New Books in European Politics

Adriana Helbig's book ReSounding Poverty: Romani Music and Development Aid (Oxford University Press, 2023) offers a micro ethnography of economic networks that impact the daily lives of Romani musicians on the borders of the former Soviet Union and the European Union. It argues that the development aid allotted to provide economic assistance to Romani communities, when analyzed from the perspective of the performance arts, continues to marginalize the poorest among them. Through their structure and programming, NGOs choose which segments of the population are the most vulnerable and in the greatest need of assistance. Drawing on ethnographic research in development contexts, ReSounding Poverty asks who speaks for whom within the Romani rights movement today. Framing the critique of development aid in musical terms, it engages with Romani marginalization and economic deprivation through a closer listening to vocal inflections, physical vocalizations of health and disease, and emotional affect. ReSounding Poverty brings us into the back rooms of saman, mud and straw brick, houses not visited by media reporters and politicians, amplifying the cultural expressions of the Romani poor, silenced in the business of development.Maggie Freeman is a PhD candidate in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How helpful is the democracy-authoritarianism binary when it comes to our understanding of contemporary conflict? What is the state of the Russia-Ukraine war? And how has it affected the great power rivalry between the United States and China? Listen to Stefan Wolff and Petra Alderman talk about the global struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, the state of the Russia-Ukraine war, and whether democracy is likely to lose out from the heightening tensions between the three great powers: the United States, Russia, and China.Stefan Wolff is a Professor of International Security at the University of Birmingham. He is well-known for his research on the management of contemporary security challenges, especially in the prevention and settlement of ethnic conflicts and civil wars. He is also an expert on post-conflict state-building in deeply divided and war-torn societies and has written extensively on the geopolitics and geo-economics in Eurasia, including great power competition between Russia, China, and the West. He is a regular contributor to The Conversation and a co-founder of the Navigating the Vortex.Petra Alderman is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Leadership for Inclusive and Democratic Politics at the University of Birmingham and Research Fellow at CEDAR.Please note that this episode was recorded in December 2023. All mentions of ‘this year’ refer to 2023 and mentions of ‘last year’ refer to 2022.The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In A United Ireland: Why Unification in Inevitable and How It Will Come About (Biteback Publishing, 2017), Kevin Meagher argues that a reasoned, pragmatic discussion about the most basic questions regarding Britain's relationship with its nearest neighbour is now long overdue, and questions that have remained unasked, and perhaps unthought, must now be answered. Indeed, in the light of Brexit and a highly probable second independence referendum in Scotland, the reunification of Ireland is not a question of if, but when and how.Listen to Meagher explain to Owen Bennett Jones why he thinks a united Ireland is inevitable and how he thinks it will happen.Kevin Meagher was a Special Adviser to former Labour Northern Ireland Secretary Shaun Woodward. He is the associate editor of the Labour Uncut blog and frequently writes about Irish politics for the New Statesman.Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship After Fascism (Duke UP, 2023), Jennifer V. Evans examines postwar and contemporary German history to broadly argue for a practice of queer history that moves beyond bounded concepts and narratives of identity. Drawing on Black feminism, queer of color critique, and trans studies, Evans points out that although many rights for LGBTQI people have been gained in Germany, those rights have not been enjoyed equally. There remain fundamental struggles around whose bodies, behaviors, and communities belong. Evans uses kinship as an analytic category to identify the fraught and productive ways that Germans have confronted race, gender nonconformity, and sexuality in social movements, art, and everyday life. Evans shows how kinship illuminates the work of solidarity and intersectional organizing across difference and offers an openness to forms of contemporary and historical queerness that may escape the archive’s confines. Through forms of kinship, queer and trans people test out new possibilities for citizenship, love, and public and family life in postwar Germany in ways that question claims about liberal democracy, the social contract, and the place of identity in rights-based discourses.Jennifer V. Evans is Professor of History at Carleton University and author of Life among the Ruins: Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin.Armanc Yildiz is a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University. He received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at Harvard University, with a secondary degree in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since February 2022, a string of books have been published about the war in Ukraine but, for the most part, these have been histories and political studies. Only