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This book—the first of a three-volume overview of comparative and transnational historiography in Europe—focuses on the complex engagement of various comparative methodological approaches with different transnational and supranational frameworks. It considers scales from universal history to meso-regional (i.e. Balkans, Central Europe, etc.) perspectives. In the form of a reader, it displays 18 historical studies written between 1900 and 1943. The collection starts with the French and German methodological discussions around the turn of the twentieth century, stemming from the effort to integrate history with other emerging social sciences on a comparative methodological basis. The volume then turns to the question of structural and institutional comparisons, revisiting various historiographical ventures that tried to sketch out a broader (regional or European-level) interpretative framework to assess the legal systems, patterns of agrarian production, and the common ethnographic and sociocultural features.   In the third part, a number of texts are presented, which put forward a supra-national research framework as an antidote to national exclusivism. While in Western Europe the most obvious such framework was pan-European, in East Central Europe the agenda of comparison was linked usually to a meso-regional framework.The studies are accompanied by short contextual introductions including biographical information on the respective authors.

This monograph provides an analysis of the economic performance and living standard in Czechoslovakia and its successor states, Hungary, and Poland since 1945. The novelty of the book lies in its broad comparative perspective: it places East Central Europe in a wider European framework that underlines the themes of regional disparities and European commonalities. Going beyond the traditional growth paradigm, the author systematically studies the historical patterns of consumption, leisure, and quality of life-aspects that Tomka argues can best be considered in relation to one other. By adopting this "e;triple approach,"e; he undertakes a truly interdisciplinary research drawing from history, economics, sociology, and demography. As a result of Tomka's three-pillar comparative analysis, the book makes a major contribution to the debates on the dynamics of economic growth in communist and postcommunist East Central Europe, on the socialist consumer culture along with its transformation after 1990, and on how the accounts on East Central Europe can be integrated into the emerging field of historical quality of life research.

This book reconstructs the fate of Italian prisoners of war captured by the Red Army between August 1941 and the winter of 1942-43. On 230.000 Italians left on the Eastern front almost 100.000 did not come back home. Testimonies and memoirs from surviving veterans complement the author's intensive work in Russian and Italian archives. The study examines Italian war crimes against the Soviet civilian population and describes the particularly grim fate of the thousands of Italian military internees who after the 8 September 1943 Armistice had been sent to Germany and were subsequently captured by the Soviet army to be deported to the USSR. The book presents everyday life and death in the Soviet prisoner camps and explains the particularly high mortality among Italian prisoners. Giusti explores how well the system of prisoner labor, personally supervised by Stalin, was planned, starting in 1943. A special focus of the study is antifascist propaganda among prisoners and the infiltration of the Soviet security agencies in the camps. Stalin was keen to create a new cohort of supporters through the mass political reeducation of war prisoners, especially middle-class intellectuals and military elite. The book ends with the laborious diplomatic talks in 1946 and 1947 between USSR, Italy, and the Holy See for the repatriation of the surviving prisoners.

Protected Children, Regulated Mothers examines child protection in Stalinist Hungary as a part of twentieth-century East Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European history. Across the communist bloc, the prewar foster care system was increasingly replaced after 1945 by institutionalization in residential homes. This shift was often interpreted as a further attempt to establish totalitarian control. However, this study-based on hundreds of children's case files and interviews with institution leaders, teachers, and people formerly in state care-provides a new perspective. Rather than being merely a tool of political repression, state care in postwar Hungary was often shaped by the efforts of policy actors and educators to address the myriad of problems engendered by the social and economic transformations that emerged after World War II. This response built on, rather than broke with, earlier models of reform and reformatory education. Yet child protection went beyond safeguarding and educating children; it also focused on parents, particularly lone mothers, regulating not only their entrance to paid work but also their sexuality. In so doing, children's homes both reinforced and changed existing cultural and social patterns, whether about gendered division of work or the assimilation of minorities. Indeed, a major finding of the book is that state socialist child protection continued a centuries-long national project of seeking a "e;solution to the Gypsy question,"e; rooted in efforts to eliminate the perceived "e;workshyness"e; of Roma.

