Bøger udgivet af Central European University Press

The volume presents the results collated in the frames of the fact finding project led by the editor. The analysis includes the examination of a large number of legal documents and policy statements issued by national authorities and the international community on the matter. A critical overview is also made about the various Roma-specific political campaigns on national and European scale. The second half of the book contains interviews with activists that assumed a leading role in school desegregation. These testimony pieces have been critically reviewed by educational and policy analysts from the concerned countries.

Based on new archival evidence, examines Soviet Empire building in Hungary and the American response to it. Hungary was not important enough to resist the Soviets, its democratic opposition failed to win American sympathy, the US simply had no leverage over the Soviets, who sacrificed cooperation with the West for a closed sphere in Eastern Europe. The imposition of a Stalinist regime assured Hungary's unconditional loyalty to Soviet imperial needs. Unlike the GDR, Eastern Europe was never considered a bargaining chip for bettering relations with the West.The book analyzes why, given all its idealism and power, the US failed even in its minimal aims concerning the states of Eastern Europe. Eventually both powers pursued power politics: the Soviets in a naked form, the US subtly, but both with little regard for the fate of Hungarians.

The River Dnipro (formerly better known by the Russian name of Dnieper) is intimately linked to the history and identity of Ukraine. Cybriwsky discusses the history of the river, from when it was formed and its many uses and modifications by human agencies from ancient times to the present.From key vantage points along the river's course-its source in western Russia, through Belarus and Ukraine, to the Black Sea-interesting stories shed light on past and present life in Ukraine. Scenes set along the river from Russian and Ukrainian literature are evoked, as well as musical compositions and works of art. Topics include the legacy of the region's cultural ancestors as the Kyivan Rus, the period of Cossack dominion, the epic battles for the river's bridges in World War II, the building of dams and huge reservoirs by the Soviet Union, and the crisis of Chornobyl (Chernobyl). The author argues that the Dnipro and the farmlands along it are Ukraine's chief natural resources, and that the country's future depends on putting both to good use.Written without academic pretence in an informal style with dashes of humor, Along Ukraine's River is illustrated with original line drawings, maps, and photographs.

This book presents and analyzes artistic interactions both within the Soviet bloc and with the West between 1945 and 1989. During the Cold War the exchange of artistic ideas and products united Europe's avant-garde in a most remarkable way. Despite the Iron Curtain and national and political borders there existed a constant flow of artists, artworks, artistic ideas and practices. The geographic borders of these exchanges have yet to be clearly defined. How were networks, centers, peripheries (local, national and international), scales, and distances constructed? How did (neo)avant-garde tendencies relate with officially sanctioned socialist realism?The literature on the art of Eastern Europe provides a great deal of factual knowledge about a vast cultural space, but mostly through the prism of stereotypes and national preoccupations. By discussing artworks, studying the writings on art, observing artistic evolution and artists' strategies, as well as the influence of political authorities, art dealers and art critics, the essays in Art beyond Borders compose a transnational history of arts in the Soviet satellite countries in the post war period.

The Austro-Hungarian aristocrat of Transylvanian origin, Baron Franz Nopcsa (1877-1933), was one of the most adventuresome travelers and scholars of Southeast Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century. He was also a paleontologist of renown and a noted geologist of the Balkan Peninsula : many of his assumptions have been confirmed by science. The Memoirs of this fascinating figure deal mainly with his travels in the Balkans, and specifically in the remote and wild mountains of northern Albania, in the years from 1903 to 1914. They thus cover the period of Ottoman Rule, the Balkan Wars and the outbreak of the First World War. Nopcsa was a keen adventurer who hiked through regions of northern Albania. With time, he became a leading expert in Albanian studies. He was also deeply involved in the politics of the period. In 1913, Nopcsa even offered himself as a candidate for the vacant Albanian throne.The Introduction also tells of Nopcsa's tragic death: he shot his Albanian secretary and partner before killing himself. The memoirs themselves reveal some references to his homosexuality for those who can read between the lines.

