New Books in European Politics - New Books Network

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Mark Gilbert, "Italy Reborn: From Fascism to Democracy" (Norton, 2024) Jun 13, 2024

Show notes

Italy's resurrection from 20 years of fascism, three years of war, and two years of civil war is one of the 20th century's great, under-told stories. It's a history of a decade of clashes and compromises between two mass movements - Communism and Christian Democracy - backed offstage by two superpowers.

Above all, it's about the party management of one man - Palmiro Togliatti - and the West-facing vision and cunning of another, Alcide De Gasperi. From the ashes of war, De Gasperi chose a republican government and a market economy, resisted pressure from the Vatican to ally with the far right, and wooed the Americans while acknowledging the unique organisational powers of the Communists until picking the right time to drop them. On top of that, he won Marshall Aid, drove through land reform, and helped found the European communities.

As Professor Gilbert writes in Italy Reborn: From Fascism to Democracy (Norton, 2024): "One need only envision what might have happened had De Gasperi failed to make even one of those calls to see how much his agency mattered for Italy's transition to democracy".

Mark Gilbert is C. Grove Haines Professor of History and International Studies at SAIS Europe in Bologna. Educated at Durham and the University of Wales, he taught history at the universities of Trento and Bath before joining SAIS.

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack.

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The Complexities of the EU Parliament Elections Jun 13, 2024

Show notes

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Director John Torpey spoke with Francesco Ronchi and Udo Zolleis, two European Parliament officials and analysts. With the European Parliament elections taking place shortly after we spoke, they share their insights on the direction that politics in Europe may take in the coming months and years, especially with regard to right-wing nationalist groups. With its unique position as a supranational institution with diverse political parties and the power to elect the president of the Commission, the European Parliament faces important challenges for Europeans to reach consensus in light of war on the continent, immigration, and global economics.

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Julia Wojnowska-Radzińska, "Implications of Pre-Emptive Data Surveillance for Fundamental Rights in the European Union" (Brill Nijhoff, 2023) Jun 12, 2024

Show notes

InImplications of Pre-Emptive Data Surveillance for Fundamental Rights in the European Union (Brill Nijhoff, 2023) Julia Wojnowska-Radzińska offers a comprehensive legal analysis of various forms of pre-emptive data surveillance adopted by the European legislator and their impact on fundamental rights. It also identifies what minimum guarantees have to be set up to recognize pre-emptive data surveillance as a legitimate measure in a democratic society. The book aims to answer the essential question of how to strike the proper balance between fundamental rights and security interests in the digital age.

Caleb Zakarin is Editor at the New Books Network.

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All About Money? Elections, Campaign Spending and the Effects on Democracy May 31, 2024

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Election campaigns are becoming ever more expensive, with many parties and candidates spending large sums of money on advertising, campaign materials, and staff. But how does money affect campaign environment and electoral outcomes? Does more money mean better chances of winning? And what role do large businesses play in this? Listen to William Horncastle as he talks to Petra Alderman about his research on campaign spending, the UK and the US campaign finance rules and regulations, and the effects money has on democracy and the current state of politics.

William Horncastle is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Bedfordshire.

Petra Alderman is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Leadership for Inclusive and Democratic Politics at the University of Birmingham and Research Fellow at CEDAR.

*** This episode was recorded before the announcement of the UK general election date. The election is taking place on 4 July 2024.***

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Benjamin A. Schupmann, "Democracy Despite Itself: Liberal Constitutionalism and Militant Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2024) May 30, 2024

Show notes

Seeking a second term as US president in November, Donald Trump joins a roster of politicians whose declared aim is to use legal means to bend democracy to their will and in their interests. The system withstood his first term. In Venezuela, Ecuador, Turkey, and Hungary, the systems didn’t, and they are undergoing stress tests in Israel, Slovakia, and Georgia.

In Venezuela, Turkey and Hungary, elections still happen and parliaments, courts, and media are intact but checks and balances have been steadily eroded as one party bids for sustained majority rule. Since the turn of the millennium, 80% of cases of democratic retreat have taken this form rather than through violence.

Worst of all, “illiberal democracy” is popular. Between 2016 and 2020, Trump added 11 million votes. In 2022, after 12 consecutive years in power, Hungary’s ruling party extended its support. Recent polls show that a third of Americans would prefer a strong unelected leader to a weak elected one while a fifth of French under-35s are indifferent to the prospect of an end to democracy.

In Democracy Despite Itself: Liberal Constitutionalism and Militant Democracy(OUP Press, 2024) Benjamin Schupmann addresses this democratic internal rot and how to defend against it. "Democratic cannibalism is a perennial problem,” he writes. “It is a question of when, not if, popular anti-democratic movements will erupt from within and try to use legal revolutionary methods to devour democracy. Democratic constitution should be designed to provide democrats with the means to defend it and themselves".

Benjamin Schupmann is an Assistant Professor at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. He got his PhD at Columbia University and then taught at Duke Kunshan University and the National University of Singapore. Democracy Despite Itself is his second book. His first – Carl Schmitt's State and Constitutional Theory – was published in 2017.

