Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans最新文献

{"title":"History, cultural identity and difference: the issue of Turkey's accession to the European Union in the French national press","authors":"Rabah Aissaoui","doi":"10.1080/14613190701216896","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14613190701216896","url":null,"abstract":"After four decades of strenuous attempts to join the European Union (EU) and a period of intense negotiations and political manoeuvring, Turkey finally managed to secure an agreement with the EU to open membership negotiations on 4 October 2005. This decision taken in Brussels was hailed by Abdullah Gül, the Turkish Foreign Minister, as a ‘historic moment’ and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stated that it represented a ‘giant leap’ for Turkey. Turkey was, to some extent, rewarded for the wide-ranging reforms that it has adopted over the 45 years since its decision to be part of the European project but also for the Western-inspired cultural, political and social transformation the country has experienced since the early years of the Kemalist era in the 1920s. In the final months of 2004, the issue of whether or not Turkey should be granted the right to start negotiations triggered heated debates in the French political and media scenes about the validity of allowing ‘in our midst’ a nation that many viewed as the quintessential ‘other’. The arguments that were exchanged divided politicians, journalists and other intellectuals across traditional political lines. Whilst Jacques Chirac remained in favour of Turkish membership, Conservative members of Parliament from Chirac’s majority and led by Philippe Pézemec called for a ‘national mobilization’ against Turkish entry to the EU. Ex-President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who had recently chaired the Convention on the European Constitution, declared himself against Turkey’s bid as did, on the left, ex-Socialist Prime Minister Laurent Fabius and Member of Parliament Manuel Valls, thereby challenging the Socialist Party’s generally favourable stance on Turkey’s entry.","PeriodicalId":313717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131449169","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":"Japan and Southeastern Europe","authors":"Asteris Huliaras","doi":"10.1080/14613190701216920","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14613190701216920","url":null,"abstract":"A few months after the beginning of the Second World War, a book entitled The Balkans appeared in Japanese bookstores. It was written by Hitoshi Ashida, a Japanese diplomat who had served in Europe. After the war, Ashida turned to politics and became Prime Minister of Japan. The book focused on the policies of the then Great Powers in the Balkans. For Ashida—as well as for the Japanese public at the time—Japan was not a participant in Balkan politics, but a far-away observer. Fifty years later, the situation was different. In the early 1990s, the wars in Yugoslavia attracted the interest of Japan’s public and of its governing elite. In contrast to the Ashida years, now Japan was not a geographically distant observer. Japan was a participant, one of the great powers involved in the region. As the Japanese constitution imposes significant restrictions on external military engagements, aid is one of Japan’s main foreign policy tools. Not surprisingly, Japan was mainly involved in the Balkans as a donor. This paper attempts to examine this ‘soft’ involvement of one of the world’s leading economic powers in one of the world’s most conflict-ridden zones.","PeriodicalId":313717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122871463","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":"Spanish foreign policy: party alternatives or the pursuit of consensus?","authors":"R. Gillespie","doi":"10.1080/14613190701216995","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14613190701216995","url":null,"abstract":"The Spanish general election of March 2004 not only produced a surprise result but also had an unusually strong foreign policy focus, representing a rarity in electoral contests both in Spain and in western and southern Europe. While Aznar’s People’s Party (PP) ultimately paid a price for its Iraq policy, the early pronouncements made by the ensuing Zapatero administration indicated that the Socialist Party (PSOE) would continue to disagree with the PP over a range of international issues: most ostentatiously over Iraq, but also over Spain’s location on the Euro-Atlantic landscape, in relation to Latin America, towards the Mediterranean and over the Western Sahara dispute. While the Socialists blamed their rivals for having broken with a ‘Polı́tica de Estado’ in foreign policy and called for a return to bipartisan (and indeed broader) consensus, neither party has consistently pursued a foreign policy rapprochement since that time. These developments represent something of a sea-change in Spanish politics, with foreign policy contested just as fiercely now as domestic policy has been since the end of the democratic transition—the latter having been a ‘transition through transaction’. Even during the first Aznar government (1996–2000), most observers continued to believe that a substantial foreign policy consensus among the ‘electable’ parties, which had emerged under González, was sufficiently well established to have survived the 13 years of Socialist government. By the 1990s foreign policy was commonly referred to by PSOE and PP alike as a ‘Polı́tica de Estado’—a domain of politics in which state interests, which could be commonly defined, should prevail in so far as the broad framework of foreign policy orientations was concerned. In contrast with the early post-Franco years, when pragmatism had led the major parties to compromise on domestic political arrangements while ideological divisions still found reflection in foreign policy preferences, external relations appeared to have become the more obvious domain for bipartisanship by the late 1980s and to have remained so in spite of the new international challenges that appeared after","PeriodicalId":313717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128068746","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":"The Palestinian parliamentary legislative elections 25 January 2006","authors":"S. Bicakci","doi":"10.1080/14613190701218777","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14613190701218777","url":null,"abstract":"The Palestinian parliamentary elections, which were held on 25 January 2006, represent a historical turning point in the fate of Palestinians. After Arafat, the expectations of Palestinian politics decreased to a minimum with the rising concern over a civil war in the Palestinian territories. The result will be the worst of the alternatives if one pays attention to the prevalent discussions before the elections. Palestinian issues attract enormous attention, but one only recognizes a limited number of comprehensive analyses to understand the roots and the routes of the problems. This paper aims to discuss the Palestinian parliamentary elections in a wider context, which will also cover the implications of the Hamas victory in the elections on Palestinian politics and, in general, for the future of the peace process.","PeriodicalId":313717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129680826","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":"EU's region-building and boundary-drawing policies: the European approach to the Southern Mediterranean and the Western Balkans","authors":"Nikolaos Tzifakis","doi":"10.1080/14613190701217001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14613190701217001","url":null,"abstract":"The European Union (EU) has more and more assertively endeavored since the early 1990s to design approaches, device instruments and implement policies towards the rest of the world. The development of the EU’s external relations has not only been a consequence of the deepening of its integration but also, a prerequisite for the latter’s further advancement. The EU’s greater role in world affairs has also been brought about by systemic developments such as the break-up of the cold war superpowers’ overlay that was superimposed over the indigenous dynamics of several international regions—and had so far contained the resurfacing and escalation of unresolved local conflicts—and, more recently, the outbreak of the war on international terrorism. The EU’s most elaborated external policies have been primarily concerned with developments in adjacent regions, largely in response to European threat perceptions regarding issues such as conflict spill-over, migration and organized crime. The present paper is accordingly interested in a parallel analysis of the European policies towards two such ‘problematic’ proximate regions, precisely, the Southern Mediterranean and the Western Balkans. As Javier Solana, the EU High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), has remarked, these two regions deserve the EU’s utmost attention, because their political and economic evolution can have serious implications for European prosperity and even its security. The purpose of this paper is neither to provide a detailed account of every European policy initiative in these two regions, nor to evaluate their effectiveness. The paper instead aims to supplement the content of the mainstream approach to the EU external policies suggesting that the EU’s primary objective is to contribute to the implementation of political and economic reforms, boost economic growth and development and act as a security and stability provider. While all of these objectives indeed form the proclaimed rationale for the elaboration of the EU instruments towards the Southern Mediterranean and the Western Balkans, the","PeriodicalId":313717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129202709","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":"The culture of the Europeans: an interview with Donald Sassoon","authors":"V. Fouskas","doi":"10.1080/14613190601004806","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14613190601004806","url":null,"abstract":"In May 1994 a couple of PhD students at Queen Mary–History working under his supervision, as well as other students of the University of London, walked into Donald Sassoon's office in Mile End. We said to him that though there was a war