Martin Schulze Wessel - Böcker

Political legitimacy has become a scarce resource in Russia and other post-Soviet states. Their capacity to deliver prosperity has suffered from economic crisis, war in Ukraine and confrontation with the West. Will nationalism and repression enable political regimes to survive? This book studies the politics of legitimation in Post-Soviet Eurasia.

Russia's attack on Ukraine marks an epochal break in European and global history. Undoubtedly, the decision to go to war is closely linked to one person, Vladimir Putin, but Russia's war is not driven solely by one man's power calculations. We can only make sense of Russia's actions in Ukraine, argues the distinguished historian Martin Schulze Wessel, by putting them in the broader context of the history of Russian imperialism and the influence it continues to exert today.Schulze Wessel argues that Russian imperialism was shaped by Russia's relationship to Poland and Ukraine. These states were absorbed or partitioned by Russia in the eighteenth century, but Russia's rule over them was contested both by the Poles and by the Ukrainians. The entangled history of these three states produced path dependencies whose impact is still felt toda. Poland and Ukraine share a common history characterized by Russian domination and Polish and Ukrainian resistance to it; just as the Polish question challenged the Russian Empire in previous centuries, so too does the Ukrainian question today. Schulze Wessel argues that, as a result of Russia's confrontation with the Polish and Ukrainian questions, Russia's national identity merged with imperial claims in ways that were pernicious and consequential – the curse of empire. By placing the war in Ukraine in the context of an era of Russian imperialism that spans three centuries, this book sheds new light on one of the bloodiest and most destructive conflicts of our time.Also available as an audiobook.

Linking contemporary concerns about democratic fragility with historical analysis, this volume examines the crisis and failure of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe during the interwar period from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. The contributions explore political culture, constitutional traditions, religion, violence, and crisis discourse in Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. Rather than focusing narrowly on institutional breakdown, the authors emphasize long-term cultural legacies, narratives of crisis, and exclusionary identities that undermined democratic pluralism. Interwar Europe functioned as a laboratory of democracy whose experiences offer critical insights into the challenges facing liberal democracies today.

This volume aims to contribute to the historicization of the post-1989 transformation period in East-Central Europe by addressing the temporality of transformation from a predominantly historical perspective, but also in dialogue with the social sciences. It focuses on the four countries that form the core of East-Central Europe - Czechia, Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary - but broadens the perspective by including more general comparisons within the region as well as insightful case studies from other countries that share some important characteristics with the narrowly defined East-Central Europe, but that, at the same time are able to shed some light on certain specific features of each case. The divergent developments in East-Central Europe after 1989 are explained by investigating the prehistory of transformation in the East-Central European states and societies from various perspectives and for areas as diverse as politics, social affairs, law, economy, culture, and national identity.

The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union were multiethnic and multireligious empires, which ruled over a large number of Jews and Muslims. In many ways these two non-Christian minorities presented similar challenges to the imperial order. Which policies did the state pursue toward Jews and Muslims? How did Jews and Muslims attempt to advance their interests in the political sphere? Which role did they play in the imperial army? What did the Jewish and Muslim Enlightenment movements have in common? In which respects were the experiences of Jews and Muslims fundamentally different? This book brings together specialists in Russian-Jewish and Russian-Muslim history and offers perspectives for a comparative approach to the history of Jews and Muslims in Russia.

Retrospectively, the Prague Spring appears to have been a coherent but unsuccessful experiment in finding a synthesis of Western democracy and socialism. However, this perspective ignores that different groups and individuals participated in these developments and shaped the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia with their completely varying professional, generational, national, and gender-specific experiences. What appears retrospectively as a goal-oriented reform movement or as an 'interrupted revolution' looked in the eyes of the protagonists rather like the situation in a laboratory, where they worked on new syntheses with uncertain results. The volume focuses on the protagonists' ideas of politics, society, and their reform plans. Of particular interest is the question which new thoughts about the interrelation of politics, science, economics, and arts were developed in Czechoslovakia.

This volume aims to depict the regimes of vigilance about love, sex, and the body in Eastern European socialist states. Case studies from Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Albania analyze the enforcement of new gender orders and the so-called socialist morality after the Second World War. On the one hand, the arguments and language used to implement this new morality and encourage the population to embrace it are analyzed. On the other hand, the authors explore how this ideal developed over the long term and ask how the boundaries between public and private shifted over time in relation to romantic relationships and sex. What did the state see, or rather, what did the people who were watchful on behalf of socialism see? What was overlooked? Where did state authorities intervene and where did they hold back? The individual contributions highlight major differences regarding socialist morality in Eastern Europe and the varying ways the collective monitored it. However, similar patterns and lines of development can also be seen in the lead-up to and the period after the fall of socialism.