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This book explores the momentous events following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the effects they have had on the world ever since. Based on documents, interviews, and television broadcasts from Washington, London, Paris, Bonn, Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow, and a dozen other locations, the book describes how Germany unified, NATO expansion began, and Russia got left on the periphery of the new Europe. Chapters cover changes in the Summer and Autumn of 1989, including the stepping back of Americans and rise in East German's confidence; the restoration of the rights of the Four Powers, including the night of November 9 and the Portugalov Push; heroic aspirations in 1990, including the emerging controversy over reparations and NATO; security, political and economic solutions; the securing of building permits, including money and NATO reform; and the legacy of 1989 and 1990. This updated edition contains a new afterword with the most recent evidence on the 1990 origins of NATO's post-Cold War expansion.

This book traces the historic struggles and the changing nature of political authority in this volatile region of the world—Afghanistan—from the Mughal Empire in the sixteenth century to the Taliban resurgence today. The book introduces readers to the bewildering diversity of tribal and ethnic groups in Afghanistan, explaining what unites them as Afghans despite the regional, cultural, and political differences that divide them. It shows how governing these peoples was relatively easy when power was concentrated in a small dynastic elite, but how this delicate political order broke down in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Afghanistan's rulers mobilized rural militias to expel first the British and later the Soviets. Armed insurgency proved remarkably successful against the foreign occupiers, but it also undermined the Afghan government's authority and rendered the country ever more difficult to govern as time passed. The book vividly describes how Afghanistan's armed factions plunged the country into a civil war, giving rise to clerical rule by the Taliban and Afghanistan's isolation from the world. It examines why the American invasion in the wake of September 11 toppled the Taliban so quickly, and how this easy victory lulled the United States into falsely believing that a viable state could be built just as easily. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how a land conquered and ruled by foreign dynasties for more than a thousand years became the “graveyard of empires” for the British and Soviets, and what the United States must do to avoid a similar fate.

The role of liberalized, ecumenical Protestantism in American history has too often been obscured by the more flamboyant and orthodox versions of the faith that oppose evolution, embrace narrow conceptions of family values, and continue to insist that the United States should be understood as a Christian nation. This book examines how liberal Protestant thinkers struggled to embrace modernity, even at the cost of yielding much of the symbolic capital of Christianity to more conservative, evangelical communities of faith. If religion is not simply a private concern, but a potential basis for public policy and a national culture, does this mean that religious ideas can be subject to the same kind of robust public debate normally given to ideas about race, gender, and the economy? Or is there something special about religious ideas that invite a suspension of critical discussion? These essays, collected here for the first time, demonstrate that the critical discussion of religious ideas has been central to the process by which Protestantism has been liberalized throughout the history of the United States, and shed light on the complex relationship between religion and politics in contemporary American life. The book brings together in one volume the author's most influential writings on ecumenical Protestantism. It features an informative general introduction as well as concise introductions to each essay.

This book looks at the rise of humanitarian intervention in the nineteenth century, from the fall of Napoleon to World War I. Examining the concept from a historical perspective, the book explores the understudied cases of European interventions and noninterventions in the Ottoman Empire and brings a new view to this international practice for the contemporary era. While it is commonly believed that humanitarian interventions are a fairly recent development, the book demonstrates that almost two centuries ago an international community, under the aegis of certain European powers, claimed a moral and political right to intervene in other states' affairs to save strangers from massacre, atrocity, or extermination. On some occasions, these powers acted to protect fellow Christians when allegedly “uncivilized” states, like the Ottoman Empire, violated a “right to life.” Exploring the political, legal, and moral status, as well as European perceptions, of the Ottoman Empire, the book investigates the reasons that were put forward to exclude the Ottomans from the so-called Family of Nations. It considers the claims and mixed motives of intervening states for aiding humanity, the relationship between public outcry and state action or inaction, and the bias and selectiveness of governments and campaigners. An original account of humanitarian interventions some two centuries ago, the book investigates the varied consequences of European involvement in the Ottoman Empire and the lessons that can be learned for similar actions today.

Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) organized the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Harlem in 1917. By the early 1920s, his program of African liberation and racial uplift had attracted millions of supporters, both in the United States and abroad. This book presents an expansive global history of the movement that came to be known as Garveyism. Offering a groundbreaking new interpretation of global black politics between the First and Second World Wars, this book charts Garveyism's emergence, its remarkable global transmission, and its influence in the responses among African descendants to white supremacy and colonial rule in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. Delving into the organizing work and political approach of Garvey and his followers, the book shows that Garveyism emerged from a rich tradition of pan-African politics that had established, by the First World War, lines of communication among black intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic. Garvey's legacy was to reengineer this tradition as a vibrant and multifaceted mass politics. The book looks at the people who enabled Garveyism's global spread, including labor activists in the Caribbean and Central America, community organizers in the urban and rural United States, millennial religious revivalists in central and southern Africa, welfare associations and independent church activists in Malawi and Zambia, and an emerging generation of Kikuyu leadership in central Kenya. Moving away from the images of quixotic business schemes and repatriation efforts, the book demonstrates the consequences of Garveyism's international presence and provides a dynamic and unified framework for understanding the movement, during the interwar years and beyond.

For the Western world, the period from 1760 to 1800 was the great revolutionary era in which the outlines of the modern democratic state came into being. Here for the first time in one volume is the author's account of this incendiary age. The book argues that the American, French, and Polish revolutions—and the movements for political change in Britain, Ireland, Holland, and elsewhere—were manifestations of similar political ideas, needs, and conflicts. The book traces the clash between an older form of society, marked by legalized social rank and hereditary or self-perpetuating elites, and a new form of society that placed a greater value on social mobility and legal equality. Featuring a new foreword, the book introduces a new generation of readers to this enduring work of political history.

In the 1930s and 1940s, rural reformers in the United States and Mexico waged unprecedented campaigns to remake their countrysides in the name of agrarian justice and agricultural productivity. This book tells the story of how these campaigns were conducted in dialogue with one another as reformers in each nation came to exchange models, plans, and strategies with their equivalents across the border. Dismantling the artificial boundaries that can divide American and Latin American history, the book shows how the agrarian histories of both regions share far more than we realize. It traces the connections between the US South and the plantation zones of Mexico, places that suffered parallel problems of environmental decline, rural poverty, and gross inequities in land tenure. Bringing this tumultuous era vividly to life, the book describes how Roosevelt's New Deal drew on Mexican revolutionary agrarianism to shape its program for the rural South. The book also looks at how the US South served as the domestic laboratory for the Rockefeller Foundation's “green revolution” in Mexico—which would become the most important Third World development campaign of the twentieth century—and how the Mexican government attempted to replicate the hydraulic development of the Tennessee Valley Authority after World War II. This book is an innovative history of comparisons and the ways they affected policy, moved people, and reshaped the landscape.

This book examines the influence of the American political experience on the imagination of Italian political thinkers between the late eighteenth century and the unification of Italy in the 1860s. The book shows how Italian political thought was shaped by debates about the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution, but it focuses on the important distinction that while European interest in developments across the Atlantic was keen, this attention was not blind admiration. Rather, America became a sounding board for the critical assessment of societal changes at home. Many Italians did not think the United States had lessons to teach them and often concluded that life across the Atlantic was not just different but in many respects also objectionable. In America, utopia and dystopia seemed to live side by side, and Italian references to the United States were frequently in support of progressive or reactionary causes. Political thinkers including Cesare Balbo, Carlo Cattaneo, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Antonio Rosmini Serbati used the United States to shed light on the course of their nation's political resurgence. Concepts from Charles-Louis de Secondat Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Giambattista Vico served to evaluate what Italians discovered about America. Ideas about American “domestic manners” were reflected and conveyed through works of ballet, literature, opera, and satire. Transcending boundaries between intellectual and cultural history, this is the first book-length examination of the influence of America's political formation on modern Italian political thought.

While America's relationship with Britain has often been deemed unique, especially during the two world wars when Germany was a common enemy, the American business sector actually had a greater affinity with Germany for most of the twentieth century. This book examines the triangular relationship between the American, British, and German business communities and how the special relationship that Britain believed it had with the United States was supplanted by one between America and Germany. The book begins with the pre-1914 period and moves through the 1920s, when American investments supported German reconstruction rather than British industry. The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 led to a reversal in German–American relations, forcing American corporations to consider cutting their losses or collaborating with a regime that was inexorably moving toward war. Although Britain hoped that the wartime economic alliance with the United States would continue after World War II, the American business community reconnected with West Germany to rebuild Europe's economy. And while Britain thought they had established their special relationship with America once again in the 1980s and 1990s, in actuality it was the Germans who, with American help, had acquired an informal economic empire on the European continent. This book uncovers the surprising and differing relationships of the American business community with two major European trading partners from 1900 through the twentieth century.

