In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis Germany became Europe’s most influential nation state. This book aims to provide a comparative assessment of how this is reflected in the country’s bilateral security relationships with key global and regional partners. Prepared by an international team of scholars, it offers unique, in-depth perspectives on the ways these evolving interactions affect the prospects for addressing recent and emerging security challenges.

This open access book collects the major discussions in divorce research in Europe. It starts with an understanding of divorce trends. Why was divorce increasing so rapidly throughout the US and Europe and do we see signs of a turn? Do cohabitation breakups influence divorce trends or is there a renewed stability on the partner market? In terms of divorce risks, the book contains new insights on Eastern European countries. These post socialist countries have evolved dramatically since the fall of the Wall and at present they show the highest divorce figures in Europe. Also the influence of gender, and more specifically women’s education as a risk in divorce is examined cross nationally. The book also provides explanations for the negative gradient in female education effects on divorce. It devotes three separate parts to new insights in the post-divorce effects of the life course event by among others looking at consequences for adults and children but also taking the larger family network into account. As such the book is of interest to demographers, sociologists, psychologists, family therapists, NGOs, and politicians. “This wide-ranging volume details important trends in divorce in Europe that hold implications for understanding family dissolution causes and consequences throughout the world. Highly recommended for researchers and students everywhere.”

"Berlin, 12 January 2030 - The crisis worsens. The Chancellor reaches for the telephone. He instructs his anteroom to put through a call to Germany's most important ally in order to discuss the situation and determine a further course of action." With whom would the chancellor speak? With the American, the French, or maybe even the Russian president? Or will the Chancellor only exercise representative functions while the real responsibility and decision-making authority lies with the President of the United Regions of Europe? This volume invites policy makers and politicians to use their imagination, to look beyond current events and take a long-term view on possible developments. Such projections, the author argues, lead to interesting conclusions for strategic planning.

'No other book that I am aware of places the German industrial relations system in the broader industrial and political context in an effort to understand the role of the industrial relations system in contributing to a nation's economic success and how that role is being affected by economic and political change.'—James P. Begin, Rutgers University The reunification of Germany in 1990 juxtaposed two very different models of industrial relations. This volume assesses the results. By the late 1980s, West Germany had developed and refined a largely collaborative relationship between business and labor, codified in law, that governed industrial relations effectively. How would East German workers, operating within a completely different system for forty years, respond to West Germany's institutional social partnership? Would western-style social partnership spread to all of the New Germany, or find itself seriously destabilized? The internationally recognized scholars who contribute to this volume are unanimous in their admiration of key elements in the German model. They diverge, however, on their assessments of the resilience of that model in the face of dramatic new challenges in the 1990s.

This book shows how Germany and America, the backbone of the Atlantic alliance and of the global system, may split apart. It argues that such a drastic shift would have immense implications for any new world order, dividing, once again, the maritime from the continental powers.

This book explores the relationship, and the potential for closer co-operation, which exist between France, Germany and Britain as they enter the new millennium.