Download or read book Embracing Democracy in Modern Germany written by Michael L. Hughes and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-14 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across the modern era, the traditional stereotype of Germans as authoritarian and subservient has faded, as they have become (mostly) model democrats. This book, for the first time, examines 130 years of history to comprehensively address the central questions of German democratization: How and why did this process occur? What has democracy meant to various Germans? And how stable is their, or indeed anyone's, democracy? Looking at six German regimes across thirteen decades, this study enables you to see how and why some Germans have always chosen to be politically active (even under dictatorships); the enormous range of conceptions of political culture and democracy they have held; and how interactions among various factors undercut or facilitated democracy at different times. Michael L. Hughes also makes clear that recent surges of support for 'populism' and 'authoritarianism' have not come out of nowhere but are inherent in long-standing contestations about democracy and political citizenship. Hughes argues that democracy – in Germany or elsewhere – cannot be a story of adversity overcome which culminates in a happy ending; it is an ongoing, open-ended process whose ultimate outcome remains uncertain.
Download or read book The Arts of Democratization written by Jennifer M. Kapczynski and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2022-02-07 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How postwar West German democracy was styled through word, image, sound, performance, and gathering
Download or read book Popular Support for Democracy in Unified Germany written by Ross Campbell and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines attitudes towards democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany. By drawing on extensive survey evidence, it charts Germans’ changing views of the political system prior to and following unification. The study examines four aspects of the political system: how it functions overall, attitudes towards the Basic Law, trust in representative institutions, and views of the European Union. Rather than accepting or rejecting democracy, the research shows how Germans merge shades of criticism and support. In addition, it pinpoints the factors that condition support, showing how it is influenced by durable and changeable stimuli. Overall, the findings challenge suggestions of a crisis of democracy but they also demonstrate that support is particularly low towards aspects of the European Union. This book appeals to readers interested in public opinion and democracy in Germany, along with those interested in the changing relationship between citizens and the state.
Download or read book The Weimar Century written by Udi Greenberg and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How ideas, individuals, and political traditions from Weimar Germany molded the global postwar order The Weimar Century reveals the origins of two dramatic events: Germany's post–World War II transformation from a racist dictatorship to a liberal democracy, and the ideological genesis of the Cold War. Blending intellectual, political, and international histories, Udi Greenberg shows that the foundations of Germany’s reconstruction lay in the country’s first democratic experiment, the Weimar Republic (1918–33). He traces the paths of five crucial German émigrés who participated in Weimar’s intense political debates, spent the Nazi era in the United States, and then rebuilt Europe after a devastating war. Examining the unexpected stories of these diverse individuals—Protestant political thinker Carl J. Friedrich, Socialist theorist Ernst Fraenkel, Catholic publicist Waldemar Gurian, liberal lawyer Karl Loewenstein, and international relations theorist Hans Morgenthau—Greenberg uncovers the intellectual and political forces that forged Germany’s democracy after dictatorship, war, and occupation. In restructuring German thought and politics, these émigrés also shaped the currents of the early Cold War. Having borne witness to Weimar’s political clashes and violent upheavals, they called on democratic regimes to permanently mobilize their citizens and resources in global struggle against their Communist enemies. In the process, they gained entry to the highest levels of American power, serving as top-level advisors to American occupation authorities in Germany and Korea, consultants for the State Department in Latin America, and leaders in universities and philanthropic foundations across Europe and the United States. Their ideas became integral to American global hegemony. From interwar Germany to the dawn of the American century, The Weimar Century sheds light on the crucial ideas, individuals, and politics that made the trans-Atlantic postwar order.
