For much of the decade prior to 1940, Churchill was out of office and often seen as a warmonger. He saw appeasement as a policy not befitting a country of Britain’s standing that failed to take account of innate German militarism. One of his most effective tactics in opposing it was his evocative use of history, drawing parallels between his own life and that of his eighteenth-century ancestor, the 1st Duke of Marlborough. To Churchill, the British government’s dealings with Gandhi and the Congress Party were also a form of appeasement. There was a paradox in his thinking; that the forms of nationalism that bolstered British international power were legitimate, while those that did not were not. Churchill’s opposition to Hitler was based on his own first-hand experiences while researching his Marlborough biography and on his reading of the German ‘mental map’. The chapter traces his evolving response from the German occupation of the Rhineland in 1936 through to the Munich Crisis of 1938 and beyond. It ends by analysing Churchill’s path to power as prime minister, suggesting that far from being a triumph of opportunity, there were simply no other suitable candidates for the post.

What constitutes Czech First World War poetry? Rejection of the romantic cult; an emphasis on collective participation in life; a turning towards reality and civilisation; the search for a new aesthetic ideal and for new means of expression, especially for a poetic vocabulary and rhythm that would correspond to a dynamic conception of the world. In the Czech cultural context, the four years of the First World War were not identical. The first two years massively affected the development of Czech culture, many magazines were forced to stop publishing and many writers were sent to the front. In the last two years of the war, censorship declined, a series of new literary magazines emerged, and, in exile, negotiations for an independent Czech and Slovak state took place. This chapter deals with a significant attempt to present the new artistic generation Almanac for the Year 1914 and Manifesto of Czech Writers (1917), Dyk’s War Tetralogy and the poetry of exile and of the Czechoslovak Legion.

Although usually associated with events in Europe and North America, the events of the ‘global 1968’ were global in scope. This chapter shows how Tanzanian youths shared common ground with their contemporaries around the world in protesting against Cold War interventions in Vietnam and Czechoslovakia. In doing so, they drew inspiration from the landscape of radical ideas and texts of revolutionary Dar es Salaam. But in contrast to the dynamics of counter-hegemonic protest elsewhere, the Tanzanian government’s foreign policy meant that it could channel these radical critiques of superpower imperialism into its own nation-building project. The language of anti-imperialism could also be deployed against more immediate threats, as the case of Malawi’s claims to Tanzanian territory demonstrate. While recognising the significance of transnational Afro-Asian and Third Worldist solidarities in these movements, the chapter integrates these dynamics into a national story. The state circumscribed the autonomy of youth activism, especially when it risked upsetting Julius Nyerere’s carefully calculated foreign policy.

Hitler’s seizure of Austria heightened awareness of the international danger. Churchill pointed to the weakening of France’s Eastern European alliances, but was deterred from advocating the use of force to reverse Hitler’s action by fear of air attacks on London. Instead he called for greater RAF expansion, and the government took steps to maximise aircraft production, including allowing rearmament contracts to divert industry from civil trade. On the other hand, whereas Churchill thought a grand alliance of European powers, including the Soviet Union, would deter German aggression, Chamberlain persisted in believing alliances would lead to war and instead pursued bilateral negotiations with Hitler on the basis of self-determination for the German-speaking minority in Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain’s decisions not to seek Soviet support against Germany or to fight over Czechoslovakia are placed in the context of advice from the Foreign Office and the chiefs of the armed forces. Churchill’s opposition to surrender to Hitler’s threats is explained in terms of the effect the fall of Czechoslovakia would have on the balance of power and also of his reduced fear of air attack following reports of the effects of bombing in the Spanish Civil War. Reactions to the Munich settlement show that both Chamberlain and Churchill’s positions had considerable public support.

The year 1968 brought a powerful affirmation of West Germany’s uniquely stable economy and society, with ripple effects across Western and Eastern Europe. Chapter 6 opens by explaining how the Grand Coalition pursued reforms that reinforced West Germany’s commitment to price stability and economic growth. When youth protests escalated in 1967–68, driven in large part by anger over U.S. and West German policies toward Greece, Iran, and the war in Vietnam, German workers declined to join in – a stark contrast to the turmoil in neighboring France. Speculators rushed to sell French francs and buy up German marks, touching off a currency crisis. Western finance ministers converged in Bonn demanding that West Germany raise the mark’s parity value – yet Bonn refused, an unprecedented display of independence. Meanwhile, the “Prague Spring” raised hopes of West German credits for Czechoslovakia, perhaps via the Bundesbank; and German visitors poured in. When the Soviet bloc invaded, de Gaulle blamed the Bonn government for provoking it. Yet the main takeaway in Moscow was that West Germany, clearly Europe’s strongest economy, could become a significant economic partner.

