RevDem Podcast

Introduction (Alexandra Medzibrodszky): Welcome all to this episode of the Review of Democracy podcast. I’m Alexandra Medzibrodszky, and it is a great pleasure to have with us today Una Bergmane to discuss her book "Politics of Uncertainty: the United States, the Baltic Question, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union". So, first of all, thank you, Una, for accepting our invitation and being here with us. Before we start discussing your book, let me introduce our guest today. Una Bergmane’s main research interests are the history of the Soviet collapse, the Baltic states, diasporas, transnational networks, collective memory, and the post-Cold War transitions in the Baltic Sea region. She is currently an Academy of Finland research fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute in Helsinki. Before joining the Institute, she held various fellowships across the world; she was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University in the US, a teaching fellow at the London School of Economics, and a postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Finland-funded BALTRANS project. She obtained her Ph.D. from Sciences Po in Paris. The focus of our podcast today is Una’s first book, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. As already mentioned, the title of the book is "Politics of Uncertainty: the United States, the Baltic Question, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union". In a nutshell, the book tells the story of how Cold War superpowers tried to deal with the Baltic question at the end of the 1980s, but also how marginal actors can find strategies to gain recognition and visibility on the international stage during periods of deep historical change. Let’s have a closer look at the ideas and arguments of your book.

The question of how to reverse illiberal backsliding after regime change is becoming live within Europe and beyond. This Rule of Law section podcast between Oliver Garner and András Sajó (Professor at the Central European University and Senior Research Fellow at the CEU Democracy Institute) considers this dilemma through the recently published lens of the CEU DI working paper ‘Militant Rule of Law and Not-So-Bad Law’.

For most of its existence the Spanish party system has been dominated by the Socialist Party, PSOE, and the People’s Party, PP. Accordingly, and somewhat unusually in Europe, the governments tended to be based on a single party. However, parties have been repeatedly forced to cooperate in parliament and since 2020 they must share office in government. This change is obviously related to the fact that recently new actors have appeared on the scene, challenging the center-right and the center-left. This podcast between Zsolt Enyedi and Fernando Casal Bertoa discusses inter-party relations in Spain. Fernando Casal Bertoa is Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham and the co-director of the Research Center for the Study of Parties and Democracy.

In this interview with RevDem editor Kasia Krzyżanowska, Rochelle Terman discusses her most recent book The Geopolitics of Shaming: When Human Rights Pressure Works—and When It Backfires published with Princeton University Press (2023). Rochelle Terman -- an assistant professor of the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Her first book, The Geopolitics of Shaming: When Human Rights Pressure Works—and When It Backfires, was published in 2023 with Princeton University Press.

In conversation with RevDem editor Lucie Hunter, Joachim Häberlen discusses his latest book, Beauty is in the Street: Protest and Counterculture in Post-War Europe (Allen Lane, 2023). Joachim Häberlen, Ph.D., is a historian of modern Europe and a writer focused on protest movements in post-war Europe and the experiences of Afghan and Syrian refugees in Germany. He received his academic training at the University of Chicago, where he graduated with a Ph.D. in Modern European History in 2011. Some of his publications include The Emotional Politics of the Alternative Left: West Germany, 1968-1984 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Citizens and Refugees: Stories from Afghanistan and Syria to Germany (Routledge, 2022), and Beauty is in the Street: Protest and Counterculture in Post-War Europe (Allen Lane, 2023).

In this conversation with RevDem editor Ferenc Laczó, Van Jackson – author of the new book Grand Strategies of the Left. The Foreign Policy of Progressive Worldmaking – explains what distinguishes progressives from liberal internationalists; clarifies why he thinks that the tradition of grand strategy might be worth rescuing by and for progressives; discusses the three main progressive grand strategies that are recurrently articulated in the US these days, what they priorities are, and what risks they respectively contain; distils the main consensual points of progressive worldmaking; and reflects on what a global starting point for agendas comparable to his own might lead to. Van Jackson is a political scientist and a scholar of international relations who specializes in East Asian and Pacific security, critical analysis of defense issues, and the intersection of working-class interests with foreign policy. He is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington. He also acts as a Senior Research Scholar at Security in Context where he co-directs the “Multipolarity, Great-power Competition, and the Global South” project. He is the author of four books, has made contributions to a wide range of international media, and runs The Undiplomatic Podcast. Grand Strategies of the Left. The Foreign Policy of Progressive Worldmaking has been published by Cambridge University Press. In collaboration with Lucie Hunter.

The guest for the latest RevDem Rule of Law podcast is Professor Jeff King. He is a Professor of Law at University College London and he is the Director of Research at the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law. He has previously acted as a legal adviser to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution. The conversation with Oliver Garner discusses Jeff’s 'regulatory’ conception of the Rule of Law and its application to contemporary challenges.

In this conversation with RevDem editor Ferenc Laczó, Matthew Longo – author of the new book The Picnic. A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain – discusses what motivated him to research the Pan-European Picnic of 1989; why he places such an emphasis on the uncertainty of the situation in those crucial days; and what conclusions he has drawn regarding the meaning of freedom in 1989 – and how that meaning has changed since. Matthew Longo is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Leiden University. The Picnic. A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain has been published by W.W. Norton & Company.   In collaboration with Lucie Hunter.

In this conversation with RevDem editor Ferenc Laczó, Viet Thanh Nguyen – author of the new book A Man of Two Faces. A Memoir, A History, A Memorial – reflects on the ambiguities and contradictions of growing up Vietnamese-American in the aftermath of what is called the Vietnam War in the US; explains what motivated him to seek a new balance between remembering and forgetting in his new book; shares his ethical considerations regarding the revelation of secrets; shows why self-representation is not enough; and discusses how his dialectic Marxism wavers between Groucho and Karl. Viet Thanh Nguyen (Vietnamese: Nguyễn Thanh Việt) is a Vietnamese-American professor and novelist. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the author of the scholarly monograph Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War and the novel The Sympathizer, among several other books. A Man of Two Faces. A Memoir, A History, A Memorial has been published by Grove Press.   In collaboration with Lucie Hunter.

In this conversation with RevDem editor Ferenc Laczó, Mirjam Zadoff – director of the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism and author of Gewalt und Gedächtnis: Globale Erinnerung im 21. Jahrhundert –discusses what motivated her to publish a collection on global memory and which key themes she wanted to address; how the explorations and reflection on key remembrance sites from across the globe have impacted her perspective on German and European trends; why she considers it so important to emphasize transnational and transcultural links; what are the shortcomings of Germany’s often-praised memory culture; and which examples of remembrance she considers particularly inspiring and capable of fostering a culture of responsibility. Mirjam Zadoff is the director of the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism. Gewalt und Gedächtnis: Globale Erinnerung im 21. Jahrhundert has been published by Hanser. In collaboration with Lucie Hunter.