This study, based on the author's doctoral dissertation at UCLA, examines Yugoslav economic policy from 1918 to 1929, how it was made, and how it was affected by political developments of the time. It studies the activities of Yugoslavia's regional political and business elites, political groups, and corporations, their reactions to Yugoslav economic policy and their efforts to influence it. The study contains a detailed analysis of party politics and the manner in which the political process affected economic policy. The study uncovers and explains relationships between state, elite, class, national-confessional groups, and territorial regions in the determination of social and economic policy in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, later renamed Yugoslavia, and the relationship between these groups and the Yugoslav state.

For five months in 2013–2014, Dušan Pavlović took time off from teaching to accept a senior position in Serbia’s Ministry of Economy. This short period was long enough for him to make a penetrating diagnosis of the economic activity of the postcommunist government. He found that a coterie of tycoons and politicians live off the wealth of the majority of citizens and smaller entrepreneurs, while the economy performs below its capacities. In academic terms, extractive economic institutions create allocative inefficiency. Vivid, suggestive, and even entertaining accounts depict how privatization is administered and foreign investment projects are handled, and how party members, relatives, and friends are hired into public administration and state-owned companies. They show how the managers of firms that queue for state subsidies resist the systematic screening of their businesses. The principles of Keynesian economics are distorted and misused to conceal deliberate fiscal mismanagement. Huge ill-conceived development projects siphon taxpayers’ money from “non-economic” activities like social services, health, education, science, and culture. What Pavlović found in Serbia is acutely symptomatic of many other European post-communist regimes of our time, lending his book singular importance.

This book examines secessionism, separatism, and calls for independence in the European Union in recent history and within an economic context. It contributes to the deeper understanding of factors influencing the individual decision-making processes around secession, using economic analysis to answer a set of simple questions about who the secessionists are, what they really want, what their incentives are, and why it is easier to declare their secessionist tendencies than to vote for secession. This a highly topical theme, given the secessionist referenda in Catalonia, Scotland, Ukraine, Kosovo, and the United Kingdom, and this book offers a unique contribution to the debate. It is based on an exclusive survey carried out among members of the pro-independence parties and movements across 17 European countries and 56 European regions. It uses the instruments of the Political Economy of Conflict to reveal the importance of romantic and economic factors influencing the drive towards secession. Secessions have been regarded as a purely romantic phenomenon that cannot be rationalised, whereas this book connects the sensibility of romantic factors such as language, religion or ethnicity with the sense of economic factors through its rational, economic approach. Furthermore, it applies the standard methodology of microeconomic analysis to discover the impact of individual pro-secessionist factors. An integral part of the text presents a brief historic overview, uncovering the lesser-known path dependency. The book will find an audience among researchers, scholars, and students of economics and political science, as well as policy-makers and professionals engaged with a secessionist agenda.

First published in 1997, this volume aims to present a new perspective on the history of the Serbs in the twentieth century, viewing this period through the lives of its most significant Serb participants. Its contributors represent a diverse variety of backgrounds, coming from different countries, academic disciplines, intellectual traditions and generations. The aim of this book is to present a new perspective on the history of the Serbs in the twentieth century through the lives of its most significant Serb participants. Nikola Pasic, Dragutin Dimitirjevic-Apis, Radomir Putnik, King Peter, King Aleksandar, Prince Pavle, Dragoljub-Draza Mihailovic and Slobodan Milosevic whose lives are profiled in the books were, in the opinion of the editors, in position significantly to shape the destiny of the Serbs. In reviewing their life and achievements, the dilemmas facing the Serbs and their leaders in the twentieth century should hopefully become clearer as well. As each of the eight leaders exercised power and influence at critical times, each of them is in many ways still a controversial figure. In order to provide the necessary historical background, in the first chapter Peter Radan offers a brief overview and assessment of the course of the history of the Serbs during the twentieth century.

