NATO’s 2010 Strategic Concept officially broadened the alliance’s mission beyond collective defense, reflecting a peaceful Europe and changes in alliance activities. NATO had become an international security facilitator, a crisis-manager even outside Europe, and a liberal democratic club as much as a mutual-defense organization. However, Russia’s re-entry into great power politics has changed NATO’s strategic calculus. Russia’s aggressive annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its ongoing military support for Ukrainian separatists dramatically altered the strategic environment and called into question the liberal European security order. States bordering Russia, many of which are now NATO members, are worried, and the alliance is divided over assessments of Russia’s behavior. Against the backdrop of Russia’s new assertiveness, an international group of scholars examines a broad range of issues in the interest of not only explaining recent alliance developments but also making recommendations about critical choices confronting the NATO allies. While a renewed emphasis on collective defense is clearly a priority, this volume’s contributors caution against an overcorrection, which would leave the alliance too inwardly focused, play into Russia’s hand, and exacerbate regional fault lines always just below the surface at NATO. This volume places rapid-fire events in theoretical perspective and will be useful to foreign policy students, scholars, and practitioners alike.
Historians of migration will welcome Mark Wyman's new book on the elusive subject of persons who returned to Europe after coming to the United States. Other scholars have dealt with particular national groups... but Wyman is the first to treat... every major group.... Wyman explains returning to Europe as not just the fulfillment of original intentions but also the result of 'anger at bosses and clocks, nostalgia for waiting families,' nativist resentment and heavy-handed Americanization programs, and a complex of other problems.... Wyman's 'nine broad conclusions' about the returnees deserve to be read by everyone concerned with international migration.
A quiet revolution has been occurring in post-World War II Europe. A world power has emerged across the Atlantic that is recrafting the rules for how a modern society should provide economic security, environmental sustainability, and global stability. In Europe's Promise, Steven Hill explains Europe's bold new vision. For a decade Hill traveled widely to understand this uniquely European way of life. He shatters myths and shows how Europe's leadership manifests in five major areas: economic strength, with Europe now the world's wealthiest trading bloc, nearly as large as the U.S. and China combined; the best health care and other workfare supports for families and individuals; widespread use of renewable energy technologies and conservation; the world's most advanced democracies; and regional networks of trade, foreign aid, and investment that link one-third of the world to the European Union. Europe's Promise masterfully conveys how Europe has taken the lead in this make-or-break century challenged by a worldwide economic crisis and global warming.
A impassioned defense of the European Union and a concise analysis of its present challenges and future In this provocative book, renowned public intellectual Ivan Krastev reflects on the future of the European Union—and its potential lack of a future. With far-right nationalist parties on the rise across the continent and the United Kingdom planning for Brexit, the European Union is in disarray and plagued by doubts as never before. Krastev includes chapters devoted to Europe's major problems (especially the political destabilization sparked by the more than 1.3 million migrants from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia), the spread of right-wing populism (taking into account the election of Donald Trump in the United States), and the thorny issues facing member states on the eastern flank of the EU (including the threat posed by Vladimir Putin's Russia). In a new afterword written in the wake of the 2019 EU parliamentary elections, Krastev concludes that although the union is as fragile as ever, its chances of enduring are much better than they were just a few years ago.
The quasi-federal European Union stands out as the major exception in the thinly institutionalized world of international politics. Something has led Europeans—and only Europeans—beyond the nation-state to a fundamentally new political architecture. Craig Parsons argues in A Certain Idea of Europe that this "something" was a particular set of ideas generated in Western Europe after the Second World War. In Parsons's view, today's European Union reflects the ideological (and perhaps visionary) project of an elite minority. His book traces the progressive victory of this project in France, where the battle over European institutions erupted most divisively. Drawing on archival research and extensive interviews with French policymakers, the author carefully traces a fifty-year conflict between radically different European plans. Only through aggressive leadership did the advocates of a supranational "community" Europe succeed at building the EU and binding their opponents within it. Parsons puts the causal impact of ideas, and their binding effects through institutions, at the center of his book. In so doing he presents a strong logic of "social construction"—a sharp departure from other accounts of EU history that downplay the role of ideas and ideology.
This book assesses recent migration patterns in Europe, which have significantly included 'return migration' against the stream of East-West migration. Since the Eastern enlargement of the EU, many regions of Central and Eastern European have experienced a loss of human resources in core industries, raising concerns about social, economic and territorial cohesion in the region. The success rates of national and regional governmental policy aiming to retain or re-attract skilled workers have been variable, yet return migration has emerged as a major element of migration flows. Bringing together leading researchers on this important topic in contemporary European geography, the contributors analyse a series of key issues. These include: theoretical frameworks in the field of return migration; the nexus between return migration and regional development; the effects of the global and European crisis on emigration and return migration; non-economic motivations for emigration and return; the intergenerational character of return migration, and; the reintegration of return migrants into post-socialist societies. Taken together, the chapters see return migrants as important agents of change, innovation and economic growth. The book will be of great interest for scholars and students of human, economic and political geography.
"The book assesses the EU Returns Directive against international human rights norms and standards. [The author] explores protection gaps in the EU return policy and highlights how the provisions of the Directive should be implemented in line with member states' human rights obligations. Informed by this assessment, the book discusses draft amendments to the Directive, proposed by the European Commission in September 2018."--
This book explores attitudes and strategies towards the return of the wild in times of ecological crisis, focusing on wolves in Europe. The contributions from a variety of disciplines discuss human encounters with wolves, engaging with traditional narratives and contemporary conflicts. Covering a range of geographical areas, the case studies featured demonstrate the tremendous impact of the return of the wolf in European societies. Wolves are a keystone species that exemplify humanity’s relation to what is called nature and their return generates powerful debates about what ‘nature’ actually is and how much it is needed or should be permitted to exist. The book considers the return of the wild as a catalyst for fundamental socio-biological changes of the world within human societies, and the various responses of humans to wolves demonstrate both our potential and limitations when it comes to multispecies communities and negotiating societal change. Managing the Return of the Wild will be relevant to a broad audience interested in discussions of social and ecological conflict today, including scholars from multispecies studies and diverse disciplines such as biology, forestry management and folklore studies.