East Central Europe Between The Two World Wars

East Central Europe Between The Two World Wars is a sophisticated political history of East Central Europe in the interwar years. Written by an eminent scholar in the field, it is an original contribution to the literature on the political cultures of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, and the Baltic states.

An exhaustive study of East Central Europe in World War I, with special emphasis on Poland, the Baltic countries, and Ukraine.

Since the death of Stalin, the supposedly monolithic character of the Socialist states of East Central Europe has been subjected to serious and major challenges: from Yugoslavia in the late 1940s, from East Germany, Poland, and Hungary in the '50s, from Albania, Romania, and Czechoslovakia in the '60s, from Poland in the '70s and early '80s. Written by one of the world's foremost authorities on East Central Europe, this informative study examines these challenges and their consequences in all their complexity, providing an extensive political history of the area from World War II to the present. A sequel to Rothschild's highly acclaimed East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars, this up-to-date volume offers a country-by-country account of the widespread political malaise in East Central Europe. Rothschild provides an insightful discussion of the Solidarity movement in Poland, a lucid analysis of Titoism in Yugoslavia, and a thorough review of Soviet policy toward the area under all leaders since World War II. In addition, he examines the acute or impending crises in countries such as Poland and Romania, and he assesses the problems that Gorbachev faces in managing the increasingly restive Soviet bloc nations. Unsurpassed in scope, in depth of analysis, and in fairness and objectivity, Return to Diversity is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in this vital bloc of nations.

Written by one of the world's foremost authorities on East Central Europe, Return to Diversity has proven to be an invaluable guide for readers of modern European history and politics. This third edition introduces a new co-author, Nancy M. Wingfield, and has been fully updated to take into account recent and ongoing developments in the region.

Europe.

The region between the Baltic and the Black Sea was marked by a set of crises and conflicts in the 1920s and 1930s, demonstrating the diplomatic, military, economic or cultural engagement of France, Germany, Russia, Britain, Italy and Japan in this highly volatile region, and critically damaging the fragile post-Versailles political arrangement. The editors, in naming this region as "Middle Europe" seek to revive the symbolic geography of the time and accentuate its position, situated between Big Powers and two World Wars. The ten case studies in this book combine traditional diplomatic history with a broader emphasis on the geopolitical aspects of Big-Power rivalry to understand the interwar period. The essays claim that the European Big Powers played a key role in regional affairs by keeping the local conflicts and national movements under control and by exploiting the region's natural resources and military dependencies, while at the same time strengthening their prestige through cultural penetration and the cultivation of client networks. The authors, however, want to avoid the simplistic view that the Big Powers fully dominated the lesser players on the European stage. The relationship was indeed hierarchical, but the essays also reveal how the "small states" manipulated Big-Power disagreements, highlighting the limits of the latters' leverage throughout the 1920s and the 1930s.

In art era of ever-increasing national consciousness combined, paradoxically, with pressures for regional economic integration, this thought-provoking and exhaustively researched volume will challenge readers' assumptions about optimal paths to national economic development. Drawing on archival sources as well as published materials in eight langua

The First World War led to a radical reshaping of Europe's political borders. Nowhere was this transformation more profound than in East Central Europe, where the collapse of imperial rule led to the emergence of a series of new states. New borders intersected centuries-old networks of commercial, cultural, and social exchange. The new states had to face the challenges posed by territorial fragmentation and at the same time establish durable state structures within an international order that viewed them as, at best, weak, and at worst, as merely provisional entities that would sooner or later be reintegrated into their larger neighbours' territory. Fragmentation in East Central Europe challenges the traditional view that the emergence of these states was the product of a radical rupture that naturally led from defunct empires to nation states. Using the example of Poland and the Baltic States, it retraces the roots of the interwar states of East Central Europe, of their policies, economic developments, and of their conflicts back to the First World War. At the same time, it shows that these states learned to harness the dynamics caused by territorial fragmentation, thus forever changing our understanding of what modern states can do.