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This article explores Ukraine’s and Georgia’s attempts to reshape the dynamics of their relations with the EU by moving from Europe’s peripheral status towards becoming part of Europe. The drive of the two post-Soviet countries towards European core is explained by both consequentialist (seeking defence from Russia) and ideational (Europe as civilization choice) incentives. The Europeanization school of the neoinstitutionalist paradigm is used to back the main argument. Finally, as the article concludes, next to Russia as a veto player, the socio-political underdevelopment and lack of good governance make both countries less attractive and complicates their quest to escape the European margins and becoming part of the European core. Abbreviations: AA - Association Agreements: CIS - Commonwealth of Independent States: DCFTA - Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area: EaP - Eastern Partnership: ENP - European Neighbourhood Policy: EU - European Union: NATO - North Atlantic Treaty Organization: RCI - Rational Choice Institutionalism: SI - Sociological Institutionalism

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... On one hand, the misplacedness policy was certainly driven by security and material considerations-to strengthen deteriorated security and sovereignty, restore territorial integrity, defend itself from Russia's assertive regionalism via membership of NATO and the EU, receive financial support, and benefit from a preferential trade regime with the EU, to name just a few (logic of consequences). On the other hand, however, there seems to be a strong ideational component to Georgia's misplacedness policy both at the elite and at the societal level and to what extent prospects of material incentives influenced Georgia's regional drift toward Europe is debatable (Kakachia, Lebanidze, and Dubovyk 2019). In the end, the country had to pay very high material costs for its misplacedness policy-in form of deteriorated security and territorial integrity and economic war with its former metropole. ...
... It is noteworthy that Georgia's pro-European orientation as a core pillar of Georgia's misplacedness policy seems to be one of the few topics of national accord in the country (Kakachia, Lebanidze, and Dubovyk 2019), which is otherwise marked by high degree of polarization and radicalization. Figure 2 shows constant high support for Georgia's EU and NATO membership and low support for the membership of the Eurasian Union. ...
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Randall L. Schweller is a John M. Olin Post-Doctoral Fellow in National Security at the Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. In August 1994 he will join the faculty of the Department of Political Science at The Ohio State University. The author is grateful to Richard Betts, Marc Busch, Thomas Christensen, Dale Copeland, Michael Desch, Richard Herrmann, Robert Jervis, Ethan Kapstein, James McAllister, Gideon Rose, David Schweller, Jack Snyder, Kimberly Marten Zisk, and the members of the Olin National Security Group at Harvard's CFIA for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay. 1. A leading proponent of the "balancing predominates" view, Kenneth N. Waltz, remarks: "In international politics, success leads to failure. The excessive accumulation of power by one state or coalition of states elicits the opposition of others." Waltz, "The Origins of War in Neorealist Theory," in Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb, eds., The Origin and Prevention of Major Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 49. 2. The bandwagoning image of international politics pictures the global order as a complex machine of wheels within wheels. In this highly interconnected world, small local disruptions quickly grow into large disturbances as their effects cascade and reverberate throughout the system. In contrast, the balancing image sees a world composed of many discrete, self-regulating balance-of-power systems. Because balancing is the prevailing tendency among states, prudent powers should limit their commitments to places where their core interests are at stake. 3. Jack Snyder, "Introduction," to Robert Jervis and Jack Snyder, eds., Dominoes and Bandwagons: Strategic Beliefs and Great Power Competition in the Eurasian Rimland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 3. 4. Quoted in Deborah Welch Larson, "Bandwagoning Images in American Foreign Policy: Myth or Reality?" in ibid., p. 95. 5. Quoted in J.H. Elliott, "Managing Decline: Olivares and the Grand Strategy of Imperial Spain," in Paul Kennedy, ed., Grand Strategies in War and Peace (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 97. 6. Quoted in Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 133. Napoleon often spoke in terms of bandwagoning dynamics. In 1794, he said: "It is necessary to overwhelm Germany; that done, Spain and Italy fall of themselves"; in 1797: "Let us concentrate all our activity on the side of the navy, and destroy England; this done, Europe is at our feet"; and in 1811, "In five years, I shall be the master of the world; there only remains Russia, but I shall crush it." Quoted in R.B. Mowat, The Diplomacy of Napoleon (New York: Russell & Russell, [1924] 1971), pp. 22, 53, 243. Not all French strategists of the period viewed the world in these terms, however. After his remarkable victory over the First Coalition in 1794, Carnot feared that France might become drunk with victory: "The rapidity of our military successes . . . do not permit us to doubt that we could . . . reunite to France all the ancient territory of the Gauls. But however seductive this system may be, it will be found perhaps that it is wise to renounce it, and that France would only enfeeble herself and prepare an interminable war by aggrandizement of this kind." Quoted in ibid., p. 11. 