European Union Approaches to Human Rights Violations in Kosovo before and after Independence

This article examines European Union (EU) approaches to the question of human rights violations in Kosovo before and after its proclamation of independence, in February 2008. While the 1999 NATO-led humanitarian intervention in the region was often justified as necessary due to the continuous abuses of human rights, perpetrated by the Serbian forces against the ethic Kosovo Albanians, the post-interventionist period has witnessed a dramatic reversal of roles, with the rights of the remaining Serbian minority being regularly abused by the dominant Albanian population. However, in contrast to the former scenario, the Brussels administration has remained quite salient about the post-independence context – a grey zone of unviable political and social components, capable of generating new confrontations and human rights abuses within the borders of Kosovo. Aware of this dynamic and the existing EU official rhetoric, it is possible to conclude that the embedded human rights concerns in Kosovo are not likely to disappear, but even more importantly, their relevance has been significantly eroded

La question démocratique en Europe de l’Est

This chapter provides a summary analysis of the main trajectories, successes and setbacks of democratization in Europe's post-Communist states between 1989 and 2009, as well as a critical appraisal of the preponderance of astonishingly naive, complacent and simplistic unilinear conceptions of 'democratic transition' and 'democratic consolidation' in the vast literature on post-Communist democratization

India's Political Economy

This article begins by outlining and assessing India's economic development pattern and trends, and its anticipated 'demographic dividend', partly on the basis of comparisons with East Asia (especially China). The article then proceeds to evaluate India's main development options and challenges and the major determinants of India's economic prospects, while outlining best case and worst case scenarios for the near future, especially in the aftermath of the nationwide parliamentary elections scheduled to take place no later than spring 2014

Europe: what kind of idea?

Salman Rushdie once asked “What kind of idea are you?” This article transposes his provocative question to “Europe”. It proposes that “Europe” cannot be primarily identified or located in terms of geographies, histories, religions, cultures or values, and that the countless attempts to do so merely diminish the various competing ideas of “Europe”. The article also challenges more recently fashionable visions of “Europe” as a series of concentric circles centred upon (or emanating from) Brussels, as these indefensibly privilege some parts of “Europe” by treating them as Europe’s “core”, while equally unacceptably marginalizing other vital (and in most cases equally “European”!) portions of “Europe” by classifying them as ‘peripheries’. We propose that, while the currently dominant European Union countries have been busily attempting (albeit in vain!) to define and foster various ways of conceptualizing and privileging a “European core”, the borders and so-called “borderlands” of such “Europes” (however they are defined, and wherever and whatever they might be) have been continually constructing, contesting, resisting or challenging the various contending notions of “Europe”. Moreover, the peripheries and perimeters are no less important – and often no less “European” – than the supposed “core”, which is in any case continually shifting, mutating, and regrouping. Indeed, the ever-shifting so-called “peripheries” and “perimeters” of “Europe” have often done more than the supposed “core” to give substance to whatever conceptions of “Europe” were being mobilized or were jockeying for primacy at any given moment. The article concludes by arguing that the various contending ideas of “Europe” can best be understood, not as fixed entities, nor even as teleological constructs, but either as creative improvisations on themes which turn out differently each time they are ‘performed’ (as in jazz), or as competing narratives, à la Roland Barthes. Ultimately, taking a leaf out of Barthes’s book, the article puts forward a “Europe” Theory of Classification, which operates at the levels of functions, actions and narration

East, West and the Return of the Central: Borders Drawn and Redrawn

This chapter outlines and problematises the changing and contested geographic, political, economic, cultural, and symbolic borders and cartographies of ‘Europe’ since 1945. It also explores the various heated debates about the status, location, and distinctiveness of Central Europe; the changing nature of Europe’s borders and borderlands; the successive metamorphoses of Europe's East-West divides; the implications of Europe's new East-West divide; and the potential shapes, meanings and significance of real and imagined borders

Rethinking the Eastward Extension of the EU Civil Order and the Nature of Europe's New East–West Divide

