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Begin New Search Political Geography Europe Content Type Journal Article Publishing Institution Central and East European International Studies Association Publication Year within 25 Years

1. Table of Contents

Publication Date:
10-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
Sovereignty at sea: the law and politics of saving lives in mare liberum Tanja E Aalberts and Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen When 'blurring' becomes the norm and secession is justified as the exception: revisiting EU and Russian discourses in the common neighbourhood Eiki Berg and Martin Mölder Foreign policy analysis, globalisation and non-state actors: state-centric after all? Rainer Baumann and Frank A Stengel Regional integration and the challenge of overlapping memberships on trade Mwita Chacha Practicality by judgement: transnational interpreters of local ownership in the Polish-Ukrainian border reform encounter Xymena Kurowska.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Globalization, Politics, and Sovereignty
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and Ukraine

2. Neoclassical realism and international climate change politics: moral imperative and political constraint in international climate finance

Author:
Mark Purdon
Publication Date:
07-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
In this article, I present a neoclassical realist theory of climate change politics that challenges the idea that cooperation on climate change is compelled alone by shared norms and interests emanating from the international level and questions if instead material factors also play a significant constraining role. Relative-gains concerns incited by the international resource transfers implicit in climate change policy may compel some states to be prudent in their international climate change efforts and conserve resources domestically for future contingencies, including their own adaptation and resiliency. Neoclassical realism recognises such systemic constraints while also identifying international and domestic factors—a 'two-level game'—that explain variation in state sensitivity to relative gains. As a preliminary test of this theory, I compare the latest data on the magnitude, distribution and financial 'additionality' of climate funds and carbon markets. Climate funds are found to be more vulnerable to systemic forces identified by neoclassical realism because they are largely drawn from existing official development assistance budgets despite international commitments that funds are 'new and additional'. Carbon markets engage a relatively broader number of states and, contrary to moral hazard concerns, have been used to a greater degree by states reducing emissions domestically. While there are concerns about whether carbon credits represent genuine emission reductions, the effectiveness of climate funds is equally, if not more, dubious. I conclude that, while imperfect, carbon markets have too often been unfairly compared with an ideal climate finance mechanism that assumes few political constraints on international resource transfers for climate change.
Topic:
Security, Foreign Policy, International Security, Political Theory, and Bilateral Relations
Political Geography:
Europe

3. European integration and the problem of the state: universality, particularity, and exemplarity in the crafting of the European Union

Author:
Stefan Borg
Publication Date:
07-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
The European Union is often presented as an entity that has 'moved beyond' the model of organising political life along the way of the modern sovereign state. This paper questions this understanding by engaging a set of texts that could be understood as exemplary of the EU's official discourse of Europe: EU's failed Constitutional Treaty and Javier Solana's collected speeches. A paradox is herein identified: the values that are said to sustain Europe's identity and upon which Europe is founded are simultaneously presented as distinctly European and universal. It is suggested that Europe is being crafted in a pendular oscillation between particularising and universalising the values upon which Europe allegedly rests. By drawing on critical International Relations theory, the paper suggests that this very contradictory oscillation between particularising and universalising Europe's values to an important extent mirrors modern statecraft. One should therefore think twice before announcing the construction of the European Union as something qualitatively different from, or 'gentler' than, modern statecraft.
Topic:
Security, Foreign Policy, Political Theory, and Bilateral Relations
Political Geography:
Europe

4. The West: a securitising community?

Author:
Gunther Hellmann, Gabi Schlag, Benjamin Herborth, and Christian Weber
Publication Date:
07-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
The primary objective of this article is to theorise transformations of Western order in a manner that does not presuppose a fixed understanding of 'the West' as a pre-constituted political space, ready-made and waiting for social scientific enquiry. We argue that the Copenhagen School's understanding of securitisation dynamics provides an adequate methodological starting point for such an endeavour. Rather than taking for granted the existence of a Western 'security community', we thus focus on the performative effects of a security semantics in which 'the West' figures as the threatened, yet notoriously vague referent object that has to be defended against alleged challenges. The empirical part of the article reconstructs such securitisation dynamics in three different fields: the implications of representing China's rise as a challenge to Western order, the effects of the transformation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) towards a global security actor, and the consequences of extraordinary renditions and practices of torture for the normative infrastructure of 'the West'. We conclude that Western securitisation dynamics can be understood as a discursive shift away from a legally enshrined culture of restraint and towards more assertive forms of self-authorisation.
Topic:
Security, Foreign Policy, Political Theory, and Bilateral Relations
Political Geography:
Europe

