Opinion: The Dalai Lama Test
The Tibetan spiritual leader’s visit to Central Europe provides some answers to the state of Chinese relations, Havel’s legacy, and the scruples of individual politicians.
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The Tibetan spiritual leader’s visit to Central Europe provides some answers to the state of Chinese relations, Havel’s legacy, and the scruples of individual politicians.
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Trafficability remains a key issue for operations in the battlefield. The majority of published works focus on either terrain trafficability or on vehicle mobility over terrain. Vehicle mobility, which focuses on the dynamics of track-wheel-terrain interactions (Shoop 2001, p. 69), predicts either a vehicle’s performance on various terrains (Zheng-Dong, Perkins 1999; Sullivan, Anderson 2003, p. 45) or estimates the consequences of the vehicle’s passage over terrain. Terrain trafficability focuses on the ability of the terrain to sustain the transport of military vehicles (e.g. Field Manual FM 5-430-00-1, 1994; Slocum et al. 2003).
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Russia’s level of state sponsored threats and repression has grown significantly over the last few years. This has led to a situation where activists and critics are forced to leave the country in order to continue their activities from abroad. Western countries need to find effective ways to help vulnerable sectors of Russian civil society which have become political refugees.
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The fate of the parliament democracy and its future in human development is one of the topical issues on the agenda in the Republic of Bulgaria and in Europe. This significant problem is influenced by both internal phenomena and processes, as well as globalization. It should be noted the significant change as a result of the war in Ukraine in 2022, the redistribution of world powers, the new unification and integration processes and the impact of all this on individual nation states.
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The Council of State is a body that is a permanent element of the political system of the French Republic. Its genesis dates back to the Consular period. The Council of State, despite numerous and serious political transformations in France over the last two hundred years, has gained authority and contributed to the stability of the concept of strong protection of individual rights. The important role of the Council of State resulted not only from legal changes (here, the Act of 1872, as a result of which the Council gained jurisdictional independence, was of crucial importance); its jurisprudence has also played an extremely important role. The Council gave special importance to many statutory freedoms and rights by referring to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789. Today, the Council of State protects the constitutional order by performing two main functions: it is the consultative body for government law projects and regulatory acts and the highest administrative judiciary body. However, in order to understand what role this body plays nowadays, it is necessary to refer to the genesis of its creation, because it corresponds to the consolidation of republican ideas in France. On the margin of the main considerations of this study, it is worth recalling that in the interwar period in Poland, numerous projects were put forward to create a Council of State on the French model. Awareness of the role of this body was very significant in the legal and scientific circles of that period. It was considered that the Council, consisting of eminent lawyers, should primarily give opinions on draft legal acts and thus contribute to shaping better law by political centers of power. The submitted postulates, some of which took the form of specific projects, were never implemented. The French Council of State has a special status today, which is the result of its authority, achievements, and the specificity of the organization and its work. The dominant research methods that have been used are the dogmatic-legal method and the historical-legal method.
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The contemporary world order is highly fluid and rife with uncertainties. Due to these shifts, the author’s main goal is to critically analyse the trajectories of the development of the contemporary world order and India’s place and role within it. Geopolitically, the world has undergone a massive metamorphosis. The old bipolar world order has given way to a new multipolar world order. The East-West conflict has paved the way for a new North-South conflict. Even though the US still remains the only superpower, especially from a political and military perspective, its supremacy has faced increasing challenges with the rise of China’s economic power. Both China and Russia have challenged the Western rule-based liberal international order. A clear demonstration of this is the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022. At the same time, there is a perceptible shift from geopolitics to geoeconomics. Due to changing global circumstances, India has aligned itself with Western groupings like the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or the Quad, whose member countries are the US, Australia, Japan, and India. In this paper, the author has examined and critically forecasted India’s futuristic role, albeit acknowledging its somewhat subservient role in the contemporary world order.
