In Statu Nascendi : Journal of Political Philosophy and International Relations 2020/2 9783838274690

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Tamara Albertini & Piotr Pietrzak “Clarity is what I seek first” (Interview with Prof. Tamara Albertini) Galina Raykova Hegel’s Recollection and Ricoeur’s Imagination Joseph Thomas Milburn Identity and Globalised Culture: A Network Approach Koumparoudis Evangelos Information Society and a New Form of Embodiment Andrea Giuseppe Ragno Reinventing Politics: An Epistemic Conversion of Information Technologies

Part II: Politics & Theory of International Relations Iga Kleszczyńska An Analysis of the Economic and Political Determinants of Today’s Venezuelan Crisis Bálint L. Tóth HSR Projects in V4 Countries: EU-driven Spillovers of Central East European Transport Development Initiatives Attila Mezei Balance of Power Theory and the 21st Century: Iron Law of International Relations or an Outdated Idea?

IN STATU NASCENDI—Journal of Political and International Relations, Vol. 3, No. 2 (2020)

Part I: Philosophy

ibidem

Journal of Political Philosophy and International Relations

Vol. 3, No. 2 (2020)

Part III: Reviews & Responses

ISBN: 978-3-8382-1469-6

IN STATU NASCENDI

3:2

ibidem

IN STATU NASCENDI JOURNAL OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Vol. 3, No. 2 (2020)

About In Statu Nascendi In Statu Nascendi (ISN) is a peer-reviewed journal that aspires to be a worldclass scholarly platform encompassing original academic research dedicated to the circle of Political Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Theory of International Relations, Foreign Policy, and the political Decision-making process. The journal investigates specific issues through a socio-cultural, philosophical, and anthropological approach to raise a new type of civic awareness about the complexity of contemporary crisis, instability, and warfare situations, where the “stage-of-becoming” plays a vital role. Any views expressed in this publication are the views of the authors and are not necessarily shared by the editorial board of this journal. In Statu Nascendi is committed to freedom, liberty, and pluralism of opinions and endeavors to contribute to unconstrained public discourse and debate on relevant social, political, and philosophical matters. ISN welcomes all types of partnership and collaboration for fostering a knowledge-based society, organizing events, and framing new projects. If you are an academic institution, research institute and investigation team or group, a non-profit organization, research center, or research funder and you are willing to become a long-term partner for ISN’s activities, please contact us at [email protected], and we will get back to you as soon as we can. More information about ISN, including information on the editorial board, membership, and all our initiatives can be found on the ISN website at

https://irinstatunascendi.wixsite.com/journal

ISN Editorial Board: EVANGELOS KOUMPAROUDIS, Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria

PIOTR PIETRZAK, Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria (Editor in chief)

MARCIN GRABOWSKI, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland

HRISTIYANA STOYANOVA, College of Europe, Natolin, Poland

STAVROS S. PANAGIOTOU, Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria

Proofreading MATTHEW GILL, Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria

ISN Advisory Board: TAMARA ALBERTINI, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, USA

ANDREA GIUSEPPE RAGNO, London School of Economics, UK

ABIOLA BAMIJOKO-OKANGBAYE, Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria

VENERA RUSSO, Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria

ELIZA EMILY CAMPBELL, Georgetown University, USA SOPHIE GRACE CHAPPELL, the Open University, UK DIMITRIS M. MOSCHOS, Panteion University, Greece DENIZ ERTIN, University of Cologne, Germany, MALWINA HOPEJ, University of Wroclaw, Poland ZORAN KOJČIĆ Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria SAMI MEHMETI, Southeast European University, North Macedonia NIEVES TURÉGANO MUÑOZ, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands ANAK AGUNG BANYU PERWITA, President University, Indonesia

IVAN SOLAKOV, Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria IVAN SIMIĆ, Carleton University, Canada GALINA RAYKOVA, Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria BÁLINT LÁSZLÓ TÓTH Corvinus University of Budapest KRZYSZTOF ŻĘGOTA, University of Warmia and Mazury, Poland

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. In Statu Nascendi—Journal of Political Philosophy and International Relations Vol. 3, No. 2 (2020) Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag / ibidem Press Erscheinungsweise: halbjährlich / Frequency: biannual ISSN 2568-7638 ISBN-13: 978-3-8382-7469-0

© ibidem-Verlag / ibidem Press Stuttgart, Germany 2020 Alle Rechte vorbehalten Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Dies gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und elektronische Speicherformen sowie die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who performs any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

In statu nascendi (Latin) In the process of creation, emerging, becoming

 

 

