New Books in European Politics

Reccep Tayyib Erdogan is towering politician. He has dominated Turkey for 20 years and is now being compared to Ataturk as a man who has changed the direction of Turkish society. And he matters not only to Turkey but to the international community more generally partly because of Turkey’s geo-strategic position but also because he has the power to influence the future direction of political Islam...

Beginning in 1955, West Germany recruited millions of people as guest workers from Yugoslavia, Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and especially Turkey. This labor force was essential to creating the postwar German economic miracle. Employers fantasized that foreign "guest workers" would provide labor power in their prime productive years without having to pay for their education, pensions, or medica...

The three protagonists of Pasta, Pizza and Propaganda: A Political History of Italian Food TV (Intellect, 2022) are food, television and politics. These are the three main characters that interrelate, collaborate and fight behind the scenes, while in front of the camera the writers, intellectuals and celebrity chefs talk about, prepare or taste the best Italian dishes. In Pasta, Pizza and Propagan...

European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine (1918-1948) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) investigates the transnationally connected history of Arab Christian communities in Palestine during the British Mandate (1918-1948) through the lens of the birth of cultural diplomacy. Relying predominantly on unpublished sources, it examines the relationship between European cultural agendas and l...

In the midst of the ongoing war between the Russian Federation and Ukraine, it is vital that the lay-educated public understand the historical origins of the conflict. It is with this in mind, that this episode of ‘Arguing History’, takes a look at the subject of ‘Ukrainian Nationalism and the Russian / Soviet state’. To guide us in this intricate and not well know matter, are three superb histori...

What impact has two decades' worth of policing and counterterrorism had on the state of mind of Muslims in Britain? In The Suspect: Counterterrorism, Islam, and the Security State (Pluto Press, 2022), Rizwaan Sabir writes compellingly about his own experiences of wrongful arrest, detention and subsequent surveillance, placing these in the broader context of 21st century British counterterrorism pr...

Çigdem Çidam, Associate Professor of Political Science at Union College, has a new book titled In the Street: Democratic Action, Theatricality, and Political Friendship (Oxford UP, 2021) that examines political action by citizens, and how we interpret and discuss that action in context of political structures. The title In the Street is a reference to the seminal French poster from May of 1968 tha...

After decades of rule by the National Liberal Party or one of its centre-right, mainstream rivals – usually either the Conservative Party or the National Peasant Party, – in December 1937 King Carol II appointed the antisemitic National Christian Party (PNC), led by Octavian Goga and A. C. Cuza to form a government, effectively ending the democratic consensus and Francophile orientation in Romania...

Jean Jaurès was a towering intellectual and political leader of the democratic Left at the turn of the twentieth century, but he is little remembered today outside of France, and his contributions to political thought are little studied anywhere. In Jean Jaurès: The Inner Life of Social Democracy (Penn State University Press, 2016), Geoffrey Kurtz introduces Jaurès to an American audience. Geoffre...

Israel's Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945–1949 (Cambridge UP, 2021) is a major new account of how a Jewish state came to be forged in the shadow of World War Two and the Holocaust and the onset of the Cold War. Drawing on new research in government, public and private archives, Jeffrey Herf exposes the political realities that underpinned supp...

"With the eurozone crisis going back to 2010, the refugee crisis that culminated in 2015, the crisis of the EU-Russia relationship going back to the Ukrainian Maidan revolution of 2013-14, to the Covid-19 crisis in 2020, the EU has struggled to live up to the expectations it raised both in relation to its own people and neighbouring countries. This is not an accident". Could this really be by desi...

Jacob Collins's The Anthropological Turn: French Political Through After 1968 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) examines some of the most important currents in French intellectual life through the 1970s. In the wake of the upheaval of 1968, and confronted with the economic and other crises of the decade that followed, a number of political thinkers and social theorists in France interrogate...

