Why did the Cold War come to a peaceful end? And why did neoliberal economics sweep across the world in the late twentieth century? In this pathbreaking study, Fritz Bartel argues that the answer to these questions is one and the same. The Cold War began as a competition between capitalist and communist governments to expand their social contracts as they raced to deliver their people a better life. But the economic shocks of the 1970s made promises of better living untenable on both sides of th...
Sep 05, 2022•59 min•Ep 1259•Transcript available on Metacast Over recent years, the issues of Brexit, COVID and the 'migrant crisis' put Kent in the headlines like never before. Images of asylum seekers on Kent beaches, lorries queued on motorways and the crumbling white cliffs of Dover all spoke to national anxieties, and were used to support ideas that severing ties with the EU was the best - or worst - thing the UK has ever done. In Borderland: Identity and Belonging at the Edge of England (Manchester UP, 2022), Phil Hubbard - an exiled man of Kent - c...
Sep 02, 2022•49 min•Ep 73•Transcript available on Metacast France is a bellwether for the postcolonial anxieties and populist politics emerging across the world today. Postcolonial France: The Question of Race and the Future of the Republic (Pluto Press, 2018) explores the dynamics and dilemmas of the present moment of crisis and hope in France, through an exploration of recent moral panics. Taking stock of the tensions as they have emerged over the last quarter of a century, Paul Silverstein looks at urban racial violence, female Islamic dress and male...
Sep 02, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Ep 185•Transcript available on Metacast In NATO’s Burden-Sharing Disputes: Past, Present and Future Prospects (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Dr. Tommi Koivula & Heljä Ossa argues that burden-sharing is one of the most persisting sources for tension and disagreement within NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation). It also belongs to one of the most studied issues within NATO with distinguishable traditions and schools of thought. However, this pertinent question has been rarely discussed extensively by academics. The key idea of the book...
Sep 01, 2022•35 min•Ep 13•Transcript available on Metacast 'Theory' - a magical glow has emanated from this word since the sixties. Theory was more than just a succession of ideas: it was an article of faith, a claim to truth, a lifestyle. It spread among its adherents in cheap paperbacks and triggered heated debates in seminar rooms and cafés. The Frankfurt School, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Adorno, Derrida, Foucault: these and others were the exotic schools and thinkers whose ideas were being devoured by young minds. But where did the fascinat...
Sep 01, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep 147•Transcript available on Metacast The Brexit debate has been so all-consuming and filled with so much misinformation that many Brits and others can overlook some the challenges facing the European Union itself. Looked at in broad terms, it has been an astonishingly successful political project, having delivered 70 years of peace and prosperity. But what lies ahead? What issues does it need to tackle to maintain that kind of success? Luuk van Middelaar is a Dutch historian, Professor of EU law at Leiden University. He has worked ...
Aug 30, 2022•48 min•Ep 28•Transcript available on Metacast For years following reunification, Berlin was the largest construction site in Europe, with striking new architecture proliferating throughout the city in the 1990s and early 2000s. Among the most visible and the most contested of the new projects were those designed for the national government and its related functions. Julia Walker's Berlin Contemporary: Architecture and Politics After 1990 (Bloomsbury, 2021) explores these buildings and plans, tracing their antecedents while also situating th...
Aug 16, 2022•59 min•Ep 135•Transcript available on Metacast Postwar multilateral cooperation is often viewed as an attempt to overcome the limitations of the nation-state system. However, in 1945, when the United Nations was founded, large parts of the world were still under imperial control. Building States investigates how the UN tried to manage the dissolution of European empires in the 1950s and 1960s—and helped transform the practice of international development and the meaning of state sovereignty in the process. In Building States: The United Nati...
Aug 16, 2022•55 min•Ep 1252•Transcript available on Metacast Trump’s voters. The yellow jackets in France. Putin’s base in Russia. The Brexiteers. One thing all these groups have in common is anger – anger at being left behind, anger about de industrialization, anger at the arrogance and wealth of the elite. But what more can be said about the nature of that anger and the different aspects of it? In Angrynomics (Agenda Publishing, 2020) Mark Blyth and Eric Lonergan address this question. Today I talked to Blyth, a professor of political economy at Brown U...
Aug 09, 2022•42 min•Ep 25•Transcript available on Metacast During the Cold War, the People's Republic of China used Switzerland as headquarters for its economic, political, intelligence, and cultural networks in Europe. Based on extensive research in Western and Chinese archives, China's European Headquarters: Switzerland and China during the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. Ariane Knüsel charts not only how Switzerland came to play this role, but also how Chinese networks were built in practice, often beyond the public face of officia...
