Flashpoints - The Emerging Crisis in Europe

Zusatztext One of the  Wall Street Journal's  Top 16 Books on Wall Street’s Spring Break Reading List "In this insightful examination of contemporary Europe! political scientist Friedman ( Next Decade ) challenges the view that the European Union and its neighbors have transcended the threat of violent conflict among nations….. By dispassionately anatomizing the fears! aspirations! and interests of the key players! particularly a resurgent and resentful Russia! Friedman vividly describes a region where memories are long! perceived vulnerabilities are everywhere! and major threats have emerged rapidly and unexpectedly many times before." -- Publishers Weekly "This nonacademic but erudite view of European history shows that the 20th century's trauma of war and violence is not quite behind us….A thoughtful! uncluttered treatise considering Europe's intractable patterns of unemployment! immigration and racism." -- Kirkus Informationen zum Autor GEORGE FRIEDMAN is the chairman and founder of Stratfor! the world’s leading private intelligence company. He is frequently called upon as a media expert in intelligence and international geopolitics! and he is the author of six books! including the New York Times bestsellers The Next Decade and The Next 100 Years . He lives in Austin! Texas. 1 A European Life On the night of August 13, 1949, my family climbed into a rubber raft along the Hungarian shore of the Danube. The ultimate destination of the journey was Vienna. We were escaping the communists. There were four of us: my father, Emil, thirty-­seven, my mother, Friderika, known as Dusi, thirty-­five, my sister Agnes, eleven, and me, age six months. There was also a smuggler, whose name and provenance have been lost to us, deliberately, I think, as our parents regarded the truth of such things as potentially deadly and protected us from it at all costs. We had come from Budapest by train to the Hungarian village of Almasfuzito, on the Danube northwest of the capital. Budapest, where my sister and I were born. My parents had migrated there with their families, met, fallen in love, and then were sucked into the abyss of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. My mother was born in 1914 in a town near Bratislava, then called Pozsony and part of Hungary, which was then part of the Austro-­Hungarian Empire. My father was born in the town of Nyirbator in eastern Hungary in 1912. They were born just before World War I. In 1918, the war ended and the structure of Europe cracked, wrecked by that war. Four imperial houses—­the Ottomans, Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns, and Romanovs—­fell, and everything that had been solid between the Baltic Sea and Black Sea was in flux. Wars, revolutions, and diplomacy redrew the map of the region, inventing some countries and suppressing others. Munkács, the town my father’s father came from, was now in Ukraine, part of the Soviet Union. Pozsony was now called Bratislava, a city now part of a newly invented country fusing the Czechs and Slovaks. My parents were Jews and for them the movement of borders was like the coming of weather. Pleasant or unpleasant, it was to be expected. There was something interesting about Hungarian Jews: they spoke Hungarian. The rest of the Jews in the east of Europe spoke Yiddish, fusing German with several other languages. Yiddish used the Hebrew alphabet, to further confuse matters. Yiddish-­speaking Jews did not tend to see themselves as part of the countries in which they lived, and their hosts generally agreed, usually emphatically. Geography was a convenience, not something that defined them. Using Yiddish as their primary tongue represented their tenuous connection to their society, something that was both resented and encouraged by those with whom they lived. But generally speaking, Hungarian Jews used Hungarian as their...

Product details

• Authors: George Friedman
• Publisher: Doubleday Usa
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 27.01.2015
• EAN: 9780385536332
• ISBN: 978-0-385-53633-2
• Dimensions: 165 mm x 245 mm x 30 mm
• Subject: Non-fiction book