Columbia International Affairs Online

CIAO DATE: 12/07

Perspectives

27 Winter 2006/2007

Complete Issue (PDF, 142 pages, 705 KB)

• IMF Surveillance and America’s Turkish Delight (PDF, 20 pages, 161 KB)
  Besma Momani

  Recently, there have been US offers to payoff Turkey for its cooperation in the war against Iraq. They are as follows: First, USD 6 billion were offered in exchange for the use of Turkey’s bases during a US attack on Iraq; second, USD 1 billion dollars were offered in exchange for the use of the Turkish air space, contingent upon Turkish compliance with the continued IMF surveillance. It is argued that the United States used the IMF as an agent to impose, monitor, and assess strict financial discipline on Turkey. Borrowing arguments from the growing literature on delegation to international organisations and principal-agent models, this case raises important points and explains how the US have benefited from delegating loan monitoring to the IMF’s surveillance function.

• The European Union’s Strategic Non-Engagement in Belarus: Challenging the Hegemonic Notion of the EU as a Toothless Value Diffuser (PDF, 19 pages, 162 KB)
  Ian Klinke

  Beyond the European Union’s increasingly fortified eastern border lies the continent’s blind spot – Europe’s last dictatorship. The Republic of Belarus, which slid into authoritarian rule in the mid-1990s, is amongst the academically most underinvestigated states in contemporary Europe. This article will contribute to the thin body of literature on Belarus by exploring the policies of the European Union, the continent’s self-styled bringer of peace and prosperity, towards its unknown eastern neighbour. Within the existing literature on the EU’s policies towards Belarus, the article identifies a dominant narrative, which depicts the Union as a ‘toothless value diffuser’. This hegemonic notion shall be challenged and replaced by the concept of “strategic nonengagement”, which more adequately describes the EU’s approach vis-à-vis Minsk.

• Conflict Transformation the Estonian Way: The Estonian-Russian Border Conflict, European Integration and Shifts in Discursive Representation of the “Other” (PDF, 23 pages, 178 KB)
  Jevgenia Viktorova

  This article explores the scope and character of the transformation of conflictive relations between Estonia and Russia that has taken place over the past decade in the context of the EU’s latest round of enlargement. Examining the allegation regarding the pacifying nature of European integration, I assess the contribution of various “pathways of EU influence” (Diez et al., 2004, 2006) to the shifts in the construction of identity and otherness in Estonian-Russian relations, based on the analysis of (de-) securitising moves as well as references to the EU as a legitimising factor of attitudinal change in elite and public discourses. Focusing primarily on Estonia as one of the new EU member states, I demonstrate that despite some evidence of de-securitisation of the Russian “other” in Estonian elite and public discourses, this transformation has remained limited and uneven and cannot be unequivocally attributed to the effects of European integration. While the construction of Estonia’s political identity is still heavily dependent upon a conflictive image of Russia, a large portion of public discourses advocating a more tolerant and secure identity construction vis-à-vis Russia “compensate” for this by a latent antagonism towards Estonian politics with an admixture of Euroscepticism.

• Legitimisation Struggles in Hungarian Politics: The Contours of Competing Foreign Policies in Prime Ministers’ Speeches (PDF, 33 pages, 210 KB)
  Katalin Sárváry

  Identity and foreign policy are posited as mutually determining one another in Constructivist theories of International Relations. The present paper focuses on the analysis of Hungarian foreign policy emanating from the identities of the political right and the left. The purpose is to collect the arguments legitimizing the foreign policies pursued by the two sides and see to what extent they add up to a coherent foreign policy, which the country will follow. Despite the rather tense relationship between the two dominant parties, the analysis arrives to the surprising coherence of foreign policy. The paper uses the discourse analysis method to focus on the Prime Ministers’ speeches, of the two sides, as the main spokesmen of the dominant parties’ foreign policy lines.

• Managing Expectations and Hidden Demands: Options for the German EU Presidency (PDF, 17 pages, 146 KB)
  Andreas Maurer

  Abstract: The “pause for thought” decreed by the heads of state and the government (after the voters in France and the Netherlands rejected the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe) has been extended for at least another year. The European Council meeting held on the 15th and 16th of June 2006 did little more than sketch out the way forward for the period 2006–2008. By the end of 2008, decisions should be made about how to continue the reform process. Before anyone can agree on how to move forward, all 27 European Union member states would have to state clearly what goals they are pursuing in the process of institutional reform (a process which all sides agree is necessary) and what steps they believe are required for achieving these goals. In this context, clear statements on the importance of the Treaty and its fate are needed. It is unlikely that Consensus on these issues be achieved among all 27 member states. Regardless, in order to allow a constructive discussion to take place, the 27 member states would have to agree on a shared criteria for assessing the reform proposals, that are on the table and on the options for resolving the “constitutional crisis.”

REVIEWS

• Akbar Ahmed and Brian Forst: After Terror: Promoting Dialogue Among Civilizations (PDF, 5 pages, 70 KB)
  London: Polity Press, 2005, 160 pages, ISBN: 10 0745635024.
  Petr Urbánek

• Christopher Booker and Richard North: The Great Deception. The Secret History of the European Union (Skryté dějiny evropské integrace od roku 1918 do současnosti) (PDF, 3 pages, 61 KB)
  Brno: Barrister & Principal, 2006, 624 pages, ISBN: 80-7364-026-0.
  Lucie Tunkrová

• Hanns W. Maull: Germany’s Uncertain Power: Foreign Policy of the Berlin Republic (PDF, 5 pages, 69 KB)
  New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 288 pages, ISBN: 1-4039-4662-0.
  Daniel Adolf

• Andrey Zagorskiy: Helsinki Process (Negotiations within the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe 1972–1991) (PDF, 5 pages, 72 KB)
  Moscow: Publishing House PRAVA TCHELOVEKA, 2005, 447 pages, ISBN: 5-7712-0285-1.
  Zdeněk Matějka

• Jan Zielonka: Europe as Empire. The Nature of the Enlarged European Union (PDF, 4 pages, 66 KB)
  1st edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 293 pages, ISBN: 0-19-929221-3.
  Ian Klinke

• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS (PDF, 2 pages, 50 KB)