TOL STORE

This book explores the system of financing local governments in selected countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Using evidence from the last two decades, the authors, experts on their particular countries, describe the development of the current local government finance system in each nation, and the major challenges and policy options they face. The contributions in this book provide comprehensive coverage of a transitional Europe that encompasses both modern local public finance theory and specific applications in the target countries. This book is a recommended read not only for students of local government and local public finance, but also practitioners and all those who have to deal with the accountability and financial issues at local government level in Central and Eastern Europe.

This volume explores the nature of health and health-care experiences in Russia by comparing societies and communities with different socio-cultural conditions. Key questions addressed by the authors include: How do Russians understand health and what are the factors that influence this understanding? How does this influence Russian self-treatment and prevention behaviour? What are the effects of poverty and standards of living on health? And, how do Russians seek and get access to medical care?These themes were explored through the collection of original data from households in three Russian cities: Moscow, Voronezh and Kazan - the same households interviewed for the authors' earlier work on work and welfare, and poverty and social exclusion. Such a longitudinal follow-up of the same households over 10 years is a unique achievement. In addition questions were identified for inclusion in the 2005 Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, conducted by University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.This book is especially valuable for its collection of original data following a period of rapidly worsening health status amongst the Russian population and a grave decline in male life expectancy. The findings are set within the context of experience from Finland and the UK, allowing the authors to explore the challenge of the Russian health-care crisis to Western European models of health status and health care.

Understanding Post-Communist Transformation: A Bottom Up Approach

The fall of the Berlin Wall launched the transformation of government, economy and society across half of Europe and the former Soviet Union. This text deals with the process of change in former Communist bloc countries, ten of which have become new European Union (EU) democracies while Russia and her neighbours remain burdened by their Soviet legacy. Drawing on more than a hundred public opinion surveys from the New Europe Barometer, the text compares how ordinary people have coped with the stresses and opportunities of transforming Communist societies into post-Communist societies and the resulting differences between peoples in the new EU member states and Russia.Subjects covered by "Understanding Post-Communist Transformation" include: stresses and opportunities of economic transformation; social capital and the development of civil society; elections and the complexities of party politics; the challenges for the EU of raising standards of democratic governance; and, differences between Russia's and the West's interpretation of political life. Written by one of the world's most renowned authorities on this subject, this text is ideal for courses on transition, post-communism, democratization and Russian and Eastern European history and politics.

Behind the Curtain: Travels in Eastern European Football

From the war-ravaged streets of Sarajevo, where turning up for training involved dodging snipers' bullets, to the crumbling splendor of Budapest's Bozsik Stadium, where the likes of Puskas and Kocsis masterminded the fall of England, the landscape of Eastern Europe has changed immeasurably since the fall of communism. Jonathan Wilson has traveled extensively behind the old Iron Curtain, viewing life beyond the fall of the Berlin Wall through the lens of soccer. Where once the state-controlled teams of the Eastern bloc passed their way with crisp efficiency—a sort of communist version of total soccer—to considerable success on the European and international stages, today the beautiful game in the East has been opened up to the free market, and throughout the region a sense of chaos pervades. The threat of totalitarian interference no longer remains; but in its place mafia control is generally accompanied with a crippling lack of funds. Jonathan Wilson goes in search of the spirit of Hungary's Golden Squad of the early 1950s; charts the disintegration of the soccer superpower that was the former Yugoslavia; follows a sorry tale of corruption, mismanagement, and Armenian cognac through the Caucasuses; reopens the case of Russia's greatest soccer player, Eduard Streltsov; and talks to Jan Tomaszewski about an autumn night at Wembley in 1973.

Donald arrives in the Ottoman city of Prizren on the first day of NATO's bombing campaign and his mythic adventures begin. Blending history and today's geopolitics, his search for the origin of the Albanian language reveals the misconceptions of small wars in exotic places through his encounters with townspeople and isolated farmers, guerrillas and a Turkish fez-maker, British special forces and Ukrainian mercenaries.

Hunting the Tiger: The Fast Life and Violent Death of the Balkans' Most Dangerous Man

A gripping investigation into the extraordinary career of Serbia's legendary warlord.

Zeljko “Arkan” Raznatovic began his life as a petty criminal, a juvenile delinquent adrift in the floundering state of Yugoslavia. He would eventually become famous throughout Western Europe: as the “smiling bank robber”; as a Houdini-like fugitive from multiple prisons; and even as a state-sponsored assassin. Stories of motorboat robberies and daylight bank heists would follow him from country to country. Yet however impressive his criminal reputation seemed at first, it was only the beginning of his path to infamy.

