New Books in Western European Studies

"The rule of law is a means by which [western EU members] want to knead us into something that resembles them," warned Viktor Orbán during his successful campaign for a fourth consecutive term as Hungary's prime minister.Yet, until Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the EU has held back on the demands it makes of members regarding core democratic norms and values. For a decade, the EU's institutions and most of its members have worried about the possibility of the emergence of a full autocracy within its borders but have been held back by diplomatic interests and the constraints imposed by unanimity in the use of Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union.The war, Orbán's re-election, a split in the Polish-Hungarian axis, and the lengthening queue of eastern membership applicants have changed the backdrop. The political will to ensure a liberal-democratic union has been reinforced but Article 7 is still inadequate to the task.Tom Theuns, assistant professor of political theory and European politics at Leiden University’s Institute of Political Science, has a nuclear option in his new paper: The Need for an EU Expulsion Mechanism: Democratic Backsliding and the Failure of Article 7 (Res Publica, Springer - 2022)*.*https://link.springer.com/arti...Mentioned: Memory and the future of Europe: Rupture and integration in the wake of total war by Peter Verovšek (Manchester University Press, 2020) and Adding a Bite to a Bark? A Story of Article 7, the EU Enlargement, and Jörg Haider by Wojciech Sadurski (Sydney Law School Research Paper No. 10/01)*The authors' book recommendations are: Technopopulism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics by Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti (OUP Oxford, 2021) and The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (Little Brown, 2013).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors (a division of Energy Aspects). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Today we talk to Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon about Wasteland with Words (Reaktion, 2010) and about microhistory as a method. Iceland is an enigmatic island country marked by contradiction: it’s a part of Europe, yet separated from it by the Atlantic Ocean; it’s seemingly inhospitable, yet home to more than 300,000. Wasteland with Words explores these paradoxes to uncover the mystery of Iceland. In Wasteland with Words Sigurdur Gylfi Magnússon presents a wide-ranging and detailed analysis of the island’s history that examines the evolution and transformation of Icelandic culture while investigating the literary and historical factors that created the rich cultural heritage enjoyed by Icelanders today. Magnússon explains how a nineteenth-century economy based on the industries of fishing and agriculture—one of the poorest in Europe—grew to become a disproportionately large economic power in the late twentieth century, while retaining its strong sense of cultural identity. Bringing the story up to the present, he assesses the recent economic and political collapse of the country and how Iceland has coped. Throughout Magnússon seeks to chart the vast changes in this country’s history through the impact and effect on the Icelandic people themselves. Up-to-date and fascinating, Wasteland with Words is a comprehensive study of the island’s cultural and historical development, from tiny fishing settlements to a global economic power.Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The beginnings of the modern welfare state are often traced to the late nineteenth-century labor movement and to policymakers’ efforts to appeal to working-class voters. But in Agents of Reform: Child Labor and the Origins of the Welfare State (Princeton UP, 2021), Elisabeth Anderson shows that the regulatory welfare state began a half-century earlier, in the 1830s, with the passage of the first child labor laws. Agents of Reform tells the story of how middle-class and elite reformers in Europe and the United States defined child labor as a threat to social order, and took the lead in bringing regulatory welfare into being. They built alliances to maneuver around powerful political blocks and instituted pathbreaking new employment protections. Later in the century, now with the help of organized labor, they created factory inspectorates to strengthen and routinize the state’s capacity to intervene in industrial working conditions. Agents of Reform compares seven in-depth case studies of key policy episodes in Germany, France, Belgium, Massachusetts, and Illinois. Foregrounding the agency of individual reformers, it challenges existing explanations of welfare state development and advances a new pragmatist field theory of institutional change. In doing so, it moves beyond standard narratives of interests and institutions toward an integrated understanding of how these interact with political actors’ ideas and coalition-building strategies.Agents of Reform is a pathbreaking contribution to our understanding of the emergence of the welfare state and the role of social movements in political reform.Javier Mejia is an economist teaching at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. His interests extend to topics on entrepreneurship and political economy with a geographical specialty in Latin America and the Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University--Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is a regular contributor to different news outlets. Currently, he is Forbes Magazine op-ed columnist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Rejecting claims that migration is a crisis for Europe, Europe's Migration Crisis: Border Deaths and Human Dignity (Cambridge University Press, 2020) instead suggests that the 'migration crisis' reflects a more fundamental breakdown of a modern European tradition of humanism. Squire