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Vocal polyphonic music, as one of Georgia’s primary cultural exports that has been gaining popularity in the world, plays a big part in the effort of creating a marketable Georgian identity – an effort tied to the Georgian state’s desire to join the EU and get away from its Soviet past. Whether state-sponsored or private, a number of institutions have risen to prominence in recent years, all proclaiming to be dedicated to the preservation and popularization of Georgian folklore. While their contribution to these missions is extensive, their policies and practices often carry an eerie resemblance to the Soviet attempts at selective promotion of indigenous cultures. By the very nature of their structure, these institutions impose a particular idea of power and hierarchy: wherein a few select people control the distribution of finances, information, and other resources, performers adhere to dress codes, and ensembles have centralized leadership. My argument in this work is that this idea of power and hierarchy is at odds with the practice of Georgian polyphonic singing, which involves (usually) three distinct voices coming together, without designating a “chief” or “main” one among them. Rather, the singers trade off taking the lead, with endless opportunities for melodic and textual improvisation, and the songs in question are not possible if all the voices are not present. Through a close analysis of ethnographic data from the provinces of Guria and Svaneti in Western Georgia, this project explores how power, preservation, and death — both semiotic and literal — coincide, intersect, and diverge in the Georgian folk singing communities. I approach the tradition as a dynamic habit, with its practitioners as participants in a continuous process, which can only die if performance reaches the “perfect” form, so often exulted by the very institutions that vow to keep it alive. My discussion of the singing practice in this dissertation poses broader questions within the disciplines of anthropology and ethnomusicology, such as: how does the growing popularity of a musical practice shape the worldwide discourse and local policies around it? What happens when rigid institutional power structures are imposed onto a tradition that is pre-disposed against them? And what options and choices do the practitioners of this tradition have when it comes to maintaining their commitment to it?

The present work tells the story of the rise and fall of a pan-Balkan discourse from the mid-1920s to the eve of the Second World War through an examination of the intellectual output of southeast European diplomat-littérateurs—a range of intellectuals and literati who functioned as conduits between the realms of culture and politics—during the years of dislocation and turmoil following the Great War. It traces the emergence of transnational networks that coalesced around interwar pan-Balkanism, or the wide-ranging and diffuse movement that aimed to forge a union out of Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Greece and Turkey, as well as to build substantive intellectual and cultural links among these states. Beginning with the Locarno treaties and the attendant optimism for a united Europe, the Universal Peace Congress of 1929 in Athens, followed by an evaluation of the consecutive Balkan conferences of the early 1930s alongside the work of its varied proponents, this dissertation illustrates how the stigmatized regional moniker, “the Balkans,” was, in fact, re-inscribed and endowed with a new, positively-inflected meaning in the course of efforts to bring about a rapprochement. Moving beyond the scope of earlier scholarship that pitted the Balkans against the West, instead this work demonstrates the interconnectedness of Balkan and European intellectual networks, as well as local actors’ overwhelming subscription to the tenets of cultural internationalism. This work examines Greek, Yugoslav and Albanian foreign policy, geopolitical agendas, popular press as well as literature in order to demonstrate that alternatives to the nation-state as a method of state-building and intellectual organization were, in fact, under consideration. Ultimately, this dissertation depicts intellectual life in the Balkans as it unfolds over the course of the interwar decades and explains why the Balkan idea reemerged during this critical interlude.

East Europeans are integrating into life in the UK. This entails learning to get along with their new neighbours, but it also involves not getting along with certain neighbours. Integration is not confined to benevolent forms of everyday cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism and conviviality; it can also include more pathological forms, like racism. Whilst integration is generally seen as desirable, the learning that it entails necessarily includes less desirable practices and norms. The aim of this article is to show how East Europeans in the UK have been acquiring specifically British competencies of racism. This doesn't mean all East Europeans are racist or they always use racism; it does mean, however, that racism is a part of the integration equation. We focus on the racist and racializing practices of Poles, Hungarians and Romanians in Bristol in the UK. These East Europeans are using racism to insert themselves more favourably into Britain's racialized status hierarchies. This is a kind of integration.

