German Diplomacy In East Central Europe

No region of the world has been more affected by the various movements of the twentieth century than East Central Europe. Broadly defined as comprising the historic territories of the Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, and Slovaks, East Central Europe has been shaped by the interaction of politics, ideology, and diplomacy, especially by the policies of the Great Powers towards the east of Europe. This book addresses Czech politics in Moravia and Czech politics in Bohemia in the nineteenth century, the international politics of relief during World War I, the Morgenthau Mission and the Polish Pogroms of 1919, the Hitler-Stalin Pact and its influence on Poland in 1939, Hungarian-Americans during World War II, and Polish-East German relations after World War II. Contributors: Bruce Garver, M. B. B. Biskupski, Neal Pease, William L. Blackwood, Anna M. Cienciala, Steven Bela Vardy, and Douglas Selvage. M. B. B. Biskupski is Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University.

Challenging conventional wisdom about German dominance in the new Europe, this study presents a new approach to the question of power and influence after the Cold War. Inspired by the debate over German hegemony and drawing on intensive fieldwork, Ann L. Phillips develops two original cases of German relations with East-Central Europe to test competing arguments. As she convincingly demonstrates, the politics of reconciliation and the activities of German party-affiliated foundations illustrate German engagement in the region in its dual faces: restraint and projection. The author uses the less-developed literature on reciprocal influences of domestic politics and the international environment to frame her analysis. These two cases provide evidence not only of the intersection of domestic politics and international relations but of when and how one trumps the other. Contributing to the theoretical debate, Phillips argues that this interplay explains the divergent trajectories bilateral relations have taken since 1990 in ways that more traditional neo-realist or liberal approaches could not. The author's fresh perspective and new evidence demonstrate that East-Central European states play a much greater role in the influence equation than they did in the past.

This innovative volume analyzes historical, strategic and domestic political influences on the character and dynamics of the European Union's eastern enlargement. Its main focus is on interactions between Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, in political-diplomatic, commercial-economic and socio-cultural fields. The book also examines the wider European and international contexts to show that as enlargement advanced, we also witnessed an increase in the potential for conflict among EU members, old and new. Steve Wood provides an eclectic and topical appraisal, which identifies the German state as the crucial actor in both the enlargement venture and parallel processes of bilateral reconciliation. The book is recommended to those with interests in contemporary Germany, Central and Eastern Europe, and European integration.

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.

How have countries in the EU that were previously under Communist rule influenced the creation of a European policy towards other Post-Soviet nations? This study explores countries including the Czech Republic and Poland and shows how they have helped develop a coherent policy based reconciling political and historical foreign policy identities.