New Books in European Politics - New Books Network

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Central Asia Under Brussels’ and Moscow’s Eyes May 04, 2022

Show notes

The Soviet Republic once held tremendous sway over the politics of Central Asia as the grand hegemon of the region. But now, in the post-Soviet world, geopolitics in this region is influenced by other powers, including the European Union (EU), and Central Asia’s own tilt towards China. In this changed environment, is the EU adjusting its policies to foster strong democracies in the region free from authoritarian influences, both foreign and domestic? Will these changes be enough to ensure regional stability and human security and focus on good governance and development?

In the second episode of our new themed series Migration, Dr. André W.M. Gerrits, professor of International Studies and Global Politics at Leiden University, talks about the changing political players in the Central Asian region and its implications and way forward for the EU and Russia, in the context of his work “Central Asia Under Brussels’ and Moscow’s Eyes”, published by Brill.

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Hélène Bienvenu, et al., "La Hongrie sous Orban" (Plein Jour, 2022) Apr 22, 2022

Show notes

"Who knows the name of the Czech prime minister, the name of the head of the Romanian or even the Polish executive branches? Yet, today everyone knows the name of the Hungarian leader: Viktor Orbán. To have a leader known outside the country's borders is a first for Hungarians. Some are frustrated by this: Hungary, they say, isn't just Viktor Orbán".

In La Hongrie sous Orban: Histoires de la Grande Plaine (Plein Jour, 2022), Corentin Léotard - together with Hélène Bienvenu, Thomas Laffitte, Joël Le Pavous, Jehan Paumero and Daniel Psenny - tell a series of stories about what else Hungary is but all under the shadow of Orbánism.

Among these are tales of the origins and corruption of Fidesz through the eyes of disillusioned co-founder József Kardos, of the power and inconvenience of national myth-making through the hunt for archaeological evidence of the "the battle that saved civilization” in Szigetvár, and of poverty in the borderlands offset by EU transfers in a pervasive environment of euroscepticism.

Hélène Bienvenu, who wrote or co-wrote six of the book's chapters, is a freelance photojournalist who has worked in Budapest since 2010 and recently relocated to Warsaw to work mostly for Le Monde.

*Her own book recommendations are: Dans la tête de Viktor Orbán by Amélie Poinssot (Éditions Actes Sud, 2019), Kaddish For An Unborn Child by Imre Kertész (Vintage Classics, 2017 - translated by Tim Wilkinson) and Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II by Svetlana Alexievich (Random House, 2019 - translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors (a division of Energy Aspects).

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Pandemic Perspectives 7: Covid 19 Political Lessons from Portugal Apr 20, 2022

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In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to Portuguese Member of Parliament and internationally renowned biologist Alexandre Quintanilha about the many valuable lessons Portugal's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic could teach all of us, if only we'd take the time to pay attention.

Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details.

Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Tom Theuns, "The Need for an EU Expulsion Mechanism: Democratic Backsliding and the Failure of Article 7" (2022) Apr 14, 2022

Show notes

"The rule of law is a means by which [western EU members] want to knead us into something that resembles them," warned Viktor Orbán during his successful campaign for a fourth consecutive term as Hungary's prime minister.

Yet, until Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the EU has held back on the demands it makes of members regarding core democratic norms and values. For a decade, the EU's institutions and most of its members have worried about the possibility of the emergence of a full autocracy within its borders but have been held back by diplomatic interests and the constraints imposed by unanimity in the use of Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union.

The war, Orbán's re-election, a split in the Polish-Hungarian axis, and the lengthening queue of eastern membership applicants have changed the backdrop. The political will to ensure a liberal-democratic union has been reinforced but Article 7 is still inadequate to the task.

Tom Theuns, assistant professor of political theory and European politics at Leiden University’s Institute of Political Science, has a nuclear option in his new paper: The Need for an EU Expulsion Mechanism: Democratic Backsliding and the Failure of Article 7 (Res Publica, Springer - 2022)*.

*https://link.springer.com/arti...

