TOL STORE BY TOPIC "politics"

The Origins of Postcommunist Elites: From Prague Spring to the Breakup of Czechoslovakia

How is it that Czechoslovakia's separation into two countries in 1993 was accomplished so peacefully-especially when compared with the experiences of its neighbors Russia and Yugoslavia? This book provides a sociological answer to this question-and an empirical explanation for the breakup of Czechoslovakia-by tracing the political processes begun in the Prague Spring of 1968.

Gil Eyal's main argument is that Czechoslovakia's breakup was caused by a struggle between two factions of what sociologists call "the new class," which consisted primarily of intellectuals and technocrats. Focusing on the process of polarization that created these two factions-and two distinct political elites-Eyal shows how in response to the events of the ill-fated Prague Spring Czech and Slovak members of the new class embarked on divergent paths and developed radically different, even opposed, identities, worldviews, and interests. Unlike most accounts of postcommunist nationalist conflict, this book suggests that what bound together each of these factions-and what differentiated each from the other-were not national identities and nationalist sentiments per se, but their distinctive visions of the social role of intellectuals.

Gil Eyal is associate professor of sociology at Columbia University.

Steven Saxonberg focuses on three main issues in Czech politics: the development of the Czech party system, the "Klaus phenomenon," and gender issues. Recurring themes throughout the book are the role and limits of formal political institutions, the importance of social psychological elements and the lack of influence which ideology has on party politics and voting during the transitional period.

Original in its range and analysis, Women in Russia, 1700-2000 fills an enormous gap in the field. It is the first book to provide a lively and compelling chronological narrative of women's experiences from the seventeenth century to the present. Synthesizing recent scholarship with her own work in primary and archival sources, Barbara Alpern Engel skillfully evokes the voices of individuals to enliven the account. The book captures the diversity of women's lives, detailing how women of various social strata were affected by and shaped historical change. Adopting the perspective of women provides fresh interpretations of Russia's past and important insights into the impact of gender on the ways that Russians defined themselves and others, and imagined political change. Designed for a scholarly as well as undergraduate readership, the book integrates women's experience into broader developments in Russia's social, economic, cultural, and political history.

The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu's Romania

The political hypocrisy and personal horrors of one of the most repressive anti-abortion regimes in history came to the world's attention soon after the fall of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Photographs of orphans with vacant eyes, sad faces, and wasted bodies circled the globe, as did alarming maternal mortality statistics and heart-breaking details of a devastating infant AIDS epidemic. Gail Kligman's chilling ethnographyof the state and of the politics of reproductionis the first in-depth examination of this extreme case of political intervention into the most intimate aspects of everyday life. Ceausescu's reproductive policies, among which the banning of abortion was central, affected the physical and emotional well-being not only of individual men, women, children, and families but also of society as a whole. Sexuality, intimacy, and fertility control were fraught with fear, which permeated daily life and took a heavy moral toll as lying and dissimulation transformed both individuals and the state. This powerful study is based on moving interviews with women and physicians as well as on documentary and archival material. In addition to discussing the social implications and human costs of restrictive reproductive legislation, Kligman explores the means by which reproductive issues become embedded in national and international agendas. She concludes with a review of the lessons the rest of the world can learn from Romania's tragic experience.

Bringing together a top flight set of contributors, this book considers the problems and prospects for creating trustworthy and reliable public institutions since the transition from socialism in Central and Eastern Europe. The focus is on "second generation" issues of democratic consolidation in states where the basic structures of the market and the state have been established. The contributors raise important issues, such as corruption and participation, largely neglected during the first stage of the transition and that are of growing importance as several countries in the region move toward entry into the European Union. Highlighting problems and prospects of democratization with comparative import to other newly democratizing areas, this volume draws on the experience of those who have lived through and studied the transition and contrasts their insights with those of generalist scholars who study government accountability and democracy.

