Gale Stokes

From Nation to Minority: Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia at the Outbreak of the Yugoslav Wars

Fears that Serbs would become a minority in a Muslim state led Miloševic to sabotage the creation of an independent Bosnia.

Thinking About 1989: The End of Politics by Other Means

The dense network of institutions binding modern Europe, especially the European Union, has eliminated war as the primary instrument of European security. By joining the European Union, the former satellite states and the Baltics became part of the single most significant political invention of modern European history.

Modes of Opposition Leading to Revolution in Eastern Europe

With the exception of a handful of books on Poland, work by a few Western social scientists on factories in Hungary, and the studies of two notable anthropologists who worked in Romania, essentially no social history of the post-Second World War period comparable to the work that has been done for twenty years or more in the West exists concerning Eastern Europe before 1989. The most obvious reason for this is that the Communist regimes forbade such work, since the findings of any real social science were likely to undermine the claims of the vanguard party. The entire sociology department of Charles University in Prague was disbanded after 1968, and in Bulgaria the field of “anthropology” is a post-1989 product. The primacy of the Cold War paradigm also hindered the development of investigations in the West that were not overtly political or economic. Even Western interest in the democratic opposition in Eastern Europe tended to lead to theoretical constructs, such as the widespread use of the concept of civil society, rather than to concrete research projects that investigated the sociological ingredients of this opposition.

The Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe.

To account for the revolutions across Eastern Europe in 1989, Gale Stokes looks back to 1968 and provides an accessible analysis and a monumental history of events to the present day. He analyses the nature of communist power and the varying forms of opposition to it, telling the story of the rise of Solidarity in Poland and of the movements for change among dissident intellectuals across the region. Stokes demonstrates that Eastern Europe is freer today than it has been previously in the twentieth century.