New Books in European Politics

Episódios Disponíveis

5 de 455

Yaroslav Hrytsak, "Ukraine: The Forging of a Nation" (PublicAffairs, 2024)
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the world witnessed the “creative, freewheeling, darkly humorous, and deeply resilient society” that is contemporary Ukraine. In this timely and original history, a bestseller in Ukraine, the historian Yaroslav Hrytsak tells the sweeping story of his nation through a meticulous examination of the major events, conflicts, and developments that have shaped it over the course of centuries. Hrytsak, is a Ukrainian historian and public intellectual. Professor of the Ukrainian Catholic University and Honorary Professor of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Hrytsak has taught at Columbia and Harvard Universities and was a guest lecturer at the Central European University in Budapest. He is the author of many historical books, including several bestsellers and the recipient of numerous national and international awards. weaves a rich and detailed tapestry of a country in continual transformation. Ukraine: The Forging of a Nation (PublicAffairs, 2024) is essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand Ukraine’s dramatic past and its global significance--from the 17th-century Cossack uprising to the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and Ukrainian independence, and from the evolution of the Ukrainian language to the warning signs that anticipated Russia’s 2022 invasion. This book is the definitive story of Ukraine and its people, as told by one of its most celebrated voices. Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Danielle Leavitt, "By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025)
An intimate, affecting account of life during wartime, told through the lives that have been shattered. Even as scores of Americans rally to the Ukrainian cause and adopt Volodymyr Zelensky as a hero, the lives of Ukrainians remain opaque and mostly anonymous. In By the Second Spring, the historian Danielle Leavitt goes beyond familiar portraits of wartime heroism and victimhood to reveal the human experience of the conflict. An American who grew up in Ukraine, Leavitt draws on her deep familiarity with the country and a unique trove of online diaries to track a diverse group of Ukrainians through the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Among others, we meet Vitaly, whose plans to open a coffee bar in a Kyiv suburb come to naught when the Russian army marches through his town and his apartment building is split in two by a rocket; Anna, who drops out of the police academy and begins a tumultuous relationship with a soldier she meets online; and Polina, a fashion-industry insider who returns home from Los Angeles with her American husband to organize relief. To illuminate the complex resurgence of Ukraine’s national spirit, Leavitt also tells the story of Volodymyr Shovkoshitniy—a nuclear engineer at Chernobyl who went on to lead a daring campaign in the late 1980s to return the bodies of three Ukrainian writers who’d died in a Soviet gulag. Writing with closeness and compassion, Leavitt has given us an interior history of Europe’s largest land war in seventy-five years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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John H. Cochrane, Klaus Masuch, and Luis Garicano, "Crisis Cycle: Challenges, Evolution, and Future of the Euro" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Crisis Cycle: Challenges, Evolution, and Future of the Euro (Princeton UP, 2025) John Cochrane Luis Garicano Klaus Masuch PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2025 Launched 26 years ago, the euro was never expected to have an easy life but it wasn't supposed to be this hard. A three-year solvency crisis, a string of bailouts, and a rescue by the European Central Bank (ECB) was followed by threats of deflation, negative interest rates, massive purchases of government debt, a global pandemic, a European land war, and an inflation surge. The euro area emerged from these tests but may not survive the next without reforms during this period of relative calm. In Crisis Cycle, economists John Cochrane, Luis Garicano, and Klaus Masuch call for critical reforms to rebuild the system's incentive structure and stop the ECB's unsought mission creep. "A beautiful ship was constructed," they write. "Out at sea, it ran into severe storms. Its captain and crew patched the holes as best they could. Now though it is time to return to the dry dock and fix the ship properly". John Cochrane is a professor of economics at Stanford University, best-known for his work on asset prices and the fiscal theory of the price level. Luis Garicano is an economics professor at the London School of Economics and former vice-chair of the Renew group in the European Parliament. Klaus Masuch recently retired from the ECB, where he was head of the monetary policy strategy department and a negotiator for the "Troika" of official creditors during the sovereign-debt crisis. To see the authors' own book recommendations, click here. Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes 242.news on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Johannes Karremans, "Between Voters and Eurocrats: How Do Governments Justify their Budgets?" (Oxford UP, 2024)
How do governments in Europe justify their budgets towards the national parliament? Are their socioeconomic policies shaped more by electoral pressures or by their commitments towards the European Union? In Between Voters and Eurocrats: How Do Governments Justify their Budgets (Oxford UP, 2024), Johannes Karremans presents a framework and methodology for studying these questions. Based on theories of democratic legitimacy, he argues that if governments temporarily pursue unpopular policies with the justification that they need to be fiscally responsible, in subsequent years they need to become more responsive again to domestic socioeconomic demands in order to maintain the trust of citizens. The recent crises faced by European countries have repeatedly evoked the impression that European economic governance constrains governments' ability to be responsive to domestic demands. Today, especially in the European Union, maintaining financial sustainability of the state has become tied to international obligations. Karremans raises the concern that financial considerations are more important than people's demands and investigates whether this proposition is true through comparative study focussing on five countries - Austria, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain - and explores how governments maintain a balance between institutional responsibility and democratic responsiveness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Ethnic minorities are good for democracy – Here is why
Democracy scholars often assume that ethnic homogeneity is good for democracy. Politically mobilised ethnic minorities, the assumption goes, stoke divisions and can destabilise democracy. In his latest book Ethnic Minorities, Political Competition, and Democracy: Circumstantial Liberals (Oxford UP 2024), Jan Rovny turns this assumption on its head and argues that not only minorities are not bad for democracy but in fact they can help strengthen and protect it. In this episode, he talks with host Licia Cianetti about why this is the case, under what circumstances, and how the book’s lessons from minorities in Central and Eastern Europe can travel well beyond the region and might even provide insights to interpret recent voting patterns in the US. Jan Rovny is Professor of Political Science at the Center for European Studies and Comparative Politics at Sciences Po, Paris. Licia Cianetti is Lecturer in Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham and Deputy Founding Director of CEDAR. Her book on these themes is The Quality of Divided Democracies: Minority Inclusion, Exclusion and Representation in the New Europe (University of Michigan Press, 2019). The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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