Shaping Postwar Europe PDF Download

Author: Peter M. R. Stirk
Publisher: Burns & Oates
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
An international team examines the often neglected contexts of European unity, in which the hopes for integration and the difficulties involved are viewed from the political, economic and cultural limits of their success. The missed opportunities for integration in Eastern Europe are viewed in light of power politics, and American policy towards shaping Europe is discussed along with the pro- and anti-American stances adopted by Britain and Germany. The two most important considerations during the integration period, economic and strategic, are explored from British, Italian and Scandinavian perspectives, with Eastern Europe providing the base for an analysis of Comecon. Tensions between international (global) and pan-Euroepan forces provide the focus for a look at the historical origins of issues which are emerging as the political map of Europe is once again transformed.

Author: Bruce D. Jones
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815729545
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
" How the United States helped restore a Europe battered by World War II and created the foundation for the postwar international order Seventy years ago, in the wake of World War II, the United States did something almost unprecedented in world history: It launched and paid for an economic aid plan to restore a continent reeling from war. The European Recovery Plan—better known as the Marshall Plan, after chief advocate Secretary of State George C. Marshall—was in part an act of charity but primarily an act of self-interest, intended to prevent postwar Western Europe from succumbing to communism. By speeding the recovery of Europe and establishing the basis for NATO and diplomatic alliances that endure to this day, it became one of the most successful U.S. government programs ever. The Brookings Institution played an important role in the adoption of the Marshall Plan. At the request of Arthur Vandenberg, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Brookings scholars analyzed the plan, including the specifics of how it could be implemented. Their report gave Vandenberg the information he needed to shepherd the plan through a Republican-dominated Congress in a presidential election year. In his foreword to this book, Brookings president Strobe Talbott reviews the global context in which the Truman administration pushed the Marshall Plan through Congress, as well as Brookings' role in that process. The book includes Marshall's landmark speech at Harvard University in June 1947 laying out the rationale for the European aid program, the full text of the report from Brookings analyzing the plan, and the lecture Marshall gave upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953. The book concludes with an essay by Bruce Jones and Will Moreland that demonstrates how the Marshall Plan helped shape the entire postwar era and how today's leaders can learn from the plan's challenges and successes. "

Author: S. M. Plokhy
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101189924
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 598

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Book Description
A major new history of the eight days in February 1945 when FDR, Churchill, and Stalin decided the fate of the world Imagine you could eavesdrop on a dinner party with three of the most fascinating historical figures of all time. In this landmark book, a gifted Harvard historian puts you in the room with Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt as they meet at a climactic turning point in the war to hash out the terms of the peace. The ink wasn't dry when the recriminations began. The conservatives who hated Roosevelt's New Deal accused him of selling out. Was he too sick? Did he give too much in exchange for Stalin's promise to join the war against Japan? Could he have done better in Eastern Europe? Both Left and Right would blame Yalta for beginning the Cold War. Plokhy's conclusions, based on unprecedented archival research, are surprising. He goes against conventional wisdom-cemented during the Cold War- and argues that an ailing Roosevelt did better than we think. Much has been made of FDR's handling of the Depression; here we see him as wartime chief. Yalta is authoritative, original, vividly- written narrative history, and is sure to appeal to fans of Margaret MacMillan's bestseller Paris 1919.

Author: Benn Steil
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198757913
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 621

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Book Description
Traces the history of the Marshall Plan and the efforts to reconstruct western Europe as a bulwark against communist authoritarianism during a two-year period that saw the collapse of postwar U.S.-Soviet relations and the beginning of the Cold War.

Author: Julie Mell
Publisher: MDPI
ISBN: 3906980561
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Between Religion and Ethnicity: Twentieth-Century Jewish Émigrés and the Shaping of Postwar Culture" that was published in Religions

Author: Tony Judt
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780143037750
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1000

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Book Description
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award • One of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of the Year “Impressive . . . Mr. Judt writes with enormous authority.” —The Wall Street Journal “Magisterial . . . It is, without a doubt, the most comprehensive, authoritative, and yes, readable postwar history.” —The Boston Globe Almost a decade in the making, this much-anticipated grand history of postwar Europe from one of the world's most esteemed historians and intellectuals is a singular achievement. Postwar is the first modern history that covers all of Europe, both east and west, drawing on research in six languages to sweep readers through thirty-four nations and sixty years of political and cultural change-all in one integrated, enthralling narrative. Both intellectually ambitious and compelling to read, thrilling in its scope and delightful in its small details, Postwar is a rare joy. Judt's book, Ill Fares the Land, republished in 2021 featuring a new preface by bestselling author of Between the World and Me and The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Author: Heide Fehrenbach
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571811073
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
American culture has been one of the most controversial exports of the United States: greeted with enthusiasm by some, with hostility by others. Yet, few societies escape its influence. However, not all changes should be interpreted simply as "Americanization." The shaping of the postwar world has been much more complex than this term implies as is shown in this volume that explores the links between Americanization and modernity in Western Europe and Japan. In considering the impact of products and images ranging from movies and music to fashion and architecture, a multi-disciplinary group of contributors asks how American culture has been employed internationally in the articulation of postwar identities - be they national or subnational, socially sanctioned or socially transgressive. Their essays on France, Italy, Germany and Japan move beyond the simple paradigms of colonization and democratic modernization, yet retain a sensitivity to the asymmetries in the postwar power relationships between these countries and the United States. An extensive introduction historically locates changing interpretations of American influences abroad and suggests the problems and promises of "Americanization" as an analytical tool. Its comparative focus and interdisciplinary scope will appeal to a wide range of students and scholars of cold war and post-cold war history.

