On the home front

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Daniel J. Elazar

Constitutionalizing Globalization explores two converging trends: the spread of federalism and federal arrangements around the world, and the globalization taking place on the international scene. Daniel Elazar shows how globalization of the economy and the concern for global human rights bring with them the need for development of a constitutional order that will control both. The gradual development of appropriate constitutional mechanisms and controls is part of a general shift from modern statism to postmodern federalism. Reliance on the sovereignty of the nation-state, which marked the era from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 to the end of World War II, gave way to the beginning of a world order that links states in various ways through enforceable constitutional bonds. These trends have been recognized by students both of federalism and of international relations. Constitutionalizing Globalization is the first book to join the perspectives of both in order to explain the new paradigm. It is important reading for students and scholars of constitutional issues, federalism, and international relations.

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William Stueck

This first truly international history of the Korean War argues that its timing, its course, and its outcome made it in effect a substitute for World War III. Stueck draws on recently available materials from seven countries, plus the archives of the United Nations, presenting a detailed narrative of the diplomacy of the conflict and a broad assessment of its critical role in the Cold War. In Stueck's view, contributors to the UN cause in Korea provided support not out of any abstract commitment to a universal system of collective security but because they saw an opportunity to influence U.S. policy. At the moment of Chinese intervention in Korea in the fall of 1950, as in other instances prior to the armistice in July 1953, NATO allies and Third World neutrals succeeded in curbing American adventurism and so in blocking the spread of hostilities to other parts of the world. While conceding the tragic and brutal nature of the war, Stueck suggests that it helped to prevent the occurrence of an even more destructive conflict in Europe.

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Ian Kershaw

The climax and conclusion of one of the best-selling biographies of our time. In this volume, Ian Kershaw introduces Adolf Hitler at the apex of his power, idolized by millions of Germans for bringing the nation out of economic catastrophe. The Nazi party, the armed forces, the industrial cartels, and the civil servants are all "working towards the Führer." Meanwhile, Hitler is poised to realize his Mephistophelean vision : the subjugation of Europe under the Thousand Year Reich and, in the process, the annihilation of the Jews. For three years, Hitler and his relentless armies pluge the European continent into a bloodbath, as German soldiers, accompanied by fanatical SS units, slaughter conquered troops and civilians alike. Then, as Allied might prevails, Kershaw reveals a Hitler transformed from invincible warlord to desperate gambler, ultimately bringing destruction to his country and ending his life in a bunker under the ruins of Berlin. This book is based on immense research, including the use of many previously untapped sources. - Publisher.

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Lev Razgon

Lev Razgon became famous overnight when his memoirs first appeared in Russia in 1988. They were a sensation both due to his angle of vision - Razgon was living among the Party elites as the Stalinist terror of 1937 began - as well as to his sophisticated understanding of both his country and his century. His remarkably long life took him from the shtetl and a family which had been unlucky with the authorities for many generations, to Moscow where he was a Communist journalist and writer, to 17 years in labor camps (a fate shared by both his wives). When he finally returned to Moscow for good, he went back to writing books for young adults and worked in secret on these memoirs. The last man alive to have actually attended and survived the Communist Party Congress of 1934 - most of those attending were dead within three years - Razgon brilliantly conveys the everyday atmosphere of a Soviet world of privilege about to be destroyed. Stalin had given secret orders that the families and friends of the powerful be decimated as a lesson in terror, a preemptive strike against any thoughts of a coup. In this book the personalities and stories which shaped Razgon's existence before and after his seventeen years in the camps are emphasized. Razgon's journalistic curiosity and interest in history as well as individuals led him in unusual directions. Much here is new: the characters and fates of the jailers; the camp lives of the wives of the Soviet elite, imprisoned as hostages to control their powerful husbands; and the frustration of formerly high-ranking military men, forgotten prisoners of the gulag as they see that World War II is approaching.