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From the French origin of Coca-Cola to McDonald’s sponsorship of the 2015 Milan Expo, the book presents the first comparative history of these multinational corporations in two Western European countries, addressing some compelling questions: to what extent our increasingly globalized world is persistently shaped by forms of American hegemony, and what are some of the forces that have been most effective at challenging the relationship between Americanization and globalization? Through the local history of global companies, the book tells a new story about not only the influence of American businesses in Europe but also the influence of European governments and societies on those American businesses and their adaptability.

In Lawfare: The Criminalization of Democratic Politics in the Global South, Zaffaroni, Caamaño and Vegh Weis offer an account of the misuse of the law to criminalize progressive political leaders in Latin America. Indeed, more and more popular political leaders in the region are being imprisoned or prosecuted, even while in power. Inacio Lula da Silva is the quintaessential case of this worrying process. Despite the centrality of this juridical-political phenomenon in Latin America, it is little known to the Anglo-Saxon public. This book aims to fill this gap. In an accessible style, the authors deconstruct the legal language and the main problematics of lawfare, drawing attention to the fact that it may end up destroying the rule of law in order to promote the most cruel forms of neoliberalism.
Author:
Buchmann analyses the work of UK, German, Danish and Swedish embassies in the USA and China on climate change in the late 2000s and early 2010s. She relates which coalitions and narratives embassies sought to develop to convince China and the United States that a more progressive climate policy was possible, to achieve gains supporting an agreement under the UNFCCC. This book shows that a key interpretation of climate diplomacy was selling/trade: Europe selling technology “solutions” to solve climate change. In this narrative, Europe has already done what needs to be done and outsourcing of production to China e.g. is ignored. In the USA, embassies entered coalitions with states, faith groups and the military, arguing that a more progressive climate policy was mandated by either God or security concerns. State politicians, including Democrats, often actually didn’t implement any climate policies. Any gains were reversed through climate denial lobbying funded by corporations. Embassies did not address this.
Views of the Cuban Communist Party on the Collapse of Soviet and Eastern European Socialism
In Cuba Was Different, Even Sandvik Underlid explores the views of Cuban authorities, official press, and Party members as they reflect back on the collapse of Soviet and Eastern European socialism. In so doing, he contributes to a better understanding as to why the Cuban system – often associated with Fidel Castro’s leadership – did not itself collapse. Despite the loss of its most important allies, key ideological referents, and even most of its foreign trade, Cuba did not embrace capitalism.

The author critically examines and analyzes the collapse of the USSR and Eastern Europe as reported in the Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma, both as they unfolded and subsequently through the lens of additional interviews with individual Party members. This focus on Cuba’s Communist Party provides new perspectives on how these events were seen from Cuba and on the notable resilience of many party members.
Volume Editors: and
The civilizing mission associated with nineteenth-century colonialism became harder to justify after the First World War. In an increasingly anti-imperialist culture, elites reformulated schemes for the “improvement” of “inferior” societies. Nation building, social engineering, humanitarianism, modernization or the spread of democracy were used to justify outside interventions and the top-down transformation of non-western, international or even domestic societies.

The contributions in Civilizing Missions in the Twentieth Century discuss how these justifications influenced Polish nation building, Scandinavian disarmament proposals and technocratic social policies in the interwar years. Treatment of the second half of the century covers the changing cultural context of European humanitarianism, as well as the influence of American social science on US foreign policy, more particularly democracy promotion.

Contributors are: Boris Barth, Rolf Hobson, Jürgen Osterhammel, Frank Ninkovich, Bianka Pietrow-Ennker, Karen Gram-Skjoldager, Esther Moeller, and Jost Dülffer.
Author:
This book is about the domestic dimension of public diplomacy, which must be understood within the context of public diplomacy’s evolution over time. In the virtually connected world of today, newcomers such as supranational organizations, sub-states and Asian countries have had less difficulty than Western nation-states including a domestic dimension in public diplomacy. Doing so does not separate the domestic and international components; rather, it highlights that there is a holistic/integrative approach to public involvement at home and abroad. In Huijgh’s comprehensive analysis, including case studies from North America, Europa and the Asia-Pacific, public diplomacy’s international and domestic dimensions can be seen as stepping stones on a continuum of public participation that is central to international policymaking and conduct.
Elihu Root, the Monroe Doctrine, and International Law in the Americas
International law’s turn to history in the Americas receives invigorated refreshment with Christopher Rossi’s adaptation of the insightful and inter-disciplinary teachings of the English School and Cambridge contextualists to problems of hemispheric methodology and historiography. Rossi sheds new light on abridgments of history and the propensity to construct and legitimize whiggish understandings of international law based on simplified tropes of liberal and postcolonial treatments of the Monroe Doctrine. Central to his story is the retelling of the Monroe Doctrine by its supreme early twentieth century interlocutor, Elihu Root and other like-minded internationalists. Rossi’s revival of whiggish international law cautions against the contemporary tendency to re-read history with both eyes cast on the ideological present as a justification for misperceived historical sequencing.
In Failure of American and Soviet Cultural Imperialism in German Universities, 1945-1990 Natalia Tsvetkova describes the American and Soviet policies in German universities during the Cold War. In both parts of divided Germany the conservative professorate resisted both the American and Soviet policies of reforms in universities. Whether these policies can be considered cases of cultural imperialism will be discussed in this book. As well as how and why both American and Soviet policies of the transformation of German universities eventually failed.