This book is about long-term changes to class and inequality in Poland. Drawing upon major social surveys, the team of authors from the Polish Academy of Sciences offer the rare comprehensive study of important changes to the social structure from the communist era to the present. The core argument is that, even during extreme societal transformations, key features of social life have...

This volume offers an analysis of the relationship between public health and the biopolitical dimensions of state- and nation building in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. It challenges the idea of diverging paths towards modernity of Europe’s western and eastern countries. It not only identifies ideas, discourses and practices of ‘solving’ public health issues that were shared among...

This book presents pieces of evidence, which – taken together – lead to an argument that goes against the grain of the established Cold War narrative. The argument is that a “long détente” existed between East and West from the 1950s to the 1980s, that it existed and lasted for good (economic, national security, societal) reasons, and that it had a profound impact on the outcome of the conflict...

The collection of well-researched essays assesses the uses and misuses of history 25 years after the collapse of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. As opposed to the revival of national histories that seemed to be the prevailing historiographical approach of the 1990s, the last decade has seen a particular set of narratives equating Nazism and Communism. This provides opportunities to exonerate...

Estonia is perhaps the only country in Europe that lacks a comprehensive history of its Jewish minority. Spanning over 150 years of Estonian Jewish history, On the Margins is a truly unique book. Rebuilding a life beyond so-called Pale of Jewish Settlement in the Russian Empire, the Jewish cultural autonomy in interwar Estonia, and the trauma of Soviet occupation of 1940–41 are among the issues...

Exploring theater practices in communist and post-communist Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, this book analyzes intertextuality or 'inter-theatricality' as a political strategy, designed to criticize contemporary political conditions while at the same time trying to circumvent censorship. In the Soviet bloc the theater of the absurd, experimentation, irony, and intertextual distancing...

Alternative strategies of economic development have received little attention in the literature. Academics rarely compare certain strategic features or assess the performance of different strategies in terms of outcomes. This book seeks to address that gap and to provide a theoretical background to the shift from industry to human capital-intensive services as the engine of economic growth....

Twenty years in the making, this collection presents 122 top-level Soviet, European and American records on the superpowers’ role in the annus mirabilis of 1989. Consisting of Politburo minutes; diary entries from Gorbachev’s senior aide, Anatoly Chernyaev; meeting notes and private communications of Gorbachev with George H.W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand; and...

Broken Masculinities portrays the post-dictatorial novel of the 1970s in all its complexity, and introduces the reader to a 1968-era Turkey, a period which challenges Turkey’s now reinforced Islamic image by portraying the quest for sexual liberation and critical student uprisings. Günay-Erkol argues that the literature written after the 1971 coup in Turkey constitutes a coherent sub-genre and...

The common critique of media- and ratings-driven politics envisions democracy falling hostage to a popularity contest. By contrast, the following book reconceives politics as a speculative Keynesian beauty contest that alienates itself from the popular audience it ceaselessly targets. Political actors unknowingly lean on collective beliefs about the popular expectations they seek to gratify,...

This meticulously researched and very personal volume recounts in detail the history of the internment, most often referred to as the internal deportation, in Hungary of Hungary's aristocracy, military and professional classes as well as the more wealthy farmers, the 'kulaks,' during the era of Matyas Rakosi, 1947-1953. Hungarian history under Rakosi's leadership bore the hallmark of...

This book compares the results of twenty years of international media assistance in the five countries of the western Balkans. It asks what happens to imported models when they are applied to newly evolving media systems in societies in transition. The book offers valuable insights into the nature and effects of media assistance and the strategies of international aid agencies, local political...