Suggesting that events in Poland during 1980–1981 represent the tip of an iceberg, the contributors examine the rise of nationalism in Eastern Europe and its potential consequences for European security. They analyze developing problems and trends in the region, including the cooling of relations between the USSR and individual countries in Eastern Europe, the continuing economic crisis, changing social structures, the influence of the intelligentsia, and the eroding importance of ideology as a key part of Eastern Europe's political culture. The second half of the book focuses on the impact of these shifts on political and military relations between the USSR and Eastern European countries and on the efficient functioning of the Warsaw Pact.
Suggesting that events in Poland during 1980-1981 represent the tip of an iceberg, the contributors examine the rise of nationalism in Eastern Europe and its potential consequences for European security. They analyze developing problems and trends in the region, including the cooling of relations between the USSR and individual countries in Eastern Europe, the continuing economic crisis, changing social structures, the influence of the intelligentsia, and the eroding importance of ideology as a key part of Eastern Europe's political culture. The second half of the book focuses on the impact of these shifts on political and military relations between the USSR and Eastern European countries and on the efficient functioning of the Warsaw Pact.
Peoples of Eastern Europe -- Ethnicity on the edge of extinction -- Linguistic nationalism -- Nationality struggles : from idea to movement -- Insurgent nationalism : Serbia and Poland -- Cursed are the peacemakers : 1848 in East Central Europe -- The reform that made the monarchy unreformable : the 1867 compromise -- 1878 Berlin Congress : Europe's new ethno-nation states -- The origins of National Socialism : fin de siecle Hungary and Bohemia -- Liberalism's heirs and enemies : socialism vs. nationalism -- Peasant utopias : villages of yesterday and societies of tomorrow -- 1919 : a new Europe and its old problems -- The failure of national self-determination -- Fascism takes root : Iron Guard and Arrow Cross -- East Europe's anti-fascism -- Hitler's war and its East European enemies -- What Dante did not see : the Holocaust in Eastern Europe -- People's democracy : early postwar Eastern Europe -- Cold War and Stalinism -- Destalinization : Hungary's revolution -- National paths to communism : the 1960s -- 1968 and the Soviet bloc : reform communism -- Real existing socialism : life in the Soviet bloc -- The unraveling of communism -- 1989 -- East Europe explodes : the wars of Yugoslav succession -- East Europe joins Europe.
Why do some violent conflicts endure across the centuries, while others become dimly remembered ancient struggles among forgotten peoples? Is nationalism really the powerful force that it appeared to be in the 1990s? This wide-ranging work examines the conceptual intersection of nationalist ideology, social violence, and the political transformation of Europe and Eurasia over the last two decades. The end of communism seemed to usher in a period of radical change-an era of "extreme politics" that pitted nations, ethnic groups, and violent entrepreneurs against one another, from the wars in the Balkans and Caucasus to the apparent upsurge in nationalist mobilization throughout the region. But the last twenty years have also illustrated the incredible diversity of political life after the end of one-party rule. Extreme Politics engages with themes from the micropolitics of social violence, to the history of nationalism studies, to the nature of demographic change in Eurasia. Published twenty years since the collapse of communism, Extreme Politics charts the end of "Eastern Europe" as a place and chronicles the ongoing revolution in the scholarly study of the post-communist world.
The authors of this book approach the emergence and endurance of the populist nationalism in post-socialist Eastern Europe, with special emphasis on Hungary. They attempt to understand the reasons behind public discourses that increasingly reframe politics in terms of nationhood and nationalism. Overall, the volume attempts to explain how the new nationalism is rooted in recent political, economic and social processes. The contributors focus on two motifs in public discourse: shift and legacy. Some focus on shifts in public law and shifts in political ethno-nationalism through the lens of constitutional law, while others explain the social and political roots of these shifts. Others discuss the effects of legacy in memory and culture and suggest that both shift and legacy combine to produce the new era of identity politics. Legal experts emphasize that the new Fundamental Law of Hungary is radically different from all previous Hungarian constitutions, and clearly reflects a redefinition of the Hungarian state itself. The authors further examine the role of developments in the fields of sociology and political science that contribute to the kind of politics in which identity is at the fore.
In this new Brookings Marshall Paper, Michael O'Hanlon argues that now is the time for Western nations to negotiate a new security architecture for neutral countries in eastern Europe to stabilize the region and reduce the risks of war with Russia. He believes NATO expansion has gone far enough. The core concept of this new security architecture would be one of permanent neutrality. The countries in question collectively make a broken-up arc, from Europe's far north to its south: Finland and Sweden; Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus; Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan; and finally Cyprus plus Serbia, as well as possibly several other Balkan states. Discussion on the new framework should begin within NATO, followed by deliberation with the neutral countries themselves, and then formal negotiations with Russia. The new security architecture would require that Russia, like NATO, commit to help uphold the security of Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and other states in the region. Russia would have to withdraw its troops from those countries in a verifiable manner; after that, corresponding sanctions on Russia would be lifted. The neutral countries would retain their rights to participate in multilateral security operations on a scale comparable to what has been the case in the past, including even those operations that might be led by NATO. They could think of and describe themselves as Western states (or anything else, for that matter). If the European Union and they so wished in the future, they could join the EU. They would have complete sovereignty and self-determination in every sense of the word. But NATO would decide not to invite them into the alliance as members. Ideally, these nations would endorse and promote this concept themselves as a more practical way to ensure their security than the current situation or any other plausible alternative.
After the conflagration of Tito’s Yugoslavia a medley of new and not-so-new states rose from the ashes. Some of the Yugoslav successor states have joined, or are about to enter, the European Union, while others are still struggling to define their national borders, symbols, and relationships with neighbouring states. Strategies of Symbolic Nation-building in South Eastern Europe expands upon the existing body of nationalism studies and explores how successful these nation-building strategies have been in the last two decades. Relying on new quantitative research results, the contributors offer interdisciplinary analyses of symbolic nation-building in Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia to show that whereas the citizens of some states have reached a consensus about the nation-building project other states remain fragmented and uncertain of when the process will end. A must-read not only for scholars of the region but policy makers and others interested in understanding the complex interplay of history, symbolic politics, and post-conflict transition.
Nationalism and Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union looks at communism's attempts to come to terms with nationalism between Marx and Yeltsin, how the inability of communist theorists and practitioners to achieve an effective synthesis between nationalism and communism contributed to communism's collapse, and what lessons that holds for contemporary Europe.
This edited volume addresses the set of politically challenging issues that the advent of populist movements raised for individual nation states and the whole Europe. Based on critical engagements with the extant scholarship in comparative politics, political philosophy, international relations, regional studies and critical geopolitics, this collection of chapters offers the interpretation of the contemporary populism as illiberal nationalism, and underscores its deeply political challenge to the post-political core of the EU project. The contributors discuss the deep transformations within the fabric of contemporary European societies that makes scholars rethink the post-Cold War hegemonic understanding of liberal democracy as the dominant paradigm destined to expand from its traditional hotbed in the West to other regions. This edited volume intends to stretch analysis beyond the conventional accounts of populism as an anti-elite and extra-institutional appeal to the general public for the sake of its mobilization against incumbent power holders, and look for more nuanced meanings inherent to this term. The chapters in this book were originally published in European Politics and Society and the Journal of Contemporary European Studies.
