Cold War Eastern Europe

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 20-27
Author(s):  
Susan Maret

Cold War Eastern Europe (CEE) provides access to files from the political departments of the U.K. Foreign Office, including embassies and consulates, located within countries of the Former Soviet Union. CEE consists of three modules, that together, cover the years 1953-1975 and include approximately 13,700 source files. CEE contains historical essays written by its editorial board; a timeline and facts files on communism and key people supplement content. The CEE platform is intuitive for users who have background in searching other Taylor & Francis collections such as the Secret Files from World Wars to Cold War; less experienced searchers may require training and assistance with certain features. Pricing was not available at the time of this review.

1995 ◽  
Vol 144 ◽  
pp. 963-979 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew G. Walder

China's post-Mao economic reforms have generated rapid and sustained economic growth, unprecedented rises in real income and living standards, and have transformed what was once one of the world's most insular economies into a major trading nation. The contrast between China's transitional economy and those in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union could not be more striking. Where the latter struggle with severe recessions and pronounced declines in real income, China has looked more like a sprinting East Asian “tiger” than a plodding Soviet-style dinosaur mired in the swamps of transition. The realization that reform measures and energetic growth continue even after the political crisis of 1989 has made China a subject of intense interest far outside the customary confines of the China field. Understood increasingly as a genuine success story, it is moving to the centre of international policy debates about what is to be done to transform the stagnating economies of Eastern Europe, and various aspects of its case now figure prominently in academic analyses ranging from theories of the firm and property rights to the political foundations of economic growth.


2007 ◽  
Vol 52 (S15) ◽  
pp. 291-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christie Davies

The largest corpus of jokes we have ridiculing both rulers and a political system comes from the former Soviet Union and the then communist countries of eastern Europe. These forbidden jokes were important to those who told them at some risk to themselves. They can be construed as a form of protest, but the relationship between jokes and protest is not a simple one. The number of jokes told was greater, and the telling more open, in the later years of the regimes than in the earlier years of terror and extreme hardship. The number of jokes is a product of the extensiveness of political control, not its intensity. Such jokes probably have no effect either in undermining a regime or in acting as a stabilizing safety valve. However, they were a quiet protest, an indication that the political system lacked stability and could collapse quickly.


2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl Cordell ◽  
Stefan Wolff

Germany's role as a kin-state of ethnic German minorities in Central and Eastern Europe stems from a number of factors. At one level it is part and parcel of a unique historical legacy. It is also inextricably linked with the country's foreign policy towards this region. The most profound policy that the Federal Republic of Germany developed in this context after the early 1960s was Ostpolitik, which contributed significantly to the peaceful end of the Cold War, but has remained relevant thereafter despite a fundamentally changed geopolitical context, as Germany remains a kin-state for hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans across Central and Eastern Europe, particularly in the former Soviet Union, in Poland, Romania, and Hungary. As such, a policy towards these external minorities continues to form a significant, but by no means the only, manifestation of Ostpolitik.


1998 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-213
Author(s):  
Mikhail A. Alexseev

The collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was accompanied by ethnopolitical conflicts that erupted “with unusual cruelty and violence” but without much warning and were soon recognized as a major threat to peace, security, and development in the post-Cold War era. Can one be alerted to the Nagorno-Karabakhs, Bosnias, Rwandas, and Tajikistans of the world—in time to take decisive preventive action?


Author(s):  
Paul Chaisty ◽  
Nic Cheeseman ◽  
Timothy J. Power

This chapter introduces the three regions—sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Former Soviet Union—and the nine countries—Armenia, Benin, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Kenya, Malawi, Russia, and Ukraine—that provide the empirical material for the book. It introduces the two criteria used for case selection: 1) democratic competitiveness; 2) de jure and de facto constitutional provisions that empower presidents to be coalitional formateurs. It also introduces a variable that measures the salience of cross-party cooperation: the Index of Coalitional Necessity. Finally, it sketches the political landscape that has shaped the dynamics of coalitional presidentialism within each region, and it draws attention to important contextual differences between the nine country cases.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document