State building and European integration in Ukraine

ABSTRACT

The article analyzes the impact on statebuilding as an aspect of Ukraine’s integration with the EU. The Euromaidan had a profound, yet hardly recognized, effect on EU-Ukraine relations, particularly in terms of the EU’s subsequent support of domestic reforms in Ukraine. Following the Euromaidan, the EU supported Ukraine’s aspirations to enter “economic integration and political association” by concluding an Association Agreement – an agreement which exceeded the capacity of the Ukrainian state to implement it. To increase this capacity, the EU has supported reform of public administration and has provided far-reaching assistance on capacity building in the government. This article posits that since 2014 European integration has become tantamount with (re)building the state structures in Ukraine. Therefore, the significance of European integration for Ukraine goes beyond the implementation of the Association Agreement and extends to root-and-branch reform of Ukrainian state structures.     

Identity and European integration: diversity as a source of integration1

ABSTRACT. This article explores the concept of European Union identity and its significance for European integration by drawing upon insights from theories of nationalism and national identity. European Union identity is viewed as an ongoing process which is banal, contingent and contextual. The central hypothesis is that: European integration facilitates the flourishing of diverse national identities rather than convergence around a single homogeneous European Union identity. The role of the EU as facilitator for diverse understandings of collective identities encourages the enhabitation of the EU at an everyday level and the reinforcement of a sense of banal Europeanism which is a crucial aspect of the European integration process. Facilitating diversity may thus provide a vital source of dynamism for the integration process.     

Overcoming barriers to institutional integration in European second-tier urban regions

Within the debates about the socio-economic advantages of cohesive urban regions, several barriers to institutional integration are said to exist, especially when a metropolitan government is absent and integration relies on inter-municipal cooperation. Some barriers are associated with different urban region structures, such as the asymmetric power relations and sociocultural contrasts between municipalities in systems with dominant core cities, or the lack of a leading city to overcome fragmentation and provide a shared identity in polycentric urban regions (PURs). This paper investigates whether urban regions formed around second-tier cities, whose features depart from both dominant core and PUR models, are able to mitigate these barriers when pursuing integration strategies. The analysis relies on interviews with municipal leaders in three representative European case studies, examining how they perceive the barriers to inter-municipal relations in second-tier urban regions. The findings show that perceptions vary not only between regions, with the three cases following different trajectories of integration, but also within regions, according to the geographical and socio-economic context of municipalities and the legacy of past relations. In general, barriers to integration are not minimized without explicit efforts to rebalance power relations, approach political cultures, mobilize core city leadership and develop a metropolitan identity.     

Soviet elites and European integration: from Stalin to Gorbachev

This article argues that, like the liberalising “Great Reforms” of Russia in the mid-19th century, Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika of the late 20th century was propelled as much by reformist intellectuals' Europe-inspired visions of a more humane society as it was by military-economic crisis. Over the post-Stalin decades, a new policy-academic elite – economists, philosophers, scientists and writers – viewed in the apparent success of East European reforms a model of “socialism with a human face” for their country's eventual reintegration into a “common European home.” Yet their understanding of European integration was too superficial, and their appreciation of communist hard-liners' resistance too belated, to carry their reforms to successful completion. This article also holds that Russian reformers' naiveté was compounded by Western leaders' selfishness and short-sightedness. The latter clung to Cold War beliefs that the Soviet system could not produce a genuine reformist movement. When Gorbachev came to power, his perestroika was considered merely a “ruse,” its ideas of “new thinking” ridiculed, and ultimately only the “shock therapy” of Boris Yeltsin merited significant Western aid despite its broad incompetence and vast corruption. The combined Western-Russian failures in 1990s efforts toward rapid marketisation and integration proved even more damaging than those of the 1980s due to their broad discrediting of Western liberal democracy.     

The camp and the question of community

Recent literature in camp geographies has sought to emphasize the significance of political agency among camp residents, particularly in refugee camps, as part of a critical reaction against the highly influential Agambenian conceptual vocabulary of exception and bare life. The concept of community has been integral to this body of work, with diverse accounts of the camp implicitly or explicitly positioning community as the natural scale through which camp resident and inmate agency is formulated, and yet there has hitherto been little research reflecting directly on the meaning that community takes on in the specific context of the camp. In this article we adopt Roberto Esposito's critique of the concept of community to problematize the assumption that camp communities necessarily constitute a space of empowerment and agency for camp residents and inmates. Drawing on Esposito's genealogical account of communitas (2010), whereby community is encountered not in terms of a property shared among individuals but instead as the loss of individuality and other forms of ‘the proper’, we suggest that the implementation of community, while generative of agency, is also fundamental to camp authorities and related regimes of power. Furthermore, we argue that the operation of camp communities includes its own forms of politics that are specific to the exceptional space of the camp and that potentially expose individuals to violence. We develop this argument through an experimental reading of communitas in relation to the two empirical contexts that have been most influential on the trajectory of camp studies within geographical debates, the concentration camp and the refugee camp, represented in this paper by Auschwitz and the contemporary archipelago of Serbian refugee camps respectively. The ambivalent account of power relationships emerging from these readings suggests that Esposito's rendering of community may have important analytic value in investigating the complexity of camp spatialities and the distinctive co-articulation of power and agency therein.     

Joseph Retinger's conception of and contribution to the early process of European integration

The origins of the European Union are especially connected to its so-called founding fathers. One of them was Polish politician Joseph Retinger, who represented a functionalist point of view. This article aims to throw light on Retinger's contribution to uniting the Old Continent. The method applied in this article is a comparative analysis of Retinger's ideas with the early phases of integration. Many significant initiatives taken with a view to the future integration of Europe, such as the founding of the European League for Economic Co-operation (1946), the Congress of Europe held in The Hague (1948), the founding of the European Movement (1948), or the establishment of the Council of Europe (1949) to give just a few examples can all be associated with Retinger's activity. The author concludes that the importance of Retinger's European activities (concerning the early period after the Second World War) were so huge that he should be ranked among the pioneers of the modern European Union.