Shifting Obsessions: Three Essays on the Politics of Anticorruption

A global anticorruption crusade is underway. "As slavery was once a way of life and now has become obsolete and incomprehensible, so the practice of bribery will become obsolete," a modern-day moralist has said. But how is global consensus on corruption possible? Why are anticorruption campaigns running out of steam, and why are post-communist societies obsessed with corruption? This book is not a study of anti-corruption policies. Instead, it looks at the politics of anti-corruption. Policies are what institutions do. But in analyzing politics, this book seeks to discover why institutions do what they do. The author delves into political motivations at a time when "combating corruption" is the fashion among the academic community.
Krastev argues that anticorruption sentiments are not driven by the actual level of corruption but by general disappointment with liberal reforms that cause rising social inequality. In this collection of essays, the author makes the provocative argument that the current corruption-focused policies are doomed.

One of the central characteristics of socialist states and societies has been the absence of trust--between the state and the citizens, and then among citizens themselves. The process of developing trust is thus a major issue facing post-Socialist countries, and this book brings together a group of leading scholars to examine barriers to and bulwarks of trust in theoretical, cross-national, and topical perspectives. From the distinctive paradox of illegal organizations--such as the Mafiya--relying on trust within but undermining it without, to the effects of transparency, the authors examine the bases of trust and the effects of its presence or absence. Throughout the analysis is grounded in the interaction of individuals and their social, political, and economic environments.

Sacco translates the events in Bosnia into graphic novel format. An indispensable document of the conflict. Sacco spent four months in Bosnia, between 1995-1996, immersing himself in the human side of life during wartime, researching stoires that are rarely found in conventional news coverage. Here he focuses on the Muslim enclave of Gorazde, which was beseiged by Bosnian Serbs during the war. The book is strongly compared to the Pulitzer prize winner Maus, and advance praise rate it as being one of the most important documents to emerge from the conflict as it portrays day to day life at the heart of these events.

The best known prose work by the winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature examines the moral and intellectual conflicts faced by men and women living under totalitarianism of the left or right.

The protagonists of The Second Book, are connected vertically and horizontally by their struggles. Nietzsche, on the edge of madness, spends a number of mornings contemplating his sweeping ideas and the tiny details of life through hazes left by "the gluey fingers of sleep." In "The Hot Sun's Golden Circle," the pharaoh Amenhotep IV, discoverer of monotheism, embarks on a search for the only true god of Egypt. Bazdulj's charming and funny "The Story of Two Brothers" examines the lives of William and Henry James from the shadows of the Old Testament and the age-old archetype of conflict between an eldest brother and the "maladjusted impracticality" of the younger.

Muharem Bazdulj has broken from the pack of new Eastern European writers influenced by innovators such as Danilo Kiš, Milan Kundera, and Jorge Luis Borges. Employing a light touch, a daring anti-nationalist tone, and the kind of ambition that inspires nothing less than a rewriting of Bosnian and Yugoslavian history, Bazdulj weaves the imagined realities of history into fiction and fiction into history. To quote one critic, for Bazdulj history "is the sum of interpretations while imagination is the sum of facts."

Theft of a Nation: Romania Since Communism

'Romania had the chance of a fresh start politically after the collapse of the brutal and macabre dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989. Instead bad governance has persisted within an incomplete democratic system with disastrous results for many millions of people. Tom Gallagher explores why continuity rather than change has been the dominant feature of political life after 1989. He provides an inspiring portrait of the post-communist leadership centred around Ion Iliescu, Adrian Nastase and their clients and allies, showing how defence of private or group interests has usually been their primary concern. He shows how they promoted bogus nationalist movements in order to cover up systematic misuse of state resources. The failure of the non-communist democratic alternative, centred around Emil Constantinescu, Romania's President from 1996 to 2000, to break this pattern of misrule, is closely examined. The author warns that NATO and EU membership are unlikely to provide the impetus for national recovery unless convincing local partners are found, prepared at all times to defend Romania's national interests. (…) Incisive portraits of the political elite, the security services and the new economic oligarchy are provided in this study. Tom Gallagher is convinced that Romania can break free from the communist past and enjoy close and fruitful links with the West only if strong reformist movements emerge from increasingly self-aware sections of society that reject the political practices of the past.'

