The early 1930s constituted an ambiguous moment for the roughly three million Jews that resided in the Polish Republic. On the one hand, as recent scholars have emphasized, Polish Jews found numerous opportunities to partake in flourishing cultural and political projects that spanned the ideological spectrum from Zionism to Yiddishism to Polish integrationism to various brands of socialism. In addition, Josef Pilsudski’s government – while by no means an ally to Polish Jewry – was the lesser of ...
Dec 24, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 338
Critics of globalisation come in many forms from environmentalists to trade unionists and many others in between. In the midst of all the controversy less attention has been paid to how big a phenomenon globalisation actually is and how it compares to another trend – regionalism. In this podcast Owen Bennett Jones discusses The Globalisation Myth: Why Regions Matter (Yale University Press, 2022) with its author, Shannon K. O Neil. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former...
Dec 22, 2022•45 min
In Feminist Transformations and Domestic Violence Activism in Divided Berlin, 1968-2002 (Oxford University Press, 2022), Jane Freeland traces the development of the shelter movement in East and West Germany. In the 1970s, feminist activists exposed the harmful gender norms and lack of legal protections that left women vulnerable to abuse in the home. Their efforts led to the founding of the first women’s shelter in West Berlin in 1976 and a broadly successful campaign that changed legal and soci...
Dec 20, 2022•57 min•Ep. 43
Turkey and Russia are two of the most significant powerhouses in Eurasia. The foreign policies of two countries directly impact the regional dynamics in Black Sea, Central Asia, Middle East, Eastern Europe, and the Balkan regions. The changes in the bilateral relations between the two countries go well beyond the Black Sea region. In the past, the Russian Empire played a significant role in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey took part in containing the USSR during the Cold War by joi...
Dec 19, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 181
With decades of hindsight, the peaceful end of the Cold War seems a foregone conclusion. But in the early 1980s, most experts believed the Soviet Union was strong, stable, and would last into the next century. Ronald Reagan entered the White House with no certainty of what would happen next, only an overriding faith in democracy and an abiding belief that Soviet communism—and the threat of nuclear war—must end. William Inboden's The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the B...
Dec 14, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 17
In 1945 the Soviet Union controlled half of Europe and was a founding member of the United Nations. By 1991, it had an army four million strong with five thousand nuclear-tipped missiles and was the second biggest producer of oil in the world. But soon afterward the union sank into an economic crisis and was torn apart by nationalist separatism. Its collapse was one of the seismic shifts of the twentieth century. Thirty years on, Vladislav Zubok offers a major reinterpretation of the final years...
Dec 13, 2022•56 min•Ep. 215
Eurozone finance ministers coordinate policy through the Eurogroup and its engine room is the Euro Working Group - a committee of top treasury officials from member states and the European Commission. Elected as the EWG's first full-time president in 2009, Thomas Wieser became the one true constant through the tsunami of solvency crises that hit Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Cyprus and threatened Italy, and the construction of the EU's financial firewalls. For the Obama Treasury, he was ...
Dec 09, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 3
Without the State: Self-Organization and Political Activism in Ukraine (U Toronto Press, 2022) explores the 2013-14 Euromaidan protests - a wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Ukraine - through in-depth ethnographic research with leftist, feminist, and student activists in Kyiv. The book discusses the concept of self-organization and the notion that if something needs to be done and a person has the competence to do it, then they should simply do it. Emily Channell-Justice reveals how sel...
Dec 09, 2022•49 min•Ep. 9
Women played an essential role in the international struggle against fascism during the interwar period, though their work has been neglected in broader historiography. In Anti-Fascism, Gender, and International Communism (Routledge, 2022), Jasmine Calver provides a comprehensive history of the Comité mondial des femmes contre la guerre et le fascisme (the International Committee of Women Against War and Fascism, or CMF), an international women's organization concerned with confronting the impac...
Dec 05, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 40
The idea of legitimate political opposition is familiar. A decent political order permits citizens, parties, and coalitions to challenge those in power. Under such conditions, there is an ongoing nonviolent contest for power. Typically, the value of legitimate opposition is understood in terms of democracy. Here, the idea is that democracy is damaged or subverted when practices of legitimate opposition are suppressed. However, this familiar account opens questions about the value of legitimate o...
