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This unique volume brings together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars as well as Czech and Slovak decisionmakers who were personally involved in the events leading up to the separation of Czechoslovakia. Asking whether the dissolution was inevitable, the contributors bring a range of different approaches and perspectives to bear on the twin problems of democratic transitions in multinational societies and ethnic separatism and its origins. The blend of analysis and insider experiences will make this book invaluable for all concerned with nationalism and ethnicity, democratization, and transitions in Eastern Europe.
How can democratization, coupled with transnational integration, resolve conflicts over cultural difference in places that are marked by legacies of nationalist competition? This book explores that question through a comparative study of contestations over language use in the heart of the post-Communist region. Zsuzsa Csergo notes that newly independent governments looked to "rejoin" the West, in particular the European Union, while at the same time asserting control over the institutions they considered key to the reproduction of national cultures. These national projects resulted in renewed salience for minority language rights and a complicated politics triggering EU concerns about the tr...
In a historic decision at its Copenhagen Conference in June 1993, the European Union gave the green light to an eastward expansion. Initially, invitations to join the EU went out to just six countries of the former Soviet bloc: Poland, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak republics, Romania, and Bulgaria. However, it was not long before there was a queue of other applicants from Eastern Europe pressing at the EU’s gates. There were real fears in some quarters that the economic reforms demanded for entry into the EU would bring about more ‘shock’ than ‘therapy’ in Eastern Europe, and that a rapid move to the market would undermine support for democracy. This volume of essays, by a group of...
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True examines political and gendered identities in flux in post-communist Czech Republic. She argues that the privatization of a formerly state economy and the adoption of consumer-oriented market practices were shaped by ideas and attitudes about gender roles. This book also offers a provocative general thesis about the inextricable linkages between political and economic changes and gender identities.
Europe Undivided analyzes how an enlarging EU has facilitated a convergence toward liberal democracy among credible future members of the EU in Central and Eastern Europe. It reveals how variations in domestic competition put democratizing states on different political trajectories after 1989, and how the EU's leverage eventually influenced domestic politics in liberal and particularly illiberal democracies. In doing so, Europe Undivided illuminates the changing dynamics of the relationship between the EU and candidate states from 1989 to 2004, and challenges policymakers to manage and improve EU leverage to support democracy, ethnic tolerance, and economic reform in other candidates and proto-candidates such as the Western Balkan states, Turkey, and Ukraine. Albeit not by design, the most powerful and successful tool of EU foreign policy has turned out to be EU enlargement - and this book helps us understand why, and how, it works.
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