Aug 08, 2022•55 min•Ep 11•Transcript available on Metacast When I was an undergrad, the chronology of World War One was simple. The war began in August of 1914 and ended in November of 1918. Now, of course, we know it's not that simple. Perhaps (perhaps) it began in 1914. But the violence lingered on well after the armistices of 1918. So did the complicated questions of how to address that violence and the suffering that accompanied it. Amy E. Grubb and Elisabeth Hope Murray are interested precisely in that moment where the official violence had ended b...
Aug 02, 2022•1 hr 25 min•Ep 164•Transcript available on Metacast The European Union, we are told, is facing extinction. Most of those who believe that, however, have no understanding of how, and why, it become possible to imagine that the diverse peoples of Europe might be united in a single political community. The Pursuit of Europe: A History (Oxford UP, 2022) tells the story of the evolution of the "European project", from the end of the Napoleonic Wars, which saw the earliest creation of a "Concert of Europe", right through to Brexit. The question was how...
Jul 28, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Ep 1241•Transcript available on Metacast The imposition of Communist ideology was a misfortune for millions in Eastern Europe, but never for Dennis Deletant. Instead, it drew him to Romania. The renowned historian’s association with the country and its people dates back to 1965, when he first visited. Since then, Romania has made Dennis appreciate the value of shrewd dissimulation, in the face of the state’s gross intrusion in the life of the individual. This vivid memoir charts his first-hand experience of the Communist era, coloured ...
Jul 22, 2022•54 min•Ep 171•Transcript available on Metacast Spoken by a quarter of the world's population, English is today's lingua franca--its common tongue. The language of business, popular media, and international politics, English has become commodified for its economic value and increasingly detached from any particular nation. This meteoric "rise of English" has many obvious benefits to communication. Tourists can travel abroad with greater ease. Political leaders can directly engage their counterparts. Researchers can collaborate with foreign co...
Jul 21, 2022•44 min•Ep 1237•Transcript available on Metacast “Confronting the past” has become a byword for democratization. How societies and governments commemorate their violent pasts is often appraised as a litmus test of their democratization claims. Regardless of how critical such appraisals may be, they tend to share a fundamental assumption: commemoration, as a symbol of democratization, is ontologically distinct from violence. The pitfalls of this assumption have been nowhere more evident than in Turkey whose mainstream image on the world stage h...
Jul 15, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Ep 47•Transcript available on Metacast While it is an overused cliché, France is indeed a land of contrasts, famous for its paradoxes. In French political history, the most startling may be the progressive policies of the Third Republic (1870-1940) on just about everything except for gender. Despite its embrace of the spirit of 1789, universal manhood suffrage, and secularism, the republic deemed French women second class citizens. Indeed, French women did not get the vote until the Fourth Republic in 1944, a full generation after al...
Jul 14, 2022•59 min•Ep 1234•Transcript available on Metacast A young imperialist adventurer turned hero of the anti-Nazi resistance, Norwegian journalist, poet, and playwright Nordahl Grieg has become more of a national legend than a real person since his death as a war reporter in Berlin in 1943. A look into Grieg’s intellectual development during the dynamic interwar period sheds light on the political and cultural ideologies that competed in a turbulent Europe. Often portrayed with an emphasis on his humanist and pacifist positions, this antifascist fi...
Jul 13, 2022•59 min•Ep 133•Transcript available on Metacast From one of the leading intellectuals of the digital age, The Digital Republic: On Freedom and Democracy in the 21st Century (Pegasus Books, 2022) is the definitive guide to the great political question of our time: how can freedom and democracy survive in a world of powerful digital technologies? A Financial Times “Book to Read” in 2022. Not long ago, the tech industry was widely admired, and the internet was regarded as a tonic for freedom and democracy. Not anymore. Every day, the headlines b...
Jul 11, 2022•43 min•Ep 324•Transcript available on Metacast Reccep Tayyib Erdogan is towering politician. He has dominated Turkey for 20 years and is now being compared to Ataturk as a man who has changed the direction of Turkish society. And he matters not only to Turkey but to the international community more generally partly because of Turkey’s geo-strategic position but also because he has the power to influence the future direction of political Islam - so what has he done, what does it signify and is he fearful of being imprisoned if he lost power? ...
Jul 05, 2022•42 min•Ep 20•Transcript available on Metacast Beginning in 1955, West Germany recruited millions of people as guest workers from Yugoslavia, Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and especially Turkey. This labor force was essential to creating the postwar German economic miracle. Employers fantasized that foreign "guest workers" would provide labor power in their prime productive years without having to pay for their education, pensions, or medical care. They especially hoped that the workers would leave behind their spouses and children and not...
