Search results for ""Central European University Press""
Central European University Press Systems, Institutions, and Values in East and West: Engaging with Janos Kornai's Scholarship
In this volume, leading social scientists, empirical analysts, and policy practitioners demonstrate the various ways in which the insights of Janos Kornai, a renowned early analyst and critic of the command economies of Eastern European communist states, are stirring academic and policy discussions about current challenges. While dissecting the economic theories and practices in the Soviet Bloc, Kornai devised and applied concepts such as soft-budget constraints, rush versus harmonic growth, surplus versus shortage economy, non-Walrasian equilibrium, bureaucratic coordination, and the invisible power of the communist party. These concepts are commonly applied to a variety of issues in the contexts of fundamental transformation. The cases discussed in this volume include the transitional paths of postcommunist economies, the pitfalls of East European market-building, economic repercussions of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and the process of integration in the Eurozone. The volume concludes with Janos Kornai's remarks about the value of democracy and other research topics, delivered at the conference celebrating his 90th birthday in February, 2018.
£57.60
Central European University Press Civic and Uncivic Values: Serbia in the Post-MilošEvić Era
Discusses Serbia's struggle for democratic values after the fall of the MiloA'evia regime provoked by the NATO war, and after the trauma caused by the secession of Kosovo. Are the value systems of the post-MiloA'evia era true stumbling blocks of a delayed transition of this country? Seventeen contributors from Norway, Serbia, Italy, Germany, Poland and some other European countries covered a broad range of topics in order to provide answers to this question. The subjects of their investigations were national myths and symbols, history textbooks, media, film, religion, inter-ethnic dialogue, transitional justice, political party agendas and other related themes. The authors of the essays represent different scholarly disciplines whose theoretical conceptions and frameworks are employed in order to analyze two alternative value systems in Serbia: liberal, cosmopolitan and civic on the one hand, and traditional, provincial, nationalist on the other.
£90.00
Central European University Press Universities and Reflexive Modernity: Institutional Ambiguities and Unintended Consequences
This is a book about the challenges and uncertainties facing today's university, a chronicle of recent and current changes in higher education in the world. There are many questions today that are sufficiently open to doubt and profoundly related to new developments, to justify new enquiries, by looking freshly and more closely at the actual configurations and at their historical grounds, for providing the new standard account of the university today. Vlasceanu discusses the inherent contradiction between academia on the one hand, and expectations and regulations of the market on the other. This title analyses demographic and other statistical characteristics of today's higher education. It examines the financial basis of universities, describes current governance models, and sets up a new typology of universities.
£20.95
Central European University Press Which Way Goes Capitalism?: In Search of Adequate Policies in a Dramatically Changing World
In this title, a well-known academic economist and former finance minister gives a lucid and well balanced overview of the current financial turbulences that have hit the developed economies. Strongly criticizing the excesses of neoliberal capitalism, Daianu calls for implementing necessary regulatory reforms in the financial sector and for restoration of a proper balance between the functions of the state and the market. Daianu goes back to some of the roots of the current crisis and the flaws or weaknesses of the global financial system. In doing so, he extensively discusses the monetary union of the Euro, and the critical question whether, how and when additional countries can and should join the club. This is a timely volume with a very strong and important warning.
£64.00
Central European University Press We, the People: Politics of National Peculiarity in Southeastern Europe
This work analyzes the processes of nation-building in nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Southeastern Europe. A product of transnational comparative teamwork, this collection represents a coordinated interpretation based on ten varied academic cultures and traditions. The originality of the approach lies in a combination of three factors: seeing nation-building as a process that is to a large extent driven by intellectuals and writers, rather than just a side effect of infrastructural modernization processes; looking at the regional, cross-border ramifications of these processes (rather than in a rigid single-country-by-country perspective); and, looking at the autonomous role of intellectuals in these areas, rather than just seeing Southeastern Europe as an appendix to Europe-at-large, passively undergoing European influences.The essays explore the political instrumentalization of the concepts of folk, people and ethnos in Southeastern Europe in the 'long 19th century' by mapping the discursive and institutional itineraries through which this set of notions became a focal point of cultural and political thought in various national contexts; a process that coincided with the emergence of political modernity.
