‘Multi-Vector’ Foreign Policies in Europe: Balancing,Bandwagoning or Bargaining?

The article examines the phenomenon of ‘multi-vector’ foreign policies that have been adopted by a variety of states in Russia and the EU common neighbourhood. It traces the origins of ‘multi-vector’ foreign policy to a series of asymmetric bargaining ‘games’ between smaller states and two competing regional powers over the terms of cooperation. During these bargaining games, they either accommodate the demands of more powerful actors to relieve external pressure, or manoeuvre between two external actors to extract concessions from and negotiate more favourable agreements with one or both. The model illustrating how ‘multi-vector’ states behave is tested in the case of Ukraine's energy policy in the period from 1999 to 2009.     

La Vía Campesina: the birth and evolution of a transnational social movement

The origin and evolution of the transnational peasant movement La Vía Campesina is analysed through five evolutionary stages. In the 1980s the withdrawal of the state from rural areas simultaneously weakened corporativist and clientelist control over rural organisations, even as conditions worsened in the countryside. This gave rise to a new generation of more autonomous peasant organisations, who saw the origins of their similar problems as largely coming from beyond the national borders of weakened nation-states. A transnational social movement defending peasant life, La Vía Campesina emerged out of these autonomous organisations, first in Latin America, and then at a global scale, during the 1980s and early 1990s (phase 1). Subsequent stages saw leaders of peasant organisations take their place at the table in international debates (1992–1999, phase 2), muscling aside other actors who sought to speak on their behalf; take on a leadership role in global struggles (2000–2003, phase 3); and engage in internal strengthening (2004–2008, phase 4). More recently (late 2008–present, phase 5) the movement has taken on gender issues more squarely and defined itself more clearly in opposition to transnational corporations. Particular emphasis is given to La Vía Campesina's fight to gain legitimacy for the food sovereignty paradigm, to its internal structure, and to the ways in which the (re)construction of a shared peasant identity is a key glue that holds the struggle together despite widely different internal cultures, creating a true peasant internationalism.     

Migrant melodrama and the political economy of suffering

This article deploys the term “migrant melodrama” to describe contemporary cultural production that trains a melodramatic imagination on migrants. It argues that migrant melodrama often reconfigures suffering as a necessary step in the progress toward inclusion and belonging. To interrogate this assumption, the article analyzes three prominent examples of migrant melodramas that feature children traveling north across national borders without adult caretakers: the 2006 journalistic narrative Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother, by Sonia Nazario; a 2009 HBO documentary film inspired by Nazario’s book, Which Way Home, directed by Rebecca Cammisa; and the 2007 fictional film Under the Same Moon, directed by Patricia Riggen. The article proposes that migrant melodrama plays a role in the commodification and circulation of undocumented migrant suffering in a global market, a phenomenon that the author terms “the political economy of suffering.” Performances of suffering can be exchanged in the political economy of suffering for any number of privileges, from a handout to a visa, and are linked to major international economic and political decisions, such as migration policies that regulate human mobility across nation-state borders. The political economy of suffering is a web of transactions in which performances of undocumented migrant suffering are exchanged in attempts to promote empathy, tolerance of mobility, and respect for migrant human rights. In different ways, all three of the works analyzed accept the underlying logic of the political economy of suffering.     

The limits of EU governance: Belarus's response to the European Neighbourhood Policy

The article examines some conceptual and practical tensions related to the application of the external governance framework to the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) in less motivated states, such as Belarus. First, it critically analyses the foundations of the external governance framework – from M. Smith's perspective – in order to suggest that the failure of the ENP to legitimize in Belarus should not be solely attributed to the vices of Lukashenko's regime. Second, it argues that an understanding of specifically Belarusian ‘boundaries of order’ – geopolitics and culture – is essential for tailoring a more nuanced policy that will be able to accommodate the needs and interests of ‘less motivated’ ENP partner states. In conclusion, it is suggested that a new policy framework – of extended partnership – should be more technical and less political, based on horizontal networks of cooperation rather than on hitherto hierarchical governance by conditionality that has found little appeal in the less motivated neighbourhood. Can an Eastern Partnership framework become such an alternative?     

Prisoners' Wives in Post-Soviet Russia: ‘For my Husband I am Pining!’

The identity of a prisoner's wife is often a shameful societal stigma. Yet Russia's unique history of imprisonment has provided an unusually positive trope for women who have to come to terms with their partners' incarceration: the ‘Decembrist wife’ (dekabristka). This trope originated in the aftermath of the 1825 ‘Decembrist’ uprising—the first anti-monarchist revolt in modern Russian history. A handful of wives of the perpetrators voluntarily joined their husbands in Siberian exile and, in leaving behind families and comforts, created a precedent to be glorified for future generations. Upheld in Russian national mythology as a model of the exemplary wife, the dekabristka identity lives on. This paper examines its enduring power and significance in contemporary Russia.     

Contemporary Russian liberalism

This article analyzes contemporary Russian liberalism through the prism of competing trends of moderate pluralist and monistic radical thought. The author focuses particularly on the pluralist trend, less well known in the West, arguing that its prospects are more promising over the long term. Ideological and tactical differences within the liberal camp in Russia are compared with those in the West, both for the purpose of emphasizing that such differences are not unique to Russia and to show the connections between Russian and Western strands of liberal political thought.     

Intolerant Policies and Discourses in Northern Italian Cities

In 2008, several local authorities in Italy implemented policies that aimed at limiting the socioeconomic and civil rights of migrants, especially in those regions administered by the North League party. This article analyzes these local policies and the discourses to support or oppose them. It shows that three main intolerant arguments are used by their supporters, which refer to security, welfare provisions, and national identity. In contrast with these dominant discourses, civil society actors construct a counterdiscourse based on respect for human rights.     

NATO: The View from the East

Abstract

Relations between Russia, Ukraine and Belarus and NATO have placed more emphasis on cooperation than confrontation since the Cold War, and Ukraine has begun to move towards membership. At the popular level, on the evidence of national surveys in 2004 and 2005, NATO continues to be perceived as a significant threat, but in Russia and Ukraine it comes behind the United States (in Belarus the numbers are similar). There are few socioeconomic predictors of support for NATO membership that are significant across all three countries, but there are wide differences by region, and by attitudinal variables such as support for a market economy and for EU membership. The relationship between popular attitudes and foreign policy is normally a distant one; but in Ukraine NATO membership will require public support in a referendum, and in all three cases public attitudes on foreign policy issues can influence foreign policy in other ways, including the composition of parliamentary committees. In newly independent states whose international allegiances are still evolving, the associations between public opinion and foreign and security policy may often be closer than in the established democracies.