Table of Contents Editorial ......................................................................................................IX PART I: PHILOSOPHY .............................................................................................. 1 Tamara Albertini & Piotr Pietrzak “Clarity is what I seek first” (Interview with Prof. Tamara Albertini).................................................. 3 Galina Raykova Hegel’s Recollection and Ricoeur’s Imagination ................................. 19 Joseph Thomas Milburn Identity and Globalised Culture: A Network Approach .................... 31 Koumparoudis Evangelos Information Society and a New Form of Embodiment ..................... 41 Andrea Giuseppe Ragno Reinventing Politics: An Epistemic Conversion of Information Technologies .............................................................................................. 59 PART II: POLITICS AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY .............. 75 Iga Kleszczyńska An analysis of the economic and political determinants of today’s Venezuelan crisis ......................................................................... 77 Bálint L. Tóth HSR Projects in V4 Countries: EU-driven spillovers of Central East European transport development initiatives ............... 107 Attila Mezei Balance of Power Theory and the 21st Century: Iron Law of International Relations or an Outdated Idea? .................................... 133 VII

  PART III: IN STATU NASCENDI’S REVIEWS & RESPONSES ......................... 151 Krzysztof Żęgota In response to Sergey Sukhankin, Russian Regionalism in Action: The Case of the North-Western Federal District (1991–2017) ....... 153 Piotr Pietrzak A brief introduction to the Journal of Romanian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2019) ................................................................................ 156 Piotr Pietrzak In response to Katherine Verdery’s “Notes on a century of surveillance” ............................................................................................. 158 Piotr Pietrzak In response to Maria Bucur’s “The Queen Is No Sister. Three Faces of Marie of Romania” ...................................................... 164 Piotr Pietrzak In response to Marius Stan and Vladimir Tismaneanu’s “Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism in Romania: The Case of Alexandru Jar Revisited.”....................................................................... 167 Call for Papers ......................................................................................... 173 Biographic Notes .................................................................................... 175 What We Stand for in Nineteen Different Languages..................... 179 Coming up next in In Statu Nascendi ................................................. 185

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Editorial Dear Readers, I hope that this message finds you well: in sound health and good spirits, and if things are not as good as they used to be, I want to send you a lot of positive energy. For I strongly believe that by the time this volume is released, the streets of our cities, pubs, restaurants, libraries, and university halls will be full again with vibrant busy crowds of people who just take pride in going about their everyday business without any fear of the spread of some deadly viruses or diseases. Surely, the way COVID-19 has spread in recent months has clearly reminded us about our mortality and our responsibilities toward our significant others, our small communities, and our fellow citizens of this world, for whom we care deeply, not only because their health also predetermines our existence, but just because it is the right thing to do. Those of us who have been privileged to work from home these days have been very lucky. Surely at times it was rather inconvenient to be locked 24/7 between just four walls, but this inconvenience cannot be even remotely compared to the disturbing images and exasperating situations that affected the first responders: doctors, nurses, medical staff, law enforcement officers, firefighters, and cleaners: people who provided us with the first line of defense against this deadly virus. I respect their work greatly, and I am immensely grateful for their incredible commitment to our wellbeing. Thanks to you, the rest of us—mortals— could feel much more secure, even during the peak of this pandemic. For this reason I proudly nominate the Covid-19 fighter for In Statu Nascendi’s person of the year of 2020 award. Surely, all of the combined efforts to fight this dangerous disease have made us more cautious about engaging in what used to be considered a normal human interaction prior to 2020; and surely it presents itself with the potential for redefining our entire existences, our everyday lives through our individual, plural and fascinating processes of creation. But I am also certain that because of these unusual circumstances, we will get much stronger and much more motivated than ever before. To those of you who share the same vision, and to those of you who are still not convinced by it, I have the same message: we will prevail; for sooner or later, we will send this pandemic where it belongs—to the dustbin of history. IX

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Piotr Pietrzak

Unfortunately, we have no virologists among us, and we don’t feel comfortable with contributing unnecessarily to overclouding the public space with some unnecessary information that mention coronavirus just for the sake of appearing original, current, or up-to-date, so for that reason, we have decided to show a far-reaching restraint and limit our COVID-19 references in the papers shortlisted for this edition to an absolute minimum, to just one or two random mentions, when it was absolutely essential in one of the papers. That being said, however, this volume’s main message is borrowed from University of Cambridge’s creed “hinc lucem et pocula sacra” that translates to “from this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge”, and in this respect, we are very transparent in hoping to “colonize” this motto, use it repetitively and turn it into one of our principles, for it seems only fair, considering all of the scholars who have decided to publish with us in recent years, both in this edition and all of the previous ones, for they have made number of timely and relevant contributions to philosophy, politics, and international relations theory, in the fields that they feel comfortable with. A very quick glimpse into the table of contents of this volume shows that our philosophy section commences with a very powerful and inspirational interview titled “Clarity is what I seek first” with world-class scholar Dr. Tamara Albertini, whose reputation truly precedes her. Dr. Albertini’s work is well recognized in academia, but it will soon be incorporated into diplomacy and international politics, for her respectful ideas, her original methods and countless publications contribute to building bridges of mutual understanding between different nations, cultures, civilizations, epochs, and horizons. Furthermore, this scholar has inspired countless contemporary scholars to look at the Muslim world with a much more open-minded perspective than, for instance, Samuel Paul Huntington. The interview itself was able to be conducted fortuitously when this scholar was still residing in Sofia during her Fulbright Scholarship in 2018–19. Dr. Albertini is otherwise based in Hawai’i and lectures as a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, specializing in Renaissance and Islamic thought. The first paper in the philosophy section is reserved for Galina Raykova from Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” who goes an extra mile to explain to her readers the interconnection between Hegel’s Recollection and Ricoeur’s Imagination, which accounts for one of the best interpretation of both philosophers that I have ever come across. Raykova’s account of Hegel is more persistent than Alexandre Kojève’s, far less dogmatic than György Lukács’, and equally as interesting as Verene’s, yet her findings are