Dec 01, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 301
Digital Activism in Russia: The Communication Tactics of Political Outsiders (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022) examines various forms of Russian online anti-establishment resistance, focusing in particular on the period between 2016 and 2019. Grounded in qualitative content analysis of the YouTube videos and social media activities of opposition activist Alexey Navalny and his associates, the book covers the history of digital resistance associated with this cohort, its style and strategies, and the im...
Nov 30, 2022•47 min•Ep. 211
The transatlantic relationship, arguably the bedrock of the world’s post-World War II international security architecture, came under significant threat during Donald Trump’s tenure in office, as Trump complained about European untrustworthiness and talked about pulling the United States out of NATO. Yet in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the transatlantic relationship has widely been seen to recover its strength and to grow in military terms as Sweden and Finland are on a path...
Nov 29, 2022•36 min•Ep. 104
What is the best way to achieve societal harmony in a place in which groups of people with different identities are living together. Should minority groups be given exemptions from general policies and laws or is it better to say majority privilege should be removed by finding solutions in which the law applies equally to the minority and the majority. Owen Bennett Jones was joined by co-authors Peter Balint and Patti Lenard who have discussed these issues in Debating Multiculturalism: Should Th...
Nov 25, 2022•53 min•Ep. 40
"An important distinction exists between the politics of rules at which the EU is quite adept and the politics driven by events - which requires improvisation, risk-taking and alertness to opportunities". In Governing the EU in an Age of Division (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022), Dalibor Roháč explains how a union built to reflect and export steadiness and consensus has failed to adapt to a decade of fast-moving financial, public health, military and energy crises. But, his book is neither anti-E...
Nov 25, 2022•51 min•Ep. 5
The world's wealthier countries have in recent years faced challenges from right-wing populist parties and movements that may rejuvenate origins from relatively far in the past, such as in the case of Italy, or they may constitute new formations disturbingly reminiscent of earlier movements of their kinds. So, for example, the Alternative for Germany, in Germany. So where does populism go from here? This week on International Horizons, Umut Korkut from Glasgow Caledonian University discusses the...
Nov 21, 2022•52 min•Ep. 103
Ramon Fernandez, the director-general of the French Treasury 2009-14, reminisces on the euro crisis years – the early signals that “something was wrong” in Greece, the calamitous Deauville summit, managing two power centres in Berlin, working with Emmanuel Macron, and bargaining with the European Central Bank. Edited and produced by davidstudio. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com Lea...
Nov 11, 2022•44 min•Ep. 2
Anna von der Goltz’s The Other ‘68ers: Student Protest and Christian Democracy in West Germany (Oxford University Press, 2021) is a history of 1968 written from a new perspective—that of center-right student activists. Based on oral history as well as new archival sources, The Other ‘68ers examines the ideas, experiences, and repertoires of West German students who identified with the long-governing political movement known as Christian Democracy. Writing these activists back into the history of...
Nov 08, 2022•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 143
The political Left has long faced tension regarding its universalistic commitments and those to the nation it inhabits. The dilemma is captured succinctly in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen that articulated leftist or progressive devotion to both man in the historic collective sense of human beings, as well as to the fellow members of a particular political community at the time of the French Revolution. That older tension persists at the same time that the left has increasingly...
Nov 07, 2022•48 min•Ep. 102
Focusing on the memory of the German Democratic Republic, Towards a Collaborative Memory: German Memory Work in a Transnational Context (Berghahn Books, 2022) explores the cross-border collaborations of three German institutions. Using an innovative theoretical and methodological framework, drawing on relational sociology, network analysis and narrative, the study breaks out of the epistemic coloniality that has underpinned global partnerships across European actors and institutions. Sara Jones ...
Nov 04, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 142
In Geography Is Destiny: Britain and the World--A 10,000-Year History (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), Ian Morris chronicles the eight-thousand-year history of Britain's relationship to Europe as it has changed in the context of a globalizing world. When Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016, the 48 percent who wanted to stay and the 52 percent who wanted to go each accused the other of stupidity, fraud, and treason. In reality, the Brexit debate merely reran a script written eight t...