5. 'Moral power' as objectification of the 'civilian'/'normative' 'EUlogy': the European Union as a conflict-dealer in the South Caucasus

Author:
Syuzanna Vasilyan
Publication Date:
07-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
This article develops a new conceptual framework of 'moral power' by arguing that the 'civilian'/'normative' power Europe paradigms are insufficient for understanding the essence of the conflict resolution policy of the European Union (EU) in the South Caucasus. Analysing the conflicts of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh, the study reveals that until the August 2008 war, the EU was an incoherent actor in terms of the interplay among its institutions and member-states. The EU's policy has been devoid of a long-term peace-focused strategy, making it inconsequential; as a result, the EU has merely dealt with, rather than managed, the conflicts. Its rhetoric has been inconsistent with practice. Often the EU has subordinated its values to material and power-related interests. Moreover, the EU has hardly been normatively stable in its approach to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Bypassing inclusiveness until the launch of the Geneva talks pertaining to the Abkhazian and South Ossetian conflicts, the EU has not enjoyed much legitimacy by the de facto states. Whereas the EU has largely failed to resolve the South Caucasian conflicts, it has achieved partial success by putting a halt to the 2008 hostilities between Russia and Georgia. Overall, having faltered as a 'civilian'/'normative' power it still has to fare as a 'moral power'.
Topic:
Security, Foreign Policy, Political Theory, and Bilateral Relations
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Georgia, South Caucasus, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia

6. Looking back: communist melancholia and post-socialist pains

Author:
Anca Pusca
Publication Date:
07-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
Remembering communism in Central and Eastern Europe is a tricky business, as memories are increasingly put on display through practices of museumisation, collective and personal biographies and official investigations. Everything — from former factories to architecture, monuments and statues, to secret service files and other material reminders — is carefully reshaped into politically convenient, or in some cases inconvenient, discourses.
Topic:
Security, Foreign Policy, Political Theory, and Bilateral Relations
Political Geography:
Europe

7. Russia's energy relations in Europe and the Far East: towards a social structurationist approach to energy policy formation

Author:
Pami Aalto, David Dusseault, Michael D Kennedy, and Markku Kivinen
Publication Date:
01-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
In this article, we examine the formation of Russia's energy policies vis-à-vis Europe and the Far East. As energy policy is a very complex field, we propose a new structurationist analytical model to deal with that complexity. Our model highlights the practices by which actors acquire information of their policy environments, which are conceptualised as structures enabling and constraining their actions. These practices involve intentions, interests and schemata. In our case analyses - the Nord Stream pipeline project and the Sakhalin Island's energy politics - we find that profit interests, as part of a wider business frame, most centrally guide Russian actors. The often-hyped energy superpower frame is found to be ambiguous. It generally does not bring the intentions of Russian actors together well, even if such a frame resonates with some of Russia's European customers. Energy security frames are found to be prevalent among Russia's customers and are highly differentiated. Environmental frames are mostly instrumentally deployed. Russian energy actors are capable of displaying collective intentionality, but are incapable of fully controlling the various dimensions of the complex policy environment.
Topic:
Security, Energy Policy, and Environment
Political Geography:
Russia and Europe

8. Expanding the Expansion of International Society: a new approach with empirical illustrations from West African and European interaction, 1400-1883

