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Addresses the many problems in defining the relationship of intellectuals to the society in which they live. The contributors come from a wide variety of disciplines, and are drawn from both America and Eastern and Western Europe.
"First published to great success in Hungarian, this entertaining and compelling book reveals surprising insights into the challenges and possibilities of self-fulfillment.
DIVEastern Europe ten years after the Cold War./div
The central conflicts of the world today are closely related to cultural, traditional, and religious differences between nations. As we move to a globalized world, these differences often become magnified, entrenched, and the cause of bloody conflict. Growing out of a conference of distinguished scholars from the MiddleEast, Europe, and the United States, this volume is a singular contribution to mutual understanding and cooperative efforts on behalf of peace. The term paideia, drawn from Greek philosophy, has to do with responsible education for citizenship as a necessary precondition for effective democracy. The problems discussed here are crucial, but not simple. How can we find shared et...
This investigation of the media in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, seeks to outline the legacies of communism confronting media reform, and how interaction between the media, state, society and market has led to the particular and unique dynamics in each case.
The revolutions of 1989 swept away Eastern Europe's communist governments and created expectations on the part of many observers that post-communist media would lead the liberated societies in establishing and embracing democratic political cultures. Peter Gross finds that it was utopian to hold such expectations of the media in societies in transition. On the one hand, those countries' media professionals had all learned their jobs under the communist regimes and could not instantly transform themselves into guides for a politically enabled populace, Gross argues. On the other hand, newcomers to the media world, even those who were notable literary figures, viewed themselves as social and p...
These essays analyze the ideological and historical sources of the apparent reversal of the pattern of welfare state expansion in the United States, Great Britain, and Western and Eastern Europe.
The book is concerned with the formation of new institutions in Eastern Europe following the events of 1989. Two comparative chapters discuss the problems of institution building arising from the communist legacy and the difficulties of a successful transition to liberal democracy. In the remainder of the book, country-specific chapters deal with the institutional characteristics of countries in the region - Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Russia, East Germany. Attention is focused on constitutions, executive and parliament relations, and parties and electoral systems.
Gale Stokes' The Walls Came Tumbling Down has been one of the standard interpretations of the East European revolutions of 1989 for many years. It offers a sweeping yet vivid narrative of the two decades of developments that led from the Prague Spring of 1968 to the collapse of communism in 1989. Highlights of that narrative include, among other things, discussions of Solidarity and civil society in Poland, Charter 77 and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, and the bizarre regime of Romania's Nikolae Ceausescu and his violent downfall. In this second edition, now appropriately subtitled Collapse and Rebirth in Eastern Europe, Stokes not only has revised these portions of the book in the light of recent scholarship, but has added three new chapters covering the post-communist period, including analyses of the unification of Germany and the collapse of the Soviet Union, narratives of the admission of many of the countries of the region to the European Union, and discussion of the unfortunate outcomes of the Wars of Yugoslav Succession in the Western Balkans.
Immediately after 1989, newly emerging polities in Eastern Europe had to contend with an overbearing and dominant legacy: the Soviet model of the state. At that time, the strength of the state looked like a massive obstacle to change; less than a decade later, the state's dominant characteristic was no longer its overweening powerfulness, but rather its utter decrepitude. Consequently, the role of the central state in managing economies, providing social services, and maintaining infrastructure came into question. Focusing on his native Bulgaria, Venelin I. Ganev explores in fine-grained detail the weakening of the central state in post-Soviet Eastern Europe.Ganev starts with the structural ...