Books in English : From Communists to Foreign Capitalists by Nina Bandelij

I am still trying to understand the logic of what my compatriots term as "Free Market with Socialist Orientation" (in Vietnam: nền kinh tế thị trường với định hướng xã hội chủ nghĩa")... Maybe we will find the answers in this book on the social foundation of post socialist Europe. 

From Communists to Foreign Capitalists: The Social Foundations of Foreign Direct Investment in Postsocialist Europe

Nina Bandelj

Princeton University Press, Oct 16, 2011 - Social Science - 312 pages

0 Reviews

From Communists to Foreign Capitalists explores the intersections of two momentous changes in the late twentieth century: the fall of Communism and the rise of globalization. Delving into the economic change that accompanied these shifts in central and Eastern Europe, Nina Bandelj presents a pioneering sociological treatment of the process of foreign direct investment (FDI). She demonstrates how both investors and hosts rely on social networks, institutions, politics, and cultural understandings to make decisions about investment, employing practical rather than rational economic strategies to deal with the true uncertainty that plagues the postsocialist environment.the postsocialist environment.

The book explores how eleven postsocialist countries address the very idea of FDI as an integral part of their market transition. The inflows of foreign capital after the collapse of Communism resulted not from the withdrawal of states from the economy, as is commonly expected, but rather from the active involvement of postsocialist states in institutionalizing and legitimizing FDI. Using a wide array of data sources, and combining a macro-level account of national variation in the liberalization to foreign capital with a micro-level account of FDI transactions in the decade following the collapse of Communism in 1989, the book reveals how social forces not only constrain economic transformations but also make them possible.

From Communists to Foreign Capitalists is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the social processes that shape economic life.

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YourVietBooks is a selection of books and articles on and about Vietnam. Categories include: Culture, History, Vietnam War, Politics, Biographies, Contemporary Vietnam, International Relations, Doing Business in Vietnam, Reference and Languages, Zen Buddhism, Philosophy, Art and Literature. Some articles are available only in English, French, German or Vietnamese. Our qualified and experienced translators can provide translations of e-books or articles on demand. Read more...

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English Authors: America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam

Reading History

This weekend, I found another inspiring book: "Une promenade singulière à travers de l'Histoire", written by Michel de Grèce, great grand child of the Duc d'Orleans, which awakens my appetite for more discoveries on History. That brings me back to my own roots, and the tumultuous history of contemporary Vietnam. Here is one episode of our tragedy. 

America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia

Seth Jacobs

Duke University Press, Jan 6, 2005 - History - 381 pages

3 Reviews

America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam rethinks the motivations behind one of the most ruinous foreign-policy decisions of the postwar era: America’s commitment to preserve an independent South Vietnam under the premiership of Ngo Dinh Diem. The so-called Diem experiment is usually ascribed to U.S. anticommunism and an absence of other candidates for South Vietnam’s highest office. Challenging those explanations, Seth Jacobs utilizes religion and race as categories of analysis to argue that the alliance with Diem cannot be understood apart from America’s mid-century religious revival and policymakers’ perceptions of Asians. Jacobs contends that Diem’s Catholicism and the extent to which he violated American notions of “Oriental” passivity and moral laxity made him a more attractive ally to Washington than many non-Christian South Vietnamese with greater administrative experience and popular support.

A diplomatic and cultural history, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam draws on government archives, presidential libraries, private papers, novels, newspapers, magazines, movies, and television and radio broadcasts. Jacobs shows in detail how, in the 1950s, U.S. policymakers conceived of Cold War anticommunism as a crusade in which Americans needed to combine with fellow Judeo-Christians against an adversary dangerous as much for its atheism as for its military might. He describes how racist assumptions that Asians were culturally unready for democratic self-government predisposed Americans to excuse Diem’s dictatorship as necessary in “the Orient.” By focusing attention on the role of American religious and racial ideologies, Jacobs makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of the disastrous commitment of the United States to “sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem.”

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YourVietBooks is a selection of books and articles on and about Vietnam. Categories include: Culture, History, Vietnam War, Politics, Biographies, Contemporary Vietnam, International Relations, Doing Business in Vietnam, Reference and Languages, Zen Buddhism, Philosophy, Art and Literature. Some articles are available only in English, French, German or Vietnamese. Our qualified and experienced translators can provide translations of e-books or articles on demand. Read more...

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Book on 21st Century Challenge : The End of the World as We Know It_ with Mark Steyn

Read the Book,

Click link to download

 http://conservativepapers.com/?wpfb_dl=2

Listen to the Author's own presentation on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAi-DsOmOS0

About the book: 

America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (ISBN 0-89526-078-6) is a nonfiction book by Mark Steyn, published in 2006. It forecasts the downfall of Western civilization owing to internal weaknesses and the increasing Muslim population in Western countries and the world generally.

