CEEOL - Search Result

52.00 €

Negotiating Marian Apparitions. The Politics of Religion in Transcarpathian Ukraine

Author(s): Agnieszka Halemba / Language(s): English

Keywords: Virgin Mary; Apparitions and miracles; Ukraine; Zakarpats’ka oblast’; church history; politics and religion

This book concerns the politics of religion as expressed through apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Dzhublyk in Transcarpathian Ukraine. The analysis provides insights into the present position of Transcarpathia in regional, Ukraine-wide, and European struggles for identity and political belonging. The way in which the apparitions site has been conceived and managed raises questions concerning the fate of religious communities during and after socialism, the significance of national projects for religious organizations, and the politics of religious management in a situation in which local religious commitments are relatively strong and religious organizations are relatively weak. The analysis contributes to the ethnography and history of this particular region and of the post-socialist world in general. The changing status of the apparition site over the years allows investigation of the questions concerning authority, legitimacy, and power in religious organizations, especially in relation to management of religious experiences.

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65.00 €

Thinking through Transition

Author(s): / Language(s): English

Keywords: Politics and government; Eastern European countries; 1989-; Intellectual life; Post-communism; Social change

Thinking through Transition is the first concentrated effort to explore the most recent chapter of East Central European past from the perspective of intellectual history. Post-socialism can be understood as a period of scarcity and preponderance of ideas, the dramatic eclipsing of the dissident legacy (as well as the older political traditions), and the rise of technocratic and post-political governance. This book, grounded in empirical research sensitive to local contexts, proposes instead a history of adaptations, entanglements, and unintended consequences. In order to enable and invite comparison, the volume is structured around major domains of political thought, some of them generic (liberalism, conservatism, the Left), others (populism and politics of history) deemed typical for post-socialism. However, as shown by the authors, the generic often turns out to be heavily dependent on its immediate setting, and the typical resonates with processes that are anything but vernacular.

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57.00 €

The Holocaust in Hungary. Seventy Years Later

Author(s): / Language(s): English

Keywords: Jews; Persecutions; Holocaust in Hungary; Ethnic relations; 1939–1945; Shoah; Holocaust in Transylvania; Jewish refugees; Anti-jewish policy; Remembrance; Interwar Period; Numerus Clausus

The Holocaust in Hungary represented a unique chapter in the singular history of the Final Solution of the “Jewish question” in Europe. In the fifth year of the Second World War Hungary still had a Jewish population of approximately 800,000.Although this large and relatively intact Jewish community was deprived of its basic rights as citizens, had suffered close to 62,000 casualties, had been confronted with the hardships of discrimination, and had endured the vicissitudes of a military-related labor service system, it continued to enjoy relative physical safety under the aristocratic-conservative regime of Hungary until the German occupation on March 19, 1944. How was all this possible? And if all this was possible until March 1944, why could it not continue for a few more months? Was it really inevitable that hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews would, within a few months, become victims of the gas chambers of Auschwitz? Could the Holocaust in Hungary have been averted and who were responsible for the violent deaths of over a half a million Hungarian Jews in the ghettos, on the deportation trains, in the extermination and concentration camps, during the death marches, and the mass shootings into the Danube? Starting from these difficult questions, the present volume offers readers the most recent scholarship on the history and memory of the Holocaust in Hungary.

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60.00 €

Economic Development Strategies and Structural Change

Shortcut or Piecemeal

Author(s): Jan Winiecki / Language(s): English

Keywords: Economic development; free-market system

Despite the economic uncertainties that have affected the world economy, alternative economic development strategies receive very little attention in the published literature. When academics compare certain strategic features or assess the performance of different strategies they rarely factor in 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. Pioneering studies reveal interesting trends and patterns that point to the growing importance of the mostly intellectual property-based intangible capital in relation to the level of GDP. These studies also indicate that economic freedom has had a large role in bringing about this second great structural change, more than was with the case with industrialization. The author also provides an extensive assessment of four key developing countries: Brazil, Russia, India, and China.

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48.00 €

Broken Masculinities. Solitude, Alienation, and Frustration in Turkish Literature after 1970

Author(s): Çimen Günay-Erkol / Language(s): English

Keywords: Turkish fiction in 20th century; Masculinity in literature; 1970 coup in Turkey; gender and sexuality through literature; Politics in literature

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 1970 coup in Turkey constitutes a coherent sub-genre and needs to be considered together. These novels share a common ground which is rich in images of men and women craving for power: general isolation, sexual-emotional frustration, and a traumatic sense of solitude and alienation.This book is an original and significant contribution to two major fields of study: (1) gender and sexuality with respect to formation of subjectivity through literature, and (2) modern literature and history through the study of Turkish literature. The chief concern in this book is not only literature’s response to a particular period in Turkey, but also the role of literature in bearing witness to trauma and drastic political acts of violence—and coming to terms with them.

