The 2004 enlargement of the European Union brought in 10 new member states: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Hungary, Slovenia, Malta and Cyprus. Echoing concerns...
About a decade ago distinctions between ‘old’ European Union (EU) members and prospective members started to be made in the literature. Pointing out differences between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ EU membe...
The article falls into three parts: an introduction that points to some general links between Europeanization, democratization and party status in the new accession countries, a more extensive discussion of developments in particular areas of party development since the enlargement of 2004, and some tentative conclusions (or suggestions) about continuing processes of democratization within the context of the European Union. In terms of party politics in relation to European impacts on democratization we conclude that in CE the logic of national party competition has overridden other logics, including that of the EU. Integration may have increased the distance between elites and citizens in some cases and depoliticized certain issues (where the acquis left little room for autonomous politics) but, in contrast to claims made of Western Europe, it is not clear that there has been a ‘hollowing out’ of party competition. The features of more successful democratization cluster in the Central and East European countries closer to the EU core. The non-democracies and bare electoral democracies of the region all lie beyond the ambit of the EU. All the liberal democracies are now EU members, and those with some defects in this regard are either the most recent (Bulgaria and Romania) or prospective (Croatia) members. But there is still a paradox in the accession process as it privileges the core national executive and puts strain on its relations with other components of the political system – possibly helping to undermine democratic stability.
Although the world has never been wealthier than its current state, there are more than a billion people, one in five of the world's population, still living in extreme poverty. As the world has be...
Foreign market entry can play a very significant role in a nation's economic prosperity. There are essentially four principal means of foreign market entry: exporting, licensing, joint-venture part...
At the turn of more than a decade of violent and rather uncertain transitions to democracy, the EU has envisaged a new vision for the Balkans - stable, self-sufficient democracies, at peace with themselves and each other, with market economies and the rule of law, and which will be either members of the EU or in the road to membership. The ambitious project builds on a new strategy, the so-called Stabilisation and Association Process (SAP), which for the first time comprises the perspective of European membership and outlines the tools of achieving that for all the countries in the region. The SAP has, thus, created high expectations for change, which are further nourished by the strong assumptions on the EU transformative power in the last wave of enlargement. Still, enlargement in the Western Balkans (WB) lacks both comparative analysis and depth of research, when compared to the bourgeoning literature on Central and East European Countries (CEEC). This article questions whether the SAP justifies the strong assumptions on the EU transformative power in the region. The article suggests that although the EU policies have advanced to embrace the promise of membership and outline the accession stages for all the Balkan countries, the loaded agenda of both stabilization and association coupled with a weaker promise of membership can arguably erode the power of enlargement conditionality in the region.
Slovenian political parties' development at the end of the 1980s followed nearly the same patterns seen in other Central and Eastern European countries. It was connected very closely with two main ...
The literature on the Europeanization of post-communist states often points to the substantial difference between this process and that occurring in the older member states. Primary attention has been drawn to the relationship between the European Union (EU) and the new and prospective member states, namely, conditions laid down in the economic realm—transition to a market economy— and the political realm—monitoring progress in meeting democratic criteria, administrative reform, and the promotion and institutionalization of human rights and minority rights. The direct and indirect involvement of the EU in this transition by post-communist states has no comparable equivalent in Western experiences of either becoming a member of the EU or in subsequent domestic change as a result of membership (i.e. Europeanization). When we turn our attention more specifically to the issue of Europeanization and political parties, there is also a clear difference between the Western and Eastern experiences. This is not surprising, given the fundamental degree of political system change that has and is occurring in post-communist states. Nevertheless, it may be worthwhile to compare and contrast more clearly and explicitly the distinction between the two processes, and in so doing gain further insights into the trajectories of change in each set. Employing Ladrech’s five research dimensions of Europeanization and parties, the paper briefly summarizes in Part 1 findings in each dimension among Western parties, and then contrasts these general findings with those among Eastern/post-communist parties. Due to the constraints of space, the presentation and comparison will remain at a fairly general level of analysis. As the concept of Europeanization is employed in its ‘top-down’ understanding, a consideration of the ‘top’, that is, the EU itself, or more specifically its influence or attraction on its current and prospective member states, will be explored as an explanatory factor in variable Europeanization dynamics. Part 2 therefore explores the variable nature of the
In his lengthy and erudite review, first of Sabrina Ramet’s Thinking about Yugoslavia and then of my Balkans into Southeastern Europe, Aleksa Djilas calls attention to three of the major problems that still burden Balkan history. All are problems that help to preserve the region’s pejorative designation as Balkan even for the recent past. At the centre of South-eastern Europe’s pejorative recent past are of course the wars of Yugoslavia’s dissolution. First, this recent violence has tempted some of ‘the academic West’, in Djilas’s phrase, into separating the warring sides on grounds of guilt or innocence, black or white, then reading the verdicts back into historical patterns of Balkan or unBalkan behaviour. Western scholars who have been attracted to such an unambiguous moral narrative typically exonerate, at least in the main, Croats and Slovenes or Bosnian Muslims with their Habsburg heritage while tracing back Serb guilt to Balkan roots. For the 1990s of course, the abuses of the Milošević regime left little room for reversing this moral narrative in Serbia’s favour or even, in the Bosnian case, room for accepting what I have called ‘the fallacy of false equivalence’, holding all three sides equally guilty for ‘the same dirty business’. Second, the wars of Yugoslavia’s dissolution have tempted regional scholars, particularly but not exclusively from Serbia and Greece, with another moral narrative, the primary responsibility of Western, primarily American intervention. They fall back on the dated paradigm of Great Power predominance in the affairs of the fledgling Balkan states of the 19th century, still defensible during and after the two world wars but otherwise debatable. American survival as the one present-day Great Power after the collapse of the Soviet Union has revived its attraction as a way of avoiding domestic responsibility. Third, these two moral narratives of the 1990s, each read back across the 20th century, challenge the region’s own younger scholars to take the lead back from ‘the academic West’ in re-examining the domestic history of the pre-1989 and pre-1945 periods. For Greece, re-examination of the three rounds of Civil War in the 1940s, with constructive contention between scholars criticizing first the anti-Communist and then the Communist sides, was already under way by the 1980s. Elsewhere, freedom from ethnic or international stereotyping is appearing in new scholarship from Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia, and also Bulgaria and Romania. Working from primary sources to conclusions, rather than the reverse,
The study of national political parties and the European Union (EU) has evolved over recent years in two directions. The first direction one might term ‘levels of analysis’, in which research focus...