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The article deals with the problem of genocide of Bosnian Muslims, its main causes and consequences. It analyses international judicial decisions adopted in international practice, specifically the decision of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (1993–2017). The relevance of this topic is associated with the growing aggressiveness of the subjects of international relations, lack of principles for international legal responsibility and a mechanism for resolving such actions. The purpose of this article is to conduct a comprehensive study and analysis of the phenomenon of genocide drawing on the examples of the events in the former Yugoslavia, specifically the problem of genocide of Bosnian Muslims in international legal practice.
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Relations with the Arab world formed one of the main lines of Morocco’s foreign policy in the post-independence period. In this respect, much attention was paid to relations with the Maghreb countries, especially Algeria and Mauritania. The paper’s main goal is to present and analyse relations of the Kingdom of Morocco with other Arab states during the rule of King Hasan II (1961–1999) in light of the events in the Middle East and North Africa. One of the key trends in the Moroccan foreign policy of that time was based on the aspiration to reclaim lands perceived as historical parts of the kingdom and to reinforce the sovereign statehood. Such plans were not welcome by the other states of the region and often led to disputes, such as the Western Sahara conflict. Considering the attitude of the Moroccan authorities towards the Arab-Israeli conflict, relations with Israel are also depicted in the work.
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During the 1990s, many sub-Sahara African states started the process of regime change so as to join what was referred to as the third wave of democratization. Almost three decades after, apart from South Africa, very few if not none of them have consolidated democracy
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The editorial team at New Perspectives welcomes you to the first issue of 2024. This issue contains five outstanding articles engaging with the international politics of perception in Central and Eastern Europe. The War in Ukraine continues to shape and reshape European politics, as it faces a range of complex threats to its cohesion from disinformation and populism. Perceptions matter to this geopolitical reality facing Europe. The articles which constitute this issue examine, in various ways, precisely how perception structures international politics in the CEE region – from cultural diplomacy at Eurovision to national status amongst the Visegrád countries, anti-migrant rhetoric, and debates about regional integration or the strength of democracy.
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The Eurovision Song Contest has long served as a platform for cultural diplomacy among its participants. This paper examines how Russia and Ukraine have approached cultural diplomacy in and around the Eurovision Song Contest in the wake of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Following an outline of pertinent events from 2014 to 2022, including the Song Contest and the respective countries’ selected entries as well as the public discourse surrounding them, two distinct types of cultural diplomacy—culturalist versus neo-propagandist—are employed in a congruence analysis. The findings show that Russia employed a largely neo-propagandist approach to cultural diplomacy characterized by their projected image of peacefulness, innocence, and strength to alter their situational image. Ukraine has employed a mostly culturalist approach mainly focused on mutual recognition and the representation of national culture. The conscious instrumentalization of the platform to counter misconstrued perceptions of Ukraine shaped by the Kremlin’s rhetoric also adds neo-propagandist elements.
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As the literature on small state foreign policy predicts that smaller states of the international community attempt to enlarge their influence by seeking a constructive status or proving their adherence to positive norms, the cases in which small states use a negative image to better their international position are almost completely neglected. The article aims to assess how the status of Visegrád countries in interstate society changed since their accession to the European Union in light of the generally negative perception of their governments’ ideological background connected to different kinds of populism and nationalism. Using the GDELT Database, the number of government-level interactions initiated towards the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia was analysed in a European context between 2004 and 2020. The results of the inquiry showed a drastic decrease in the interactions initiated towards the four countries between 2004 and the mid-2010s with a slightly higher ratio of confrontative interactions than in the case of other small and middle-sized states. Data show that Hungary, governed by populist parties since 2010, witnessed the smallest drop in attention in the last decade. These results defy the expectations of the small state literature and suggest a more complicated relationship between international status and the image of small states.