This dissertation examines the development of Russian literature in the decades after the fall of the Soviet Union as a focused study in how literature adjusts to institutional failure. It investigates how cultural forms reproduce themselves and how literature continues to forge meaningful symbolic connections with its audiences, traditions, and the broader culture. I begin when Soviet state prizes, publishers, and organizations like the Writers Union could no longer provide paths to literary prominence in the early 1990s and a booming book market and a privatized prestige economy stepped into the vacuum. At this time, post-Soviet Russian authors faced a mixed blessing: freedom from censorship alongside a disorienting array of new publishers, prizes, and critical outlets, joined later by online and social media. In this new environment, personal success became an important structural value for authors and for literary works. The literary process was driven, in large part, by authors who found innovative solutions to immediate problems along their pathways to success. In search of readers, recognition, and aesthetic innovation, the authors in this dissertation transformed and even created the institutional and economic frameworks for post-Soviet Russian literature’s development, while at the same time developing new cultural forms capable of connecting with audiences in intimate and meaningful ways. The sum effect of their individual solutions to discrete problems along their own paths to success was a profound shift in the literary field, the creation and entrenchment of a new system of cultural production, distribution and consumption based on capitalist principles—the system I call “cultural capitalism.” This dissertation shows how cultural capitalism developed out of the institutional collapse of the Soviet cultural system. While many studies have analyzed the cultural field’s genesis, its social role, and internal mechanisms, few have considered the fate of literature or culture at times of institutional failure, and fewer still have focused on possible mechanisms of recovery. Studies of contemporary Russian literature, on the other hand, have often relied on master tropes, frequently borrowed from Western literary theory. While this research constitutes an important contribution, it fails to address the central question of how literature has been affected by social upheaval and institutional failure. My project addresses this gap by modeling cultural capitalism as a literary system in which the drive for success is pervasive, but the very meaning of “success” can be defined differently by different authors. The term cultural capitalism builds on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital, but imagines that resource as part of a dynamic system of cultural exchange, while my understanding of success expands on Boris Dubin’s work on the topic. Finally, building on Formalist investigations of “literary evolution” and the “literary everyday,” as well as contemporary Russian sociological studies, I provide a theoretical model that connects the structures of the post-Soviet literary environment to new forms of verbal art. Through interviews, close readings, and secondary research, I show how four prominent authors—Boris Akunin, Olga Slavnikova, Aleksei Ivanov, and Vera Polozkova—have developed idiosyncratic visions of success. I then demonstrate how each author’s particular patterns of ambitions correlate with the literary, economic, and institutional innovations that define their artistic works, careers, and positions in the literary field. By triangulating authors’ visions of success, their navigations of the literary field, and their innovative verbal art, I map out the trajectories of literature as both an institution and as an art form across the transition from the Soviet to the post-Soviet era.

I examine the origins of the anti-totalitarian collective memory pervading Central and Eastern Europe by tracking the genesis and development of the region’s ubiquitous and state-sponsored memory institutes. I deploy field analysis, prosopography and in-depth interviews to reveal how these hybrid institutes generate a potent anti-communist symbolic repertoire by overseeing alliances and exchanges across political, historiographic and Eurocratic fields. Memory institutes ensure this hegemony fundamentally via two mechanisms: The scientific validation of their activities by way of scholarly co-optation, and its regional legitimation through incursions into European arenas. I conclude that memory institutes are ultimately a key element of post-communist political competition, responsible for creating a durable symbolic advantage for the right’s conservative identity politics.

