New Books in European Politics - New Books Network

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The 10,000 Year Build-Up to Brexit: A Conversation with Ian Morris Feb 01, 2023

Show notes

How did Britain become a global superpower? Historian and classicist Ian Morris thinks geography has a lot to do with it. Prof. Morris discusses his latest book, Geography is Destiny: Britain and the World: A 10,000 Year History (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022) which traces the long history of Britain's complex relationship with the European continent. He draws surprising parallels between characters ranging from the Roman Britons and Nigel Farage, to the Papacy and the European Union.

Prof. Ian Morris is the Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics and Professor in History at Stanford University, as well as the author of the critically acclaimed Why the West Rules—for Now (Picador, 2011).

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Corey Lee Wrenn, "Animals in Irish Society: Interspecies Oppression and Vegan Liberation in Britain's First Colony" (SUNY Press, 2021) Jan 28, 2023

Show notes

Irish vegan studies are poised for increasing relevance as climate change threatens the legitimacy and longevity of animal agriculture and widespread health problems related to animal product consumption disrupt long held nutritional ideologies. Already a top producer of greenhouse gas emissions in the European Union, Ireland has committed to expanding animal agriculture despite impending crisis. The nexus of climate change, public health, and animal welfare present a challenge to the hegemony of the Irish state and neoliberal European governance. Efforts to resist animal rights and environmentalism highlight the struggle to sustain economic structures of inequality in a society caught between a colonialist past and a globalized future.

Animals in Irish Society: Interspecies Oppression and Vegan Liberation in Britain's First Colony(SUNY Press, 2021) explores the vegan Irish epistemology, one that can be traced along its history of animism, agrarianism, ascendency, adaptation, and activism. From its zoomorphic pagan roots to its legacy of vegetarianism, Ireland has been more receptive to the interests of other animals than is currently acknowledged. More than a land of "meat" and potatoes, Ireland is a relevant, if overlooked, contributor to Western vegan thought.

Corey Lee Wrenn is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She is the author of several books, including A Rational Approach to Animal Rights: Extensions in Abolitionist Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Piecemeal Protest: Animal Rights in the Age of Nonprofits (University of Michigan Press, 2019).

Kyle Johannsen is a philosophy instructor at Trent University and Wilfrid Laurier University. His most recent book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021).

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Robert Holzmann and Fernando Restoy, "Central Banks and Supervisory Architecture in Europe: Lessons from Crises in the 21st Century" (Edward Elgar, 2022) Jan 27, 2023

Show notes

Since 2020, Europe's financial sector has been severely stress-tested by a global pandemic and a major land war yet, compared to the period between 2007 and 2012, the impact has been remarkably muted. Still minnows compared to their US peers, Europe's post-crisis recapitalised banks nevertheless have held up well. And so, by and large, has the quality of their assets despite ten years of slow growth and low inflation followed by enormous volatility, high inflation and interest rates heading to two-decade highs.

How much of this has been luck? How much is due to the redesign of European banking supervision after the punishing experience of the 2007-12 crisis? What still has to be done? To answer these questions, Robert Holzmann and Fernando Restoy have pulled together 21 contributors from policy-making and the academy to examine these fundamental questions in Central Banks and Supervisory Architecture in Europe: Lessons from Crises in the 21st Century(Edward Elgar, 2022).

Since 2019, Robert Holzmann has been governor of the Austrian national bank and his country’s representative on the European Central Bank’s governing council. Formerly, an economist at the OECD, the IMF and the World Bank, Holzmann has taught economics full-time in Vienna and Saarland and as a visiting scholar at Harvard and Oxford.

Since 2017, Fernando Restoy has chaired the Financial Stability Institute at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel. Trained at the LSE and Harvard, Restoy joined the Bank of Spain in 1991 and rose to the position of deputy governor, chairman of Spain’s FROB crisis resolution authority, and a member of the supervisory board of the ECB's Single Supervisory Mechanism.

*Holzmann's book recommendations are: Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order by Paul Tucker (Princeton University Press, 2022), Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State also by Tucker (Princeton University Press, 2018), and Der Dreißigjährige Krieg: Europäische Katastrophe, Deutsches Trauma 1618-1648 by Herfried Münkler (Rowohlt Berlin, 2017). Restoy chose A Promised Land by Barack Obama (Viking, 2020) and Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed (William Heinemann, 2009).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors and writes the Twenty-Four Two newsletter on Substack.