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This article examines the utility of a revised postfunctionalist theory in explaining regional (dis)integration dynamics. The case study employed to test the theoretical framework is based on Ukraine’s regional integration processes with respect to Eurasian and European regional organizations in the early 2010s. The principal research question posed is: what factors contributed to Ukraine’s decision to opt out of deeper integration with Eurasia in the early 2010s and pursue integration with the European Union insead, and how can this case study move the postfunctionalist theory forward? Three assumptions proposed by postfunctionalism, enriched with insights from social constructivism, were applied to the (dis)integration processes: salience, politicization, and collective identity. The analysis suggests that the revised postfunctionalist framework is indeed instrumental in explaining both integration and disintegration, providing insights into the role of collective identity mobilization once public discussion reaches a critical juncture in the politicization process.
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The relevance of the research lies in the observation that, while Ukraine has established formal democratic institutions since its independence, many democratization issues remain unresolved. These formal structures lack effectiveness and support, with informal, often non-democratic political processes and secret agreements continuing to prevail. The study aims to conclude a theoretical study, conceptualization, and generalization of the problems of the existence of informal institutions, as well as a comprehensive analysis of practical technologies of informal institutionalization in modern Ukraine. The authors used such general scientific methods as analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, abstraction, the ascent from the abstract to the concrete. The authors considered such informal institutions that exist in the political reality of Ukraine, such as lobbying, corruption, populism, non-conventional forms of political participation of citizens, party agreements, clientelism, and political bargaining. The effective technologies for the informal institutionalization of modern Ukraine, including technologies for eliminating authoritarian practices, technologies of party structuring, technologies of political participation and technologies for the formation of democratic political consciousness have been proposed. These technologies are aimed at the political modernization of Ukraine, ensuring the institutional functioning of democracy at the proper level and minimizing the negative effects of informal institutions.
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Emmanuel Macron’s idea for an European Political Community, launched on May 9, 2022, on the occasion of Europe Day, is part of the French traditional political thinking on the strategic autonomy of Europe. The French President's proposal was focused on two main ideas: political cooperation and European sovereignty. We find these ideas in other French Presidents’ proposals for the Europe organisation after World War II and the creation of the first European Communities. These proposals also failed to be implemented, for various reasons.
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The European Union is a political project born out of the desire of its arhitects to promote peace on the European continent. Desiring to end the series of frequent and bloody conflicts that culiminated in the Second World War, the European political elites began the construction of the current European Union from the economic component. In order to fulfil its role in the world as a promoter of peace and democracy, the EU needs its own foreign and defence policy. We propose in our study a description of the European Union’s foreign and security policy – as it was configured in primary law, following to draw some conclusions regarding the EU’s role as a political actor in the field of foreign policy and security, by examining the characteristic features of the institutions of the European Union with the role of putting into practice the common foreign and security policy and important legal rules in the field – and a final conclusion regarding the quality of the European Union as a global actor.
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Socio-political changes in the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries in the conditions of geopolitical processes specified by the collapse of the Soviet and socialistic systems, rapid development of information-and-communication technologies have transformed information space. Contemporary Ukrainian journalism and its national information space have been established in interdependence with sociopolitical, economic, cultural-educational development of the independent Ukrainian state. Media were both a mirror and a catalyzer of the socio-political processes. Ukraine’s development in the current conditions of the military aggression and increased information threats creates a necessity to protect its national information space, to improve the system of information security and resist to information operations, and to decrease negative results of the impact of external information. Globalization of the information space and the increased scope of untrue information in the post-truth age require an expansion of the opportunities for media education, a development of critical thinking and enhancement of the level of citizens’ media literacy, their ability to counterstand manipulations both from inside and outside.
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This paper discusses the new protectionism between the united states of america and china and examines international trade policy amid worldwide geopolitical turbulence. The primary research task is to comprehensively analyze the current trends in foreign trade theory and policy, and in particular, the foreign trade policy models, trade interests indicated by export orientation and import sensitivity, the types and degrees of protec- tionist pressures in different political systems, new trends in international business, and the usa’s motives for imposing tariffs and import restrictions. china will be significantly impacted by an import tariff trade war in all indicators, including welfare, gross domestic product (GdP), manufacturing employment, and trade. However, it has been pointed out that although china will be significantly affected, the costs should be sustainable and not severely damage the chinese economy. as for the united states, the simulation resultsindicate that there will be welfare, GdP and non-manufacturing production gains, but employment and trade losses.