Like a great dynasty that falls to ruin and is eventually remembered more for its faults than its feats, Arab nationalism is remembered mostly for its humiliating rout in the 1967 Six Day War, for inter-Arab divisions, and for words and actions distinguished by their meagerness; but people tend to forget the majesty that Arab nationalism once was. This book brings this majesty to life through a sweeping historical account of its dramatic rise and fall. The book argues that Arab nationalism—inspired by nineteenth-century German Romantic nationalism—really took root after World War I and not in the nineteenth century, as many believe, and that it blossomed only in the 1950s and 1960s under the charismatic leadership of Egypt’s Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir. The book traces the ideology’s passage from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire through its triumphant ascendancy in the late 1950s with the unity of Egypt and Syria and with the nationalist revolution of Iraq, to the mortal blow it received in the 1967 Arab defeat by Israel, and its eventual eclipse. The book criticizes the common failure to distinguish between the broader, cultural phenomenon of “Arabism” and the political, secular desire for a united Arab state that defined Arab nationalism. In recent decades, competitive ideologies—not least, Islamic militancy—have inexorably supplanted the latter, the book contends.

This book presents the essential backstory to the formation of the modern nation-state and mass nationalism in the Middle East. While standard histories claim that the roots of Arab nationalism emerged in opposition to the Ottoman milieu, this book points to the patriotic sentiment that grew in the Egyptian province of the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century, arguing that it served as a pivotal way station on the path to the birth of Arab nationhood. The book examines the collusion of various Ottoman elites in creating this nascent sense of national belonging and finds that learned culture played a central role in this development. The book investigates the experience of community during this period, engendered through participation in public rituals and being part of a theater audience. It describes the embodied and textual ways these experiences were produced through urban spaces, poetry, performances, and journals. From the Khedivial Opera House's staging of Verdi's Aida and the first Arabic magazine to the ʻUrabi revolution and the restoration of the authority of Ottoman viceroys under British occupation, the book illuminates the cultural dynamics of a regime that served as the precondition for nation-building in the Middle East. A wholly original exploration of Egypt in the context of the Ottoman Empire, the book sheds fresh light on the evolving sense of political belonging in the Arab world.

In 1945, psychologist Yusuf Murad introduced an Arabic term borrowed from the medieval Sufi philosopher and mystic Ibn ʿArabi—al-la-shuʿur—as a translation for Sigmund Freud's concept of the unconscious. By the late 1950s, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams had been translated into Arabic for an eager Egyptian public. This book challenges the notion of a strict divide between psychoanalysis and Islam by tracing how postwar thinkers in Egypt blended psychoanalytic theories with concepts from classical Islamic thought in a creative encounter of ethical engagement. The book provides an in-depth examination of psychoanalysis in Egypt and reveals how a new science of psychology—or “science of the soul,” as it came to be called—was inextricably linked to Islam and mysticism. It explores how Freudian ideas of the unconscious were crucial to the formation of modern discourses of subjectivity in areas as diverse as psychology, Islamic philosophy, and the law. Founding figures of Egyptian psychoanalysis, the book shows, debated the temporality of the psyche, mystical states, the sexual drive, and the Oedipus complex, while offering startling insights into the nature of psychic life, ethics, and eros. The book invites us to rethink the relationship between psychoanalysis and religion in the modern era. Mapping the points of intersection between Islamic discourses and psychoanalytic thought, it illustrates how the Arabic Freud, like psychoanalysis itself, was elaborated across the space of human difference.

