Pluralism or isolation of Civilisations? Russia's foreign policy discourse and the reception of Huntington's paradigm of the post‐cold war world

This paper studies the effects of Samuel Huntington's ‘Clash of Civilisations’ thesis on Russian foreign policy discourse. In response to Huntington's thesis, two major currents of Russia's foreign policy thinking ‐ Liberals and Nationalists ‐ are identified, both of which are critical of the thesis. The two groups offer diametrically opposed alternatives to Huntington's paradigm of the post‐Cold War world. The Liberal‐Nationalist controversy reflects Russia's debates about its own political identity and provides us with a rich and informative understanding of the process of identity formation. By identifying Russia's various reactions to the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ thesis, the paper identifies potential influences of various currents in Russian foreign policy thinking on the country's future foreign policy. It also suggests some implications for further studies of cultures/civilisations in international politics.     

European integration and the legacy of the post‐world war II German expulsions in East‐Central Europe

Efforts towards the formal integration of Poland and the Czech Republic into the European Union have opened the Pandora's box of issues concerning the expulsion of Germans and the confiscation of their property after the Second World War. This paper explains why Sudeten German expellees have been at the forefront of the drive for compensation and property restitution and why Czech‐German relations have been significantly more strained after 1989. As Poland and the Czech Republic prepare to join the EU, the potential for controversy over the involvement of European‐wide institutions in lingering disputes concerning the expulsions as well as over Germans acquiring property in areas formerly part of Germany is also a focus of concern.     

Post‐cold war self‐determination: Ireland and east Timor

The national conflicts centred on Northern Ireland and East Timor bear little resemblance. Yet the two main political groupings aspiring to national liberation, Sinn Féin in Ireland and the National Council of Timorese Resistance (CNRT) have developed remarkably similar peace proposals. These define the process of reconstruction, protection of human rights and self‐government as separable from issues of state sovereignty, at least in the medium term. Both have promoted the creation of transitional structures to address these issues, delaying self‐determination in order to promote conflict resolution and political reconciliation. The two peace initiatives have been relatively successful in seizing the moral high ground, and have forced the respective state authorities to participate in a process of peace‐making that has substantially recast the exercise of political authority.     

Globalisation and post‐socialist development: the Tatarstan variety of capitalism

Russia's regions are attempting to form meaningful democratic systems, free markets and profitable industrial firms. This article, based on qualitative interviewing with local and foreign economic actors in the Republic of Tatarstan in central Russia, argues that while there are strong desires for globalisation to happen, the goal of significant integration into the world market is far from being attained. In this difficult scenario the local state, far from being a ‘failed state’, instead takes on a central role in determining the present and future shape of this developing region. Implications for globalisation theory are considered in the conclusion.     

A post‐Keynesian model of output,employment and monetary demand

This paper presents a simple model based on three broad Post‐Keynesian hypotheses: (1) the economic process develops over time; (2) money is endogenous; and (3) producers are price setters. To make the analysis easier we also assume (4) that firms are vertically integrated. Producers assess the expected demand and ask banks for credit in order to start production; banks create credit at the request of producers to finance the wage bill; workers buy goods sold by firms; firms must repay banks the amount borrowed plus interest and earn a target rate of profit. Since firms have created only as much purchasing power as they have advanced to workers in the form of the wage fund, equilibrium requires that there is an amount of autonomous monetary demand equal to profits and interest. Furthermore, in order to make the value of supply equal to the value of effective demand, firms will employ the number of workers necessary to create the purchasing power which, when added to the anticipated autonomous demand, enables all costs to be covered and the planned rate of profits to be attained.     

Geopolitical fantasies,national strategies and ordinary Russians in the post‐communist Era

New geopolitical writings that have developed in the post‐Soviet period are predicated on different ideological and historical perspectives and against the formal statements of Russia's place in the world from President Vladimir Putin and enshrined in the document ‘Concept of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation’. Four geopolitical schools can be identified, ranging from the fantastic notions of extreme Eurasianism to the reformers’ goal of tying Russia firmly to the West. Formal statements concentrate on Russia's regional prominence in Eurasia and on close integration into the world economic and political systems. However, ordinary Russians display little interest in these geopolitical writings or in the foreign policy actions of the Russian state, except in special cases where the Russian military are actively involved on Russian territory or the ‘near abroad’. In this regard, Russian public opinion has increasingly become like that of the Western democracies, generally disinterested in foreign policy and focused on their personal day‐to‐day lives.     

Jousting with Malthus’ ghost: Environment and conflict after the cold war

G. Baechler, Violence through Environmental Discrimination: Causes, Rwanda Arena, and Conflict Model, Dordrecht: Kluwer 1999.

A. Carius and K.M. Lietzmann (eds), Environmental Change and Security: A European Perspective, Berlin: Springer 1999.

T. Homer Dixon, Environment, Scarcity and Violence, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1999.

K.M. Lietzmann and G.D. Vest (eds), Environment and Security in an International Context, Bonn: North Atlantic Treaty Organization Committee on the Challenges of Modern Society 1999, Report No. 232.

S.C. Lonergan (ed.), Environmental Change, Adaptation and Security, Dordrecht, Kluwer 1999.

L. Ohlsson, Environment, Scarcity and Conflict: A Study of Malthusian Concerns, Department of Peace and Development Research, Goteburg University 1999.

