Download Free Czech Exceptionalism A Comparative Political Economy Interpretation Of Post Communist Policy Pathways 1989 2004 Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Czech Exceptionalism A Comparative Political Economy Interpretation Of Post Communist Policy Pathways 1989 2004 and write the review.

Czechoslovakia has been at the center of some of the most difficult--and tragic--episodes of modern European history: its sacrifice to Nazi Germany at Munich; the Communist Coup of 1948; and the military crushing of the Prague Spring. It has also enacted momentous change almost magically, as in the peaceful overthrow of communism in 1989, and then the negotiated end to the country in 1992. Czechoslovak history has consequently produced enduring political metaphors for our times, such as the Velvet Revolution and Velvet Divorce. The second edition of the Historical Dictionary of the Czech State has been thoroughly updated and greatly expanded. Featuring a chronology, introductory essay, appendix, bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries, this detailed, authoritative reference provides understandings of the Czechs as a people; the territory they inhabit; their social, cultural, political, and economic developments throughout history; and interactions with their neighbors and the wider world.
The Routledge Handbook of European Sociology explores the main aspects of the work and scholarship of European sociologists during the last sixty years (1950-2010), a period that has shaped the methods and identity of the sociological craft. European social theory has produced a vast constellation of theoretical landscapes with a far reaching impact. At the same time there has been diversity and fragmentation, the influence of American sociology, and the effect of social practice and transformations. The guiding question is: does European Sociology really exist today, and if the answer is positive, what does this really mean? Divided into four parts, the Handbook investigates: intellectual and institutional settings regional variations thematic variations European concerns. The Handbook will provides a set of state-of-the-art accounts that break new ground, each contribution teasing out the distinctively European features of the sociological theme it explores. It will be of interest to students and scholars across the social sciences and humanities.
Published ten years after the first edition, this new Handbook offers topical, and comprehensive information on the welfare systems of all 28 EU member states and their recent reforms, giving the reader an invaluable introduction and basis for comparative welfare research. Additional chapters provide detailed information on EU social policy, as well as comparative analyses of European welfare systems and their reform pathways. For this second edition, all chapters have been updated and substantially revised, and Croatia additionally included. The second edition of this Handbook is most timely, given the often-fundamental welfare state transformations against the background of the financial and economic crises, transforming social policy ideas, as well as political shifts in a number of European countries. The book sets out to analyse these new developments when it comes to social policy. In the first part, all country chapters provide systematic and comparable information on the foundations of the different national welfare systems and their characteristics. In the second part, using a joint conceptual foundation, they focus on policy changes (especially of the last two decades) in different social policy areas, including old-age, labour market, family, healthcare, and social assistance policies. As the comparative chapters conclude, European welfare system landscapes have been in constant motion in the last two decades. While austerity is not to be seen on the aggregate level, the in-depth country studies show that all policy sectors have been characterised by different reform directions and ideas. The findings not only reveal both change and continuity, but also policy reversal as a distinct type that characterises social policy reform. The book provides a rich resource to the international welfare state research community, and is also useful for social policy teaching.
The concept of predistribution is increasingly setting the agenda in progressive politics. But what does it mean? The predistributive agenda is concerned with how states can alter the underlying distribution of market outcomes so they no longer rely solely on post hoc redistribution to achieve economic efficiency and social justice. It therefore offers an effective means of tackling economic and social inequality alongside traditional welfare policies, emphasising employability, human capital, and skills, as well as structuring markets to promote greater equity. This book examines the key debates surrounding the emergence and development of predistributive thought with contributions from leading international scholars and policy-makers.
This analysis of the Yugoslav democratisation process explains the variation of regime outcomes within a structuralist framework. Focusing on the post‐socialist world, it goes beyond ethnicity and elite agency to bring the role of class and the state into discussions of third wave democracies. Offering an in‐depth study of four post‐Yugoslav cases and relying on extensive field work, it examines how civil society, state structures and elite agency influence the trajectories of Croatia, North Macedonia, Serbia and Slovenia after the end of socialism. The analysis also considers the impact of the European Union on domestic conditions. The author argues that no single factor explains the occurrence of democracy. It is instead the result of the combination of an autonomous civil society, a non‐captured state and ruling elites willing to implement democratic reforms. Concomitant with this, the analysis provides evidence that the only sufficient condition for the occurrence of democracy is non‐captured state structures. State capacity, therefore, plays a central role in democratisation. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Eastern Europe, Southeastern Europe, the EU and democratisation, as well as to policymakers and nongovernmental organisations.
After the fall of the Iron Curtain, people across the former socialist world saw their lives transformed. In just a few years, labor markets were completely disrupted, and the meanings attached to work were drastically altered. How did people who found themselves living under state socialism one day and capitalist democracy the next adjust to the changing social order and its new system of values? Till Hilmar examines memories of the postsocialist transition in East Germany and the Czech Republic to offer new insights into the power of narratives about economic change. Despite the structural nature of economic shifts, people often interpret life outcomes in individual terms. Many are deeply attached to the belief that success and failure must be deserved. Emphasizing individual effort, responsibility, and character, they pass moral judgments based on a person’s fortunes in the job market. Hilmar argues that such frameworks represent ways of making sense of the profound economic and social dislocations after 1989. People craft narratives of deservingness about themselves and others to solve the problem of belonging in a new social order. Drawing on in-depth interviews with engineers and care workers as well as historical and comparative analysis of the breakdown of communism in Eastern Europe, Deserved sheds new light on the moral imagination of capitalism and the experience of economic change. This book also offers crucial perspective on present-day politics, showing how notions of deservingness and moral worth have propelled right-wing populism.
