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Following World War II, a poorly funded, piecemeal effort to transfer British and American institutions into West Germany resulted in many positive changes for that nation's citizens. After reunification, however, a more ambitious, well-funded, and systematic effort to establish West German institutions in the former GDR has been less effective. Through a close analysis of these two cases, Wade Jacoby explores the conditions under which one society can serve as a model for the reshaping of another. In the initial transfer, Jacoby finds, Allied occupying forces sought to build institutions in Germany that were the functional equivalents of ones they valued at home. They encouraged the develop...
The work's major substantive themes revolve around problems of post-communist socio-economic transformations. Specifically, it explores post-communist systemic change, the role of religion and collective identity, the significance of trust and economic culture, patterns of state-economy interactions in enterprise restructuring, the context of EU expansion, the strengths and weaknesses of economic theory and neo-liberal doctrine, and the history of ideas in the post-communist transformation debate.
As the Central and East European states seek to join the European Union and NATO, they face challenging demands to adhere to specific European norms and standards. In this first comprehensive analysis, contributors examine how this process operates in a variety of domains, including civil-military relations; social, labor, and regional relations; economic and information policies; and foreign policy. Each author considers what norms are generated by (or absent from) European international organizations; how they are communicated to prospective members; and, most important, what impact they have had on the policies and actions of individual countries as well as on the region as a whole. These on-the-ground studies provide the empirical foundation needed to support theories of norm diffusion, constructivism, and liberalism in international relations and comparative politics alike.
Germany has undergone more change in the past two years than it has experienced in decades. In the fall of 2021, the Social Democratic Party unexpectedly surged to first place in the Bundestag elections, going on to lead a coalition of SPD, Greens, and Free Democrats that promised to “dare more progress” domestically. Then just two months after the new government was installed, Russia invaded Ukraine. The contributions in this volume investigate the altered state of German politics and predict the trajectory of Europe’s leading power in the transformed geopolitical environment.
When Vladimir Putin claimed "outside forces" were at work during the Ukrainian Orange Revolution of 2004, it was not just a case of paranoia. In this uprising against election fraud, protesters had been trained in political organization and nonviolent resistance by a Western-financed democracy building coalition. Putin's accusations were more than just a call to xenophobic impulses-they were a testament to the pervasive influence of transnational actors in the shaping of postcommunist countries.Despite this, the role of transnational actors has been downplayed or dismissed by many theorists. Realists maintain that only powerful states assert major influence, while others argue that transnati...
In Collective Action and Exchange: A Game-Theoretic Approach to Contemporary Political Economy, William D. Ferguson presents a comprehensive political economy text aimed at advanced undergraduates in economics and graduate students in the social sciences. The text utilizes collective action as a unifying concept, arguing that collective-action problems lie at the foundation of market success, market failure, economic development, and the motivations for policy. Ferguson draws on information economics, social preference theory, cognition theory, institutional economics, as well as political and policy theory to develop this approach. The text uses classical, evolutionary, and epistemic game theory, along with basic social network analysis, as modeling frameworks. These models effectively bind the ideas presented, generating a coherent theoretic approach to political economy that stresses sometimes overlooked implications.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, West Germany was considered to be one of the world's most successful economic and political systems. In his seminal 1987 analysis of West Germany's 'semisovereign' system of governance, Peter Katzenstein attributed this success to a combination of a fragmented polity, consensus politics and incremental policy changes. However, unification in 1990 has both changed Germany's institutional configuration and created economic and social challenges on a huge scale. This volume therefore asks whether semisovereignty still exists in contemporary Germany and, crucially, whether it remains an asset in terms of addressing these challenges. By shadowing and building on the original study, an eminent team of British, German and American scholars analyses institutional changes and the resulting policy developments in key sectors, with Peter Katzenstein himself providing the conclusion. Together, the chapters provide a landmark assessment of the outcomes produced by one of the world's most important countries.
With the collapse of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in 1991, the Eastern European nations of the former socialist bloc had to figure out their newly capitalist future. Capitalism, they found, was not a single set of political-economic relations. Rather, they each had to decide what sort of capitalist nation to become. In Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery, Dorothee Bohle and Béla Geskovits trace the form that capitalism took in each country, the assets and liabilities left behind by socialism, the transformational strategies embraced by political and technocratic elites, and the influence of transnational actors and institutions. They also evaluate the impact of three re...
Can the political institutions of the transatlantic alliance endure the demise of the Soviet enemy? Did the Iraq crisis of 2002–3 signal the final demise of the Atlantic partnership? If so, what are the likely consequences? In this book a distinguished group of political scientists and historians from Europe and the United States tackle these questions. The book examines the causes and consequences of the crisis in Atlantic relations that accompanied the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The authors' collective focus is not on the war itself, or how it was conducted, or even the situation in Iraq either before or after the conflict. Instead, the crisis over Iraq is the starting point for an examination of transatlantic relations and specifically the Atlantic alliance, an examination that is cross-national in scope and multi-disciplinary in approach.
Reconfiguring European States in Crisis offers a ground-breaking analysis by some of Europe's leading political scientists, examining how the European national state and the European Union state have dealt with two sorts of changes in the last two decades. Firstly, the volume analyses the growth of performance measurement in government, the rise of new sorts of policy delivery agencies, the devolution of power to regions and cities, and the spread of neoliberal ideas in economic policy. The volume demonstrates how the rise of non-state controlled organizations and norms combine with Europeanization to reconfigure European states. Secondly, the volume focuses on how the current crises in fiscal policy, Brexit, security and terrorism, and migration through a borderless European Union have had dramatic effects on European states and will continue to do so.