Author: Norman M. Naimark
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 067423877X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Winner of the Norris and Carol Hundley Award Winner of the U.S.–Russia Relations Book Prize A Financial Times Best History Book of the Year The Cold War division of Europe was not inevitable—the acclaimed author of Stalin’s Genocides shows how postwar Europeans fought to determine their own destinies. Was the division of Europe after World War II inevitable? In this powerful reassessment of the postwar order in Europe, Norman Naimark suggests that Joseph Stalin was far more open to a settlement on the continent than we have thought. Through revealing case studies from Poland and Yugoslavia to Denmark and Albania, Naimark recasts the early Cold War by focusing on Europeans’ fight to determine their future. As nations devastated by war began rebuilding, Soviet intentions loomed large. Stalin’s armies controlled most of the eastern half of the continent, and in France and Italy, communist parties were serious political forces. Yet Naimark reveals a surprisingly flexible Stalin, who initially had no intention of dividing Europe. During a window of opportunity from 1945 to 1948, leaders across the political spectrum, including Juho Kusti Paasikivi of Finland, Wladyslaw Gomulka of Poland, and Karl Renner of Austria, pushed back against outside pressures. For some, this meant struggling against Soviet dominance. For others, it meant enlisting the Americans to support their aims. The first frost of Cold War could be felt in the tense patrolling of zones of occupation in Germany, but not until 1948, with the coup in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Blockade, did the familiar polarization set in. The split did not become irreversible until the formal division of Germany and establishment of NATO in 1949. In illuminating how European leaders deftly managed national interests in the face of dominating powers, Stalin and the Fate of Europe reveals the real potential of an alternative trajectory for the continent.

Author: István Deák
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400832055
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
The presentation of Europe's immediate historical past has quite dramatically changed. Conventional depictions of occupation and collaboration in World War II, of wartime resistance and post-war renewal, provided the familiar backdrop against which the chronicle of post-war Europe has mostly been told. Within these often ritualistic presentations, it was possible to conceal the fact that not only were the majority of people in Hitler's Europe not resistance fighters but millions actively co-operated with and many millions more rather easily accommodated to Nazi rule. Moreover, after the war, those who judged former collaborators were sometimes themselves former collaborators. Many people became innocent victims of retribution, while others--among them notorious war criminals--escaped punishment. Nonetheless, the process of retribution was not useless but rather a historically unique effort to purify the continent of the many sins Europeans had committed. This book sheds light on the collective amnesia that overtook European governments and peoples regarding their own responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity--an amnesia that has only recently begun to dissipate as a result of often painful searching across the continent. In inspiring essays, a group of internationally renowned scholars unravels the moral and political choices facing European governments in the war's aftermath: how to punish the guilty, how to decide who was guilty of what, how to convert often unspeakable and conflicted war experiences and memories into serviceable, even uplifting accounts of national history. In short, these scholars explore how the drama of the immediate past was (and was not) successfully "overcome." Through their comparative and transnational emphasis, they also illuminate the division between eastern and western Europe, locating its origins both in the war and in post-war domestic and international affairs. Here, as in their discussion of collaborators' trials, the authors lay bare the roots of the many unresolved and painful memories clouding present-day Europe. Contributors are Brad Abrams, Martin Conway, Sarah Farmer, Luc Huyse, László Karsai, Mark Mazower, and Peter Romijn, as well as the editors. Taken separately, their essays are significant contributions to the contemporary history of several European countries. Taken together, they represent an original and pathbreaking account of a formative moment in the shaping of Europe at the dawn of a new millennium.

Author: Anne Deighton
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349240524
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Controversy surrounds the construction of postwar European institutions. Did West European states simply respond to American pressure and Cold-War politics? How important was federalist idealism, as opposed to economic and power political factors to decision-makers? These studies, by an international team of historians, examine the motivations of national political leaders and their officials. Topics covered include British and French officials, European integration and military policies; German, Italian, Belgian and Dutch attitudes; Britain and the first attempt to join the EEC; and the covert relationship between the USA and the European federalists.