This book provides the first comprehensive analyses of the challenges all European welfare systems have been facing since 2007, combining in-depth country-based studies and comparative chapters. It focuses on: 1) the economic and financial crisis, 2) demographic change, and 3) the balance between avoiding risks and opening up opportunities in social policy. The results show that European welfare systems tend to face the same challenges in different ways and that also their responses to those challenges differ considerably. Although the EU also plays a part in shaping national welfare systems, it becomes evident that European welfare systems are by no means converging: in terms of social policy, national diversity within Europe is still a major factor that will shape future developments in European welfare systems.
The Hungarian historian Professor Zoltán Tefner has a remarkable academic career. This book is a tribute to his versatile, energetically continuous work. At the same time, it is a collection of current texts in which Tefner's well-known students, colleagues and members of the international scientific community deal with historically and socially significant themes, such as the construction of the European territorial order, border policy and contractual civilization, the importance of jurisprudence in the search for the civilizing process, welfare economics, a systematic conception of human being, and Hungary's critical decades in the 19th and 20th centuries. The historical and geographical arc of the texts extends from the Carolingian Empire of the 8th century to the European Union of the 2020s. Tefner Zoltán magyar történész kiemelkedő tudományos pályafutással rendelkezik. Ez a könyv tisztelgés sokrétű, nyughatatlan folyamatos munkája előtt. Ugyanakkor aktuális szöveggyűjtemény, amelyben Tefner neves tanítványai, kollégái és a nemzetközi tudományos közösség tagjai történelmi és társadalmi szempontból is fontos témákkal foglalkoznak, mint a felségterület-elrendezések és határpolitikák Európában, az európai szerződéses civilizáció szerkezete, az igazságszolgáltatás jelentősége a civilizációs folyamat értelmének keresésében, a jóléti gazdaságtan, az emberiség szisztematikus szemlélete, valamint Magyarország kritikus évtizedei a 19. és a 20. században. A szövegek történelmi és földrajzi íve a 8. századi Karoling Birodalomtól a 2020-as évek Európai Úniójáig terjed. Der ungarische Historiker Professor Zoltán Tefner hat eine bemerkenswerte akademische Karriere. Dieses Buch ist eine Hommage an sein vielseitiges, dynamisch-kontinuierliches Werk. Zugleich handelt es sich um eine Sammlung aktueller Texte, in denen sich Tefners namhafte Studierende, Kollegen und Mitglieder der internationalen Wissenschaftsgemeinschaft mit historisch und gesellschaftlich bedeutsamen Themen auseinandersetzen; wie etwa den Territorialitätsordnungen und Grenzpolitiken in Europa, dem Aufbau der europäischen Vertragszivilisation, der Bedeutung der Rechtsprechung bei der Suche nach dem Sinn des Zivilisationsprozesses, der Wohlfahrtsökonomie, dem systematischen Menschenbild und den kritischen Jahrzehnten Ungarns im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Der historische und geografische Bogen der Texte reicht vom Karolingischen Kaiserreich des 8. Jahrhunderts bis hin zur Europäischen Union der 2020er Jahre.
Examines developments between 1989 and 2008 in the areas of employment, social policies, earnings, income inequalities and social structure, with a focus on the situation of the middle class, pensioners and the poor. Comments on new socio-economic values relating to work and consumption.
Since the beginning of the 1970s, democratic capitalist Western Europe as well as state-socialist Eastern Europe faced the double challenge of the third industrial revolution and the second globalization. The accelerated political, social, economic and cultural change did not lead to a crisis "of capitalism" or "of communism", instead challenging European industrial society as such. In 1989, after a long erosion process, state socialism failed at the task of solving the manifold problems of adjustment; yet a lasting solution is also not conceivable within the context of a neo-liberal "new spirit of capitalism".The present volume, which arose from the interdisciplinary cooperation of historians and social scientists, discusses the consequences of this "great transformation" for the economic elites in both "West" and "East": for their qualification profiles and their social composition, their options and their room for maneuver, their value systems and legitimization strategies, their self-perception and their public image. Economic elites in both systems saw themselves forced to adopt new strategies which very often seem quite different at the surface; looking deeper, they exhibit clear similarities. After 1989, the consolidation of the post-socialist economic elites has, all in all, been completed according to the Western example. The emerging convergences, which are being supported by the process of European integration, contributed to the internationalization of the European economic elites. The volume discusses the problem how strong this tendency was and if it has already created truly transnational economic elites more or less separated from the national context.The contributions, which are embedded into a coherent interpretative framework, are penned by internationally renowned experts and junior researchers from a wide array of countries, from Britain to Poland and from Norway to Portugal. The innovative value of the volume lies in its Europe-wide scope and, above all, in its comparative East-West perspective. A genuinely European community of researchers tackles a topic which is indisputably current for history as well as for the social sciences.