Oct 31, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 49
Delegating Responsibility: International Cooperation on Migration in the European Union (U Michigan Press, 2022) explores the politics of migration in the European Union and explains how the EU responded to the 2015–17 refugee crisis. Based on 86 interviews and fieldwork in Greece and Italy, Nicholas R. Micinski proposes a new theory of international cooperation on international migration. States approach migration policies in many ways—such as coordination, collaboration, subcontracting, and un...
Oct 31, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 627
As they worked on the second edition of What is Europe? (Routledge, 2022), Anna Triandafyllidou and Ruby Gropas admit that they struggled to keep up. The problem wasn't just the pace of change since 2015 in the EU - the resolution of the Greek and onset of the refugee crisis, Brexit, pandemic and war - but what each of these did to the concept of "Europe" itself. In their history and sociology of an idea, Triandafyllidou and Gropas find that 'Europe' "takes different shapes and meanings dependin...
Oct 28, 2022•39 min•Ep. 5
An alienated society divided into groups and classes suspicious of one another does not pose an especially great problem for an authoritarian regime that does not legitimize itself through fair elections. In contrast, democratic institutions presuppose a consensus about obeying common “rules of the game” and rely on a culture of trust and reciprocity. For democratic consolidation, citizens must respect and participate in shared democratic institutions. For instance, they should trust courts as t...
Oct 25, 2022•59 min•Ep. 178
President Vladmir Putin – the son of a foreman at a railway carriage works – is today one of the most powerful individuals on earth. What drives him? What does he want his legacy to be? Was he once a liberal? What is he now? After 22 years in power what do we know about him. The Western press often portrays him as an irrational monster – how does he see himself? Owen Bennett Jones speaks to Philip Short who has studied the man for 8 years and written a well-reviewed and comprehensive biography o...
Oct 25, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 36
The leadership of Hungary and Poland seemingly shared the same playbook when it came to undermining judicial independence, consolidating electoral power, regulating media ownership and enacting laws against LGBTQ rights and abortion. They also work together to push back against the European Union's efforts to sanction member states pursuing illiberal reforms. However, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Poland has embraced Ukrainian refugees and promoted EU sanctions against Russia, while Hun...
Oct 24, 2022•38 min•Ep. 100
What do citizens do in response to threats to democracy? Citizenship in Hard Times: How Ordinary People Respond to Democratic Threat (Cambridge UP, 2022) examines the mass politics of civic obligation in the US, UK, and Germany. Exploring threats like foreign interference in elections and polarization, Sara Wallace Goodman shows that citizens respond to threats to democracy as partisans, interpreting civic obligation through a partisan lens that is shaped by their country's political institution...
Oct 24, 2022•57 min•Ep. 626
While German unification promised a new historical beginning, it also stirred discussions about contemporary Germany's Nazi past and ideas of citizenship and belonging in a changing Europe. Minority Discourses in Germany Since 1990 explores the intersections and divergences between Black German, Turkish German, and German Jewish experiences, with reflections on the evolving academic paradigms with which these are studied. Informed by comparative approaches, the volume investigates social and aes...
Oct 21, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 141
Are we in a new cold war? And if so, is the US up against China or Russia? Join Owen Bennett Jones for a discussion with Sergey Radchenko, the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Radchenko is the author of Unwanted Visionaries: The Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War and Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962-1967 among other works. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and wr...
Oct 18, 2022•48 min•Ep. 35
In ancient Rome, any citizen who had brought disgrace upon the state could be subject to a judgment believed to be worse than death: damnatio memoriae, condemnation of memory. The Senate would decree that every trace of the citizen's existence be removed from the city as if they had never existed in the first place. Once reserved for individuals, damnatio memoriae in different forms now extends to social classes, racial and ethnic groups, and even entire peoples. In modern times, the condemned g...
Oct 18, 2022•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 323
The existence of minorities has been an unavoidable reality of the creation of nation states that almost always have a dominant national group inscribed in their names. From this perspective, Germany is a country for Germans and Australia is a country for Australians. But there are invariably others who don't fit the heritage or the stereotype of German or Italian, or Australian, or whatever the country might be. So how do we deal with the reality that minorities are a normal feature of basicall...
Oct 17, 2022•36 min•Ep. 99
