A. James McAdams

Transitional justice and the rule of law in new democracies

This study focuses on the relationship between the use of national courts to pursue retrospective justice and the construction of viable democracies. Included are essays on the experiences of eight countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Poland and South Africa.

Rebirth : a history of Europe since World War II

Part 1 Historical background: Europe triumphant - 1300-1900 Europe in crisis - 1900-1945. Part 2 The international scene: Europe divided - 1945-1955 East-West equilibrium - 1955-1975 a new Europe emerges. Part 3 The nation-states: Germany - East and West the Soviet Union Eastern Europe the United Kingdom France Italy and the Vatican the small states of Western and Northern Europe the Iberian and Aegean states.

Inter‐German relations in historical perspective: The risks of biased hindsight

It is a mixed blessing to know that the German Democratic Republic ceased to exist in late 1989 and the German nation was reunified less than a year later. While scholars can now comment definitively on what made these events possible, they must fight the temptation to think deterministically about the past and to read German history as though it were destined to culminate in the outcomes of 1989 and 1990. In this essay on the risks of biased hindsight, the author considers three respects in which such historical reasoning may lead to distorted impressions of the 40‐year relationship between East and West Germany. In line with the non‐deterministic view of history that he espouses, he concludes by suggesting one way in which the revolutionary autumn of 1989 could have taken a dramatically different turn.

Inter-German Relations

On 2 February 1973, Helmut Kohl, then the CDU minister-president of the Rheinland Palatinate, used a Bundesrat debate on the admission of East and West Germany to the United Nations to list his party’s well-known grounds for refusing to support ratification of the Basic Treaty of 1972, the signing of which only months before had begun the normalisation of relations between the two Germanies. The treaty, he declared, had seriously weakened his country’s ability to preserve the grounds for eventual national reunification, since its proponents now accepted the GDR — while not fully recognising it diplomatically — as a separate German state. In so doing, the Social Democratic-Liberal majority had needlessly endangered the FRG’s historical right, as the only freely elected state on German soil, to speak for all Germans, including those living in the GDR. At the same time the East German regime, now emboldened by its growing international stature, would no longer feel constrained to give in to the FRG’s demands for an improvement in the human rights situation on the other side of the Elbe.

The Origins of a New Inter-German Relationship

Is there a new ‘German Question’ in Europe today? At one time, both the Germans themselves and their continental neighbors and superpower allies could agree that there were actually two points of uncertainty about Germany’s postwar division. The first uncertainty lay in what future one might predict for the tenuous political experiments undertaken in 1949 by the liberal democratic Federal Republic of Germany and its socialist counterpart, the German Democratic Republic. The second uncertainty lay in what was to come of the division of Germany itself. Was the natural German condition one of unity? If so, did the two German states possess both the inclination and the wherewithal to press for national reunification?

East Germany and Detente: Building Authority after the Wall

Preface 1. Introduction 2. Die mauer: 1961 3. Building authority: 1962-1966 4. Cracks in the myth of stability: 1967-1971 5. Redefining East German priorities: 1972-1978 6. Looking outward: 1979-1984 7. Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index.