This monograph focuses on the challenges that interwar regimes faced and how they coped with them in the aftermath of World War One, focusing especially on the failure to establish and stabilize democratic regimes, as well as on the fate of ethnic and religious minorities. Topics explored include the political systems and how they changed during the two decades under review, land reform, Church–state relations, and culture. Countries studied include Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania. "Sabrina Ramet has assembled a team of highly respectable country specialists to offer a fresh and historiographically updated reading of interwar developments in East Central Europe. The volume is bookended by two excellent comparative and theoretically informed essays carefully weighing the multiplicity of factors contributing to the instability of the interwar regimes. As a result this survey succeeds admirably in producing a nuanced narrative and analysis." - Maria Todorova, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA Sabrina Ramet, together with a roster of other eminent scholars, has produced an exciting new history of interwar East Central Europe. The volume has a clear focus on the failure of democracy (1918 to 1941), and on the bedeviling issues of ethnic minorities and of peasants; the latter made up an overwhelming majority of much of the region's population. The book will be of great interest to political scientists and historians of East Central Europe, and of Europe more generally, and it is perfect for classroom use. - Irina Livezeanu, University of Pittsburgh, USA

The subject of this volume is the social and political history of East-Central Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, with particular emphasis on Polish society in the interwar period (1918-1939) and the role of the intelligentsia. These articles make available the results of work otherwise published only in the author's books in Polish. The first part deals with key themes in the history of the last two centuries: nationalism and the nation state, the role of culture in the recovery of Polish independence, the Versailles system, and the growth of authoritarianism and fascism. The second part focuses on the history of Polish society in the 20th century, highlighting the extraordinary importance of the intelligentsia in modern Poland. Two articles also discuss the impact of new technologies and media in interwar Poland.

European Dictatorships 1918–1945 surveys the extraordinary circumstances leading to, and arising from, the transformation of over half of Europe’s states to dictatorships between the first and the second World Wars. It describes the course of dictatorship in Europe before and during the Second World War, and examines the phenomenon of dictatorship itself and the widely different forms it can take. From the notorious dictatorships of Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin to less well-known states and leaders, this book scrutinizes the experiences of Russia, Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal, and Central and Eastern European states. This third edition has been revised throughout to include recent historical research and contains a completely new chapter on the meaning of dictatorship. Including new tables, maps and diagrams, this is the perfect survey for all students of the period. To view the companion website, please visit: www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415454858.

A few years after the Nazis came to power in Germany, an alliance of states and nationalistic movements formed, revolving around the German axis. That alliance, the states involved, and the interplay between their territorial aims and those of Germany during the interwar period and World War II are at the core of this volume. This “territorial revisionism” came to include all manner of political and military measures that attempted to change existing borders. Taking into account not just interethnic relations but also the motivations of states and nationalizing ethnocratic ruling elites, this volume reconceptualizes the history of East Central Europe during World War II. In so doing, it presents a clearer understanding of some of the central topics in the history of the war itself and offers an alternative to standard German accounts of the period and East European national histories.

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