£81.00
Central European University Press The Gratis Economy
£22.99
Central European University Press Stalin: An Unknown Portrait
This volume of oral history contains new information about Joseph Stalin's actual and political 'family', the political Mafia and the clans that surrounded him. The author has interviewed key politicians who survived the Stalin era, including officials of the KGB and the Komsomol and people who had personal contact with the dictator as secretaries or interpreters. The author's expertise and his access to archival sources in Russia have resulted in a work revealing jealously guarded secrets. This volume also contains a fascinating selection of photographs from a private collection. This collection includes photographs pf Stalin, his family members, as well as various political actors of the period.
£90.00
Central European University Press Alienated Women: A Study on Polish Women's Writing, 1845-1918
A study on Polish women prose writers from a turbulent time in that country's literary history. Key writers examined include Klemenntyna Hoffmanowa, Narcyza michovska, Eliza Orzeszkowa and Zofia Nakowska. The author's approach of major feminist theory and post-feminist thought throws new light on Polish women writers and their contribution to European thought.
£73.00
Central European University Press Mind and Labor on the Farm in Black-Earth Russia, 1861-1914
Did Tsarist Russia's political and industrial backwardness result from its rigid and archaic agrarian structure? Did the Russian revolution stem in large part from a parasitical elite's exploitation of an enormous peasant class? Was the Russian peasantry itself backward and 'dark' as a result? The attention contemporaries and historians have lavished on these questions has enshrined them as fundamental issues in Russian history. This text endeavours to recast our understanding of the agrarian problem by uncovering the history of both the physical and mental dimensions of agriculture. Employing literary, agronomic and statistical information on peasant labour and culture, this book also offers new perspectives on the limitations of traditional agriculture to adapt to a rapidly changing economic geography, such as that of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Russia. By taking a ground level view of the evolution of Russian agricultural technique, the author arrives at a very different understanding of the agrarian problem. The book identifies both the achievements and limitations of peasant farmers in adapting farming practices to the economic and technological challenges of the half century preceding the revolution. Most importantly, the book delves deeply into peasant life and culture to demonstrate how and why farming imrovements did not pass determinable levels.
£90.00
Central European University Press Studies in Biopolitics
This book is a collection of multidisciplinary case studies on biopolitical practices and discourses. The chapters discuss the regulation of assisted reproductive technologies in the Arab states, Israel, and Serbia; the biopolitics of abortion in Poland and Hungary; abortion used as a method of sex selection in Georgia, Armenia and India, and sex selection used to avoid abortion in the Arab states and in Germany. Other chapters explore local cases in a global biopolitical context: virginity tests conducted in order to humiliate women in Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey; transnational surrogacy commercializing the bodies of women in India; stem cell research abused in the lack of regulation in Russia; and the representation of Roma as research subjects in human genetic research in Hungary. Some of the essays discuss novel and unique reproductive policies, such as the pronatalist measures of a local municipality in Serbia, or the utilization of pronatalist policies by originally not targeted groups, such as gay and lesbian couples in Israel. There is also a set of case studies in the book that focus on reproductive tourism and procreative exile and analyze the practices of escaping the restrictive reproductive policies in one country and utilizing reproductive services in another.
£22.95
Central European University Press The Three Cs of Higher Education: Competition, Collaboration and Complementarity
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. Competition, especially for funding, occurs between and within institutions. Collaboration, more than a basic code of conduct, has become a political principle across Europe. Complementarity in the market for higher education facilitates this collaboration. The themes and contexts in higher education for which the three Cs are examined include missions and identities, response to external forces, the impact of evaluation systems and ranking schemes, the effects of globalization, intercultural awareness, and gender imbalance, and the challenges of student participation. Statistical tables and visual aids support the analysis and arguments. This book is the fifth in a series of publications drawn from the annual Forums of the European Association of Institutional Research (EAIR) from 2013 onwards.