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fresher, deeper, more thorough, and much more mature than the combination of the above mentioned. It is my personal belief that Raykova’s insights should be seen as a potential game-changer in the understanding of both of these philosophers, for I was very much speechless for at least a few days after my first reading of her article, and it did not change after the second, third, or fourth. The next paper in the philosophy section can be of interest to our readers who have had previous exposure to our Habermasian debates on the concept of Deliberative Democracy from the first and second volumes, for as much as it was not intended as such, it can be seen as a continuation. Indeed, Joseph Thomas Milburn invites us to the discussion upon contemporary identity-formation in Zygmunt Bauman which takes place in a society of increasingly globalized culture in which the call for a global public space and individual identity is approached from various perspectives in a globalized planetary cultural dialogue concerning global responsibility and commitment, in which distinct identities function as integral components or nodes. I am sure that both our “continental” and “analytical” readers as well as those who consider themselves as in-betweeners will look at this paper with wonder for it is a real jaw-dropper. This paper is followed by another marvel by Koumparoudis Evangelos (prepared during his scholarship at Sorbonne University) that can be seen as both a futuristic and forward-thinking philosophic treatise touching upon many important contemporary issues related to new forms of embodiment in our contemporary information society. Consequently, the sophisticated debate launched by this scholar incorporates very timely issues related to the changes in our embodying experience in the context of new information, virtual, and robotic technologies, new forms of sexuality, and recent discoveries in medicine, discussed in the context of various moral dilemmas, and also encompassing issues related to the new forms of bodily governance, such as the personal and biometric data collection techniques used and unfortunately abused by massive surveillance systems used by various intelligence services of very pluralistic regimes in the contemporary world. The final paper in this section is authored by a still very young but extremely talented young academic from London School of Economics, Andrea Giuseppe Ragno who continues the deliberation on information society through the prism of a pragmatic interpretation of Shannon’s information theory and questions the political and epistemic implications of the global application of the current technologies seen specifically through the prism of

—In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

XII Piotr Pietrzak the deliberations on the potentialities of unleashing various cognitive informational technologies under capitalist forms of organization. This is a fascinating piece of work that is both intriguing to read and forward-thinking, so I strongly recommend it to everyone. This subsequently brings us to our Politics & International Relations section that is opened up with a very powerful paper authored by Iga Kleszczyńska who brings to the fore a very comprehensive study of external and internal determinants of Venezuela’s economic turmoil and presidential crisis that have unfolded in recent years. The methods used by this academic from Jagiellonian University are truly impressive and very comprehensive, for Kleszczyńska looks at the current socio-political upheaval in this important Latin American country through the prism of local, as well as external (regional, global) factors that have had a massive impact on the way the internal political and economic choices have been made in the country that has suffered from an overall inflation rate rising to 53,798,500% since 2016. The paper doesn’t only remind us that printing money can never account for a viable solution to meet the augmented social demands of increasingly frustrated masses of populations exposed to economic upheavals, but it also reminds us about the crisis of political leadership everywhere that very often affects local politicians, prone to accept easy solutions, who refuse proper economic counsel. The problem is that too often it will not be those weak, incompetent, and populist politicians who accept the consequences of dragging their fellow citizens into economic black holes. No, it will be always the ordinary man and women who will suffer the most because of these treacherous socio-political choices of their direct representatives, for generations to come. This article is really an addictive page-turner for its author applies a very sophisticated historical and economic governance model to compare the behaviors of previous governments with the current people in power in Caracas; it compares various differences and similarities in the directions of Chavez and Maduro’s public policies, looks at this crisis through the prism of various statistical methods and reports produced by a number of independent international organizations and think tanks, and for those reasons, I recommend it to our Latin America experts and those people who seek an original and verifiable piece of contemporary academic work that explains the complicated socio-political patterns with refreshing ease. Naturally, when we speak about the potential consequences of populism on the rise, our attention would normally turn to the countries of the socalled Visegrád Group, especially after 2015, but on this occasion, we will —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