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The Future of the European Left Jan 20, 2023

Show notes

Why is it so hard for left wing parties in the West to win elections? Some such as the UK Labour Party have headed to the centre. The history of Labour since 1979 tells the story – their record goes lost, lost, lost, lost, Blair, Blair, Blair, lost, lost, lost, lost. But what does heading the centre consist of? And are their alternative strategies? Listen to Owen Bennett Jones discuss leftist parties and what they need to do to win with Eunice Goes of the Richmond American International University.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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"Trust was thin on the ground" with Georges Heinrich Jan 06, 2023

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As the right-hand man to Jean-Claude Juncker (chairman of the Eurogroup from 2005-13) and vice president of the Euro Working Group from 2011-14, Georges Heinrich found himself in the eye of the euro's financial storm in his late-30s. "Eventually, the right decisions were taken. Solidarity did prevail. Everybody chipped in,” he says. “But we had very, very long discussions on how to split the bill or whether to do a runner and leave one or two guys at the table who aren't so fit and who will then have to answer to the police or wash up the dishes".

Edited and produced by davidstudio.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com

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Aaron Moulton, "The Influencing Machine" (Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, 2022) Dec 31, 2022

Show notes

In the 1990s, a network of twenty Soros Centres for Contemporary Art sprung up across Eastern Europe: Almaty, Belgrade, Budapest, Kiev, Ljubljana, Prague, Riga, Sarajevo, Tallinn, Warsaw, and Zagreb among them. These centres, funded as their name suggests by Geroge Soros’ Open Society Foundation, had as their mission the cataloguing of dissident pre-1989 art and the introduction of new forms of artistic practice to the art scenes of post-Eastern Block states. Within a decade, the centres wound up their operation and their histories have been forgotten but not because they made a mark on Eastern European art and societies.

The Influencing Machine, Aaron Moulton’s exhibition and book traces the network’s history and evaluates its outsized impact on its host societies. Through the use of template annual exhibitions and synchronised open calls, the Centres pioneered forms of socially engaged practice that preceded the form’s development in Western art capitals and gave artists access to unprecedented production budgets, international networking opportunities, and access to new media technologies.

Moulton proposes that the Centres played an underappreciated role in orienting artists ideologically in pro-Western and pro-neoliberal directions, a that the extent of their influence has been underappreciated. In societies making the transition from socialism to free-reign capitalism, the actions of a single NGO which habitually outspent all other funders appear to have been glossed over if not outright expunged from memory.

The book invites a conversation about the global art world, the role of activism in art, and the power of institutional critique. Its proposals should be a warning to anyone attempting to understand the role of capital in forming cultural consciousness today. If a single NGO could be credited with creating the cultural values of a whole region without once being called to account, what other ideologies is contemporary art producing and on whose orders?

Aaron Moulton speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the legacy of the Soros Centers of Contemporary Art Network, gonzo anthropology and conspiratorial theorising as methods for writing art history from neglected vantage points, and the antisemitic, bogeyman tropes which appear along the way.

Aaron Multon trained at the RCA, London and was the editor of Flash Art International and a curator at Gagosian Gallery. He founded the Berlin exhibition space Feinkost.

The Influencing Machine exhibition at CCA Ujazdowski Castle

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

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Kenneth B. Moss, "An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland" (Harvard UP, 2021) Dec 24, 2022

Show notes

The early 1930s constituted an ambiguous moment for the roughly three million Jews that resided in the Polish Republic. On the one hand, as recent scholars have emphasized, Polish Jews found numerous opportunities to partake in flourishing cultural and political projects that spanned the ideological spectrum from Zionism to Yiddishism to Polish integrationism to various brands of socialism. In addition, Josef Pilsudski’s government – while by no means an ally to Polish Jewry – was the lesser of two evils compared to the explicitly anti-Semitic Endecja regime that ruled the country by the end of the decade. At the same time, however, trouble lurked around every corner. Polish Jews found their earning opportunities deeply limited, due to both economic depression and a widespread social prejudice that blocked them from getting jobs. Even more concerning, the rise of fascist politics – in Poland and abroad – made clear the fledgling state’s weaknesses, and cast a shadow of doubt over any sense that acceptance would prevail over national hatred. Polish Jews now grappled with the possibility that Jewish life in Eastern Europe might not be feasible going forward. What was to be done amidst these precarious circumstances? How was one to plan for the future, both as an individual and as a member of a minority community? How was one to handle the anxiety of unclear and multifarious dangers?