£22.95
Central European University Press Regenerating Japan: Organicism, Modernism and National Destiny in Oka Asajirō’s Evolution and Human Life
As the first step toward a comprehensive reinterpretation of the role of evolutionary science and biomedicine in pre-1945 Japan, this book addresses the early writings of that era’s most influential exponent of shinkaron (evolutionism), the German-educated research zoologist and popularizer of biomedicine, Oka Asajirō (1868–1944). Concentrating on essays that Oka published in the years during and after the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), the author describes the process by which Oka came to articulate a programmatic modernist vision of national regeneration that would prove integral to the ideological climate in Japan during the first half of the twentieth century. In contrast to other scholars who insist that Oka was merely a rationalist enlightener bent on undermining state Shinto orthodoxy, Gregory Sullivan maintains that Oka used notions from evolutionary biology of organic individuality—especially that of the nation as a super-organism—to underwrite the social and geopolitical aims of the Meiji state. The author suggests that this generative scientism gained wide currency among early twentieth-century political and intellectual elites, including Emperor Hirohito himself, who had personal connections to Oka. The wartime ideology may represent an unfinished attempt to synthesize Shinto fundamentalism and the eugenically-oriented modernism that Oka was among the first to articulate.
£90.00
Central European University Press Tyrants Writing Poetry
Why do tyrants - of all people - often have poetic aspirations? Where do terror and prose meet? This book contains nine case studies that compare the cultural history of totalitarian regimes. The essays focus not on the arts, literature or architecture but on the phenomenon that many of history's great despots considered themselves talented writers. By studying the artistic ambitions of Nero, Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Saparmurat Niyazov and Radovan Karadzic, the authors explore the complicated relationship between poetry and political violence, and provide a fascinating look at the aesthetic dimensions of total power. The essays make an important contribution to a number of fields: the study of totalitarian regimes, cultural studies, and biographies of 20th century leaders. They underscore the frequent correlation between tyrannical governance and an excessive passion for language, and demonstrate that the combination of artistic and political charisma is often effective in the quest for absolute power.
£22.95
Central European University Press Isaac, Iphigeneia, and Ignatius: Martyrdom and Human Sacrifice
What is the meaning of the martyr's sacrifice? Is it true that the martyr imitates Christ? After the "one and eternal" sacrifice of Jesus, why are the occasional new (and often quite numerous) sacrifices necessary? What is the underlying divinitical concept behind these acts? How do these ideas survive in present times? The author considers martyrdom as a voluntary human sacrifice. The two emblematic figures of this transformation are Iphigeneia and Isaac. Pesthy argues that all the peoples in the environment in which Christianity came into being are characterized by an ambiguous and often hypocritical attitude toward human sacrifice: in theory they condemn it as barbarian and belonging to bygone times, in other cases they accept, admire and practice it. In modern Christianity, martyrs are real sacrifices, not symbolical ones. Our feelings about martyrs vary: we may admire their unbending courage and heroism or be irritated by their stubbornness, or even feel disgusted at the fanaticism with which they strove for death. Whatever our feelings may be, we must acknowledge that a very strong motivation is necessary to accept voluntarily or even seek death.
£64.00
Central European University Press A European Union with 36 Members?: Perspectives and Risks
A European Union with 36 members is a pure working hypothesis today. Extending future territorial contours is in full harmony with one of the main political objectives of the organization as the European Communities offered the possibility of membership to all European states, from the first day of its existence.
£73.00
Central European University Press Enemies for a Day: Antisemitism and Anti-Jewish Violence in Lithuania Under the Tsars
It begins by illustrating how widespread anti-Jewish feelings were among the Christian population in 19 th century, focusing on blood libel accusations as well as describing the role of modern antisemitism. Secondly, it tries to identify the structural preconditions as well as specific triggers that turned anti-Jewish feelings into collective violence and analyzes the nature of this violence. Lastly, pogroms in Lithuania are compared to anti-Jewish violence in other regions of the Russian Empire and East Galicia. This research is inspired by the cultural turn in social sciences, an approach that assumes that violence is filled with meaning, which is “culturally constructed, discursively mediated, symbolically saturated, and ritually regulated.” The author argues that pogroms in Lithuania instead followed a communal pattern of ethnic violence and was very different from deadly pogroms in other parts of the Russian Empire.
£64.00
Central European University Press Shortcut or Piecemeal: Economic Development Strategies and Structural Change
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.
