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Accessible overview of the relationships between the West and the Middle East, from the 1953 overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, when the CIA and MI6 installed the Shah in his place. Downhill from there...

'The people of Central Europe [.] cannot be separated from European history; they cannot exist outside it; but they represent the wrong side of this history; they are its victims and outsiders.'In a moment of historic threat and uncertainty in mainland Europe, this collection, makes the case for the 'small countries' of Central Europe as the nucleus of European values and a lightning rod for its potential dangers, where language and culture play an active role in affirming national identity and democracy is under continued threat from the threat of Russian oppression.However, these countries have been historically overlooked by the major powers of Western Europe. Kundera warns that this blindness puts Europe's cultural and political independence at risk, a warning that feels increasingly relevant to our current moment.

Why did the West, after winning the Cold War, lose its political balance?In the early 1990s, hopes for the eastward spread of liberal democracy were high. And yet the transformation of Eastern European countries gave rise to a bitter repudiation of liberalism itself, not only in the East but also back in the heartland of the West.In this brilliant work of political psychology, Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that the supposed end of history turned out to be only the beginning of an Age of Imitation. Reckoning with the history of the last thirty years, they show that the most powerful force behind the wave of populist xenophobia that began in Eastern Europe stems from resentment at the post-1989 imperative to become Westernized.Through this prism, the Trump revolution represents an ironic fulfillment of the promise that the nations exiting from communist rule would come to resemble the United States. In a strange twist, Trump has elevated Putin's Russia and Orbán's Hungary into models for the United States.Written by two pre-eminent intellectuals bridging the East/West divide, The Light that Failed is a landmark book that sheds light on the extraordinary history of our Age of Imitation.

The relationship between Germany and Russia is Europe’s most important link with the largest country on the continent. But despite Germany’s unparalleled knowledge and historical experience, its policymakers struggle to accept that Moscow’s efforts to rebalance Europe at the cost of the cohesion of the EU and NATO are an attack on Germany’s core interests. This book explains the scale of the challenge facing Germany in managing relations with a changing Russia. It analyses how successive German governments from 1991 to 2014 misread Russian intentions, until Angela Merkel sharply recalibrated German and EU policy towards Moscow. The book also examines what lies behind efforts to revise Merkel’s bold policy shift, including attitudes inherited from the GDR and the role of Russian influence channels in Germany.

Since its first publication in two volumes between 1918-1923, The Decline of the West has ranked as one of the most widely read and most talked about books of our time. In all its various editions, it has sold nearly 100,000 copies. A twentieth-century Cassandra, Oswald Spengler thoroughly probed the origin and "fate" of our civilization, and the result can be (and has been) read as a prophesy of the Nazi regime. His challenging views have led to harsh criticism over the years, but the knowledge and eloquence that went into his sweeping study of Western culture have kept The Decline of the West alive. As the face of Germany and Europe as a whole continues to change each day, The Decline of the West cannot be ignored.The abridgment, prepared by the German scholar Helmut Werner, with the blessing of the Spengler estate, consists of selections from the original (translated into English by Charles Francis Atkinson) linked by explanatory passages which have been put into English by Arthur Helps. H. Stuart Hughes has written a new introduction for this edition.In this engrossing and highly controversial philosophy of history, Spengler describes how we have entered into a centuries-long "world-historical" phase comparable to late antiquity. Guided by the philosophies of Goethe and Nietzsche, he rejects linear progression, and instead presents a world view based on the cyclical rise and decline of civilizations. He argues that a culture blossoms from the soil of a definable landscape and dies when it has exhausted all of its possibilities.Despite Spengler's reputation today as an extreme pessimist, The Decline of the West remains essential reading for anyone interested in the history of civilization.

'Compelling' Guardian'Eloquent and comprehensive' Financial Times'Excellent' The Telegraph'Astonishing' The Times'An eye-opener' Gavin EslerUntil recently, Germany appeared to be a paragon of economic and political success. Angela Merkel was widely seen as the true 'leader of the free world', and Germany's export-driven economic model seemed to deliver prosperity. But recent events - from Germany's dependence on Russian gas to its car industry's delays in the race to electric - have undermined this view.In Kaput, Wolfgang Münchau argues that the weaknesses of Germany's economy have, in fact, been brewing for decades. The neo-mercantilist policies of the German state, driven by close connections between the country's industrial and political elite, have left Germany technologically behind over-reliant on authoritarian Russia and China - and with little sign of being able to adapt to the digital realities of the 21st century. It is an essential read for anyone interested in the future of Europe's biggest economy.

The first volume of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West is a classic milestone in the annals of historiography. However, it is not a history book in the traditional sense of recounting events in chronological order. Instead, it tries to explain the mechanisms that make different cultures tick. While classical culture had no concept of the past or future and was only fixated on the present, Western culture is focused on both the past as memory and the future as unconquered territory.Like organisms that are born, mature and eventually die, cultures are the blossoming youth while civilizations usher in senility, decay and demise. When a culture becomes a civilization, decadence sets in and the ensuing downward spiral becomes a Faustian whirlwind of self-destruction. This is inevitable as we can see that each culture’s evolution has its parallels in other periods of human history.The endgame for the West has already begun. It is in terminal decline, desperately trying to revive the dead forms and buried traditions that animated its Promethean spirit in its youthful heyday of exuberance. But in old age, it all seems preposterous, and hence in vain as the West has become tired of itself and unable to innovate in either the arts or philosophy. The West is on its way to the grave and what will see the light next must necessarily be something completely new and not just a corpse reanimated.

In Ägypten herrscht das Militär, in Syrien ein Massenmörder, Libyen versinkt im Chaos und die Golfstaaten werden weiter autokratisch regiert. Ein scheinbar düsteres Fazit zehn Jahre nach der arabischen Revolution. Karim El-Gawhary schildert, wie die Regime versuchen, jede Veränderung zu blockieren. Wie die Regionalmächte um ihre Einflusssphären kämpfen. Wie Europa die Lektion, dass arabische Autokraten Terror und Flüchtlinge produzieren, noch immer nicht gelernt hat. Die soziale Frage wird immer drückender. Das System bekommt Risse. Etwa im Sudan, wo der Autor Demonstranten in Khartum erlebt hat, die für einen neuen Staat kämpfen. Oder im Libanon und im Irak, wo er sah, wie vor allem junge Menschen gegen Misswirtschaft, Korruption und die konfessionell dominierte Politik auf die Straße gehen. Die Corona-Krise wird die Situation noch weiter verschärfen. Dieses Buch springt nicht, wie TV-Berichte von 1: 30 Minuten, von Event zu Event. Es zoomt immer wieder vom analytischen Weitwinkel mitten hinein ins Leben der Menschen. Ein Buch, das Zeit und Raum gibt, um die Prozesse in unserer arabischen Nachbarschaft wirklich zu verstehen.