The renowned historian Ivan Berend discusses populist demagoguery through the presentation of 18 politicians from 12 European countries from World War I to the present. In this book, Berend defines demagoguery, reflects on its connections with populism, and examines the common features and differences in the demagogues' programs and language. Mussolini and Hitler, the "model demagogues," are only briefly discussed, as is the election of Donald Trump in the United States and its impact on Europe. The 18 detailed portraits include two communists, two fascists, and several rightwing and anti-EU politicians. The series runs from Bela Kun, the leader of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, through Codreanu and Gombos from the 1930s, Stahremberg and Haider in Austria, Ceausescu, Milosevic, Tudjman, Izetbegovic, Berlusconi, Wilders, the two Le Pens, Farage and Boris Johnson, Orban and the two Kaczynskis. Each case includes an analysis of the time and place and is illustrated with quotations from the demagogues' speeches. This book is a warning about the continuing threat of populist demagogues both for their subjects and for history itself. Berend insists on the crucial importance for Europe to understand the reality behind their promises and persuasive language in order to impede their success.

Catherine Horel has undertaken a comparative analysis of the societal, ethnic, and cultural diversity in the last decades of the Habsburg Monarchy as represented in twelve cities: Arad, Bratislava, Brno, Chernivtsi, Lviv, Oradea, Rijeka, Sarajevo, Subotica, Timișoara, Trieste, and Zagreb. By purposely selecting these cities, the author aims to counter the disproportionate attention that the largest cities in the empire receive. With a focus on the aspects of everyday life faced by the city inhabitants (associations, schools, economy, and municipal politics) the book avoids any idealization of the monarchy as a paradise of peaceful multiculturalism, and also avoids exaggerating conflicts. The author claims that the world of the Habsburg cities was a dynamic space where many models coexisted and created vitality, emulation, and conflict. Modernization brought about the dissolution of old structures, but also mobility, the progress of education, the explosion of associative life, and constantly growing cultural offerings.

This book of thirteen conversations introduces us to the life of an exceptional person—theatre critic, Germanist, and long-time chair of the Open Lithuania Fund board—Irena Veisaitė. The dialogue between Lithuanian historian Aurimas Švedas and a woman who reflects deeply on her experiences reveals both one individual’s historically dramatic life and the fate of Europe and Lithuania in the twentieth century. Through the complementary lenses of history and memory, we confront with Veisaitė the horrific events of the Holocaust, which brought about the end of the Lithuanian Jewish world. We also meet an array of world-class cultural figures, see fragments of legendary theatre performances, and hear meaningful words that were spoken or heard decades ago. This book’s interlocutors do not so much seek to answer the question “What was it like?” but instead repeatedly ask each other: “What, how, and why do we remember? What is the meaning of our experiences? How can history help us to live in the present and create the future? How do we learn to understand and forgive?”A series of Veisaitė’s texts, statements, and letters, presented at the end of the book suggest further ways of answering these questions.

In this book Joan Wallach Scott discusses the role history has played as an arbiter of right and wrong and of those who claim to act in its nameΓÇö"in the name of history." Scott investigates three different instances in which repudiation of the past was conceived as a way to a better future: the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996, and the ongoing movement for reparations for slavery in the United States. Scott shows how in these cases history was not only used to explain the past but to produce a particular future. Yet both past and future were subject to the political realities of their time and defined in terms of moral absolutes, often leading to deep contradictions. These three instances demonstrate that history is not an impartial truth, rather its very meaning is constructed by those who act in its name.

This book presents and interprets archival records of the meetings between Mikhail Gorbachev and George W. Bush between 1989 and 1991, including transcripts of conversations between top leaders on the rapid and monumental events of the final days of the Cold War

This book is the culmination of twenty years of research in which the editors gathered thousands of pages documenting the most important conversations of the late Cold War. Every word Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev said to each other in their five superpower summits from 1985 to 1988 is included in this volume.

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.

Labor regimes under communism in East-Central Europe were complex, shifting and ambiguous. This collection of sixteen essays offers new conceptual and empirical ways to understand their history from the end of the Second World War to 1989, and to think about how their experiences relate to debates about labor history, both European and global.

The thirteen papers in this collection address three aspects of higher education, primarily in Europe but also in the United States. These aspects are competition, collaboration, and complementarity, both on the level of policy and on the practical level of impact on students and staff.