7. Adolf Hitler in a speech to Gauleiters on May 8, 1943. Quoted in J. Noakes and G. Pridham, eds., Nazism, 1919-1945: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, Vol. II: Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination (New York: Schocken Books, 1988), p. 857. 8. For his most comprehensive statement on the subject, see Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987). 9. See Robert G. Kaufman, "To Balance or to Bandwagon? Alignment Decisions in 1930s Europe," Security Studies, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Spring 1992), pp. 417-447; and Paul W. Schroeder, "Neo-Realist Theory and International History: An Historian's View," paper presented at the War and Peace Institute, Columbia University, June 11, 1993. 10. The domestic-sources school of alliance formation includes Deborah Welch Larson, Stephen R. David, and Jack S. Levy and Michael M. Barnett...
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The history of international political orders is written in terms of continuity and change in domestic and international political relations. As a step toward understanding such continuity and change, we explore some ideas drawn from an institutional perspective. An institutional perspective is characterized in terms of two grand issues that divide students of international relations and other organized systems. The first issue concerns the basic logic of action by which human behavior is shaped. On the one side are those who see action as driven by a logic of anticipated consequences and prior preferences. On the other side are those who see action as driven by a logic of appropriateness and a sense of identity. The second issue concerns the efficiency of history. On the one side are those who see history as efficient in the sense that it follows a course leading to a unique equilibrium dictated by exogenously determined interests, identities, and resources. On the other side are those who see history as inefficient in the sense that it follows a meandering, path-dependent course distinguished by multiple equilibria and endogenous transformations of interests, identities, and resources. We argue that the tendency of students of international political order to emphasize efficient histories and consequential bases for action leads them to underestimate the significance of rule- and identity-based action and inefficient histories. We illustrate such an institutional perspective by considering some features of the coevolution of politics and institutions, particularly the ways in which engagement in political activities affects the definition and elaboration of political identities and the development of competence in politics and the capabilities of political institutions.
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List of cartoons List of figures and tables Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Blat: the unknown phenomenon 2. Understanding blat 3. The Soviet order: a view from within 4. The use of personal networks 5.Blat as a form of exchange: between gift and commodity 6. Networking in the post-Soviet period Appendix Bibliography Index.
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Contemporary theories of politics tend to portray politics as a reflection of society, political phenomena as the aggregate consequences of individual behavior, action as the result of choices based on calculated self-interest, history as efficient in reaching unique and appropriate outcomes, and decision making and the allocation of resources as the central foci of political life. Some recent theoretical thought in political science, however, blends elements of these theoretical styles into an older concern with institutions. This new institutionalism emphasizes the relative autonomy of political institutions, possibilities for inefficiency in history, and the importance of symbolic action to an understanding of politics. Such ideas have a reasonable empirical basis, but they are not characterized by powerful theoretical forms. Some directions for theoretical research may, however, be identified in institutionalist conceptions of political order. This is precisely the objective of the present article.
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This article examines some basic assumptions about the nature of political institutions, the ways in which practices and rules that comprise institutions are established, sustained, and transformed, and the ways in which those practices and rules are converted into political behavior through the mediation of interpretation and capability. We discuss an institutional approach to political life that emphasizes the endogenous nature and social construction of political institutions, identities, accounts, and capabilities.
