TOL STORE

Explores patterns of interaction between the mass media and identity formation in the context of Europeanization. On the one hand, the major contribution of the volume is a comprehensive framework that considers media impacts on four levels of identity: European, regional, national, and ethnic minority identities. On the other hand, authors offer cutting edge analysis of the structural transformation of European media institutions, and policies that shape the future of European media. The book conceptualizes how transnational European publics should and could be created in an environment that does not feature any significant pan-European commercial and public service media as we know these institutions from the experience of nation states. Normative conceptualizations of the European publics are juxtaposed to empirical analyses of editorial practice, i.e., the ways journalists and political elites actually represent European matters in their respective national media.

Debating the Past - Modern Bulgarian History: From Stambolov to Zhivkov

The book is comprised of the four major debates on modern Bulgarian history from independence in 1878 to the fall of communism in 1989. The debates are on the Bulgarian–Russian/Soviet relations, on the relations between Agrarians and Communists, on Bulgarian Fascism, and on Communism. They are associated with the rule (regimes) of key political personalities in Bulgarian history: Stambolov (1887–1894), Stamboliiski (1919–1923), Tsar Boris III (1918–1943), and the communist leaders Georgi Dimitrov and Todor Zhivkov (1956–1989). The debates are traced through their various articulations and dramatic turns from their beginnings to the present day.
The whole modern history of Bulgaria is reviewed in the light of the discourses, placed in socio-political contexts. A genuinely modern historiographical syntheses in the East European field that contributes significantly to the gradual de-provincialization of the discipline.

Divide, Provide and Rule - An Integrative History of Poverty Policy, Social Reform, and Social Policy in Hungary under the Habsburg Monarchy

A concise and comprehensive account of the transformation of social policy from traditional poor relief towards social insurance systems in a European state before World War One. Brings together the analysis of older, mostly local welfare policies with the history of social policy developed by the state and operated at a national level. Explores also the interaction of various layers of and actors in welfare policy, i.e. of poor relief, social reform policies and the unfolding welfare state over time, including often neglected elements of these policies such as e.g. protective policies at the work place, housing policy, child protection, and prostitution policies.
Demonstrates how definitions of what constituted need have served historically to produce divergent visions and treatment of male and female poverty, and how these historical biases have continued to shape the conceptual apparatus of research into the history of welfare and social policies.

Lost in Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life after Communism

Lost in Transition tells of ordinary lives upended by the collapse of communism. Through ethnographic essays and short stories based on her experiences with Eastern Europe between 1989 and 2009, Kristen Ghodsee explains why it is that so many Eastern Europeans are nostalgic for the communist past. Ghodsee uses Bulgaria, the Eastern European nation where she has spent the most time, as a lens for exploring the broader transition from communism to democracy. She locates the growing nostalgia for the communist era in the disastrous, disorienting way that the transition was handled. The privatization process was contested and chaotic. A few well-connected foreigners and a new local class of oligarchs and criminals used the uncertainty of the transition process to take formerly state-owned assets for themselves. Ordinary people inevitably felt that they had been robbed. Many people lost their jobs just as the state social-support system disappeared. Lost in Transition portrays one of the most dramatic upheavals in modern history by describing the ways that it interrupted the rhythms of everyday lives, leaving confusion, frustration, and insecurity in its wake.

Worlds Apart: Bosnian Lessons for Global Security

Worlds Apart tells of a well-meaning foreign policy establishment often deaf to the voices of everyday people. Its focus is the Bosnian War, but its implications extend to any situation that prompts the consideration of military intervention on humanitarian grounds. Ambassador Swanee Hunt served in Vienna during the Bosnian War and was intimately involved in American policy toward the Balkans. During her tenure as ambassador and after, she made scores of trips throughout Bosnia and the rest of the former Yugoslavia, attempting to understand the costly delays in foreign military intervention. To that end, she had hundreds of conversations with a wide range of politicians, refugees, journalists, farmers, clergy, aid workers, diplomats, soldiers, and others. In Worlds Apart, Hunt’s eighty vignettes alternate between the people living out the war and “the internationals” deciding whether or how to intervene. From these stories, most of which she witnessed firsthand, she draws lessons applicable to conflicts throughout the world. These lessons cannot be learned from afar, Hunt says, with insiders and outsiders working apart. Only by bridging those worlds can we build a stronger paradigm of inclusive international security.

