume will be of interest to scholars or international relations, security studies, border studies, EU policies, migration studies and Southeast European studies.
Labor in State-Socialist Europe, 1945–1989
Labor regimes under communism in East-Central Europe were complex, shifting, and ambiguous. This collection of sixteen essays offers new conceptual and empirical ways to understand their history from the end of World War II to 1989, and to think about how their experiences relate to debates about labor history, both European and global. The authors reconsider the history of state socialism by re-examining the policies and problems of communist regimes and recovering the voices of the workers who built them. The contributors look at work and workers in Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. They explore the often contentiou...
The Politics of Social Ties
After forced migration to a country where immigrants form an ethnic majority, why do some individuals support exclusivist and nationalist political parties while others do not? Based on extensive interviews and an original survey of 1,200 local Serbs and ethnic Serbian refugees fleeing violent conflict in Bosnia and Croatia, The Politics of Social Ties argues that those immigrants who form close interpersonal networks with others who share their experiences, such as the loss of family, friends, and home, in addition to the memory of ethnic violence from past wars, are more likely to vote for nationalist parties. Any political mobilization occurring within these interpersonal networks is not strategic, rather, individuals engage in political discussion with people who have a greater capacity for mutual empathy over the course of discussing other daily concerns. This book adds the dimension of ethnic identity to the analysis of individual political behavior, without treating ethnic groups as homogeneous social categories. It adds valuable insight to the existing literature on political behavior by emphasizing the role of social ties among individuals.
The Dark Side of Nation-States
Why was there such a far-reaching consensus concerning the utopian goal of national homogeneity in the first half of the twentieth century? Ethnic cleansing is analyzed here as a result of the formation of democratic nation-states, the international order based on them, and European modernity in general. Almost all mass-scale population removals were rationally and precisely organized and carried out in cold blood, with revenge, hatred and other strong emotions playing only a minor role. This book not only considers the majority of population removals which occurred in Eastern Europe, but is also an encompassing, comparative study including Western Europe, interrogating the motivations of Western statesmen and their involvement in large-scale population removals. It also reaches beyond the European continent and considers the reverberations of colonial rule and ethnic cleansing in the former British colonies.
Reporting Genocide
The Western world's responses to genocide have been slow, unwieldly and sometimes unfit for purpose. So argues David Patrick in this essential new contribution to the aid and intervention debate. While the UK and US have historically been committed to the ideals of human rights, freedom and equality, their actual material reactions are more usually dictated by geopolitical 'noise', pre-conceived ideas of worth and the media attention-spans of individual elected leaders. Utilizing a wide-ranging quantitative analysis of media reporting across the globe, Patrick argues that an over-reliance on the Holocaust as the framing device we use to try and come to terms with such horrors can lead to slo...
The last Yugoslav generation
This promising addition to the growing literature on the history of late socialism charts the development of youth culture and politics in socialist Yugoslavia, focusing on the 1980s. Rather than examining the 1980s as a mere prelude to the violent collapse of the country in the 1990s, the book recovers the multiplicity of political visions and cultural developments that evolved at the time and that have been largely forgotten in subsequent discussion. The youth of this generation, the author convincingly argues, sought to rearticulate the Yugoslav socialist framework in order to reinvigorate it and 'democratise' it, rather than destroy it altogether.
