You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
During the past decade northern Europe has started to assume an identity of its own. Categories of East and West have become blurred, challenging as well the idea of what it means to be Nordic. Post-Cold War Identity Politics maps this process in Scandinavia. Looking at projects designed to help regional development in the Nordic countires, it assesses whether a new way of defining 'Northern-ness' is emerging. The book highlights the existence of co-existing and - to some extent - competing region-building projects in northern Europe. It demonstrates how they are all efforts by existing nations to redefine their role in Europe at a time of change, and points to how they might develop in the future.
This book is the first comprehensive study of how and why the European Union has enlarged to become northern Europe’s leading power. Pami Aalto presents a new approach to the under-theorized field of EU foreign policy studies, showing how, since 1990, the EU has enlarged to include Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, and also incorporated the former East Germany. He also examines how this northern expansion has led the EU to reflect on relations with Russia and its north-western regions. This unique study includes: a fresh approach to the under-theorized field of EU foreign policy key empirical material, including hundreds of documents, interviews and field experiments in-depth case studies of relations between the EU, Nordic states, Baltic states and Russia with its north-western regions. This is essential reading for all students of European politics, Russian studies and international relations.
To understand the historical complexity of the Pakistan–Afghanistan borderland, this book brings together some of the foremost thinkers of this borderland and seeks to approach its various problematic dimensions. This book presents an overview of the geopolitics of the Pakistan–Afghanistan borderland and approaches the topic from different methods and perspectives. It focuses on some of the least debated dimensions of this borderland, for instance, the status of women in the tribal-border culture, the legal status of aliens in the making of the border, material and immaterial manifestations of the border, political aesthetics of the border, and the identity crisis on the border. Given th...
First published in 1999, this book examines the construction of new political, economic and mental borders in post-Cold War Europe. Various national and regional settings are analyzed along the old East-West divide. In post-Cold War Europe the East-West divide no longer exists in the form of the clear-cut Iron Curtain, separating two security blocs, two politico-economic systems, and two ideologically and culturally distinct worlds. Still, it remains clearly discernible, both in the form of unrelenting politico-cultural differences and as an economic Golden Curtain. At the same time, a more complicated system of intersecting political, economic and mental borders keeps developing. Today, there are various scales of interaction, which produce distinctive national, regional and local experiences of borders. In this book, the construction of new political, economic and mental borders is analysed by specialists from both sides of the former East-West divide. The future of European borders is discussed in various national and regional settings, from the Barents Region in the North to the Old Habsburgian lands in ‘Mitteleuropa’.
By critically assessing the opportunities and challenges posed by planning and governing at the megaregional scale, this innovative book examines the latest conceptualizations of trans-metropolitan landscapes. In doing so, it seeks to uncover whether m
This book examines the degree to which the European Union has responded as a coherent and strategic actor towards the developmental and security needs of its immediate neighbourhood in the post-Cold War era.
The 2004 and 2007 enlargements pushed the EU's external border further east as well as closer to unstable areas in the western Balkans. With future enlargements unlikely in the short-term, the EU faces new challenges in securing stable relationships with these neighbouring countries, while not fostering false hopes of early accession.
First published in 1998, this book exsplores the dilemma in Western policy towards Russia in recent years is whether to admit into NATO and the EU all those countries who wish to join, or whether to respect Russian sensitivities and be more selective. The Dilemma is at its peak for those countries bordering Russia; they are the ones who fear Russia the most, but whose integration into the West provokes Russia the most, a situation likely to strengthen Russian non-democratic forces. This is the dilemma that the present volume evolves around. Apart from stressing geopolitical fundamentals and the countries’ historical experiences, the book is also future-orientated. Will Europe’s Baltic rim become an outpost of the West with an iron curtain to its East, will it become an extensive ‘grey zone’, or will the countries become Western bridge-builder’s eastwards?
The Euro Area, the Schengen Area, and Airbus - the 'Anglosphere', the Franco-German 'motor' and Nordic cooperation – each illustrates how differentiation has become a pervasive feature of European integration. Which Europe? offers an authoritative and comprehensive examination of differentiated integration in its functional and its territorial aspects. It focuses on its implications for both the practice and the theory of European integration. Is it strengthening or weakening the EU and its Member States? Are territorial identities being undermined or strengthened? Are new theories of integration required? In particular, this book looks at the relationship between the growth in use of differentiated integration and the widening of European Union membership, the broadening in its policy scope, and the deepening in integration.