Books about Reunification from Amazon.com

When the Berlin Wall fell, people who lived along the dismantled border found their lives drastically and rapidly transformed. Daphne Berdahl, through ongoing ethnographic research in a former East German border village, explores the issues of borders and borderland identities that have accompanied the many transitions since 1990. What happens to identity and personhood, she asks, when a political and economic system collapses overnight? How do people negotiate and manipulate a liminal condition created by the disappearance of a significant frame of reference?
Berdahl concentrates especially on how these changes have affected certain "border zones" of daily life--including social organization, gender, religion, and nationality--in a place where literal, indeed concrete, borders were until recently a very powerful presence. Borders, she argues, are places of ambiguity as well as of intense lucidity; these qualities may in fact be mutually constitutive. She shows how, in a moment of headlong historical transformation, larger political, economic, and social processes are manifested locally and specifically. In the process of a transition between two German states, people have invented, and to some extent ritualized, cultural practices that both reflect and constitute profound identity transformations in a period of intense social discord. Where the World Ended combines a vivid ethnographic account of everyday life under socialist rule and after German reunification with an original investigation of the paradoxical human condition of a borderland..
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For forty-five years Europe was divided, and at the center of that divided continent lay a divided Germany. In this brilliantly nuanced book, one of our most respected authorities on Central Europe tells the story of German reunification. Garton Ash has produced a panoramic, dramatic, and definitive account of events that are continuing to transform the map of Europe..
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Nearly half a century after the fighting stopped, the 1953 Armistice has yet to be replaced with a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War. While Russia and China withdrew the last of their forces in 1958, the United States maintains 37,000 troops in South Korea and is pledged to defend it with nuclear weapons. In Korean Endgame, Selig Harrison mounts the first authoritative challenge to this long-standing U.S. policy.

Harrison shows why North Korea is not--as many policymakers expect--about to collapse. And he explains why existing U.S. policies hamper North-South reconciliation and reunification. Assessing North Korean capabilities and the motivations that have led to its forward deployments, he spells out the arms control concessions by North Korea, South Korea, and the United States necessary to ease the dangers of confrontation, centering on reciprocal U.S. force redeployments and U.S. withdrawals in return for North Korean pullbacks from the thirty-eighth parallel.

Similarly, he proposes specific trade-offs to forestall the North's development of nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems, calling for the withdrawal of the U.S. nuclear umbrella in conjunction with agreements to denuclearize Korea embracing China, Russia, and Japan. The long-term goal of U.S. policy, he argues, should be the full disengagement of U.S. combat forces from Korea as part of regional agreements insulating the peninsula from all foreign conventional and nuclear forces.

A veteran journalist with decades of extensive firsthand knowledge of North Korea and long-standing contacts with leaders in Washington, Seoul, and Pyongyang, Harrison is perfectly placed to make these arguments. Throughout, he supports his analysis with revealing accounts of conversations with North Korean, South Korean, and U.S. leaders over thirty-five years. Combining probing scholarship with a seasoned reporter's on-the-ground experience and insights, he has given us the definitive book on U.S. policy in Korea--past, present, and future.

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Since at least the early 1950s, the entire Asia-Pacific region has struggled with the complicated and complex relationship between China and Taiwan--today the Taiwan question is considered a potential flashpoint for a much larger international conflict. Bringing together experts from the United States and Taiwan, Assessing the Threat provides a comprehensive look at the dangers of military escalation in the Taiwan Strait, the latest advances in capabilities of the People s Liberation Army, and China s security relationship with the United States and the Asia-Pacific. There is increasing concern that Beijing is steadily shifting the balance of power across the Taiwan Strait in its favor. Recent advances in Chinese air and naval power, along with changes in PLA doctrine, have the potential to weaken deterrence and destabilize the cross-strait military balance. At this critical juncture, there is not question that this issue requires sustained, detailed analysis and that many measures can and should be taken to reduce the threat of conflict between China, Taiwan, and the United States. Assessing the Threat offers such analysis as well as concrete suggestions and crisis management practices for government and military leaders in Washington, D.C., Beijing, and Taipei..
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Vulnerable to external pressure and confronting internal demands for change, the future of the North Korean state remains very much a live issue. In June 2003 the ratings agency Standard and Poor's issued a report highlighting the ineluctable prospect of a North Korean collapse and its perilous implications for South, identifying the prospectively economically devastating costs of unification— a la Germany— as a factor depressing South Korean sovereign bond ratings.

The S&P scenario is as provocative as the title of this monograph. Today's North Korean regime embodies elements of both communism and Confucian dynasty under its deified-yet-mortal leader, Kim Jong-il. Its anomalous internal characteristics and external relations create an unusually broad set of possible transition paths and successor regimes, ranging from effective maintenance to the status quo to evolutionary change to revolutionary upheaval, probably implying the collapse of North Korea as a sovereign state and its absorption into rival South Korea. Now the Kim regime has raised the stakes both externally with its nuclear program, and internally, taking up economic reform and its accompanying dislocations, thereby moving from the realm of elite to the realm of mass politics. Korea expert Marcus Noland traces how under these unsettled conditions, something as prosaic as the demise of the sixty-something Kim Jong-il could set off abrupt transitions to non-Kim family leadership with or without juche, the near-theological ideology of national self-reliance, while collapse, or civil war are possible as well.

This study quantitatively analyzes the probability under alternative scenarios of regime change in North Korea, investigates the character of possible successor regimes, examines the likelihoods of "radical" and "gradual" economic integration between the North and South and the implications of these profoundly different trajectories for the South..
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