East Central Europe In The 1990s

A volume which explores the political, economic and social changes taking place in post-communist Europe. The contributing authors analyze current issues and trends, linking them to their origins in the communist past.

Throughout Eastern Europe, the unexpected and irrevocable fall of communism that began in the late 1980s presented enormous challenges in the spheres of politics and society, as well as at the level of individual experience. Excitement, uncertainty, and fear predicated the shaping of a new order, the outcome of which was anything but predetermined. Recent studies have focused on the ambivalent impact of capitalism. Yet, at the time, parliamentary democracy had equally few traditions to return to, and membership in the European Union was a distant dream at best. Nowadays, as new threats arise, Europe’s current political crises prompt us to reconsider how liberal democracy in Eastern Europe came about in the first place. This book undertakes an analysis of the year 1990 in several countries throughout Europe to consider the role of uncertainty and change in shaping political nations.

The Price of Freedom surveys and explains the fascinating and intricate history of East Central Europe - the present day countries of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Taking a thematic approach, the author explores such issues and controversies as the tension between the industrial developed West and the agrarian East Central Europe, the rise of modern nationalism, democracy and authoritarianism and Communism. While the countries of East Central Europe have differed dramatically from one another, the author asserts that they have been bound by a certain community of fate. These comparisons are traced through the Middle Ages and the Early Modern era to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This exploration reveals that it is no accident that the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland were the first among the former Soviet bloc nations to be admitted to NATO, and are likely to become the first members of the expanded European Union. Thus an understanding of their experiences, contributions and their place within the European community of nations vastly enriches our knowledge of Europe's past and present.The second edition of this distinguished book brings the history of the region up to date. It discusses the events of the post-communist decade of the 1990s and the problems resulting from the transition to democracy and market economy.

The 1990s. An extraordinary decade in Europe. At its beginning, the old order collapsed along with the Berlin Wall. Everything seemed possible. Everyone hailed a brave new Europe. But no one knew what this new Europe would look like. Now we know. Most of Western Europe has launched into the unprecedented gamble of monetary union, though Britain stands aside. Germany, peacefully united, with its capital in Berlin, is again the most powerful country in Europe. The Central Europeans—Poles, Czechs, Hungarians—have made successful transitions from communism to capitalism and have joined NATO. But farther east and south, in the territories of the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia, the continent has descended into a bloody swamp of poverty, corruption, criminality, war, and bestial atrocities such as we never thought would be seen again in Europe. Timothy Garton Ash chronicles this formative decade through a glittering collection of essays, sketches, and dispatches written as history was being made. He joins the East Germans for their decisive vote for unification and visits their former leader in prison. He accompanies the Poles on their roller-coaster ride from dictatorship to democracy. He uncovers the motives for monetary union in Paris and Bonn. He walks in mass demonstrations in Belgrade and travels through the killing fields of Kosovo. Occasionally, he even becomes an actor in a drama he describes: debating Germany with Margaret Thatcher or the role of the intellectual with Václav Havel in Prague. Ranging from Vienna to Saint Petersburg, from Britain to Ruthenia, Garton Ash reflects on how "the single great conflict" of the cold war has been replaced by many smaller ones. And he asks what part the United States still has to play. Sometimes he takes an eagle's-eye view, considering the present attempt to unite Europe against the background of a thousand years of such efforts. But often he swoops to seize one telling human story: that of a wiry old farmer in Croatia, a newspaper editor in Warsaw, or a bitter, beautiful survivor from Sarajevo. His eye is sharp and ironic but always compassionate. History of the Present continues the work that Garton Ash began with his trilogy of books about Central Europe in the 1980s, combining the crafts of journalism and history. In his Introduction, he argues that we should not wait until the archives are opened before starting to write the history of our own times. Then he shows how it can be done. From the Hardcover edition.

While there are still occasional uses of it today, the term "Central Europe" carries little of the charge that it did in the 1980s and early 1990s, and as a political and intellectual project it has receded from the horizon. Proponents of a distinct cultural profile of these countries—all involved now in the process of Transatlantic integration—used "Central European", as a contestation with the geo-political label of Eastern Europe. This book discusses the transnational set of practices connecting journals with other media in the mid-1980s, disseminating the idea of Central Europe simultaneously in East and West. A range of new methodologies, including GIS-mapping visualization, is used, repositing the political-cultural journal as one central node of a much larger cultural system. What has happened to the liberal humanist philosophy that "Central Europe" once evoked? In the early years of the transition era, the liberal humanist perspective shared by Havel, Konrád, Kundera, and Michnik was quickly replaced by an economic liberalism that evolved into neoliberal policies and practices. The author follows the trajectories of the concept into the present day, reading its material and intellectual traces in the postcommunist landscape. She explores how the current use of transnational, web-based media follows the logic and practice of an earlier, 'dissident' generation of writers.

What is East Central Europe? Can it be defined with any precision? The question of definition is a difficult one as is ussually the case concerning borderlands whose historical developments show little continuity and an uncertain identity born of the conflict between aspirations and reality. It is in East Central Europe that „no peace settlement is ever final, no frontiers are secure and each generation must begin its work anew”. Is there any chance that this definition will become out of date?

Andrew A. Michta examines the security of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary in the aftermath of the 1989 collapse of communism and the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. He reviews the old geopolitical dilemmas in the region as well as the new conditions in Europe as it approaches the remainder of the decade, and offers a country-by-country discussion of security policies and military reforms underway in the region. The analysis is set against a background discussion of the region's history as well as a review of the key events leading to the disintegration of the Warsaw Treaty Organization, including the reformulation of Soviet security policy in the late 1980s. Michta concludes with an assessment of security challenges facing the Triangle states of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary as they work to join Western Europe by the end of the decade. He argues that the Triangle will remain in a gray security zone in Europe for the foreseeable future, with an implicit security commitment from NATO, but without explicit formal security guarantees.

Eastern and Western Europe continue to change in their relationship to one another and in their ongoing dynamic with the post-Soviet states. Economic development, electoral upheaval, and the Bosnian crisis all color the transition from communism to democracy and from a Cold War outlook to a new global order still taking shape.In this fully revised and updated edition of his popular and critically acclaimed text, David Mason brings the revolutionary events of 1989 into context with the transitional yet turbulent 1990s. We see new parties, new politics, new constitutions, and new opportunities in light of economic shock therapies, ?left turns? in recent elections, and dissolving sovereignties and alliances. Despite savage ethnic conflict, economic scarcity, and political insecurity, Mason shows us that East-Central Europe is consolidating and reemerging as a region to be reckoned with on the global stage.