How democratic regimes should engage with authoritarian regimes, or self-proclaimed authorities in states under occupation, has long been a subject of debate. The work examines Canada's relations with member-states of the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War. Central and East European communist states were nominally independent but established under occupation. Canadian leaders explored whether engaging in foreign relations with these countries would encourage liberalization or embolden dictatorships. Over time, Canada's position evolved as a policy of encouraging bilateral and multilateral diplomacy, while calling for the respect of human rights. However, Canada's economic relationship with East European states was at times at cross-purposes with its democratic principles. Andrea Chandler concludes that while Canada did play a role in encouraging democratization, the country's leaders did not sufficiently consider the impact of these policies on the citizens of Warsaw Pact countries.

This book treats Canada’s engagement with Hungary, Poland, the German Democratic Republic, Romania, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakiaduring the Cold War, in which the Western countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (including Canada) had an adversarial relation with the Soviet bloc nations.

The 1989-91 upheavals in Eastern Europe sparked a turbulent process of social and economic transition. Two decades on, with the global economic crisis of 2008-10, a new phase has begun.

This book explores the scale and trajectory of the crisis through case studies of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, Russia, Ukraine and the former Yugoslavia. The contributors focus upon the relationships between geopolitics, the world economy and class restructuring.

The book covers the changing relationship between business and states; foreign capital flows; financialisation and asset price bubbles; austerity and privatisation; and societal responses, in the form of reactionary populism and progressive social movements.

Challenging neoliberal interpretations that envisage the transition as a process of unfolding liberty, the dialectic charted in these pages reveals uneven development, attenuated freedoms and social polarisation.

The authors of this book retell the political and economic history of East-Central Europe, the post-communist Balkans, and the Baltic states and speculate about their future from the vantage point of three competing forces operating in the region: territorial imperialism, globalization, and nationalism.

Exposed to imperial aspirations, the geographic area from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea has in the past 150 years been subject to alternating waves of globalization and nationalism. The nineteenth century Eastern European empires were open to forces of economic globalization, but all collapsed at the end of World War One. Emerging nation-states embraced the logic of Western-led globalization but were subjugated by Nazi and Soviet empires, which pursued policies of economic autarchy. The demise of the Soviet empire marked the revival of pre-1939 nation-states and the re-entry of forces of liberalism and globalization into the region, with multiple crises of economic transition, ethnic militancy, new forms of authoritarianism, and external security threats. By 2010 negative, nationalist-populist reactions against crises that globalization brought to Eastern Europe became the dominant political trend. The analysis involves the consideration about the very contemporary factors of Brexit and COVID, as well as Russia’s and China’s influences, and their effects on Eastern Europe.

Winner of the 2019 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities

Kateřina Kolářová’s Rehabilitative Postsocialism offers a timely interdisciplinary and intersectional analysis of how disability, race, class, and gender operate as ideological tools within the postsocialist Czech Republic (formerly Czechoslovakia). Kolářová presents postsocialism as an analytic that can and should be brought to bear to understand cultural politics, economic formations, and state politics through the present day. 

Rehabilitative Postsocialism names disability, sexuality, and race as central yet invisible to negotiations of the postsocialist consensus. Drawing from a rich and varied archive, Rehabilitative Postsocialism maps the formation of new structures of inequalities and social imaginaries of wellness, merit, and justice in order to understand current articulations of global disenchantment with democracy, social justice, and solidarity. The book also makes clear that disability, race, and ethnicity continue to circulate in depictions of Eastern Europe as suspended in a chronic developmental “delay.” Rehabilitative Postsocialism both situates this positioning within its political and historical formation and offers the analytical tools to challenge its continued deployment.

The cultural phenomenon of exhibiting non-European people in front of the European audiences in the 19th and 20th century was concentrated in the metropolises in the western part of the continent. Nevertheless, traveling ethnic troupes and temporary exhibitions of non-European humans took place also in territories located to the east of the Oder river and Austria. The contributors to this edited volume present practices of ethnographic shows in Russia, Poland, Czechia, Slovenia, Hungary, Germany, Romania, and Austria and discuss the reactions of local audiences. The essays offer critical arguments to rethink narratives of cultural encounters in the context of ethnic shows. By demonstrating the many ways in which the western models and customs were reshaped, developed, and contested in Central and Eastern European contexts, the authors argue that the dominant way of characterizing these performances as “human zoos” is too narrow.

The contributors had to tackle the difficult task of finding traces other than faint copies of official press releases by the tour organizers. The original source material was drawn from local archives, museums, and newspapers of the discussed period. A unique feature of the volume is the rich amount of images that complement every single case study of ethnic shows.

Post-Communist tax reform, like institutional reform in other areas of the post-Communist transition, holds tremendous material consequences for different groups in society. Consequently, one would expect the allocation of resources and the distribution of the financial burden of that allocation to be highly sensitive to domestic politics. Indeed the political stakes should be especially high since post-Communist tax reform requires not merely a simple adjustment at the margin, but the fundamental reallocation of the responsibility for government revenue. In Eastern Europe, however, important areas of tax policy do not reflect traditional domestic variables (e.g., interest groups and partisanship) so much as the international imperatives associated with regional and global economic integration.

Documenting the latest statistical data on current problems related to reproductive health issues in Central and Eastern Europe, this text explores the reasons for these problems and recommends action based on the scientific evidence for improving reproductive health.

The main issues covered are: declining standards of reproductive health care; rising trends in the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases; low rates of use of modern contraceptives; high rates of induced abortion; high prevalence of infertility; and the needs of adolescents with regard to reproductive health.

The authors of this edited volume address the hidden attraction that existed between the extremes of left and right, and of internationalism and nationalism under the decades of communist dictatorship in Eastern Europe. One might suppose that under the suppressive regimes based on leftist ideology and internationalism their right-wing opponents would have been defeated and ultimately removed. These essays, on the other hand, recount the itinerary of survival and revival of "right-wing" thought and activities under communist dictatorship. Resistance and accommodation are explored in the various phases from the Stalinist era to the demise of the Soviet Bloc, with the continuity provided by tacit or concealed right-wing discourses receiving particular consideration. The Eastern European right, both in its conservative and fascist version, centered on nationalism, a legitimizing factor that increased with the downfall of the regimes, and the authors thus accord nationalism special attention.

Two documentary sources for these essays that stand out are files of the security services and the exceptionally rich Oral History Archive compiled by the 1956 Institute in Budapest, Hungary.