TOM GALLAGHER BA PhD Manc holds the Chair of Ethnic Conflict and Peace at Bradford University in the UK. Much of his teaching and research focuses on the evolution of post-communist states of South Eastern Europe.

Tom Gallagher has written two books ‘Outcast Europe: The Balkans From The Ottomans To Milosevic: 1789-1989’, (Routledge 2001) and ‘The Balkans Since The Cold War: From Tyranny to Tragedy’, (Routledge in 2003) which examine the long-term mishandling of the problems of the region by the great powers and the failure of timely conflict prevention measures to avert the tragedy of Bosnia and build a durable peace.

Tom Gallagher is a regular analyst for well-known consultancy groups and he is a frequent visitor to the region. Romania, Macedonia, and Kosovo were among the countries he visited in 2003-4. He is one of the few specialists who has expert knowledge of both the former Yugoslavia and those parts of the post-communist Balkans that remained at peace in the 1990s and beyond. Romania is a country about which he can claim particular expertise. ‘Romania After Ceausescu: The Politics of Intolerance’ was published by Edinburgh University Press in 1995.

On May 1, 2004, the European Union expanded dramatically. Ten new countries on the periphery of the old union were absorbed, changing the EU in many ways. How can we redefine Europe now? What is its meaning? Is “Europe” just a theoretical concept or, worse yet, merely a small geographical region? Or, on the contrary, is Europe re-emerging as a Western civilization of its own, a North Atlantic partner? Many scholars believe that federalism should play the central role as 25 member states seek to cooperate fully while simultaneously retaining their sovereignty. This volume, with new and thought-provoking contributions by leading experts, clarifies the issues and proposes ways in which federalism can rescue and preserve the new Europe.

After the collapse of communism there was a widespread fear that nationalism would pose a serious threat to the development of liberal democracy in the countries of Central Europe. This book examines the role of nationalism in postcommunist development, focusing in particular on Poland the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It argues that a certain type of nationalism that is liberal nationalism has positively influenced the process of postcommunist transition towards the emerging liberal democratic order.

Caviar and Ashes : A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968

"In the elegant capital city of Warsaw, the editor Mieczyslaw Grydzewski would come with his two dachshunds to a café called Ziemianska." Thus begins the history of a generation of Polish literati born at the fin de siècle. They sat in Café Ziemianska and believed that the world moved on what they said there. Caviar and Ashes tells the story of the young avant-gardists of the early 1920s who became the radical Marxists of the late 1920s. They made the choice for Marxism before Stalinism, before socialist realism, before Marxism meant the imposition of Soviet communism in Poland. It ended tragically.

Marci Shore begins with this generation’s coming of age after the First World War and narrates a half-century-long journey through futurist manifestos and proletarian poetry, Stalinist terror and Nazi genocide, a journey from the literary cafés to the cells of prisons and the corridors of power. Using newly available archival materials from Poland and Russia, as well as from Ukraine and Israel, Shore explores what it meant to live Marxism as a European, an East European, and a Jewish intellectual in the twentieth century.

Central Asia’s first decade of independence was disappointing for those who envisioned a transition from Soviet republics to independent states with market economies and democratic political systems. The region was given a "second chance" to address social and economic problems, but the Soviet-era leaders have been more interested in exploiting state resources and controlling their populations than in implementing democratic and regional reforms.
Central Asia, a critical battlefield in the war on terror, is vitally important and still unfamiliar even to many foreign policy specialists. Regional expert Martha Brill Olcott highlights the deep contradiction running through U.S. policy toward Central Asia. Partnerships with antidemocratic regimes have created long-term security risks and the international community has remained complicit in its lack of effective engagement. As recent events in Uzbekistan and Kyrgystan demonstrate, tensions in the region lie close to the surface: If we are to prevent these states from descending into chaos, the international community must identify solutions to the economic, political, and social challenges confronting them.