New Books in European Politics

With decades of hindsight, the peaceful end of the Cold War seems a foregone conclusion. But in the early 1980s, most experts believed the Soviet Union was strong, stable, and would last into the next century. Ronald Reagan entered the White House with no certainty of what would happen next, only an overriding faith in democracy and an abiding belief that Soviet communism—and the threat of nuclear war—must end.William Inboden's The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink (Dutton, 2022) reveals how Reagan’s White House waged the Cold War while managing multiple crises around the globe. From the emergence of global terrorism, wars in the Middle East, the rise of Japan, and the awakening of China to proxy conflicts in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, Reagan’s team oversaw the worldwide expansion of democracy, globalization, free trade, and the information revolution. Yet no issue was greater than the Cold War standoff with the Soviet Union. As president, Reagan remade the four-decades-old policy of containment and challenged the Soviets in an arms race and ideological contest that pushed them toward economic and political collapse, all while extending an olive branch of diplomacy as he sought a peaceful end to the conflict.Reagan’s revolving team included Secretaries of State Al Haig and George Shultz; Secretaries of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Frank Carlucci; National Security Advisors Bill Clark, John Poindexter, and Bud McFarlane; Chief of Staff James Baker; CIA Director Bill Casey; and United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. Talented and devoted to their president, they were often at odds with one another as rivalries and backstabbing led to missteps and crises. But over the course of the presidency, Reagan and his team still developed the strategies that brought about the Cold War’s peaceful conclusion and remade the world.Based on thousands of pages of newly-declassified documents and interviews with senior Reagan officials, The Peacemaker brims with fresh insights into one of America’s most consequential presidents. Along the way, it shows how the pivotal decade of the 1980s shaped the world today.Grant Golub is an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a PhD candidate in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on the politics of American grand strategy during World War II. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1945 the Soviet Union controlled half of Europe and was a founding member of the United Nations. By 1991, it had an army four million strong with five thousand nuclear-tipped missiles and was the second biggest producer of oil in the world. But soon afterward the union sank into an economic crisis and was torn apart by nationalist separatism. Its collapse was one of the seismic shifts of the twentieth century.Thirty years on, Vladislav Zubok offers a major reinterpretation of the final years of the USSR, refuting the notion that the breakup of the Soviet order was inevitable. Instead, Zubok reveals how Gorbachev's misguided reforms, intended to modernize and democratize the Soviet Union, deprived the government of resources and empowered separatism. Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (Yale UP, 2021) sheds new light on Russian democratic populism, the Baltic struggle for independence, the crisis of Soviet finances--and the fragility of authoritarian state power.Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eurozone finance ministers coordinate policy through the Eurogroup and its engine room is the Euro Working Group - a committee of top treasury officials from member states and the European Commission. Elected as the EWG's first full-time president in 2009, Thomas Wieser became the one true constant through the tsunami of solvency crises that hit Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Cyprus and threatened Italy, and the construction of the EU's financial firewalls. For the Obama Treasury, he was the answer to Henry Kissinger's famous question: "Who do I call if I want to call Europe?" Listen to his account of a truly unique European career.Edited and produced by davidstudio.This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Without the State: Self-Organization and Political Activism in Ukraine (U Toronto Press, 2022) explores the 2013-14 Euromaidan protests - a wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Ukraine - through in-depth ethnographic research with leftist, feminist, and student activists in Kyiv. The book discusses the concept of self-organization and the notion that if something needs to be done and a person has the competence to do it, then they should simply do it.Emily Channell-Justice reveals how self-organization in Ukraine came out of leftist practices but actors from across the spectrum of political views also adopted self-organization over the course of Euromaidan, including far-right groups. The widespread adoption of self-organization encouraged Ukrainians to rethink their expectations of the relationship between citizens and their state. The book explains how self-organized practices have changed people's views on what they think they can contribute to their own communities, and in the wake of Russia's renewed invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it has also motivated new networks of mutual aid within Ukraine and beyond. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, including the author's first-hand experience of the entirety of the Euromaidan protests, Without the State provides a unique analytical account of this crucial moment in Ukraine's post-Soviet history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Women played an essential role in the international struggle against fascism during the interwar period, though their work has been neglected in broader historiography. In Anti-Fascism, Gender, and International Communism (Routledge, 2022), Jasmine Calver provides a comprehensive history of the Comité mondial des femmes contre la guerre et le fascisme (the International Committee of Women Against War and Fascism, or CMF), an international women's organization concerned with confronting the impact of fascism on women and children across the globe. Examining the CMF's key figures and campaigns during its short 1934-41 tenure, Calver reveals its place at the forefront of global debates about the threat posed by fascism and imperialism. This book explores how the professional women activists and the working-class women who populated the organization developed a committee which advocated for women on a global scale. CMF campaigns around the Spanish Civil War, rising Nazism in Germany, the Sino-Japanese