Editorial XIII look at the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia from a slightly different perspective for when we reach to the following paper in this section we will come across another robust analysis authored by Bálint László Tóth, associated with Corvinus University of Budapest and employed as an international relations expert at MÁV Hungarian State Railways Co. Tóth brings to our attention the dilemmas related to dealing with various spillovers in the Central East European intergovernmental transport development initiatives related to the North-South Railway Construction Projects in the Visegrád Four Countries (V4). In this respect, I need to admit that for someone who once was very optimistic about the potential of this particular regional initiative, Tóth’s paper is very refreshing, for it shows V4 in a far more positive light than I am used to. Even though most of the intergovernmental initiatives initiated by the V4 are poorly coordinated, as he claims, reading about some reasonable infrastructural plans that could enlarge cooperation between the governments in Bratislava, Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw at one point in the future shows that this pro-V4 type of thinking is still present in Central Europe. Someone once told me that you cannot be a Visegrád Group critic, for this group no longer exists, and it should be historians or historians of political ideas who should deal with it and they would most probably just look at it from the perspective of the idea that was tried some thirty years ago in February 1991 and attempted as a Visegrád collaboration. This initiative has shown a certain potential to evolve into something of value for the Central European countries that needed to unite for their respective integrations with the North Atlantic Alliance and the European Union, but the last ten years have clearly shown that V4 should be seen as a rather missed opportunity, for both the group itself and the nation states that were meant to compose it have descended toward populism underpinned by nationalism that caused massive reputational damage to the entire opinion about Central Europe and its famous hospitality. Indeed, the only major issues that could bring these countries together in recent years were their skeptical response to the Mediterranean Refugee Crisis of 2015 and their categorical refusal to accept any fixed EU distribution quotas. So the overall overwhelming perception of this group has deteriorated significantly since 2004, for one cannot build anything of value on such a 19th century-type nationalistic foundation. Having said that, Tóth’s paper shows us that we still can move beyond this type of negativity, restrain from such pessimistic assessments, and that it is still too early to leave the deliberations in this case to the historians, for he

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XIV Piotr Pietrzak virtually reanimates this group with a different type of analysis that goes beyond the current political climate. Indeed, this Hungarian scholar claims that most of the important integration within the V4 countries, in terms of HSR construction projects, materializes as a result of politics-level decision making. Tóth’s paper shows that there is a clear demand for the intergovernmental cooperation within this group on a different level, among the non-political elites in Visegrád countries that do not have enough bargaining power on their own separately, and that is why they are more inclined to come together and coordinate some of the local trans-border initiatives. This paper can be a real perspective-changer, so it is strongly recommended especially for our liberal IR thinkers, for it can equip them with many interesting observations. Finally, the last academic paper published in this section is dedicated to the concept of Balance of Power that is evaluated by Attila Mezei who acknowledges that this has been one of the most influential theories for studying international relations for centuries, but there are some clear limitations to its functionality that we need to reevaluate. This scholar from the Corvinus University of Budapest suggests that we don’t need to look far for even the school of neorealism, which has been known for utilizing this theory to the biggest extent, in the end failed to predict the end of the Cold War and has been consistently under-delivering ever since when it comes to providing us with a convincing evaluation of the current status of the global architecture of power that would explain why we are still faced with an imbalanced power of the United States as a result. It is fascinating to read, for Mezei enriches his theoretical deliberations with various case studies and comparisons to strengthen the power of his arguments; I strongly recommend it to our IR theory “fanatics”, especially those non-classical ones, for I really hope for that in the next volumes we will read even more fascinating responses to this paper. Our final section comprising Commentaries & Debates begins with Krzysztof Żęgota’s review of Russian Regionalism in Action: The Case of the North-Western Federal District (1991–2017) by Sergey Sukhankin, published by “Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society” 2018, vol. 4, no. 1. This piece is followed by my humble introduction to the Journal of Romanian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2019) that I had a real pleasure of reviewing, followed by slightly more comprehensive responses to three selected papers from this unbelievably interesting new journal: Paper 1: Katherine Verdery’s “Notes on a century of surveillance” Journal of Romanian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2019), p. 35–52; Paper 2: Maria Bucur’s “The Queen Is No Sister. —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

