New Books in European Politics

Among Eastern Europe’s postwar socialist states, Yugoslavia was unique in allowing its citizens to seek work abroad in Western Europe’s liberal democracies. Brigitte Le Normand's book Citizens Without Borders: Yugoslavia and Its Migrant Workers in Western Europe (U Toronto Press, 2021) charts the evolution of the relationship between Yugoslavia and its labour migrants who left to work in Western E...

We live in strange times. Politics around the world seem to be transforming into something new and often frightening. But this process has a history. In 1989, the bi-polar certainties of the Cold War gave way to a neo-liberal consensus, what Francis Fukuyama termed “the End of History”. Yet with BREXIT and Trump in 2016, the End of History seemed to be coming to an end itself. The current COVID cr...

Over the past decade, Poland and Hungary have become laboratories for a new kind of government: proto-authoritarian regimes that still have regular elections, vibrant oppositions and are externally constrained by EU law and potential loss of fiscal transfers. Viktor Orbán, Hungary's prime minister since 2010, especially has generated a comprehensive academic literature attempting to understand the...

Today we are joined by Philippe Vonnard, Senior SNSF Researcher at the University de Lausanne, and the author of Creating a United Europe of Football: The Formation of UEFA (1949-1961) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). In our conversation, we discussed the role UEFA played in the production of European identity, the global origins of the European confederation, and how European sports bureaucrats were a...

Both Russia and Turkey were pioneering examples of feminism in the early 20th Century, when the Bolshevik and Republican states embraced an ideology of women's equality. Yet now these countries have drifted towards authoritarianism and the concept of gender is being invoked to reinforce tradition, nationalism and to oppose Western culture. Gökten Dogangün's book Gender Politics in Turkey and Russi...

The collapse of the Berlin Wall has come to represent the entry of an isolated region onto the global stage. On the contrary, this study argues that communist states had in fact long been shapers of an interconnecting world, with '1989' instead marking a choice by local elites about the form that globalisation should take. Published to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the 1989 revolution...

Margarita Balmaceda’s Russian Energy Chains: The Remaking of Technopolitics from Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union (Columbia University Press, 2021) is a meticulous exploration of a complex system of energy supplies involving Russia, Ukraine, and the European Union. While originating in Russia, energy supplies, as the author asserts, undergo changes and transformations when being delivered...

A Sultan in Autumn: Erdogan Faces Turkey's Uncontainable Forces (I. B. Tauris, 2021) is a primer for anybody who wants to understand modern Turkish politics and its central player Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who, for better or worse, has shaped Turkish politics and society for the last two decades. The book breaks down various elements of his administration and policy and is a vital resource for understa...

It’s been 44 years since the Young European Federalists first coined the term “democratic deficit” – two years before the first direct elections to the European Parliament, 10 before the Single European Act and more than 20 before the advent of the euro. Over those years – as the single market and the new currency shifted powers from the nation to the union – the conviction that the EU suffers suc...

"The populist radical right is by far the best-studied party family within political science”. Extremism expert Cas Mudde may be right but, as Léonie de Jonge argues in The Success and Failure of Right-Wing Populist Parties in the Benelux Countries (Routledge, 2021), less studied are the specific conditions under which right-wing populism succeeds and - just as importantly - fails. Why, for exampl...

In July 2021, nine summers after its then president saved the euro with three choice words (“whatever it takes”), the European Central Bank published the results of a thoroughgoing review of its strategy. A policy framework built for times when inflation posed a modest upside challenge had coped – but only just – with successive financial, sovereign-debt, banking and health crises that threatened...

Once described as a “German oddity”†, Ordoliberalism was one of a number of new liberalisms that emerged from the political maelstrom of the interwar period. But, unlike the other neoliberal splinters, Ordoliberalism – founded at the University of Freiburg by economist Walter Eucken and jurist Franz Böhm – was quickly tested in the real world. The West Germany rebuilt out of the ashes of war was f...

