The rejuvenation of Europe as a totalitarian century ends and a global century begins is a remarkable story. This book brings together the three dynamics of Europe's position at this extraordinary ...moment: European monetary union, the deepening of intra-EU cooperation, and the widening of the EU and NATO to take in central European members. It looks at the broad political and policy implications of EMU and shows how the United States views this integration.
Elizabeth Pond, a longtime observer of events in Europe and Russia, sees these developments as the beginning of a new postnational European system that is replacing the centuries-old nation-state system. She shows how belligerence and anarchy have faded away on the European continent as compulsory cold war cooperation becomes a habit and as French-German reconciliation becomes the pattern for reconciliation between other old enemies. She follows NATO's transformation into a reluctant peacemaker in Bosnia and the United States' decision to remain a European power. She describes the leap of faith needed to create European monetary union and charts the magnetic attraction of both NATO and the EU in shaping the democratic, economic, and social revolutions in central Europe. She warns about the strains that will face the transatlantic relationship when the euro is on a par with the dollar as a reserve currency. And she concludes by agreeing with former Polish foreign minister Wladyslaw Barteszewski that we are witnessing, after the original birth of European consciousness a millennium ago, the rebirth of Europe.
Relations between the U.S. and Europe have declined in recent years, and today they are worse than at any time since the 1950s. In Friendly Fire, a veteran reporter known for her shrewd observations ...of political behavior in Europe examines the widening gulf and worsening acrimony between the U.S. and its traditional allies on the European continent. Elizabeth Pond examines a number of disputes -chronic trade quarrels, the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol, Israeli-Palestinian violence, and Iraq -and identifies the ways in which they reinforce and exacerbate one another. European governments have accepted a rhetorical responsibility for global (and not just European) security, but the dearth of defense funding in Europe, disagreements over tactics, and the bad American temper toward the Europeans have added to the estrangement.
This revised and updated paperback edition covers the introduction of the euro, the fall of Milosevic, and the impact of September 11 in European integration. The rejuvenation of Europe as a ...totalitarian century ends and a global century begins is a remarkable story. This book brings together the three dynamics of Europe's position at this extraordinary moment: European monetary union, the deepening of intra-EU cooperation, and the widening of the EU and NATO to take in central European members. It looks at the broad political and policy implications of EMU and shows how the United States views this integration. Elizabeth Pond, a longtime observer of events in Europe and Russia, sees these developments as the beginning of a new postnational European system that is replacing the centuries-old nation-state system. She shows how belligerence and anarchy have faded away on the European continent as compulsory cold war cooperation becomes a habit and as French-German reconciliation becomes the pattern for reconciliation between other old enemies. She follows NATO's transformation into a reluctant peacemaker in Bosnia and the United States' decision to remain a European power. She describes the leap of faith needed to create European monetary union and charts the magnetic attraction of both NATO and the EU in shaping the democratic, economic, and social revolutions in central Europe. She warns about the strains that will face the transatlantic relationship when the euro is on a par with the dollar as a reserve currency. And she concludes by agreeing with former Polish foreign minister Wladyslaw Barteszewski that we are witnessing, after the original birth of European consciousness a millennium ago, the rebirth of Europe.
Can Europe tame the Balkans? That's the question veteran journalist Elizabeth Pond addresses in this timely and absorbing book. Starting with the wars of the Yugoslav succession,Endgame in the ...Balkansguides readers through the region's tumultuous recent history and explores both how the lure of European Union (EU) membership has affected the Balkans and how Balkan developments have shaped the EU. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, as well as decades of experience as a foreign correspondent, Pond moves deftly across the region, from Bulgaria to Romania, Kosovo, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Albania, and Serbia and Montenegro. She examines the many hurdles standing between these countries and EU membership -including poverty, corruption, and rabid chauvinism -as well as the hopes and problems that have led Balkan leaders to look to the West. In the process, she paints a vivid picture of the challenges facing the region as it seeks to vault from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Already in its brief history, the European Union has forged a historic reconciliation between France and Germany and helped consolidate democracy in Portugal, Spain, and Greece. But in southeastern Europe, it faces one of its most difficult tasks yet. Endgame in the Balkans reveals the full extent of this challenge, as well as the grounds for hope. Rich in detail and penetrating analysis, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the future both of the region and of Europe as a whole.
As the immediate threat recedes, the oligarchs who once personally financed Ukraine's defence seem to be trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Serbia Reinvents Itself Pond, Elizabeth
Survival,
09/2013, Letnik:
55, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The Serbia-Kosovo deal signed in April was an historic breakthrough. The ultranationalists in Belgrade are evolving into pragmatists or are being sidelined.
Vietnam’s Second Revolution Pond, Elizabeth
World policy journal,
04/2014, Letnik:
31, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Pond talks about Vietnam. The best way to feel the sheer energy of Vietnam's under-29 population is to ride pillion on Do Duyen's motorbike. Vietnam faces serious economic, political, and ...international problems. But if past is prologue, the difficulties will be resolved by the same bottom-up process that in the late 1980s launched the nation's second revolution, producing a market economy. The first revolution of expelling the French in the 1950s and the Americans in the 1970s was led from the top down, as every Vietnamese schoolboy knows, by founding fathers Ho Chi Minh and General Vo Nguyen Giap. Adapted from the source document.
A generation after the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Serbs have struggled to achieve accountability and reconciliation. Belgrade's record may not offer a blueprint for others, but it has not yet failed.
According to the statistics, Pan Kebiao should be unhappy. As a Fengyang county peasant, he is at the wrong end of China's highly inequitable distribution of wealth. Urban Chinese now earn, on ...average, 3.23 times as much as Pan and his 700 million fellow farmers, a disparity on a par with the United States, Latin America and Russia, and a stark contrast with more egalitarian Europe and Japan. Yet Pan is content, even ebullient. The decollectivisation of China's farmland that started surreptitiously in Fengyang county in Anhui province 33 years ago has let him grow and sell more wheat and rice, trade in his water buffalo for a small tractor to play his eight-tenths of a hectare, and even, this past January, buy a Xiali car and earn extra money as a odd-job driver between planting and harvest. He is not sure whether he actually possesses the paper contract for his renewable and transferable 30-year lease from the local government, but he has no doubt that the land rights will be his to bequeath to his niece. Nor does he worry about urban seizure of contiguous cropland in this still predominantly rural county. Qian Yunhui, by contrast, was extremely discontented with the lot of the farmers he was responsible for as a local Communist Party leader. His village of Zhaiqiao was too close to urban sprawl.