Author:
John Anthony Pella, Jr.
Publication Date:
01-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
The purpose of this article is to expand upon Hedley Bull and Adam Watson's work The Expansion of International Society (1984a), initially theoretically and thereafter through empirical illustrations. The premise is that Bull and Watson's approach can only take study of the expansion so far, as it creates silences that neglect aspects of international history that were central to the expansion process. As such, I initially focus on three features of Bull and Watson's theoretical approach that are thought to create these silences and a problematic Euro-centrism: historical periodisation, a neglect of non-European regions and the system/society distinction. I thereafter argue that the original Expansion's periodisation scheme needs to be broadened, that research into non-European regions before European contact is necessary and that interaction at the world society level should be considered. The benefits of this new approach are then illustrated, first in a study of the West African international society in its own right, and then in a study of the Afro-European interaction that took place in the context of that society. Ultimately, this new approach suggests that the expansion process was driven largely by the exchange of norms and ideas at the world society level and by the emergence of mutually constructed institutions over the course of several centuries.
Political Geography:
Africa and Europe

9. People out of place: allochthony and autochthony in the Netherlands' identity discourse - metaphors and categories in action

Author:
Dvora Yanow and Marleen van der Haar
Publication Date:
04-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
As with much of Europe, the Netherlands has no explicit 'race' discourse; however, the state, through its public policy and administrative practices, does categorise its population along 'ethnic' lines, using birthplace - one's own or one's (grand-) parent's - as the surrogate determining factor. The contemporary operative taxonomy has until recently been binary: autochtoon (of Dutch heritage) and allochtoon (of foreign birth). Used earlier at the provincial level in respect of internal migration, the taxonomy was expanded in 1999 to demarcate between 'Western' allochtoon and 'non-Western' allochtoon, with the latter being further subdivided into first and second generation. Informed by a 'generative metaphor' approach (Schon 1979) that links cognition to action, this article subjects the allochtoon/autochtoon binary to metaphor analysis and the Western/non-Western taxonomy to category analysis. The work done by 'birthplace' in the term pair suggests that they are, in their everyday usage, surrogates for a race discourse, carrying the same (ancient) assumptions about individual identity and the earth-air-sun-water of the spot on which one was born that underlies definitions-in-use of 'race'. Their meaning in contemporary policy discourse derives from the interaction of metaphoric and category structures, with implications for policy implementation.
Political Geography:
Europe and Netherlands

10. The importance of the Eurasian steppe to the study of international relations

Author:
Einar Wigen and Iver B Neumann
Publication Date:
07-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
This article is a call for making the Eurasian steppe an object of study within International Relations. The first section argues that the neglect of the steppe is due to 19th-century prejudice against non-sedentary polities as being barbarian. This is hardly a scholarly reason to neglect them. The second section is a nutshell overview of literature on the steppe from other fields. On the strength of these literatures, we postulate the existence of what we call an almost three thousand year long steppe tradition of ordering politics. The third section of the article suggests that the steppe tradition has hybridised sundry polity-building projects, from early polity-building in the European the Middle Ages via the Ottoman and Russian empires to contemporary Central Asian state-building. We conclude this exploratory piece by speculating whether a focus on the steppe tradition may have the potential to change our accounts of the emergence of European international relations at large.
Topic:
International Relations and Politics
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Central Asia, and Eurasia

11. Securing energy or energising security: the impact of Russia's energy policy on Turkey's accession to the European Union

Author:
Burak Bilgehan Özpek
Publication Date:
07-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
The emergence of an energy security crisis between Russia and European countries has cast doubt on the argument that commercial ties lead to peaceful political relations between states as the energy trade between Russia and Europe has been inclined to generate conflict rather than cooperation. Nevertheless, the crisis has showed that military security issues no longer dominate the agenda and that issues produce different degrees of cooperation and conflict between governments. Furthermore, governments cannot use military force in order to resolve issues in an era of interdependence. Therefore, the European Union (EU), which suffers from an asymmetric dependence on energy resources imported from or via Russia, has adopted a diversification policy. This policy not only affects energy security but also the EU's enlargement process. Accordingly, a diversification policy requires embracing alternative energy sources, such as Turkey's involvement in oil and gas pipeline projects bypassing Russia. Thus, Turkey's contribution to European energy security creates an interdependence, which could affect Turkey's relations with the EU.
Topic:
Security, Energy Policy, and Government
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and Turkey