in the Balkans there was no serious academic journal dealing specifically with the region, as well as southern Europe, in a broader European and global context. We also told him our intentions: the setting up of a graduate seminar in the University of London, hopefully to be followed by an association for the study of southern Europe and the Balkans and then, we all hoped, to find a publisher to launch a journal. Donald Sassoon not only supported us, but he also did not miss a single seminar (held every week at LSE at 6:30 p.m. and for five consecutive years); he contributed to the discussions, helped us on a number of substantial issues and advised us about how to get the association and the journal started. In other words, it is doubtful that this venture, which now enjoys the support of a plethora of institutions and intellectuals in the country and abroad and which is read by thousands of students and individuals worldwide, would have ever got off the ground without that substantial element of moral support and encouragement we received from Donald Sassoon. And he continues to do so.","PeriodicalId":313717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133664916","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":"Turkey's encounters with the new Europe: multiple transformations, inherent dilemmas and the challenges ahead","authors":"Ziya Öniş","doi":"10.1080/14613190601004814","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14613190601004814","url":null,"abstract":"From a comparative standpoint, Turkey constitutes an interesting case for studying alternative paths to modernity. The irony of the Turkish experience is that the Turkish elites have unambiguously adopted the West as their reference point and modernization has typically been interpreted as being identical to Westernization. Developing close, organic relations with Europe was a natural corollary of this style of modernization. Westernization, in the Turkish context, meant a commitment to reach not only the standards of economic, scientific and technological development of the West but also to establish a secular and democratic political order. Yet, the process of top-down modernization that Turkey experienced has created not only tensions domestically within a predominantly Muslim society, but also in her encounters with Europe. Turkey’s long-standing aspiration to become part of Europe has been the source of a tense relationship, creating divisions and conflicts not only within Turkey but also within Europe itself. During the successive waves of enlargement of the European Community—more recently the European Union (EU)—there has not been a case comparable to Turkey that has generated such heated debate about the nature of European identity and the very boundaries of modern Europe. Turkey was a rather unique case which appeared to differ from the core of Europe in civilizational terms, but at the same time wished to develop deep relations with Europe. In spite of the rather unusual tensions underlying this relationship which was present on both sides, a dense set of interactions with a primary emphasis on the economic dimension developed over successive decades. The nature of this relationship, however, was not sufficiently strong to produce a far-reaching impact on the Turkish economy and Turkish democracy, that is the kind of impact that countries like Spain, Portugal and Greece experienced during the course of the 1980s and the 1990s. More recently, however, following the key decision by the EU to provide formal endorsement to Turkey’s claims for full membership, the impact of the Europeanization process on Turkey has been quite phenomenal. Although the process cannot be explained simply on the basis of a changing set of external dynamics, nevertheless, there is no doubt that the more credible commitments made by the EU have rendered the adoption of the Copenhagen","PeriodicalId":313717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122446993","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":"The Second Berlusconi government, the parties and the president: a new European policy?","authors":"Paolo Morisi","doi":"10.1080/14613190601004889","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14613190601004889","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years the Italian party system has experienced major changes. The crisis of party government caused by the collapse of the ‘First Republic’ and its main political parties might make Italy a less party-centered polity. Since the 1970s the hypothesis of a general decline and loss of influence of political parties at the expense of national executives and autonomous bureaucratic organizations has attracted a lot of interest. It is argued that changes in interest mediation and representation, the constraints of a more global economy and the fiscal crisis of the welfare state are causing the retreat of party government from the policy and decision-making function. The state-centered, new institutionalism and corporatist literature have made the argument concerning the decline of party government. In Italy beginning in the 1990s, a crisis of the major political parties has been noted and according to this view a