The question “Whither Eastern Europe?” prompts the author to reflect upon the interplay of area studies and political power in the United States. Concerns about the future of East European studies tend to originate outside of academe: in the real or imagined declining relevance of Europe in the U.S. foreign policy orbit. Sadly, perhaps, as the region’s complex history and contemporary politics seem to attest, it is highly unlikely that it will lose its strategic importance anytime soon. Therefore, the most important dimension of East European continued significance might be the normative one. Whither to/for whom? Who are the audiences that we are addressing and what is our responsibility to them?
István Csillag - Péter
Mihályi: Kettős kötés: A stabilizáció és a reformok 18 hónapja [Double
Bandage: The 18 Months of Stabilisation and Reforms] (Budapest: Globális Tudás
Alapítvány, 2006, 144 pp.) Reviewed by Zoltán Ádám; Marco
Buti - Daniele Franco: Fiscal Policy in Economic and Monetary Union. Theory,
Evidence and Institutions (Cheltenham/UK - Northampton/MA/USA: Edward Elgar
Publishing Co., 2005, 320 pp.) Reviewed by László Csaba; Piotr Jaworski -
Tomasz Mickiewicz (eds): Polish EU Accession in Comparative Perspective:
Macroeconomics, Finance and the Government (School of Slavonic and East
European Studies, University College of London, 2006, 171 pp.) Reviewed by
András Bakács; Is FDI Based R&D Really Growing in Developing Countries? The
World Investment Report 2005. Reviewed by Zoltán Pogátsa
Reforms, in view of a comparative party-state model, become the instruments of self-reproduction and self-destruction of party-state power. The specific patterns of power distribution imply different development and transformation paths through different instruments of self-reproduction. This approach also points to the structural and dynamic background of the differences in the location, sequence, speed and political conditions of reforms during the operation and transformation of party-states. In view of the model the paper points to the inconsistencies that emerge in the comparative reform literature concerning the evaluation and strategies of reforms disconnected from their systemic-structural context.
Political Catholicism and Euroscepticism: The Deviant Case of Poland in Comparative Perspective. By Bartosz Napieralski. BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies. London: Routledge, 2018. xii, 233. Appendixes. Notes. Index. Bibliography. Tables. $160.00, hard bound.