12. Caribbean development alternatives and the CARIFORUM–European Union economic partnership agreement

Author:
Anthony Payne, Matthew Louis Bishop, and Tony Heron
Publication Date:
01-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
The Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) signed in October 2008 between the Caribbean and the European Union has been the subject of much controversy. There has been a marked split within the Caribbean between the officials and politicians who negotiated — and thus championed — the EPA and the wider academic and civil society community that subjected it to heavy criticism. The paper examines these debates in detail and situates them within the broader intellectual and practical panorama of Caribbean development alternatives. Specifically, it discusses how the terrain upon which development has been both theorised and practised in the region has narrowed significantly since the 1980s, with the EPA being the latest manifestation of this evolving trend. The paper consequently goes beyond an analysis of the short-term politics of the EPA to elucidate the deeper, structural explanations for the divisions over the EPA between the policy and academic communities and the wider implications of the Agreement for contemporary Caribbean development.
Topic:
Development
Political Geography:
Europe and Caribbean

13. The Common Agricultural Policy Health Check: time to check the health of the theory of the reform?

Author:
Marko Lovec and Emil Erjavec
Publication Date:
01-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
In 2008, the ministers of agriculture of European Union member states made a political agreement on the Common Agricultural Policy reform, also known as the Health Check. The reform coincided with three things: the ongoing Doha round of the World Trade Organization negotiations; political pressures to limit the costs of the policy financed from the common budget; and various 'new' policy issues. Rational institutional and constructivist approaches, which are often viewed as theoretical alternatives with each explaining some aspects of the reform, have employed simplified and narrow abstractions in conceptualising the role of these policy contexts. In order to identify the mechanisms facilitating the Health Check, a critical realist approach is proposed here, arguing that the relationship among the trade negotiations, budget bargaining, new issues and the policy reform can be explained by theoretically endorsing the asymmetrical development of the agricultural production factors and of production relations. A qualitative analysis is used to determine which of these three approaches seems to be better able to explain the empirical evidence.
Topic:
Development and Reform
Political Geography:
Europe

14. International organisations and policy diffusion: the global norm of lifelong learning

Author:
Anja p. Jakobi
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
This article analyses the role of international organisations in global policy diffusion, drawing on the example of lifelong learning, a currently widely appreciated concept in education policy. I explain this success based on a sociological institutionalist framework, arguing that lifelong learning has become a global norm in education policy. For this purpose, I conduct a quantitative study of 99 countries from 1996 to 2004, showing how the idea of lifelong learning has been disseminated by international organisations and how states have reacted to this development. I first outline the theoretical framework, highlighting in particular the crucial role of international organisations. In a further step, I present the data and methods. In the third part, I analyse the activities of several international organisations on lifelong learning. In the fourth step, I show how lifelong learning has spread, distinguishing the idea of lifelong learning and reforms linked to it. Fifth, as the quantitative analysis shows, international organisations like the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the European Union can explain a large part of dissemination when it comes to the idea of lifelong learning, but reforms are more dependent on national preconditions like the wealth of a country. In the conclusions, I sum up the article's main findings and outline further research areas linked to global diffusion processes.
Topic:
International Organization
Political Geography:
Europe

15. Aid allocation of the emerging Central and Eastern European donors

Author:
Balázs Szent-Iványi
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
In the past decade, a number of Central and Eastern European countries have emerged as new donors of foreign aid. Although these countries already had certain forms of development-related cooperation with Third World countries during the Cold War, the pre-1989 experiences are difficult to compare with their current, (re-)emerging aid policies. There is a clear pressure, related mostly to membership in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the European Union (EU), for these new donors to align themselves with the norms and principles of the international development aid regime. Many special characteristics are observable, however, in the Central and Eastern European donors, which predict that they will behave differently than the members of the OECD's Development Assistance Committee (DAC), the 'club' of advanced donor countries. In part, this may be related to the fact that their foreign aid policies are still in their infancy, but it is also undeniable that their motivations for giving aid are somewhat different than those of the Western donors. It is logical to assume that the consequences of these different motivations are identifiable in the quality and allocation of aid provided by the emerging donors.
Topic:
Foreign Aid
Political Geography:
Europe, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, and Slovakia

