The EU and Its Neighbourhoods: A Textual Analysis on Key Documents of the European Neighbourhood Policy

Over the last twenty years, European Union (EU) actorness at both regional and global scales, has become a fruitful topic of analysis in the field of political science, and more specifically in international relations and political geography. Critical geopolitics dedicated many substantive papers on EU discourses and representations. Our paper aims at providing a complementary way to study texts issued by the EU and to question EU actorness by adopting an approach based on textual analysis. The corpus examined includes the seven communications on the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) issued between 2003 and 2013. These communications provide essential information regarding relations between the EU and its immediate neighbours. The textual analysis allows several relevant characteristics of discourses to be highlighted: stability and changes, actors, spaces and scales mentioned. The outcomes of the analysis confirm previous research on the subject: The ENP appears as a bilateral state-centric policy, missing global scale, and neglecting the role of regional powers like Turkey or Russia.     

Europeanisation and Discourse Building: The European Commission,European Narratives and European Neighbourhood Policy

Europeanisation is a legitimising process through which the European Union strives to gain meaning, actorness and presence internationally. However, this process continues to be described in less than complimentary ways as ambiguous, incomplete, unsettled, or impotent. We contend that it is the contradictory demands of negotiating order at the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ levels both operationally and normatively which critically affect the EU's ability to achieve presence and actorness in international affairs. In this paper we focus upon the role of the European Commission in the external projection of Europeanisation towards the Mediterranean with an emphasis upon the discursive construction, performance and survival of Europeanisation. We show the ways in which the external projection of Europeanisation produces fuzziness and messiness in which the Mediterranean emerges as both a chaotic conception and site of chaos.     

An Incorporating Geopolitics: Frontex and the Geopolitical Rationalities of the European Border

This paper develops a critique of the emergence of the new European Border Agency, Frontex, specifically its operations along Europe's maritime borders with North Africa. Rather than account for Frontex in terms of securitising and neoliberalising processes, as has become common, I focus instead on the underlying geopolitical rationalities that guide Frontex operations. These reflections then set up the further argument of the paper: that what Frontex itself sheds light upon is a novel geopolitics of the border, what can be thought of as an ‘incorporating geopolitics’. Through investigation of the policies and practices of Frontex, such an incorporating geopolitics can be shown to be replacing the much-discussed paradox of contemporary border regimes – that between trade freedoms and security restrictions – with a more fundamental contradiction: that the more border controls address more than just borders, the more they may themselves undermine the societies they purport to protect.     

Space and the Atom: On the Popular Geopolitics of Cold War Rocketry

This paper considers the imbricated domains of space exploration and Cold War geopolitics by following the trajectory of the ‘Corporal’, the world's first guided missile authorised to carry a nuclear warhead. It examines the popular geopolitics of rocketry as both a technology of mass destruction and as a vehicle for the transcendent dreams of extra-terrestrial discovery. Avoiding both technical and statist accounts, the paper shows how these technologies of Cold War strategic advantage were activated and sustained through popular media and everyday experience. Particular attention is given to such mundane activities as children's play, citing the example of die-cast miniature toys of the Corporal. Through such apparently modest means, nuclear weapons were made intelligible in, and transposable to, a domestic context. The paper is also situated within a wider emerging literature on geographies and geopolitics of outer space.     

中国公民财产权法律保护制度的确立与公民社会的发展--"中国公民财产权利的法律保护与制度创新"专家座谈会综述

中国共产党第十六次代表大会明确提出要“完善保护私人财产的法律制度”，并把建立法治化的市场经济作为下一步推进改革的目标和任务。针对我国公法对公民私人财产权法律保护的有关问题，《经济社会体制比较》杂志社、《法学研究》杂志社与上海金融与法律研究院日前在海南博鳌联合举办了“中国公民财产权利的法律保护与制度创新”专家座谈会，来自中国社会科学院法学研究所、上海金融与法律研究院、中共中央编译局比较政治与经济研究中心等单位的专家学者就如何从公法的角度完善我国公民财产权的法律保护问题进行了广泛的讨论。综合座谈会专…     

Privatization: Reflections on the Eastern European experience

Opinions expressed in this paper are strictly personal.     

公民社会与国家的协同发展——民间组织的自主性、民主性和代表性对其公共服务效能的影响

长期以来,人们认为国家与公民社会呈现你强我弱的零和博弈关系,公民社会自主性的提高会有损于国家的施政。但是,最近十年来国家比较发展和公共管理研究领域的最新进展表明,国家与社会可以协同发展、相得益彰。本文根据北京大学中国社会团体研究中心对两省一市两千多社团的调查数据,初步检验了自主的、实施民主治理的民间组织有利于政府施政的假设,获得正面的结果。基于这一经验研究,我们提出国家新的社会发展战略,即通过强化社团组织的自主性,提高民间组织的能力,从而形成一个国家行政能力强大、社会组织富有活力的新局面,推进经济社会的和谐发展。     

对当前民事执行检察监督的思考

执行工作是人民法院工作的重要组成部分,也是当事人合法权益得以保护的最终体现。通过剖析检察机关对法院民事执行监督的现实需要和优越性、制约检察机关对法院民事执行监督的因素,并结合实际提出如何加强执行监督的建议和对策,以切实推动和加强检察机关对法院民事执行的监督。     

Competition effects in EU external aid supply tenders funded with the Pre-accession and Neighbourhood instruments

Empirica - This paper investigates empirically the competition effects on procurement costs for Europe Aid funded supply tenders in countries benefiting from the EU Pre-accession (IPA) and...     