When Mustafa Kemal Atatürk became the first president of Turkey in 1923, he set about transforming his country into a secular republic where nationalism sanctified by science would reign supreme as the new religion. This book provides an in-depth look at the intellectual life of the Turkish Republic's founder. It frames him within the historical context of the turbulent age in which he lived, and explores the uneasy transition from the late Ottoman imperial order to the modern Turkish state through his life and ideas. The book takes readers from Atatürk's youth as a Muslim boy in the volatile ethnic cauldron of Macedonia, to his education in nonreligious and military schools, to his embrace of Turkish nationalism and the modernizing Young Turks movement. Who was this figure who sought glory as an ambitious young officer in World War I, defied the victorious Allies intent on partitioning the Turkish heartland, and defeated the last sultan? This book charts Atatürk's intellectual and ideological development at every stage of his life, demonstrating how he was profoundly influenced by the new ideas that were circulating in the sprawling Ottoman realm. It shows how Atatürk drew on a unique mix of scientism, materialism, social Darwinism, positivism, and other theories to fashion a grand utopian framework on which to build his new nation.

Islam emerged amid flourishing Christian and Jewish cultures, yet students of antiquity and the Middle Ages mostly ignore it. Despite intensive study of late antiquity over the last fifty years, even generous definitions of this period have reached only the eighth century, whereas Islam did not mature sufficiently to compare with Christianity or rabbinic Judaism until the tenth century. This book suggests a new way of thinking about the historical relationship between the scriptural monotheisms, integrating Islam into European and West Asian history. The book identifies the whole of the First Millennium—from Augustus and Christ to the formation of a recognizably Islamic worldview by the time of the philosopher Avicenna—as the proper chronological unit of analysis for understanding the emergence and maturation of the three monotheistic faiths across Eurasia. It proposes not just a chronological expansion of late Antiquity but also an eastward shift in the geographical frame to embrace Iran. The book looks at Judaism, Christianity, and Islam alongside other important developments in Greek philosophy and Roman law, to reveal how the first millennium was bound together by diverse exegetical traditions that nurtured communities and often stimulated each other.

This book tracks the dramatic outcomes of the federal government's growing involvement in higher education between World War I and the 1970s, and the conservative backlash against that involvement from the 1980s onward. The book recovers higher education's central importance to the larger social and political history of the United States in the twentieth century, and chronicles its transformation into a key mediating institution between citizens and the state. Framed around the three major federal higher education policies of the twentieth century—the 1944 G.I. Bill, the 1958 National Defense Education Act, and the 1965 Higher Education Act—the book charts the federal government's various efforts to deploy education to ready citizens for the national, bureaucratized, and increasingly global world in which they lived. It details the myriad ways in which academic leaders and students shaped, and were shaped by, the state's shifting political agenda as it moved from a preoccupation with economic security during the Great Depression, to national security during World War II and the Cold War, to securing the rights of African Americans, women, and other previously marginalized groups during the 1960s and 1970s. Along the way, the book reappraises the origins of higher education's current-day diversity regime, the growth of identity group politics, and the privatization of citizenship at the close of the twentieth century. At a time when people's faith in government and higher education is being sorely tested, this book sheds new light on the close relations between American higher education and politics.

This is a book about the theory of the city or commonwealth, what would come to be called the state, in early modern natural law discourse. It takes a fresh approach by looking at this political entity from the perspective of its boundaries and those who crossed them. The book begins with a classic debate from the Spanish sixteenth century over the political treatment of mendicants, showing how cosmopolitan ideals of porous boundaries could simultaneously justify the freedoms of itinerant beggars and the activities of European colonists in the Indies. It goes on to examine the boundaries of the state in multiple senses, including the fundamental barrier between human beings and animals and the limits of the state in the face of the natural lives of its subjects, as well as territorial frontiers. The book reveals how early modern political space was constructed from a complex dynamic of inclusion and exclusion. Throughout, the book shows that early modern debates about political boundaries displayed unheralded creativity and virtuosity but were nevertheless vulnerable to innumerable paradoxes, contradictions, and loose ends. The book resonates with modern debates about globalization and the transformation of the nation-state.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the global Mennonite church developed an uneasy relationship with Germany. Despite the religion's origins in the Swiss and Dutch Reformation, as well as its longstanding pacifism, tens of thousands of members embraced militarist German nationalism. This book is a sweeping history of this encounter and the debates it sparked among parliaments, dictatorships, and congregations across Eurasia and the Americas. Offering a multifaceted perspective on nationalism's emergence in Europe and around the world, the book demonstrates how Mennonites' nationalization reflected and reshaped their faith convictions. While some church leaders modified German identity along Mennonite lines, others appropriated nationalism wholesale, advocating a specifically Mennonite version of nationhood. Examining sources from Poland to Paraguay, the book shows how patriotic loyalties rose and fell with religious affiliation. Individuals might claim to be German at one moment but Mennonite the next. Some external parties encouraged separatism, as when the Weimar Republic helped establish an autonomous “Mennonite State” in Latin America. Still others treated Mennonites as quintessentially German; under Hitler's Third Reich, entire colonies benefited from racial warfare and genocide in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. Whether choosing Germany as a national homeland or identifying as a chosen people, called and elected by God, Mennonites committed to collective action in ways that were intricate, fluid, and always surprising.

As the French public debates its present diversity and its colonial past, few remember that between 1946 and 1960 the inhabitants of French colonies possessed the rights of French citizens. Moreover, they did not have to conform to the French civil code that regulated marriage and inheritance. One could, in principle, be a citizen and different too. This book examines momentous changes in notions of citizenship, sovereignty, nation, state, and empire in a time of acute uncertainty about the future of a world that had earlier been divided into colonial empires. This book explains how African political leaders at the end of World War II strove to abolish the entrenched distinction between colonial “subject” and “citizen.” They then used their new status to claim social, economic, and political equality with other French citizens, in the face of resistance from defenders of a colonial order. Africans balanced their quest for equality with a desire to express an African political personality. They hoped to combine a degree of autonomy with participation in a larger, Franco-African ensemble. French leaders, trying to hold on to a large French polity, debated how much autonomy and how much equality they could concede. Both sides looked to versions of federalism as alternatives to empire and the nation-state. The French government had to confront the high costs of an empire of citizens, while Africans could not agree with French leaders or among themselves on how to balance their contradictory imperatives. The book shows how both France and its former colonies backed into more “national” conceptions of the state than either had sought.

This book explores the historical role and influence of protective legislation for American women workers, both as a step toward modern labor standards and as a barrier to equal rights. Spanning the twentieth century, the book tracks the rise and fall of women-only state protective laws—such as maximum hour laws, minimum wage laws, and night work laws—from their roots in progressive reform through the passage of New Deal labor law to the feminist attack on single-sex protective laws in the 1960s and 1970s. The book considers the network of institutions that promoted women-only protective laws, such as the National Consumers' League and the federal Women's Bureau; the global context in which the laws arose; the challenges that proponents faced; the rationales they espoused; the opposition that evolved; the impact of protective laws in ever-changing circumstances; and their dismantling in the wake of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Above all, the book examines the constitutional conversation that the laws provoked—the debates that arose in the courts and in the women's movement. Protective laws set precedents that led to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and to current labor law; they also sustained a tradition of gendered law that abridged citizenship and impeded equality for much of the century. Drawing on decades of scholarship, institutional and legal records, and personal accounts, the book sets forth a new narrative about the tensions inherent in women-only protective labor laws and their consequences.

This book thoroughly reassesses an important but neglected form of government in ancient Greece, the “rule of the few.” The book challenges scholarly orthodoxy by showing that oligarchy was not the default mode of politics from time immemorial, but instead emerged alongside, and in reaction to, democracy. It establishes how oligarchies maintained power in the face of potential citizen resistance. It argues that oligarchs designed distinctive political institutions—such as intra-oligarchic power sharing, targeted repression, and rewards for informants—to prevent collective action among the majority population while sustaining cooperation within their own ranks. To clarify the workings of oligarchic institutions, the book draws on recent social science research on authoritarianism. Like modern authoritarian regimes, ancient Greek oligarchies had to balance coercion with co-optation in order to keep their subjects disorganized and powerless. The book investigates topics such as control of public space, the manipulation of information, and the establishment of patron–client relations, frequently citing parallels with contemporary nondemocratic regimes. It also traces changes over time in antiquity, revealing the processes through which oligarchy lost the ideological battle with democracy for legitimacy. This book represents a major new development in the study of ancient politics. It fills a longstanding gap in our knowledge of nondemocratic government while greatly improving our understanding of forms of power that continue to affect us today.