The German Economy and East-Central Europe: The Development of Intra-Industry Trade from Ostpolitik to the Present

2013 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 83-105
Author(s):  
Stephen Gross
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
German Economy ◽  
Youth Unemployment ◽  
The United States ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Export Sector ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
The Past ◽  
Developed World

Over the past decade Germany has had one of the most successfuleconomies in the developed world. Despite the ongoing Euro crisis unemploymenthas fallen below 7 percent, reaching its lowest levels since Germanreunification in 1990. Germany’s youth unemployment is among thelowest in Europe, far beneath the European average.1 One of the mostimportant engines of the German economy today, and in fact throughoutthe twentieth and twenty-first centuries, has been its export sector. As LudwigErhard, West Germany’s Economics Minister during the Wirtschaftswunderof the 1950s remarked: “foreign trade is quite simply the core andpremise of our economic and social order.”2 According to various estimates,today exports and imports of goods and services account for nearly a half ofGerman GDP—up from only a quarter in 1990. Germany is one of only threeeconomies that do over a trillion dollars worth of exports a year, the othertwo being the United States and China.

Stowaways at Bohemia's Shores: Undocumented Emigration and People-Smuggling Networks in Interwar East Central Europe

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 564-583
Author(s):  
Allison Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
The People ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Migrant Smuggling ◽  
First World

AbstractThis article investigates interwar people-smuggling networks, based in Germany and Czechoslovakia, that transported undocumented emigrants across borders from east-central Europe to northern Europe, where the travelers planned to sail to the United States. Many of the people involved in such networks in the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands had themselves been immigrants from Galicia. They had left a homeland decimated by the First World War and subsequent violence and entered societies with limited avenues to earn a living. The “othering” of these Galician immigrants became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as those on the margins of society then sought illegal ways to supplement their income. This article concludes that the poor economic conditions and threat of ongoing violence that spurred migrant clients to seek undocumented passage had driven their smugglers, who also faced social marginalization, to emigration and the business of migrant smuggling.

scholarly journals Preface: The Historical Geography of the Hungarian Nation

1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-376
Author(s):  
Andrew Ludanyi
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
World War ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
East European ◽  
The Past ◽  
French And English ◽  
The Subject

The fate of Hungarian minorities in East Central Europe has been one of the most neglected subjects in the Western scholarly world. For the past fifty years the subject—at least prior to the late 1980s—was taboo in the successor states (except Yugoslavia), while in Hungary itself relatively few scholars dared to publish anything about this issue till the early 1980s. In the West, it was just not faddish, since most East European and Russian Area studies centers at American, French and English universities tended to think of the territorial status quo as “politically correct.” The Hungarian minorities, on the other hand, were a frustrating reminder that indeed the Entente after World War I, and the Allies after World War II, made major mistakes and significantly contributed to the pain and anguish of the peoples living in this region of the “shatter zone.”

From Nowhere to “Partyslava”

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 299-320
Author(s):  
Peter Barrer
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Slovak Republic ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
The Past ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
English Speaking

Over the past two decades, Prague has cemented itself as a tourist hotspot in the popular imagination. But what of Bratislava, long considered a “poor cousin” to Prague? What images of Bratislava have foreign publics been presented with since the fall of communism in East-Central Europe and the establishment of the Slovak Republic? Building on previous research which has examined visitors’ historical perceptions of Bratislava primarily from a German-speaking perspective, this paper seeks to map the development of Bratislava’s image in media texts from English-speaking countries since 1989 by focusing on two central motifs: Bratislava as a post-communist space and Bratislava as a locus of touristic pleasures (“Partyslava”). The images presented herein will be evaluated and contrasted with local descriptions of Bratislava, thus offering a cross-cultural perspective which will contribute to the wider discussion of popular perceptions of post-communist urban spaces in East-Central Europe.

The Past, Present, and Future of Comparative History in East Central Europe and Beyond

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 328-344
Author(s):  
Wendy Bracewell ◽  
Ulf Brunnbauer ◽  
Diana Mishkova ◽  
Joachim von Puttkamer ◽  
Philipp Ther
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Comparative History ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
The Past

Screening Migrants in the Early Cold War: The Geopolitics of U.S. Immigration Policy

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 154-179
Author(s):  
Peter J. Verovšek
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Immigration Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Screening Process ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Argument Proceeds

The main elements of U.S. immigration policy date back to the early Cold War. One such element is a screening process initially designed to prevent infiltration by Communist agents posing as migrants from East-Central Europe. The development of these measures was driven by geopolitical concerns, resulting in vetting criteria that favored the admission of hardline nationalists and anti-Communists. The argument proceeds in two steps. First, the article demonstrates that geopolitics influenced immigration policy, resulting in the admission of extremist individuals. Second, it documents how geopolitical concerns and the openness of U.S. institutions provided exiles with the opportunity to mobilize politically. Although there is little evidence that the vetting system succeeded in preventing the entry of Communist subversives into the United States, it did help to create a highly mobilized anti-Communist ethnic lobby that supported extremist policies vis-à-vis the Soviet Union during the early Cold War.

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