自生能力与巩固脱贫成果——后扶贫时代的思考

我国已经如期实现了精准脱贫的目标,成功按期消除了绝对贫困,这同时意味着我国进入了后扶贫时代.如何巩固深度贫困地区和人口的扶贫成果,防止出现规模性退化或返贫,应当是后扶贫时代需要深入思考和解决的重大课题.经验证明,当贫困地区和贫困人口按标准成功摆脱贫困以后,会出现一定的退化现象,从而需要有一个脱贫成果的巩固期.特别是那些...     

The Geopolitics of the Eastern Border of the European Union: The Case of Romania-Moldova-Ukraine

Since the fall of the communist regimes, we have been witnessing in Europe two phenomena that dominate the geopolitical scene: on the one hand there is integration, with the advance of the borders of the European Union (EU) towards the east through its two enlargements, and on the other hand there is disintegration, as expressed by social crisis, and latent tensions and conflicts in the countries found beyond the said border. This article focuses on the geopolitical changes that came about on the eastern border of Europe (Romania-Moldova-Ukraine) and the border relations between these three countries after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the integration of Romania into the EU. This is both a multidimensional and ethno-territorial border, associated with tensions and conflict. ¹ 1. D. Newman, ‘Conflict at the Interface: The Impact of Boundaries and Borders on Contemporary Ethno-National Conflict’, in C. Flint (ed.), Geographies of War and Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2004) pp. 321–345; G. Blake, ‘State Limits in the Early 21st Century: Observations on Form and Function’, Geopolitics 5/1 (2000) pp. 1–18; S. Ratner, ‘Drawing a Better Line: Uti Possidetis and the Borders of New States’, American Journal of International Law 90/4 (1996) pp. 590–624; S. Waterman, ‘Boundaries and the Changing World Political Order’, in Clive Schofield (ed.), World Boundaries, Vol. I, Global Boundaries (London: Routledge, 1994). Using the territorial dialectic of the globalisation argument, we are able to analyse, describe and interpret from a theoretical-empirical standpoint, the two current discussions about that border: opening by means of cooperation, or closing by means of control and security.     

中国的社会团体、公民社会和国家组合主义：有争议的领域

20世纪90年代中期以来学术界展开了一场争论：一派认为,应该用公民社会概念来研究中国团体;另一派通过调查研究认为,中国几乎所有团体的生活在本质上是国家组合主义。公民社会和组合主义都关注国家和社会之间的社团和其他机构。但不同的是：公民社会站在社会的角度,发展自治社团,维护“公共领域”的能力,以界定和制约国家权力;组合主义则相反,从国家的角度,为实现政府自己的目的,与选定的社团发展一种特殊的关系。在深入细致的实证研究基础上,学者们考察了中国不同类型社团的活动,得出了不同的结论,同时他们也超越了国家、社会和组合主义以及公民社会的框架,阐明了别的一系列重要的问题。     

市民社会、公共领域及其与中国法治发展的关系

当前,学术界围绕着中国历史上有没有市民社会、如何界定市民社会的内涵、和市民社会的价值等问题展开深入研究。这种状况的出现是以中国市场经济与市民社会发展时期的经济态势相吻合为历史背景的。本文以对市民社会的理解为基础,分析西方市民社会的发展过程和中国社会的独特性,以期找到一条有利于中国法治发展的道路。     

Assessing the trade impact of the European Neighbourhood Policy on the EU-MED Free Trade Area

The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) set an additional objective for the Southern Mediterranean Countries (SMCs): the prospect of ‘a stake in the internal market’. The launch of this new policy has been the occasion for a revival of empirical studies aimed at assessing the impact of the EU-MED partnership on bilateral trade. The novelty of this work is twofold: (i) to present nonparametric matching estimators besides gravity estimates; (ii) to assume as a counterfactual of the treatment the ex-post long-run average treatment effects of the Europe Agreements. By controlling for likely selection bias and country and time heterogeneity, using both qualitative and quantitative measures of the policy variable, we assess ex-post the trade-enhancing impact of the EU preferential agreements towards SMCs and ex ante the actual efficacy of the ENP.     

对日本航天高技术发展的思考

本文综述了日本航天高技术的发展现状,其特点是具有军民兼容的航天高技术并以空前规模发展;介绍了从1995年起未来15年的航天发展计划,其中包括宗旨、目的、政策和投资等;最后纵观日本航天高技术的发展过程及其采取的技术发展途径和规模．提出了几点思考。     

Cartopolitics,Geopolitics and Boundaries in the Arctic

Critical Border Studies emphasise how distinct political spaces are produced by borders. In this article I suggest that the order of this relationship should be reversed. I argue that space precedes and conditions the manifestation of borders. The argument is based on an understanding of cartography as a practice that mediates the relationship between space and borders. Drawing on Bruno Latour, I introduce the notion of cartopolitics to describe the process where questions pertaining to sovereign control over space are decided through cartography and law. In analysing current border practices in the Arctic, the term cartopolitics captures how the relationship between the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and cartography is shaping the attempts by Arctic states to expand sovereign rights into the sea. The key is the continental shelf and how it is defined in law. In this process cartographic practices work to establish a particular spatial reality that subsequently serve as a basis for border making.