This is a major new account of the Soviet occupation of postwar Germany and the beginning of the Cold War. Dr Filip Slaveski shows how in the immediate aftermath of war the Red Army command struggled ...to contain the violence of soldiers against German civilians and, at the same time, feed and rebuild the country. This task was then assumed by the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SVAG) which was established to impose order on this chaos. Its attempt, however, intensified the battle for resources and power among competing occupation organs, especially SVAG and the army, which spilled over from threats and sabotage into fighting and shootouts in the streets. At times, such conflicts threatened to paralyse occupation governance, leaving armed troops, liberated POWs and slave labourers free to roam. SVAG's successes in reducing the violence and reconstructing eastern Germany were a remarkable achievement in the chaotic aftermath of war.
Was the Soviet Union a superpower? Red Globalization is a significant rereading of the Cold War as an economic struggle shaped by the global economy. Oscar Sanchez-Sibony challenges the idea that the ...Soviet Union represented a parallel socio-economic construct to the liberal world economy. Instead he shows that the USSR, a middle-income country more often than not at the mercy of global economic forces, tracked the same path as other countries in the world, moving from 1930s autarky to the globalizing processes of the postwar period. In examining the constraints and opportunities afforded the Soviets in their engagement of the capitalist world, he questions the very foundations of the Cold War narrative as a contest between superpowers in a bipolar world. Far from an economic force in the world, the Soviets managed only to become dependent providers of energy to the rich world, and second-best partners to the global South.
This book examines the increasing body of research dedicated to the lasting differences between the former separate states of the Federal German Republic (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic ...(GDR). Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it takes a broad view on German unification and transformation research.
Transformation and unification processes in East and West Germany are still ongoing, and they may serve as a model for social change and its political, economic, and psychological consequences. Using advanced statistical methods of analysis, this edited volume provides insights into the valuable contextualization of individual and social phenomena that current research on German unification and transformation is producing.
Following the open science mindset using code and data, the authors investigate temporal trends in (1) mental health, (2) political attitudes, and (3) work and family life. It explores changes in mental health and political attitudes, as well as continued differences in work and family arrangements, that may stem from heterogeneous experiences within the systems and during the transformation process. This book will appeal to scholars and students from the disciplines of sociology, political science, public health, social psychology, psychology, and communication science interested in postsocialist transition processes and temporal changes in individuals and societies.
The first comparative study of estimative intelligence and strategic surprise in a European context, complementing and testing insights from previous studies centred on the United States.
This book ...provides the first assessment of the performance of three leading European polities in providing estimative intelligence during an era of surprise. It develops a new framework for conducting postmortems guided by a normative model of anticipatory foreign policy. The comparative analysis focuses on how the UK, the EU and Germany handled three cases of major surprises: the Arab uprisings, the rise to power of the Islamic State (ISIS), and the Russian annexation of Crimea. It considers not just government intelligence assessments, but also diplomatic reporting and expert open sources and how these assessments were received by organisational leaders. The book tests and develops new theories about the causes of strategic surprises, going beyond a common focus on intelligence versus policy failures to identify challenges and factors that cut across both communities. With the help of former senior officials, the book identifies lessons yet to be learnt by European polities to better anticipate and prepare for future surprises.
Why have some former enemy countries established durable peace while others remain mired in animosity? When and how does historical memory matter in post-conflict interstate relations? Focusing on ...two case studies, Yinan He argues that the key to interstate reconciliation is the harmonization of national memories. Conversely, memory divergence resulting from national mythmaking harms long-term prospects for reconciliation. After WWII, Sino-Japanese and West German-Polish relations were both antagonized by the Cold War structure, and pernicious myths prevailed in national collective memory. In the 1970s, China and Japan brushed aside historical legacy for immediate diplomatic normalization. But the progress of reconciliation was soon impeded from the 1980s by elite mythmaking practices that stressed historical animosities. Conversely, from the 1970s West Germany and Poland began to de-mythify war history and narrowed their memory gap through restitution measures and textbook cooperation, paving the way for significant progress toward reconciliation after the Cold War.
The Weimar century Greenberg, Udi
2015., 20150104, 2015, 2015-01-04
eBook
The Weimar Centuryreveals the origins of two dramatic events: Germany's post-World War II transformation from a racist dictatorship to a liberal democracy, and the ideological genesis of the Cold ...War. Blending intellectual, political, and international histories, Udi Greenberg shows that the foundations of Germany's reconstruction lay in the country's first democratic experiment, the Weimar Republic (1918-33). He traces the paths of five crucial German émigrés who participated in Weimar's intense political debates, spent the Nazi era in the United States, and then rebuilt Europe after a devastating war. Examining the unexpected stories of these diverse individuals-Protestant political thinker Carl J. Friedrich, Socialist theorist Ernst Fraenkel, Catholic publicist Waldemar Gurian, liberal lawyer Karl Loewenstein, and international relations theorist Hans Morgenthau-Greenberg uncovers the intellectual and political forces that forged Germany's democracy after dictatorship, war, and occupation.
In restructuring German thought and politics, these émigrés also shaped the currents of the early Cold War. Having borne witness to Weimar's political clashes and violent upheavals, they called on democratic regimes to permanently mobilize their citizens and resources in global struggle against their Communist enemies. In the process, they gained entry to the highest levels of American power, serving as top-level advisors to American occupation authorities in Germany and Korea, consultants for the State Department in Latin America, and leaders in universities and philanthropic foundations across Europe and the United States. Their ideas became integral to American global hegemony.
From interwar Germany to the dawn of the American century,The Weimar Centurysheds light on the crucial ideas, individuals, and politics that made the trans-Atlantic postwar order.
To forget it all and begin anew Schroeder, Steven M
To forget it all and begin anew,
c2013, 20130617, 2013, 2013-06-17, 20130101, Letnik:
14
eBook
Drawing on underutilized archival materials, To Forget It All and Begin Anew reveals a nuanced mosaic of like-minded people who worked against considerable odds to make right the wrongs of the Nazi ...era.
The global rise of neoliberalism since the 1970s is widely seen
as a dynamic originating in the United States and the United
Kingdom, and only belatedly and partially repeated by Germany. From
this ...Anglocentric perspective, Germany's emergence at the forefront
of neoliberal reforms in the eurozone is perplexing, and tends to
be attributed to the same forces conventionally associated with the
Anglo-American pioneers. This book challenges this ruling narrative
conceptually and empirically. It recasts the genesis of
neoliberalism as a process driven by a plenitude of actors, ideas,
and interests. And it lays bare the pragmatic reasoning and
counterintuitive choices of German crisis managers that are
obscured by this master story.
Drawing on extensive original archival research, this book
argues that German officials did not intentionally set out to
promote neoliberal change. Instead they were more intent on
preserving Germany's export markets and competitiveness in order to
stabilize the domestic compact between capital and labor.
Nevertheless, the series of measures German policy elites took to
manage the end of golden-age capitalism promoted neoliberal
transformation in crucial respects: it destabilized the Bretton
Woods system; it undermined socialist and social democratic
responses to the crisis in Europe; it frustrated an internationally
coordinated Keynesian reflation of the world economy; and
ultimately it helped push the US into the Volcker interest-rate
shock that inaugurated the attack on welfare and labor under Reagan
and Thatcher.
From this vantage point, the book illuminates the very different
rationale behind the painful reforms German state managers have
demanded of their indebted eurozone partners.