In an era of increased mobility and globalisation, a fast growing body of writing originates from authors who live in-between languages and cultures. Transnational perspective offers a new approach to the growing body of cultural texts with an emphasis on experiences of migration, transculturation, bilingualism, and (cultural) translation.

This volume offers a comparative analysis of the evolution of direct state intervention in the economy through state-owned companies in Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Singapore, and Slovenia. Each case study includes substantial explanations of historical, cultural, and institutional contexts.

The tumultuous history of the Balkans has been subject to a plethora of conflicting interpretations by local as well as non-Balkan historians. In an attempt to help overcome the stereotypes that still pervade Balkan history and historiography, Battling over the Balkans concentrates on five principal controversies from the precommunist period,

The fall of communism in Europe is now the frame of reference for any mass mobilization, from the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement to Brexit. Even thirty years on, 1989 still figures as a guide and motivation for political change. It is now a platitude to call 1989 a "world event," but the chapters in this volume show how it actually became one.

Psy-sciences (psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, pedagogy, criminology, special education, etc.) have been connected to politics in different ways since the early twentieth century. Here, in twenty-two essays, scholars address a variety of these intersections from a historical perspective.

This monograph is about an exciting episode in the intellectual history of Europe: the vigorous debate among leading Polish historians on the sources of the economic development and non-development, including the origins of economic divisions within Europe. The work covers nearly fifty years of this debate between the publication of two pivotal works in 1947 and 1994. Anna Sosnowska provides an insightful interpretation of how local and generational experience shaped the notions of post-1945 Polish historians about Eastern European backwardness, and how their debate influenced Western historical sociology, social theories of development and dependency in peripheral areas, and the image of Eastern Europe in Western, Marxist-inspired social science. Although created under the adverse conditions of state socialism and censorship, this body of scholarship had an important repercussion in international social science of the post-war period, contributing an emphasis on international comparisons, as well as a stress on social theory and explanations. Sosnowska's analysis also helps to understand current differences that lead to conflicts between Europe's richest and economically most developed core and its southern and eastern peripheries. The historians she studies also investigated analogies between paths in Eastern Europe and regions of West Africa, Latin America and East Asia.

This book describes the process of the Czech economic transformation from the beginning of the 1990s to the country's entry into the European Union in 2004. This transformation is divided into four periods: an initial recession caused by the transformation; economic growth in the mid-1990s; a recession connected to the currency crisis of 1997; and recovery and growth from 1999 until 2004, when the analysis ends. The examination covers the main aspects of the transformation - an overall view of the process, political transition, economic policy, economic results (GDP development, inflation, unemployment), changes in outside indicators (balance of payments), privatization, transformation of the financial sector, and changes in the business sector and institutional development. The book also compares Czech development in this transformative era to those of Poland and Hungary. As in Hungary and Poland, the Czech Republic underwent an exceptional qualitative shift from a system centrally planned to one that was market-based. The book concludes that despite mistakes and hardships, the overall transformation process in Central Europe has been successful.

This volume gathers authors who wrote important works in the fields of the history of ideology, the comparative study of dictatorship, and intellectual history.

The Latin-English bilingual volume presents the text of The Chronicle of the Czechs by Cosmas of Prague.

This book is about the Christ Pantokrator, an imposing monumental complex serving monastic, dynastic, medical and social purposes in Constantinople, founded by Emperor John II Komnenos and Empress Piroska-Eirene in 1118. Now called the Zeyrek Mosque, the second largest Byzantine religious edifice after Hagia Sophia still standing in Istanbul represents the most remarkable architectural and the most ambitious social project of the Komnenian dynasty. This volume approaches the Pantokrator from a special perspective, focusing on its co-founder, Empress Piroska-Eirene, the daughter of the Hungarian king Ladislaus I. This particular vantage point enables its authors to explore not only the architecture, the monastic and medical functions of the complex, but also Hungarian-Byzantine relations, the cultural and religious history of early medieval Hungary, imperial representation, personal faith and dynastic holiness. Piroska's wedding with John Komnenos came to be perceived as a union of East and West. The life of the Empress, a "e;sainted ruler,"e; and her memory in early rpdian Hungary and Komnenian Byzantium are discussed in the context of women and power, monastic foundations, architectural innovations, and spiritual models.

Most practitioners and decision makers look at corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a socially responsible management practice on top of what company leaders generally do: focus on the sustainable, long term financial profitability of their corporation. This book focuses on a political understanding of CSR: the author bridges politics with corporate social responsibility and in a creative and provocative manner. Braun seeks to explore why and how corporations are to be seen as political actors with important roles in our current societies. The first part discusses the social context, the various stakeholder approaches and it also endeavors - with the help of the historic/political parallel of the bourgeois revolutions in the 19th century - to define the corporate polity. The second part analyses the new kind of political operational logic from the viewpoint of the different areas of corporate operation; it gives an overview of the consequences for the individual areas of operation and indicates how corporate policy can be realized in the given field of operation. The third part of the book introduces the institutions necessary for the creation of the corporate polity.

Karl Polanyi's "e;substantivist"e; critique of market society has found new popularity in the era of neoliberal globalization. The author reclaims this polymath for contemporary anthropology, especially economic anthropology, in the context of Central Europe, where Polanyi (1886-1964) grew up. The Polanyian approach illuminates both the communist era, in particular the "e;market socialist"e; economy which evolved under Janos Kadar in Hungary, as well as the post-communist transformations of property relations, civil society and ethno-national identities throughout the region. Hann's analyses are based primarily on his own ethnographic investigations in Hungary and South-East Poland. They are pertinent to the rise of neo-nationalism in those countries, which is theorized as a malign countermovement to the domination of the market. At another level, Hann's adaptation of Polanyi's social philosophy points beyond current political turbulence to an original concept of "e;social Eurasia"e;.

This volume examines Russian discourses of regionalism as a source of identity construction practices for the country's political and intellectual establishment. The overall purpose of the monograph is to demonstrate that, contrary to some assumptions, the transition trajectory of post-Soviet Russia has not been towards a liberal democratic nation state that is set to emulate Western political and normative standards. Instead, its foreign policy discourses have been constructing Russia as a supranational community which transcends Russia's current legally established borders. The study undertakes a systematic and comprehensive survey of Russian official (authorities) and semi-official (establishment affiliated think tanks) discourse for a period of seven years between 2007 and 2013. This exercise demonstrates how Russia is being constructed as a supranational entity through its discourses of cultural and economic regionalism. These discourses associate closely with the political project of Eurasian economic integration and the "e;Russian world"e; and "e;Russian civilization"e; doctrines. Both ideologies, the geoeconomic and culturalist, have gained prominence in the post-Crimean environment. The analysis tracks down how these identitary concepts crystallized in Russia's foreign policies discourses beginning from Vladimir Putin's second term in power.

This collective volume shows how Ukraine can best be understood through its regions and how the regions must be considered against the background of the nation.

This book examines the historical examples of Soviet Communism, Italian Fascism, German Nazism, and Spanish Anarchism, suggesting that, in spite of their differences, they had some key features in common.

The volume unites conversations with four masters of Medieval Studies from east-central Europe: Janos Bak from Hungary, Jerzy Kloczowski from Poland, Frantisek Smahel from the Czech Republic, and Herwig Wolfram from Austria. The interviews, made by younger colleagues, reveal engaging life stories, with numerous observations, anecdotes and experiences. The four scholars grew up before and during the war, under Nazi occupation, emerged as young scholars in the difficult post-war period, and, for most of their careers worked in the shadow of the Iron Curtain, two of them spending most of their lifetimes under communist regimes. The conversations focus on ways in which open-minded young intellectuals became medieval historians under difficult circumstances, how they experienced the long shadows of totalitarian regimes with their acute sensitivity for historical change, and how their perceptions of the world around them reflected back on their approach to medieval history. The histories of their nations were broken, most of them ceased to exist and then were re-established during their lifetimes, came under foreign domination, were split up, or had their territories shifted. These changes affected these scholars' identities and patriotic feelings, and their present was reflected in the distant mirror of the medieval past.

The volume contains extracts from essays written by some of the young people who have fled the former Yugoslavia in the face of war. In their writings, they describe both the circumstances which drove them to leave their homes and their feelings about the future of their country.