The "New Europe" and the International Debate Over Iraq [antikvár]

Europeanisation, renationalisation, globalisation The change of security policy course in the Central-Eastern European region after 1989-90 can be defined most properly with the notions of Europeanisation, and renationalisation. These two simultaneous processes had an impact on every country of the region. After the collapse of the bipolar world order, hoping to get out of the economic and social crises and also for a rapid modernisation nearly every Central-Eastern European state set a goal of building a democratic state based on the rule of law, creating a market economy, and approaching the organisations of European and Euro-Atlantic integration. On the other hand, however, freed from the limited souvereignty forced on them by decades-long bloc policy, all these states rearticulated their national interests, their independent foreign and security policy. That is, in a way these states returned to the process of national development which they were forced to abandon either before or after the second world war. It should be seen, however, that these two processes were and still are of rather different magnitude and intensity for the various nations of the region - depending on the particular state's state-legal system, the structure of their society, quality of democratic political traditions, cultural traditions, the openness and development of their economies. For instance, while in the case of states with independent statehood the renationalisation involved "only" the establishment of rule of law, transforming their national economies into market economies, and putting their foreign and security policy on national bases, in the case of nations of federative states disintegrating under the influence of renationalisation it involved the creation of a full-scale construction of independent statehood with all of its social, political and institutional aspects. While in the first case the dominant role was mostly played either by the external integration of a nation-state or Europeanisation in its support, in the case of the latter states the creation or reinforcement of the internal integration of a nation-state became the key issue of the transition in which the most important integrative role was taken up by the reviving nationalism. With a certain simplification it can be stated that in some Central-Eastern European countries the "international integration" of society should be preceeded by a national integration even if their extremistic reactions may seem anacronistic at the turn of the 21st century. Thanks to renationalisation during the last 15 years the Central-Eastern European region largely changed and disintegrated. As a result of the disintegration of the