Search

The new democracies of Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland have been at the forefront of integration into West European intergovernmental organizations since the fall of communism. Cooperation among Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland began in the post-communist era at the 1991 summit in Visegrad, Hungary. Although states in the West encouraged cooperation, particularly as a condition for membership in the EU and NATO, national security priorities of the Visegrad states diverge due to historical experiences and geostrategic location. The three states share a common insecurity from being positioned throughout history between great powers that have pursued expansionist policies from time to time. Although the foreign policy agenda of Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland have been quite similar since the fall of communism, each state maintains different policy priorities and different traditional perceptions of external threats. Moreover, the three states have experienced varying degrees of security anxiety from the end of the bipolar system. The breakup of the USSR, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and COMECON, the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and the velvet divorce of the Czech and Slovak republics have had direct implications on security, trade, and foreign relations for each state. In neighboring East European states, military bases that once housed Soviet troops are currently being offered to the hegemonic power of the U.S. for troop redeployment consideration, and the U.S. military already has a presence as a NATO force on the Taszar air base in Hungary. This paper will examine the security postures of Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland since the Visegrad Summit in 1991. What are the competing exogenous pressures that affect the security policies of Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland? To what degree does cooperation impinge upon the security priorities and the sovereignty of Central European states? Can these states achieve relative gains vis-a-vis neighboring states and increase their influence with competing regional powers, or can shared norms and values from regional cooperation increase absolute gains and increase regional stability? In order to evaluate the security concerns, collective security, neoliberal institutionalism, and realism will be introduced as frameworks of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst there is an emerging theoretical consensus in critical security studies on the Bakhtinian understanding of the 'other' as an epistemological and ontological necessity for the comprehension and completion of the 'self', the response of the 'other' to the construction of its identity has generally escaped scholarly attention, not the least in the context of Central and East European states' responses to the long-time Western designation 'Europe but not Europe'. Yet, this paper argues, the experience of being framed as simultaneously in Europe and not quite European has left a constitutive imprint on Poland's and the Baltic states' current self-understandings and security imaginaries. This paper applies William Connolly's notion of the politics of becoming in order to analyse the Polish and Baltic versions of becoming a subject in the field of post-Cold War European foreign and security policy. Setting out from a Sartrean dictum 'we are what we make of what others have made of us', this paper presents a critical discourse analysis on what the representation of Central and East European countries in Western post-Cold War security debates has made of them, with a particular reference to the bifurcations of New/Old and modern/postmodern Europe. The paper thus aims to advance Bakhtin's ideal-typical model's applicability to the study of international relations by pinpointing the inevitable infusion of collective identity formation with power relations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ongoing debates within European studies over the nature of Central and Eastern European accession to the European Union (EU) have generated interest about the legacies of the communist past because of the importance of the role of previous modes of governance on the current politics of the entire continent. How do these legacies interact with the accession process to produce the current outcomes? What is the role of the EU in producing these outcomes? What are the limitations of the EU?s influence on the newly acceded countries? Models of the diffusion of international norms which utilize the EU as an organization platform may provide the beginning of an answer to these questions. This paper argues that in particular the spiral model of norm diffusion is useful at describing the ?transition? of Central and Eastern European countries to liberal democratic states rather than the internalization and consolidation of these norms. The influence of the European Union upon the accession countries is limited because of the two factors which have had an effect upon the accession criteria. The first is the positive enforcement of EU conditionality which is no longer effect in a post-accession environment. The second is the emphasis upon harmonization rather than development within the accession countries. This has limited the depth of the changes within the societies of Central and Eastern Europe. By clarifying the theoretical issues surrounding the accession to the EU, this paper promotes a greater understanding of the current and future politics between ?old? and ?new? Europe. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]