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Regionalism at the margins: East Central European and Black Sea regional cooperation initiatives in comparative perspective
... The common denominator of the above-mentioned explanations is that Romania's regional initiatives in the Black Sea region did not have a strategic project behind them, but they were rather an exercise in strategic PR. More precisely, either Romania sought to impress NATO and the EU through its democratic commitment (Ivan 2016) or it aimed to internationalize the Black Sea in the interests of NATO and the EU, but not in its own interest (Nițoiu 2016;Ghica 2016). ...
The article brings under scrutiny Romania’s strategic initiatives in the Black Sea area. Theoretically, our article rests on neoclassical realism which highlights the importance of subsystemic factors for states that seek to make strategic adjustments in a strained security environment. In our view, strategic expertise, or lack thereof, is another subsystemic factor, along with strategic culture and the political calculus of different leaders, that accounts for the emergence of misperceptions of a given security milieu. In the case of Romania, lack of strategic expertise has led to misjudgements of the security environment in the Black Sea area which have caused tactical errors, such as the systematic promotion of a high politics security agenda. Thus, the failure of Romania’s strategic initiatives in the Black Sea region are not only the systemic factors but also the subsystemic lack of strategic expertise, which reveals a deficit of state capacity. By annihilating the low level of agency that small states can actualize in a tense security environment, the lack of strategic expertise spawns peripheral regionalism, which is a failed subregionalism that occurs under specific security circumstances.
The Turkish Straits (composed of İstanbul and Çanakkale Straits) are strategic geographic regions between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. Their legal status and the sovereignty-navigation regimes are determined by a multilateral treaty, namely the Montreux Straits Convention of 1936. Today, International Relations (IR) environment has changed greatly when compared with the period of the signing of the Convention. The Cold War is now over and the balance between the East and the West has been disrupted. Furthermore, there are some conflicts in the Black Sea basin, such as the war between Russia/Ukraine and Russia/Georgia. The complex nature of the Black Sea requires a securitization framework from both Russia and the EU/NATO perspectives. In this context, the recent developments in international politics about the region may also have an impact on the Montreux regime in the Turkish Straits in future. Considering these current developments, this paper analyzes the impact of the NATO and EU enlargements on the Montreux regime and evaluates future scenarios about the security of the Turkish Straits. In doing so, it will use the securitization theory as an explanatory approach for the developments in the region. Thus, the Black Sea and the Turkish Straits contains the securitization dynamics within itself.
A post-structural approach to regions insists on working on the inside of the concepts which are already in circulation in the extant literatures. I take as my example the Northern region of Europe, a region that has been defined and redefined time and again through history, and whose identity was brought clearly into play after the end of the Cold War. The analysis shows that each actor tries to impose a definition of the region which places the actor as close as possible to its several cores. These cores are both territorial and functional, and the way to take hold of them goes through manipulation of knowledge and power. The point here is not in any way to treat these actors as sovereign, however, but rather to acknowledge that, after the fall of the sovereign actor in politics and the sovereign author of regions, actors and authors are still thick on the ground (Neumann, 1997).
The European Union (EU) is increasingly getting involved in conflicts and post-conflict settings outside its own boundaries. A lot of the discussion of the EU’s engagement has focused on the question of an increasing ‘militarization’ and the legitimacy of interventions involving military force. Yet the engagement of the EU in conflict and post-conflict settings does not often rely on such force, and is better treated as an attempt to act as a normative power. In this contribution, we explore an aspect of this ‘normative power’ that has so far been largely neglected: is this discourse of EU normative power shared by other actors in international society, and does this make a difference in the chances of the EU to help bring about conflict transformation?
Russia is losing its bid to represent, and perhaps also to reintegrate, the former Soviet republics through the Commonwealth of Independent States. Instead, the successor states are creating their own regional partnerships and striving to join existing European organizations.
The term ‘actor network theory’ (ANT) combines two words usually considered as opposites: actor and network. It is reminiscent of the old, traditional tensions at the heart of the social sciences, such as those between agency and structure or micro- and macro-analysis. Yet, ANT, also known as the sociology of translation, is not just another attempt to show the artificial or dialectical nature of these classical oppositions. On the contrary, its purpose is to show how they are constructed and to provide tools for analyzing that process. One of the core assumptions of ANT is that what the social sciences usually call ‘society’ is an ongoing achievement. ANT is an attempt to provide analytical tools for explaining the very process by which society is constantly reconfigured. What distinguishes it from other constructivist approaches is its explanation of society in the making, in which science and technology play a key part.