Following Yugoslavia's chaotic descent into madness in the 1990s, Arkan would become not only a gangster but one of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic's most valued henchmen in the country's civil war. He rallied Belgrade's notoriously violent soccer hooligans, paired them with inmates from Serbia's prisons, among other brutal street thugs, and trained them to become his ruthless foot soldiers, known as the “Tigers.” During the war, the men rampaged through Croatia and Bosnia---killing, raping, burning, and looting. As they earned a reputation as Serbia's most feared death squad (accused of genocide by The Hague tribunal), Arkan became one of the region's wealthiest men. A national hero, he married the country's greatest pop star---the so-called “Madonna of the Balkans”---in a ceremony that was compared to that of Prince Charles and Princess Diana.

His fame and good fortune, however, could not last. In 1999, as NATO bombs fell on Belgrade, The Hague's International War Crimes Tribunal indicted Arkan forcrimes against humanity, the United States called for his arrest, the world media chased him, and mobster rivals wanted him dead. His days were numbered, and just after the Serbian New Year, he was shockingly assassinated in the crowded lobby of a high-profile Belgrade hotel.

In Hunting the Tiger, journalist Christopher S. Stewart tells the spectacular, bloody, and often nebulous story of a man who was equal parts James Bond, James Dean, Billy the Kid, and Al Capone. In a region still in the throes of sectarian conflict and wracked by the aftermath of decades of violence, Stewart gives us an engaging first-person look at one man who became a symbol of an intensely combustible and illicit age, and who played both villain and hero at a profound historical moment.

Peace Lost. The Failure of Conflict Prevention in Kosovo

This book traces the failure of international action in Kosovo from the late 1980s until NATO intervention in 1999, and endeavours to explain why, during that time, so many opportunities for making peace were squandered. Applying methodology developed by the EU Conflict Prevention Network, it divides the conflict into four main phases and examines how, at each, chances for settlement were either lost or overlooked. It considers policy alternatives available at the time, and hypothesises reasons why these were ultimately discarded. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including the author's own experience of the negotiations process, this book presents a hitherto unexplored thesis of the Kosovo conflict, that of a 'lag' in international action in relation to the situation on the ground, and seeks to draw from these failures some central lessons for the future of conflict prevention.

Bones of Contention: The Living Archives of Vasil Levski and the Making of Bulgaria's National Hero

This is a historical study, taking as its narrative focus the life, death and posthumous fate of Vasil Levski (1837-1873), arguably the major and only uncontested hero of the Bulgarian national pantheon. The main title refers to the 'thick description' of the reburial controversy during the final phase of communist Bulgaria, which centered on the search for Levski's bones. The book gives a specific understanding also of the relationship between nationalism and religion in the post-communist period, by analyzing the recent canonization of Levski. The processes described, although with a chronological depth of almost two centuries, are still very much in the making, and the living archive expands not only in size but with the constant addition of surprising new forms they take.At another level, the book engages in a variety of general theoretical questions. It offers insights into the problems of history and memory: the question of public, social or collective memory; the nature of national memory in comparison to other types of memory; the variability of memory over time and social space; alternative memories; and, memory's techniques like commemorations, the mechanism of creating and transmitting memory.

"If the Balkans hadn't existed, they would have been invented" was the verdict of Count Hermann Keyserling in his famous 1928 publication, Europe. This book traces the relationship between the reality and the invention. Based on a rich selection of travelogues, diplomatic accounts, academic surveys, journalism, and belles-lettres in many languages, Imagining the Balkans explores the ontology of the Balkans from the eighteenth century to the present day, uncovering the ways in which an insidious intellectual tradition was constructed, became mythologized, and is still being transmitted as discourse.
The author, who was raised in the Balkans, is in a unique position to bring both scholarship and sympathy to her subject. A region geographically inextricable from Europe, yet culturally constructed as "the other," the Balkans have often served as a repository of negative characteristics upon which a positive and self-congratulatory image of the "European" has been built. With this work, Todorova offers a timely, accessible study of how an innocent geographic appellation was transformed into one of the most powerful and widespread pejorative designations in modern history.

Revolution and Resistance in Eastern Europe: Challenges to Communist Rule

The history of Eastern Europe during the Cold War is one punctuated by protest and rebellion. Revolution and Resistance in Eastern Europe covers these flashpoints from the Stalin-Tito split of 1948 to the dramatic collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.Covering East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland and Romania, the authors provide comprehensive critical analysis of the varying forms of dissent in the East European socialist states. They take a comparative approach and show how the different movements affected one another. Incorporating archival material only accessible since 1989, they discuss issues such as the diverse manifestations of non-conformity among different strata of the population, the complex relationship between Moscow and the national Communist Parties, the loosening of Soviet control after 1985, and everyday resistance to state authority.This book offers a firm grounding in the tumultuous decades of communist rule, which is essential to understanding the contemporary politics of Eastern Europe.

