During the Cold War era, the United States faced the prospect of expanding its power in Central America. But we miscalculated--grievously. After 1945, Central America teemed with leaders willing to alter the region's quasi-colonial status. Some, like Fidel Castro, sought out revolution to shatter the status quo. Others, like Anastasio Somoza Garcia, attempted to seek out new directions along more subtle paths. Nicaragua subsequently challenged American hegemony in a manner at once more deliberate and more dangerous than any other effort in the hemisphere. The Somoza regime, unlike its contemporaries, chose to utilize American institutions and American preferences to subvert the latter's power rather than reinforce it. American arrogance, combined with a complacent approach to policy in its global "backyard," offered a myriad of political, military, and economic opportunities to a leader willing to take risks. In the years after 1945, Somoza was thus able to peel away layers of clientage until, at certain moments, he could act as a partner of his northern neighbor.

As the fortieth anniversary of the Nixon resignation approaches, it is time to take a fresh look at Watergate's impact on the American political system and to consider its significance for the historical reputation of the president indelibly associated with it.

The unification of Germany set in motion the transformation of a whole society. In the GDR, employment for men and women has been taken for granted, wages were low, housing cheap, childcare plentiful and child-benefits generous. After unification, former certainties turned into unknown risks of employment mobility, unemployment, income differentiation and in some cases poverty. This work examines key areas of transformation with special reference to the place and future of the family. The first part of the book evaluates family policy agendas while the second looks at income and employment change and the challenges faced by women, the young and older people in Germany's post-communist society.

Israel is the only new state among the twenty-one countries in the world today that have maintained democracy without interruption since the end of the Second World War. Israel's case is all the more notable because its democracy was established under extremely adverse conditions: massive immigration; severe social dislocation; the introduction of ethnic, cultural, linguistic, religious, and national differences; rapid economic growth; a permanent security threat that led to five major wars in thirty-five years; and a population that, in the main, had little or no experience of a democratic order. In this insightful study of Israel's founding period from 1948 to 1967, Peter Medding addresses this puzzle, providing a lucid account of the political and historical conditions that gave rise to this distinctive period, as well as the changes which brought it to an end. The result is an eminently readable account of the state-building process and of the role played by David Ben-Gurion and other politicians in moving from consensus politics to a majoritarian-like democracy. Medding's analysis is further enriched by his comparisons of the development of Israeli democracy with that of other countries.

Publication of this complete edition of The Movement is an important contribution to popular understanding of the social movements of the 1960s. No other periodical provided such extensive coverage of the transformation of the civil rights movement into the diverse radical movements of the late 1960s. Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and Huey Newton are among the many black militant leaders who are discussed in The Movement. Its insightful and sympathetic coverage, including participants' accounts, of a wide range of community organizing activities such as anti-war/anti-draft protests and Cesar Chavez's National Farm Workers Association and grape workers' strike in Delano, California. It covers national and international events, with articles on revolutionary movements in Cuba, Vietnam, and Africa. It is an excellent source of information regarding the social change activities of the late 1960s. As such, it is invaluable to students of the New Left, contemporary race relations, African-American history and Black Studies.

At the dawn of the nuclear age, strategist Bernard Brodie recognized our predicament when he said, "Nuclear weapons exist and they are incredibly destructive." Despite the end of the Cold War, thousands of nuclear weapons remain on hair-trigger alert on both sides of the Atlantic. Plans to develop, deploy, and detonate nuclear weapons (for purposes of war prevention or war fighting) are informed by the ambiguous notion that nuclear war can be avoided by maintaining a balance of power. Policy-makers and decision-makers believe that once the balance of power is destroyed, a crisis will ensue, and if this crisis cannot be resolved with words, it is somehow necessary to use weapons. This idea is held as an historic inevitability, but the nuclear subculture is unaware of the highly problematic nature of their fundamental assumptions. Hirschbein entertains the possibility that the theory and practice of these policy-makers and decision-makers are informed by concepts at once ancient and metaphorical. He analyzes the primary and secondary metaphors invoked to conceptualize and manage nuclear weaponry. Hirschbein draws a striking parallel between dramatic changes in the ancient Greek account of conflict and the American conceptualization of nuclear weapons. Facing harrowing times, Thucydides avoided supernatural, Homeric imagery in favor of naturalistic metaphors to account for conflict--an account regarded as "eternal wisdom" by today's realist. Likewise, facing the Soviet challenge, American strategists abandoned supernatural Judeo-Christian accounts of nuclear weapons in favor of Thucydides' naturalistic tropes.

