Shatterzone of Empires Larry Wolfe, Gregor Thum, Dan Diner, Theodore R. Weeks, Gary B. Cohen, Pieter M. Judson, Frithjof Benjamin Schenk, Elke Hartmann, Patrice M. Dabrowski, Robert Nemes, Yaroslav Hrytsak, Tomas Balkelis, Taner Akçam, Eyal Ginio, Keith Brown, David Gaunt, Peter Holquist, Alexander V. Prusin, John-Paul Hi / Omer Bartov, Eric D. Weitz / OMER BARTOV, ERIC D WEITZ
02/2013
eBook
Shatterzone of Empires is a comprehensive analysis of interethnic relations, coexistence, and violence in Europe's eastern borderlands over the past two centuries. In this vast territory, extending ...from the Baltic to the Black Sea, four major empires with ethnically and religiously diverse populations encountered each other along often changing and contested borders. Examining this geographically widespread, multicultural region at several levels-local, national, transnational, and empire-and through multiple approaches-social, cultural, political, and economic-this volume offers informed and dispassionate analyses of how the many populations of these borderlands managed to coexist in a previous era and how and why the areas eventually descended into violence. An understanding of this specific region will help readers grasp the preconditions of interethnic coexistence and the causes of ethnic violence and war in many of the world's other borderlands both past and present.
Contemporary debates give the impression that the presence of immigrants necessarily spells strife. Yet as Immigration and Conflict in Europe shows, the incidence of conflict involving immigrants and ...their descendants has varied widely across groups, cities, and countries. The book presents a theory to account for this uneven pattern, explaining why we observe clashes between immigrants and natives in some locations but not in others and why some cities experience confrontations between immigrants and state actors while others are spared from such conflicts. The book addresses how economic conditions interact with electoral incentives to account for immigrant-native and immigrant-state conflict across groups and cities within Great Britain as well as across Germany and France. It highlights the importance of national immigration regimes and local political economies in shaping immigrants' economic position and political behavior, demonstrating how economic and electoral forces, rather than cultural differences, determine patterns of conflict and calm.
European anti-Muslim attitudes: the voice of public protest against out-of-touch elites? Are anti-Muslim attitudes becoming the spectre that is haunting Europe? Is Islamophobia as widespread and ...virulent as is made out? Or do some EU societies appear more prejudiced than others? And is there an anti-elitest dimension to Europeans' protest about rapid demographic change occurring in their countries? This cross-national analysis of Islamophobia looks at these questions in an innovative, even-handed way, steering clear of politically-correct clichés and stereotypes. It cautions that Islamophobia is a serious threat to European values and norms, and must be tackled by future immigration and integration policy.
Europe in crisis Hewitson, Mark; D’Auria, Matthew
2012., 20121015, 2012, 2015-06-30, 20120101
eBook
The period between 1917 and 1957, starting with the birth of the USSR and the American intervention in the First World War and ending with the Treaty of Rome, is of the utmost importance for ...contextualizing and understanding the intellectual origins of the European Community. During this time of 'crisis,' many contemporaries, especially intellectuals, felt they faced a momentous decision which could bring about a radically different future. The understanding of what Europe was and what it should be was questioned in a profound way, forcing Europeans to react. The idea of a specifically European unity finally became, at least for some, a feasible project, not only to avoid another war but to avoid the destruction of the idea of European unity. This volume reassesses the relationship between ideas of Europe and the European project and reconsiders the impact of long and short-term political transformations on assumptions about the continent's scope, nature, role and significance.
This edited collection offers the latest scholarship on book catalogues in early modern Europe. Contributors discuss the role that these catalogues played in bookselling and book auctions, as well as ...in guiding the tastes of book collectors.
Cold war cultures Vowinckel, Annette; Payk, Marcus M; Lindenberger, Thomas
2012., 20120315, 2012, 2012-03-15, 20120101
eBook
The Cold War was not only about the imperial ambitions of the super powers, their military strategies, and antagonistic ideologies. It was also about conflicting worldviews and their correlates in ...the daily life of the societies involved. The term "Cold War Culture" is often used in a broad sense to describe media influences, social practices, and symbolic representations as they shape, and are shaped by, international relations. Yet, it remains in question whether - or to what extent - the Cold War Culture model can be applied to European societies, both in the East and the West. While every European country had to adapt to the constraints imposed by the Cold War, individual development was affected by specific conditions as detailed in these chapters. This volume offers an important contribution to the international debate on this issue of the Cold War impact on everyday life by providing a better understanding of its history and legacy in Eastern and Western Europe.
In 2004 the European Union and NATO each added ten new member states, most from the post-communist countries of Eastern and Central Europe. In order to prepare for membership, these countries had to ...make many thousands of institutional and legal adjustments. Indeed, they often tried to modernize in just a few years, implementing practices that evolved over many decades in Western Europe. This book emphasizes the way that policy elites in Central and Eastern Europe often 'ordered from the menu' of established Western practices. When did this emulation of Western practices succeed and when did it result in a fiasco? Professor Jacoby examines empirical cases in agriculture, regional policy, consumer protection, health care, civilian control of the military, and military professionalism from Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, Bulgaria, and the Ukraine. The book addresses debates in institutionalist theory, including conditionality, Europeanization, and external influences on democratic and market transitions.
In the wake of modern genocide, we tend to think of violence against minorities as a sign of intolerance, or, even worse, a prelude to extermination. Violence in the Middle Ages, however, functioned ...differently, according to David Nirenberg. In this provocative book, he focuses on specific attacks against minorities in fourteenth-century France and the Crown of Aragon (Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia). He argues that these attacks--ranging from massacres to verbal assaults against Jews, Muslims, lepers, and prostitutes--were often perpetrated not by irrational masses laboring under inherited ideologies and prejudices, but by groups that manipulated and reshaped the available discourses on minorities. Nirenberg shows that their use of violence expressed complex beliefs about topics as diverse as divine history, kinship, sex, money, and disease, and that their actions were frequently contested by competing groups within their own society. Nirenberg's readings of archival and literary sources demonstrates how violence set the terms and limits of coexistence for medieval minorities. The particular and contingent nature of this coexistence is underscored by the book's juxtapositions--some systematic (for example, that of the Crown of Aragon with France, Jew with Muslim, medieval with modern), and some suggestive (such as African ritual rebellion with Catalan riots). Throughout, the book questions the applicability of dichotomies like tolerance versus intolerance to the Middle Ages, and suggests the limitations of those analyses that look for the origins of modern European persecutory violence in the medieval past.
This book examines the fascinating interplay of party and media behavior to explain one of the most important phenomena in Western Europe: the rise of far-right parties. To account for the divergent ...electoral fortunes of these parties, the book examines how political parties and the mass media have dealt with growing public concerns over national identity. Mainstream politicians chose to 'play the nationalist card', creating opportunities for the entry of far-right parties into the political system. In some cases, the media gave outsized exposure to such parties, allowing them to capitalize on these opportunities; in other cases, they ignored them, blocking their entry into the political system. Using elite interviews, content analysis, and primary documents to trace identity politics since the 1980s, this book presents an original interpretation of identity politics and media behavior in Austria, Germany, Greece, and France since the 1980s.
An exemplary study in comparative contemporary history, this monograph looks at rural change in six countries: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. In the 1990s most of ...these nations experienced a fourth radical restructuring of agricultural relations in the twentieth century, and all went through the dramatic transition from communism to capitalism.
