Au sommaire : Le Parlement européen et la politique de la mémoire / The European Parliament’s youth policy, 1952-1979: An attempt to create a collective memory of an integrated Europe / Victimizing Europeans: Narrating Shared History in the European Parliament’s House of European History / Competing Regimes of Memory? The European Day of Remembrance in Romania / Acting at the margins – Italian mnemonic activism in the European Parliament / (Un)shared memory: European Parliament and EU. Rem...

The crisis faced by the European project today is above all a crisis of meaning. After the disappearance of the narratives about peace and prosperity, the reason for Europe is now the one given by millions of Europeans. Together we must therefore explore a Europe whose institutions are a means but not an end, remain open to discovery, attentive to stories and critical of common ideas.This six-month journey is dotted with eleven stops, eleven letters from eleven cities in nine Europe...

THE AGE OF EMPIRE is a book about the strange death of the nineteenth century, the world made by and for liberal middle classes in the name of universal progress and civilisation. It is about hopes realised which turned into fears: an era of unparalleled peace engendering an era of unparalleled war; revolt and revolution emerging on the outskirts of society; a time of profound identity crisis for bourgeois classes, among new and sudden mass labour movements which rejected capitalism and ne...

A magisterial account of the rise of capitalismEric Hobsbawm's magnificent treatment of the crucial years 1848-1875 is a penetrating analysis of the rise of capitalism and the consolidation of bourgeois culture. In the 1860s a new word entered the economic and political vocabulary of the world: 'capitalism'. The global triumph of capitalism is the major theme of history in the decades after 1848. The extension of capitalist economy to four corners of the globe, the...

The changes in Polish life, culture, economics, and development have been remarkable. And the pace of change shows little sign of abating. Through twenty-five years of post-Communist transformation and ten years as a member of the European Union, some Polish cities, like Warsaw, KrakÓw, Poznan, and Wroclaw, have experienced an economic renaissance thanks largely to direct foreign investment, EU funds, and an influx of tourists. Much of the countryside, and cities like LÓdz and Lublin, howe...

Eric Hobsbawm is considered by many to be our greatest living historian. Robert Heilbroner, writing about Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes 1914-1991 said, “I know of no other account that sheds as much light on what is now behind us, and thereby casts so much illumination on our possible futures.” Skeptical, endlessly curious, and almost contemporary with the terrible “short century” which is the subject of Age of Extremes, his most widely read book, Hobsbaw...

The Magic Lantern is one of those rare books that capture history in the making, written by an author who was witness to some of the most remarkable moments that marked the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe.Timothy Garton Ash was there in Warsaw, on 4 June, when the communist government was humiliated by Solidarity in the first semi-free elections since the Second World War. He was there in Budapest, twelve days later, when Imre Nagy - thirty-one years after his exec...

Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives! presents an intellectually invigorating set of hypotheticals about the twentieth century--had we been smart enough to avoid World War I.The "Great War" claimed nearly 40 million lives and set the stage for World War II, the Holocaust, and the Cold War. More than one hundred years later, historians are beginning to recognize how unnecessary it was. In Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives!, acclaimed political psychologist Richard Ne...

The problem with the history of twentieth-century Europe is that everyone thinks they know it. The great stories of the century - the two world wars, the rise and fall of Nazism and communism, female emancipation - seem self-evidently important. But behind the grand narratives, the politics and the ideologies, lies another history: the history of forces that shaped the lives of individual Europeans.That is the thrust of Richard Vinen's magisterial survey of this uniquely destructiv...

As financial turmoil in Europe preoccupies political leaders and global markets, it becomes more important than ever to understand the forces that underpin the European Union, hold it together and drive it forward. This timely book provides a gripping account of the realities of power politics among European states and between their leaders. Drawing on long experience working behind the scenes, Luuk van Middelaar captures the dynamics and tensions shaping the European Union from its ori...

In October 1956, a spontaneous uprising took Hungarian Communist authorities by surprise, prompting Soviet authorities to invade the country. After a few days of violent fighting, the revolt was crushed. In the wake of the event, some 200,000 refugees left Hungary, 35,000 of whom made their way to Canada. This would be the first time Canada would accept so many refugees of a single origin, setting a precedent for later refugee initiatives. More than fifty years later, this collection focus...

"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...