M. Suliman (ed.), Ecology, Politics and Violent Conflict, London: Zed 1999.     

The ‘West’ against the ‘Rest’: Geopolitics after the end of the cold war

With the end of the Cold War, it seemed that we had reached the ‘end of geopolitics’. Since the mid‐1990s, however, the term ‘geopolitics’ has experienced a revival, and even regional groupings which have so far abstained from any kind of power politics, such as the European Union, have started to claim geopolitical interests for themselves. But it is not clear what constitutes this kind of power politics in the 1990s and what drives ‘the West’ to pursue geopolitics, directed against what Huntington has labelled so plainly and provocatively the ‘Rest’. The article addresses this question by analysing Western capital's need for access to markets in the South and the EU's and US’ growing dependence on oil imports. The article will argue that a Western geostrategy based on Huntington's civilisational model would be counterproductive in the long run, manoeuvring the Western states into a situation where these geopolitical goals would have to be enforced by military means instead of being pursued through a strategy of political and economic support.     

Towards an understanding of the geopolitics of cyberspace: Learning,re‐learning and un‐learning

Spiegel classifies the world's states as high‐tech, nationalistic, or transitional in character, along with some fluidity. His thesis is that ‘traditional geography’ has declined in importance in international politics and has been replaced by information and communications technologies (ICT). He seems unaware of recent developments in political geography, especially to the manner in which geographers consider space, cyberspace and ICT. Territory is one element of political space; others include identities, networks, regionalism, transboundary processes and non‐state actors in regional and global politics.     

Is ex‐ante ex‐post analysis irrelevant to Keynes's theory of employment?

Ex‐ante ex‐post analysis has become a standard tool in macroeconomics. Yet Keynes dismissed it. We argue that Keynes's dismissal of ex‐ante ex‐post analysis is not an oddity but an indication of the originality of his theory of employment compared to standard macroeconomics. First, the principle of effective demand does not amount to a process that determines employment and income at the point of intersection of the traditionally defined ex ante supply and demand functions. Second, the finance motive allowed Keynes to confirm the identity of aggregate supply and demand already asserted in The General Theory. This latter conclusion is puzzling, however, since the principle of effective demand presupposes the possibility of a discrepancy between supply and demand. We suggest that Keynes's theory of employment is linked to a theory of income distribution whereby profits are a redistributed share of factor income which is transferred to firms when prices exceed factor costs. The identity and the equilibrium condition then relate to separate measurements of income and output, factor cost and prices.     

Conceptual confusion – an analysis of the meaning of concepts in technological innovation systems and sociological functionalism

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how conceptual confusion may be a significant obstacle to cross-disciplinary dialogue. We focus on the relationship between the framework of technological innovation systems (TIS) and sociological functionalism (SF). The paper argues that while there are similarities between the two schools of thought, in particular in the use of the terms ‘structure’ and ‘function’, these are more linguistic than substantive. We demonstrate this by assessing the validity of the spillover to TIS of four main points of critique raised against SF. We conclude by stating some lessons for improving cross-disciplinary communication.     

Formation of the non‐state sector and privatisation in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan

In this paper, we take a detailed look at one Polish bank's experiences with financial sector reforms focusing on a bank-led enterprise-restructuring plan that linked directly bank privatization and recapitalization to bad-debt workouts. Based on personal interviews and original statistical data, we evaluate the performance of Bank Depozytowo-Kredytowy (BDK) in promoting financial and operational restructuring of its clients. We found that BDK continued to provide soft lending to keep four old military‐industrial companies afloat and actually increased its exposure to these companies during the program. The five success stories among BDK's clients were companies that had external agents other than the bank promoting and monitoring their operational restructuring. From our case study of BDK, we conclude that, while banks may play a role in financial restructuring of their clients, their ability to affect operational restructuring is quite limited. Moreover, stateowned banks are particularly vulnerable to incentive problems when dealing with large state-owned enterprises that may be too big or too political to fail.     

Trade Liberalization,Skill‐linked Intermediate Production and the Two‐sided Wage Gap

Abstract

A rising wage‐gap, almost universally, in the last two decades has contradicted the age‐old conventional wisdom of asymmetric wage movements across nations when trade is liberalized. We offer an explanation that fits well with the emerging trade pattern between the developed and more advanced developing countries like India and Mexico. We argue that a tariff reduction in the South on imports of an intermediate good from the North may raise the wage‐gap in both the North and the South. The price of the intermediate good moving in different directions and different factor‐intensity‐ranking of this good relative to the two different final goods produced in the two countries underlie this result. Rising wage inequality may specially affect the South because educational expenses and infrastructure do not allow ready transformation of the vast masses of unskilled workers into skilled workers. Hence, the policy lesson of the paper seems to be more public effort in arranging for smoother acquisition of human capital by the unskilled.     

Modifying Taylor reaction functions in the presence of the zero‐lower‐bound — Evidence for the ECB and the Fed

We propose an alternative way of estimating Taylor reaction functions if the zero‐lower bound on nominal interest rates is binding. This approach relies on tackling the real rather than the nominal interest rate. So if the nominal rate is (close to) zero central banks can influence the inflation expectations via quantitative easing. The unobservable inflation expectations are estimated with a state‐space model that additionally generates a time varying series for the equilibrium real interest rate and the potential output — both needed for estimations of Taylor reaction functions. We test our approach for the ECB and the Fed within the recent crisis. We add other explanatory variables to this modified Taylor reaction function and show that there are substantial differences between the estimated reaction coefficients in the pre‐ and crisis era for both central banks. While the central banks on both sides of the Atlantic act less inertially, put a smaller weight on the inflation gap, money growth and the risk spread, the response to asset price inflation becomes more pronounced during the crisis. However, the central banks diverge in their response to the output gap and credit growth.