The Saracens of the Baltic: Pagan and Christian Lithuanians in the Perception of English and French Crusaders to Late Medieval Prussia

This paper investigates the use of the term ‘Saracens’ to describe the Lithuanian opponents of the Western crusaders who took part in expeditions launched from Prussia by the Teutonic Order against the grand duchy of Lithuania in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It presents a variety of evidence from narrative and documentary sources to demonstrate that this usage was derived from existing images of Muslim opponents and was reinforced by epic and romance literature. The use of the term Saracens, which by the fourteenth century had become a generic designation for pagans, was both a convenient way for Western crusaders to imbue the Prussian crusades with a value commensurate with campaigns in the Holy Land, but also to blacken their Lithuanian opponents even when they had abandoned paganism.     

自我产业链整合，跨省联合发展——辽宁工业振兴之浅见

辽宁老工业基地要振兴,首先要做好本省产业链的整合,建成现代装备制造业和重要原材料基地;在此基础上寻求跨省的联合.     

From universal system of social policy to particularistic? The case of the Baltic States

This paper compares the system of social maintenance and insurance in the Soviet Union, which was in force in the three Baltic countries before their independence, with the currently existing social security systems. The aim of the paper is to highlight the forces that have influenced social policy transformation from its former highly universal, however authoritarian form, to the less universal, social insurance-based systems of present day Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.It will be demonstrated that the welfare–economy nexus is not the only important factor in the development of social programs. Rather, social policy should be studied as if embedded in the political, historical and cultural aspects of a given society. The people’s attitude towards distributive justice will be highlighted as being one of the most important factors for either social policy shortcomings or expansion.This paper takes steps to combine quantitative and qualitative data.     

东北三省旅游业增长绩效差异影响因素的实证分析

在日益激烈的市场竞争和外部宏观经济风险不断增大的背景下,如何提高旅游业的增长绩效,是目前东北旅游业谋求不断发展过程中亟待解决的问题。东北地区旅游资源丰富,森林、草原、湿地、冰雪、工业、农业旅游资源在全国独具特色,生态环境优越,是中国重要的冰雪旅游和避暑度假旅游目的地。运用非参数Malmquist生产率指数分解方法测算和分析东北三省旅游业在1999～2010年期间的技术效率变化和技术进步情况,并结合面板协整模型分析地区财政条件、区位条件、旅游资产规模、旅行社等因素,可从中找出东北旅游业增长效率的切入点。     

Article 5: Permanent Neutrality in The Tartu Peace Treaty, 1920

The article argues for the need to develop more multicausal accounts of international relations. It uses the Estonian–Russian political crisis over the relocation of the Bronze Soldier monument in 2007 as a case in point, showing how the ideational, material and institutional structures within the wider international society interact. As such, even cases with clear identity-political root causes can benefit from other factors being inserted into the equation when it comes to analysis. The article concludes by arguing that it is only by embracing multicausality that our chances of arriving at fuller and consequently more truthlike accounts of the events out there are improved.     

The Evolution of Innovation Policy Governance Systems and Policy Capacities in the Baltic States

This paper analyzes the evolution of innovation policy (IP) governance systems in the Baltic States and discusses how this progression has influenced the development of long-term IP capacities. The Baltics must attend to their long-term policy capacities as they are going through a ‘catch-up’ process while being influenced by both historical socioeconomic legacies and pressures of the global political economy. At the same time, they have delegated key policy activities away from centers of policy making and moved toward increasingly fragmented IP governance models, which provide narrow feedback and policy learning mechanisms that complicate the creation of long-term policy capacities.     

Out of the Shadows: Explaining the Undeclared Economy in Baltic Countries

Until now, participation in undeclared work has been explained through either a structuralist lens as driven by ‘exclusion’ from state benefits and the circuits of the modern economy or through a neo-liberal and/or post-structuralist lens as driven by the voluntary ‘exit’ of workers out of formal institutions and into this alternative realm. Reporting the results of a 2007 survey of undeclared work in eight Baltic nations, this article reveals how such either/or explanations need to be transcended and replaced with an appreciation of the heterogeneous nature of such work and the diverse motives underpinning participation.     

The Baltic miracle? The economic crisis and its consequences for young people in the labor market of the Baltic states, 2007–2017

ABSTRACT

The financial crisis (2008–2009) resulted in significant deterioration of the youth labor market in the Baltic states. In 2017, however, the Baltic states were among the countries with the highest employment-to-population ratio in Europe (the ‘Baltic Miracle’). This article shows that the observed progress is mostly due to the demographic changes in the three countries. Isolating the demographic effect demonstrated that it played crucial role in mitigating the negative effects of the crisis, especially in Latvia and Lithuania. The results of the study show that in 2017 only in Estonia had the youth labor market returned to its precrisis conditions.     

Socio-economic differentiation in the post-communist rural Baltics: the case of three kolkhozes

This paper uses longitudinal quantitative data to examine socio-economic differentiation in the rural Baltic areas after decollectivization. It argues that the rural social structure in the post-Soviet Baltics is best determined by two criteria: source of income (income from farming entrepreneurship or income from salaries) and land holdings. Four rural groups are identified: people getting their main income from farming can be differentiated into large landowners engaged in the commercial production of agricultural goods and people with small or medium-sized farms; and people earning their main income from wages can be separated into people with no farming activities and people who are still keeping small or medium-sized farms. The paper also finds that the importance of farming activities in the countryside decreases while importance of wage income tends to increase.     

A Soviet West: nationhood,regionalism, and empire in the annexed western borderlands

This article considers the role the Soviet Union's western borderlands annexed during World War II played in the evolution of Soviet politics of empire. Using the Baltic Republics and Western Ukraine as case studies, it argues that Sovietization had a profound impact on these borderlands, integrating them into a larger Soviet polity. However, guerrilla warfare and Soviet policy-making indirectly led to these regions becoming perceived as more Western and nationalist than other parts of the Soviet Union. The Baltic Republics and Western Ukraine differed in their engagement with the Western capitalist world. Different experiences of World War II and late Stalinism and contacts with the West ultimately led to this region becoming Soviet, yet different from the rest of the Soviet Union. While the Soviet West was far from uniform, perceived differences between it and the rest of the Soviet Union justified claims at the end of the 1980s that the Soviet Union was an empire rather than a family of nations.