In this book, a stellar collection of contributors consider each British post-war Prime Minister and examine how they have dealt with Britains changing role, domestic and overseas, since the end of WWII. Even at the start of the 21st century, Britain remains in a state of transition, between a world which is dead and one still struggling to be born.

This work looks at competing, overarching, guiding principles for American foreign policy in the post-Cold War era, not only by delineating these belief systems but also by linking them to current foreign policy actors in Congress and the executive branch. The book perfects a tool, schools-of-thought analysis, which relates theory to political processes and specific policymakers. It is an attempt to both classify and analyze the intellectual and political nature of the post-Cold War era.

How did European imperialism shape the ideas and practices of religion in East and Southeast Asia? "Casting Faiths" brings together eleven scholars to show how Western law, governance, education and mission shaped the basic understanding of what religion is, and what role it should play in society.

Central America provocatively challenges the myths of Central American democracy, development, and change--concepts traditionally maligned and oversimplified, but here presented analytically through a unique series of first-hand accounts. Incorporating essays by a variety of well-known academics and Central American specialists, this work considers each of the three concern areas separately. Part I includes five essays on democracy in the context of such nations as El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Part II explores the idea of development, the development of democratic education, U.S. aid, and the Social Democratic Project of 1948. Part III discusses the concept of change--seven essays cover liberation theology, the Sanctuary Movement, and the Reagan administration's attempts to thwart change.

"An exploration of how the theme of Anti-Americanism was employed by influential sections of the West German media to oppose the modernisation of the Federal Republic of Germany during the long 1950s. In the public battle over the future direction of Germany, America stood as a symbol of social, political and economic corruption"--Provided by publisher.

Renowned Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe's groundbreaking book revisits the formation of the State of Israel. Between 1947 and 1949, over 400 Palestinian villages were deliberately destroyed, civilians were massacred and around a million men, women, and children were expelled from their homes at gunpoint. Denied for almost six decades, had it happened today it could only have been called "ethnic cleansing". Decisively debunking the myth that the Palestinian population left of their own accord in the course of this war, Ilan Pappe offers impressive archival evidence to demonstrate that, from its very inception, a central plank in Israel's founding ideology was the forcible removal of the indigenous population. Indispensable for anyone interested in the current crisis in the Middle East.

An examination of the nature of middle power diplomacy in the post-Cold War era. As the rigid hierarchy of the bipolar era wanes, the potential ability of middle powers to open segmented niches opens up. This volume indicates the form and scope of this niche-building diplomatic activity from a bottom up perspective to provide an alternative to the dominant apex-dominated image in international relations.

When Bill Clinton left office there was little consensus even among Democrats as to the significance of his political legacy. He was eager to stress that enduring changes had been made to American society. Critics, however, were less convinced that Clintonism had developed an integrated vision of governance. This book examines whether or not the Clinton experience illustrates the value of the New Democrat and Third Way agenda.

After the Second World War, the international migration regime in Europe took a course different from the global migration regime and the migration regimes in other regions of the world. Cumbersome and arbitrary administrative practices prevailed in the late 1940s in most parts of Europe. The gradual implementation of regulations for the free movement of people within the European Community, European citizenship, and the internal and external dimensions of the Schengen agreements profoundly transformed the European migration regime. These instruments produced a regional regime in Europe with an unparalleled degree of intraregional openness and an unparalleled degree of closure towards migrants from outside Europe. This book relies on national and international archives to explain how German strategies during the Cold War shaped the openness of that original regime. This migration regime helped Germany to create a stable international order in Western Europe after the war, conducive to German Reunification and supported German economic expansion. The book embraces the whole period of development of this regime, from 1947 through 1992. It deals with all types of migrants between and towards European countries: unskilled labourers, skilled professionals, self-employed workers, and migrant workers' family members, examining both their access to economic activity and their social and political rights.

Leading Kennedy scholars along with a group of younger historians have mined recently declassified documentation in order to reexamine many of the key issues surrounding JFK's time in the White House: Vietnam, Cuban missile crisis, Berlin crisis, space race, and others. Rejecting the idolatry and bitterness evident in so many previous works on JFK, this study adopts an evenhanded, eclectic approach. The result is a less caricatured, more compelling view of the Kennedy presidency.

