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For Germany's neighbors, perhaps more acutely than for observers elsewhere, the 1990 reunification of divided Germany has raised old memories and new concerns in public and scholarly discourse. The shape and influence of these issues are the subject of this unique, ambitious book. Organized into country-specific chapters, the book offers original, expert analyses of Germany's relations with seventeen European neighbors as well as with the United States. The contributors explore the essential concerns these nations have faced in their bilateral relations with Germany—past, present, and future. In their introduction, the editors trace both commonality and diversity in various national conceptions of the "German Question" and the ways in which these perceptions in turn generate shared as well as divergent national policy agendas vis-a-vis united Germany.
Over the last decade German culture has been engaged in a re-examination of the traumatic events of the Second World War and their post-war legacy in the public and private sphere. This shift in German memory culture from a focus on responsibility for the Holocaust to a focus on wartime suffering has attracted a lot of critical attention over the past decade, in both Cultural and Literary Studies and History. This volume brings together British, German, Dutch and American scholars from the fields of Cultural Studies, History and Sociology to address the national and international significance of discourses of ‘German wartime suffering’ in post-war and contemporary Germany. The focus of t...
The Code of Conduct on Politico-Military Aspects of Security, adopted by OSCE member states during the Budapest Summit of December 1994, has become a significant addition to the range of politically binding documents of the OSCE. The Code, besides referring to internationally legally binding provisions for the conduct of politico-military affairs, codifies some of the existing norms on the democratic control and use of armed forces for interstate and intrastate purposes. It also lays down guidelines for the personal responsibility and accountability of the individual members of these armed forces. Moreover, this latest product of OSCE norm setting aims at becoming a valuable and effective in...
Literature, Language, and Multiculturalism in Scandinavia and the Low Countries presents a ground-breaking comparative approach to the study of multicultural literature. Focusing on the development of migration literature in Sweden, Denmark, Flanders, and the Netherlands, the volume argues that the political and institutional preconditions for the development of ‘multicultural’ literatures are still given within the frame of the nation-state. As a consequence, both the field of ‘migration literature’ and the (multi-)lingual quality of literary texts are shaped differently in each state and in each language area. The volume delineates the development of multicultural literature in Sca...
This book analyzes the evolution of the institutional structure of the Dutch political economy since 1950. It sketches in broad strokes the origin and economic role of coordination in the Netherlands. The Dutch economy is compared with other OECD countries by using the ‘varieties of capitalism’ theory and distinguishing between coordinated and liberal market economies. The author focuses on the constant adaptation of deliberative institutions in the business system, in labor relations, and in welfare policy. The complex institutional setting did not prevent the economy from participating in the globalization of markets and capital that took place since ca. 1980. The book is located at the intersection of two quite different literatures: modern economic history and the political science literature on ‘varieties of capitalism’.
Although the Socialist or Social Democractic parties played a key role in West European politics during the quarter century after the Second World War, they have been studied far less than their political rivals, the Christian Democrats. The story of West European Social Democracy after 1945 begins with a dilemma: Democratic marxism, which had been the parties' ideological and organizational principle until the Second World War, was becoming politically irrelevant. The three parties analyzed here represent the spectrum of reactions among Social Democratic parties to this realization. The debate over the parties' programs and ideologies did not, of course, take place in a vacuum: the author d...
Since Henry Hudson landed on Manhattan in 1609, the peoples of the Netherlands and North America have been inextricably linked. Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations, written by a team of nearly one hundred Dutch and American scholars, is the first book to offer a comprehensive history of this bilateral relationship. This volume covers the main paths of contacts, conflicts, and common plans, from the first exploratory contacts in the early seventeenth century to the intense and multifaceted exchanges in the early twenty-first. Based on the most up-to-date research, Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations will be for years to come a valuable and much-used reference work for anyone interested in the history and culture of the United States and the Netherlands and the larger transatlantic interdependent framework in which they are embedded.
Few would dispute that many Western industrial democracies undertook extensive deregulation in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet this narrative, in its most familiar form, depends upon several historiographical assumptions that bely the complexities and pitfalls of studying the recent past. Across thirteen case studies, the contributors to this volume investigate this “deregulatory moment” from a variety of historical perspectives, including transnational, comparative, pan-European, and national approaches. Collectively, they challenge an interpretive framework that treats individual decades in isolation and ignores broader trends that extend to the end of the Second World War.
United City, Divided Memories? focuses on the basic question of how Berlin today deals with three specific Cold War-era legacies: the presence of the four Great Powers, the East German Stasi, and the Berlin Wall. Dirk Verheyen looks at monuments, museums, and memorial sites as illustrations of Berlin's struggle to craft an effective shared identity that ties together its western and eastern halves. Verheyen's comprehensive and critical analysis is considered against the broader background of Germany's efforts at coming to grips with its dual twentieth-century totalitarian past. This book demonstrates that important elements of east-west contrast linger and complicate the city's efforts at crafting a more definitively future-oriented united identity. United City, Divided Memories? will stimulate debate among German studies scholars, as well as among those interested in German history and cultural studies.