scholarly journals DECLINING SYSTEMIC TRUST IN THE POLITICAL ELITE IN THE EU’S NEW MEMBER STATES: THE DIVERGENCE BETWEEN EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE AND THE BALTIC STATES

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Attila Ágh
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
Baltic States ◽  
Member States ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
New Member States ◽  
Systemic Trust ◽  
The Baltic

In the last decade there has been a process of rolling-back Europeanization efforts in the EU’s new member states (NMS), a process intensified by the global crisis. This de-Europeanization and de-democratization process in the NMS has become a significant part of a more general polycrisis in the EU. The backslide of democracy in the NMS as a topical issue has usually been analysed in terms of macro-politics, formal-legal state institutions, party systems, and macroeconomics. The most significant decline of democratization, however, is evident in the public’s decreasing participation in politics and in the eroding trust. This decline in systemic trust in political elites in the NMS has been largely neglected by analysts. Therefore, this paper concentrates on this relatively overlooked dimension of declining trust and social capital in the NMS. This analysis employs the concepts of governance, trust, and social capital to balance the usual formalistic top-down approach with a bottom-up approach that better illustrates the divergence between East-Central Europe and the Baltic states’ sub-regional development.

scholarly journals European Regional Integration in the Drafting of the Eastern Pact in 1934–1935: Interests of the Baltic Entente and the Little Entente

2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-56
Author(s):  
Dalia Bukelevičiūtė
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Regional Integration ◽  
Regional Security ◽  
Baltic States ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
European Regional

This article follows the interests and actions of the countries of Baltic and Little ententes with regard to the projected Eastern Pact, which raised marked interest in East-Central Europe in 1934-1935. It seeks to give an answer to the question whether the negotiations over the Eastern Pact brought the interests of the Baltic states closer to those of the Little Entente. It highlights that the progress of negotiations made it clear that each country was more concerned with its security than the common security of the entire bloc, even though both the Little Entente and the Baltic Entente were established for the sake of safeguarding security of their member states and harmonising their foreign policy in this respect. Both regional security bodies declared their agreement to the Eastern Pact but the key difference was that the Baltic Entente was expected to participate in the Eastern Pact directly, whereas only Czechoslovakia was singled out from among the members of the Little Entente. The analysis concludes that Lithuania and Czechoslovakia were the two countries which were most actively concerned with the conclusion of the Eastern Pact.

Fragmentation in East Central Europe

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Richter
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Social Exchange ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
The First World War ◽  
New States ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
First World

The First World War led to a radical reshaping of Europe’s political borders like hardly any previous event. Nowhere was this transformation more profound than in East Central Europe, where the collapse of imperial rule led to the emergence of a series of new states. New borders intersected centuries-old networks of commercial, cultural, and social exchange. The new states had to face the challenges posed by territorial fragmentation and at the same time establish durable state structures within an international order that viewed them at best as weak and at worst as provisional entities that would sooner or later be reintegrated into their larger neighbours’ territory. Fragmentation in East Central Europe challenges the traditional view that the emergence of these states was the product of a radical rupture that naturally led from defunct empires to nation states. Using the example of Poland and the Baltic States, it retraces the roots of the interwar states of East Central Europe, of their policies, economic developments, and of their conflicts back to deep in the First World War. At the same time, it shows that these states learned to harness the dynamics caused by territorial fragmentation, thus forever changing our understanding of what modern states can do.

Business Risk from Governmental Corruption in East Central Europe, the Baltic Countries, and Russia

2014 ◽  
pp. 119-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duane Windsor
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Geographic Region ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Business Risk ◽  
Framework Analysis ◽  
Regional Competitiveness ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Baltic Countries ◽  
The Baltic

This chapter places in a comparative, cross-country framework analysis of selected secondary information about business risk from governmental corruption in the region comprised of East Central Europe (including the Balkans), the Baltic Countries, and Russia. The region is an important setting for understanding corruption and anticorruption reform. What defines this geographic region is that all the countries are transitioning from monopoly-party rule and typically Soviet economic and political domination. Globalization is drawing the region into world economic integration through increasing Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). Key information from several sources provides an analytically consistent picture. Corruption increases business risk for multinational and domestic enterprises. Corruption deters inward FDI, undermines corporate integrity, and reduces country and regional competitiveness. The chapter provides information and examples about corruption in 21 political entities. These entities range from reasonably clean to endemic corruption, with varying patterns of corruption and anticorruption reform effectiveness. The chapter discusses possible solutions and recommendations and proposes future research directions.

Dig Peat!

2020 ◽  
pp. 157-203
Author(s):  
Klaus Richter
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Baltic States ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
Economic Agents ◽  
International Image ◽  
Merchant Class ◽  
The Creation

The chapter examines national policies to economically empower the titular nations and thus establish a national merchant class. It argues that these policies bore rather different results: the marginalization of minorities and the creation of states that were major economic agents. It explores how attempts of foreign powers to exploit the new Polish and Baltic states economically interacted with the emerging governments’ efforts to take control of the region’s raw materials from the disintegrating commercial monopolies of the German occupation. Using the example of timber and flax trade, the chapter retraces how territorial fragmentation spurred distinct policies that shaped states within East Central Europe, but also an international image of the region: the collapse of sovereignty spurred the commercial engagement of outside powers, which in turn contributed to domestic efforts to secure sovereignty, seal off the territory, and organize commerce within the titular nations.

Federalism in the Baltic: Interpretations of Self-Determination and Sovereignty in Estonia in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

2012 ◽  
Vol 39 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 237-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaarel Piirimäe
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
World War ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Socialist Movement ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
The Right

The objective of this article is to challenge the widespread interpretation of interwar East Central Europe as a hotbed of excessive nationalism, by establishing a longue durée of federalist thinking in Estonia in the first half of the twentieth century. By focusing on personal continuities from the founding years of the Estonian Republic into the 1940s, it is possible to detect a remarkable persistence of ‘idealist’ visions about intra and interstate federalism that had been internalized by Estonian statesmen before and during the First World War and earlier. Apart from establishing the continuity of federalist thought the article analyzes the political discourse in which the concept of national self-determination was picked up. The primary framework for Estonian thinkers on nationality was the debate that developed within the all-Russian socialist movement in the context of the nationality problems of the multinational Western provinces and Congress Poland. The discourse on territorial and cultural autonomy within a federative Russia, demands that came to the fore in 1905, developed only after the idea of self-determination entered the thinking of Estonian radicals. Until late 1917, asserting the right to self-determination by no means meant separation from Russia. Even after 1917 Estonian politicians imagined the future republic as part of a regional league or union relinquishing part of its sovereignty to a supranational authority, plans that foundered on the incompatibility of national interests by 1920. Although the experience had not been encouraging, Baltic politicians resuscitated federalist concepts in the early period of the Second World War, as they tried to envisage a new structure for a cooperative and autonomous East Central Europe, within a restored Europe.

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