In his new volume An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland(Harvard UP, 2021), Kenneth Moss has resurrected the mentalité of those that struggled daily with these questions, illustrating what it meant for Polish Jews to grope for meaning in the face of constant uncertainty and real dread. To accomplish this task, Moss has assembled and examined an astounding breadth of documents produced by people from throughout Polish Jewish society. Readers will find analyses of Polish Jewish intellectual luminaries like Max Weinreich, Jacob Lestschinsky and Chaim Grade, each of whom allowed recent events to influence and mutate their understandings of Jewish life and community. Moss also shines a light on more common Jews that no less vociferously sought to forge practical and pragmatic solutions to their increasingly dire situations. The result is a monograph dedicated to the daily experience of minority life in the modern world; a world permeated by a sense of unease at what tomorrow might bring.

James Benjamin Nadelis a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Columbia University.

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The Future of Global Trade: A Discussion with Shannon K. O'Neil Dec 22, 2022

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Critics of globalisation come in many forms from environmentalists to trade unionists and many others in between. In the midst of all the controversy less attention has been paid to how big a phenomenon globalisation actually is and how it compares to another trend – regionalism. In this podcast Owen Bennett Jones discusses The Globalisation Myth: Why Regions Matter (Yale University Press, 2022) with its author, Shannon K. O Neil.

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Jane Freeland, "Feminist Transformations and Domestic Violence Activism in Divided Berlin, 1968-2002" (Oxford UP, 2022) Dec 20, 2022

Show notes

In Feminist Transformations and Domestic Violence Activism in Divided Berlin, 1968-2002 (Oxford University Press, 2022), Jane Freeland traces the development of the shelter movement in East and West Germany. In the 1970s, feminist activists exposed the harmful gender norms and lack of legal protections that left women vulnerable to abuse in the home. Their efforts led to the founding of the first women’s shelter in West Berlin in 1976 and a broadly successful campaign that changed legal and social attitudes toward domestic abuse. Situating domestic violence activism within a broader history of feminism in post-war Germany, the book traces the evolution of this movement both across political division and reunification and from grassroots campaign to established, professionalized social service. It links histories of feminism in East and West Germany and challenges historiographies of reunification that focus on feminist failures. Feminist Transformations reflects on the tensions between the activists who founded the shelter movement and the media and bureaucratic institutions that helped build popular and political support, with important consequences for the trajectory of German feminism up to today.

Rebecca Turkington is a PhD Candidate in History at Cambridge University studying transnational women’s networks.

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Muhammet Koçak, "Turkey-Russia Relations in the Twenty-First Century: Cooperation and Competition Amid Systemic Turbulence" (Lexington, 2022) Dec 19, 2022

Show notes

Turkey and Russia are two of the most significant powerhouses in Eurasia. The foreign policies of two countries directly impact the regional dynamics in Black Sea, Central Asia, Middle East, Eastern Europe, and the Balkan regions. The changes in the bilateral relations between the two countries go well beyond the Black Sea region. In the past, the Russian Empire played a significant role in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey took part in containing the USSR during the Cold War by joining the NATO in 1952. In the twenty-first century, however, Turkey and Russia invested in bilateral trade and established significant partnerships in the strategic defense and energy sectors. In the same period, the competition between Turkey and Russia heightened, giving way to military confrontation in multiple fronts. Turkey-Russia Relations in the Twenty-First Century: Cooperation and Competition Amid Systemic Turbulence(Lexington, 2022) argues that the changing balance of power in the region has triggered adjustments in the foreign policies of Russia and Turkey in the twenty-first century. The decline of the US influence in the region have brought about increased engagement between Turkey and Russia in the form of partnerships and competition for influence.

Muhammet Koçak received his PhD in International Relations from Florida International University.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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