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45.00 €

Hungarian Culture and Politics in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1711–1848

Author(s): Gábor Vermes / Language(s): English

Keywords: Hungarian politics and government; 1700-1848; Hungarian intellectual life; Habsburg era; Habsburg Monarchy; Austrian Hungarian relations

This book describes and analyzes the critical period of 1711–1848 within Hungary from novel points of view, including close analyses of the proceedings of Hungarian diets. Contrary to conventional interpretations, the study, stressing the strong continuity of traditionalism in Hungarian thought, society, and politics, argues that Hungarian liberalism did not begin to flower in any substantial way until the 1830s and 1840s. "Hungarian Culture and Politics in the Habsburg Monarchy" also traces and evaluates the complex relationship between Austria and Hungary over this span of time. Past interpretations have, with only a few exceptions, tilted heavily towards the Austrian role within the Monarchy, both because its center was in Vienna and because few non-Hungarian scholars can read Hungarian. This analysis redresses this balance through the use of both Austrian and Hungarian sources, demonstrating the deep cultural differences between the two halves of the Monarchy, which were nevertheless closely linked by economic and administrative ties and by a mutual recognition that co-existence was preferable to any major rupture.

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48.00 €

The Eugenic Fortress

Author(s): Tudor Georgescu / Language(s): English

Keywords: Eugenics in Romania; Fascism;20th Century;Transylvania; Saxons

The ever-growing library on the history of eugenics and fascism focuses largely on nation-states, while Georgescu asks why an ethnic minority, the German-speaking Transylvanian Saxons, turned to eugenics as a means of self-empowerment in inter-war Romania. The Eugenic Fortress examines the eugenic movement that emerged in the early twentieth century, and focuses on its conceptual and methodological evolution during this turbulent period. Further on, the book analyses the gradual process of radicalising and politicization by a second generation of Saxon eugenicists in conjunction with the rise of an equally indigenous fascist movement. The Saxon case-study offers valuable insights into why an ethnic minority would seek to re-entrench itself behind the race-hygienic walls of a “eugenic fortress,” as well as the influence that home nations had upon its design. Georgescu’s work is ground-breaking in the sense that the history of this uprooted community is usually handled with extreme sensitivity and serious (and critical) research into Transylvanian Saxon involvement with Nazism has been scant, until now.

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45.00 €

Through the Window. Kinship and Elopement in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Author(s): Keith Doubt / Language(s): English

Keywords: Elopement; Marriage customs and rites in Bosnia and Herzegovina

This book is not about war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, evil, or the killing of a society. It is about a cultural heritage, something vital to a society as a society, something that was not killed in the previous war, something that is resilient.Through the Window: Kinship and Elopement in Bosnia-Herzegovina accounts for the trans-ethnic character of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s cultural heritage, focusing on marriage customs shared by different ethnic groups, namely, elopement and affinal visitations. The study provides for the inter-subjective logic that “makes sense” of these two complementary rites of passage that establish the collective identities of Catholics, Muslims, and Orthodox in Bosnia-Herzegovnia, and shows how the affinal relation called “prijatelji” is special to Bosnia and unique to its social character.

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45.00 €

Political Justice in Budapest after World War II

Author(s): Ildikó Barna,Andrea Pető / Language(s): English

Keywords: Political crimes and offenses; People’s Tribunals; Trials; Political Justice; Jewish Identity

In Hungary, which fell under Soviet influence at the end of World War II, those who had participated in wartime atrocities were tried by so called people’s tribunals. This book examines the history of these courts by means of a new methodology that the authors themselves have elaborated. Seeking to rise above ideological considerations and the methodological problems of earlier investigative frameworks, this study hopes to bring about a new level of awareness. The authors seek to determine which people were drawn into the transitional justice process and how the people’s tribunals functioned, with particular regard to gendered aspects. A further aim is to reveal the effects of the people’s tribunals on post-Holocaust Jewish identity.