America Alone is set in the context of the global war on terror. 

Steyn argues that "much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive the twenty-first century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most European countries."

Steyn attributes the forecast fall of the Western world to three factors:

• Demographic decline, based on the observation that European nations have low birth rates while Muslim nations have higher birth rates. Specifically, in recent years the population of the developed world declined from about 30% of world population to around 20%, while the population of Muslim nations increased from about 15% to 20%.

• The unsustainability of the advanced Western social-democratic state, based on the thesis that the responsibilities of normal adults, such as care of the elderly, childcare, health care and insurance, have been slowly taken over by the state. Steyn argues that these programs erode humanity's basic sense of self-reliance to a point at which a more resilient group of people — Muslims in his view — will take control.
• The exhaustion of civilization. Steyn argues that Western nations are so focused on moral and cultural relativism—with "diversity" and "racism" as their new favorite words—that they are unable to see that their existence is threatened. Specifically, he argues that European nations have given up defending themselves and rely on America for their defense. He views anti-Americanism as a symptom of civilisational exhaustion, whether manifested by Muslims (to whom America symbolizes gay porn, children born out of wedlock, immodest women, and immorality) or by Europeans (to whom America symbolizes a crude and radical Christianity, fat rednecks and uncontrolled firearms). However in his view America is the most benign hegemonic power the world has ever seen. According to Steyn, America will be the last and only country—as all others will be taken over by Muslims—that will retain its sense of self-preservation, but this is not a given, as America's enemies know that it ran from Vietnam and they hope that America will continue to flee when faced with a challenge.

Steyn's final argument is that the Muslim world will not need to carry out an outright attack. Instead, Europe will collapse from "wimpiness" or "multicultural 'sensitivity,'" leading to betrayal of the state's core values. Thus, during the Danish 'cartoon jihad' of 2006, Jack Straw, then British foreign secretary, hailed the 'sensitivity' of Fleet Street in not reprinting the offending representations of the Prophet."

Steyn dismisses the danger of climate change, The Population Bomb, The Limits to Growth, nuclear winter, and points out Jimmy Carter's 1977 incorrect prediction that the world's oil would run out in the next decade. (Source: wikipedia)

More on Mark Steyn view on politics: http://www.steynonline.com/politics-war

Books in English: The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War

From Cautious Friend to Reluctant Ally: The Soviet Union and the VietnamWar

Ilya V. Gaiduk. Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy toward the Indochina Conflict, 1954-1963. Cold War International History Project Series. Washington, D.C.: Stanford University Press, 2003. xxi + 286 pp., ISBN 978-0-8047-4712-7.
Reviewed by Tom Nichols (U.S. Naval War College)

Published on H-Diplo (November, 2004)

Cuộc Chiến Việt Nam, Liên Bang Xô Viết và chiến tranh Việt Nam bởi TG: Ilya V. Gaiduk, link to vnthuquan.net Vietnam translation: 
http://vnthuquan.net/truyen/truyentext.aspx?tid=2qtqv3m3237nmn1n3n1n31n343tq83a3q3m3237nvn)

About the Book: 

In his first book on this subject, The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War (1996), Ilya Gaiduk harvested a great deal of fascinating data from previously closed communist archives and produced a volume on Soviet involvement in Vietnam and communist coalitional dynamics that has few if any peers in the literature. His second book, a kind of prequel to the first (which picked up the story of Vietnam near the moment of U.S. intervention) does not disappoint, and is a worthy and fascinating companion to the first. Although Confronting Vietnam is essentially a diplomatic history, it nonetheless tells a story that carries important implications for understanding the nexus of ideology and realpolitik in war.

Readers of The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War will recognize the Soviet Union of Confronting Vietnam: an ascending superpower torn between the need to improve relations with the West in Europe and the unfortunate burdens that fall to the self-declared center of a revolutionary ideological movement. When the North Vietnamese declared themselves to be engaged in a revolutionary struggle, both the USSR and China were faced with an ideologically driven requirement to aid them.

For more, click on link below:

(http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9966)

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YourVietBooks is a selection of books and articles on and about Vietnam. Categories include: Culture, History, Vietnam War, Politics, Biographies, Contemporary Vietnam, International Relations, Doing Business in Vietnam, Reference and Languages, Zen Buddhism, Philosophy, Art and Literature. Some articles are available only in English, French, German or Vietnamese. Our qualified and experienced translators can provide translations of e-books or articles on demand. Read more...

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