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Three Faces of Marie of Romania” Journal of Romanian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2019), p. 77–104; and finally Paper 3: Marius Stan and Vladimir Tismaneanu’s “Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism in Romania: The Case of Alexandru Jar Revisited. Journal of Romanian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2019), p. 105–122. As you have perhaps noticed there is no academic paper authored by the editor in this particular volume, just a few article reviews, but don’t worry, I have kept myself quite busy for the last couple of months. I have just channeled my energy differently by initiating various ad hoc initiatives to attract more talent, more academics, and more peer-reviewers to our network, and also by taking some important steps to strengthen our foothold in the academic world. Speaking of which, you too can be part of our great adventure, if you wish. It’s easy—just forward us your proposals via one of our emails that you will find below and our editorial board will be delighted to get back to you with our initial evaluation in a timely fashion. This statement brings me to the recognition of the efforts of the people who have already responded to our calls for assistance, and I would like to mention: Tamara Albertini, Galina Raykova, Hristiyana Stoyanova, Koumparoudis Evangelos, Joseph Thomas Milburn, Andrea Giuseppe Ragno, Iga Kleszczyńska, Bálint László Tóth, Attila Mezei, Krzysztof Żęgota, Marcin Grabowski, Stavros Panagiotou. Ivan Solakov, Zoran Kojčić, Sami Mehmeti, Rafał Michniuk, Artemis Papachristou, Gunel Shukurova, Marta Bocharnikova, Bekim Nuhija, Joel Patomäki, Yllka Imeri, Prof. Labinot Berisha, Goran Iiik, Saranda Buzhala, Olivia Nantermoz-Benoit-Gonin, Martin Smith, Molly Durkin, Vasselin Dafov, Malwina Hopiej, Magdalena Tomala, Rafał Zajecki, Abiola BamijokoOkungbaye, Anak Agung Banyu Perwita, and Ahlam Tarayra. Thanks to their feedback, their recommendations, and their constructive criticism, we are now where we are at the very moment, and we can look very optimistically to the future. So once again thank you very much for your time, your kindness, and your dedication. My next thank you is reserved for Matthew Gill for his exceptional support with various proofreading jobs over last few years, his professionalism, his honest opinions, and most importantly for the breathtaking speed in which he normally responds. Thanks to Matthew our communication with our readers is becoming much clearer than in 2017 when we embarked on this journey. If you are a writer who needs some support with your papers or dissertations, I strongly recommend you contact him via the email that you will find in the biographical section of this journal.

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XVI Piotr Pietrzak My special gratitude goes to Valerie Lange and Christian Schön from ibidem-Verlag, and the unyielding support of their respective teams, especially Malisa Mahler, for thanks to their kindness, patience, and professionalism, we can reach out to so many readers in so many remote places all over the world. Finally, I would like to dedicate this volume to my wife Delyana Boyadzhieva-Pietrzak, to acknowledge that without her counsel, her everyday warm words of encouragement, her unyielding support, and much appreciated constructive criticism, this volume would not exist. Now, without any further ado, on behalf of our growing network and our editorial board, I would like to thank you for purchasing this volume. It means a lot to us, for we see it as your voice of confidence in this initiative, and we will not let you down. We will continue to do our utmost to raise the bar higher and higher, so every edition of this journal will be stronger than all of the previous editions combined. We hope to achieve this goal by focusing on our organic internal development within this non-profit organization, and by taking pride in being open to various forms of academic collaboration with our colleagues and partners overseas. Yours sincerely,

Piotr Pietrzak Editor-in-chief In Statu Nascendi Journal of Political Philosophy and International Relations [email protected]

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PART I: PHILOSOPHY

 

Tamara Albertini & Piotr Pietrzak

“Clarity is what I seek first” (Interview with Prof. Tamara Albertini) Piotr Pietrzak (PP): Good Afternoon. Today, I am a guest at the Bulgarian residence of Dr. Tamara Albertini, whose reputation as a distinguished scholar and philosopher precedes her. Professor Albertini’s work in the fields of Renaissance and Islamic philosophy is known around the world. In Statu Nascendi is deeply grateful that she has granted us an interview. Prof. Albertini, could you please tell us more about your “in statu nascendi,” i.e., your academic development from Basel to Munich and eventually Hawai’i where you are to this day. What has led you to your educational choices? Tamara Albertini (TA): My driving force from a very young age was intellectual curiosity and an insatiable desire for clarity. When I read René Descartes in my first year at the University of Basel, his criteria of clarity and distinction instantly made sense to me. I realized that philosophy would stay with me all my life—with or without a career. To this day, whether I teach or write, clarity is what I seek first. When I ended my studies in Basel with a “Licentiate” (the equivalent of an M.A.), I knew I needed to find another university where I could have exposure to different materials, other schools of thought, and alternative teaching styles. My choice fell on Munich since its Ludwig-Maximilians-University had a large Philosophy Department. I trusted there would be one or two professors whose lectures would impress me enough to want to develop a dissertational project under their guidance. I wasn’t exactly modest, was I? I will never forget the cold November night on which I arrived. I could tell I was going to face some challenges right from the beginning. Compared to cozy Basel, Munich’s academic culture was quite rough. Intellectually speaking, to win an argument was more important there than getting to the bottom of a philosophical problem. And the professors? Each one of them conducted himself like a prima donna. Ironically, speaking of ‘prima donna,’ there were no women among the tenured professors. On the positive side, I discovered an entire institute dedicated to Renaissance philosophy, a tradition of thought I hadn’t known even existed. The Renaissance is widely acknowledged as an art period connected to the illustrious names of Leonardo da 3

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Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and many more. But the Renaissance as a distinct philosophical period like the Middle Ages, Rationalism, or the Enlightenment? Nobody had ever mentioned it in my undergraduate studies. That very few specialists worked in that field added to its appeal. I never followed trends, nor did I think it relevant to know what everybody knew. As a teenager, I even refused to watch movies or read books about which everybody talked. I always waited until the excitement quieted down so that my mind remained unobstructed by other opinions. The first seminar I enrolled in focused on the aesthetics in the works of Thomas Aquinas and Marsilio Ficino. I had some knowledge of Aquinas, but Ficino? Not a clue. Sure enough, Marsilio Ficino became the philosopher on whose work I focused for my dissertation. Six months before my doctoral exams, I applied for a summer fellowship at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles), administered by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.1 The director then was Michael J. B. Allen, a most distinguished Ficino specialist I was hoping to get interested in my research. I was thrilled when the award letter arrived, for the experience I was going to gain and because it would prevent me from falling into a deep hole like after my Licentiate. When you work intensively long hours for many years, you cannot just stop from one day to the next. You have to plan a transition before tackling a new project. So, you see, there was always something driving me. While at UCLA, I recognized how easy it was for a young scholar to network in the US. The American system offers extraordinary mentorship. Thus Michael J. B. Allen turned out to be immensely supportive. Then, while I was at UCLA, I also met Jean-Claude Carron, a fellow Swiss who was a specialist in French Renaissance literature. Finally, the opportunity to teach there as a visiting assistant professor presented itself in 1993, and two years later came the job offer from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. To answer your last two questions, what determined my choices was being true to myself, a dose of risk-taking, and the confidence that I could bring clarity to anything that has some rational foundation. I have every intention to continue working in that vein. (PP): Prof. Albertini, I can tell from your CV and publications that foreign languages have been indispensable to your scholarship. What advice can you offer our young researchers?

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The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies’ website available at: [Accessed on 03.07.2020, at: 21:13].

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(TA): They should definitely learn as many foreign languages as they can. I never tire mentioning this to my students in Hawai’i, especially graduate students. They need to be able to tap into scholarly literature published in different countries. Let’s say you happen to be American, and all you read is the English language. You will miss essential scholarship available in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and so forth. Not to mention that reading philosophical texts in the original is quintessential to the creation of original work. Naturally, there is a limit as to how many languages one can acquire, one of them being the limitation of time. Ironically, the more you know, the likelier it is that you’ll come across information about materials written in a tongue you don’t master. I recommend if nothing else reading competence in three to four modern European languages and also in one or two ancient languages, i.e., Greek or Latin. Then, of course, if you are interested in nonWestern philosophical traditions, you will have to add some more languages. It would thus be futile to research Islamic philosophy without the knowledge of Arabic or Indian philosophy without Sanskrit. The benefit that foreign languages bring to your scholarly work is immeasurable, especially if at some point you don’t perceive them as “foreign” anymore. The command of many languages also makes traveling abroad more rewarding. To speak the same language as your host helps establish trust and mutual respect. For instance, I was researching the burial place of French Renaissance philosopher Charles de Bovelles (1479–1567) earlier this year, for which I needed to enter uninvited the premises of a chateau in the Picardy. After addressing the owner in her language and with the proper etiquette, I was allowed to inspect the entire terrain. Everyone speaks of the value of languages for scholarly networking, which is indeed the case. Still, there is something more precious, which is that the mastery of foreign languages generates a sense of connectedness with many communities. At another yet deeper level, you discover that with every language you think in, your train of thought changes—sometimes in most dramatic ways. I don’t mean that you’ll have a different solution or theory depending on the language you use. It is more like looking at the world through different glasses. With some, you’ll see the details better, or particular details, with others the general picture. Translating a philosophical text into another language is an extraordinary experience. You go back and forth between the original wording and the translation to ensure you do not do violence to the author’s intention (this is an ethical requirement). While subtleties of the original text get lost in the process, new ones may manifest themselves in translation. There is something almost ecstatic about how concepts —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

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resonate differently according to the language you use; you journey from meaning to meaning, make discoveries, and find the process itself to be highly philosophical. My husband likes to call me a linguistic chameleon. In some ways, I believe that I am also a cultural chameleon. But that’s another topic.