The history of the Cold War has rarely been looked at through the eyes of the smaller powers, especially ones in the Balkans. Works have also often ignored the actual workings of the international socialist market, and the possibilities it created for some of these small countries. The conventional wisdom has also prevailed that the Eastern Bloc was irreversably lagging technologically, and its societies had failed to enter the information age after the 1970s, one among a myriad of reasons for the failure of socialism. Using the prism of a commodity history of the Bulgarian computer and an ethnography of the professional class that built it and worked with it, this dissertation argues that such narratives obscure the role of small states and the importance of technology to the socialist project. The backward Bulgarian economy exploited the international socialist division of labour and COMECON’s mechanisms to set itself up as the “Silicon Valley” of the Eastern Bloc, garnering huge profits for the economy. To do so, it did not hue a politically maverick road but exploited its political orthodoxy and Soviet alliance to the full, securing huge markets. Importantly, this work also shows that the state facilitated massive transfers of knowledge and technology through both legal and illicit means, using its state security and economic organisations to look to the West. This made the Iron Curtain much more porous for a growing cadre of technical intellectuals who were trusted by the regime in order to create the golden exports of the country. This transfer and mobility helped create an internationally plugged-in and fluent class of engineers and managers, at odds with most of the rest of the economy. At the same time, the Global South became an important area of exchange where these specialists competed with both nascent protectionist regimes and international firms. Using India as a case study, this dissertation shows how Bulgarian met the First World on the grounds of the Third and learned to market, negotiate, advertise, and service customers – a skillset that was then applied to its socialist dealings. Finally, the dissertation examines the domestic impact of such policies. The regime wished to use cybernetics and computing to solve the problems of its lagging economic growth, as well as usher in communism. It introduced both the widespread discourse of technological revolutions to its population, and robots and automation to some of its factories. This created both anxieties and hopes among workers, as well as vibrant philosophical debates about the future roles of humans in the information society, among both technical and humanistic intellectuals. Ultimately, however, the economic inefficiency undermined the promise and this failure was utilised by some technical managers to call for reforms, playing a hand in the end of the regime. They managed to negotiate the transfer to capitalism better than most, utilising their financial and business links, while thousands of engineers also found a better life than the vast majority of Bulgarian workers, through emigration or their possession of cutting edge skills. Using Bulgarian, Russian, Indian archives as well as interviews with living actors, the dissertation thus intervenes in both the view of the Iron Curtain as an impenetrable barrier for ideas, and 1989 as a convenient end point for communism’s legacies. It shows both the creation of new professional classes and how they were plugged into global developments, arguing that some people in the socialist bloc did enter the information age, and it is by paying attention to their actions and interests that we can get a better understanding of the developments of late socialism and its end.

This dissertation is about holes. It begins by analyzing the proverbial ���hole in the fence��� at late-Soviet enterprises: the way that workers pragmatically employed the planned economy's distribution rules by actions that were both morally commendable and questionably legal. It then analyzes the omission of this hole in perestroika economic analysis, which devoted surprisingly little attention to enterprises' central role in providing welfare and exerting social control, or to employees' pragmatic employment of the enterprises' rules. This analytic hole is compounded by a historiographic one: by the omission of the post-1956 omission of Stalin's name from public mention. Framing the perestroika reforms against ���Stalinism,��� perestroika-era texts typically trace the start of de-Stalinization to Khrushchev's ���Cult of Personality��� speech, after which Stalin's name disappeared from textbooks; rather than to the post-1953 reforms that fundamentally restructured labor, economic and punitive institutions to create characteristically late-Soviet methods of retaining and motivating labor: including the widespread disciplinary lenience that allowed workers to pragmatically employ enterprise rules. Precluded by this historiography from seeing how late-Soviet institutions had evolved in the post-Stalin absence of forced labor laws and how they practically functioned, popular and expert analysis instead tended to analyze citizens' relationships to the state in subjective terms: as a question of stagnant mindsets and loss of faith. Defined by its non-complicit denouncement of a retrospectively posited ���Stalinist��� state, the subject position taken by this analysis precluded speakers from seeing the presence behind all these holes: from seeing how they had practically constructed themselves and the late-Soviet system by pursuing their own economic, social and political goals through its institutions. The perestroika reform laws that were justified by this analysis intended to ���speed up��� society by intervening in workers' and citizens' feelings of ownership and responsibility. But, lacking a practical understanding of how late-Soviet institutions functioned, they instead quickly crashed the economy.

This dissertation analyzes the works of Yiddish and Hebrew writer Isaac Leib Peretz (1852-1915) during the 1890's. It criticaly engages with the entire range of Peretz's literary output during this period in both languages. It argues that Peretz functioned as a literary agent of the Jewish working class in Eastern Europe which was an ethnic-class fraction that was represented politically by the emerging Jewish Socialist Bund. During this period, Peretz's Yiddish-centric ideology emerged alongside his development as a writer of prose as well as of poetry. Thus he evolved from being a social realist, naturalist, and romantic bilingual politically radical writer into becoming a predominantly Yiddish writer of symbolist drama, folk-tales, and neo-romantic Hasidic stories and poetry during the 20th century. This thesis refutes the long-standing convention in Peretz-scholarship that his interest in new literary styles coinsided with a rejection of revolutionary politics; rather it reflected his ongoing search for new ways of expressing his radicalism.