War, and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia show its international ambitions. Using newly-available sources to assess CMF congresses, correspondence, travels, and publications, Calver uncovers the complexities of its links to the Communist International, and its status as an early Popular Front organization. The book comes at an important time to reevaluate the successes and failures of historical efforts to combat rising fascist movements.Rebecca Turkington is a PhD Candidate in History at Cambridge University studying transnational women’s networks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The idea of legitimate political opposition is familiar. A decent political order permits citizens, parties, and coalitions to challenge those in power. Under such conditions, there is an ongoing nonviolent contest for power. Typically, the value of legitimate opposition is understood in terms of democracy. Here, the idea is that democracy is damaged or subverted when practices of legitimate opposition are suppressed. However, this familiar account opens questions about the value of legitimate opposition under conditions that are not satisfactorily democratic. It also obscures real-world practices of legitimate opposition that are themselves not allied with democratic norms of equality.In Legitimate Opposition (Yale 2022), Alexander Kirshner develops and defends a conception of legitimate opposition that’s not so tightly tethered to democracy. On this view, the value of legitimate opposition lies with the value of political agency.Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Digital Activism in Russia: The Communication Tactics of Political Outsiders (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022) examines various forms of Russian online anti-establishment resistance, focusing in particular on the period between 2016 and 2019. Grounded in qualitative content analysis of the YouTube videos and social media activities of opposition activist Alexey Navalny and his associates, the book covers the history of digital resistance associated with this cohort, its style and strategies, and the impact that this form of political communication has had on the Russian public sphere.Sofya Glazunova is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow within the Digital Media Research Centre at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia. Glazunova specialises in political communication, digital resistance, Russian media, disinformation, fake news, and digital propaganda. In addition to Digital Activism in Russia: The Communication Tactics of Political Outsiders (2022), she is the co-author of the Global Disinformation Index report entitled Disinformation Risk Assessment: The Online News Market in Australia (2021).Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The transatlantic relationship, arguably the bedrock of the world’s post-World War II international security architecture, came under significant threat during Donald Trump’s tenure in office, as Trump complained about European untrustworthiness and talked about pulling the United States out of NATO. Yet in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the transatlantic relationship has widely been seen to recover its strength and to grow in military terms as Sweden and Finland are on a path to become NATO members. What is the state of the transatlantic relationship and why does it matter?This week on International Horizons, former State Secretary of Germany, Sigmar Gabriel, joins John Torpey to discuss European security policy and transatlantic relations in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine. He discusses the motivations that led Putin into the war in Ukraine, as he saw an opportunity after the US withdrawal from the Middle East and doubts about NATO. Gabriel delves into the possibilities of a negotiated outcome in Russia’s war in Ukraine, and analyzes the future prospects of geopolitical competition, where the US will look at the Pacific and will operate under systems of alliances and shared military burdens instead of subsidizing the security system of the West. Finally, Gabriel argues that China is often overestimated, and that a potential strategy for the US and Europe could be to offer alternatives to the Belt and Road Initiative, as China is now coping with domestic economic difficulties. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"An important distinction exists between the politics of rules at which the EU is quite adept and the politics driven by events - which requires improvisation, risk-taking and alertness to opportunities".In Governing the EU in an Age of Division (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022), Dalibor Roháč explains how a union built to reflect and export steadiness and consensus has failed to adapt to a decade of fast-moving financial, public health, military and energy crises.But, his book is neither anti-EU nor lacking in practical proposals. Although once an avowed eurosceptic, Roháč describes his new book as "unabashedly pro-European both in the sense that it wishes prosperity and peace for the European continent and in the sense that it sees the EU and much of its institutional architecture as important components of its success".A senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and a research associate at the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies in Brussels, Roháč was educated at Charles University Prague, Oxford, George Mason University, and King’s College London. He previously worked at the Cato Institute, the University of Buckingham, the Legatum Institute, and the Centre for the New Europe in Brussels. He contributes to journals and news outlets and co-hosts The Eastern Front podcast.*The author's book recommendations are: Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order by Paul Tucker (Princeton University Press, 2022) and Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars by Azar Gat (Oxford University Press, 2022).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors and writes the Twenty-Four Two newsletter on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is the best way to achieve societal harmony in a place in which groups of people with different identities are living together. Should minority groups be given exemptions from general policies and laws or is it better to say majority privilege should be removed by finding solutions in which the law applies equally to the minority and the majority. Owen Bennett Jones was joined by co-authors Peter Balint and Patti Lenard who have discussed these issues in Debating Multiculturalism: Should There be Minority Rights? (Oxford UP, 2022).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