Anchored in the Russian Empire, but not limited to it, the eight studies in this volume explore the nineteenth-century imperial responses to the challenge of modernity, the dramatic disruptions of World War I, the radical scenarios of the interwar period and post-communist endgames at the different edges of Eurasia. The book continues and amplifies the historiographic momentum created by Alfred J. Rieber's long and fruitful scholarly career. First, the volume addresses the attempts of Russian imperial rulers and elites to overcome the economic backwardness of the empire with respect to the West. The ensuing rivalry of several interest groups (entrepreneurs, engineers, economists) created new social forms in the subsequent rounds of modernization. The studies explore the dynamics of the metamorphoses of what Rieber famously conceptualized as a "sedimentary society" in the pre-revolutionary and early Soviet settings. Second, the volume also expands and dwells on the concept of frontier zones as dynamic, mutable, shifting areas, characterized by multi-ethnicity, religious diversity, unstable loyalties, overlapping and contradictory models of governance, and an uneasy balance between peaceful co-existence and bloody military clashes. In this connection, studies pay special attention to forced and spontaneous migrations, and population politics in modern Eurasia.

The Nazi 1933 Civil Service Law and the 1935 Nuremberg Laws are often considered the first anti-Jewish decrees in interwar Europe. Mária M. Kovács convincingly argues that Hungary's numerus clausus law of 1920, which introduced a Jewish quota at Hungary's institutions of higher learning, was, in fact, interwar Europe's first antisemitic law. By defining-and discriminating against-Jews as a separate "racial" or "national" group, it abrogated the principle of equal rights that had been enshrined into law; as such, it marked an abrupt reversal of Jewish emancipation in Hungary. Moreover, the numerus clausus law set the stage for subsequent "Jewish Laws" (in the late 1930s and early 1940s) that sought to solve Hungary's "Jewish Question" by means of extraordinary legal measures that targeted Jews alone. This book examines the origins and implementation of the numerus clausus, as well as the attempts to dampen its impact on Hungary's international reputation, focusing on the debates surrounding it promulgation (1920), its modification (1928) and its eventual application to other areas of Jewish life (1938-45).

Dániel Mikecz addresses in this study the tensions between oppositional civil society and party-political actors. As successive elections demonstrate the increasing confidence of the illiberal regime of Viktor Orbán, left and liberal parties of the opposition have faced a prolonged crisis in credibility. At the same time, the civil society has not been immobile, and bottom-up initiatives, social and political movements, and non-governmental organizations have gained momentum in the public sphere. The ruling power is also active in the extra-parliamentary political arena. Through national consultations, Peace Marches, and other means, Orbán's governing Fidesz party has mobilized voters outside of election campaigns and has implemented a so-called movement governance. The study offers a vivid examination of this top-down or astroturf mobilization of the regime. Mikecz identifies the different patterns of activism and creates a coherent typology. He describes in detail each kind of activism based on opinion surveys, protest surveys and content analysis. The categorization and comprehensive exploration of civil movements provide a deep understanding of the mechanisms of illiberal postcommunist regimes.

The creative sector, including the cultural industry, is key for today's economy. Copyright has the capacity to fix the roles and tasks of the actors involved and determine the direction of cash flows within this sector. The study of the evolution of copyright helps understand and adjust the regulation and commercialization of creative labor. Augusta Dimou provides a thoroughly researched, interdisciplinary and comparative study of the historical development of copyright regimes in three countries - Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria. She examines the function and significance of copyright in the institutionalization, development, and regulation of modern culture in East Central Europe and the Balkans during the diverse political regimes of the modern era, and at the interface between the various nationalization and globalization processes of the 20th century. The bulk of the exposition deals with the first half of the twentieth century with a final chapter providing a summary history of copyright under communism. The author presents the development of copyright in East Central Europe in the context of the European and global history of intellectual property and the creative industries. The study considers the expansion of copyright in the multiple contexts (social, economic political, cultural, technological, ideological, legal) that sustained its rise and development.