The Borders of Integration: Polish Migrants in Germany and the United States, 1870-1924

The issues of immigration and integration are at the forefront of contemporary politics. Yet debates over foreign workers and the desirability of their incorporation into European and American societies too often are discussed without a sense of history. McCook’s examination questions static assumptions about race and white immigrant assimilation a hundred years ago, highlighting how the Polish immigrant experience is relevant to present-day immigration debates on both sides of the Atlantic. Further, his research shows the complexity of attitudes toward immigration in Germany and the United States, challenging historical myths surrounding German national identity and the American “melting pot.”

In a comparative study of Polish migrants who settled in the Ruhr Valley and northeastern Pennsylvania, McCook shows that in both regions, Poles become active citizens within their host societies through engagement in social conflict within the public sphere to defend their ethnic, class, gender, and religious interests. While adapting to the Ruhr and northeastern Pennsylvania, Poles simultaneously retained strong bonds with Poland, through remittances, the exchange of letters, newspapers, and frequent return migration. In this analysis of migration in a globalizing world, McCook highlights the multifaceted ways in which immigrants integrate into society, focusing in particular on how Poles created and utilized transnational spaces to mobilize and attain authentic and more permanent identities grounded in newer broadly conceived notions of citizenship.

There have been dramatic changes to the landscape of European security in the twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The essays in European Security Since the Fall of the Berlin Wall collectively take stock of how approaches to security in Europe have changed, both in practice and in theory, since the end of the Cold War.

Organized into three sections, this collection begins with an exploration of the broad changes in Europe's security environment relating to issues such as terrorism and the rising importance of energy security. The second section describes the adaptations of Europe's institutional framework, including the transformation of NATO and the evolution of European armed forces, while the closing essays examine regional security issues with the Middle East, the Balkans, and Russia. Covering a broad spectrum of theoretical approaches and written in a clear, engaging style, European Security Since the Fall of the Berlin Wall will illuminate European security debates for years to come.

Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and its Reversal

Bosnia Remade is an authoritative account of ethnic cleansing and its partial undoing from the onset of the 1990s Bosnian wars up through the present. Gerard Toal and Carl Dahlman combine a bird's-eye view of the entire war from onset to aftermath with a micro-level account of three towns that underwent ethnic cleansing and--later--the return of refugees.

There have been two major attempts to remake the ethnic geography of Bosnia since 1991. In the first instance, ascendant ethno-nationalist forces tried to eradicate the mixed ethnic geographies of Bosnia's towns, villages and communities. These forces devastated tens of thousands of homes and lives, but they failed to destroy Bosnia-Herzegovina as a polity. In the second attempt, which followed the war, the international community, in league with Bosnian officials, endeavored to reverse the demographic and other consequences of this ethnic cleansing. While progress has been uneven, this latter effort has transformed the ethnic demography of Bosnia and moved the nation beyond its recent segregationist past.

By showing how ethnic cleansing was challenged, Bosnia Remade offers more than just a comprehensive narrative of Europe's worst political crisis of the past two decades. It also offers lessons for addressing an enduring global problem.

 

Read TOL's book review: Bosnia’s Frozen Conflicts

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania experienced a sequence of foreign regimes, including Nazism and communism, before recovering their independence and joining the European Union. Clearly and accessibly written, this book is one of the first to provide a general overview of their histories from the stone age to the present using a comparative approach.