At the height of his power in 1923, the head of the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BANU), Alexander Stamboliiski, summed up the significance of his politics for European history in the following way: "Today there are only two interesting social experiments: the experiment of Lenin and my own." Taking the aspirations reflected in the quotation above seriously and rescuing the agrarian project from the enormous condescension of posterity is the foundation of this dissertation. Briefly, it is about unpacking and restoring the significance of the Golden Age of the European Peasantry between the two world wars by focusing on the paradigmatic cases of Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. The dissertation proposes a novel synoptic approach with regards to interwar agrarianism as a counterpoint to ideology driven classifications or structuralist synthesis. Its thematic chapters alternate between strategic probes of evocative micro histories and broader theoretically informed overviews in order to illustrate and clarify the analytical frame. The most radical expression of interwar agrarianism, that of Bulgaria, and the man responsible for it, Alexander Stamboliiski, serve as the center of this dissertation. The juxtaposition of this center to the development of agrarianism in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, as well as to various oppositional formations such as the Communist International Peasant Union allows this dissertation to overcome the national parochialism that has contributed to the sidelining of the study of agrarianism. The innovative structure of the dissertation is above all a demonstration of the rich possibilities still open to researchers in this field to reinsert the study of agrarianism into contemporary theoretical debates and developments in the historiography. The dissertation explicitly engages agrarianism with the theoretical literature on nationalism, corruption, the subaltern, as well as makes possible the connection to the problematics of modernity, politics as systemic change, transnational and global history.

"Afterlife of Empire" explores Ottoman cultural, social, and political continuities in Bosnia Herzegovina during the Habsburg administration (1878-1914). The research focuses on the enduring influence of the Ottoman Empire - an influence perpetuated both by the efforts of the Ottoman imperial state, and by the former subjects in Bosnia Herzegovina itself to explain the lingering aftereffects of the Ottoman Empire in the province. At the core of this dissertation is the argument that the Ottoman subjects and the former territories did not stop being Ottoman in any significant sense immediately after the separation from the empire, and that the break with the empire was not that of rupture, but characterized by enduring features of the empire that evolved to respond to diplomatic and strategic interests in the region. A shift from the common inclination to analyze the Habsburg period as the introduction of modernity, and a focus, not on the national/ethnic framework constructed around identity, but on the overlapping, multiple loyalties in this study convey a more accurate representation of the period and an assessment of what legitimacy and sovereignty meant in this region. By drawing on Ottoman and Bosnian archival sources in focusing on Bosnia's overlapping imperial, regional, religious, linguistic, and cultural frameworks, this dissertation demonstrates the importance of considering the Ottoman context after its formal departure, and the significance of incorporating Islamic intellectual history in understanding the past and present of Bosnia Herzegovina and Southeastern Europe in general.

Two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union the conflicts in Abkhazia, Nagorno Karabakh, South Ossetia and Transnistria remain unresolved and their dynamics continue to impact political stability, state-building and great power competition in the former Soviet Union. Over the last years, the international community‘s strategy for addressing them has varied significantly. By bringing together leading scholars, policy analysts, and NGO representatives from Europe, the United States and Eurasia to discuss these issues we hope to provide an opportunity to reflect on the last twenty years and to think about possible steps forward.

Two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union the conflicts in Abkhazia, Nagorno Karabakh, South Ossetia and Transnistria remain unresolved and their dynamics continue to impact political stability, state-building and great power competition in the former Soviet Union. Over the last years, the international community‘s strategy for addressing them has varied significantly. By bringing together leading scholars, policy analysts, and NGO representatives from Europe, the United States and Eurasia to discuss these issues we hope to provide an opportunity to reflect on the last twenty years and to think about possible steps forward.

