CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2008
| Author | Ghica, Luciana Alexandra |
|---|---|
| Title | Friendship communities? The politics of regional intergovernmental cooperation in Central and Eastern Europe, 1990-2007 |
| Summary | In this dissertation, I investigate from a social constructivist perspective how international regionalism has become a widespread phenomenon in post Cold War Central and Eastern Europe, although the historical and political circumstances were not pointing towards this development. Existing scholarship on the topic, focusing mostly on the regional intergovernmental arrangements established in the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars, seems to agree that the European Union had the decisive role in the process, even if not through direct intervention. Instead, I argue that democratic rather than EU conditionality was mostly at play in this case. At the same time, post Cold War regionalism has been also a race to appropriate better mental spaces in the attempt to be recognised as part of the democratic community. In order to investigate this hypothesis of democratic conditionality and rhetoric action, I analyze comparatively the creation and evolution of the major Central and East European regional intergovernmental initiatives. For this purpose, I use the conceptual frameworks of social constructivism and international regionalism, which I further develop particularly through the introduction of the concept of regional cohesiveness. Prompted by the necessity to find an alternative to the regional integration/interdependence paradigm, this concept refers to the degree to which a group of actors inhabiting a limited contiguous space act and represent themselves as a group. In terms of methods, I use discourse analysis tools loosely inspired by the archaeological method of Michel Foucault. Mainly due to the conceptual setting, the dissertation is a prospective one, aiming at identifying the potential of the regional cohesiveness concept using the particular case of post Cold War Central and East European regionalism. At the same time, it aims at producing a theoretically framed monograph of the most important Central and East European regional intergovernmental arrangements, underpinned by a historical account of their constitutive conditions. |
| Supervisor | Bozoki, Andras |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2008/pphghl01.pdf |
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