United Germany Jarausch, Konrad Hugo
2013., 20130715, 2013, 2013-08-15
eBook
Since the attempt to unite two parts of a country divided for four decades yielded contradictory results, this volume provides a balance sheet of the successes and failures of German unification ...during the first quarter century after the fall of the Wall. Five themes, ranging from the transfer of political institutions to the economic crisis, from the social upheaval for women's movements to the cultural efforts at interpretation and the changes in foreign policy have been chosen to illustrate the complexity of the process. The contributors represent a broad interdisciplinary mix of political scientists, historians, and literary scholars. Because personal experiences tend to color scholarly judgments, they are drawn from West Germany, East Germany, and the United States. This collection is the most up-to-date and comprehensive assessment of the political, social, and intellectual consequences of the efforts to regain German unity.
Wolfgang Streeck has written extensively on comparative political economy and institutional theory. In this book he addresses some of the key issues in this field: the role of history in ...institutional analysis, the dynamics of slow institutional change, the limitations of rational design and economic-functionalist explanations of institutional stability, and the recurrent difficulties of restraining the effects of capitalism on social order. In the classification of the 'Varieties of Capitalism' school, Germany has always been taken as the chief exemplar of a 'European', coordinated market economy. Streeck explores to what extent Germany actually conforms to this description. His argument is supported by original empirical research on wage-setting and wage structure, the organization of business and labor in business associations and trade unions, social policy, public finance, and corporate governance. From this evidence, Bringing Capitalism Back In traces the current liberalization of the postwar economy of democratic capitalism by means of an historically-grounded approach to institutional change. This is an important book in comparative political economy and key reading across the social sciences for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Political Economy, Sociology, comparative business systems. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/management/9780199573981/toc.html
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.
1989 Sarotte, Mary Elise; Sarotte, Mary Elise
2014., 20141005, 2014, 2015-01-01
eBook
1989explores the momentous events following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the effects they have had on our world ever since. Based on documents, interviews, and television broadcasts from ...Washington, London, Paris, Bonn, Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow, and a dozen other locations,1989describes how Germany unified, NATO expansion began, and Russia got left on the periphery of the new Europe.
This updated edition contains a new afterword with the most recent evidence on the 1990 origins of NATO's post-Cold War expansion.
The struggle between Russia and Great Britain over Central Asia in the nineteenth century was the original “great game”. For the British, control over the region protected their vital possessions in ...the subcontinent. For an expanding Russian Empire, Central Asia represented the next step in their evolution as a great power. In the past quarter century, a new “great game” has emerged. Not only is the region enmeshed in America's global war on terror, it sits between a newly aggressive Russia and resource-hungry China and alongside one of the volatile areas in the world. This book explores the dynamics of the new competition for influence over the region since 9/11. All three great powers have crafted strategies to build their influence the region, which includes Afghanistan and the former Soviet republics of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. All three are pursuing important goals: basing rights for the U.S., access to natural resources for the Chinese, and increased political influence for the Russians. However, overlooked in all of the talk about this new great game is fact that the Central Asian governments have proven themselves critical agents in their own right, establishing local rules for external power involvement that serve to fend off external pressures and bolster their sovereign authority.
Hezbollah Norton, Augustus Richard
2014, 2014-05-04, Letnik:
53
eBook
With Hezbollah's entry into the Lebanese government in 2009 and recent forceful intervention in the Syrian civil war, the potent Shi'i political and military organization continues to play an ...enormous role in the Middle East. Policymakers in the United States and Israel usually denounce it as a dangerous terrorist group and refuse to engage with it, yet even its adversaries need to contend with its durability and resilient popular support. Although Hezbollah's popularity has declined in many quarters of the Arab world, the Shi'i group-a hybrid of militia, political party, and social services and public works provider-remains the most powerful player in Lebanon. Augustus Richard Norton's Hezbollah stands as the most lucid, informed, and balanced analysis of the group yet written. This edition, with a new prologue and expanded afterword, analyzes recent momentous events-including Hezbollah's political performance in Lebanon, inconsistent responses to the Arab Spring, and recent military support of the al-Asad regime in Syria. Hezbollah is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the Middle East.
Land-locked between its giant neighbors, Russia and China, Mongolia was the first Asian country to adopt communism and the first to abandon it. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, ...Mongolia turned to international financial agencies-including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank-for help in compensating for the economic changes caused by disruptions in the communist world.Modern Mongoliais the best-informed and most thorough account to date of the political economy of Mongolia during the past decade. In it, Morris Rossabi explores the effects of the withdrawal of Soviet assistance, the role of international financial agencies in supporting a pure market economy, and the ways that new policies have led to greater political freedom but also to unemployment, poverty, increasingly inequitable distribution of income, and deterioration in the education, health, and well-being of Mongolian society. Rossabi demonstrates that the agencies providing grants and loans insisted on Mongolia's adherence to a set of policies that did not generally take into account the country's unique heritage and society. Though the sale of state assets, minimalist government, liberalization of trade and prices, a balanced budget, and austerity were supposed to yield marked economic growth, Mongolia-the world's fifth-largest per capita recipient of foreign aid-did not recover as expected. As he details this painful transition from a collective to a capitalist economy, Rossabi also analyzes the cultural effects of the sudden opening of Mongolia to democracy. He looks at the broader implications of Mongolia's international situation and considers its future, particularly in relation to China.
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 2005 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.
In this compelling study, Damani J. Partridge explores citizenship and exclusion in Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall. That event seemed to usher in a new era of universal freedom, but ...post-reunification transformations of German society have in fact produced noncitizens: non-white and "foreign" Germans who are simultaneously portrayed as part of the nation and excluded from full citizenship. Partridge considers the situation of Vietnamese guest workers "left behind" in the former East Germany; images of hypersexualized black bodies reproduced in popular culture and intimate relationships; and debates about the use of the headscarf by Muslim students and teachers. In these and other cases, which regularly provoke violence against those perceived to be different, he shows that German national and European projects are complicit in the production of distinctly European noncitizens.
