Product Description: What will German foreign policy look like in 2015? This book dares to speculate by making a provocative argument: what drives German foreign policy is its power position in Europe and on the international stage. By examining German manoeuvres in the Balkans, its role in European Monetary Union, and its leadership in curbing Europe's proliferation of WMD technology, Crawford shows how German power is linked to its "embedded hegemony" in Europe and the changing state of its economy...read more

Recent efforts by the United States and its allies to promote democracy, security, and stability in the Middle East owe much to the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) – also known as the Barcelona Process – an important region-building plan in the Mediterranean region since 1995. The Convergence of Civilizations represents the output of an innovative and much needed collaborative project focused on the EMP. Editors Emanuel Adler, Beverly Crawford, Federica Bicchi, and Rafaella A. Del Sarto have set out to show that regional security and stability may be achieved through a cultural approach based on the concept of regional identity construction, and aim to take stock of the EMP in relation to this goal.The contributors to this collection focus on the obstacles Mediterranean region construction faces due to post 9/11 regional and global events, the difficulties of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, tensions between the EU and the US over Iraq, and the expected consequences of EU enlargement. They also seek to bring the EMP and region-making practices to the attention of American scholars in order to promote a more fertile academic exchange.Ultimately, the contributors demonstrate that the EMP and related region-making practices, while failing so far to promote the development of a Mediterranean regional identity and to achieve regional stability, suggest nonetheless a viable model for regional partnership and cooperation, and thus, for preventing a ‘clash of civilizations’ in the long haul. The Convergence of Civilizations will be an important tool for meeting the current global challenges being faced by nation-states as well as those in the future.

Recalls what it was like to help out in the family grocery store and to go shopping in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, during the 1940s.

Product Description: As Germany celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany--the former West Germany-- leading scholars take stock in this volume of the political, social, and economic progress Germany made as it built a democratic political system and a powerful economy, survived the Cold War, and dealt with the challenges of reunification...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In the last decade, discourses of economic and political liberalization and globalization have swept the world. Yet during this same period and all across the globe, many states are fragmenting and more than 30 ethnic and sectarian conflicts have displaced or killed millions of people--and far more civilians than soldiers...read more

Product Description: Shadows of the past are affecting the new capitalist democracies throughout the former Communist world. This volume not only examines the question of former Communists again holding public office and managing firms, but also looks to the deeper cultural considerations: do Leninist legacies leave the former Communist countries with political cultures that shy away from the public debate and political participation vital to robust democracy? The authors examine these issues comparatively across Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union, asking whether Leninism was unique, but also asking how other new democracies emerging from an authoritarian past have been affected by legacies of repression and dictatorship...read more

Product Description: A look at historical, international and economic policy conditions that bolster or undermine the efforts of liberalizers. The contributors explain how these forces interact, pinpoint the political conditions they support and speculate on the potential outcomes of the liberalization process...read more

Product Description: -- Joseph S. Nye, Harvard University

Product Description: In providing aid to the ailing economies of the former USSR and Eastern Europe, many Western governments fear that they may be leaving themselves vulnerable to fierce economic competition in the future. This study examines claims that vulnerability existed in Western economic relations with the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from 1970 to 1990, and shows how the historical evidence undercuts the vulnerability assumptions that fueled the Reagan administration's foreign policy and were never systematically tested...read more

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