New Books in European Politics

"On the centenary of the Russian Revolution, Jonathan Daly and Leonid Trofimov have reinvigorated the study of a turning point in world history. Instead of rehashing the internal dynamics of the Bolshevik takeover, the authors have carefully juxtaposed the international ambitions of the Bolsheviks with the Revolution's reception around the world. Daly and Trofimov pair their lucid introductory ess...

Urban Planning in Nazi Germany: Attack, Triumph, Terror in the European Context, 1933–1945 (DOM, 2025) is edited by Uwe Altrock, Harald Bodenschatz, Victoria Grau, Jannik Noeske, Christiane Post, and Max Welch Guerra. The book includes contributions from Christian von Oppen, Piero Sassi, and Jannik Noeske.  Two co-editors, Victoria Grau and Max Welch Guerra, join the New Books Network to discuss t...

This deeply researched book offers new perspective on the NATO-Russia relationship through the eyes of Strobe Talbott, a deputy secretary of state for seven years under President Bill Clinton and the key US diplomatic broker for the former USSR. Stephan Kieninger traces the Clinton administration’s efforts to engage Russia and enlarge NATO at the same time, as elements of a new European security a...

A bracing corrective to predictions of the European Union’s decline, by a leading historian of modern Europe Is the European Union in decline? Recent history, from the debt and migration crises to Brexit, has led many observers to argue that the EU’s best days are behind it. Over the past decade, right-wing populists have come to power in Poland, Hungary, and beyond—many of them winning elections...

For a few years in the middle of the nineteenth century, Mexico was ruled by an Austrian and defended by a French army. This often neglected story is more than just historical trivia - it's a way of understanding 19th century imperial politics, and global insurgencies today. In Habsburgs on the Rio Grande: The Rise and Fall of the Second Mexican Empire (Harvard UP, 2024), University of Washington...

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...

Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–48 (Cambridge UP, 2014) tells a story of Polish and Slovak Holocaust survivors returning to homes that no longer existed in the aftermath of the Second World War. It focuses on their daily efforts to rebuild their lives in the radically changed political and social landscape of post-war Eastern Europe. Such an analysis shifts the persp...

The War on Critical Race Theory: Or, The Remaking of Racism (Polity Press, 2023) by David Theo Goldberg discusses how “Critical Race Theory” is consuming conservative America. The mounting attacks on a once-obscure legal theory are upending public schooling, legislating censorship, driving elections, and cleaving communities. In this much-needed response, renowned scholar David Theo Goldberg cuts...

The German Democratic Republic has come to stand as a symbol of communist tyranny, a source of Cold War nostalgia and socialist kitsch, and a failed alternative to the worst excesses of 21st century capitalism. In this book, Ned Richardson-Little delves into the central contradictions of the GDR state: This book illustrates the fault lines of GDR society, the worldviews and experiences of not only...

In this unprecedented history of intelligence cooperation during the Cold War, Aviva Guttmann uncovers the key role of European intelligence agencies in facilitating Mossad's Operation Wrath of God; a campaign of assassination against Black September terrorists. She reveals how, in the aftermath of the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre, Palestinians suspected of involvement in terrorism were hunted an...

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...

How do states advance their national security interests? Conventional wisdom holds that states must court the risk of catastrophic war by “tying their hands” to credibly protect their interests. Dan Reiter overturns this perspective with the compelling argument that states craft flexible foreign policies to avoid unwanted wars. Through a comprehensive analysis of key international crises, includin...

Globalization is over. With US president Donald Trump pursuing an 'America First' agenda in trade and foreign policy, everyone now recognises the urgency of defending their own country's national interest. But what is the national interest and why did it disappear from the political agenda? Will Trump restore American national interests, or will he betray them? How might we know the difference? Th...

For a long time many (although by no means all) scholars saw the relationship between capitalism and democracy as mutually reinforcing: economic competition and growth were expected to sustain democratic competition and improve governance and public good delivery for citizens, in turn creating a better environment for capitalist competition to flourish. But as capitalism has changed and has in man...

The term “Heimat,” referring to a local sense of home and belonging, has been the subject of much scholarly and popular debate following the fall of the Third Reich. Countering the persistent myth that Heimat was a taboo and unusable term immediately after 1945, Geographies of Renewal uncovers overlooked efforts in the aftermath of the Second World War to conceive of Heimat in more democratic, inc...

Human Costs of War: 21st Century Human (In)Security from 2003 Iraq to 2022 Ukraine (Taylor & Francis, 2024) documents and analyses the direct and indirect toll that war takes on civilians and their livelihoods, taking a human security approach exploring personal, economic, political and community security in Afghanistan, Iraq and Ukraine, in the contexts of the War on Terror and the New Cold War....

Charles de Gaulle is one of the greatest figures of twentieth century history. If Sir Winston Churchill was (in the words of Harold Macmillan) the "greatest Englishman In history", then Charles de Gaulle was without a doubt, the greatest Frenchman since Napoleon Bonaparte. Why so? In the early summer of 1940, when France was overrun by German troops, one junior general who had fought in the trench...

The history of the world’s most successful military alliance, from the wrecked Europe of 1945 to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. As they signed NATO into being after World War II, its founders fervently believed that only if the West’s democracies banded permanently together could they avoid a catastrophic global atomic conflict. Over the 75 years since, the alliance has indeed avoided war w...

Billionaires are an ultra-elite social class whose numbers are growing alongside their obscene wealth while others struggle, suffer or even die. They represent a scourge of economic inequality, but how do they get away with it? A set of dangerous and deceptive inter-connected myths portrays them as a ‘force for good’: -the ‘heroic billionaire’ asserts they are gallant protagonists of the American...

The Open Society as an Enemy: A critique of how free societies turned against themselves by J. McKenzie Alexander Nearly 80 years ago, Karl Popper gave a spirited philosophical defence of the Open Society in his two-volume work, The Open Society and Its Enemies. In this book, J. McKenzie Alexander argues that a new defence is urgently needed because, in the decades since the end of the Cold War, m...

Saving Liberalism from Itself: The Spirit of Political Participation Bristol UP, 2022) By Timothy Stacey In the wake of populism, Timothy Stacey’s book critically reflects on what is missing from the liberal project with the aim of saving liberalism. It explains that populists have harnessed myth, ritual, magic and tradition to advance their ambitions, and why opponents need to embrace rather th...

In the latest episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Professor Julie Yu-Wen Chen of the University of Helsinki speaks with Mr. Mohamed Ariff Bin Mohamed Ali, Chargé d’Affaires of the Malaysian Embassy in Helsinki, Finland. Their discussion centered on Malaysia's Foreign Policy, Malaysia’s current ASEAN 2025 Chairmanship, and the country’s engagement with Nordic nations moving forward. Mr. Ariff Ali,...

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the world witnessed the “creative, freewheeling, darkly humorous, and deeply resilient society” that is contemporary Ukraine. In this timely and original history, a bestseller in Ukraine, the historian Yaroslav Hrytsak tells the sweeping story of his nation through a meticulous examination of the major events, conflicts, and developments that have shaped it ove...

An intimate, affecting account of life during wartime, told through the lives that have been shattered. Even as scores of Americans rally to the Ukrainian cause and adopt Volodymyr Zelensky as a hero, the lives of Ukrainians remain opaque and mostly anonymous. In By the Second Spring, the historian Danielle Leavitt goes beyond familiar portraits of wartime heroism and victimhood to reveal the huma...

Crisis Cycle: Challenges, Evolution, and Future of the Euro (Princeton UP, 2025) John Cochrane Luis Garicano Klaus Masuch PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2025 Launched 26 years ago, the euro was never expected to have an easy life but it wasn't supposed to be this hard. A three-year solvency crisis, a string of bailouts, and a rescue by the European Central Bank (ECB) was followed by threats of defl...