This book assesses the impact of norms on decision-making. It argues that norms influence choices not by being causes for actions, but by providing reasons. Consequently it approaches the problem via an investigation of the reasoning process in which norms play a decisive role. Kratochwil argues that, depending upon the strictness the guidance norms provide in arriving at a decision, different styles of reasoning with norms can be distinguished. While the focus in this book is largely analytical, the argument is developed through the interpretation of the classic thinkers in international law (Grotius, Vattel, Pufendorf, Rousseau, Hume, Habermas).
Between 1989 and 2004, the EU's conditionality for membership transformed Central and East Europe. The EU had enormous potential power over the whole range of domestic politics in the candidate countries. However, the EU was able to use that power at a few key points in the process leading to their accession. The EU's long-term influence worked primarily through soft power and through voluntary rather than coercive means. During the membership preparations, the EU built many different routes of influence into the candidate countries' domestic policy-making through 'Europeanization'. The Central and East Europeans voluntarily took on the Union's norms and methods, guided by the European Commission, in a massive transfer of policies and institutions. However, the EU missed important opportunities to effect change as well. The EU's Transformative Power explores in detail how the EU used its influence to control the movement of people across Europe, through both coercive use of conditionality and voluntary methods of Europeanization.
The Soviet Union was the first of Europe’s multiethnic states to confront the rising tide of nationalism by systematically promoting the national consciousness of its ethnic minorities and establishing for them many of the institutional forms characteristic of the modern nation-state. In the 1920s, the Bolshevik government, seeking to defuse nationalist sentiment, created tens of thousands of national territories. It trained new national leaders, established national languages, and financed the production of national-language cultural products. This was a massive and fascinating historical experiment in governing a multiethnic state. Terry Martin provides a comprehensive survey and interpretation, based on newly available archival sources, of the Soviet management of the nationalities question. He traces the conflicts and tensions created by the geographic definition of national territories, the establishment of dozens of official national languages, and the world’s first mass “affirmative action” programs.Martin examines the contradictions inherent in the Soviet nationality policy, which sought simultaneously to foster the growth of national consciousness among its minority populations while dictating the exact content of their cultures; to sponsor national liberation movements in neighboring countries, while eliminating all foreign influence on the Soviet Union’s many diaspora nationalities. Martin explores the political logic of Stalin’s policies as he responded to a perceived threat to Soviet unity in the 1930s by re-establishing the Russians as the state’s leading nationality and deporting numerous “enemy nations.”.
Since the Soviet bloc collapsed in 1989, the strategic priority of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe has been their integration with the West, in particularly joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU). The established democracies and market economies of Western Europe and North America represent the model to which the countries of Central and Eastern Europe aspire. They see NATO and the EU as the only bodies capable of providing them with credible security guarantees and economic security. For them, membership of NATO and the EU will both symbolize their full integration with the West and underpin the democratization and reform of their societies and economies. In short, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe are seeking to return to the democratic Europe from which they were separated by forty years of Soviet domination. At the same time, they have sought to normalize and re-build relations with each other and with their Western and former Soviet neighbours. For the most part, this has taken place in the context of bilateral relationships: through the negotiation of state treaties guaranteeing existing borders and minority rights and committing states to develop cooperative relations; and through various more practical forms of bilateral political, economic and military cooperation.
This chapter deals with the recent wave of regionalism and regionalization in the context of global transformation and competing world order projects which have the purpose of regulating a turbulent global condition. It builds and elaborates on results from a United Nations University/World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU/WIDER) sponsored international research project on the New Regionalism, for which the author was the project director. The thrust of this project, which was carried out in the latter half of the 1990s, was to explore the role of the regional factor in the emerging world order. Under the assumption that this regional wave was qualitatively new and that there was a need for a more empirical exploration, the project used a broad comparative approach that came to be called the New Regionalism Approach (NRA). The overall purpose here is to move away from ‘region-centrisn’, which may be as limiting as state-centrism, the original sin for which the UNU/WIDER project was to be a cure. This strong concentration on the empirical regions must be understood against the background of the surprising explosion of regional initiatives starting in the mid-1980s in many parts of the world; and constituting a new wave of regionalization processes, or what was called ‘the new regionalism’.
This chapter seeks to assess the actual and potential contributions of regionalism to the achievement of such widely affirmed world order values as peace, social justice, human rights, democracy (Falk, 1975, 1992, 1995a). This assessment proceeds by way of discussing in an introductory section, several main features of the global setting that have achieved prominence, initially in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, and now modified by the response to the September 11 attacks on the United States as combined with the trials and tribulations of world capitalism.