In this historical monograph on non-urban communist Albania, Artan Hoxha discusses the ambitious development project that turned a swampland into a site of sugar production after 1945. The author seeks to free the history of Albanian communism from the stereotypes that still circulate about it with stigmas of an aberration, paranoia, extreme nationalism, and xenophobia. This micro-history of the agricultural and industrial transformation of a zone in southeastern Albania, explores a wide range of issues including modernization, development, and social, cultural, and economic policies. In addition to analyzing the collectivization of agriculture, Hoxha shows how communism affected the lives of ordinary rural people. As elsewhere in the Communist Bloc, the Albanian regime borrowed developmental projects from the past and implemented them using social mobilization and a command economy. The abundant archival resources along with interviews in the field attest to the authorities' efforts to increase consumption and to radically transform people's tastes. But the book argues that despite the repressive environment, people involved in the sugar project were not simply passive receivers of models from the nation's capital. The author also describes that-in defiance of Cold War bipolarity-technological requirements and social policy considerations required a degree of engagement with the broader world.

Plebiscites, or referendums, are epitomes of direct democracy and the right of self-determination. While direct democracy has always been a key subject in the theory and practice of western liberal democracies, the issue of self-determination has been propelled to the fore by the hegemonistic moves of Russia. By providing a historical analysis of the post-World War One plebiscites, this book deals with enduring, painfully contemporary, and in in any case fundamental, concepts. The contributors to this edited volume approach the referendums comparatively. After grounding the analysis theoretically, the authors look at detailed aspects of individual cases, with the two plebiscites held in the Danish-German border region of Schleswig in the winter of 1920 as points of departure. They then extend the exploration through the inter-war period and address the effects of border delimitations on everyday life or gender roles in the context of ethnic mobilization. Finally, the book places the post-World War One plebiscites in a long-term perspective. The concluding essays assess, among others, the applicability of plebiscitary solutions to contemporary conflicts, taking into consideration issues of borders, religion, language, identity, and minority rights.

Eugenics and scientific racism are experiencing a resurgence, and an understanding of the ideas of Ales Hrdlička can help combat them. Today, the racial science of the early twentieth century is both untenable and contemptible. This book is about an arch figure of that period: Ales Hrdlička served as Curator of Physical Anthropology at the prestigious Smithsonian Institution from 1910 to 1941. Although his ideas about race are today considered pseudoscience, the uncomfortable truth is that he was an internationally respected scientist in his own day.The Perils of Race-Thinking advances a bold new interpretation of modern racial ideology by exploring Hrdlička's intellectual world. Using previously untapped Czech-language sources, Brandon irrevocably alters the discussion about this important figure by placing Czech nationalism at the center of his racial thinking. Defying disciplinary categories, Perils of Race-Thinking joins critical analysis of this key American anthropologist with an incisive revisionist perspective of interwar Czechoslovakia to unearth transnational racial presumptions lurking behind the worst crimes of the twentieth century.At the center of Hrdlička's race beliefs was his commitment to Czech and Slovak unity and independence. From this center, his next level of concern was what he believed to be a millennial racial struggle between Germans and Slavs. On a global scale, he viewed the Slavs, and especially the Soviet Union, as a eugenic bastion of White strength holding off the "rising tide of color."Step by step, Perils of Race-Thinking mercilessly dismantles Hrdlička's racial system and exposes it as mysticism dressed up in the language of science. Convinced that human individuals belonged "naturally" in racial groups, Hrdlička embraced a revolutionary program of reordering the globe according to a harrowing morality of "Darwinist" struggle. Yet despite a lifetime of measuring body parts, even Hrdlička could not decide how many races there were or how to tell them apart.

