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Based on archival research and interviews with leading participants in the movement, this book traces the ascendancy of neoliberalism from the academy of interwar Europe to supremacy under Reagan and Thatcher and in the decades since. The book argues that there was nothing inevitable about the victory of free-market politics. Far from being the story of the simple triumph of right-wing ideas, the neoliberal breakthrough was contingent on the economic crises of the 1970s and the acceptance of the need for new policies by the political left. This edition includes a new foreword which addresses the relationship between intellectual history and the history of politics and policy. Fascinating, important, and timely, this is a book for anyone who wants to understand the history behind the Anglo-American love affair with the free market, as well as the origins of the current economic crisis.

This book offers a biography of the Catholic priest and Slovak nationalist Jozef Tiso (1887–1947). The first president of an independent Slovakia, established as a satellite of Nazi Germany, Tiso was ultimately hanged for treason and (in effect) crimes against humanity by a postwar reunified Czechoslovakia. The book portrays Tiso as a devoutly religious man who came to privilege the maintenance of a Slovak state over all other concerns, helping thus to condemn Slovak Jewry to destruction. He is portrayed as a man of principle and a victim of international circumstances. This potent mix, combined with an almost epic ability to deny the consequences of his own actions, ultimately led to Tiso's undoing. Tiso began his career as a fervent priest seeking to defend the Church and pursue social justice within the Kingdom of Hungary. With the breakup of Austria-Hungary in 1918 and the creation of a Czechoslovak Republic, these missions then fused with a parochial Slovak nationalist agenda, a complex process that is the core narrative of the book. The book presents the strongest case yet for Tiso's heavy responsibility in the Holocaust. To this day memories of Tiso divide opinion within Slovakia, burdening the country's efforts to come to terms with its own history. Tiso's life not only illuminates the history of a small state but also supplies a missing piece of the larger puzzle that was interwar and wartime Europe.

A Vision of Europe analyses a little-known collaborative effort by France and Germany to secure a durable peace between the World Wars, through European integration organized around a Franco-German axis. Received wisdom has it that the era of Franco-German rapprochement depended from 1925 on a close personal relationship between the French and German Foreign Ministers, Briand and Stresemann. With Stresemann’s death in 1929, and the simultaneous onset of the interwar Great Depression, Germany in particular allegedly turned its back on this process of rapprochement several years before Hitler took power. However, A Vision of Europe challenges this view of Franco-German relations during the Depression years. Upsets and setbacks notwithstanding, a sustained mutual effort drew on political will, diplomatic rationale, economic synergies, cultural affinities, and various peace movements to agree a Franco-German customs union which had European union as its ultimate goal. These efforts were formalized in the Franco-German Berlin Accord of September 1931, with the diplomacy surrounding this event forming the heart of this book. By mid-1932, however, rapprochement had all but failed. An unforeseen crisis in trading relations, the impact on French opinion of a media scandal surrounding the publication of the late Stresemann’s memoirs, and the disruptive impact of domestic party politics in both countries derailed a process that had been conceived by France and Germany’s diplomatic, political and economic elites. Nonetheless, this first modern attempt at European unification reflected a deeper process and logic that survived Hitler and informed the creation of the contemporary European Union.

This book addresses the various ways in which Colonial Germans attempted to cope with the loss of the German colonies after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The German colonial advocates who are the focus of this monograph comprised not only those individuals who had been allowed to remain in the mandates as new subjects of the Allies, but also former colonial officials, settlers, and missionaries who were forcibly repatriated by the mandatory powers after the First World War. These Kolonialdeutsche (Colonial Germans) had invested substantial time and money in German imperialism. This work places particular emphasis on how colonial officials, settlers, and colonial lobbies made use of the League of Nations framework, and investigates the involvement of former settlers and colonial officials in such diplomatic flashpoints as the Naturalization Controversy in South African-administered Southwest Africa, and German participation in the Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) from 1927 to 1933. The period of analysis ends in 1933 with an investigation of the involvement of one of Germany’s former colonial governors in the League of Nations’ commission sent to assess the Manchurian Crisis between China and Japan. This study revises standard historical portrayals of the League of Nations’ form of international governance, German participation in the League, the role of interest groups in international organizations and diplomacy, and liberal imperialism. In analyzing colonial German investment and participation in interwar liberal internationalism, the project also challenges the idea of a direct continuity between Germany’s colonial period and the Nazi era.

In the first years after its founding, the Republic of Turkey was widely praised as a model state governed by an enlightened elite. In contrast to the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, Turkey was viewed as politically moderate, stable, and friendly to the West. It instead appeared to be a state that had radically transformed itself into a strong, united, and progressive nation unburdened by its past. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was held to be the chief architect and engineer of this feat and was placed by many among the greatest reforming statesmen in world history. These perceptions of Atatürk and his revolutionary rule have endured to this day. As a study grounded in untapped archival and scholarly sources, Eternal Dawn presents a definitive look inside the development and evolution of Atatürk’s Turkey. Ryan Gingeras presents Turkey’s early years as the culmination of a variety of social and political forces dating back to the late Ottoman Empire. Eternal Dawn presses beyond the reigning mythology that still envelops this period and challenges many of the standing assumptions about the limits, successes, and consequences of the reforms of Mustafa Kemal. Through a detailed survey of the social and political conditions that defined life in Turkey’s diverse provinces, Ryan Gingeras lays bare many of the harsh realities and bitter legacies of the republic’s founding. Atatürk’s revolution destroyed as much as it built and established precedents that strengthened and undermined the country’s long-term stability.

This book is an intellectual biography of Meir Wiener (1893–1941), an Austrian-Jewish intellectual and a student of Jewish mysticism who emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1926 and reinvented himself as a Marxist scholar and Yiddish writer. Wiener's life story offers a glimpse into the complexities and controversies of Jewish intellectual and cultural history of pre-war Europe. Wiener made a remarkable career as a Yiddish scholar and writer in the Stalinist Soviet Union, and left an unfinished novel about Jewish intellectual bohemia of Weimar Berlin. He was a brilliant intellectual, a controversial thinker, a committed communist, and a great Yiddish scholar—who personally knew Lenin and Rabbi Kook, corresponded with Martin Buber and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and argued with Gershom Scholem and Georg Lukács. Wiener's intellectual biography brings Yiddish to the forefront of the intellectual discourse of interwar Europe.