Ostmitteleuropäer sind im Vergleich zu Westeuropäern politisch unterentwickelt? Autoritätshörig? Diktaturaffin? Die lange Zeit unter sowjetischer Herrschaft hat sie entmündigt? Keineswegs. In den vier zentraleuropäischen Ländern Polen, Tschechien, der Slowakei und Ungarn herrscht vielmehr Enttäuschung darüber, dass sie von den Westeuropäern als Länder zweiter Klasse behandelt werden. Dass ihre Wirtschaft nur als verlängerte Werkbank genutzt wird, dass größere westliche Investitionen ausble...

Since the ‘migration crisis’ of 2016, long-simmering tensions between the Western members of the European Union and its ‘new’ Eastern members – Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary – have proven to be fertile ground for rebellion against liberal values and policies.In this startling and original book Ivan Kalmar argues that Central European illiberalism is a misguided response to the devastating effects of global neoliberalism, which arose from the area’s brutal transi...

The history of western notions about Islam is of obvious scholarly as well as popular interest today. This book investigates Christian images of the Muslim Middle East, focusing on the period from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, when the nature of divine as well as human power was under particularly intense debate in the West.Ivan Kalmar explores how the controversial notion of submission to ultimate authority has in the western world been discussed with reference to Islam’s ...

At the turn of the twenty-first century, in spite of growing globalization there remains in the world a split between the West and the rest. The manner in which this split has been imagined and represented in Western civilization has been the subject of intense cross-disciplinary scrutiny, much of it under the rubric of “orientalism.” This debate, sparked by the 1978 publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism identifies the “Orient” as the Islamic world and to a lesser extent Hindu India. “O...

This book presents a critical and empirically informed examination of Islamophobia and related issues of racism and nationalism in Germany today, with particular attention to the East/West distinction. The authors, representing several disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and media and literary studies, situate the topic in the global and German context of the 2015-16 "migration crisis" and its aftermath, and of the ongoing transformations seen in the postsocialist regions of the E...