suspension of party government has occurred as technocrats, the president of the republic and the bureaucracy were responsible for making important political decisions. Given that Italy does not have a highly professional bureaucratic apparatus or highly institutionalized corporatist structures of interest representation, it is argued that the threat toward Italian party government has come primarily from the evolution of the role of the president of the republic. The emergency situation of the 1990s resulted in an expansion of the president’s role in the policy-making process, which went beyond the norm of a parliamentary democracy such as Italy. Specifically it is argued that the evolution of the Italian political system toward a variant of French semi-presidentialism has reduced the role of the parties in the policy-making process. In contrast to the parties, the president has assumed increasing responsibilities in the decision-making process and his prerogatives now resemble those of the French president. Thus, the paper aims to determine whether Italy appears to have indeed moved in a direction posited by the party decline hypothesis with a more limited","PeriodicalId":313717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116118795","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":"The ‘sick man’ paradox: history, rhetoric and the ‘European character’ of Turkey","authors":"D. Livanios","doi":"10.1080/14613190601004830","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14613190601004830","url":null,"abstract":"1687: ‘In Christendom many think that the Turks are Devils, . . . but . . . it is certain, the Turks are good people . . . ’ (Jean de Thévenot) 1798: ‘ . . . injustice, tyranny and vice’ (William Hunter on the Ottoman government) 1853: ‘The sick man of Europe’ (attributed to Tsar Nicholas I of Russia; emphasis mine) 1853: ‘a sick man—a very sick man’ (the words that Nicholas actually used) 1942: ‘Play it again, Sam’ (attributed to ‘Rick’ [Humphrey Bogart] in Casablanca) 1942: ‘Play it’ (the words that Bogart actually used) 1909: ‘ . . . the term [“Savage Europe”] accurately describes the wild and lawless countries between the Adriatic and Black Seas’ (Harry De Windt) 2004: ‘The people of the Western Balkans are our fellow Europeans’ (Chris Patten)","PeriodicalId":313717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126927528","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":"The Serbs, a people on the move?","authors":"S. Pavlowitch","doi":"10.1080/14613190601016792","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14613190601016792","url":null,"abstract":"The Serbs have found a place in ‘The Peoples of Europe’, a series edited by archaeologists that includes the Etruscans, the Goths, the Huns, the Illyrians, the Normans as well as the English by the late Sir Geoffrey Elton. They have found a niche among lost tribes, wayward peoples and interesting personal renderings. Their history, from the time when they first left a trace on the limes of the Roman Empire to the present when they hover on the border of the European Union, is told by the most eminent medievalist of the former Yugoslav lands, Professor Sima Ćirković. And so it should be, for a critical strand of medieval history has been at the cutting edge of the study of the past in Serbian scholarship for over a hundred years at least. It managed to preserve its integrity through communism, as it was able to break through romanticism in earlier times, and holds its head high above nationalism since. Having first made his mark in the 1960s with histories of medieval Bosnia and medieval Montenegro, Ćirković has since worked mostly on the social history of the medieval Church, and has published Italian and French versions of a history of the Serbs in the Middle Ages. His aptly titled ‘Toilers, Soldiers, Priests: Societies in the Medieval Balkans’ (Rabotnici, vojnici, duhovnici: društva srednjevekovnog Balkana, 1997) sums up his work to date. The Serbs is an attempt to shed light on the development of a community of people called Serbs, and on the factors pertinent to its creation and preservation as a group. It deals with the legends of the origins. It examines the way in which the idea of a direct relationship to God, taken from the Hebrews, transferred to the Christians, and in particular to the universal Christian Empire, later served individual parts of the Empire, notably the Serbian Nemanjić or Nemanjid ‘dynasty of sacred roots’, as well as its successors and neighbours. Later, the more secular, but hardly less inspired, view prevailed of nations (including the Serbian) created in distant times, each one immutable and fighting for its survival. Against that, Sima Ćirković relates the actual course of events, exposing the discrepancy between them and the events recited in inspired chronicles and epics. This is a dense account of seemingly endless processes of integration and disintegration. Sources for certain periods are sparse and fragmented, dependent on preservation by others, usually neighbouring powers. Already before the","PeriodicalId":313717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122932163","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}