Poland under Communism: A Cold War History

This is the first English-language history of Poland from the Second World War until the fall of Communism. Using a wide range of Polish archives and unpublished sources in Moscow and Washington, Tony Kemp-Welch integrates the Cold War history of diplomacy and inter-state relations with the study of domestic opposition and social movements. His key themes encompass political, social and economic history; the Communist movement and its relations with the Soviet Union; and the broader East-West context with particular attention to US policies. The book concludes with a first-hand account of how Solidarity formed the world's first post-Communist government in 1989 as the Polish people demonstrated what can be achieved by civic courage against apparently insuperable geo-strategic obstacles. This compelling new account will be essential reading for anyone interested in Polish history, the Communist movement and the course of the Cold War.

The Birth of Tajikistan: National Identity and the Origins of the Republic

This book describes how the Tajiks gained, first an autonomous oblast within Uzbekistan, then an autonomous republic, and finally, in 1929, the status of a full Soviet Union Republic. The new government had not only to survive the civil war that followed the revolution but then to build an entirely new country in an immensely inhospitable terrain. This book is the first documentation of how the idea of a Tajik state came into being.

A vivid history of the birth of a nation. When the Russian Revolution broke out in October 1917, much of Central Asia was still ruled by autonomous rulers such as the Emir of Bukhara and the Khan of Khiva. By 1920 the khanates had been transformed into People's Republics, and, in 1924, Stalin re-drew the frontiers on ethno-linguistic lines creating, amongst other statelets, the Soviet Socialist Republic of Uzbekistan – the land of the Uzbeks. But the Uzbeks were not the only significant ethnic group within the new Uzbekistan's frontiers. An older people, the Tajiks, formed a considerable part of the population. This book describes how, often in the teeth of Uzbek opposition, the Tajiks gained, first an autonomous oblast within Uzbekistan, then an autonomous republic, and finally, in 1929, the status of a full Soviet Union Republic. Once the Tajiks had acquired their own republic, they began to acquire a national identity and national pride. The new government had not only to survive the civil war that followed the revolution but then to build an entirely new country in an immensely inhospitable terrain. New frontiers had to be wrested from neighbours, and a new cultural identity, "national in form but socialist in content", had to be created. This book is the first documentation of how the idea of a Tajik state came into being.

Mitrovic's volume fills the gap in Balkan history by presenting an in-depth look at Serbia and its role in WWI. Serbia did play a key role at the start of the conflict but British and American historians have paid little attention to the topic. As Mark Cornwall writes in his introduction, The Serbian experience is in fact of major significance for three notable reasons. First, in the interlocking development of the wartime continent, Serbia's plight is part of a European jigsaw that cannot be omitted if the whole is to be better understood. At the same time, it serves as a valuable case study of the war in microcosm. It contains all the ingredients of the conflict experienced elsewhere—appalling suffering, legendary sacrifice, war aims, political-military tensions, socio-economic and political upheaval—and some more peculiar to itself, such as mass migration, exile, guerrilla resistance, and the trauma of three years of foreign occupation. Secondly, the First World War was crucial as a stage in the construction of Serbian national mythology in the twentieth century. It enabled many Serbs to envisage themselves as a martyred people, their blood constantly spilled for the greater good. Out of the wartime Serbian 'Golgotha' (a favorite phrase from the Great War!), there finally emerged the dream of a South Slav or Yugoslav state with the Serbian kingdom at its core. It was a national trauma and sacrifice which nationalist Serbs might easily see as being repeated later in the century, in the wars of the 1940s and the 1990s. Thirdly, the Serbian story has a particular resonance for a British reader because of British participation in that trauma. At the time the British role in aiding or propagating or even betraying the Serbian cause was well publicized across Britain. Since then it has been a rather neglected subject, a sign of the amnesia, which can so easily creep into a reductionist official "national memory."

Minority rights is an important issue in all modern states, but for those countries hoping to join the European Union the protection of minorities is a key condition for success in the accession process.This book provides a comprehensive assessment of minority rights in Central and Eastern Europe, covering all the countries of the region that have joined the EU since 2004, including Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria. For each country it outlines the major developments since 1989, highlights the salient issues in minority rights politics, assesses the actual implementation of policies and legislation, explores the roles that domestic and international factors have played - including the impact of the EU succession process - and discusses whether there have been any major changes once EU accession was secured. Overall, this book is important for all those interested in European integration and minority rights politics, as well as for specialists on Central and Eastern Europe.

Of Khans and Kremlins: Tatarstan and the Future of Ethno-Federalism in Russia

Of Khans and Kremlins is the first scholarly book in English to fully examine the effort made by the leadership of the Russian republic of Tatarstan to build and retain state sovereignty in the post-Soviet period. Katherine E. Graney provides new insight into inter-ethnic relations, the politics of cultural pluralism, and federalism in Russia and beyond.