(PP): Amazing. So, we have a language, and we have a location. How about people who were a driving force on your philosophical path? Who was your mentor? (TA): I am happy to acknowledge my teachers. I still feel a profound connection with my first teacher in philosophy. His name was Hansjörg A. Salmony. He was a Holocaust escapee, which means that unlike Holocaust survivors, he was not deported to an extermination camp. But he was interned all the same, in a southern French camp like Hannah Arendt and many more German Jews. Luckily, he managed to break out and find safety in Switzerland.2 What I have learned from him is that there may be no division between your philosophical work and how you live; the two ought to blend. Whether it was due to his tragic life or an inborn trait, I cannot tell. The fact is that Salmony placed high ethical demands upon himself and his students. In addition, he was Karl Jaspers’ last assistant, and thus exposed to a particularly rigorous brand of existential philosophy, which added to his pre-existing uprightness. There was hardly a course in which he didn’t mention Jaspers. Sometimes, I would find Salmony’s handwritten comments on my papers saying “Existentiell—sehr gut!” (Existential—very good!). Although I did not pursue existential philosophy at the doctoral level, it did leave a mark on me and my later work. The Licentiate thesis I wrote on Simone Weil and published in French haunted me for many years. You see, she is not the kind of philosopher who engages you on an intellectual level only. Nowadays, I’m finding that I’m returning to existential philosophy because my students in Hawai’i don’t have sufficient exposure to this tradition. Another influence in Basel was Annemarie Pieper. She became an important role model. I always knew women could be and have been philosophers, but it made a difference to see one in action, especially Pieper, during her lively lectures. She is the one who introduced me to British empiricism and John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice.

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For additional information, please visit the website Professor Albertini created: https:// www.hjsalmony.com/ In honor of Professor Salmony’s 100th anniversary, tributes from former colleagues and students have been uploaded on February 16, 2020.

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In Munich, I had a very different type of teacher. Intellectually speaking, he was rather exceptional, endowed with a sharp mind and a most creative approach to texts. He was the one who opened up for me the world of Renaissance philosophy and comparative methodology within Western thought. His name was Stephan Otto. Sadly, he was a poor mentor. We graduate students often suffered from his inexplicable outbursts and oppressive personality. Nevertheless, I do like to acknowledge my scholarly debt. I wouldn’t have become a Renaissance expert without him. Later, I had exemplary mentors in the US, also among the senior members of “The American Cusanus Society.” For my research in Renaissance philosophy, the Society became my intellectual home in the US. For me, who was used to strict boundaries between senior and junior scholars in Europe (I still see grey-haired assistants carrying their professor’s books at conferences in Italy), to be able to mingle at ease with major capacities at conferences was quite a revelation. It confirmed to me that respect for the work of senior philosophers did not have to lead to subservient behavior.

(PP): I understand. I wonder, for readers who approach some of your work, like, for instance, The Mediation of Mind and World in a Metaphysics of Simplicity, how much do you expect they will understand? (TA): You are referring to the subtitle of my dissertation, and, indeed, like many dissertation titles, mine too was rather long. I would definitely revise that title today, but back then, it seemed the right fit, especially since the titles of Renaissance works are even longer.

(PP): What does this work convey? How would you explain it to a child? (TA): Well, it has to do with the intricate metaphysics of Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499). Ficino was the first person in Europe who read all of Plato thanks to his patron Cosimo de’ Medici (who bought the entire corpus). Not only was he familiar with the Platonic work in its integrity, but he also translated it from Greek to Latin and wrote substantial commentaries on many dialogues. Now, although he claimed that he had merely elaborated on the ancient Greek authority, he did develop his own philosophy in the process of translating and commenting. I am convinced he too was enchanted by how concepts metamorphosize in the process of translation. Transformation is, anyway, a significant theme of Renaissance philosophy.

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Something that caught my attention early on was how Ficino addressed the functions of intellect and will. These have been discussed most controversially by leading figures in the Middle Ages. Thomas Aquinas and the Dominican order opted for the intellect’s superiority over the will. The Franciscans, of course, maintained the opposite view. You should know that these two schools of thought hardly ever agreed with each other on any subject— which made their confrontations intellectually fruitful for medieval philosophy. Ultimately, the question at stake was whether knowledge is obtained primarily by the use of the intellect or by following the lead of the will. The Franciscans were in favor of the will, which they correlated with love, while the Dominicans maintained that the intellect was superior unless the object of knowledge was God. Since God was ultimately inscrutable, the loving movement of the will reached further than the intellect. This is the debate Ficino inherited from the previous period. In his Ficino book (that was originally going to be a habilitation thesis supported by Martin Heidegger), Paul Oskar Kristeller worked out this medieval background and analyzed the many passages in which Ficino seemed to vacillate, once favoring the intellect and at other times declaring the will superior. I think I was able to show that Ficino had no intention of establishing a hierarchy. He did something rather marvelous with the controversial question. Being a true man of the Renaissance, he was not interested in opposites as opposites. For him, like, for instance, the earlier Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), extremes did not exist in reality. In other words, opposites are merely concepts. In the same way, as the human mind generates opposites, it is also the faculty that may find the means of mediation. That’s how Marsilio Ficino ended up thinking of intellect and will as correlatives. Now let me think of how I would explain Ficino’s harmonious solution to a child. Maybe this way: the will is a great power in us human beings, it opens us up to the world. It is driven by love and desire to embrace all there is outside of ourselves. On the contrary, the intellect draws the world inside itself. The two movements, one directed outwardly, the other inwardly, are complementary. As one power goes out, the other goes in. Together they enable us to acquire knowledge. It is a beautiful way of thinking about human beings and their place in the world. We are not only predisposed to know, but we are also born to love what surrounds us. Without that love, there could be no knowledge. Ficino did not think of intellect and will as equal capabilities, but he also did not want to declare one superior to the other. Instead, he ended up using a harmonious triangle called by the ancients the “Lambda-figure.” It was meant to show the various functions of the human —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

