TOL STORE BY TOPIC "international relations"

In 1919, Hungarian Communists aid the Bolsheviks' defeat of Czarists, the Whites. Near the Volga, a monastery and a field hospital are held by one side then the other. Captives are executed or sent running naked into the woods. Neither side has a plan, and characters the camera picks out soon die. A White Cossack officer kills a Hungarian and is executed by his own superiors when he tries to rape a milkmaid. At the hospital, White officers order nurses into the woods, dressed in finery, to waltz. A nurse aids the Reds, then they accuse her of treason for following White orders. Red soldiers walk willingly, singing, into an overwhelming force. War seems chaotic and arbitrary.

Read more about Miklós Janscó at CER: Miklos Who?

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 Myth Of Ethnic War: Serbia And Croatia In The 1990s

"The wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in neighboring Croatia and Kosovo grabbed the attention of the western world not only because of their ferocity and their geographic location, but also because of their timing. This violence erupted at the exact moment when the cold war confrontation was drawing to a close, when westerners were claiming their liberal values as triumphant, in a country that had only a few years earlier been seen as very well placed to join the west. In trying to account for this outburst, most western journalists, academics, and policymakers have resorted to the language of the premodern: tribalism, ethnic hatreds, cultural inadequacy, irrationality; in short, the Balkans as the antithesis of the modern west. Yet one of the most striking aspects of the wars in Yugoslavia is the extent to which the images purveyed in the western press and in much of the academic literature are so at odds with evidence from on the ground."—from Chapter 1
V. P. Gagnon Jr. believes that the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s were reactionary moves designed to thwart populations that were threatening the existing structures of political and economic power. He begins with facts at odds with the essentialist view of ethnic identity, such as high intermarriage rates and the very high percentage of draft-resisters. These statistics do not comport comfortably with the notion that these wars were the result of ancient blood hatreds or of nationalist leaders using ethnicity to mobilize people into conflict.

Yugoslavia in the late 1980s was, in Gagnon’s view, on the verge of large-scale sociopolitical and economic change. He shows that political and economic elites in Belgrade and Zagreb first created and then manipulated violent conflict along ethnic lines as a way to short-circuit the dynamics of political change. This strategy of violence was thus a means for these threatened elites to demobilize the population. Gagnon’s noteworthy and rather controversial argument provides us with a substantially new way of understanding the politics of ethnicity.

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.

The Lone Wolf And the Bear: Three Centuries of Chechen Defiance of Russian Power

The Lone Wolf and the Bear examines the Russo-Chechen conflict, from early Russian expansion into the Caucasus in the sixteenth century to the current war between Russia and Chechnya. Moshe Gammer offers a comprehensive study of modern Chechen history, its people and cultures, and the factors of Russo/Soviet influence and modernization that have molded Chechen self-perception and enflamed the passions of separatism. Perhaps the most ethnically diverse region in the world, Chechnya claims over seventy native groups, yet it is unified in its opposition to Russian control and the quest for nationhood.

Through difficult research (many historic documents on Chechnya have been destroyed by Russian authorities, and Chechen documentation is scarce), Gammer assembles the stories of a fiercely independent people and their three-hundred-year struggle against domination by the world power of Russia, a conflict that continues today.

Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan

Much has been written about the Muslim Murid movement and its leader Shamil, who resisted the Tsarist Russian expansion into Chechan and Daghestan for more than quarter of a century. This study, based on research in multilingual archives, offers a fresh insight into a subject that generates constant controversy in Russian historiography and has often been misinterpreted by Western scholars.

Balkan Ghosts : A Journey Through History

From the assassination that triggered World War I to the ethnic warfare now sweeping Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia, the Balkans have been the crucible of the twentieth century, the place where terrorism and genocide first became tools of policy. This enthralling and often chilling political travelogue fully deciphers the Balkans' ancient passions and intractable hatreds for outsiders. For as Kaplan travels among the vibrantly-adorned churches and soul-destroying slums of the former Yugoslavia, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece, he allows us to see the region's history as a time warp in which Slobodan Milosevic becomes the reincarnation of a fourteenth-century Serbian martyr; Nicolae Ceaucescu is called "Drac," or "the Devil"; and the one-time Soviet Union turns out to be a continuation of the Ottoman Empire.