This book is part of an ongoing transnational turn in cultural history. Studies on the history of urban popular culture and the entertainment industries increasingly engage with the European or global circulation of genres, actors, and shows, especially during the period of massive growth and expansion of the sector from the 1870s to the 1930s. Nevertheless, a large part of this research remains focused on exchanges between Western and Central European, and North American metropolises. To provide a fuller picture of the emergence and cross-border transfer of different genres of popular culture, this volume investigates Northern, East Central, and Southern European cities and their relations with each other and the West. The authors analyze the mediating agents, transnational networks, and local responses to new forms of entertainment from Madrid to Vyborg, and from Istanbul to Reykjavík. These examples re-focus the history of urban popular culture in Europe in view of multidirectional transfers and a wider range of regional experiences. Urban Popular Culture and Entertainment will appeal to researchers and students alike interested in the history of popular culture in modern societies, particularly those studying urban centers in Europe, and their transnational and transregional connections.

Party System Closure maps trends in interparty relations in Europe from 1848 until 2019. It investigates how the length of democratic experience, the institutionalization of individual parties, the fragmentation of parliaments, and the support for anti-establishment parties, shape the degree of institutionalization of party systems. The analyses presented answer the questions of whether predictability in partisan interactions is necessary for the survival of democratic regimes and whether it improves or undermines the quality of democracy. The developments of party politics at the elite level are contrasted with the dynamics of voting behaviour. The comparisons of distinct historical periods and of macro-regions provide a comprehensive picture of the European history of party competition and cooperation. The empirical overview presented in the book is based on a novel conceptual framework and features party composition data of more than a thousand European governments. Party systems are analysed in terms of poles and blocs, and the degree of closure and of polarization is related to a new party system typology. The book demonstrates that information collected from partisan interactions at the time of government formation can reveal changes that characterise the party system as a whole. The empirical results confirm that the Cold War period (1945-1989) was exceptionally stable, while the post-Berlin-Wall era shows signs of disintegration, although more at the level of voters than at the level of elites. After three decades of democratic politics in Europe (1990-2019), the West and the South are looking increasingly like the East, especially in terms of the level of party de-institutionalization. The West and the South are becoming more polarised than the East, but in terms of parliamentary fragmentation, the party systems of the South and the East are converging, while the West is diverging from the rest with its increasingly high number of parties. As far as our central concept, party system closure, is concerned, thanks to the gradual process of stabilization in the East, and the recent de-institutionalization in the West and South, the regional differences are declining. Comparative Politics is a series for researchers, teachers, and students of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu. The series is edited by Susan Scarrow, Chair of the Department of Political Science, University of Houston, and Jonathan Slapin, Professor of Political Institutions and European Politics, Department of Political Science, University of Zurich.

This monograph focuses on the challenges that interwar regimes faced and how they coped with them in the aftermath of World War One, focusing especially on the failure to establish and stabilize democratic regimes, as well as on the fate of ethnic and religious minorities. Topics explored include the political systems and how they changed during the two decades under review, land reform, Church–state relations, and culture. Countries studied include Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania. "Sabrina Ramet has assembled a team of highly respectable country specialists to offer a fresh and historiographically updated reading of interwar developments in East Central Europe. The volume is bookended by two excellent comparative and theoretically informed essays carefully weighing the multiplicity of factors contributing to the instability of the interwar regimes. As a result this survey succeeds admirably in producing a nuanced narrative and analysis." - Maria Todorova, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA Sabrina Ramet, together with a roster of other eminent scholars, has produced an exciting new history of interwar East Central Europe. The volume has a clear focus on the failure of democracy (1918 to 1941), and on the bedeviling issues of ethnic minorities and of peasants; the latter made up an overwhelming majority of much of the region's population. The book will be of great interest to political scientists and historians of East Central Europe, and of Europe more generally, and it is perfect for classroom use. - Irina Livezeanu, University of Pittsburgh, USA