Overthrowing communism in 1989 and joining the European Union in 2004, the Polish people hold loyalties to region, country and now continent - even as the definition of what it means to be 'European' remains unclear. Paying particular attention to those who came of age in the earliest years of the neoliberal and democratic transformations, this book uses the life-story narratives of rural and urban southern Poles to reveal how 'being European' is considered a fundamental component of 'being Polish' while participants are simultaneously 'becoming European'. Ultimately, this study demonstrates how the EU is regarded as both an idea and an instrument, and how ordinary citizens make choices that influence the shape of European identity and the legitimacy of its institutions.

Over the last two decades, Eastern Europe has experienced extensive changes in geo-political relocations and relations leading to everyday uncertainty. Attempts to establish liberal democracies, re-orientations from planned to market economics, and a desire to create 'new states' and internationally minded 'new citizens' has left some in poverty, unemployment and social insecurity, leading them to rely on normative coping and semi-autonomous strategies for security and social guarantees. This anthology explores how grey zones of governance, borders, relations and invisibilities affect contemporary Eastern Europe.

The succession of great power influences in the Balkans played a key role in shaping Bulgaria's international place and its domestic policy. Bulgaria in British Foreign Policy explores Britain's involvement in Bulgaria between 1943 and 1949 and revisits the important issue of British attitudes towards Eastern Europe. Using recently released sources from the Bulgarian and Soviet Communist parties and foreign ministries, Stankova offers new insight into the nuanced origins of the Cold War in Bulgaria, and bridges significant gaps in the treatment of the country in English-language literature.

This book analyzes the effects of European Union membership conditionality on institutional reforms in Eastern Europe, building on concrete examples from four sectors in Albania and Macedonia, two postcommunist countries that have yet to join the EU. The author discusses the theory of 'consociational democracy' often considered the key to stabilizing deeply divided countries, and reapplies it on the international stage to argue for how the EU can better direct democratization.

This book explores the memory of the First Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, which proved crucial for communist Hungarian political culture in the twentieth century. Apor approaches the topic in an innovative way, focusing on the understudied aspects of European memory cultures. Offering great insights on how a dictatorship remembers and the concept of authenticity, Apor's study integrates the broad range of processes through which history is sought to be rendered authentic. The volume successfully reveals the crooked history of the retrospective revisions of the iconic First Republic between the years of its 30th and 40th anniversary, 1949 and 1959.

This book explores the multiple effects of globalization on urban and rural communities, providing anthropological case studies from postsocialist Bulgaria. As globalization has been studied largely in urban contexts, the aim of this volume is to shift attention to the under-examined countryside and analyse how transnational links are transforming relations between cities, towns and villages. The volume also challenges undifferentiated notions of 'the countryside', calling for an awareness of rural economic and social disparities which are often only associated with urban environments. The work focuses on how the 'urban' and 'rural' have been reconfigured following the end of socialism and the advent of globalization, in socioeconomic, as well as political, ideological and cultural terms.

Ireland�s Great Famine or �an Gorta M�r� (1845�51) and Ukraine�s �Holodomor� (1932�33) occupy central places in the national historiographies of their respective countries. Acknowledging that questions of collective memory have become a central issue in cultural studies, this volume inquires into the role of historical experiences of hunger and deprivation within the emerging national identities and national historical narratives of Ireland and Ukraine. In the Irish case, a solid body of research has been compiled over the last 150 years, while Ukraine�s Holodomor, by contrast, was something of an open secret that historians could only seriously research after the demise of communist rule. This volume is the first attempt to draw these approaches together and to allow for a comparative study of how the historical experiences of famine were translated into narratives that supported political claims for independent national statehood in Ireland and Ukraine. Juxtaposing studies on the Irish and Ukrainian cases written by eminent historians, political scientists, and literary and film scholars, the essays in this interdisciplinary volume analyse how national historical narratives were constructed and disseminated � whether or not they changed with circumstances, or were challenged by competing visions, both academic and non-academic. In doing so, the essays discuss themes such as representation, commemoration and mediation, and the influence of these processes on the shaping of cultural memory.

‘Russian Language Studies in North America: New Perspectives from Theoretical and Applied Linguistics’ offers a unique collection of research papers representing current directions in Russian language studies in Canada and the United States. Traditionally, Slavic and Russian studies in these countries have centered around literature, history, politics and culture. This volume reflects recent changes in Russian studies by focusing on language structure, language use and teaching methodology. The volume brings together several generations of scholars, from young promising researchers to those with long-established reputations in the field.