16. Everyday practices of international relations: people in organizations

Author:
Oliver Kessler and Xavier Guillaume
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
The idea that there are biases, blind spots or exclusionary if not oppressive forces in the very way scientific endeavour is organised still appears to be a rather strange idea. It runs counter to the ingrained idea that science is reflective. Science is still predominantly associated with the idea of a separation between values and facts and a clear separation between subject and object, that is, the normative ideal that researchers are detached from their 'object of study'. With it comes the idea that knowledge and power need to be separated before the scientific enterprise can enjoy the fruits of objectivity and neutrality. True knowledge can only be produced where power is absent. Yet, regardless of whether one subscribes to, for instance, the Kuhnian notion of paradigm shifts, Wittgenstein's idea of therapy, or Foucault's arché, as soon as the well-trodden paths of positivist philosophy of science are re-situated within a series of relations, practices, institutions, and persons, questions regarding scientific endeavour stop being solely confined to objectively instituted rules of evaluation.
Topic:
International Relations
Political Geography:
Europe

17. A global journal with Central European roots: a vision for the JIRD

Publication Date:
07-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
The JIRD is a global journal with Central European roots. We have established a diverse editorial team of scholars from Europe and North America linked first by a commitment to publish highest quality scholarship in international relations (IR) and development, broadly conceived, regardless of substantive or methodological focus; and second by a common awareness of the contribution the Central and East European (CEE) experience can make to the study of international politics. We envision the JIRD as a globally relevant journal with a CEE touch. This does not mean dealing primarily with CEE themes, although the region will naturally remain more strongly in focus than in comparable IR journals. More profoundly, it means nurturing both CEE IR scholarship and also the broader transnational scholarly context in which it develops.
Topic:
International Relations and Development
Political Geography:
Europe and North America

18. Into the 'Heart of Darkness' — EU's civilising mission in the DR Congo

Author:
Gabi Schlag
Publication Date:
07-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
'Normative Power Europe', a concept introduced by Ian Manners in 2002 in order to describe the international identity of the European Union (EU), remains a lasting point of reference for academic as well as political debates. However, many contributions to this discussion tend to essentialise notions of a collective identity where normative self-depictions are uncritically used as an explanation for the EU's external actions. The main challenge, thus, is to reconstruct how a self is invented in the conduct of foreign and security policies as a discourse of locating others and articulating insecurities. These discursive processes, I will argue, are highly productive of hierarchical relations and justification narratives overlooked by most research on the EU's security and defence policies. The results of a reconstruction of EU discourse on the European Security and Defence Policy missions in the Democratic Republic of Congo lead to the preliminary conclusion that the EU might increasingly be imagined as a 'civilising power', partly re-activating its imperial legacies of the 19th century.
Topic:
Foreign Policy
Political Geography:
Europe

19. Hierarchy in World Politics

Author:
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and George Lawson
Publication Date:
04-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
With this Special Issue the editorial team fulfils a campaign promise, so to speak. In our original proposal to assume the editorship of the Journal of International Relations and Development, we proposed three special features: a Forum on IR in Eastern and Central Europe (published in issue 12:2), a Forum on post-Communist and post-Socialist transitions (published in issue 12:4), and a Special Issue on hierarchy in world politics. The four papers collected here represent the end result of a process of soliciting proposals for manuscripts, putting those manuscripts through the regular peer-review process, and selecting papers that would allow a multi-faceted exploration of a complex topic that has made its way back into IR after the long interregnum of theories and models that focused on presumptively equivalent states operating under conditions of anarchy. But this is more than simply 'bringing hierarchy back in'; the new focus on unequal relations of power in world politics is a good deal more sophisticated than the sometimes blunt assertions of dependency theory and early world-systems accounts. The papers that we have assembled for this Special Issue represent some, but by no means all, of the rich analytical diversity in contemporary accounts of hierarchy in world politics.
Topic:
International Relations
Political Geography:
Europe