£56.00
Central European University Press Institutional Trust and Economic Policy Lessons from the History of the Euro : Lessons from the History of the Euro
By what mechanisms does trust influence economic outcomes? Under what conditions do these mechanisms prevail? How do debates about trust help our understanding of the subprime crisis in the European Union? By integrating insights from Post-Keynesian, Austrian and new institutional economics, the central proposition of the analysis is that the presence or absence of institutional trust creates virtuous and vicious cycles in law-abiding, which critically influence the possibility for economic agents to have realistic long-term plans. In a low-trust environment the uncertainty surrounding the functioning of institutions leads to short-term decisions. Political business cycles, lax regulations on credit and boom-bust cycles are typical of such an environment. While empirical evidence from the EU largely supports these propositions, important exceptions are also identified and the conditions for the theory noted - including financial market influences, fashions in economic theory as well as political leadership
£56.00
Central European University Press Constitution for a Disunited Nation: On Hungary's 2011 Fundamental Law
This collection is the most comprehensive account of the Fundamental Law and its underlying principles. The objective is to analyze this constitutional transition from the perspectives of comparative constitutional law, legal theory and political philosophy. The authors outline and analyze how the current constitutional changes are altering the basic structure of the Hungarian State. The key concepts of the theoretical inquiry are sociological and normative legitimacy, majoritarian and partnership approach to democracy, procedural and substantive elements of constitutionalism. Changes are also examined in the field of human rights, focusing on the principles of equality, dignity, and civil liberties.
£98.00
Central European University Press On Baltic Slovenia and Adriatic Lithuania: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Patterns in Post-Communist Transformation
The analysis includes a critical revision of received dichotomies (e.g. on gradualism versus "shock therapy"), and contributes to current debates on the varieties of post-communist capitalism. This conceptual framework is applied in case studies on the Baltic States, with special consideration given to the possibility of alternatives to the Lithuanian way and the challenges of populism in this country's politics.
£81.00
Central European University Press The Tower: and Other Stories
In many of his stories Ezerioo was an initiator in the portrayal of the "fine neurosis". He was one of the first writers of Latvian prose to dispute the single - dimensional (e.g., good/evil) portrayal of a human being. The people in Ezerioo' prose are individuals with their own unique characteristics, often ambivalent, and subject to change in time and situations. As is common in modern literature, Ezerioo often blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy, frequently making his reader laugh about the serious while aching when reading the humorous. Ezerioo' best work was created in the genre of the short story. Among his literary models were Boccaccio, Maupassant and Poe. During his active literary working life, which lasted the short space of approximately 5 to 6 years of a short life, Ezerioo seemingly grasped an encyclopaedia of possibilities and subject matter, as well as the versatility of storytelling, not avoiding either classical subjects or the repetition of characters so traditional in short stories.
£14.95
Central European University Press Multidisciplinary Approaches to Romany Studies
£25.00
Central European University Press Duty to Respond: Mass Crime, Denial, and Collective Responsibility
The central claim of the book is that all members of the group in whose name collective crime is committed share responsibility for it. Discusses analytical and normative defense of arguments that purport to explain reasons for, and the character of, responsibility of decent people. Those who did not intend, support, or committed wrong, are still accountable in a non-vicarious manner. The basis of their responsibility is the crime-specific relationship between group identity and personal identity. Combines eye witness experience with the best of current scholarship on one of the most serious ethical issues of the day, namely, responding to criminal behavior of a national regime. This fact-rich review of emblematic political events in the recent past shows not only what it means to assume responsibility for the criminal actions of a corrupt regime but also frames the argument in the context of a critique of moral relativism.
£56.00
Central European University Press A Life under Russian Serfdom: The Memoirs of Savva Dmitrievich Purlevskii, 1800–68
This is a translation of one of very few Russian serfs' memoirs. Savva Purlevskii recollects his life in Russian serfdom and life of his grandparents, parents, and fellow villagers. He describes family and communal life and the serfs' daily interaction with landlords and authorities. Purlevskii came from an initially prosperous family that later became impoverished. Early in his childhood, he lost his father. Purlevskii did not have a chance to gain a formal education. He lived under serfdom until 1831 when at the age of 30 he escaped his servitude.Gorshkov's introduction provides some basic knowledge about Russian serfdom and draws upon the most recent scholarship. Notes provide references and general information about events, places and people mentioned in the memoirs.