Tests and testing have evolved and developed, in part driven by scientific evolution, but mostly driven by the needs of societies that are served by psychologists and other specialists who use tests and other assessment methods. Society therefore provides the impetus for the development of testing, the incentives for the various stakeholders in this field, as well as occasional deterrents and limits in their usage. In this chapter we look at how testing assessment developed in the region of Eastern Europe, initially connected to early international evolutions at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, being then more and more influenced by the dominant ideologies that have permeated this area of Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. Modern and contemporary evolutions in the development, adaptation, and use of tests and assessments in various areas of psychological practice, as well as the state of research in testing and assessment, in countries across the region of Eastern Europe, will be discussed.

Chapter 5 expands the tracing of the theorized causal mechanisms beyond Egypt to see how far these mechanisms travel and if they operate in the same way across other cases of founding elections. Each case comparison begins with an analysis of the processes of party formation, linking the political opportunity structure of the authoritarian era to the contours of the ideological landscape and the strategic incentives facing different groups at this juncture. Each case then examines the evidence for the mechanisms linking the authoritarian era political opportunity structure to the organizational and persuasive resources available to each political group and their ability to use different mobilization tactics. As in Egypt, opposition groups that were excluded from electoral participation possess similar organizational and symbolic resources and thus are able to use more effective voter mobilization tactics than other political groups, resulting in their electoral success. The accounts find evidence for this causal chain in Tunisia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Zambia, but the mechanism operates differently in the case of Brazil, offering useful insight into the scope conditions under which the mechanisms theorized in the Egypt case operate elsewhere.

Chapter 3 examines the political opportunity structure in Tunisia, followed by three more closed regimes (Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Zambia), and ending with Brazil. In each comparative case, we trace the effect of the political opposition structure to the adaptations and strategies adopted by different political groups within the constraints the state placed upon them.

Although usually associated with events in Europe and North America, the events of the ‘global 1968’ were global in scope. This chapter shows how Tanzanian youths shared common ground with their contemporaries around the world in protesting against Cold War interventions in Vietnam and Czechoslovakia. In doing so, they drew inspiration from the landscape of radical ideas and texts of revolutionary Dar es Salaam. But in contrast to the dynamics of counter-hegemonic protest elsewhere, the Tanzanian government’s foreign policy meant that it could channel these radical critiques of superpower imperialism into its own nation-building project. The language of anti-imperialism could also be deployed against more immediate threats, as the case of Malawi’s claims to Tanzanian territory demonstrate. While recognising the significance of transnational Afro-Asian and Third Worldist solidarities in these movements, the chapter integrates these dynamics into a national story. The state circumscribed the autonomy of youth activism, especially when it risked upsetting Julius Nyerere’s carefully calculated foreign policy.

From 1972 to 1977, Roth regularly traveled to Prague in order to meet with writers silenced by the totalitarian Czech regime, trips that he briefly but poignantly describes in his remarks at the 2013 PEN Literary Gala. His relationships with artists in Prague also led to his work as general editor of the “Writers from the Other Europe” series, which featured work by Milan Kundera, Bruno Schulz, and others. Roth would send Nathan Zuckerman to Prague in 1985’s The Prague Orgy. With this in mind, this chapter will address the importance of the city in Roth’s own life, in his philosophies of artistic freedom, and in the development of his protagonists.

Although his family left Czechoslovakia fleeing Nazi persecution when he was a child, Tom Stoppard re-engaged with the country of his birth through his human rights work and his friendship with Vaclav Havel.

Tom Stoppard’s childhood in Czechoslovakia, his Jewish family’s flight from the Nazis to Singapore, and his eventual assumption of a new English identity after his mother’s remarriage all had an impact on his work, in which questions of name and identity are often important.

The thematics of the Cold War, including the daily ambient threat of nuclear annihilation, permeate much of Stoppard’s writing – implicitly in the absurdity and fatalism of early plays like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and explicitly in works dealing with interactions across the Iron Curtain like Squaring the Circle and Professional Foul.

Though they met only late in life, the two great Czech-born playwrights Havel in Stoppard shared a close kinship in many areas, including both artistic interests and political commitments, though Stoppard is generally regarded as much less political than Havel, who became president of Czechoslovakia.