Author: John P. Anchan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134400993
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
The collapse of communism and the adoption of parliamentary democracy led to rapid and dramatic educational change in countries formerly under the control of the Soviet Union. Leaders of the affected countries acknowledged the need to develop educational systems during the rebuilding process and embraced this transformation in a short period of time. This has provided researchers with a unique opportunity to investigate educational change as a 'living laboratory'. In this book, the authors explore the complex nature of change in five former communist countries: Russia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and East Germany. The authors consider: * Educational change as a process rather than as a event * A comparison of such changes against a model for educational change developed by Michael Fullan for understanding large-scale educational reform * Analysis of issues at the national level where the original impetus for change has occurred With contributors from countries affected by such changes, this book provides an insight into the process of educational change as a result of revolution rather than evolution. This book will be of great interest to academics and researchers of educational change and those involved with educational reform. It will also interest those looking at comparative education models and postgraduate students focussing their studies on issues of educational change and reform.
Author: S. Fisher
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230600883
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
Revealing how the quest for independence and challenges of democratization created a contest between nationalists and Europeanists, two powerful forces in domestic politics, after the collapse of communism, Fisher sheds light on the nationalism and post-communist transitions.
Author: B lint Magyar
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 6155513546
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
Having won a two-third majority in Parliament at the 2010 elections, the Hungarian political party Fidesz removed many of the institutional obstacles of exerting power. Just like the party, the state itself was placed under the control of a single individual, who since then has applied the techniques used within his party to enforce submission and obedience onto society as a whole. In a new approach the author characterizes the system as the ?organized over-world?, the ?state employing mafia methods? and the ?adopted political family', applying these categories not as metaphors but elements of a coherent conceptual framework. The actions of the post-communist mafia state model are closely aligned with the interests of power and wealth concentrated in the hands of a small group of insiders. While the traditional mafia channeled wealth and economic players into its spheres of influence by means of direct coercion, the mafia state does the same by means of parliamentary legislation, legal prosecution, tax authority, police forces and secret service. The innovative conceptual framework of the book is important and timely not only for Hungary, but also for other post-communist countries subjected to autocratic rules. ÿ
Author: Andr s K d r
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9789639241152
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
Contents:
Author: Timothy Edmunds
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131797042X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
Fifteen years after the fall of communism, we are able to appraise the results of the multi-faceted postcommunist transition in Central and Eastern Europe with authority. This volume specifically addresses the fascinating area of Civil-Military relations throughout this transitional period. The countries of the region inherited a onerous legacy in this area: their armed forces were part of the communist party-state system and most were oriented towards Cold War missions; they were large in size and supported by high levels of defence spending; and they were based on universal male conscription. Central and eastern European states have thus faced a three fold civil-military reform challenge: establishing democratic and civilian control over their armed forces; implementing organisational reform to meet the security and foreign policy demands of the new era; and redefining military bases for legitimacy in society. This volume assesses the experiences of Poland, Hungary, Latvia, Romania, Croatia, Serbia-Montenegro, Ukraine and Russia in these areas. Collectively these countries illustrate the way in which the interaction of broadly similar postcommunist challenges and distinct national contexts have combined to produce a wide variety of different patterns of civil-military relations. This book was previously published as a special issue of European Security.
Author: Vladimir Tismaneanu
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633864062
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 408
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Book Description
Why has communism’s humanist quest for freedom and social justice without exception resulted in the reign of terror and lies? The authors of this collective volume address this urgent question covering the one hundred years since Lenin’s coup brought the first communist regime to power in St. Petersburg, Russia in November 1917. The first part of the volume is dedicated to the varieties of communist fantasies of salvation, and the remaining three consider how communist experiments over many different times and regions attempted to manage economics, politics, as well as society and culture. Although each communist project was adapted to the situation of the country where it operated, the studies in this volume find that because of its ideological nature, communism had a consistent penchant for totalitarianism in all of its manifestations. This book is also concerned with the future. As the world witnesses a new wave of ideological authoritarianism and collectivistic projects, the authors of the nineteen essays suggest lessons from their analyses of communism’s past to help better resist totalitarian projects in the future.
Author: Péter Apor
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1783087250
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 476
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Book Description
The collection of essays in Secret Agents and the Memory of Everyday Collaboration in Communist Eastern Europe addresses institutions that develop the concept of collaboration, and examines the function, social representation and history of secret police archives and institutes of national memory that create these histories of collaboration. The essays provide a comparative account of collaboration/participation across differing categories of collaborators and different social milieux throughout East-Central Europe. They also demonstrate how secret police files can be used to produce more subtle social and cultural histories of the socialist dictatorships. By interrogating the ways in which post-socialist cultures produce the idea of, and knowledge about, “collaborators,” the contributing authors provide a nuanced historical conception of “collaboration,” expanding the concept toward broader frameworks of cooperation and political participation to facilitate a better understanding of Eastern European communist regimes.
Author: Kerstin Jacobsson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781032930626
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This is the first book to examine the development of post-communist social movements of the last decade focusing specifically on various types of rights-based civic activism (ranging from disability organizations and human rights activism to animal rights, gay rights and women's movements) in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Russia.
Author: Linda J. Cook
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801458234
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285
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Book Description
In the early 1990s, the countries of the former Soviet Bloc faced an urgent need to reform the systems by which they delivered broad, basic social welfare to their citizens. Inherited systems were inefficient and financially unsustainable. Linda J. Cook here explores the politics and policy of social welfare from 1990 to 2004 in the Russian Federation, Poland, Hungary, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Most of these countries, she shows, tried to institute reforms based on a liberal paradigm of reduced entitlements and subsidies, means-testing, and privatization. But these proposals provoked opposition from pro-welfare interests, and the politics of negotiating change varied substantially from one political arena to another. In Russia, for example, liberalizing reform was blocked for a decade. Only as Vladimir Putin rose to power did the country change its inherited welfare system. Cook finds that the impact of economic pressures on welfare was strongly mediated by domestic political factors, including the level of democratization and balance of pro- and anti-reform political forces. Postcommunist welfare politics throughout Russia and Eastern Europe, she shows, are marked by the large role played by bureaucratic welfare stakeholders who were left over from the communist period and, in weak states, by the development of informal processes in social sectors.
Author: Tomá? Janík
Publisher: Waxmann Verlag
ISBN: 3830991622
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 162
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Book Description
School systems in the Visegrad Four countries have gone through significant change since the political upheavals of 1989. The book describes developments in curriculum and curriculum policy over the last three decades and considers the possible impact and perspectives of current changes. It explores the nature of curriculum reform, addresses the challenge of its implementation and highlights the reform as a means by which school quality can be improved and as a 'provider' of aims and contents of school education. Hopefully, the book will contribute to the discussion of options for further curriculum development and curriculum policy in the Visegrad Four and other countries with a similar educational background.