Address contemporary developments in European identity politics based on the idea of "solidarity". This book is the result of the work of a distinguished group of scholars and politicians, invited by the previous President of the European Union, Romano Prodi, to reflect on some of the most important subjects affecting the future of Europe.

Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage, and Integration after Communism

Europe Undivided explores how the leverage of an enlarging EU has facilitated a convergence toward liberal democracy among credible future members of the EU in Central and Eastern Europe. It reveals how variations in domestic competition put democratizing states on different political trajectories after 1989, and illuminates the changing dynamics of the relationship between the EU and candidate states from 1989 to accession, and beyond. Albeit not by design, the most powerful and successful tool of EU foreign policy has turned out to be EU enlargement--and this book helps us to understand why, and how, it works.

Development on the Periphery: Democratic Transitions in Southern and Eastern Europe

In Development on the Periphery, noted textbook author Howard J.Wiarda tackles the important question of development in Southern and Eastern Europe. Both areas have undergone impressive transitions to democracy, experienced vast social changes, embraced open markets, developed Western political party systems, and joined the EU and NATO. However, the differences between the regions, and in particular, their individual countries, show us that development occurs by many routes-and that culture, geographic location, and timing do matter. Students of Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, and transitions to democracy will benefit from this accessible and thorough comparative study.

Meddling in Middle Europe: Britain And the Lands Between, 1919-1925

Addresses the much-ignored history of British policy towards Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland following the creation of nation states in Central Europe at the end of the First World War. Lojko convincingly argues that the absence of trust in the new political settlement and the discrediting of the tradional channels of diplomacy resulted in British influence in the region.

The European Union in the Wake of Eastern Enlargement: Institutional and Policy-Making Challenges
(Europe in Change)

This book deals with the theoretical, conceptual and historical processes that led to European Union enlargement. It discusses the effects of enlargement on selected European Union policies (agriculture, single market, foreign, security and defense policy, immigration), and looks at the effect of the institutional reforms that were made at Amsterdam and Nice, as well as considering the significance of the debates on the Constitution.

War Plans and Alliances in the Cold War: Threat Perceptions in the East and West

This Important new volume reviews the threat perceptions, military doctrines, and war plans of both the NATO alliance and the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War, as well as the position of the neutrals, from the post-Cold War perspective.
Based on previously unknown archival evidence from both East and West, the 12 essays in this collection focus on the potential European battlefield rather than the strategic competition between the superpowers. They present conclusions about the nature of the Soviet threat that previously could only be speculated about and analyze the interaction between military matters and politics in the alliance management on both sides, with implications for the present crisis of the Western alliance. By focusing on the potential European battlefield rather than the strategic competition between the superpowers, the book explores the Cold War roots of the different American and European approaches to security.
The conclusions about the strengths and weaknesses of the two alliances highlight the importance of political, rather than merely military, determinants of the cohesion of NATO in the post-Cold War security environment.
This new book will be of much interest to students of the Cold War, strategic history and international relations history.

Widely regarded as one of the most influential international affairs journals in the world, Foreign Policy was launched in 1970 to encourage fresh and more vigorous debate on the vital issues confronting U.S. foreign policy. The journal, which is published by the nonprofit Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, based in Washington, D.C., is a forum for in-depth discussion of issues and events and a source of new ideas and approaches.

In any assessment and understanding of Belarus, the key questions to address include: Why has Belarus apparently rejected independence under its first president, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, and sought a union with Russia? Why has the government rejected democracy, infringed on the human rights of its citizens and fundamentally altered its constitution in favor of presidential authority? Has the country made any progress toward market reforms? How have Russia and the West responded to the actions of Belarus? And what is the future likely to hold for its ten million citizens? The author's conclusions are optimistic. Belarus, he believes, will survive into the twenty-first century, but as a Eurasian rather than a European state.