£12.42
Central European University Press The Elefánthy: The Hungarian Nobleman and His Kindred
In an exploration of the life and customs of the Hungarian nobility, this text compares historical reality and legal literature on the example of one noble kindred: the Elefanthy of northern Hungary (present-day Slovakia). The text begins by outlining the customary laws regarding noble status, inheritance and marriage, as summarized in the famous code of Stephen Werboczy (1514). The author then compares these norms with the documentary evidence and establishes that the legal literature differs in regard to social mobility and kindred solidarity. With regard to this information, the fate of the Elefanthy family is traced through several generations, enabling the author to draw conclusions on the inheritance, the rise and fall of various branches, marriage strategies, and the "survival skills" of the kindred. In his summary, the author outlines some of the avenues for further research, including the peculiar Hungarian form of retainership (familiaritas), and the relationships between noble families and between the nobility and local communities.
£42.00
Central European University Press The Czech and Slovak Republics: Twenty Years of Independence, 1993–2013
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.
£72.90
Central European University Press Globalization and Nationalism: The Cases of Georgia and the Basque Country
This title argues for an original, unorthodox conception of the relationship between globalization and contemporary nationalism. While the prevailing view holds that nationalism and globalization are clashing forces of opposition, Sabanadze establishes that these forces tend to become allied. Sabanadze acknowledges that nationalism does react against rising globalization and represents a form of resistance against globalizing influences, but the Basque and Georgian cases prove that globalization and nationalism can be complementary rather than contradictory tendencies. Nationalists have often served as promoters of globalization, seeking out globalizing influences and engaging with global actors out of their very nationalist interests. In the case of both Georgia and the Basque Country, there is little evidence to suggest the existence of any strong, politically organized nationalist opposition to globalization. On the contrary, a predominant relationship between globalization and nationalism appears to be that of complementarity and mutual support, where nationalism often promotes rather than resists globalization. This work discusses why, on a broader scale, different forms of nationalism develop differing attitudes towards globalization and engage in different relationships.
£56.00
Central European University Press Given World and Time: Temporalities in Context
The interconnections of time with historical thought and knowledge have come powerfully to the fore since the 1970s. An international group of scholars, from a range of fields including literary theory, history of ideas, cultural anthropology, philosophy, intellectual history and theology, philology, and musicology, address the matter of time and temporalities. The volume's essays, divided into four main topical groups question critically the key problem of context, connecting it to the problem of time.Contexts, the essays suggest, are not timeless. Time and its contexts are only partly 'given' to us: to the primordial donations of time and world correspond our epistemic, moral, and practical modes of receiving what has been granted. The notion of context may have radically different parameters in different historical, cultural, and disciplinary situations. Topics include the deep antiquity, and the timeless time of eternity, as well as formal philosophies of history and the forms of histories implicit in individual and community experience. The medium specific use of time and history are examined with regard to song, image, film, oral narration, and legal discourse.
£81.00
Central European University Press Politics as a Moral Problem
In a world where politics is often associated with notions such as moral decay, frustration and disappointment, the feeling of betrayal, and of democracy in trouble, Kis examines theories about the morality of political action. Amending the two classical theses of realism and of indirect motivation in politics, Kis argues for a constrained thesis of realism and a wide thesis of indirect motivation. By these means the place of moral motivation and common deliberation can be identified, and political agents can be held morally accountable. The analysis refers to a broad range of classic and contemporary literature as well as to recent cases from international politics which call for moral judgment. The Appendix is dedicated to Václav Havel’s seminal essay on “The Power of the Powerless,” which sheds light on the diversity of approaches dissident intellectuals have taken to politics.
£25.95
Central European University Press Between Exile and Asylum: An Eastern Epistolary
A collection of letters by a most extraordinary member of East European intelligentsia, sent from Moscow, Mostar; lately Paris and Rome, where the author has lived since leaving war-torn Bosnia. Matvejević , vice president of the International PEN Club, was born in Yugoslavia, the son of a Russian emigre. His letters are about the past and the present of Russia, as welll as his hopes and fears for her future.
£56.00
Central European University Press The Paradoxes of Unintended Consequences
This volume of essays is dedicated to George Soros in honor of his seventieth birthday. The authors come from the different but intersecting worlds of academia, politics and business. The editors have chosen the title The Paradoxes of Unintended Consequences to encourage the contributors to adopt a dialogue-oriented approach and in reference to the example of Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake 400 years ago for holding heretic views which were probably far more backward than the views of those condemning him. The idea behind this approach was that any complex social process or political attempt to change the lives of people will have unintended consequences, usually paradoxical ones. These consequences should force us to reconsider our original theory. The volume also contains a short biography of George Soros and a list of his published works and philanthropic initiatives.
