2nd Edition

A History of Eastern Europe Crisis and Change

By Robert Bideleux, Ian Jeffries Copyright 2007
    720 Pages
    by Routledge

    718 Pages
    by Routledge

    This welcome second edition of A History of Eastern Europe provides a thematic historical survey of the formative processes of political, social and economic change which have played paramount roles in shaping the evolution and development of the region.

    Subjects covered include:

    • Eastern Europe in ancient, medieval and early modern times
    • the legacies of Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Empire
    • the impact of the region's powerful Russian and Germanic neighbours
    • rival concepts of 'Central' and 'Eastern' Europe
    • the experience and consequences of the two World Wars
    • varieties of fascism in Eastern Europe
    • the impact of Communism from the 1940s to the 1980s
    • post-Communist democratization and marketization
    • the eastward enlargement of the EU.

    A History of Eastern Europe now includes two new chronologies – one for the Balkans and one for East-Central Europe – and a glossary of key terms and concepts, providing comprehensive coverage of a complex past, from antiquity to the present day.

    List of maps.  List of tables.  Preface to the second edition.  Glossary of Key Terms and Concepts.  Chronology of the Balkan Peninsula.  Chronology of East Central Europe.  List of abbreviations.  Introduction: Crisis and Change in the Balkan Peninsula and East Central Europe.  Part 1. The Balkan Peninsula from Graeco-Roman times to the First World War  1.  The gradual ‘Balkanization’ of the Balkan Peninsula  2.  The Balkan Peninsula in the Graeco-Roman Period  3.  The Byzantine ascendancy and its impact, 395-1204  4. The Crusades, the emergence of South Slav polities, and the decline of Byzantium (1095-1453)  5. The rise of the Ottoman (Osmanli) state, 1326-1453  6. The Balkans during the heyday of Ottoman power, 1453-1686  7. The Balkans and the waning of Ottoman power, 1687-1921  8. The emergence of Balkan national states (1817-1913) and the steady contraction of Ottoman control of the Balkans  9. The cataclysmic impact of the Balkan Wars and the First World War on the Balkans, 1912-1918  Part 2. East Central Europe from Roman Times to the First World War.  10. The disputed ‘roots’ of East Central Europe before the tenth century AD  11. The apparent convergence between East Central Europe and western Europe from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries AD  12. The ‘parting of the ways’: the underlying divergence of East Central Europe from western Europe between the late fifteenth and the late eighteenth centuries  13. The emergence of Austrian Hapsburg hegemony over East Central Europe, 1526-1789  14. Poland-Lithuania 1466-1795  15.  Revolution and 'reaction': the Hapsburg Empire, 1789-1848  16. The 'Revolutions of 1848': the Hapsburg Empire in Crisis  17. The empire strikes back: counter-revolution, neo-absolutism and reform in the Hapsburg Monarchy, 1849-1918  18. Capitalism and nationalism: the seeds of social revolution in Austria and Hungary, 1860s-1914  19. Life after death: partitioned Polarnd, 1795-1914  19. The Austro-Hungarian road to war, 1908-14  20. The impact of the First World War on East Central Europe  Part 3. From national self-determination to fascism and the Holocaust? the Balkans and East Central Europe, 1918-45 22. The post-1918 political order in the Balkans and East Central Europe   23. From revolution and counter-revolution to fragile stabilization and recovery, 1918-29  24. The 1930s economic depression and its consequences   25. The plight of the peasantry: towards a re-evaluation of peasant poverty and aspirations  26. The failure of democracy    27. The lure of fascism: towards a reinterpretation   28. The Comintern ‘theory of fascism’ and its long-neglected role in rationalizing the Communist seizures of power in 1945-48   29. The Second World War and Mass Genocide, 1939-45 Part 4. In the shadow of Yalta: The Communist-dominated Balkans and East Central Europe, 1945-89.  30. The East-West Partition of Europe, 1945-89  31. The emergence of Communist regimes in the Balkans and East Central Europe, 1945-60  32. 'National Communism'  33. From the crisis of 1968 to the revolutions of 1989  Part 5. Post-Communist Transformations 34. Post-Communist political transformations: debunking 'democratic transition' and 'democratic consolidation' 35. Post-Communist economic transformations: from dirigiste capitalism to more liberal forms of market capitalism 36. The ‘return to Europe’: the gradual integration of the East Central Europe and Balkan post-Communist states into the EU and NATO  37. Epilogue: Some final reflections on the fate of modernist projects in East Central Europe and the Balkans. Bibliography.  Index.

    Biography

    Bideleux, Robert; Jeffries, Ian

    'The authors challenge widely held view of the cultural and moral superiority of Central Europe over the Balkans' – Mainstream Journal