In post-war Europe, protest was everywhere. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, from Paris to Prague, Milan to Wroclaw, ordinary people took to the streets, fighting for a better world. Their efforts came to a head most dramatically in 1968 and 1989, when mass movements swept Europe and rewrote its history.  In the decades between, Joachim C. Haberlen argues in Beauty Is in the Street: Protest and Counterculture in Post-War Europe (Penguin, 2023), new movements emerged that transformed the...

If ideology has never before been so much in evidence as a fact and so little understood as it appears to be today then, Jason Blakely argues in his new book Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life (Agenda Publishing, 2023), this may not be because we are like travellers guided by old maps of the political world but because we make the mistake of thinking that our maps are the worlds in which we live and act politically. When we read them as if they are reality, rather than a...

Who is in charge? In The Political Class: Why It Matters Who Our Politicians Are (Oxford University Press, 2018), Peter Allen, a Reader in Comparative Politics in the Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies at the University of Bath, explores the rise of a specific type of political leader and what this means for our politics. The book works through debates over the existence of a political class, arguing this ‘class’ is homogenised along lines of characteristics,...

If ideology has never before been so much in evidence as a fact and so little understood as it appears to be today then, Jason Blakely argues in his new book Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life (Agenda Publishing, 2023), this may not be because we are like travellers guided by old maps of the political world but because we make the mistake of thinking that our maps are the worlds in which we live and act politically. When we read them as if they are reality, rather than a...

Politics is a site of performance, and contemporary politicians often perform the role of a regular person--perhaps someone we would like to have a beer with. They win elections not because of the elevated rhetorical performances we often associate with charisma ("ask not what your country can do for you"), but because of something more ordinary and relatable.  The everyday magic spell that politicians cast using mass and social media is what sociologist Julia Sonnevend calls "charm."...

In the 2010s, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) began to mobilize an international media system to project Turkey as a rising player and counter foreign criticism of its authoritarian practices. In Talking Back to the West: How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order (University of Illinois Press, 2024), Bilge Yesil examines the AKP’s English-language communication apparatus, focusing on its objectives and outcomes, the idea-generating...

"Everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideas would spread to the autocratic states. Nobody imagined that autocracy and illiberalism would spread to the democratic world instead". So writes Anne Applebaum in Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World (Double Day Books, 2024). Applebaum's new book develops the themes she rehearsed in Twilight of Democracy (2020), an analysis of the rise of authoritarianism in Eastern Europe and national...

In 2012, to stave off the collapse of their currency union, Europe’s leaders sought to end the so-called “doom loop” between the solvency of their governments and their banking systems. Two years later, a banking union was born.  Created as a crisis response, like the postwar coal and steel community, this ten-year-old union is another step in Europe’s long integrationist road. Yet – as Nicolas Véron points out in Europe’s Banking Union At Ten: Unfinished Yet Transformative (Bruegel, 2024) -...

Why are so many democracies experiencing the rise of authoritarian populism? And what can we do to address this? Join Nic Cheeseman as he talks to Armin Schäfer and Michael Zürn about their new book The Democratic Regression: The Political Causes of Authoritarian Populism (Polity Press, 2023). Armin and Michael explain what authoritarian populism is, why and how it is driven by increasingly unresponsive and unrepresentative parliaments, as well as the transfer of power to unelected...

Contemporary Europe seems to be divided between progressive cosmopolitans sympathetic to the European Union and the ideals of the Enlightenment, and counter-enlightened conservative nationalists extolling the virtues of homelands threatened by globalised elites and mass migration.  Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past (Cambridge UP, 2023) seeks to uncover the roots of historically informed ideas of Europe, while at the same time underlining the...

In The Soviet Union and the Construction of the Global Market. Energy and the Ascent of Finance in Cold War Europe, 1964–1971 (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Oscar Sanchez-Sibony reveals the origins of our current era in the dissolution of the institutions that governed the architecture of energy and finance during the Bretton Woods era. He shows how, in the second half of the 1960s, the Soviet Union sought to dismantle the compartmentalized nature of Bretton Woods in order to escape its...

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...

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...

In Implications 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The spring 2022 battle for Kyiv was "one of the most tragic – and the most bizarre – events in modern history," writes Illia Ponomarenko. "Outnumbered and outgunned, Ukraine sustained the most critical blow and unexpectedly delivered Russia the greatest and most defining defeat of this war. It spelt a stunning end to the Kremlin’s megalomaniac plans of an easy conquest of a 40-million-person nation. Ukraine did it alone, by itself, still with very little defence aid from the West, And that...

As a teenager in Shetland, Jen Stout fell in love with Russia and, later, Ukraine – their languages, cultures, and histories. Although life kept getting in the way, she eventually managed to pause her BBC career and take up a nine-month scholarship to live and work in Russia. Unfortunately, this dream only came true in November 2021, as Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s borders. Three months later, she left Russia but only got as far as Vienna before heading back into Ukraine via Romania...

In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press/CEU Review of Books) sat down with Éric Fassin (Université Paris 8) to discuss his new book with CEU Press entitled, State Anti-Intellectualism and the Politics of Gender and Race: Illiberal France and Beyond (2024). Éric Fassin examines the trend of state anti-intellectualism in France using the nation as a case study to demonstrate that this tendency is not limited to ostensibly illiberal regimes. He argues that...

The global battle among the three dominant digital powers―the United States, China, and the European Union―is intensifying. All three regimes are racing to regulate tech companies, with each advancing a competing vision for the digital economy while attempting to expand its sphere of influence in the digital world. In Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology (Oxford UP, 2023), her provocative follow-up to The Brussels Effect, Anu Bradford explores a rivalry that will shape...