Two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union the conflicts in Abkhazia, Nagorno Karabakh, South Ossetia and Transnistria remain unresolved and their dynamics continue to impact political stability, state-building and great power competition in the former Soviet Union. Over the last years, the international community‘s strategy for addressing them has varied significantly. By bringing together leading scholars, policy analysts, and NGO representatives from Europe, the United States and Eurasia to discuss these issues we hope to provide an opportunity to reflect on the last twenty years and to think about possible steps forward.

In the harsh snowy days of late November, 2004, I joined hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens on Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Independence Square in Kyiv, to protest the unfair presidential election which had been rigged in favor of the corrupt government -sponsored candidate. I was there as an international election observer and was simultaneously researching the role that Ukrainian-language popular and folk music were playing in the protests, dubbed as the Orange Revolution (Helbig 2006). Music has had such a long history of politicization in Ukraine that newspapers printed the names of Ukraine’s most well-known musicians and the candidate they supported, either the opposition candidate or the government -sponsoredone (Klid 2007). These affiliations were based less on political ideology as they were ruled by ethnic identity, language choice between Ukrainian and Russian, regional identity, and religious identity. Among the performers on Maidan Nezalezhnosti were an African-Jamaican duo calling themselves “Chornobryvtsi” (Black -Browed), performing Ukrainian folk songs dressed in Ukrainian folk garb for the crowd. The passion with which the crowd embraced Chornobryvtsi made it clear that outsider validation of Ukrainian ethnic identity and culture was at the root of the protests. The crowds’ chants of “Chor-no-bryv-tsi! Chor-no-bryv-tsi!” signaled an embrace of nonUkrainians who supported Ukrainian language and culture, perceived by protestors to be under threat by the Russian -oriented policies of the political regime. The role of African and Jamaican musicians in that critical historical moment also brought forth the role of migrants and foreigners living in Ukraine in Ukraine’s ongoing political and cultural identity struggles, in terms of its vacillating leanings between more pro-Russian and pro-Western ideologies and policies. Since the 2004 Orange Revolution, the highly mediatized involvement of African musicians in Ukraine’s pop-folk music scenes has broadened the contemporary public sphere beyond the ongoing ethnic Russian and ethnic Ukrainian culture wars since Ukrainian independence in 1991. The continued popularity of African musicians helps foreground issues of pluralism and multiculturalism that reinforce the notion of Ukraine as a patchwork quilt made up of many different ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups, including ethnic Russians, Russian-speaking Ukrainians, ethnic Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars, Roma ( Gypsies), Armenians, and Jews. African folk musicians’ appearances on talk shows, at folk music festivals, at public city events, in newspapers and on the Internet, have influenced the ways that people speak about ethnicity and race, albeit with a greater sense of conflation of identities as regards people with dark skin. It is common for locals to refer to musicians from Africa as African American or to use “African” and “African American” or “Afro-American” interchangeably when speaking or writing about performers from the African continent in the media. Musicians from Africa capitalize upon the popularity of u.s. popular music genres associated with African Americans, conflating the widely marketed stereotype of “African American as musician” to localize their social acceptance via Ukrainian folk music idioms. Are Africans accepted in their own right or only to the extent that they adhere to more localized cultural norms, such as participation in Ukrainian folk-influenced music? How do Soviet -era and contemporary attitudes regarding Africans and African Americans influence levels of inclusion for African migrants in post-Orange Revolution Ukraine?, Current Musicology, No 91 (2011): Current Musicology

Over the course of the last decade, Eastern Europe and Central Asia have experienced similar non-violent, pro-democratic social movements led by Social Movement Organizations. In contrast, though, post-social movement states are not equally democratic today. In this essay, I analyze where the SMOs that led three of the Color Revolutions, Kmara, Pora, and Otpor, changed the course of democratization in Georgia, Ukraine, and Serbia, respectively. From this analysis, I conclude that the decision of SMO activists to actively engage with the newly established democratic regime as both opposition and as following a social movement is more beneficial for democratization than passively challenging and more feasible than other means.

