Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans最新文献

{"title":"Changes in the party politics of the new EU member states in Central Europe: patterns of Europeanization and democratization","authors":"Paul G. Lewis","doi":"10.1080/14613190802145911","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14613190802145911","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":313717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125579872","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Parties and the party system of Serbia and European integrations","authors":"Slaviša Orlović","doi":"10.1080/14613190802146356","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14613190802146356","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we consider the impact of the Europeanization process on the parties and party system of Serbia. First of all, we consider five fields of party Europeanization: political/programme contents, organization, the model (pattern) of party competition, the party–government relationship and the relationship with the supranational party system, as well as the specifics of a case study of Serbia. Political parties play a central role in contemporary European politics. The term ‘Europe’ has become pretty flexible. Many perceive themselves as being part of it, yet formally many are still outside it. Political parties are at the same time both subjects and objects of changes conditioned by European integration processes. In states that are becoming members of the European Union (EU), parties have played an active role but they themselves have undergone changes in this process. While old members created European policies, new members are only in position to incorporate them in their legal and political systems. After the first direct elections for the European Parliament in 1979, we can also talk about the European party system alongside the national party systems. The latter differ depending on the actual phase a state is in within the European integration process: a member, a candidate, in the negotiation process or simply a prospective applicant for EU membership. Political parties, torn by processes related to international or supranational entities, are stillmore efficient innational arenas. For the member states, European integrations have created a new arena for party activity and for 30 years already party elites have been preparing candidates and party manifestoes in competition for the European Parliament. In this way, parties are building bridges among sovereign nations and via supranational sovereignty which makes decisions related to member states. MEPs are elected in as many ways (diverse sets of election rules) as there are members of the EU. At the EU level, political parties are represented in a dual way: as party groups","PeriodicalId":313717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128417028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: Europeanization and party politics in the territory of former Yugoslavia","authors":"Danica Fink-Hafner, Robert Ladrech","doi":"10.1080/14613190802145432","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14613190802145432","url":null,"abstract":"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 focuses on the relationship between the European, national, and in somecases, the sub-national, level of party relationswithin theEU. Thiswould include the organizational development andactivities of transnational party federations (or Europarties), the development of programmatic positions on theEUamongnational parties, etc. Itwould also include the analysis of the pattern of competition within the European Parliament between party groups and the impact of the EU on national party systems. The second direction in which national political parties havebeen approachedwithin the context of the ‘impact of Europe’ has been related to EU enlargements. The establishment of a scholarly connection between European integration on the one hand, and the dynamics of national political parties on the other, was originally confined to political phenomena in Western Europe. This is not surprising as the first studies explaining the emergence of Europarties, analysis of direct elections to the European Parliament, and soon thereafter individual party stances vis-à-vis the EC/EU, began to emerge at the end of the 1970s when competitive party systems were located exclusively in this area of Europe. This changed with the processes associated with the accession to the EU of a number of post-communist countries in 2004. From the late 1990s onwards, scholars investigated the impact of theEUon the emerging political systems and economies of these countries, in many cases under the label of ‘Europeanization’. During the pre-accession period, approaches to the study of parties and elections in these countries were based on those developed to study competitive elections in the West. Thus models of voter volatility, party organization, etc., were incorporated into analytical frameworks for Central and Eastern European (CEE) parties and party systems. By the early 2000s, however, adjustments based upon empirical political reality promoted new advances in the study—and expectations—of parties and the EU inCEE countries. Rates of electoral volatility, in general, have remained high compared to theWest; Eurosceptic public opinion has been changing (often with ups and downs in the specific country’s success in relations with the EU); party organization remains weak; etc.Apart from these ‘generic’ features, it should benoted that inmanypostcommunist countries Europeanization under the slogan ‘returning to Europe’ became anew ideology supported bymanypolitical parties aswell as an informed positive opinion among decision-makers and opinion-formers, making the EU a credible alternative for CEE post-communist countries during the 1990s. Since EU","PeriodicalId":313717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123104966","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Europeanization and the variable influence of the EU: national parties and party systems in Western and Eastern Europe","authors":"Robert Ladrech","doi":"10.1080/14613190802145580","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14613190802145580","url":null,"abstract":"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","PeriodicalId":313717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128929940","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Impact of the Europeanization process on the transformation of the party system of Montenegro","authors":"Zlatko J. Vujović, O. Komar","doi":"10.1080/14613190802146430","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14613190802146430","url":null,"abstract":"Europeanization and democratization are strongly connected processes in postcommunist European countries. The prospect of becoming integrated with the community of developed European countries is a key motivating factor for introducing changes in these countries, including Montenegro. Burdened by its recent history, Montenegrin society is undergoing significant transformations of all aspects, including its party system. Some serious work has been done in the field of studying the processes involved in the Europeanization of national party systems. Constituting the European Union (EU) has started to have a more important top-down impact and therefore the transformation of the party systems which has followed has become more evident and interesting. In this paper we accept the definition of the term ‘Europeanization’ given in one of the most important works in this field, namely, The Europeanization of National Political Parties—Power and Organizational Adaptation by Thomas Poguntke, Nicholas Aylott, Elisabeth Carter, Robert Ladrech and Kurt Richard Luther. Following this, we understand Europeanization as institutionalization of the European political system which has certain effects on domestic structures and member