The enlargement of the European Community from six countries to nine, including Britain, comes at a time when the whole world system appears to be in flux. In Europe, a series of agreements culminating in the codification of the status of West Berlin is virtually closing that phase of history associated with the phrase ‘the cold war’, though they do not settle the ambiguities of the long-term balance between the Eurasian super-power, the Soviet Union, and the rest of the European peninsula, especially if, as it now seems, the position of the United States is to be uncertain. While Europe seems to be settling down, in the Far East new stars of the first magnitude, China and Japan, are coming to the fore on a scale comparable almost with the super-powers themselves. The Sino-Soviet quarrel, the American recognition of Mao’s China, and the latter’s triumphant entry into the United Nations, mark the coming of age of the Far East as the major centre of the world balance. These changes accompany a major modulation in relations between the super-powers themselves. America, disillusioned with the notion of policing the world, seems potentially to be consummating the retreat of the West begun with the collapse of the great European empires after the war.
À l'été 2008, la reprise de la guerre entre la Géorgie et l'Ossétie du Sud a surpris la plupart des observateurs. Certes, depuis 2004, les incidents se répétaient et s etaient même multipliés les semaines précédant la nuit du 7 au 8 août 2008. Toutefois, personne ne pensait que la confrontation irait aussi loin et que l'arniée russe avancerait autant en territoire géorgien. Un an plus tard, la situation demeure fragile. D'ailleurs, à l'occasion de « l'anniversaire » du déclenchement du conflit, les tensions ont repris, Abkhazes, Géorgiens, Russes et Sud-Ossètes s'accusant mutuellement de raviver les cendres du conflit. Pour l'instant, les menaces ne sont restées que verbales sans nouvelles hostilités. Contrairement à 2008, les États-Unis comme l'Union européenne se sont rapidement manifestés pour empêcher tout nouvel embrasement de la région. Pour ces derniers comme pour certaines compagnies pétro-gazières transnationales, le Caucase du Sud ne doit pas sombrer dans la violence. Il est en effet amené à devenir un corridor énergétique majeur pour approvisionner en pétrole et en gaz les marchés mondiaux de l'énergie. Si cette mission est d'ores et déjà assurée par les oléoducs Bakou-Tbilissi-Ceyhan (BTC) et BakouSoupsa et le gazoduc Bakou-Tbilissi-Erzurum (BTE), elle devrait prendre de l'ampleur dans les prochaines années, avec l'établissement d'un Corridor Sud qui transportera du gaz de la Caspienne, d'Irak, voire d'Iran en Europe. Dans un tel contexte, le Caucase du Sud se retrouve sous les projecteurs, pris au milieu d'une compétition mondiale pour le contrôle des hydrocarbures de l'Eurasie, impliquant des acteurs les plus divers, venant de tous horizons.
Analysing the current hegemony of Erdogan's AKP in Turkey, Cihan Tagal argues that the party has been the agent of a classic passive revolution, effectively shoring up the Kemalist state. Paradoxes of 'Americanization with Muslim characteristics', against the backdrop of Western military intervention in the Middle East.
‘Even in an era of globalisation, geography is still important’, the 2003 European Security Strategy (ESS) states. ‘It is in the European interest that countries on our own borders are well-governed. Neighbours who are engaged in violent conflict, weak states where organised crime flourishes, dysfunctional societies or exploding population growth on its borders all pose problems for Europe’, hence the definition of ‘building security in [the EU’s] neighbourhood’ as one of three strategic objectives for EU foreign policy.
Combining a sophisticated theoretical analysis with detailed empirical case-studies, this book provides an original view of the challenges and threats to a stable peace order in Europe. The end of Cold War bipolarity has transformed Europe. Using structural realist theory, Adrian Hyde-Price analyzes the new security agenda confronting Europe in the twenty-first century. Europe, he argues, is not 'primed for peace' as mainstream thinking suggests, rather, it faces new security threats and the challenge of multipolarity. This critical and original volume looks at European security after the Iraq War, the failure of the EU constitution and the change of government in Germany. Reflecting on the inherently competitive and tragic nature of international politics, it concludes that realism provides the only firm foundations for an ethical foreign and security policy. European Security in the Twenty-First Century will appeal to students and scholars of international relations, European politics and security studies.
This 2003 book develops the idea that since decolonisation, regional patterns of security have become more prominent in international politics. The authors combine an operational theory of regional security with an empirical application across the whole of the international system. Individual chapters cover Africa, the Balkans, CIS Europe, East Asia, EU Europe, the Middle East, North America, South America, and South Asia. The main focus is on the post-Cold War period, but the history of each regional security complex is traced back to its beginnings. By relating the regional dynamics of security to current debates about the global power structure, the authors unfold a distinctive interpretation of post-Cold War international security, avoiding both the extreme oversimplifications of the unipolar view, and the extreme deterritorialisations of many globalist visions of a new world disorder. Their framework brings out the radical diversity of security dynamics in different parts of the world.
The Black Sea has long formed a zone of interaction-sometimes cordial, sometimes conflictual-among the peoples and states around its shores, from the Balkans to the Caucasus, from Russia to Turkey. To the ancient Greeks, the sea lay at the edge of the known world. In time the growth of Greek trading colonies linked all the coasts into a web of economic relationships. In the Middle Ages the sea was tied to the great commercial cities of the Mediterranean. Later the Ottomans used the region's resources to build their own empire. In the late eighteenth century the sea was opened to foreign commerce, and the sea coasts were part of a genuinely global system of trade. After the collapse of the Russian and Ottoman empires, the coastline was carved up among a number of newly formed nation-states, with each asserting its right to a piece of the coast and a section of the coastal waters. Today, efforts to resurrect the idea of the Black Sea as a unified region are once again on the international agenda. Based on extensive research in multiple languages, this book provides a comprehensive guide to the history, cultures, and politics of the sea, and its future at the heart of Europe and Eurasia.
Exploring the varied roots of clans, and their political role and transformation during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, this volume argues that clans are informal political actors critical to understanding regional politics. It demonstrates that the Soviet system was far less successful in transforming and controlling Central Asian society by eradicating clan identities, than has often been assumed. Clans actually influenced and constrained the regime's political trajectory increasingly, during the later Soviet and post-Soviet periods, and made liberalizing political and economic reforms very difficult.
Organization takes place in a tangled world, intermeshed by changing markets, products, standards, technologies, institutions and social groups. Coming to grips with the complexity and fluidity of organization and management is a persistent problem for scholars and practitioners alike, which is why process issues have received renewed interest in recent years. This book, aimed at scholars and higher level students, frames some of these issues in novel and instructive ways. Process views have existed since before the early Greek philosophers and have made decisive marks in all sciences. Alfred North Whitehead's classic work is a landmark in process philosophy, and his thinking provides renewed impetus to social scientists in search of an expanded framework of process thinking. Theorists such as Niklas Luhmann, Bruno Latour, Karl Weick and James March have contributed significantly towards a process view of organization. In this book, central aspects of their thinking are interpreted and discussed with the help of a broader canvas of process thinking provided by Whitehead. The comparisons do not only allow for interesting connections to be made between the theorists, but they also enable understanding to be made of the thinking behind their respective works. From the analysis, ideas are suggested for a framework for process-based organizational analysis. Advanced students and academics in sociology, organization studies and management studies will find this book useful in its discussion of such subjects as organization theory, process philosophy and process studies.
http://www.garnet-eu.org/fileadmin/documents/working_papers/7410.pdf
The relative intractablility of the international environment poses a problem for the foreign policy of all nations. Purpose and power meet with cross-purpose and countervailing power, and most foreign policy projects face external restraints that the makers of policy can neglect only at the risk of failure. Foreign policy—the more or less coordinated strategy with which institutionally designated decision-makers seek to manipulate the international environment—generally meets with tenacious resistance, if not insuperable obstacles.
To regard foreign policy and statecraft from this perspective, however, implies a good deal of determinism. In its more extreme analytical applications, this viewpoint reduces the pursuit of foreign policy goals to a contest between statesman and environment that is already settled by the insurmountable restrictions of the international “system.” Nations are implicitly delegated to play out the roles that the international system has “assigned” to its “actors” to maintain system stability or equilibrium. Domestic political variables are largely neglected in this analytical perspective. Foreign policy aspirations are assessed primarily in terms of whether a nation has adequately “internalized” system “rules”—that is to say, whether a polity has adjusted to the contingencies of the international system, which seems to move toward a preordained historical or analytical telos. The strictures of necessity, imposed by the international environment, take analytical precedence over considerations of preferences and the possibility of choice.
Eurasia is the axial supercontinent. It is home to most of the world's politically assertive states and all the historical pretenders to global power. Accounting for 75 percent of the world's population, 60 percent of its output, and 75 percent of its energy resources, Eurasia's potential power overshadows even America's. For these reasons, the United States should begin paving the way to a transcontinental security system that will ensure Eurasia's future is more peaceful than its past.
In performing judgment, inference and choice functions in the foreign policy decisionmaking process, decisionmakers acting as practical-intuitive historians rely on a variety of procedures. These include: rules of thumb, heuristics, propositional knowledge structures and non-propositional structures of a more schematic nature. These procedures draw, among other sources, on the decisionmakers' subjective information and comprehension of events, situations and personalities from one's own nation's history or foreign nations' histories, and are applied to current tasks. This study attempts to introduce a systematic theoretical analysis of how decisionmakers use these historical analogies, metaphors and extrapolations. The main questions discussed are: What are the functions the use of history serves? How are past, present and future compared? What motivates the use of history? And what are the typical shortcomings of using history as expressed in potential biases and errors? The study concludes with a number of prescriptive suggestions for controlling the risks of abusing history.