now are the “first drafts of history” from war reporters starting to emerge.Christopher Miller and Andrew Harding published last summer and they will be followed, in late January, by Simon Shuster’s inside account of Volodymyr Zelensky’s war. But, beating Shuster by a fortnight, is Yaroslav Trofimov’s Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence (Penguin Press, 2024) - an account of the first year of the full-scale invasion combining history, frontline reporting, and flashes of emotion from the Wall Street Journal's Kyiv-born chief foreign-affairs correspondent"Being in a country at war,” he writes, “one is rarely distressed by the causalities of the invading army ... But, in the forests outside Lyman, these freshly dead Russian men with their civilian backpacks containing their meagre possessions, with their sleeping bags and pouches of fever and pain medication, were no longer anonymous and generic invaders. I looked at their faces and felt anger".Yaroslav Trofimov joined the Wall Street Journal in 1999 – reporting from Rome, Singapore, Pakistan, Dubai, and Afghanistan where he covered the Taliban’s takeover in 2021. Since January 2022 – a month before the invasion – he has been working out of Ukraine. This is his third book.*The authors' book recommendations are Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine by Timothy Snyder (Yale University Press, 2005) and Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte (first published in Italian in 1944, the latest edition from Adelphi, 2014; translated into English and published in 2007 by NYRB Classics).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her new book Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism (Cornell University Press, 2019) Jelena Subotić asks why Holocaust memory continues to be so deeply troubled―ignored, appropriated, and obfuscated―throughout Eastern Europe, even though it was in those lands that most of the extermination campaign occurred. As part of accession to the European Union, Subotić shows, East European states were required to adopt, participate in, and contribute to the established Western narrative of the Holocaust. This requirement created anxiety and resentment in post-communist states: Holocaust memory replaced communist terror as the dominant narrative in Eastern Europe, focusing instead on predominantly Jewish suffering in World War II. Influencing the European Union's own memory politics and legislation in the process, post-communist states have attempted to reconcile these two memories by pursuing new strategies of Holocaust remembrance. The memory, symbols, and imagery of the Holocaust have been appropriated to represent crimes of communism.Yellow Star, Red Star presents in-depth accounts of Holocaust remembrance practices in Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania, and extends the discussion to other East European states. The book demonstrates how countries of the region used Holocaust remembrance as a political strategy to resolve their contemporary "ontological insecurities"―insecurities about their identities, about their international status, and about their relationships with other international actors. As Subotić concludes, Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe has never been about the Holocaust or about the desire to remember the past, whether during communism or in its aftermath. Rather, it has been about managing national identities in a precarious and uncertain world.Jelena Subotić is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Georgia State University (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2007).Steven Seegel is professor of history at University of Northern Colorado. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

February 2024 will mark the tenth anniversary of Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian territory in Crimea and the Donbas and two years since its full-scale invasion.While military assistance from Ukraine’s allies has been gradual and cautious, retaliatory sanctions have been impressive. "The sanctions imposed against Russia beginning in late winter 2022 were sweeping, historic and rolled out with stunning rapidity,” writes Christine Abely in The Russia Sanctions: The Economic Response to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine (Cambridge University Press, 2023).Yet, until now at least, most Russians have been insulated from their effects. As the war reaches an attritional stalemate and Putin waits for NATO's resolve to fracture, the sanctions and their lagged effects are taking on critical importance.Christine Abely is an assistant professor at New England Law in Boston. Previously, she taught at Boston University School of Law after a career at Massachusetts law firms specialising in business litigation, and international trade and sanctions law. While she has published papers on sanctions, food and sports law, The Russia Sanctions is her first book.*The authors' book recommendations are Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against US Interests by Agathe Demarais (Columbia University Press, 2022) and The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson (Princeton University Press, second edition 2016).