Viktor Yanukovich's victory in the Ukrainian presidential election Sunday has predictably sparked a spate of commentary that Ukraine's Orange Revolution has come to an end. This conclusion seems natural given that it was the same Yanukovich's efforts to steal the 2004 presidential election that led to the Orange Revolution. At first glance, it is difficult to imagine a more clear symbolic rebuke to the western oriented reform agenda of President Viktor Yuschenko, who defeated Yanukovich in 2004, but received only 5% of the vote in the first round of this election, and to Yulia Timoschenko, the other major leader of the Orange Revolution, who lost to Yanukovich on Sunday, than Yanukovich's victory. This, at least, is how the election has been portrayed in most media. A narrative has been created that the elections of 2004 and 2010 represented swings in the Ukrainian electorate signaling the beginning and end of the Orange Revolution. An alternative narrative has also emerged claiming that Yanukovich's victory is evidence of the success of the Orange Revolution. Alternation of power through fair elections, as Ukraine has just experienced, is, after all, a defining characteristic of a democracy. However, there is a considerably more plausible, if less dramatic, explanation of the events of the last decade or so in Ukraine. Perhaps Yuschenko's narrow victory in 2004 and Yanukovich's similarly narrow victory this year are part, not of a cycle of revolution and counter-revolution, or of a consolidation of democracy, but simply stages of Ukraine's slow and bumpy post-Soviet history. In this view, Yuschenko's victory in 2004 reflects a process of regime development of which Leonid Kuchma's presidency, which began in 1994, is also part.

From 2003-2005, a wave of Color Revolutions brought about regime change in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. These Color Revolutions all saw fraudulent elections lead to the ouster of undemocratic leaders. Although, for the most part these events failed to bring about the democratic advances which many hoped they would, the Color Revolutions were dramatic, largely peaceful events which inspired many people in that region and beyond. The wave of Color Revolutions did not last long, as fraudulent elections in Azerbaijan in 2005 and Belarus in 2006 led to some demonstrations followed by displays of state strength that ended those demonstrations quickly. Despite efforts in Iran and elsewhere, the Color Revolution model has not been successfully replicated since 2005. Nonetheless, it is impossible not to watch the developing events in Belarus and think about Color Revolution.

The Russia-Georgia war of August 2008 had repercussions well beyond the South Caucasus. The war was the culmination of Western tensions with Russia over its influence in the post-Soviet space, while the fallout exposed divisions within the transatlantic community over how aggressively to confront Moscow after its invasion of undisputed Georgian territory and its permanent stationing of troops in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The conflict also called into question Georgia's relationship with the United States, as well as U.S. credibility as a regional security partner in light of Washington's apparent inability either to restrain Tbilisi from launching an attack against Tskhinvali in August 2008 or to help its ally once the war began. Since the war, both the United States and Europe have provided significant financial support to help rebuild Georgia and have denounced the continued presence of Russian forces in the breakaway territories. The transatlantic community, however, has failed to develop a forward-looking strategy toward those territories. The West's adamant refusal to accept Russia's recognition of the declared independence of these two territories in August 2008 is legally correct, but just pledging enduring support for Georgia's territorial integrity is impractical and somewhat meaningless now that Abkhazia and South Ossetia are even further out of Georgian sovereignty than they were before the war. These territories almost certainly are lost to Georgia for the short and medium terms—possibly for a period of decades—and Russian influence has substantially increased in both regions. Russia has formally recognized their independence, and perhaps ironically, the territories have gone from enjoying de facto independence as unrecognized states and parties to frozen conflicts, before August 2008, to becoming almost de facto parts of the Russian Federation in their new status as "independent states." Further, Russia has sought international support (particularly from Latin American countries) for the policy, offering economic incentives to secure recognition from third parties such as Nicaragua and Venezuela. Russia's "sovereign diplomatic" offensive, therefore, has further eroded the very international regime of sovereignty which Moscow professed to uphold when it criticized Kosovo's 2008 unilateral declaration of independence as a "dangerous precedent." The war's troubling consequences for the region's territorial disputes do not seem to have resulted in any updated Western policy initiatives or active measures to rollback Russia's accelerating absorption of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Nearly 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Eurasia's unrecognized states remain isolated and dependent on regional patrons, removed from international governance structures, rules, and norms. Instead of a region pursuing greater global integration, the unrecognized states continue to act as islands of isolation while regional powers seek to monopolize their interactions. With these pressing factors in mind, we propose a basic outline of a new approach called "engagement without recognition" for Western policy toward at least Abkhazia, a policy that could serve as a model for crafting more robust engagement with Eurasia's other unrecognized states. According to this strategy, Abkhazia would be given the opportunity to engage with the West on a number of political, economic, social, and cultural issues for the purpose of lessening Russia's influence. While undertaking this strategy, the West must make it clear that Abkhazia's status as an independent state will never be accepted by either the United States or the EU. By separating the international legal dimensions of sovereignty (the question of non-recognition) from its governance aspects, the West can attempt to gain some needed strategic leverage over Abkhazia, which it currently lacks.

The war between Russia and Georgia in August of 2008 revealed many tensions between Russia and the west. One of the most significant of these issues was the Russian belief in "spheres of privileged interests." According to this view, which Russian president Dmitri Medvedev spelled out very clearly in September of 2008, because it is a major regional power, Russia should have special rights in its part of the world including much of the former Soviet Union. This was meant as both a post facto justification for Russia's actions in the Georgia war as well as a statement about Russia's intentions going forward. Russia, according to Medvedev, was going to reassert itself as the dominant power in the region, which was an implicit warning to the U.S. to tone down its involvement in the former Soviet Union.

The Russian—Georgian war in August 2008 and Russia's decision to recognise the independence of the Georgian breakaway territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia have fundamentally altered the political balance of what were previously referred to as 'frozen' conflicts. After years of pursuing policies that isolated Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the European Union and the government of Georgia have both announced new strategies towards these regions. Despite certain similarities between the two strategies, however, aligning their instruments and goals will prove difficult given the different political priorities of Brussels and Tbilisi. The EU must prepare to pursue its own engagement strategy regardless of how the Georgian approach is crafted or implemented.

The first round of the Ukrainian election, which was held on the 17th of January, was inconclusive making a runoff, scheduled for February 7th , necessary. At first glance, the contrast between the two candidates in the runoff, Prime Minister Yulia Timoschenko the heroine of the 2004 Orange Revolution, and Viktor Yanukovich, the man whose fraudulent attempt to claim victory led directly to the Orange Revolution, is stark. According to the most common narrative, Timoschenko is viewed as pro-west and likely to bring Ukraine closer into the European orbit while Yanukovich is closer to Russia and likely to strengthen ties with Russia while weakening relations with Europe and the U.S. The reality is that both candidates will have to continue the extremely difficult task of balancing a divided country between Russia and the west while trying to reenergize an economy which has been badly hurt by the global economic downturn. It is very likely that the winning candidate will not have a sufficient mandate, or enough votes in parliament, to quickly change the course of Ukraine. Moreover, the electorate is sufficiently polarized, hence the need for the runoff between these two candidates, that no president will be able to abandon the west in favor of Russia, or do the reverse. Additionally, in recent years, Timoschenko's western orientation has become more equivocal as she too has sought to improve Ukraine's relations with Russia.

There is an old story about a pogrom in Czarist Russia. During the pogrom, attackers break into a Jewish home, destroy much of the meager property inside and threaten to kill the man of the house. The terrified man pleads for his life and is finally spared under the condition that he teach the Czar’s dog to talk within one year. If he fails, his attackers promise they will come back and kill him. When the attackers leave, the man’s wife says to him “Are you crazy? How are you ever going to teach the Czar’s dog to talk?” The man responds “Who knows? In a year, the dog might die, or the Czar might die.”

You know it is a rough time for democracy in the former Soviet Union when images of fisticuffs from the floor of the Ukrainian parliament are broadcast all over the world; and that those images of fistfights, eggs being thrown and wrestling over a giant Ukrainian flag represent some of the better news regarding democracy in the region. Obviously, debate and discussion is more appropriate than violence and shouting matches in any legislature, but sadly, this incident is one of the rare signs of democratic life in the region.