£90.00
Central European University Press Sectoral Responses to a New World Order: The European Union and its Policies
In the early 2000s, the European Union (EU) set out to transform itself into a leading player in world politics. Drawing strength from the Union's sui generis nature as a unique economic and political project, its leaders sought to make the EU a de facto global actor. However, in the past few years, the changing international order, the decrease in European competitiveness and economic output, as well as a number of internal institutional compromises have begun to challenge the EU's ability to perform its role as a global player, indeed even its role of regional stabilizer. The ongoin military conflict in Ukraine, the US's continuing pivot to Asia, and the repercussions of the global financial crisis in the Eurozone all hamper the Union's ability to act, but also undermine its magnetism> partner countries now without a clear path to accession appear to be much more opportunistic when it comes to their European relations, than the enthusiastic post-communist countries who became members in 2004. The present book offers a survey of both the challenges that the EU as a global actor has been facing since the 2008 financial crisis, and the policy responses it gives (or should give) to these problems. It assesses key areas of European policy such as internal institutional reform, foreign policy, security policy, trade, energy security and migration. The contributors believe that this selection offers a non-exhaustive list of policy areas that the EU can use to shape both itself and its environment in a way that is favorable for a stable and prosperous "wider Europe."
£20.95
Central European University Press The Sorrowful Eyes Of Hannah Karajich
The Sorrowful Eyes of Hannah Karajich is a lyrical, deeply moving story of love and the pain of emancipation, set in the now vanished world of rural East European Jewish village life. Hanna is the most beautiful girl in all Polona, a Hasidic community in the remote province of Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia. Involvement in the exciting new movement of Zionism takes her away to a commune in a nearby town. But there she meets and falls in love with the strangely named Ivo Karajich: a Jew, yet not a Jew. The agonizing drama that follows, plants into her beautiful almond-shaped eyes the hard grain of sorrow that her children, too, will inherit. Olbracht's novella is both a great love story and a marvellous portrait of a world that modernity threatened and Hitler destroyed.
£14.95
Central European University Press Europe'S Position in the New World Order
The European Union has succeeded to considerably expand its influence during the past twenty years. The three rounds of enlargement and the strengthening of the EU's economic and political presence in its neighborhood are among the most remarkable successes of its post-Cold War history. The Union is one of the key facilitators of stability in the Western Balkans; it represents an institutional and normative anchor for countries in Eastern Europe and acts as a partner for a thriving economic partnership with most of the Mediterranean states. During the past few years, however, the changing international order, the deterioration of European competitiveness and the need for internal compromises have begun to challenge the belief in the Union's future capabilities to actively mold its environment, bringing the problem of the capabilities-expectations gap once again to the fore. The essays in this book analyze the interaction between two processes: the evolving influence of the European Union in the wider European space, and its adaptation to the changing global environment.
£22.95
Central European University Press Catalogue of the Slavonic Cyrillic Manuscripts of the National Szechenyi Library
This volume provides a thorough introduction to the Cyrillic collection, and contains the detailed descriptions of the fifty-six Slavonic Cyrillic codices or fragments thereof held by the National Széchényi Library in Budapest, the vast majority of which are here described for the first time. The analysis of the codices has been done using the resources of modern technology. Written from the thirteenth to early nineteenth century, the codices were mostly produced within the confines of the historical Kingdom of Hungary. The catalogue is extensively illustrated with pictures of the most characteristic and decorative pages and a few covers of the codices.This publication is a further step towards the complete documentation of the Cyrillic manuscript heritage of Central Europe.
£73.00
Central European University Press Imperfection and Defeat: The Role of Aesthetic Imagination in Human Society
Literature is defined in a challenging way as the "science" of imperfection and defeat, or else as a type of discourse that deals with defeat, loss, uncertainty in social life, by contrast with virtually all disciplines (hard sciences or social sciences) that affirm certainties and wish to convince us of truths. If in real history most constructive attempts end up in failure, it follows that we ought to have also a field of research that examines this diversity of failures and disappointments, as well as the alternative options to historical evolution and progress. Thus literature serves an indispensable role: that of gleaning the abundance of past existence, the gratuitous and the rejected being placed here on an equal level with the useful and the successful.This provocative and unusual approach is illustrated in chapters that deal with the dialectics between literary writing and such fields as historical writing, or religious discourses, and is also illustrated by the socio-historical development of East-Central Europe.
£47.00
Central European University Press Meddling in Middle Europe: Britain and the 'Lands Between' 1919-1925
This work addresses the much-ignored history of British policy towards Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland following the creation of nation states in Central Europe at the end of the First World War. Lojkó convincingly argues that the absence of trust in the new political settlement and the discrediting of the traditional channels of diplomacy resulted in British influence in the region, being exerted mainly in the form of commercial and financial undertakings. While not always successful, the emergence of this new policy affected the development of diplomatic ties with these new nations.Yet no lasting diplomatic leverage resulted from this British involvement, and the absence of such influence proved fatal in the late 1930's when the new system of nations was disintegrating under the pressure of escalating violence.
£81.00
Central European University Press A Common Law for Europe
An essential guide for lawmakers, scholars, and students of law, this work takes on the formidable task of providing a detailed overview of the harmonization of law in the European Union. Skillfully researched, the authors seek to approach this topic with an eye to the recent enlargement process. In highlighting the most recent actions of the European Court of Justice and the Court of First Instance, the book seeks to analyze the future strengths and pitfalls of EU Common Law. Court rulings are quoted at length, and work in conjunction with text inserts in providing a format that breaks down complex information. This open style of the book gives researchers the ability to quickly locate useful information and cite statements from EU institutions. In outlining the sources and institutions of Community Law, and the challenges in harmonizing national and supra-national law-books, 'A Common Law for Europe' has done a tremendous service for academics and future leaders of the European Union.
£73.00
Central European University Press The Rise of Populist Nationalism: Social Resentments and Capturing the Constitution in Hungary
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. Overall, the volume attempts to explain how the new nationalism is rooted in recent political, economic and social processes. The contributors focus on two motifs in public discourse: shift and legacy. Some focus on shifts in public law and shifts in political ethno-nationalism through the lens of constitutional law, while others explain the social and political roots of these shifts. Others discuss the effects of legacy in memory and culture and suggest that both shift and legacy combine to produce the new era of identity politics. Legal experts emphasize that the new Fundamental Law of Hungary is radically different from all previous Hungarian constitutions, and clearly reflects a redefinition of the Hungarian state itself. The authors further examine the role of developments in the fields of sociology and political science that contribute to the kind of politics in which identity is at the fore.
£81.00
Central European University Press Wars and Betweenness: Big Powers and Middle Europe, 1918-1945
This book illuminates a set of crisis and conflicts that marked the 1920s and 1930s in the area between the Baltic and the Black Seas, demonstrating the diplomatic, military, economic or cultural engagement of France, Germany, Russia, Britain, Italy and Japan in this highly volatile region, and critically damaging the fragile post-Versailles political arrangement. By connoting the region as "Middle Europe," the editors revive the symbolic geography of the time and accentuate its position of in-betweenness, between the Big Powers and the two World Wars. The ten case studies combine more traditional diplomatic history with a broader emphasis on the geopolitical aspects of Big Power rivalry. The essays claim that the European Big Powers played a key role in regional affairs by keeping the local conflicts and national movements under the control and by exploiting the region's natural resources and military dependencies while at the same time strengthening their prestige through cultural penetration and the cultivation of networks of clientele. The authors nevertheless aim to overcome the simplistic view that the Big Powers totally dominated the lesser players on the European stage. The relationship was hierarchical, but the essays also reveal how the "small states" manipulated Big Power disagreements, highlighting the limits of the latters' leverage throughout the 1920s and the 1930s.
£56.00
Central European University Press Gorbachev and Reagan: The Last Superpower Summits. Conversations that Ended 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 editors argue in their contextual essays and detailed notes that these summits fueled a learning process on both sides of the Cold War. Their anthology provides insight into the nuanced shifts of monumentally important discussions, showing how Moscow's sense of threat was eased and how a hawkish Reagan softened his tone in negotiations during his second presidential term. Documents from foreign ministers Eduard Shevardnadze and George Shultz offer a particularly intriguing look into the handful of conversations that ended almost half a century of conflict. These verbatim transcripts, until now top secret, are combined with fascinating photos and crucial information from declassified preparatory and after-action documents from both the Americans and Soviets, obtained in the US through the Freedom of Information Act and in Russia from the Gorbachev Foundation, the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow, and from the personal files of Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev's foreign policy adviser.
£37.95
Central European University Press Physicians, Peasants and Modern Medicine: Imagining Rurality in Romania, 1860-1910
This book provides a historical narrative about Romania’s modernization. It focuses on one group of the country’s elites in the late nineteenth century, health professionals, and on the vision of a modern Romania that they constructed as they interacted with peasants and rural life. Doctors ventured out from the cities and became a familiar sight on the dusty country roads of Moldavia and Wallachia, for new health legislation required general practitioners (medicilor de plasă) to visit the villages in their districts twice every month. Some of them were motivated by charity, and others by patriotism, as the rural world became ever more prominent in Romania's national ideology. Based on original research, including doctors’ public health reports and memoirs, the book describes the rural conditions in Romania between 1860 and 1910 and the doctors' efforts to improve the peasants’ way of life. The author illuminates a variety of aspects of social life based on the doctors' reports on the peasant and the rural world, including general hygiene, clothing, dwellings, nutrition, drinking habits and healing. He places official measures, laws, regulations, and modern norms about public health in the context of a broader modernizing process.
£73.00
Central European University Press The Neopopular Bubble: Speculating on "the People" in Late Modern Democracy
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.
£90.00
Central European University Press How They Lived 2: The Everyday Lives of Hungarian Jews, 1867-1940: Family, Religious, and Social Life, Learning, Military Life, Vacationing, Sports, Charity
Having presented the physical conditions among which Hungarian Jews lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries--the kind of neighborhoods and apartments they lived in, and the places where they worked--this second volume addresses the spiritual aspects and the lighter sides of their life. We are shown how they were raised as children, how they spent their leisure time, and receive insights into their religious practices, too. The treatment is the same as in the first volume. There are many historical photographs-at least one picture per page-and the related text offers a virtual cross section of Hungarian society, a diverse group of the poor, the middle-class, and the wealthy. Regardless of whether they lived integrated within the majority society or in separate communities, whether they were assimilated Jews or Hasidim, they were an important and integral part of the nation. Through arduous work of archival research, Koerner reconstructs the many diverse lifestyles using fragmentary information and surviving photos.
£73.00
Central European University Press The Eugenic Fortress: The Transylvanian Saxon Experiment in Interwar Romania
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 analyzes 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.
£64.00
Central European University Press Subversive Stages: Theater in Pre- and Post-Communist Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria
Exploring theater practices in communist and post-communist Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, this book analyzes intertextuality or "inter-theatricality" as a political strategy, designed to criticize contemporary political conditions while at the same time trying to circumvent censorship. In the Soviet bloc the theater of the absurd, experimentation, irony, and intertextual distancing (estrangement) were much more than mere aesthetic language games, but were planned political strategies that used indirection to say what could not be said directly. Plays by Romanian, Hungarian and Bulgarian dramatists are examined, who are "retrofitting" the past by adapting the political crimes and horrifying tactics of totalitarianism to the classical theatre (with Shakespeare a favorite) to reveal the region's traumatic history. By the sustained analysis of the aesthetic devices used as political tools, Orlich makes a very strong case for the continued relevance of the theater as one of the subtlest media in the public sphere. She embeds her close readings in a thorough historical analysis and displays a profound knowledge of the political role of theater history.
£56.00
Central European University Press Civic and Uncivic Values in Kosovo: History, Politics, and Value Transformation
£33.95
Central European University Press Party Colonisation of the Media in Central and Eastern Europe
This book compares media and political systems in East-Central as well as in Western Europe in order to identify the reasons possibly responsible for the extensive and intensive party control over the media. This phenomenon is widely experienced in many of the former communist countries since the political transformation. The author argues that differences in media freedom and in the politicization of the news media are rooted in differences in party structures between old and new democracies, and, notably, the fact that young parties in the new members of the European Union are short of resources, which makes them more likely to take control of and to exploit media resources. The book takes a closer look at five former communist countries (Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, and Slovenia) to explain variations in media freedom and the politicization of the news media in and across countries. It offers general country descriptions as well as detailed case studies of the media policies and party backgrounds of two governments in each country.
£64.00