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI's Director John Torpey interviews Grzegorz Ekiert, Chair of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, a propós of the recent election in Poland that installed a centrist government led by former prime minister and president of the European Council Donald Tusk. Ekiert starts by discussing the paradoxes behind the support of Putin and the antiliberalism in Eastern Europe given the imperialism these countries faced from the Russians historically. In addition, Ekiert addressed Poland’s leading role in the democratization and economic development in the region after the end of the Soviet Union and how many of these initiatives were reversed by an authoritarian regime associated with the Catholic church. The interview concludes with a discussion of the challenges that the new government is going to face after the PiS (Law and Justice Party) seriously eroded the institutions of the state; the challenges are illuminated by a comparison of the institutional constraints extremism will face in Europe with those that exist in the US.International Horizons is a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly expertise to bear on our understanding of international issues. John Torpey, the host of the podcast and director of the Ralph Bunche Institute, holds conversations with prominent scholars and figures in state-of-the-art international issues in our weekly episodes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

European governments are emerging from 15 years of on-again, off-again crises that upended their budgetary positions. From close to balance in 2008, the aggregate budget deficit for governments using the euro is now 3% of output while public debt is up from 66% to 90%.These "processes happened more forcefully", writes Alice Cavalieri in Italian Budgeting Policy: Between Punctuations and Incrementalism (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023). Since 2008, Italy's primary account excluding interest payments has turned from a substantial surplus to a deficit while public debt surged from 100% to 140% of output. At the same time, Italy’s politics have fragmented – leading to the formation of seven governments in ten years – and, for 15 months in 2018-2019, Western Europe’s first-ever administration run only by populists. Italy’s budgetary framework has been tested like no other. “The budget unmasks politicians,” writes Cavalieri. “In contrast to other political documents, the budget cannot be exploited as a mere showcase of policy positions without any future but is rather a litmus test of actual policy priorities. It leaves no room for imagination, as it translates policy commitments into a quantifiable amount of financial resources, listing revenues and expenses for a delimited time period and conveying the services that the state wants to provide to its citizens and what specific services and to what extent citizens are entitled to them. Thus, it is not simply a document, it is a political act".Alice Cavalieri is a research fellow at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Trieste. Before that, she spent two years as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Turin, having obtained her PhD at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa.*The author's own book recommendations are Political Recruitment: Gender, Race and Class in the British Parliament by Pippa Norris and Joni Lovenduski (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (Virago, 1987).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael W. Doyle's book Cold Peace: Avoiding the New Cold War (Liveright, 2023) offers an urgent examination of the world barreling toward a new Cold War.By 1990, the first Cold War was ending. The Berlin Wall had fallen and the Warsaw Pact was crumbling; following Russia’s lead, cries for democracy were being embraced by a young Chinese populace. The post–Cold War years were a time of immense hope and possibility. They heralded an opportunity for creative cooperation among nations, an end to ideological strife, perhaps even the beginning of a stable international order of liberal peace.But the days of optimism are over.As renowned international relations expert Michael Doyle makes hauntingly clear, we now face the devastating specter of a new Cold War, this time orbiting the trilateral axes of Russia, the United States, and China, and exacerbated by new weapons of cyber warfare and more insidious forms of propaganda.Such a conflict at this phase in our global history would have catastrophic repercussions, Doyle argues, stymieing global collaboration efforts that are key to reversing climate change, preventing the next pandemic, and securing nuclear nonproliferation. The recent, devastating invasion of Ukraine is both an example and an augur of the costs that lay in wait.However, there is hope.Putin is not Stalin, Xi is not Mao, and no autocrat is a modern Hitler. There is also an unprecedented level of shared global interest in prosperity and protecting the planet from environmental disaster.While it is unlikely that the United States, Russia, and China will ever establish a “warm peace,” there are significant, reasonable compromises between nations that can lead to a détente. While the future remains very much in doubt, the elegant set of accords and non-subversion pacts Doyle proposes in this book may very well save the world.Andrew O. Pace is a historian of moral dilemmas of US foreign relations and an adjunct professor of history at Salt Lake Community College. He is a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network and is currently working on a book about the reversal in US foreign policy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at apace24@slcc.edu or via andrewopace.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices