Books in the History and Politics in the 20th Century: Bloomsbury Academic series

Failure in Palestine traces Britain''s attempts to reconcile her commitments to Palestine with her interests in the rest of the Middle East through bureaucratic and diplomatic paths to her eventual abandonment of Palestine. The text offers an excellent analysis of British decision making in this crucial period, whose repercussions are felt to the present day.

The Cold War is over, yet many attitudes and analyses typical of the period persisted in the strategic thinking of the Great Powers. In this brilliantly original study, Simon Dalby uses the conceptual tools of geopolitical analysis to uncover the essence of American strategic discourse. Focussing on the period of the late 1970s, he shows how Washington pressure groups, political organisations and, in particular, the Committee on the Present Danger, recreated a language of confrontation that deeply influenced Western attitudes towards the Soviet Union in ways that continue to shape foreign policy.

The purpose of this book is to give an accurate and scholarly assessment of a major international crisis, and to contribute to public understanding of the decisions and processes that brought about the crisis. Calvert deals with the nature and history of the Falkland Islands, the grounds for the competing claims, the political background and events in both Argentina and Britain that led up to the crisis, and the unfolding events of the crisis itself, in its political, diplomatic and military aspects. He concludes with a substantial assessment of the impact of the crisis on international politics.

The rise of extreme right parties and neo-fascist movements in recent years as a response to economic crisis has become a major concern for most European countries. The phenomenon is likely to increase, as more disillusioned and discontented sectors of the population become drawn towards intense nationalism and the scapegoating of ''foreigners''. Paul Hainsworth has assembled a team of experts in the field to present a comparative, empirical assessment of the historical evolution, nature and extent of the extreme right in Europe and the United States from the 1940s to the early 1990s. This volume evaluates the nature and influence of the extreme right in the post-war context.

This book is a historical reinterpretation of the Cold War in the broadest sense from the viewpoint of the late 1980s. Dukes contends that the rivalry of the USA and Soviet Union, like the Great Game between Britain and Imperial Russia, can be understood only by analysing their relationship over centuries. He adopts the explanatory model of French historian Fernand Braudel - the concepts of event, conjuncture and structure - and examines the super-power relationship in an historical context stretching back to the medieval period. He argues that the political and cultural gaps between Western and Soviet approaches at key events have stemmed from widely different experiences of these events, as well as from long-embedded traditions.

This important study examines the role of Africa''s strategic mineral resources in global defense and in the international economic system. Beginning with an overview of the situation as a whole, the author discusses the role of transnational corporations in the exploitation of Africa''s mineral resources and explains the implications of the theories of Matthew Effect, dependency, core-periphery, and imperialism. Among the issues Ogunbadejo considers are the political economy of strategic minerals; the political significance of American, European, and Soviet dependence on these minerals vis-a-vis their relations with the producer nations; and the impact of geopolitical considerations on U.S./South African relations.

This volume evaluates the notion of European Unity in a period when European identity was subjected to the destructive consequences of Nazi and Fascist domination of much of the Continent. By presenting the competing visions of transformation and reconstruction played out during the war years the book aims to provide broader-based and more complex insights into forces that shaped the post-war period than those in conventional accounts that locate the thinking about European unity only in the years after 1945.

After the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, no-one was prepared for the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia. Suddenly old terms like chetnik and ustasha found new currency, and a new term surfaced - ''ethnic cleansing'' - with its sickening echo of ''final solution''. The upsurge of nationalist sentiment in Eastern Europe raises the question whether the wars in the former Yugoslavia are harbingers of things to come. Will the racist idea of the ethnically pure state crush the humanist ideal of the multicultural society? Yugoslavian Inferno provides a rich analysis of the complex issues that brought about the demise of Yugoslavia and the ensuing fratricidal warfare. It pays particular attention to the role of religion in fanning the flames of interethnic hatred and is written by a scholar uniquely placed to write it. A Yugoslavian-American with roots in both Croatia and Serbia, whose religious tradition is Protestant, rather than Catholic, Orthodox, or Muslim, Paul Mojzes is an internationally recognized authority on religion in Eastern Europe. Based on travels in the region, interviews with politicians, scholars, and religious leaders, as well as news accounts and monographs in generally inaccessible languages, and formulated after a lifetime of scholarly achievement, Yugoslavian Inferno presents insights that only a native can provide and the critical objectivity that only an outsider can offer.

In the first volume of this work, Professor Humphreys showed the economic and strategic importance of the Latin American countries in the Second World War, covering the struggle for supremacy in the area between the great powers up to the Rio de Janeiro Conference in 1942.This second volume opens with the Battle of the Caribbean and continues the story to 1945. The impact of the War on Mexico and Brazil - each of which sent fighting forces abroad - is examined in detail, along with other aspects such as the Bolivian revolution of 1943 and the rise of military dictatorship and Colonel Per├│n in Argentina. The book ends with a discussion of Latin American aspirations at the time of transition from war to peace in 1945.

This authoritative work examines the experiences of the Latin American countries during the Second World War, their reactions to its outbreak and the extent of their involvement. Although the war was fought far from Latin America, the area had immense economic and strategic significance for the great powers and witnessed a fierce struggle between them for influence and advantage.In this volume, R.A. Humphreys covers the period from the eve of war to the end of the Rio de Janeiro Conference of American Foreign Ministers in 1942, when all Latin American states, with the exception of Argentina and Chile, had either declared war on the Axis Powers or severed relations with them. This account is based on a wide variety of sources, including the author''s own war-time study of the Latin American press and the records of the British Foreign Office.

The transition from communist dictatorship to multi-party democracy has proved a long and painful process for the countries of Eastern Europe, and has met with varying degrees of success. In Hungary, the radical opposition was uniquely successful in fighting off attempts by the old-guard communist elite to hijack reform programmes, by forcing free elections and creating a multi-party system. This volume focuses on the Hungarian experience, analysing in detail the process of transition from dictatorship to pluralist democracy. Some of Hungary''s leading political scientists examine issues such as the legitimation crisis of communist rule, resulting struggles within the ruling elite and the forces behind transition. Constitutional reform, party formation and voting behaviour at the first free elections are also taken into account. The concluding section places the Hungarian experience in comparative perspective, within the context of other Central and Western European states.