With the war in Ukraine showing no signs of stopping anytime soon, it was thought a worthwhile idea to have an informed discussion with four expert historians of 19th and 20th century European and Eastern European, diplomatic and military history. As you can readily see from the below biographies, this is a superior and award-winning panel. Please listen and enjoy. University of Exeter, Professor...

Today I talked to Nomi Claire Lazar about Out of Joint: Power, Crisis, and the Rhetoric of Time (Yale University Press, 2019). Drawing on stories of leaders and thinkers across a range of cultures and political contexts, ancient and modern, Nomi Claire Lazar shows how constructions of time can help stabilize or destabilize political order and spark violent resistance or coax quiescence by shaping...

Late one night, journalist Sally Hayden received an urgent message on Facebook: “Sally, we need your help.” It was from a group of Eritrean refugees who had been held in a Libyan detention center for months. Now, Tripoli was crumbling in a scrimmage between warring factions, and the refugees remained stuck, defenseless, with only one hope: contacting her. With that begins Hayden’s staggering accou...

To many the city might seem simply a large urban area to live within, but it actually forms an important political concept and community that has been influential throughout European history. From the polis of Ancient Greece, to the Roman Republic, to the city-states of the Italian Renaissance, and down to the present day. Modern concepts of democracy and citizenship that have shaped European thou...

As the culture wars intensify, it seems that all sources of neutral authority get challenged and that includes opinion polls. Accusations about bias and unreliability fly around and yet everyone seriously engaged in the political process studies polls closely because they think they contain important truths. So are polls becoming more reliable because of improved techniques or less so because of t...

In Poland in the 1940s and '50s, a new kind of Catholic intended to remake European social and political life--not with guns, but French philosophy. Piotr H. Kosicki's book Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and 'Revolution,' 1891-1956 (Yale UP, 2018) examines generations of deeply religious thinkers whose faith drove them into public life, including Karol Wojtyla, future Pope John Paul...

In The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community (Harvard University Press, 2022), Dr. Megan Brown details the surprising story of how Algeria joined and then left the postwar European Economic Community and what its past inclusion means for extracontinental membership in today’s European Union. On their face, the mid-1950s negotiations over European integration were aimed...

In his new and fascinating book, Britain Alone: How a Decade of Conflict Remade the Nation (Manchester UP, 2022), Dr. Liam Stanley explores how, over the past decade or so, various crises have encouraged a particular process of nationalization in Britain. Typically, increased scarcity of resources will twist and intensify existing tensions about access to those resources – who should have access,...

The Soviet Republic once held tremendous sway over the politics of Central Asia as the grand hegemon of the region. But now, in the post-Soviet world, geopolitics in this region is influenced by other powers, including the European Union (EU), and Central Asia’s own tilt towards China. In this changed environment, is the EU adjusting its policies to foster strong democracies in the region free fro...

"Who knows the name of the Czech prime minister, the name of the head of the Romanian or even the Polish executive branches? Yet, today everyone knows the name of the Hungarian leader: Viktor Orbán. To have a leader known outside the country's borders is a first for Hungarians. Some are frustrated by this: Hungary, they say, isn't just Viktor Orbán". In La Hongrie sous Orban: Histoires de la Grand...

In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to Portuguese Member of Parliament and internationally renowned biologist Alexandre Quintanilha about the many valuable lessons Portugal's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic could teach all of us, if only we'd take the time to pay attention. Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three dis...

"The rule of law is a means by which [western EU members] want to knead us into something that resembles them," warned Viktor Orbán during his successful campaign for a fourth consecutive term as Hungary's prime minister. Yet, until Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the EU has held back on the demands it makes of members regarding core democratic norms and values. For a decade, the EU's institutions a...

Rejecting claims that migration is a crisis for Europe, Europe's Migration Crisis: Border Deaths and Human Dignity (Cambridge University Press, 2020) instead suggests that the 'migration crisis' reflects a more fundamental breakdown of a modern European tradition of humanism. Squire provides a detailed and broad-ranging analysis of the EU's response to the 'crisis', highlighting the centrality of...