Dr. Daniel E Miller

"The authors of this volume challenge conventional notions about Habsburg and Czechoslovak politics, arguing that they were more democratic than they often appear. At combining political science and history, the authors' guiding principle and means of analysis is the consociational model of democracy. This theory, linked best to Arend Lijphart, asserts that consociationalism guarantees minorities a say in government and helps preserve democracy in societies that experience deep ideological, cultural, or ethnic divisions. It enables the main segments to be isolated organizationally from each other, thus avoiding conflict, and affording the leaders to make compromises for the good of the whole.
Consociationalism has proven its worth as a model for describing contemporary democracies and diagnosing their ills. By exploring the institutions and practices of the Habsburg Monarchy before 1918 and the Czechoslovak First Republic, Howe, Lorman, and Miller prove the value of the consociational theory at analyzing the past. They hold that a multitude of parties, frequent cabinet changes, and reliance on circles of experts do not necessarily signal flawed democracies, when, in fact, they are features of consociationalism. This book is a call to specialists to view current politics not just in terms of majoritarian democracy but rather by the standard of the consociational democracies"

While president of the Czech Republic between 2003 and 2013, Václav Klaus, an outspoken critic of the European Union, employed speeches, interviews, and writings as a means of discrediting the EU in the eyes of Czech citizens.  The author used opinion polls from Eurobarometer and the Public Opinion Research Center (CVVM) of the Czech Academy of Sciences to establish the correlation between Klaus’s popularity and Euroskepticism.  In the early years of Klaus’s presidency, scepticism about the EU among Czechs grew, and between 2006 and 2010, there was a strong correlation between Klaus’s popularity and Czech Euroskepticism.  As Klaus’s popularity waned during his last years in office, Czech confidence in the EU began to rise.  This study not only helps to explain some bases of Czech Euroskepticism, but it also addresses the influence Czech presidents have in shaping public opinion in their country.

Excerpt- The creation of Czechoslovakia, as a result of the First World War, was the culmination of national awakening movements among Czechs and Slovaks that were typical in the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth century in the Balkans and East-Central Europe. Few Americans, in the years from 1914 to 1918, knew much about the historical developments of the many ethnic groups between the Baltic and the Black Sea, but most were aware of some of the events related to the establishment of Czechoslovakia, along with other border changes that took place in Europe in the wake of the First World War. Like many small towns of America that had limited concentrations of Czechs, Slovaks, or other immigrants from the Baltics, East-Central Europe, and the Balkans, the inhabitants of the western portion of Northwest Florida knew only some of the sensational aspects of the state’s creation. Their main source of news was the Pensacola Journal, published in Pensacola, the county seat of Escambia County, Northwest Florida’s largest city and the host of a naval base. The Milton Gazette, from the small city of Milton, which lies less than 25 miles to the east of Pensacola and is the county seat of Santa Rosa County, also was a source of news for some.1 Nevertheless, of all the newspapers in the region, the Pensacola Journal was by far the most important. Not only did it have a following in Escambia County but in other parts of Northwest Florida, including Okaloosa County, with its county seat of Crestview and its coastal community of Fort Walton Beach. The Pensacola Journal even had a “Fort Walton Page” that catered specifically to readers in that town. There were other newspapers in the area, but either no copies of them exist, or they contain little or no information about the Czechs and Slovaks.

Excerpt-Rees’s engaging style of writing makes “Hitler’s Charisma” a very readable volume, one of the traits of a popular history. His use of Weber’s categories to explain charisma and his extensive sources combine to give the work the character of an academic monograph that presents a viable explanation of how Hitler built and maintained such a dedicated following. The shortcomings in the work do little to detract from the important place it holds in the body of literature devoted to understanding Hitler and the Third Reich.