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While the creation of public policies usually requires a process of consultation of the stakeholders, foreign policy is an exception to this rule. The concentration of the decision-making competences at the peak of the institutional architecture of the State is a characteristic that has lead scholars to consider it as pertaining to high politics. Nevertheless, identifying the main actors of decision-making is a relevant issue when it comes to the attribution of responsibility for a State's external action. This issue is at the heart of this article, which tries to locate this kind of responsibility for the post-communist Romanian foreign policy. Thus, after outlining the main theoretical tools that can be used for such an endeavor, the author proceeds to examine the legal and institutional framework that circumscribes foreign policy decision-making in Romania. The third part of the article is dedicated to a deeper approach to the informal relations established between the persons holding the key positions in the decision-making apparatus, based on a methodology that triangulates official documents, interviews with Romanian officials, and autobiographic texts published by the latter.

The Eastern European space proves itself full of instable spots and old disputes between States, regions, populations. The peaceful relations are constructed here by overcoming these legacies of the past, and through cooperation on multilateral levels. The relations between Romania and Ukraine are an example of this twofold trend. Inheriting a disputed border since the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, and large minorities on their territories, the two States signed a Treaty of friendship and good neighborhood in 1997, when Romania was under pressure to fulfill the NATO accession criteria. After that, disputes re-emerged concerning the delimitation of the continental shelf in the Black Sea, and the question was brought before the International Court of Justice in 2004. On the other hand, Romania and Ukraine were partners in the attempts to give a solution to the Transnistrean conflict or in the Black Sea Economic Cooperation. Observing the development of the relations between Romania and Ukraine since 1992, when the two countries established diplomatic relations, to 2004, we will argue that these relations follow a pattern of cooperation when conducted in a multilateral framework or when pressured by international organizations, while they are more prone to conflict when no other international actors are directly involved. These empirical findings support a liberal institutionalist approach to international relations in Eastern Europe. This view, together with a traditional foreign policy analysis approach, will be the main theoretical approaches adopted in this article.

The aim of this article is to analyze the bilateral relations between Romania and the Russian Federation from the dismantlement of the USSR until the accession of Romania to the European Union. The main thesis that we shall try to demonstrate is that, for several reasons, these relations remained very ambiguous during this whole period. One the one hand, there are historical causes of a strong russophobia among the Romanian population, which prevented a rapprochement between the two countries after the fall of communism. On the other hand, Russia's prestige as a great power and its proximity to Romania makes it impossible to ignore when it comes to foreign policy. The position of the different Romanian governments oscillated between these two negative attitudes. We shall try to explain the policy conducted by the Romanian decision-makers by using three types of variables: history, domestic politics and international environment.

This paper is an attempt at reconstituting the emergence of the international mechanisms of criminal justice after the Cold War from the point of view of the articulation between the fundamental norm of the modern system of states -sovereignty- and the corpus of human rights, more precisely, on the regime formation of international criminal justice. Our approach will focus on the political, rather than on the legal aspects of this process. While it is difficult enough to conceptualize and to theoretically justify the link between sovereignty and the possibility for individuals to become subjects of international law, a further obstacle to the emergence of international criminal justice is the overcoming of the strategic interests of particular states, especially great powers, in establishing such a jurisdiction. Since international law remains politically negotiable, we will try to look into the political context that allowed for the developments that led, at the end of the 1990s, to the creation of the ICC, as well as to the transformation of the meaning of "sovereignty", in order to include the responsibility to protect citizens against ethnic cleansing, genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Thus, some of the questions addressed in this contribution will be: which is the conceptual link between sovereignty and human rights? Subsequently, how do individuals become subjects of international law? Which is the extent of the "universality" of human rights? The linkage between these sets of questions might provide a critical perspective on the transformation of international politics.

The approach of the European Union towards several regions that might be considered as "gates" to the rest of the world, such as North Africa and the Middle East or the Black Sea area, is becoming more and more ambiguous. This is certainly a paradox, since the actual conditions of world politics would seem to require, on the contrary, a more integrated strategy, and one that is more oriented towards clearly defined objectives. This article proposes a comparative reading of the different European initiatives linked to the European Neighborhood Policy addressed to the two above-mentioned regions: the Barcelona Process, EuroMed and the Union for the Mediterranean, on the one hand, and the Black Sea Synergy and the Eastern Partnership, on the other hand. The content of these cooperations, as well as their objectives and the State and other institutional actors that contribute to them will be examined. The ambiguous nature and the lack of global coherence of these initiatives can be explained through the competition among member States but also among the European institutions in their attempts to assume a leadership position in these policies. Another explanation is the lack of a properly political global strategy of the EU, that should gather the consensus of all member States and link the technical and economic aspects of cooperation to a wider vision of the role and the objectives of the EU in the world.

The article examines the fate of sovereignty in the post-Cold War international system. It points to some processes that undermine the traditional understanding of modern sovereignty as the exclusivity of jurisdiction over a given territory and the absence of a higher authority than the state. These processes are, first, the development of international jurisdictions that supersede the state, such as the European Court of Human Rights or the International Criminal Court; second, the emergence of a doctrine that links sovereignty to certain obligations of the state towards its citizens, under the name of "responsibility to protect"; third, the dissolution of the distinction inside/outside, as well as of the cohesion of the political community upon which the sovereign state is founded. Parallel to these processes, there is a visible tendency of the state to reassert its sovereignty through a tighter control over the society and its territory, and through the manipulation of the discourse on security and danger.

The purpose of this article is twofold. First, we will try to show how the idea of the "responsibility to protect" gained terrain in the circles of international lawyers and theorists during the last ten years, as well as the very debatable issues raised by it. Secondly -and this constitutes the stake of our approach- we will address the broader discussion of the link between R2P and the problem of state sovereignty, by arguing that the emergence of this new international obligation is merely a hypostasis of a general malaise of the traditional state sovereignty. We will then conclude by assessing the impact of the new norm of R2P to the recent political developments in the Middle East, in order to grasp the direction into which the practice is evolving in this field.