states and, concretely, intraorganizational change in national political parties as a result of the ongoing process of European integration. A legitimate question can be posed here: what kind of impact can Europeanization have on the transformation of the party systems of states in such an early accession phase as Montenegro finds itself in? Namely, a Stabilisation and Association Agreement between Montenegro and the EU was signed on 15 October 2007 and will come into force when it is ratified by all 27 EU members, the European and the Montenegrin Parliament, which could take some time. Candidacy for EU membership will be requested by the end of 2008 and further dynamics of the accession process will depend on many external and internal circumstances. Some of the main premises for detecting the Europeanization process are missing. For example, Montenegro does not have representatives in the European Parliament and therefore political parties’","PeriodicalId":313717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130035269","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Responses to Aleksa Djilas, ‘The Academic West and the Balkan Test’, JSEB, Vol. 9, No. 3, December 2007","authors":"John R. Lampe","doi":"10.1080/14613190801923276","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14613190801923276","url":null,"abstract":"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,","PeriodicalId":313717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127872649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Power politics and integration into Western institutions: the placement of embassies for Romania and Bulgaria","authors":"C. Webster, Stanislav Ivanov","doi":"10.1080/14613190801895961","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14613190801895961","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":313717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125617000","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Vojislav Koštunica—some reflections on his time as Serbian Premier","authors":"Janine Natalya Clark","doi":"10.1080/14613190801895862","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14613190801895862","url":null,"abstract":"With Koštunica, you have a repetition of the same policy and the same obsessions as you had with Milošević. The difference is that Milošević was like a cancer of the skin where everything looked ugly. Koštunica, on the other hand, is like a cancer of the bones. Everything looks normal on the surface, but is sick and unhealthy inside. (Miljenko Dereta, executive director of the Civic Initiative).1  1 Interview, Belgrade, 4 July 2006.","PeriodicalId":313717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122802759","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"How that city changed","authors":"Bruce H. Clark","doi":"10.1080/14613190801923292","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14613190801923292","url":null,"abstract":"After its portrayal byMarkMazower, the sprawling conurbation on the Thermaic Gulf will never be quite the same again, and almost everybody who lives in that place, or is concerned by its future or past, has been feeling the difference. Last year, when the book was being presented, in Greek translation, to a distinguished audience in the city it describes, the social anthropologist Effie Voutira described her own experience of the ‘Mazower effect’. When travelling abroad, especially in the USA, a conversation with fellow academics about where she lived would quickly lead to the question: ‘So you’re from Mazower’s Salonica . . . ?’ And she was happy to answer in the affirmative. Mazower’s narrative begins with the Ottoman takeover of the battered Byzantine port, after a three-day siege, in 1430; he then describes the influx of Sephardic refugees from Spain at the beginning of the 16th century and explains how one of the city’s numerous titles was ‘Madre de Israel’—for at least two centuries, it was the biggest Jewish metropolis in the world. The issue of nomenclature, Mazower points out, was never simple. In medieval times, at least 13 variants of Salonicco/Selanik/Solun were recorded. In opting for ‘Salonica’, the author has chosen, and in a way re-popularized, the nearest thing that has ever existed to a standard English rendering of the city known in Greek (and in many international contexts) as Thessaloniki. In addition to re-stamping Salonica on the mental map of the global chattering classes, the appearance of Mazower’s wonderful book, and the mainly positive reception it has received in Greece, has had some important political consequences. Mazower hasmade it much harder for anyonewho expects to be taken seriously to read that city’s history in the light of nationalist stereotypes, or any other form of crude essentialism. Rather than telling us what conclusions we should draw from the extraordinary story of Salonica’s ever-changing ethnic composition and cultural life, it helps readers to avoid certain tempting but deeply wrong ways of thinking. The book does not impose any specific theory about the mechanics of inter-religious or inter-ethnic coexistence, but it does knock certain foolish yet persistent ideas on the head, and that in itself is a hugely valuable service. For a start, it will hardly be possible now for any serious historian to imply that Salonica always existed ‘for’ any one particular ethnic group, with the","PeriodicalId":313717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129439356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Multilateral free trade agreements for Western Balkans","authors":"Franjo Štiblar","doi":"10.1080/14613190801895953","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14613190801895953","url":null,"abstract":"Peace and stabilization in the region can come about only through cooperation amongst member countries, which should be initiated as an organic initiative from below and should not be forced by the authorities from above, if it is to have any chance of succeeding.Among the different possible forms of cooperation, economic cooperation has the most important role and trade is its best representative. The goal of this section is to analyse the existing trade flows of the Western Balkan countries and discuss the potential effect of a new multilateral free trade arrangement (SEFTA—South East European Free Trade Agreement) in light of the broader economic cooperation among these countries and their integration into the EU and the world economy. This agreement was signed on 17 December 2006, but by autumn 2007 it was still not operational. Uvalic identified two controversial questions regarding trade among the Western Balkan countries: first, how important is regional trade within South East Europe (SEE), and second, is there a potential for its growth? Wittich posed the question as to whether the increase in trade with the EU at the expense of intra-trade in the SEE region indicates a trade diversion in the European context, as the trade liberalization with the EU prior to the regional trade liberalization diverted some trade flows previously directed to the SEE partners. For the Western Balkan countries liberalization sequencing is the other way round and thus less supportive for the intra-regional trade. The EU bilateral Stabilization and Association Agreements (SAAs) with some Western Balkan countries were signed and applied before the asymmetric uniform regime on Autonomous Trade Preferences (ATP) was applied for all Western Balkan countries late in 2000, while bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) between these countries were signed and applied later, in the 2002–2004 period. Due to such sequencing, the trade diversion from the region to the EU took place first and intra-regional bilateral FTAs were signed later among the ‘spokes’, which can","PeriodicalId":313717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116086829","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}