This article begins by arguing that the major benefits of the ongoing eastward enlargement of the European Union (EU) have accrued, not from direct redistributive transfers of income or wealth, but rather through the ‘game-changing’ impact of the recurrently expanding EU on the conduct of political, economic and social life in new and prospective member countries, primarily as a result of their joining a supranational civil order and ‘civil association’ in which decision-making, policy-making, governance and even relations between states rest increasingly upon the rule of law and largely consensual negotiations between governing elites. The article then goes on to argue that the papable unreadiness and unsuitability of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine and other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) for membership of the EU need not be explained by falling back on highly questionable allegations that they have been sundered from their Western and Central European neighbours by intractable cultural/civilisational differences, and that this somehow makes them in certain ‘essentialist’ ways ‘less European’ or ‘less civilized’ than Western and Central Europe (the home of the Holocaust, lest we forget). Instead, it is argued that the evident unreadiness and unsuitability of the CIS countries for EU membership is primarily a consequence of situational factors, above all the still largely unchecked, unmitigated and profoundly entrenched (albeit not wholly unchallengeable) ‘verticality’ of power-structures and power-relations in the CIS polities, economies and societies. In Western and Central Europe, conversely, the emergence and recurrent deepening and expansion of the EU has helped to foster and entrench increasingly powerful horizontal power-structures, power-relations and ‘level-playing fields’ (most conspicuously the Single Market and the extensive and elaborate system of EU law), which powerfully counteract or counterbalance Western and Central Europe’s still strong ‘vertical’ power-structures and the ‘vertical’ power-relations which they sustain. To be sure, powerful ‘vertical’ hierarchical power-structures and power-relations exist in the EU as well as in the CIS, but in the CIS they are not (yet) strongly counterbalanced and counteracted by the increasingly powerful and entrenched horizontal power-structures and ‘level-playing fields’ promoted by the EU countries. Consequently, the fact that Europe’s Cold War East-West divide has not (yet) been completely abolished or transcended, but has merely been replaced by a new East-West divide lying a bit further East than before, does not have to be treated as unassailable evidence or ‘proof’ of the existence of seemingly intractable ‘essential’ differences between these conspicuously contrasting zones of Europe, nor as justifications for implicitly fatalistic latter-day versions of Western and Central European ‘Orientalism’ vis-à-vis the CIS countries. After all, most of East Central Europe and the Balkans appears to have been successfully (albeit not completely irreversibly) ‘brought in from the cold’. Thus there are solid grounds for believing that Europe’s new East-West divide can be continually challenged and eventually surmounted by ceaseless concerted efforts to keep on changing or ‘reforming’ the powerful structures of incentives, opportunities and penalties which govern political, social and economic conduct and inter-state relations in post-Cold War Europe, strongly helped by the vast disparity in income and wealth between the EU countries and the CIS

Contrasting Responses to the International Economic Crisis of 2008–10 in the Eleven CIS Countries and in the Ten Post-Communist EU Member Countries

This article developed out of a presentation which I gave to the US Department of State in June 2009, when I was invited to Washington DC to advise the US government on the likely impact of the Western financial crisis of 2008-09 on Europe’s post-Communist states. The articles argues that the nature and magnitude of the effects of the international economic crisis on the eleven Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries and on the ten post-communist states admitted into the EU in 2004 or 2007 differed quite widely and are not amenable to broad generalizations. Not surprisingly, therefore, the responses of these states to the crisis have also differed even more widely, as have the longer-term consequences. It is argued that it is not necessary to invoke or fall back on highly questionable allegations of ‘essential’ cultural differences to explain these widely differing impacts, responses and consequences. They can be satisfactorily explained and conceptualized in terms of relatively concrete and tangible differences in the structures of power, resources, opportunities, incentives and constraints that have emerged in these two broad groupings of countries. Above all, the nature, structure and orientations of the economic systems that have emerged in most of the CIS countries have diverged quite substantially from those of the post-communist states that joined the EU. It is also argued that the profound structural, situational and systemic divergences between the economies of the eleven CIS countries and those of the ten post-communist states admitted into the EU in 2004 or 2007 are very likely to continue to complicate and frustrate attempts to integrate or associate CIS countries more closely with the EU for the foreseeable future

Post-Communist Democratization: Democratic Politics as the Art of the Impossible? (review article)

Since the early 1990s, the dominant rubrics for the study of post-Communist transformations have been provided by the relatively naive and simplistic concepts of 'democratic transition' and 'democratic consolidation' , which portray democratization as a finite, once-and-for-all, and largely unilinear and unidirectional process. This article, by contrast, argues that it is far more realistic and accurate to regard democratization as a never-ending struggle to realise great democratic ideals which are largely unattainable in practice. Democrats sometimes appear briefly to gain the upper hand, but it is extremely difficult to maintain much effective democratic participation, scrutiny, control, and accountability in the face of the ever-growing economic disparities generated by increasingly unaccountable global capitalism, which has resulted in ever-increasing concentration of incomes, power and wealth in ever-fewer hands. These key challenges or constraints are universal, afflicting advanced capitalist countries just as much as they affect post-Communist states and less developed countries. To think otherwise is sheer complacency, self-delusion, or myopia. Consequently, this article argues that the thousands of books and articles portraying post-Communist democratization as a unilinear and unidirectional process, leading almost automatically (much as day follows night) from ‘democratic transition’ to ‘democratic consolidation’, are peddling seriously misleading and complacent make-believe. In reality, the majority of post-Communist states have sooner or later succumbed to various more or less overt forms of authoritarianism or semi-authoritarianism, or are much closer to ‘illiberal democracy’ or highly personalist ‘delegative democracy’ than to (largely illusory) idealized Western conceptions of liberal democracy. However, while it has become increasingly apparent that most post-Communist ‘democracies’ are even more flawed and corrupt and even less liberal and law-governed than most Western variants, it is also important to remember that ‘democratic consolidation’ is a bogus concept and that all ‘democratic’ countries are in much the same boat when it comes to trying to sustain meaningful democratic participation, scrutiny, control, and accountability in the face of the ever-growing concentration of incomes, wealth and power in ever-fewer hands under neoliberal global capitalism

Epilog: Wie sich die Wege von Ost- und Westeuropa trennten (pp. 239-248)

This chapter deals with the developmental 'parting of the ways' between Russia, the Balkans and Western Europe during the seveteenth and early eighteenth centuries