Download or read book Western Europe s Democratic Age written by Martin Conway and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-14 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major new history of how democracy became the dominant political force in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century What happened in the years following World War II to create a democratic revolution in the western half of Europe? In Western Europe's Democratic Age, Martin Conway provides an innovative new account of how a stable, durable, and remarkably uniform model of parliamentary democracy emerged in Western Europe—and how this democratic ascendancy held fast until the latter decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Conway describes how Western Europe's postwar democratic order was built by elite, intellectual, and popular forces. Much more than the consequence of the defeat of fascism and the rejection of Communism, this democratic order rested on universal male and female suffrage, but also on new forms of state authority and new political forces—primarily Christian and social democratic—that espoused democratic values. Above all, it gained the support of the people, for whom democracy provided a new model of citizenship that reflected the aspirations of a more prosperous society. This democratic order did not, however, endure. Its hierarchies of class, gender, and race, which initially gave it its strength, as well as the strains of decolonization and social change, led to an explosion of demands for greater democratic freedoms in the 1960s, and to the much more contested democratic politics of Europe in the late twentieth century. Western Europe's Democratic Age is a compelling history that sheds new light not only on the past of European democracy but also on the unresolved question of its future.
Download or read book Rethinking Social Movements after 68 written by Belinda Davis and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2022-07-08 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The year 1968 has widely been viewed as the only major watershed moment during the latter half of the twentieth century. Rethinking Social Movements after ’68 takes on this conventional approach, exploring the spaces, practices, organization, ideas and agendas of numerous activists and movements across the 1970s and 1980s. From the Maoist Communist League to the women’s movement, youth center movement, and gay liberation movement, established and emerging scholars across Europe and North America shed new light on the development of modern European popular politics and social change.
Download or read book Freedom in the World 2018 written by Freedom House and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-01-31 with total page 1265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freedom in the World, the Freedom House flagship survey whose findings have been published annually since 1972, is the standard-setting comparative assessment of global political rights and civil liberties. The survey ratings and narrative reports on 195 countries and fifteen territories are used by policymakers, the media, international corporations, civic activists, and human rights defenders to monitor trends in democracy and track improvements and setbacks in freedom worldwide. The Freedom in the World political rights and civil liberties ratings are determined through a multi-layered process of research and evaluation by a team of regional analysts and eminent scholars. The analysts used a broad range of sources of information, including foreign and domestic news reports, academic studies, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, individual professional contacts, and visits to the region, in conducting their research. The methodology of the survey is derived in large measure from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and these standards are applied to all countries and territories, irrespective of geographical location, ethnic or religious composition, or level of economic development.
Download or read book Conflict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic written by Andrew I. Port and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the reasons why the post-World War II Communist regime in East Germany outlasted both the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich.
Download or read book Democracy in Europe written by and published by . This book was released on 1877 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book What is Christian Democracy written by Carlo Invernizzi Accetti and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-03 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christian Democratic actors and thinkers have been at the forefront of many of the twentieth century's key political battles - from the construction of the international human rights regime, through the process of European integration and the creation of postwar welfare regimes, to Latin American development policies during the Cold War. Yet their core ideas remain largely unknown, especially in the English-speaking world. Combining conceptual and historical approaches, Carlo Invernizzi Accetti traces the development of this ideology in the thought and writings of some of its key intellectual and political exponents, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. In so doing he sheds light on a number of important contemporary issues, from the question of the appropriate place of religion in presumptively 'secular' liberal-democratic regimes, to the normative resources available for building a political response to the recent rise of far-right populism.
Download or read book State and Sovereignty in Modern Germany written by Rupert Emerson and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy written by Daniel Ziblatt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do democracies form and what makes them die? Daniel Ziblatt revisits this timely and classic question in a wide-ranging historical narrative that traces the evolution of modern political democracy in Europe from its modest beginnings in 1830s Britain to Adolf Hitler's 1933 seizure of power in Weimar Germany. Based on rich historical and quantitative evidence, the book offers a major reinterpretation of European history and the question of how stable political democracy is achieved. The barriers to inclusive political rule, Ziblatt finds, were not inevitably overcome by unstoppable tides of socioeconomic change, a simple triumph of a growing middle class, or even by working class collective action. Instead, political democracy's fate surprisingly hinged on how conservative political parties - the historical defenders of power, wealth, and privilege - recast themselves and coped with the rise of their own radical right. With striking modern parallels, the book has vital implications for today's new and old democracies under siege.