Which European and non-European ideas and practices facilitated the shaping of European unity? Or rather, which pursuits led to deadlocks in the cooperation between states? The book seeks answers to these questions by surveying the historical attempts at realizing supranational patterns of governance in Europe since the Middle Ages. The main focus is on the nineteenth and twentieth century organizational models of European unification. The analysis draws on an abundance of historical and legal source material. While the author encourages critical thinking about European integration, the exploration is admittedly based on specific values. va Bka claims that the struggle for the humanization of power with its democratic creative force has been the major driver in the development of the system of liberties and the idea of European unity. The analysis of the historical process up to the Lisbon Treaty (2007) with the recognition of common, shared, and supported competences meets the author's set of values to a great extent. The last part of the book examines whether the European Union can serve as a political and economic organizational model for other parts of the world.

The authors of this book retell the political and economic history of East-Central Europe, the post-communist Balkans, and the Baltic states and speculate about their future from the vantage point of three competing forces operating in the region: territorial imperialism, globalization, and nationalism. Exposed to imperial aspirations, the geographic area from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea has in the past 150 years been subject to alternating waves of globalization and nationalism. The nineteenth century Eastern European empires were open to forces of economic globalization, but all collapsed at the end of World War One. Emerging nation-states embraced the logic of Western-led globalization but were subjugated by Nazi and Soviet empires, which pursued policies of economic autarchy. The demise of the Soviet empire marked the revival of pre-1939 nation-states and the re-entry of forces of liberalism and globalization into the region, with multiple crises of economic transition, ethnic militancy, new forms of authoritarianism, and external security threats. By 2010 negative, nationalist-populist reactions against crises that globalization brought to Eastern Europe became the dominant political trend. The analysis involves the consideration about the very contemporary factors of Brexit and COVID, as well as Russia's and China's influences, and their effects on Eastern Europe.

M¿m¿lig¿, maize porridge or polenta, is a universally consumed dish in Romania and a prominent national symbol. But its unusual history has rarely been told. Alex Drace-Francis surveys the arrival and spread of maize cultivation in Romanian lands from Ottoman times to the eve of the First World War, and also the image of m¿m¿lig¿ in art and popular culture. Drawing on a rich array of sources and with many new findings, Drace-Francis shows how the making of m¿m¿lig¿ has been shaped by global economic forces and overlapping imperial systems of war and trade. The story of maize and m¿m¿lig¿ provides an accessible way to revisit many key questions of Romanian and broader regional history. More generally, the book links the history of production, consumption, and representation. Analyses of recipes, literary and popular depictions, and key vocabulary complete the work.

Serbia's national movement of the 1980s and 1990s, the author suggests, was not the product of an ancient, immutable, and aggressive Serbian national identity; nor was it an artificial creation of powerful political actors looking to capitalize on its mobilizing power. Miller argues that cultural processes are too often ignored in favor of political ones; that Serbian intellectuals did work within a historical context, but that they were not slaves to the past. His subjects are Dobrica ¿osi¿ (a novelist), Mi¿a Popovi¿ (a painter) and Borislav Mihajlovi¿ Mihiz (a literary critic). These three influential Serbian intellectuals concluded by the late 1960s that communism had failed the Serbian people; together, they helped forge a new Serbian identity that fused older cultural imagery with modern conditions.

150 expertly-researched biographical portraits (with pictures) of women and men who were active in, or part of, women's movements and feminisms in 22 countries in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Liberalism was not only the first modern ideology, it was also the first secular movement to have an international presence. The scholarly articles in this collection, skillfully edited by Ivan Zoltan Denes, examine liberal ideas and movements from Scotland to the Ottoman Empire. The volume seeks to uncover and analyze various relationships between liberalisms and nationalisms, national identities and modernity concepts, nations and empires, nation-states and nationalities, traditions and modernities, images of the self and the others, modernization strategies and identity creations. This volume provides an important historical analysis that is essential toward understanding the questions and motivations of liberalism in the European Union today. This is, therefore, a timely contribution to both historiography and contemporary politics.

Why are anti -corruption campaigns running out of steam, and why are post-communist societies obsessed with corruption?This book is not a study of anti-corruption policies. Instead, it looks at the politics of anti-corruption. Policies are what institutions do. But in analyzing politics, this book seeks to discover why institutions do what they do.