With the stability of the European Union under threat and tensions between the national and supranational increasing, what will happen to the EU party system?For the internationalist European left, European integration and the role of transnational parties represent a central contention and concern. In May 2004, the European radical left, representing parties to the left of social democracy and the Green party family, created the transnational European Left Party (EL), uniting part...

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, both the Russian state and Russia's Muslim communities have struggled to find a new modus vivendi in a rapidly changing domestic and international socio-political context. At the same time as Islamic religious belief and practice have flourished, the state has become increasingly concerned about the security implications of this religious revival, reflecting and responding to a more general international concern over radicalised political Islam. This...

One of the most unexpected outcomes of the Soviet bloc's transition out of communism has been the divergent but important paths followed by once ruling communist parties. In Poland, Hungary, and Lithuania those parties transformed themselves into pro-Western free market center leftists who have won elections and formed governing coalitions periodically since the early 1990s. The result has been former communists leading their countries into NATO and the EU even as their conservative oppone...

Although the most pernicious consequences of the crisis have apparently abated, the long-term political repercussions remain unclear. Whereas most attention has focused on the right-wing populist parties, the rejuvenation of the left is an unwritten story of post-crisis politics.This volume addresses this story, with three principal aims:to examine the radical left intellectual response to the crisis, i.e. how actors conceptualise the causes of crisis and its consequences; t...

This profound and insightful handbook aims to promote critical reflection on the way we conceptualise and study the radical left and to advance research by asking new questions. Radical left parties in Europe have been the subjects of significant study in the last decade, aided by the demonstrable success of newer parties like the Greek Syriza and Spanish Podemos, as well as the persistence of more established actors like the German Die Linke. Nevertheless, the emergent literature remains ...

Accessibly written to appeal to a wide readership, this is a meticulous study of Gorbachev by a leading Western specialist on Soviet politics. - ;Mikhail Gorbachev was arguably the most important world statesman of the second half of the twentieth century. He played the decisive role in ending the Cold War and in allowing the countries of Eastern Europe to regain their independence peacefully. He left Russia a freer country than it had ever been. Although he failed in his attempts to turn the...

Fiona Hill and other U.S. public servants have been recognized as Guardians of the Year in TIME’s 2019 Person of the Year issue.From the KGB to the Kremlin: a multidimensional portrait of the man at war with the West.Where do Vladimir Putin's ideas come from? How does he look at the outside world? What does he want, and how far is he willing to go?The great lesson of the outbreak of World War I in 1914 was the danger of misreading the statements, ac...

"A fresh multi-faceted look at the overthrow of the Soviet State, the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, and the campaign to introduce capitalism from above. Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny have given us a clear and powerful Marxist analysis of the momentous events which most directly shaped world politics today, the destruction of the USSR, the 'Superpower' of socialism."-Norman Markowitz, author of The Rise and Fall of the People's Century"I have not read anything e...

The fall of the Berlin Wall sent shock waves around the world. It was, quite literally, a world-changing event. Now, more than two decades after the Wall's collapse, this book brings together leading authorities who offer a fresh look at how leaders in four vital centers of world politics--the United States, the Soviet Union, Europe, and China--viewed the world in the aftermath of this momentous event. Jeffrey Engel contributes a chronological narrative of this tumultuous period, followed ...

"Tony Judt's elegant essay is a good place to begin discussion of these two large postwar questions: What is Europe? And where is it going?" — Michael Mandelbaum, Johns Hopkins University*"I am enthusiastically European; no informed person could seriously wish to return to the embattled, mutually antagonistic circle of suspicious and introverted nations that was the European continent in the quite recent past. But it is one thing to think an outcom...

This is a fascinating new overview of European-American relations during the long twentieth century. Ranging from economics, culture and consumption to war, politics and diplomacy, Mary Nolan charts the rise of American influence in Eastern and Western Europe, its mid-twentieth century triumph and its gradual erosion since the 1970s. She reconstructs the circuits of exchange along which ideas, commodities, economic models, cultural products and people moved across the Atlantic, capturing t...

The Russian annexation of Crimea was one of the great strategic shocks of the past twenty-five years. For many in the West, Moscow's actions in early 2014 marked the end of illusions about cooperation, and the return to geopolitical and ideological confrontation. Russia, for so long a peripheral presence, had become the central actor in a new global drama. In this groundbreaking book, renowned scholar Bobo Lo analyzes the broader context of the crisis by examining the interplay between Rus...