Download or read book Post Imperial Democracies written by Stephen E. Hanson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-05 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the causal impact of ideology through a comparative-historical analysis of three cases of 'post-imperial democracy': the early Third Republic in France (1870–86); the Weimar Republic in Germany (1918–34); and post-Soviet Russia (1992–2008). Hanson argues that political ideologies are typically necessary for the mobilization of enduring, independent national party organizations in uncertain democracies. By presenting an explicit and desirable picture of the political future, successful ideologues induce individuals to embrace a long-run strategy of cooperation with other converts. When enough new converts cooperate in this way, it enables sustained collective action to defend and extend party power. Successful party ideologies thus have the character of self-fulfilling prophecies: by portraying the future polity as one organized to serve the interests of those loyal to specific ideological principles, they help to bring political organizations centered on these principles into being.
Download or read book America s Role in Nation Building written by James Dobbins and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2003-08-01 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The post-World War II occupations of Germany and Japan set standards for postconflict nation-building that have not since been matched. Only in recent years has the United States has felt the need to participate in similar transformations, but it is now facing one of the most challenging prospects since the 1940s: Iraq. The authors review seven case studies--Germany, Japan, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan--and seek lessons about what worked well and what did not. Then, they examine the Iraq situation in light of these lessons. Success in Iraq will require an extensive commitment of financial, military, and political resources for a long time. The United States cannot afford to contemplate early exit strategies and cannot afford to leave the job half completed.
Download or read book Learning from the Germans written by Susan Neiman and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As an increasingly polarized America fights over the legacy of racism, Susan Neiman, author of the contemporary philosophical classic Evil in Modern Thought, asks what we can learn from the Germans about confronting the evils of the past In the wake of white nationalist attacks, the ongoing debate over reparations, and the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments and the contested memories they evoke, Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Neiman is a white woman who came of age in the civil rights–era South and a Jewish woman who has spent much of her adult life in Berlin. Working from this unique perspective, she combines philosophical reflection, personal stories, and interviews with both Americans and Germans who are grappling with the evils of their own national histories. Through discussions with Germans, including Jan Philipp Reemtsma, who created the breakthrough Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibit, and Friedrich Schorlemmer, the East German dissident preacher, Neiman tells the story of the long and difficult path Germans faced in their effort to atone for the crimes of the Holocaust. In the United States, she interviews James Meredith about his battle for equality in Mississippi and Bryan Stevenson about his monument to the victims of lynching, as well as lesser-known social justice activists in the South, to provide a compelling picture of the work contemporary Americans are doing to confront our violent history. In clear and gripping prose, Neiman urges us to consider the nuanced forms that evil can assume, so that we can recognize and avoid them in the future.
Download or read book The Responsibility to Defend written by Bastian Giegerich and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise or resurgence of revisionist, repressive and authoritarian powers threatens the Western, US-led international order upon which Germany’s post-war security and prosperity were founded. With Washington increasingly focused on China’s rise in Asia, Europe must be able to defend itself against Russia, and will depend upon German military capabilities to do so. Years of neglect and structural underfunding, however, have hollowed out Germany’s armed forces. Much of the political leadership in Berlin has not yet adjusted to new realities or appreciated the urgency with which it needs to do so. Bastian Giegerich and Maximilian Terhalle argue that Germany’s current strategic culture is inadequate. It informs a security policy that fails to meet contemporary strategic challenges, thereby endangering Berlin’s European allies, the Western order and Germany itself. They contend that: Germany should embrace its historic responsibility to defend Western liberal values and the Western order that upholds them. Rather than rejecting the use of military force, Germany should wed its commitment to liberal values to an understanding of the role of power – including military power – in international affairs. The authors show why Germany should seek to foster a strategic culture that would be compatible with those of other leading Western nations and allow Germans to perceive the world through a strategic lens. In doing so, they also outline possible elements of a new security policy.
Download or read book Weimar Germany written by Eric D. Weitz and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Weimar Centennial edition with a new preface by the author."--Title page.