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52.00 €

Those Who Count. Expert Practices of Roma Classification

Author(s): Mihai Surdu / Language(s): English

Keywords: Romanies; Government policies; Roma Classification; Ethnicity; Stereotypes; Public opinion;

Those Who Count scrutinizes the scientific and expert practices of Roma classification and counting, and the politics of Roma-related knowledge production. The book takes a historical perspective on Roma group construction, both as an epistemic object and a policy target, with a focus on the expert discourse of the last two decades. The book argues that knowledge production on Roma is neither objective nor disinterested but rather is co-produced by political and academic actors driven by organizational interests with rather narrow disciplinary research traditions, as well as by political manifestos. The result of such co-production is a negative Roma public image circulating well beyond the expert discourse which reinforces stereotypes held by society at large. The case studies and examples presented in the book show that the state-led population census, policy related surveys, as well as academic and scientific research, together craft an essentialized Roma identity. The recently reemerged Roma-related genetic research imports assumptions, classifications, and narrations from the social sciences and contributes through sampling strategies, interpretation of data, and generalization to reify and pathologize Roma ethnicity. Roma are relegated by experts to several types of determinism: to a social category, to a frozen culture, and to a homogenous biologized entity.

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95.00 €

The Last Superpower Summits. Gorbachev, Reagan, and Bush. Conversations that Ended the Cold War

Author(s): Thomas S. Blanton,Svetlana Savranskaya / Language(s): English

Keywords: Cold War;Diplomatic history;Soviet Union;USA;Great powers;Mikhail Gorbachev; George Bush;Ronald Reagan;Foreign relations;

This book publishes for the first time in print every word the American and Soviet leaders – Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, and George H.W. Bush – said to each other in their superpower summits from 1985 to 1991. Obtained by the authors through the Freedom of Information Act in the U.S., from the Gorbachev Foundation and the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow, and from the personal donation of Anatoly Chernyaev, these previously Top Secret verbatim transcripts combine with key declassified preparatory and after-action documents from both sides to create a unique interactive documentary record of these historic highest-level talks – the conversations that ended the Cold War.The summits fueled a process of learning on both sides, as the authors argue in contextual essays on each summit and detailed headnotes on each document. Geneva 1985 and Reykjavik 1986 reduced Moscow’s sense of threat and unleashed Reagan’s inner abolitionist. Malta 1989 and Washington 1990 helped dampen any superpower sparks that might have flown in a time of revolutionary change in Eastern Europe, set off by Gorbachev and by Eastern Europeans (Solidarity, dissidents, reform Communists). The high level and scope of the dialogue between these world leaders was unprecedented, and is likely never to be repeated.

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52.00 €

The Czech and Slovak Republics. Twenty Years of Independence, 1993-2013

Author(s): / Language(s): English

Keywords: Politics and government;Czech republic;Slovakia;Post-communism;Social conditions;Economic conditions;

The essays in the book compare the Czech Republic and Slovakia since the breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1993. The papers deal with the causes of the divorce and discuss the political, economic and social developments in the new countries. This is the only English-language volume that presents the synoptic findings of leading Czech, Slovak, and North American scholars in the field.The authors include two former Prime Ministers of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, eight leading scholars (four Czechs and four Slovaks), and eight knowledgeable commentators from North America. The most significant new insight is that in spite of predictions by various pundits in the Western World that Czechia would flourish after the breakup and Slovakia would languish, the opposite has happened. While the Czech Republic did well in its early years, it is now languishing while Slovakia, which had a rough start, is now doing very well. Anyone interested in the history of the Czech and Slovak Republics over the last twenty years will find gratification in reading this book.

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60.00 €

The Neopopular Bubble. Speculating on "the People" in Late Modern Democracy

Author(s): Péter Csigó / Language(s): English

Keywords: Democracy;Capitalism;Mass Media;

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, and thus do not follow popular public opinion as it is, but popular public opinion about popular public opinion.This book unravels how collective discourses on “the popular” have taken the role of intermediary between political elites and electorates. The shift has been driven by the idea of “liquid control:” that postindustrial electorates should be reached through flexibly designed media campaigns based on a complete understanding of their media-immersed lives. Such a complex representation of popular electorates, actors have believed, cannot be secured by rigid bureaucratic parties, but has to be distilled from the collective wisdom of the crowd of consultants, pollsters, journalists and pundits commenting on the political process.The mediatization of political representation has run a strikingly similar trajectory to the marketization of capital allocation in finance: starting from a rejection of bureaucratic control, promising a more “liquid” alternative, attempting to detect a collective wisdom (of/about “the markets” and “the people”), and ending up in self-driven spirals of collective speculation.

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50.00 €

Twenty-five Sides of a Post-communist Mafia State

Author(s): / Language(s): English

Keywords: Hungary;Politics and government;political corruption;dictatorship;Post-communism;21st century;Organized crime—Hungary;—History—21st century;Mafia state;Orbán’s government;FIDESZ;

The twenty-five essays accompany, illustrate and underpin the conceptual framework elaborated in Post-Communist Mafia State (CEU Press, 2016), published in conjunction with this volume. Leading specialists analyze the manifestations of the current political regime in Hungary from twenty-five angles. Topics discussed include the ideology, constitutional issues, social policy, the judiciary, foreign relations, nationalism, media, memory politics, corruption, civil society, education, culture and so on. Beyond the basic features of the economy the domains of taxation, banking system, energy policies and the agriculture are treated in dedicated studies. The essays are based on detailed empirical investigation about conditions in today’s Hungary. They nevertheless contribute to the exploration of the characteristic features of post-communist authoritarian regimes, shared by an increasing number of countries in Europe and Central Asia.

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65.00 €

The Long Détente. Changing Concepts of Security and Cooperation in Europe, 1950s–1980s

Author(s): / Language(s): English

Keywords: National security;Foreign relations 1945-; European History;20th century;International cooperation;Great Powers;East and West;Cold

The present volume presents a collection of 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 eventual outcome of the conflict between East and West and the quintessentially peaceful framework in which this “endgame” was played.By offering new, Euro-centered narratives that include both West and East European perspectives, the combined contributions of this volume point to critical inconsistencies and inherent problems in the traditional U.S.-dominated narrative of the “Victory in the Cold War.” Yet, rather than aiming at replacing this understanding entirely, the argument of a “long détente” demonstrates that this superpower narrative can, and needs to be, augmented with the plentitude of European experiences and perceptions. After all, it was Europe—its peoples, societies, and states—that stood both at the ideological and military frontline of the conflict between East and West, and it was here that the struggle between liberalism and communism was eventually decided.

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52.00 €

Pressed By a Double Loyalty. Hungarian Attendance at the Second Vatican Council, 1959-1965

Author(s): András Fejérdy / Language(s): English

Keywords: Foreign relations;Hungary;Vatican City;Vatican Council II;Communism;Christianity;Catholic Church;church and state;

The history of the Second Vatican Council and the history of the policy of openness towards the East-Central European Communist countries, that is, the so called Vatican “Ostpolitik,” were looked at until now as two separate topics of research. The virtue of András Fejérdy’s work is to demonstrate, at the end of a thorough-going study through various available archives (first of all of the party and state, but also ecclesiastical ones), that it is not like that, but in reality the two topics are closely linked. Analyzing the history of the Hungarian presence at Vatican II in the context of the Hungarian Church policy and the evolution of the relations between the Holy See and Hungary, the book reveals that in consequence of the interests of the Holy See and the Hungarian party-state related to the Council—from the perspective of Hungary—Vatican II was not primarily an ecclesial event, but it remained closely joined to the negotiations between the Holy See and Hungary. During the Council, Hungary became the experimental laboratory of the Vatican’s new eastern policy.

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58.00 €

Great expectations and interwar realities. Hungarian cultural diplomacy, 1918–1941

Author(s): Zsolt Nagy / Language(s): English

Keywords: Hungary 1918-1945;foreign relations;Cultural diplomacy;Cultural policy;Politics and government;Horthy era;Horthy Miklós;

After the shock of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which Hungarians perceived as an unfair dictate, the leaders of the country found it imperative to change Hungary’s international image in a way that would help the revision of the post-World War I settlement. The monograph examines the development of interwar Hungarian cultural diplomacy in three areas: universities, the tourist industry, and the media—primarily motion pictures and radio production. It is a story of the Hungarian elites’ high hopes and deep-seated anxieties about the country’s place in a Europe newly reconstructed after World War I, and how these elites perceived and misperceived themselves, their surroundings, and their own ability to affect the country’s fate. The defeat in the Great War was crushing, but it was also stimulating, as Nagy documents in his examination of foreign language journals, tourism, radio, and other tools of cultural diplomacy. The mobilization of diverse cultural and intellectual resources, the author argues, helped establish Hungary’s legitimacy in the international arena, contributed to the modernization of the country, and established a set of enduring national images.Though the study is rooted in Hungary, it explores the dynamic and contingent relationship between identity construction and transnational cultural and political currents in East-Central European nations in the interwar period.

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60.00 €

A Contested Borderland. Competing Russian and Romanian Visions of Bessarabia in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century

Author(s): Andrei Cuşco / Language(s): English

Keywords: Bessarabia;foreign relations;Russia;Romania;20th century history;

Bessarabia―mostly occupied by modern-day republic of Moldova―was the only territory representing an object of rivalry and symbolic competition between the Russian Empire and a fully crystallized nation-state: the Kingdom of Romania. This book is an intellectual prehistory of the Bessarabian problem, focusing on the antagonism of the national and imperial visions of this contested periphery. Through a critical reassessment and revision of the traditional historical narratives, the study argues that Bessarabia was claimed not just by two opposing projects of ‘symbolic inclusion,’ but also by two alternative and theoretically antagonistic models of political legitimacy.By transcending the national lens of Bessarabian / Moldovan history and viewing it in the broader Eurasian comparative context, the book responds to the growing tendency in recent historiography to focus on the peripheries in order to better understand the functioning of national and imperial states in the modern era.Bessarabia―mostly occupied by modern-day republic of Moldova―was the only territory representing an object of rivalry and symbolic competition between the Russian Empire and a fully crystallized nation-state: the Kingdom of Romania. This book is an intellectual prehistory of the Bessarabian problem, focusing on the antagonism of the national and imperial visions of this contested periphery. Through a critical reassessment and revision of the traditional historical narratives, the study argues that Bessarabia was claimed not just by two opposing projects of ‘symbolic inclusion,’ but also by two alternative and theoretically antagonistic models of political legitimacy.By transcending the national lens of Bessarabian / Moldovan history and viewing it in the broader Eurasian comparative context, the book responds to the growing tendency in recent historiography to focus on the peripheries in order to better understand the functioning of national and imperial states in the modern era.

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62.00 €

Dynamics of Class and Stratification in Poland

Author(s): Irina Tomescu-Dubrow,Kazimierz M. Słomczyński,Henryk Domański,Joshua Kjerulf Dubrow,Zbigniew Sawiński,Dariusz Przybysz / Language(s): English

Keywords: Poland;Social classes;Social stratification;Social mobility

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 long-lasting, stratifying effects. The authors analyse the core issues of inequality research that best explain “who gets what and why:” social mobility, status attainment and their mechanisms, with a focus on education, occupation, and income. The transition from communist political economy to liberal democracy and market capitalism offers a unique opportunity for scholars to understand how people move from one stratifi cation regime to the next.There are valuable lessons to be learned from linking past to present. Classic issues of class, stratification, mobility, and attainment have endured decades of radical social change. These concepts remain valid even when society tries to eradicate them.

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50.00 €

Screening Trafficking. Prudent and Perilous

Author(s): Yana Hashamova / Language(s): English

Keywords: human trafficking;

This book examines film and media representations of the social, political, and economic issue of human trafficking, one of the most dramatic challenges of today’s globalized world. Hashamova productively combines fieldwork in NGOs in southeastern Europe, social science data, and the analysis of Western and East European anti-trafficking films and media and their reception in the United States and the Balkans. Her book identifies a disconnect between the global flow of trafficking images and their local comprehension. The critical analysis of documentaries, feature films, video clips, and NGOs’ media materials and the responses they elicit from spectators reveals the flaws of these products and the ideological structures present both in them and in their audiences.

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Publisher: Central European University Press

Negotiating Marian Apparitions. The Politics of Religion in Transcarpathian Ukraine

Thinking through Transition

The Holocaust in Hungary. Seventy Years Later

Shortcut or Piecemeal

Broken Masculinities. Solitude, Alienation, and Frustration in Turkish Literature after 1970

Hungarian Culture and Politics in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1711–1848

The Eugenic Fortress

Through the Window. Kinship and Elopement in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Political Justice in Budapest after World War II

Those Who Count. Expert Practices of Roma Classification

The Last Superpower Summits. Gorbachev, Reagan, and Bush. Conversations that Ended the Cold War

The Czech and Slovak Republics. Twenty Years of Independence, 1993-2013

The Neopopular Bubble. Speculating on "the People" in Late Modern Democracy

Twenty-five Sides of a Post-communist Mafia State

The Long Détente. Changing Concepts of Security and Cooperation in Europe, 1950s–1980s

Pressed By a Double Loyalty. Hungarian Attendance at the Second Vatican Council, 1959-1965

Great expectations and interwar realities. Hungarian cultural diplomacy, 1918–1941

A Contested Borderland. Competing Russian and Romanian Visions of Bessarabia in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century

Dynamics of Class and Stratification in Poland

Screening Trafficking. Prudent and Perilous