provides a detailed and broad-ranging analysis of the EU's response to the 'crisis', highlighting the centrality of practices of governing migration through death and precarity. Furthermore, she unpacks a series of pro-migration activist interventions that emerge from the lived experiences of those regularly confronting the consequences of the EU's response. By showing how these advance alternative horizons of solidarity and hope, Squire draws attention to a renewed humanism that is grounded both in a deepened respect for the lives and dignity of people on the move, and an appreciation of longer histories of violence and dispossession.Vicki Squire is Professor of International Politics at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick. Her research explores the politics of migration, displacement, asylum and solidarity activism across various contexts. She is author of several books, including Reclaiming Migration (2021, Manchester University Press), Europe’s Migration Crisis (2020, Cambridge University Press), Post/Humanitarian Border Politics Between Mexico and the US (2015, Palgrave) and The Exclusionary Politics of Asylum (2009, Palgrave). She currently leads a large collaborative project, Data and Displacement, which explores the data-based humanitarian assistance to IDPs (internally displaced persons) in north-eastern Nigeria and South Sudan.Lamis Abdelaaty is an assistant professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

(Dis)connected Empires: Imperial Portugal, Sri Lankan Diplomacy, and the Making of a Habsburg Conquest in Asia (Oxford University Press, 2019) takes the reader on a global journey to explore the triangle formed during the sixteenth century between the Portuguese empire, the empire of Kotte in Sri Lanka, and the Catholic Monarchy of the Spanish Habsburgs. It explores nine decades of connections, cross-cultural diplomacy, and dialogue, to answer one troubling question: why, in the end, did one side decide to conquer the other? To find the answer, Biedermann explores the imperial ideas that shaped the politics of Renaissance Iberia and sixteenth-century Sri Lanka. (Dis)connected Empires argues that, whilst some of these ideas and the political idioms built around them were perceived as commensurate by the various parties involved, differences also emerged early on. This prepared the ground for a new kind of conquest politics, which changed the inter-imperial game at the end of the sixteenth century. The transition from suzerainty-driven to sovereignty-fixated empire-building changed the face of Lankan and Iberian politics forever, and is of relevance to global historians at large. Through its scrutiny of diplomacy, political letter-writing, translation practices, warfare, cartography, and art, (Dis)connected Empires paints a troubling panorama of connections breeding divergence and leading to communicational collapse. It examines a key chapter in the pre-history of British imperialism in Asia, highlighting how diplomacy and mutual understandings can, under certain conditions, produce conquest.Please also see this related article by Dr. Biedermann (which was mentioned during the interview): https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/714972Dr. Zoltán Biedermann is Professor of Early Modern History in the School of European Languages, Culture and Society at University College London.Samee Siddiqui is a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Today I spoke to Prof. Adrian Shubert, professor of History at York University and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada about his book on the nineteenth century Spanish soldier statesman Baldomero Espartero published by the University of Toronto Press in 2021.Baldomero Espartero (1793–1879) who Shubert compares to Napoleon and Garibaldi and on whom a postage stamp was released in May 2020 in Spain (after the publication of The Sword..), led a life resembling that of a character created by Stendhal or Gabriel García Márquez. Indeed Espartero was famed to have been the peacemaker who promoted national unity who had brought an end to the horrific Carlist civil war, a highly internationalized conflict. He became the harbinger of a nationalism that was not elitist but collective.In The Sword of Luchana: Baldomero Espartero and the Making of Modern Spain, 1793–1879 (U Toronto Press, 2021), based on comprehensive archival research in Spain, Argentina, and the United Kingdom, the historian explores the public and private lives of Espartero and his wife Jacinta who he describes as the power couple of 19th century Spain. He affirms that her role in his life and public life brought to the fore gender issues in the 19th century and were a constitutive part of the liberal revolution.Shubert’s work touches diverse aspects during times of war, revolution, and political and social change and brings to life a Spanish hero who Karl Marx mentioned in his writings and who has fallen into oblivion.Minni Sawhney is a professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Delhi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In Converging on Cannibals: Terrors of Slaving in Atlantic Africa, 1509-1670 (Ohio UP, 2019), Jared Staller tells the history of how the myth of cannibalism in West Central Africa developed between 1509 and 1670 in the context of mis-understandings between European and Africans. Many of these misunderstandings were in fact intentional, given that the myth of cannibalism proved very useful to Portuguese slavers seeking to bypass the restrictions imposed by the Papacy as to who could be justifiably enslaved. On the African side, rulers of the Kongo kingdom used the discourse of cannibals to secure Portuguese support at a time of political upheaval. The increasing chaos and violence that resulted from the slow decline of existing political structures such as the Kongo, coupled with a protracted drought, contributed to the