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We argue in this paper in favor of a rather parsimonious theoretical approach to the study of the domestic impact of Europeanization. Whether we study policies, politics, or polities, a misfit between European-level and domestic processes, policies, or institutions constitutes the necessary condition for expecting any change. However, adaptational pressures alone are insufficient. There must be mediating factors enabling or prohibiting domestic change and accounting for the empiri-cally observable differential impact of Europe. We have then introduced two pathways leading to domestic changes which are theoretically grounded in rationalist and sociological institutionalisms, respectively. On the one hand, rationalist institutionalism follows a logic of resource redistribution emphasizing the absence of multiple veto points and the presence of supporting institutions as the main factors facilitating change. On the other hand, sociological institutionalism exhibits a sociali-zation and learning account focussing on norm entrepreneurs as "change agents" and the presence of a cooperative political culture as the main mediating factors. We claim that Europeanization might lead to convergence in policy outcomes, but at best to "clustered convergence" and continu-ing divergence with regard to policy processes and instruments, politics, and polities.
Go West: Georgia's European Identity and Its Role in Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy Objectives
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  • Mariam Amashukeli
On complex interaction among different actors in terms of formation and shaping of European identities and discourses in the post-Soviet countries, see: Tsuladze, Lia, Flora Esebua, Irakli Kakhidze, Ana Kvintradze, Irina Osepashvili, and Mariam Amashukeli. 2016. "Performing Europeanization-Political vis-à-vis Popular Discourses on Europeanization in Georgia." Center for Social Sciences. Tbilisi. References Brisku, Adrian. 2013. Bittersweet Europe: Albanian and Georgian Discourses on Europe, 1878-2008: Berghahn Books. Ó Beacháin, Donnacha, and Frederik Coene. 2014. "Go West: Georgia's European Identity and Its Role in Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy Objectives." Nationalities Papers 42 (6): 923-41.
EU versus Russia: Lessons in Victory Classics
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Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani - the Man Who Paved the Road to Europe
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The Political Economy of State Capture in Central E Urope
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In Neighbourhood Perceptions of the Ukraine Crisis: From the Soviet Union into Eurasia
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Kakachia, K. 2016. "The Return of Geopolitics: Georgia in the Shadow of Russian-Ukrainian Conflict." In Neighbourhood Perceptions of the Ukraine Crisis: From the Soviet Union into Eurasia? edited by G. Besier and K. Stokłosa, 141-156. Post-Soviet politics. London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.
Russia, EU and the Post-Soviet Democratic Failure
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Lebanidze, B. 2019. Russia, EU and the Post-Soviet Democratic Failure. Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft Ser. Wiesbaden: Springer Vieweg. in Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH.
Ukrainian-American Military Exercise with the Involvement of 19 Countries Kicked off in Odesa
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Public Attitudes in Georgia Results of a April 2017 Survey Carried Out for NDI by CRRC Georgia
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NATO. 2013. "Georgia: Now the Top non-NATO Troop Contributor in Afghanistan." Accessed 21 August 2018. https:// www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_101633.htm NDI. 2017. "Public Attitudes in Georgia Results of a April 2017 Survey Carried Out for NDI by CRRC Georgia." Accessed 24 August 2018. https://www.ndi.org/sites/default/files/NDI%20poll_April%202017_Foreign%20Affairs_ENG_vf.pdf Papava, V. 2006. "The Political Economy of Georgia's Rose Revolution." Orbis 50 (4): 657-667. doi:10.1016/j. orbis.2006.07.006.
Religious Belief and National Belonging in Central and Eastern Europe
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Pew Research Center. 2017. "Religious Belief and National Belonging in Central and Eastern Europe." Accessed 24 August 2018. http://www.pewforum.org/2017/05/10/social-views-and-morality/
A Wider Europe - A Proximity Policy as the Key to Stability
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EU Unlikely to Expand into post-Soviet East in Next Decade
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