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This article deals with the issue of analyzing the security policy of Belarus in the context of the dynamics and processuality of Russia's neo-power (assertive and revisionist) campaign. The aim of the article is, taking into account the asymmetry of Russian-Belarusian relations, an attempt to explain the attempts to overcome and diversify the Belarusian status as a satellite of Moscow. These efforts will be presented against the backdrop of the main security events at the East Euro-Atlantic and West Eurasian junction - geopolitical areas that intertwine the fate and prospects of ensuring the security (survival) of Belarus, in the light of subsequent sequences of Russia's international activities. Therefore, the research strategy of this article assumes the use of systematic and at the same time reductively hierarchical ascertainment – the use of research instruments offered (apart from the critical analysis of literature) by the following methods: abstraction, induction and analogy. In the field of research problems – findings – regarding: the impact of Moscow's revisionism on the security policy of Belarus (1), the importance and specificity of Moscow's supervision over "recalcitrant" Belarus, in the context of its global Russian projection as a superpower (2), and Belarus' attitude towards Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine (3) should fill the gap in building a realistic policy towards Belarus. The main research problem of this analysis comes down to the basic question: "how does Russian revisionism and assertiveness in the international arena affect the subjectivity, statehood and security policy of Belarus?". The analysis and the conclusions presented should therefore be useful for the proper reception of recent, current and potentially – upcoming activities - of Belarus in the international arena, as well as the possibility of using Belarus by Russia. The main conclusion of the study should be considered the Kremlin's still significant influence on the fate of the Belarusian statehood, conditioned by Russia's skilful maintenance of Belarus in its sphere of influence and its "power exhibition" on the geopolitical Western Front, at an important stage of reconfiguration of the global order. The article shows that as a result of Russia's "restrained domineering" towards Belarus, which is allowed "characteristic satelliteness" and "recalcitrant loyalty", a systemic consensus develops between these countries, which, while still allowing Putin to feel like an emperor, binds Belarus in a limited in the process of Russian revisionism and provides the Belarusian dictator with the resources and cover to survive. In a situation where a return to “business as usual” with the West and connecting Russia to transit connections with the West is not possible for the time being, Lukashenko is trying to implement an adversarial (albeit useful for Russia) set of opposing roles: a “reluctant co-aggressor” and a “supporter of peace” in the Ukrainian-Russian war.
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The aim of the article is to present an outline of the genesis, definition and concept of hybrid warfare in NATO member countries, hybrid activities in the Russian concept of new generation warfare and the impact of hybrid threats on the Polish Armed Forces. The implementation of the above is intended to enable the solution of a research problem in the form of a question: What challenges related to hybrid threats, the main source of which is the expansionist policy of the Russian Federation and the crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border, await the Polish Armed Forces?. The research methods used in the work are observation, document examination, analysis and synthesis. The conflict in eastern Ukraine that started in 2014 and the outbreak of a regular Russian-Ukrainian war in 2022 confirm Russia's willingness to strive to revise the international order in Central and Eastern Europe and regain influence in this region. For this reason, it is expected that all available instruments (both military and non-military) will be used to achieve the above-mentioned goals by the Russian Federation. The second part of the article analyzed the main assumptions of the concept of rebellious wars, the views of I. Kapitaniec, V. Slipchenko, J. Gorbachev, V. Geriasimov and the concept of a new generation war by S. Bogdanov and S. Czekanov, which constitute the theoretical basis for the use of the above-mentioned. resources to implement its strategic assumptions. Therefore, the Polish Armed Forces must be ready to counteract any threats related to such an expansionary policy of a neighbouring country, bearing in mind that hybrid methods are used to blur the boundaries between war and peace, sow doubts in the minds of target populations, and their aim is to destabilize and weaken societies. Preparing the Polish Armed Forces to counteract hybrid threats requires defining challenges and conclusions regarding their ability to respond in the real and information environment.
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