*The author's book recommendations are Sovereignty Across Generations: Constituent Power and Political Liberalism by Alessandro Ferrara (OUP Oxford, 2023) and Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity by Hartmut Rosa (Columbia University Press, 2013).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack.

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The Social Acceptance of Inequality May 28, 2024

Show notes

On this episode of International Horizons, Francesco Duina, Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology at Bates College and Luca Storti, Associate Professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Turin in Italy and a Research Fellow of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, discuss the rise of inequalities around the globe and the divergent attitudes towards them since 1970. How can those inequalities be broken down?

In this week’s episode, Duina and Storti preview their book-in-progress on The Social Acceptance of Inequality, and they examine four types of logic leading us to accept inequalities in today’s world. Not surprisingly, the concept of meritocracy plays a major role in our thinking about contemporary inequality, although perhaps more so in the United States than in Europe.

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Asian Soft Power in Estonia: A Discussion with Agnieszka Nitza-Makowska May 24, 2024

Show notes

How do Asian nations exercise soft power in the Baltics? Soft power is a political strategy to influence other international relations actors by using a variety of political, economic, and cultural instruments. The rise of Asia aligns with its growing economic, political, and cultural influences worldwide, including in geographically distant Central Eastern and Nordic Europe. In this episode, Agnieszka Nitza-Makowska discusses China’s, India’s and Singapore’s activities in Estonia, drawing on the findings from a new report on “The Political, Economic and Cultural Role of Asia in Northern and Eastern Europe”, published by the University of Tartu Asia Centre.

Agnieszka Nitza-Makowska is a research fellow at the University of Tartu Asia Centre Centre. She received her PhD from the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland. Her current work focuses on two specific themes: China’s and India’s soft power, and the implications of Putin’s nuclear blackmail for the perception of nuclear weapons in South Asia. She also leads a scientific project about China’s environmental diplomacy and its green soft power, funded by Poland’s National Science Centre.

Heidi Maiberg, the host of the episode, is the Head of Communication at the University of Tartu Asia Centre.

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Dmitry Grozoubinski, "Why Politicians Lie About Trade...How, and What You Need to Know" (Canbury Press, 2024) May 23, 2024

Show notes

In November, it will be 25 years since the Battle of Seattle – the summit and street fight that marked the end of a half-century of ever-broadening global trade negotiations. Between 2013 and 2016, the same “anti-globalisation” movement sank a US-EU bid to build a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership but it wasn’t until 2016 – with the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s election as president – that the postwar trade liberalisation process threatened to go into reverse.

With his trade expertise and a voice made for Twitter, Dmitry Grozoubinski was – as he admits in Why Politicians Lie About Trade: … and What You Need to Know About It (Canbury Press, 2024) - “in the right place at the right time with the right credentials to stand in front of the firehose of bullshit that was the public debate around trade policy in the late 2010s and cry: ‘um, no, that's not how that works".

Executive director of the Geneva Trade Platform and founder of ExplainTrade, Grozoubinski was once an Australian diplomat who negotiated trade agreements in Geneva at the World Trade Organization. Before joining the Australian civil service, he taught at the Monash Graduate School of Business, where he took his Masters in Diplomacy and Trade.

*The author's book recommendations are The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin (Harvard University Press, 2019) and The Art of Explanation: How to Communicate with Clarity and Confidence by Ros Atkins (Wildfire, 2023).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack.

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Agnieszka Pasieka and Paweł Rodak, "Rethinking Modern Polish Identities: Transnational Encounters" (U Rochester Press, 2023) May 10, 2024

Show notes

Anti-Semitic or philo-Semitic? Backward or modern? Locally rooted or diasporic? “Polishness” is too often flattened to an oversimplified list of either-or propositions. But a critical look at the multiple, contradictory versions of “Polishness” circulating in the modern era helps us to make sense not only of Poland’s past and present, but of a whole host of global problems: from the failures of multiculturalism, to the mutual misunderstandings of different communities claiming the same identity, to the insidious prejudice sometimes lurking within egalitarian projects.

Conceived and curated as a collaborative encounter by anthropologist Agnieszka Pasieka and historian Paweł Rodak, Rethinking Modern Polish Identities: Transnational Encounters (University of Rochester Press, 2023) challenges conventional wisdom and serves up a range of scholarly essays that are sure to change the way that students and scholars alike think about Poland, Eastern Europe, and some of the biggest challenges facing the modern world.

Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). His most recent writings appeared in The Atlantic and in Foreign Affairs.

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Lawrence Freedman, "Modern Warfare: Lessons from Ukraine" (Penguin, 2023) May 08, 2024

Show notes

The foremost authority on modern war in the English-speaking world examines Europe's most important conflict since World War II.

More than any other modern war, the fight between Russia and Ukraine has been a tough testing ground for modern weapons and operational concepts. In Modern Warfare: Lessons from Ukraine(Penguin, 2023), Sir Lawrence Freedman assesses the contrasting strategies of the two sides. Ukraine has fought along classical lines, seeking victory through battle. Russia has adopted a more total approach, combining conventional battles with attacks on Ukraine's socio-economic structure. Freedman explains why the apparently superior Russian force has been unable to defeat and subjugate Ukraine.

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