Mentioned: Memory and the future of Europe: Rupture and integration in the wake of total war by Peter Verovšek (Manchester University Press, 2020) and Adding a Bite to a Bark? A Story of Article 7, the EU Enlargement, and Jörg Haider by Wojciech Sadurski (Sydney Law School Research Paper No. 10/01)

*The authors' book recommendations are: Technopopulism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics by Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti (OUP Oxford, 2021) and The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (Little Brown, 2013).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors (a division of Energy Aspects).

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Vicki Squire, "Europe's Migration Crisis: Border Deaths and Human Dignity" (Cambridge UP, 2020) Apr 11, 2022

Show notes

Rejecting claims that migration is a crisis for Europe, Europe's Migration Crisis: Border Deaths and Human Dignity (Cambridge University Press, 2020) instead suggests that the 'migration crisis' reflects a more fundamental breakdown of a modern European tradition of humanism. Squire provides a detailed and broad-ranging analysis of the EU's response to the 'crisis', highlighting the centrality of practices of governing migration through death and precarity. Furthermore, she unpacks a series of pro-migration activist interventions that emerge from the lived experiences of those regularly confronting the consequences of the EU's response. By showing how these advance alternative horizons of solidarity and hope, Squire draws attention to a renewed humanism that is grounded both in a deepened respect for the lives and dignity of people on the move, and an appreciation of longer histories of violence and dispossession.

Vicki Squire is Professor of International Politics at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick. Her research explores the politics of migration, displacement, asylum and solidarity activism across various contexts. She is author of several books, including Reclaiming Migration (2021, Manchester University Press), Europe’s Migration Crisis (2020, Cambridge University Press), Post/Humanitarian Border Politics Between Mexico and the US (2015, Palgrave) and The Exclusionary Politics of Asylum (2009, Palgrave). She currently leads a large collaborative project, Data and Displacement, which explores the data-based humanitarian assistance to IDPs (internally displaced persons) in north-eastern Nigeria and South Sudan.

Lamis Abdelaaty is an assistant professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty.

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Schengen Borders and Multiple National States of Emergency: From Refugees to Terrorism to COVID-19 Apr 06, 2022

Show notes

The Schengen area consists of 26 European states, most members of the EU but some not, and consists of two main features: the absence of intra-Schengen state border controls on persons and a common external border control on entry into the Schengen area. However, this inclusivity has been threatened over time by events like refugee crises, terrorism, and a global pandemic. In light of the present refugee influx from Ukraine, the issue of border control in Europe merits closer inspection.

In the first episode of our new themed series Migration, Dr. Elspeth Guild, Jean Monnet Professor ad personam at Queen Mary, University of London, takes us through the trajectory of abolition and re-introduction of border control in the Schengen states from its formation in 1985 to the present day, in the context of her work “Schengen Borders and Multiple National States of Emergency: From Refugees to Terrorism to COVID-19”, published by Brill.

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Lasse Skytt, "Orbanland: Why Viktor Orbán's Hungary Matters" (New Europe Books, 2022) Mar 28, 2022

Show notes

On Sunday April 3rd, Hungarians decide whether to elect Viktor Orbán and his special form of eurosceptical "illiberal democracy" to a fourth consecutive term in office as war rages on their northeastern border.

Since he returned to power in 2010, Orbán has established a new style of government that is hard to capture with standard political vocabulary. In previous podcasts, András Körösényi opted for plebiscitary leader democracy, Gábor Scheiring for authoritarian capitalism, and Tímea Drinóczi and Agnieszka Bień-Kacała for illiberal constitutionalism. Whatever term best explains it, Orbánism has attracted a fan base among national-conservatives globally: most prominently Donald Trump's intellectual outriders and Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

In his new edition of Orbanland: Why Viktor Orbán's Hungary Matters(New Europe Books, 2022), Lasse Skytt - a Danish journalist who has lived in provincial Hungary since 2013 - investigates what is uniquely Hungarian about Orbanism and what is just a more politically efficient channelling of the global reaction against liberalism and globalisation. He writes: "Through understanding what is going on in Hungary - and why - perhaps we will be able to predict how the current polarisation might shape the future of both sides of the Atlantic''.

*The authors' own book recommendations are: After Europe by Ivan Krastev (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) and Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know by Adam Grant (WH Allen, 2021).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors (a division of Energy Aspects).