20. Gender and race in the European security strategy: Europe as a 'force for good'

Author:
Maria Stern
Publication Date:
01-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
Taking Robert Kagan's imagery of US-Mars and Europe-Venus as a point of departure, this article probes into how the naturalised reproduction of Europe in the text of the European Security Strategy (ESS) discursively occurs through intermeshing gendered and racialised discourses. The article therefore offers a narrative that has been largely silenced in conversations about the EU as a global security actor. By paying attention to embedded 'sticky' gendered and racialised signs in the text of the ESS, the article argues that the delineations drawn to secure Europe in the text of the ESS also engender 'Europe' as multiply masculine by dividing the world into sharp spatio-temporal distinctions. Echoing Europe's colonial past, the ESS represents its 'Others' as both feminised and subordinate. In this sense, the article argues that the European project of security-development as written in the ESS is both civilising (normative) and violently exclusionary - in contradistinction to many contemporary depictions of Europe as a normative power and a harbour of tolerance. The gendered and colonial grammar of these spatial and temporal distinctions work to naturalise a certain (re)production of 'Europe', yet haunt the secure Europe and the better world promised in the strategy.
Topic:
Security
Political Geography:
United States and Europe

21. Facing up to financialisation and the aesthetic economy: high time for aesthetics in international political economy!

Author:
Claes Belfrage
Publication Date:
07-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
'Aesthetics' has been a core concern of modern European philosophy1 (and other subject areas in the Humanities) since Baumgarten's Aesthetica (1750). Its reified dominant meaning is the result of deep struggle and is linked to dominant ideological forms in the capitalist economy, of which International Political Economy (IPE) forms part.
Political Geography:
Europe

22. Power beyond conditionality: European organisations and the Hungarian minorities in Romania and Slovakia

Author:
Jakob Skovgaard
Publication Date:
10-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
The article addresses the power of three international organisations, the Council of Europe (CoE), the European Union (EU) and the High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM) regarding the Hungarian minority policies of Romania, Slovakia and Hungary. It is argued that most of the academic literature within the field misses the point when relying on a rather limited conceptualisation of power as something which one actor uses to get another actor to do what it otherwise would not have done. Using a broader conceptualistion of power, including the power to interpret norms and their application, leads to a better understanding of the roles of the CoE and the HCNM. Analysing the three organisations' approaches to the Hungarian minority education policy in Romania and Slovakia, as well as the Hungarian Status Law, reveals how the CoE and the HCNM interpreted norms of national minority policy and their application to the addressed policies. These interpretations shaped EU policy on the subject, and Romania, Slovakia and Hungary had to take the EU policy seriously due to their desire to join the EU. The three organisations engaged in an exchange of power, in which the CoE and the OSCE High Commissioner bestowed legitimacy on the EU, which in return could provide them with increased leverage over the accession states.
Political Geography:
Europe, Romania, and Slovakia

23. The European rescue, recommodification, and/or reterritorialisation of the (becoming-capitalist) state? Marx, Deleuze, Guattari, and the European Union

Author:
David J Bailey
Publication Date:
12-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
Years ago at a workshop one of our colleagues, whose name we shall keep anonymous, claimed — to the amusement of the participants — that International Relations (IR) is where theory goes to die. Given the vicissitudes of intellectual fads that sweep through IR, one could, perhaps, be forgiven for condemning what appears to be the superficiality of the theoretical engagements within the field. From another perspective, though, this judgement could be considered unfair, and that the convergence of so many disparate theoretical interventions in IR is actually a testament to its growing vitality. Though many scholars now label themselves constructivists, this is quite a polyglot category that seems to indicate a movement beyond the contrived inter-school debates rather than the rise of a new intellectual hegemon.
Political Geography:
Europe

24. Conceptualising neighbourhood: Russia vs its 'others'

Author:
Andrey S Makarychev
Publication Date:
06-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
Russia's longing to be a part of Europe is usually manifested in the Kremlin's inclination to politically deal with (and get recognition from) the core European Union (EU) powers. Moscow, which regularly goes through a process of self-assertion as a great power, agrees to communicate only with those who are considered to possess a comparable international status.
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and Moscow