Jun 29, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Ep 131•Transcript available on Metacast The three protagonists of Pasta, Pizza and Propaganda: A Political History of Italian Food TV (Intellect, 2022) are food, television and politics. These are the three main characters that interrelate, collaborate and fight behind the scenes, while in front of the camera the writers, intellectuals and celebrity chefs talk about, prepare or taste the best Italian dishes. In Pasta, Pizza and Propaganda, Dr. Francesco Buscemi develops a political history of Italian ‘good food’ on national television...
Jun 23, 2022•56 min•Ep 17•Transcript available on Metacast European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine (1918-1948) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) investigates the transnationally connected history of Arab Christian communities in Palestine during the British Mandate (1918-1948) through the lens of the birth of cultural diplomacy. Relying predominantly on unpublished sources, it examines the relationship between European cultural agendas and local identity formation processes and discusses the social and religious transformations of Arab Chr...
Jun 22, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep 178•Transcript available on Metacast In the midst of the ongoing war between the Russian Federation and Ukraine, it is vital that the lay-educated public understand the historical origins of the conflict. It is with this in mind, that this episode of ‘Arguing History’, takes a look at the subject of ‘Ukrainian Nationalism and the Russian / Soviet state’. To guide us in this intricate and not well know matter, are three superb historians: John-Paul Himka, Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Alberta; ...
Jun 21, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep 19•Transcript available on Metacast What impact has two decades' worth of policing and counterterrorism had on the state of mind of Muslims in Britain? In The Suspect: Counterterrorism, Islam, and the Security State (Pluto Press, 2022), Rizwaan Sabir writes compellingly about his own experiences of wrongful arrest, detention and subsequent surveillance, placing these in the broader context of 21st century British counterterrorism practices and the policing of Muslims. Writing publicly for the first time about the traumatising ment...
Jun 16, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast Çigdem Çidam, Associate Professor of Political Science at Union College, has a new book titled In the Street: Democratic Action, Theatricality, and Political Friendship (Oxford UP, 2021) that examines political action by citizens, and how we interpret and discuss that action in context of political structures. The title In the Street is a reference to the seminal French poster from May of 1968 that read “beauty is in the street,” and was adapted by the demonstrators in Turkey decades later, prov...
Jun 16, 2022•1 hr•Ep 698•Transcript available on Metacast After decades of rule by the National Liberal Party or one of its centre-right, mainstream rivals – usually either the Conservative Party or the National Peasant Party, – in December 1937 King Carol II appointed the antisemitic National Christian Party (PNC), led by Octavian Goga and A. C. Cuza to form a government, effectively ending the democratic consensus and Francophile orientation in Romanian politics. During their 45 days in power, Goga and Cuza introduced sweeping changes to basic civil ...
Jun 13, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep 167•Transcript available on Metacast Jean Jaurès was a towering intellectual and political leader of the democratic Left at the turn of the twentieth century, but he is little remembered today outside of France, and his contributions to political thought are little studied anywhere. In Jean Jaurès: The Inner Life of Social Democracy (Penn State University Press, 2016), Geoffrey Kurtz introduces Jaurès to an American audience. Geoffrey Kurtz is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, C...
Jun 10, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Ep 215•Transcript available on Metacast Israel's Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945–1949 (Cambridge UP, 2021) is a major new account of how a Jewish state came to be forged in the shadow of World War Two and the Holocaust and the onset of the Cold War. Drawing on new research in government, public and private archives, Jeffrey Herf exposes the political realities that underpinned support for and opposition to Zionist aspirations in Palestine. In an unprecedented international accoun...
Jun 02, 2022•35 min•Ep 127•Transcript available on Metacast "With the eurozone crisis going back to 2010, the refugee crisis that culminated in 2015, the crisis of the EU-Russia relationship going back to the Ukrainian Maidan revolution of 2013-14, to the Covid-19 crisis in 2020, the EU has struggled to live up to the expectations it raised both in relation to its own people and neighbouring countries. This is not an accident". Could this really be by design? In European Disunion: Democracy, Sovereignty and the Politics of Emergency (Hurst in the UK, OUP...
May 26, 2022•56 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast Jacob Collins's The Anthropological Turn: French Political Through After 1968 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) examines some of the most important currents in French intellectual life through the 1970s. In the wake of the upheaval of 1968, and confronted with the economic and other crises of the decade that followed, a number of political thinkers and social theorists in France interrogated "the social" borrowing anthropological concepts and approaches to religion, identity, citizenship,...
May 26, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep 97•Transcript available on Metacast 
