Evolution of Approaches to Countering Hybrid Threats in the European Union’s Strategic Planning

This article aims to identify the main components of the EU approach to countering hybrid threats. To achieve this goal, research questions were posed: 1) How does the theory of hybrid warfare define hybrid threats, what are its strengths and weaknesses? 2) How is the approach to combating hybrid threats regulated in the EU? 3) What changes are taking place in this approach under the influence of trends in recent years, including the crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic? The author concludes that the “open architecture” of the hybrid war theory, the wide possibilities of interpreting the definition of hybrid threats allow us to improve practical measures and theoretical approaches to security problems. However, as economic competition and political contradictions under geopolitical rivalry deepen, the approach to countering hybrid threats is hyper politicized, being used to justify sanctions pressure, strengthening military blocs or massive psychological campaigns against a political adversary. The EU tries to develop and improve a systemic approach to ensuring security in the context of the growth of hybrid threats. However, this approach is increasingly deformed under the influence of above-mentioned hyperpoliticization. This is especially evident in the EU’s attitude towards Russia and China, which are constantly accused of creating hybrid threats. The excessive use of the rhetoric of the hybrid war theory in the EU discourse jeopardizes the security of Europe.

Non si può fermare il vento con le mani – Populismo e Moralismo nella crisi del pensiero europeo

One of the distinctive features of a democratic society is the pervasive and endless public debate that regularly antagonize groups and individuals, clashing different interests and ideologies. In this competitive environment, the delegitimization of a political enemy is the more natural – and yet democratically unhealthy – way to win the confrontation between diverse ideas. Historically, one of the predilected strategies to discredit a political adversary has always been blaming its morality, thereby eroding the very root on which any consensus rests. The moral blaming is declined differently, depending on the social and cultural context of the time and therefore the dominating values. In a democratic debate, these moral allegations often relate to duplicity or spreading of misinformation, the so-called demagogy. Today, the same campaign is rolled out against some partiers accused to be “populists” for their appeal to the most illogic and instinctive popular sentiment. The definition of “populism” is though still uncertain and subject to academic debate. This article aims at presenting different definition and interpretation of this political phenomenon to better frame it in the nowadays Western politics. The concept of populism is considered in its different shapes, questioning on the one hand the consistency of the existing definition and on the other its relationship with the democratic tenet. At the end of this analysis, the focus is shifted to the European Union and the reason as to why all the populist parties are seemingly Eurosceptic. The reason provided challenges the ideas of European unity itself, underlying the contrasting directions that the experiment of integration conveys, and question the multi-layered architecture of the contemporary democracy.

British Intellectuals and the British Government: Junius vs Grafton Administration (1768–1770)

В статье рассматривается процесс развертывания борьбы известного анонимного публициста Юниуса с администрацией герцога Графтона с ноября 1768 года по январь 1770. Издатель журнала “The Public Advertiser”, в котором печатались письма Юниуса, в 1772 году опубликовал их и ответы некоторых оппонентов анонимного автора в сборнике “Stat Nominis Umbra”, оставив широкое поле для исследований будущим поколениям историков. «Письма Юниуса» до сих пор не переведены на русский язык. Это объясняется, с одной стороны, трудностями интерпретации иносказательности текста, с другой — сложностью исторического контекста, связанного с ситуацией политического кризиса в Британии на рубеже 60–70-х годов XVIII века. В статье на основании текста писем Юниуса реконструирован персональный состав кабинета герцога Графтона, обстоятельства прихода его к власти, а также показана слабость правительства в решении двух принципиально важных вопросов этого периода — дело Уилкса и кризис в английских североамериканских колониях. Кульминацией карьеры Юниуса является письмо XXXV, в котором анонимный автор посмел обратиться к самому Георгу III и попытаться навязать ему свои советы. После этого в январе 1770 года герцог Графтон подает в отставку, оставив тем самым в победителях своего главного политического соперника. The article focuses on the confrontation between an anonymous publicist known to the general public as Junius and the Duke of Grafton, the prime minister of the United Kingdom. The confrontation started in November 1768 and finished in 1770. The anonymous writer Junius contributed his public letters to the Public Advertiser, a London newspaper which later, in 1772, published the letters and some answers of Junius’ opponents in the Letters of Junius: Stat Nominis Umbra. The book, which contains valuable historical information, remains untranslated into Russian. Its allegorical and figurative language makes the book highly difficult to translate. Moreover, it is exceptionally difficult to render in translation the intricacies of the historical background, namely of the political crisis Britain was involved in at the turn of the 1760s–1770s. The article analyzes the letters of Junius to reconstruct the cabinet composition and the circumstances of the Duke of Grafton’s rise to power. The analysis shows that the Grafton ministry failed to solve two crucial problems of the time, namely the Wilkes case and the crisis in Britain’s North American colonies. The turning point in Junius’ career was his letter XXXV, in which he addressed the prime minister himself and sought to impose his advice on the 3rdDuke of Grafton. After that in January 1770, the Duke of Grafton resigned from his post recognizing defeat from his major political adversary.