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Joanna Mishtal, "The Politics of Morality: The Church, the State, and Reproductive Rights in Postsocialist Poland" (Ohio UP, 2015) Mar 21, 2022

Show notes

In the fall of 2020, Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal decreed that the country’s near-total ban on abortion was too liberal; henceforth, pregnancies could be terminated only in cases of rape, incest, or imminent threat to the mother’s life. The court’s decision triggered a nationwide Women’s Strike, whose social mobilization galvanized reproductive rights advocacy across Europe.

In the wake of the Polish mass protests, and in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, now is a crucial moment to re-visit anthropologist Joanna Mishtal’s ground-breaking book The Politics of Morality: The Church, the State, and Reproductive Rights in Postsocialist Poland (Ohio University Press, 2015). Mishtal recast the decades since communism’s collapse as a time of joint Church-State war on reproductive rights, as well as feminism, which was painted as either a communist legacy or a foreign import. The Politics of Morality examines the contradiction between an emerging democracy on the one hand, and a declining tolerance for women’s rights and political and religious pluralism on the other. Surveillance, control, and abuse of power are persistent themes in this revealing ethnography, which has had an enormous scholarly impact in the study of gender and religion & politics in Eastern Europe, but carries powerful lessons far beyond its immediate field.

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).

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Vassilis Petsinis, "National Identity in Serbia: The Vojvodina and a Multi-Ethnic Community in the Balkans" (I.B. Tauris, 2019) Mar 09, 2022

Show notes

In his book, National Identity in Serbia: Vojvodina and a Multiethnic Society between the Balkans and Central Europe(I.B. Tauris, 2019), Vassilis Petsinis analyses the evolution of Vojvodina's identity over time and the unique pattern of ethnic relations in the province. Although approximately 25 ethnic communities live in Vojvodina, it is by no means a divided society. Intercultural cohabitation has been a living reality in the province for centuries and this largely accounts for the lack of ethnic conflict. Vassilis Petsinis explores Vojvodina's intercultural society and shows how this has facilitated the introduction of flexible and regionalized legal models for the management of ethnic relations in Serbia since the 2000s. He also discusses recent developments in the region, most notably the arrival of refugees from Syria and Iraq, and measures the impact that these changes have had on social stability and inter-group relations in the province.

Vassilis Petsinis is a Senior Research Fellow in Comparative Politics at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies (University of Tartu, Estonia) within the frame of the Horizon 2020 POPREBEL international project. He is a political scientist with an expertise in European Politics and Ethnopolitics specializing in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

Christian Axboe Nielsen is associate professor of history and human security at Aarhus University in Denmark.

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Fabio Mattioli, "Dark Finance: Illiquidity and Authoritarianism at the Margins of Europe" (Stanford UP, 2020) Mar 07, 2022

Show notes

Dark Finance: Illiquidity and Authoritarianism at the Margins of Europe (Stanford University Press, 2020) offers one of the first ethnographic accounts of financial expansion and its political impacts in Eastern Europe. Following workers, managers, and investors in the Macedonian construction sector, Fabio Mattioli shows how financialization can empower authoritarian regimes—not by making money accessible to everyone, but by allowing a small group of oligarchs to monopolize access to international credit and promote a cascade of exploitative domestic debt relations. The landscape of failed deals and unrealizable dreams that is captured in this book portrays finance not as a singular, technical process. Instead, Matttioli argues that finance is a set of political and economic relations that entangles citizens, Eurocrats, and workers in tense paradoxes. Mattioli traces the origins of illiquidity in the reorganization of the European project and the postsocialist perversion of socialist financial practices—a dangerous mix that hid the Macedonian regime's weakness behind a façade of urban renewal and, for a decade, made it seem omnipresent and invincible. Dark Finance chronicles how, one bad deal at a time, Macedonia's authoritarian regime rode a wave of financial expansion that deepened its reach into Macedonian society, only to discover that its domination, like all speculative bubbles, was teetering on the verge of collapse.

Mathias Fuelling is a doctoral candidate in History at Temple University, working on a political history of Czechoslovakia in the immediate post-WWII years. He can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/bucephalus424

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