. The BSEC was officially transformed from an initiative into a ‘regional economic organisation’ on 5 June 1998, when a charter was signed that made it into a formal organisation.3 The BSEC is neither an economic community along the lines of the EU nor a security alliance like NATO. In addition, its capacity for authoritative decisions over economic and political issues is restricted. It envisages neither the creation of a preferential trading area nor the introduction of a common external tariff. Discussions on the establishment of a free trade area, which led to an
. During the Cold War years, the CSCE focused primarily on ten principles for security (the ‘Decalogue’), a series of confidence-building measures to reduce fears of surprise attack between NATO and the Warsaw Treaty Organisation, and on human rights and expanded human contacts across the East–West divide through the centre of Europe. Since the end of the Cold War, conflict prevention and resolution have moved to the forefront of the OSCE’s agenda. Yet these roles performed routinely by the OSCE and its missions and field activities have gone largely unnoticed in
conflict and Eurasian security NATO interventions in Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999 expressed the Euro-American security policy of rebuilding NATO as the premier security organisation in Europe. Continued Russian intervention in the Caucasus can, in this light, be understood as a Russian effort, driven by the security dilemma, to prevent such NATO hegemony on its southern border. Encouraging constructive international intervention and heading off the destructive kind is, in this light, harder than it looks. The dilemmas of policy intervention Because all of these
Plan would end. The UK and other countries wanted the OEEC budget to be cut thereafter, with some of its work handed over to NATO. (In the end, the OEEC would live on with the same limited powers as at its creation, becoming, in 1960, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and equipped with a more global economic role.) The ECSC’s proposed structure was also very much in line with federalist, supranationalist thinking. It was to have as its supreme organ a High Authority – a name that would be difficult for Europeans to accept today – endowed with
also members of NATO (showing the US interest in a politically stronger EEC). However, inner EEC solidarity became more difficult with a more heterogeneous membership in terms of economic performance and policy orientations – weakening in the process the traditional common understanding between France and Germany. Monetary co-operation was revived through the European Monetary System, but the latter led an anaemic existence in the coming years, due to still highly divergent EEC economies. Economic underdevelopment in Central and Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union
enlarge the geographical scope of European integration as at best futile, at worst a process that may weaken Western civilisation. ‘Europe’, he claims, can not be (and therefore should not be) redefined by politics, since politics has to be based on the ‘fact’ that Europe’s (geographical) west is part of a different civilisation than Europe’s east. The enlargement of NATO and
overnight. The NATO-led military operation against Yugoslavia had to be based on broad popular support, which required careful preparation. For one thing, the existing gallery of Western political images had to be rearranged and even transformed so as to avoid the need for a United Nations Security Council mandate which would legitimise the military intervention and overcome the barriers of sovereignty and
, faces an acute geostrategic dilemma. Whether it be NATO’s PfP programme, the OSCE, or the signing of bilateral military agreements with states in the region, China views these American initiatives, even if they have been directed at the disinterested goal of regional stability, as a putative threat to Chinese regional interests (just as many in Washington have viewed the SCO as a threat to American interests). These divergent geostrategic assessments raise a few interesting questions: are American and Chinese interests in fact opposed in the region? Is the nascent
developments? In Kosovo, the conflict which had escalated after the abolition the Province’s autonomous status eventually prompted a NATO bombing campaign against the new Yugoslavia between March and June 1999. The assessment, planning and implementation stages of NATO’s intervention occurred with negligible reference to the Security Council. 7 It would seem, at least at first sight, as if, in the
fashion Ferrini ( Chapter 13 ) presents us with another imagine-within-an-image, this one of a 2009 encounter at a Rome airport when media tycoon and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (soon to be deposed by scandal) greeted autocratic Libyan ruler Colonel Muammar Gaddafi (soon to be deposed by NATO-backed militias in a civil war) on the latter's first and only visit to the country. At that meeting, which was intended to usher in a new age of economic cooperation, especially concerning Libya's rich oil deposits, Gaddafi wore pinned to his chest an image of Omar al