2018 Presidential Elections and fertility variations across regions in Brazil

In this work, we analyzed the spatial distribution of fertility levels in 558 microregions of Brazil and correlated it with vote outcomes from the last presidential election of 2018, controlling for important confounding variables. Applying spatial regression models, to the contrary of expected, we see that votes in Bolsonaro did not associate positively with fertility levels. In fact, in regions where its political adversary won, the Brazilian Labour Party (PT), the fertility levels are on average higher than the ones where Bolsonaro had electoral success. However, we would expect that these results will be different, due to the fact that Bolsonaro represents conservatism and traditional family values, which in turn resumes in desires for more children. In line with McDonald’s gender equity theory, we argue that votes in Bolsonaro may actually indicate other facets of reproduction, like an electorate with defending lesser gender equity in family institutions and that also configures in smaller TFR as consequence.

Class, political economy and loyalist political disaffection: agonistic politics and the flag protests

The flag protests in Northern Ireland (2012–13) offer an opportunity on the one hand to examine the politics of dispossession, national identity, decline and political violence in loyalist areas in Belfast. On the other, they are an opportunity to examine of hope, leadership and change within working class loyalism – not least, around the re-imagining of what Britishness can/could or perhaps should mean in post-Agreement Northern Ireland. This article offers an activist-academic perspective on and interpretation of the meaning and potential of those protests around how they reveal both a fracturing and potential for rethinking Britishness. It suggests the possibilities and limits of an inclusive, civic, rather than ethnic, national identity, and a sense of Britishness sufficient to the task of agonistic (as opposed to antagonistic) engagement and contestation with Irish nationalism and republicanism. By antagonistic I mean relations that are characterised in whole or part in terms of ‘friend-enemy’ thus containing within them the possibility of violence, while by agonistic I mean oppositional relations that do not contain this threat of violence. Agonism (from Greek agon, meaning ‘struggle’) emphasises the potentially positive aspects of certain (but not all) forms of political conflict. It accepts a permanent place for such conflict, but seeks to show how we might accept and channel this positively. It is also to affirm the legitimacy of one’s political adversary and their objectives even if one fundamentally disagrees with those objectives. The article argues that an agonistic conceptualisation of democracy and democratic change understood as non-violent disagreement (as opposed to consensus and agreement) is a more accurate and useful understanding than a conceptualisation of democracy and politics as either agreement or antagonism. In this way one can interpret the flag protests as vacillating between a legitimate democratic agonistic politics of struggle and contestation and an illegitimate, reactionary antagonistic politics of violence and threat.

Reflections on Stalin and the Holodomor

The mechanisms and the chronology of the great crimes committed by totalitarian regimes are now well documented. While they may explain the mechanics of these events, they do not always explain <em>why</em> they transpired. The implementation of Stalin’s policy of collectivization and de-kulakization relied on dissimulation. Moreover, the pace of collectivization was justified by external threats, initially from Great Britain and Poland, and later extending to Japan. This made possible the branding of any political adversary as a traitor. As long as Stalin faced organized political opposition, he was unable to launch any maximal policies. After the defeat of Trotsky in December 1927 he was able to create crisis situations that ultimately furthered his own power. The offensive he unleashed against the peasants became a means of reinforcing his increasing dictatorship. The collectivization campaign employed the rational argument that the backward countryside needs to modernize production. Its ultimate aim, however, was the crushing of an independent peasantry. There are enlightening comparisons that can be made between collectivization in China and the USSR, which are explored in this essay. The resistance to collectivization was particularly strong amongst Ukrainians. Stalin, who had long regarded the national question as inseparable from the peasant question, deliberately chose mass starvation to break resistance to his will. The history of these events was for a long time shrouded in great secrecy until it began being discussed by Western scholars, becoming a matter of considerable debate between the “totalitarian” and “revisionist” schools of Soviet historiography.

Legitimation from the Top to Civil Society: Politico-Cultural Change in Eastern Europe

Communism has collapsed in Eastern Europe because the regimes, no ionger justified by their Soviet hegemon, lost confidence in their “mandate from heaven.” Domestically and internationally discredited, East European regimes had traditionally shielded themselves behind a principle of legitimation from the top that saw communism as the global fulfillment of a universal theory of history. Once the theory became utterly indefensible, a crippling legitimacy vacuum ensued. Reacting against that theory, East European dissent, and a civil society of sorts, survived under communism not just as an underground political adversary but as a visible cultural and existential counterimage of communism. This fact must be given proper weight when assessing the capacity of civil society to rebound in postcommunist Eastern Europe.

The 1988 French Presidential Election

THE 1986 ELECTION WAS THE BEGINNING OF ‘COHABITATION’ and 1988 was the end of it — at least of the Fifth Republic's first experience of it. Cohabitation between the President and a Prime Minister who was his chief political adversary was to be the last great test of the stability and adaptability of the Fifth Republic's political institutions. It had been the dominant theme in 1986 just as the fearsome prospect of cohabitation between left-wing parliamentary majorities and previous presidents had been to the forefront in the parliamentary elections of 1978 and even 1973. It was as the President of cohabitation that FranGois Mitterrand won his extraordinary 1988 victory. The survival of presidential legitimacy against the onslaught of prime ministerial power is what the 1988 presidential election will be remembered for. This is the principal theme of this article.