In 1961, it was famously declared that the “fight for education is too important to be left solely to the educators.” Enter the OECD. In The OECD’s Historical Rise in Education: The Formation of a Global Governing Complex (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Christian Ydesen offers a well-edited volume that illuminates how the OECD normalized its influence over global education policy from its Cold War ori...

Putin is not the unconstrained, all-powerful boogeyman he is made out to be in the popular Western media. So says Timothy Frye, Professor of Political Science at Columbia University in his new book, Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia (Princeton UP, 2021). Drawing on more than three decades of research, and reams of data from within Russia itself, Frye depicts a "personal autocra...

Marta Dyczok's book Ukraine Calling: A Kaleidoscope from Hromadske Radio 2016-2019 (Ibidem Press, 2021) is like a time capsule containing a selection of interviews that aired on Hromadske Radio's Ukraine Calling show. They capture what people were thinking during a critical time in the country's history, from the July 2016 NATO Summit through to Volodymyr Zelenskyy's 2019 landslide election victor...

In 2020-21, the UK left first the EU and then the 30-nation European Economic Area. Much of the impact has been masked by the coronavirus pandemic but, as that lifts, there will be profound effects on patterns of employment, national strategic positioning, political cleavages and even on the continued cohesion of the kingdom itself. This did not have to be the case. Short of never leaving the EU,...

This is not a book about Sir Winston Churchill. It is not principally about his politics, nor his rhetorical imagination, nor even about the man himself. Instead, it addresses the varied afterlives of the man and the persistent, deeply located compulsion to bring him back from the dead, capturing and explaining the significance of the various Churchill myths to Britain's history and current politi...

How did communities come to terms with the collapse of communism? In order to guide the wider narrative, many former communist countries constructed museums dedicated to chronicling their experiences. Museums of Communism: New Memory Sites in Central and Eastern Europe (Indiana UP, 2020) explores the complicated intersection of history, commemoration, and victimization made evident in these museum...

With thousands of migrants attempting the perilous maritime journey from North Africa to Europe each year, transnational migration is a defining feature of social life in the Mediterranean today. On the island of Sicily, where many migrants first arrive and ultimately remain, the contours of migrant reception and integration are frequently animated by broader concerns for human rights and social j...

Exploring the concepts of collaboration, resistance, and postwar retribution and focusing on the Chetnik movement, Jelena Đureinović's book The Politics of Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Serbia (Routledge, 2020) analyses the politics of memory. Since the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, memory politics in Serbia has undergone drastic changes in the way in which the Second W...

An elected politician is assassinated in the street by a terrorist associated with extreme political groups, and the national response is to encourage picnics. Thousands of people are held in prison-like conditions without judicial oversight or any time-limit on their sentence. An attempt to re-assert national sovereignty and borders leads thousands of citizens to register for dual citizenship wit...

In this richly observed account of migrant shopkeepers in five cities in the United Kingdom, Suzanne Hall examines the brutal contradictions of sovereignty and capitalism in the formation of street livelihoods in the urban margins. Hall locates The Migrant's Paradox: Street Livelihoods and Marginal Citizenship in Britain (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) on streets in the far-flung parts of de...

Between voting to leave the European Union in 2016 and doing it four years later, the British political and media classes debated what kind of relationship they should have with the EU after withdrawal. Should it be Norwegian, Canadian or even - said government spinners - Australian? Now the UK is outside both the EU and the wider 30-nation European Economic Area (EEA), Routledge has launched a fo...

In 2021, Ukraine celebrates its thirty-year independence anniversary. During this relatively short period of time—when considered in historical terms—Ukraine underwent a number of drastic changes that have so far shaped the country’s domestic and international environments. From “the Ukraine” to Ukraine: A Contemporary History, 1991-2021 (Ibidem Press, 2021), edited by Georgiy Kasianov, Matthew Ro...

The scene is Turkey in the mid-to-late Seventies. A young male college student hops onto a bus. He sits next to a cute female student from his class, but before they can strike up a conversation, they see a right-wing passenger, walk up to another passenger and hit him on the head with a hammer. The young woman screams. The two students get off the bus, only for the female student to call the male...