Columbia International Affairs Online

CIAO DATE: 12/07

Perspectives

26 Summer 2006

Complete Issue (PDF, 114 pages, YYY KB)

• The European Commission and Member States: Conflict Over Nuclear Safety (PDF, 18 pages, 120 KB)
  Regina S. Axelrod

  Nuclear energy has received increased attention in the European Union (EU) as a source of energy with the enlargement of 10 members many with Soviet designed nuclear power plants. It has been discussed as an alternative to fossil fuel plants as a strategy to meet Kyoto Protocol goals, reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However nuclear security and safety issues are major concerns. The European Union Commission introduced legislation harmonizing existing safety standards for all Member States. However, a conflict emerged between the Commission and Member States as to whether the EU should expand its legal authority in an area that has been the responsibility of the Member States. EU institutions have been unable to develop harmonized standards for nuclear power plants leaving issues of safety and the long-term disposal of radioactive waste and spent fuel unresolved.

• Austrian Neutrality: Burden of History in the Making or Moral Good Rediscovered? (PDF, 23 pages, 160 KB)
  Michal Kořan

  Since the late 1980s, when the importance of neutrality for Austrian politicians and officials significantly decreased, mainstream scholarship on Austrian foreign policy has condemned neutrality to oblivion. Today, these scholars feel considerable disappointment when they confront the return of the idea of neutrality even among previously neutrality-sceptical politicians. The aim of this essay is (1) to show that the inability to comprehend this development is caused primarily by posing the wrong questions and (2) to suggest a different orientation of future research.

• Complex Systems – New Conceptual Tools for International Relations (PDF, 23 pages, 155 KB)
  Ion Cîndea

  Globalization, as a social process, induces particular constraints on the analysis of peace and war. The increasing complexity of social systems can only be ignored at the cost of inefficient social intervention and a decrease in the understanding of the phenomena. The distinction between the “classical” and the “complex” system becomes an issue at the core of the epistemological debates. Non-linearity is inherent in politics, and therefore linearity assumptions do not help very much in understanding the non-linearity of the real world. In order to analyse peace and war from a complex systems perspective we need to identify the ways in which the states of peace or war can be stable attractors of the systems. The property which makes the attractors valuable for studying conflicts and peace is their emergent nature. In order to make the concept “attractor” more operational, we analyse the “degree of freedom” of the systems and the way it is diminished by the emergence of certain normative regulations. Social attractors express the limitation on the degree of freedom of the systems. The emergence of a powerful conflictual attractor in the system causes the system to return, after any perturbation, into the state of conflict. On the other hand, the emergence of pacific attractors is a condition for any stable peace. Finally, the case of the European Union is analyzed as an example of a pacific attractor that shaped the post-war European states system.

• The Geographical and Systemic Influences on Greek Foreign Policy in the Balkans in the 1990s (PDF, 22 pages, 157 KB)
  George Voskopoulos

  The aim of this article is to structurally and operationally link geography to foreign policy. Greek foreign policy will be used as a case study in order to define reasons for policy differentiation between Greece and its EC/EU partners. The analysis builds upon a state-centric assumption of state behaviour according to which a state’s foreign policy is determined by geography, culture, threat [mis]perceptions, domestic politics as well as its systemic features such as structure, interactions amongst players, the input and output ratio of the local subordinate system as well as its self-stabilizing potential. The analysis is formulated on the assumption that foreign policy choices are dependent on cultural elements, and that foreign policy cannot be formulated in a vacuum of domestic interests. To support the view that geography and system structure define state behaviour and affect international outcomes, the paper uses the two-security zone typology of M. Singer and A. Wildavsky that operationally and structurally differentiates Greece’s environment from that of its EC/EU partners. The emergence of the post-Cold War Balkan subordinate system and its characteristics will provide a causational approach to the adoption of self-help policies that may distance the country from its European partners. To look into the causes of this trend in Greek foreign policy in the 1990s, its policy adjustment margins in a zone of turmoil will be compared to the Western European zone of peace and within Greece’s systemic operational framework (Balkan subordinate system).

REVIEWS

• Christien van den Anker: The Political Economy of New Slavery (PDF, 4 pages, 65 KB)
  New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 272 pages, ISBN: 1-4039-1523-7.
  Tereza Němcová

• Harald Barrios, Martin Beck, Andreas Boeckh, Klaus Segbers (eds.): Resistance to Globalization: Political Struggle and Cultural Resilience in the Middle East, Russia, and Latin America (PDF, 3 pages, 63 KB)
  Münster, Hamburg, London: LIT Verlag, 2003, vi + 178 pages, ISBN: 3-8258-6749-8 (pbk).
  Gabriela Jovanoska

• László Csaba: The New Political Economy of Emerging Europe (PDF, 6 pages, 78 KB)
  Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2005, 359 pages, ISBN: 963 05 8196 5.
  Jan Hřích

• Jan Koehler and Christoph Zürcher (eds.): Potentials of Disorder: New Approaches to Conflict Analysis (PDF, 3 pages, 60 KB)
  Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 2003, 277 pages, ISBN: 0 7190 6241 1 (hbk).
  Špela Veselič

• Václav Tomek, Ondřej Slačálek: Anarchism: Freedom against Power (Anarchizmus: Svoboda proti moci) (PDF, 4 pages, 65 KB)
  Praha: Vyšehrad, 2006, 672 pages, ISBN: 80-7021-781-2.
  Zuzana Majbová

• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS (PDF, 2 pages, 36 KB)