formation of new political formations that relied heavily on violence and terror and who found the myth of cannibalism useful in their attempts to compete and survive in a dangerous and insecure world. Back in Europe, stories about African cannibals were also used as a means to reflect on the religious conflicts of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation era, allowing the myth to be passed on and survive into the modern world. Staller tells this compelling story by re-reading the most important European sources where African cannibals are mentioned as well as the few African sources that exist for this period. By carefully cross-referencing these sources and building on the knowledge that historians of Africa have been able to secure from oral and ethnographic sources, Staller is able to revisit old debates in African historiography and demonstrate that European sources, when carefully read, can illuminate our understanding of African perspectives. The book includes a detailed explanation of the methodology used, suggested readings for every chapter and brief excerpts from the sources, all of which make this book a robust contribution to the history and historiography of Africa and the Atlantic world.Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is an associate professor of history at Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Patronage has long been an important topic of study in musicology, but is much more likely to be one that specialists in medieval or renaissance music research. In The Creative Labor of Music Patronage in Interwar France (Boydell Press, 2021), Louis Epstein turns to patronage in the twentieth century to reveal an important part of the musical economy that is often overlooked. Many different types of patrons existed in this period, from music publishers and the French government to institutions and wealthy individuals. Far from mere sources of funding, early twentieth-century patrons collaborated closely with composers, treating commissions for new music as opportunities to express their own artistry. Although some of these patrons tried to interfere with the compositional process, most were engaged in a more subtle form of labor. For instance, they curated like-minded composers, encouraged people to write in expensive genres like opera or orchestral music, and supported French nationalism. Epstein also finds that the French example helped to influence the flowering of institutional patronage in post-World War II America.Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

As modern empires rise and fall, ancient Rome becomes ever more significant. We yearn for Rome's power but fear Rome's ruin--will we turn out like the Romans, we wonder, or can we escape their fate? That question has obsessed centuries of historians and leaders, who have explored diverse political, religious, and economic forces to explain Roman decline. Yet the decisive factor remains elusive.In New Rome: The Empire in the East (Harvard UP, 2022), Paul Stephenson looks beyond traditional texts and well-known artifacts to offer a novel, scientifically-minded interpretation of antiquity's end. It turns out that the descent of Rome is inscribed not only in parchments but also in ice cores and DNA. From these and other sources, we learn that pollution and pandemics influenced the fate of Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire. During its final five centuries, the empire in the east survived devastation by natural disasters, the degradation of the human environment, and pathogens previously unknown to the empire's densely populated, unsanitary cities. Despite the Plague of Justinian, regular "barbarian" invasions, a war with Persia, and the rise of Islam, the empire endured as a political entity. However, Greco-Roman civilization, a world of interconnected cities that had shared a common material culture for a millennium, did not.Politics, war, and religious strife drove the transformation of Eastern Rome, but they do not tell the whole story. Braiding the political history of the empire together with its urban, material, environmental, and epidemiological history, New Rome offers the most comprehensive explanation to date of the Eastern Empire's transformation into Byzantium. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Poland in a Colonial World-Order: Adjustments and Aspirations, 1918-1939 (Routledge, 2021) is a study of the interwar Polish state and empire building project in a changing world of empires, nation-states, dominions, protectorates, mandates, and colonies.Drawing from a wide range of sources spanning two continents and five countries, Piotr Puchalski examines how Polish elites looked to expansion in South America and Africa as a solution to both real problems, such as industrial backwardness, and perceived issues, such as the supposed overrepresentation of Jews in "liberal professions." He charts how, in partnership with other European powers and international institutions such as the League of Nations, Polish leaders made attempts to channel emigration to South America, to establish direct trade with Africa, to expedite national minorities to far-away places, and to tap into colonial resources around the globe. Puchalski demonstrates the intersection between such national policies and larger processes taking place at the time, including the internationalist turn of colonialism and the global fascination with technocratic solutions.Carefully researched, the volume is key reading for scholars and advanced students of twentieth-century European history.Piotr Puchalski is Assistant Professor at the Institute of History and Archival Studies of the Pedagogical University of Kraków, Poland. His academic interests include Polish, French, British, and American diplomacy, as well as Western colonialism, totalitarian regimes, and modern ideologies.Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies