Central and Eastern European region defined by the socialist past has transformed in the 21st century. We must abandon the paradigms of the Cold War period within geopolitical thought. The key question of the 21st century is whether a new gateway zone of the present forming World-Island can be developed along a north-south Baltic-Adriatic axi...
Honeymooners Viktor and Liesel Landauer are filled with the optimism and cultural vibrancy of central Europe of the 1920s when they meet modernist architect Rainer von Abt. He builds for them a home to embody their exuberant faith in the future, and the Landauer House becomes an instant masterpiece. Viktor and Liesel, a rich Jewish mogul married to a thoughtful, modern gentile, pour all of their hopes for their marriage and budding family into their stunning new home, filling it with children, friends, and a generation of artists and thinkers eager to abandon old-world European style in favor of the new and the avant-garde. But as life intervenes, their new home also brings out their most passionate desires and darkest secrets. As Viktor searches for a warmer, less challenging comfort in the arms of another woman, and Liesel turns to her wild, mischievous friend Hana for excitement, the marriage begins to show signs of strain. The radiant honesty and idealism of 1930 quickly evaporate beneath the storm clouds of World War II. As Nazi troops enter the country, the family must leave their old life behind and attempt to escape to America before Viktor's Jewish roots draw Nazi attention, and before the family itself dissolves. As the Landauers struggle for survival abroad, their home slips from hand to hand, from Czech to Nazi to Soviet possession and finally back to the Czechoslovak state, with new inhabitants always falling under the fervent and unrelenting influence of the Glass Room. Its crystalline perfection exerts a gravitational pull on those who know it, inspiring them, freeing them, calling them back, until the Landauers themselves are finally drawn home to where their story began. Brimming with barely contained passion and cruelty, the precision of science, the wild variance of lust, the catharsis of confession, and the fear of failure - the Glass Room contains it all.
The region between the Baltic and the Black Sea was marked by a set of crises and conflicts in the 1920s and 1930s, demonstrating the diplomatic, military, economic or cultural engagement of France, Germany, Russia, Britain, Italy and Japan in this highly volatile region, and critically damaging the fragile post-Versailles political arrangement. The editors, in naming this region as "Middle Europe" seek to revive the symbolic geography of the time and accentuate its position, situated between Big Powers and two World Wars. The ten case studies in this book combine traditional diplomatic history with a broader emphasis on the geopolitical aspects of Big-Power rivalry to understand the interwar period. The essays claim that the European Big Powers played a key role in regional affairs by keeping the local conflicts and national movements under control and by exploiting the region's natural resources and military dependencies, while at the same time strengthening their prestige through cultural penetration and the cultivation of client networks. The authors, however, want to avoid the simplistic view that the Big Powers fully dominated the lesser players on the European stage. The relationship was indeed hierarchical, but the essays also reveal how the "small states" manipulated Big-Power disagreements, highlighting the limits of the latters' leverage throughout the 1920s and the 1930s.
Central Europe is one of the key notions of classical geopolitics yet it has always been a somewhat elusive concept. Originally perceived as a plan for a German dominated political and economic union, it subsequently emerged to threaten leaders in the East and West in a variety of forms. Otilia Dhand provides a critical examination of the concept of Central Europe, from its early inception to the present day. Making extensive use of archival material, she shows how successive manifestations of Central Europe - of whatever vintage - have failed to bring about their intended changes on the international structure, and how customary claims about Central Europe are not supported by the original source material. The result is a work of outstanding scholarship that advances our understanding of regionalism and geopolitics in Europe.
With 29 contributors from across Europe and beyond, this work represents a unique and important resource that examines the many relationships between tourism and geopolitics, with a focus on experiences drawn from Central and Eastern Europe. It begins by assessing the changing nature of 'geopolitics', from pejorative associations with Nazism to the more recent critical and feminist geopolitics of social science's 'cultural turn'. The book then addresses the important historical role of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in geopolitical thinking, before exemplifying a range of contemporary interactions between tourism and geopolitics within this critical region. Pursuing innovative analytical paths, the book demonstrates the interrelated nature of tourism and geopolitics and emphasizes the freshness of this research area. Addressing key principles and ideas which are applicable globally, it is an essential source for researchers, teachers and students of tourism, geography, political science and European studies, as well as for diplomatic, business and consultant practitioners.
This work covers the uncertain geopolitical situation of some countries of Central and Eastern Europe, including some of those which are hoping to enter the European Union in the near future, some for which entry is far off, and some which may never seek or be eligible for membership.
This book analyzes the combined consequences of Brexit and of the new US foreign policy under President Trump on the geopolitical situation of Eastern Europe. It perceives the evolution of the East European regional security complex as a struggle between the European Union's Kantian, win-win geopolitical vision and Russia's neoclassical geopolitics, also promoted by President Trump. In the most probable scenario, the latter approach will have the upper hand. The EU's post-Brexit control by the Franco-German axis will likely be followed by the geopolitical irrelevance of the EU due to the renationalization of member states' foreign policy, with Germany becoming the main West European actor. Consequently, Eastern Europe will be turned into the arena of a mainly three-cornered neoclassical geopolitics rivalry opposing Russia, the Franco-German axis and then Germany, and the US in alliance with the post-Brexit UK and certain East European states. The book will appeal to scholars across the fields of International Relations, Geopolitics, European Studies, and Area Studies.
This open access book provides an in-depth look into the background of rule of law problems and the open defiance of EU law in East Central European countries. Current illiberal trends and anti-EU politics have the potential to undermine mutual trust between member states and fundamentally change the EU. It is therefore crucial to understand their domestic causes, context conditions, specific processes and consequences. This volume contributes to empirically informed theory-building and includes contributions from researchers from various disciplines and multiple perspectives on illiberal trends and anti-EU politics in the region. The qualitative case studies, comparative works and quantitative analyses provide a comprehensive picture of current societal, political and institutional developments in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Through studying similarities and differences between East Central European and other EU countries, the chapters also explore whether there are regional patterns of democracy- and EU-related problems.
Fourteen specialists of Central and Eastern European politics explore memory policies and politics by examining how and why contested memories are constantly reactivated in the former Soviet bloc. The book explores how new social and political actors can challenge the traditional narratives about the past produced by state bodies.
Football in Central-Eastern and Eastern Europe has long functioned as a carrier of the three “non-normal” socio-political drivers that were effective below the surface of modernity, including the official self-image of European political systems, since the second half of the 20th century: Tribal Politics, Imaginal Politics, and Contextual Politics. All three are trends that are currently surfacing prominently on an international and global level. Long before the return of the now proverbial “Political Tribes” by the means of populisms and neo-authoritarianisms in societies around the world, football in Central-Eastern and Eastern Europe worked as a subconscious vehicle of group instincts and political moods that represented, mirrored, informed and influenced political behavior and governmental decisions both in the post-WWII communist and then, after 1989, the neo-capitalist societies located east of the former iron curtain. Football has always been used by both governments and their opponents, including the dissident civil society, to further coherence and to symbolically represent specific readings of power relations, system ideologies and history. Football in Central and Eastern Europe was always able to attract and include large parts of the population, inducing them to symbolically express protest against the government or to sustain the “politics from above”. Through football politics, aspects of the area’s specific political mechanisms are introduced and explained.