Last summer’s war in Georgia brought into sharp focus several key components of U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War period, and raised major questions about the future of U.S. relations with Russia, Georgia and most of the former Soviet region. The war was also a wake-up call (to those who may somehow have still been asleep): The post-Cold War period—a time marked by a prostrate Russia and virtually unchecked American power in the region—is over. In this new post-post-Cold War period, the challenge for U.S. policymakers is to craft a strategy that recognizes both the potential danger Russia poses to its neighbors and the limits to U.S. influence in the region— limits that have only grown tighter thanks to the ongoing global economic crisis. The war has already forced the United States to take a more critical look at its relationships with both Georgia and Russia. That task fell to a Bush Administration as it was coming to an end. But the war also forces us to situate those challenges in the context of a triangular relationship between Russia, the United States and Europe, because the United States cannot formulate an effective policy toward Russia without the sup - port of the Europeans. This task falls to the Obama Administration as it is just beginning.

An attempt by Imedi Television, a network very close to the Georgian government, to remind the Georgian people, as if they needed reminding, of the threat posed by Russia, by showing a fake newscast of a Russian invasion, backfired causing panic and anger at the government for perpetrating the hoax.

From Tallinn to Tbilisi, one of the most common criticisms of the Obama administration is that the U.S. is abandoning its new allies to Russia, and underestimating the threat Russia poses to these countries. This notion persists in spite of the efforts made by the current administration and Vice President Biden who has become, in the words of Nicholas Kulish, the “reassurer-in-chief,” to restate American support for these countries.

Georgia, Russia and Armenia have all held presidential elections this year, and in each case, the outcomes demonstrate that efforts to strengthen democracy are either stagnant or, more worryingly, failing. These elections, and the political contexts in which they occurred, were distinct from each other, but together they point toward the major challenges facing the advance of democracy and policies to support it. All three of elections demonstrate the importance of developing democracy assistance strategies that can help liberalize illiberal regimes or stop the slide of semi-democracies toward authoritarianism.

The United States must not be dissuaded from restoring the promotion of freedom and democracy as a core principle of U.S. foreign policy. Democracy assistance is both a reflection of American values and in America's strategic interests. America's next president will be challenged to revitalize the democracy agenda — and get it right. What's needed to address the challenges of the 21st century is a more versatile approach based on the requirements of each country and tailored to the characteristics of different regime types — authoritarian regimes, illiberal democracies, free-wheeling kleptocracies and post-conflict countries.

The preeminent economic challenge for Central European economies in transition is to grow rapidly for a sustained period of time. On current policies, the Central European economies can expect to grow at moderate rates, faster than Western Europe, but far short of the rapid growth rates achieved in the very fast growing economies (VFGEs) in Asia and elsewhere. This paper discusses the sources of rapid growth in the VFGEs, and the ways in which Central Europe could emulate key aspects of the economic policies of the VFGEs in order to raise the growth rates of the Central European economies.

This paper gives a motivation and a method for a fast integration of the reforming countries of central Europe into the European Union. The motivation is based on the idea of self-fulfilling prophecies where the expectation of the entry can trigger the coordination of expectations towards a fast-growth, catch-up equilibrium, and help central Europe avoid the stagnation equilibrium. The method is a target data which enhances the credibility of the integration and a set of conditions and modalities which stimulates the reforms in the applicant countries and ensures that they will contribute to its development.

It is such an honor for me to follow in this program such esteemed individuals and close friends. And I am also quite thrilled to be here, in a literal sense, if you would appreciate that in the last 18 hours it's been a 12,000 mile journey to get here on time. When one leaves an afternoon talk in Seoul, stops in Singapore, Bombay, Zurich, and Prague and arrives within a few moments of schedule, I think one can say that some systems in the world are working well. The amazing fact that one can reliably give an afternoon talk in Seoul and a breakfast talk in Prague gives one pause in another way: as fast as economists move, world capital moves even faster; it's just the press of a button. Not only can one shuttle between Seoul and Prague, but Korea and the Czech Republic compete directly for international capital and for markets. When we consider our policy choices and the issues of the day, we have to put them as clearly as possible within the realistic framework of today's world markets and today's possibilities for nations to both grow and improve the environment. And it is in that context that I would like to turn to a specific although very broad part of the current policy agenda: not the question of global cooperation, but the more specific set of issues involved in the transition economies of this region.

In order to understand the tasks and responsibilities of the present time we have to remember the past. For many of the burning issues of today result from the insufficiently extinguished fires of yesterday.