Deals with the intersection of issues associated with globalization and the dynamics of core-periphery relations. It places these debates in a large and vital context asking what the relations between cores and peripheries have in forming our vision of what constitutes globalization and what were and are its possible effects. In this sense the debate on globalization is framed as part of a larger and more crucial discourse that tries to account for the essential dynamics—economic, social, political and cultural—between metropolitan areas and their peripheries.

The volume, which has been accomplished in honor of Ivan T. Berend, former Director of the Center for European and Eurasian Studies of UCLA, is organized under three themes, each of which is part of the larger discussion concerning the dynamics of core-periphery relations in a globalized world. The first section deals with the theoretical origins and implications of the core-periphery debate. The second, focusing primarily upon Central and Eastern Europe, analyzes the interactions between economy and society. The third section focuses upon the concept of globalization, its history and its nature.

 

Nationalism from the Left: The Bulgarian Communist Party During the Second World War and the Early Post-War Years

Nationalism from the Left' analyses the case of the BCP as a Marxist institution which increasingly adopted and adapted nationalism; it contributes to the examination of the relatively underresearched field of communist national propaganda, as only in the last decade, have researchers become interested in this topic. It explains the reasons for this and provides evidence of the Party’s nationalism across a number of spheres of political life: domestic and foreign policy, school text books, historiography, festivities and symbols. Thus, the Marxist nationalist discourse of the BCP was all-encompassing. In contrast to many works on national communist parties, 'Nationalism from the Left' identifies many international parallels and presents an historical introduction to the reconciliation of Marxism and nationalism.

The Baltic region is frequently neglected in broader histories of Europe and its international significance can be obscured by separate treatments of the various Baltic states. With this wide-ranging survey, Andrejs Plakans presents the first integrated history of three Baltic peoples - Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians - and draws out the common threads to show how it has been shaped by their location in a strategically desirable corner of Europe. Subordinated in turn by Baltic German landholders, the Polish nobility and gentry, and then by Russian and Soviet administrators, the three nations have nevertheless kept a their distinctive identities - significantly retaining three separate languages in an ethnically diverse region. The book traces the countries' evolution from their ninth-century tribal beginnings to their present status as three thriving and separate nation states, focusing particularly on the region's complex twentieth-century history, which culminated in the eventual re-establishment of national sovereignty after 1991.

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

If there is an explanation for the political killing perpetrated in eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, historian Snyder roots it in agriculture. Stalin wanted to collectivize farmers; Hitler wanted to eliminate them so Germans could colonize the land. The dictators wielded frightening power to advance such fantasies toward reality, and the despots toted up about 14 million corpses between them, so stupefying a figure that Snyder sets himself three goals here: to break down the number into the various actions of murder that comprise it, from liquidation of the kulaks to the final solution; to restore humanity to the victims via surviving testimony to their fates; and to deny Hitler and Stalin any historical justification for their policies, which at the time had legions of supporters and have some even today. Such scope may render Snyder’s project too imposing to casual readers, but it would engage those exposed to the period’s chronology and major interpretive issues, such as the extent to which the Nazi and Soviet systems may be compared. Solid and judicious scholarship for large WWII collections.

Who are Our Ancestors?: "Race", Science, and Politics in Bulgaria 1879-1912

Ever since the changes of 1989, we have seen an outpouring of academic and quasi-academic literature in Bulgaria with a particular emphasis on the quest for origins, and a remote fatherland. Especially important was the revival and even the enforcement of an openly racial thought and a racial approach not that typical in the Bulgarian past. This study relies on a wide scope of primary sources such as references from newspapers and journals, various memoirs, parliamentary debates, political speeches, historical studies, popular historical notions and descriptions, studies in the field of physical anthropology, historical accounts, etc. All these are used to investigate the political instrumentalization of the quest for origins (Slavic, Old Bulgar, Turkic, Tartar, Aryan etc.) in "fin-de-siècle" Bulgaria. The book will be of interest for different specialists in humanities and social sciences working on modern and contemporary problems as well as those working on issues related to earlier periods.