The operational code is the most commonly used psychological/attitudinal approach applied by international relations scholars to the study of political leadership. Its basic assumption is that the belief system of a leader plays a decisive role in the way he/she understands a political event and the way he/she makes decisions. In this paper, I will first present the operational code of the former President of the Republic of Cyprus, George Vasiliou (1988–93), by using quantitative and qualitative analysis of primary and secondary sources. Then, three major policy decisions of Vasiliou over a period of time will be examined in order to determine if they have a direct linkage with his beliefs. If all three decisions have a consistency with his belief system, then we can conclude that his belief system played a decisive role.
Romania and Bulgaria joined the European Union in January 2007 and they share many characteristics. In this work, we will investigate the placement of embassies for the two countries to determine if the placement of embassies seems to be influences by the desire to integrate into Western European institutions or is largely interested in realist concerns. In this analysis, the authors perform logistical regressions on the placement of embassies for 168 countries. The findings illustrate that there is little reason to believe that Romania and Bulgaria have allocated embassies based upon the need to integrate themselves politically into the EU and NATO. The evidence seems to indicate that both countries allocate embassies based upon realist principles and still have embassies in countries as an artifact of their Communist legacies.
When the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) applied for admission to the European Union in March 2004, it was the culmination of a long and difficult road since it had gained its independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in September 1991. Although FYROM was the only republic of former Yugoslavia which gained its independence peacefully and without bloodshed, in a little over a decade the viability of the new state had been challenged more than once due to political, ethnic and economic reasons. Yet, despite tremendous difficulties and against all odds, FYROM not only surmounted these obstacles but as of December 2005 is officially an EU candidate country. This can be considered a tremendous achievement for a country which many feared would be the next domino in the cycle of violence which followed the break-up of Yugoslavia. This paper will analyse FYROM’s transition and economic development since independence, as well as the country’s relations with the European Union and the prospects for EU membership. The stimulus for this paper is based on three premises. First, the process of FYROM’s political and economic transition is unprecedented in range and scope. Specifically, FYROM’s transition has been threefold: from a centrally planned to a market economy, from a regional to a national economy, and from a part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to an independent state and an EU candidate country. This fact makes FYROM’s experience particularly interesting as a case study of a transition economy, and one which can provide valuable lessons. Other examples of countries who successfully undertook a threefold transition differ in that these countries were economically among the strongest of their respective federations. Thus, they not only had strong economic motivations which led them to seek independence, they also were able to launch their transitions from a more solid starting point in terms of economic development, infrastructure, etc. FYROM was one of the poorest regions of the former Yugoslavia, and was particularly dependent on the transfer of federal funds; thus, unlike the countries referred to above, FYROM actually stood to lose from the breakdown of the federation. Second, FYROM’s transition and economic development since independence has not been extensively documented and there is an evident lack of literature on this subject. As a small state, which had been considered unviable due to the particularly unfavourable conditions under which it had gained independence,
The development of regional cooperation is in the best interests of all the western Balkan countries: it is a key factor for establishing political stability, security and economic prosperity.… In this context, regional cooperation is therefore a cornerstone of the EU's policy framework for the western Balkans—the stabilization and association process, which offers to the countries of the region the possibility of eventual EU membership. (Olli Rehn,1 European Commissioner for Enlargement) 1 European Commission, Regional Cooperation in the Western Balkans, European Commission, Brussels, 2005, p. 2. The [Southeast Europe] region must be given a perspective of re-joining the European mainstream—because the clearest lesson of the past 50 years is that integration breeds trust, stability and prosperity. (Lord Robertson,2 Secretary General NATO) 2 Southeast Europe Initiative—NATO Fact Sheet, < www.nato.int/docu/facts/2001/seei.htm> (10 November 2004).
As part of ongoing research, this paper attempts to explain how a non-governmental organization (NGO) engages in activities of social and institutional entrepreneurship in developing capabilities a...
Europeanization and democratization are strongly connected processes in post-communist European countries. The prospect of becoming integrated with the community of developed European countries is ...