This book questions the prevalent assumption that ethnicity and nationalist politics had nothing to do with the Cold War and that, far from being frozen until the fall of communism, they remained central to the conflict in Europe. Leading scholarsbring theirunderstanding of particular regions to bear on the wider issue of why ethnic explanations were written out of the discourse and whether this was a failure on the part of Western observers. This in turn has led to an overly simple understanding of power flowing downwards, from superpower to nation state and from state to society. Engaging with key thinkers such as Gaddis, Moynihan and Adam Roberts this collection ultimately allows such speculation to be replaced by historical research and bridges the gap between high politics and ethnic concerns.

After almost four centuries of expansion the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 20th century covered vast territories on the Eurasian continent and included an immensely diverse population. How was the new Russian regime to deal with the complexity of its population? This book examines the role of nation and nationality in the Soviet Union and analyzes the establishment of national republics in Soviet Central Asia. It argues that the originally nationally minded Soviet communists with their anti-nationalist attitudes came to view nation and national identity as valuable and constructive tools in state constructions.

This volume discusses the evolution of ideas about the desirable combination of planning and market in the former Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary since the 1960s, when major economic reforms started, up to 1991 when the countries have been engaged in a transformation of the economies into market economies. It also discusses the common and contrasting features of the debates which evolved in the countries under review.

The past fifteen years have seen a major evolution in French society and the way it views culture. Cultural Policy and Socialist France offers a multi-faceted approach to determining what role the Socialist Party has had in that change through a detailed evaluation of the policies of the Ministry of Culture under President Francois Mitterrand and Minister of Culture Jack Lang.

Focusing on the Cold War and the post-Cold War eras, R. Gerald Hughes explores the continuing influence of Appeasement on British foreign policy and re-evaluates the relationship between British society and Appeasement, both as historical memory and as a foreign policy process. "The Postwar Legacy of Appeasement" explores the reaction of British policy makers to the legacies of the era of Appeasement, the memory of Appeasement in public opinion and the media and the use of Appeasement as a motif in political debate regarding threats faced by Britain in the post-war era. Using many previously unpublished archival sources, this book clearly demonstrates that many of the core British beliefs and cultural norms that had underpinned the Chamberlainite Appeasement of the 1930s persisted in the postwar period.

A Chronology of European Security and Defence 1945-2006 is a unique and authoritative source of reference for all those with an interest in European defense and security over the last 60 years. An extensively annotated chronology, the book offers a blow-by-blow account of the events that have shaped the Europe of today. The book carefully places each event in context, explaining what happened, where, when, and why. Month-by-month, year-by-year Europe's recent past is laid out and explained. With its accessible layout, rich detail, and balanced analysis, the book will be essential reading and reference for scholars, students, policy-makers and policy-analysts alike.

This is the story of that small band of women who wore U.S. Marine uniforms during the Korean War. These women are a "lost generation" of women Marines who stepped into the breach between two wars and preserved the opportunity to be a Marine for those who were as yet unborn. They were, in fact, a "thin green line"--and they stood fast, just like Marines are taught to do.

"The New India" looks critically at various constructions of the Indian citizen from 1991 to 2007, the period when economic liberalization became established government policy. Liberalization generated complex social and economic tensions, and Chowdhury reveals howthese tensions shaped images of the citizen in cultural narratives of the time--in films, literary texts, corporate advertisements, political documents, and citizens' responses to the privatization of public space. Examining differing images of citizenship and its rules and rituals in these narratives, Chowdhury sheds light on the complex interactions between culture and political economy in the New India.

Most scholars agree that 1968 was a watershed in U.S. political history. And Senator Eugene McCarthy's anti-Vietnam War presidential campaign was a main catalyst for the year's events. McCarthy's near upset of President Lyndon B. Johnson in the first presidential primary in New Hampshire dramatically illustrated the divisions within the Democratic party, brought Senator Robert F. Kennedy into the race, led to Johnson's withdrawal, and undercut the radical New Left antiwar movement. This work has two main purposes. First, it seeks to delineate Eugene McCarthy's conservative-liberal ideology and, in so doing, contrast it to the ideology of the New Left antiwar movement. And second, it seeks to describe the historical context, causes, important events, and effects of McCarthy's 1968 presidential campaign.