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soul. Think of a triangle with an open base (that’s how Lambda, the Greek L, looks) and numbers on three levels on each of the figure’s legs. At every level, the number on the left produces with the number on the right a harmonious sound. For intellect and will Ficino chose the ratio 2:1, which corresponds to an octave in music: C D E F G A B C. This is how this Renaissance philosopher could state that intellect and will collaborate to generate knowledge in which the inner and the outer are in balance. The relationship between the two powers is defined by harmonious equality. It is basically saying that if thinking is done well, it creates music of the mind. Your advanced readers can look up more detailed information on the “Lambda-figure” in my Ficino book and also in a separate article on the topic that appeared in English.

(PP): Prof. Albertini, are you using this type of harmonization to explore different currents in contemporary philosophy? In other words, has the Renaissance proven to be particularly useful to your various philosophical explorations? (TA): You are right. I do like to look at opposites the way Renaissance philosophers did—as an opportunity for reconciliation and not as a basis for conflicts. That’s what the Renaissance called ars oppositorum (the “art of opposites”); Charles de Bovelles dedicated an entire book to this art.3 Not to forget that there is a great variety of opposite relationships. They can be contradictory, privative, relative, dynamic, polar, contrary … The contrary opposition is the fascinating one since it allows for endless means that can be adjusted towards one end or the other on the spectrum. Needless to say, that’s the one the Renaissance preferred. Today, whether I read Hegel or a contemporary Arab philosopher like Qustantin Zurayq (d. 2000), I find it easy to detect concepts conducive to the mediation of opposites. Zurayq, for instance, worked tirelessly toward a theory of mediation between civilizations. I might not have recognized it without my knowledge of the “art of opposites,” a powerful tool that is at the same time dynamic and peacebuilding.

(PP): Coincidently, I have a question that may reconcile this theme to a different dimension of your philosophy. Prof. Albertini, this year, we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the

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The Ars oppositorum is published in: Carolus Bovillus, Que hoc volumine continentur, Liber de intellectu, Liber de sensu, Liber de nichilo, Ars oppositorum, Liber de generatione, Liber de sapiente, Liber de duodecim numeris, Epistole complures … (Parisiis, Emissum ex officina Henrici Stephani[Henri Estiennethe Elder], impensis ejusdem et Joannis Parvi [Jean Petit] sociorum, 1510, primo cal. [1] Februarij [i.e. n.s. 1511]).

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outbreak of World War II. We, therefore, expect significant events around the first of September, some of which will remind us of the horrors of that war. But 1939 was not a tragic year everywhere. Isn’t that the year in which the first East-West Philosophers’ Conference took place in Hawai’i? (TA): It is a rather extraordinary story that an island in the Pacific became the world’s center for comparative philosophy. As Eliot Deutsch, one of our most distinguished emeriti4, wrote in the text we use on the website of our Philosophy Department, it all began with “three University of Hawai’i visionaries—Professors Charles A. Moore, Wing-tsit Chan, and Gregg Sinclair— [who] initiated the first East-West Philosophers’ Conference in Honolulu.” They realized that not much attention had been given to non-European philosophical traditions. Western scholars knew, of course, about Daoism and Confucianism, but these were studied in departments of Sinology. The same applied to Japanese philosophy. That’s how the idea was born to invite philosophers from different traditions to convene in one place. Hawai’i was geographically speaking best positioned to become the site for an East-West dialogue. China and Japan seem to be around the corner—and they are in the West. Coincidentally, Oahu, the island on which Honolulu is located, means in Hawai’ian language ‘place of gathering.’ It began as a small venue with few participants, among them D. T. Suzuki who at that time was teaching in Kyoto, endeavoring “to determine the possibility of a world philosophy through a synthesis of the ideas and ideals of East and West, and to reach conclusions in the form of specific suggestions concerning the most fruitful ways in which such a synthesis could be effected …” There is much ingenuousness expressed in these words written by Charles E. Moore in the Preface to Philosophy—East and West (1944). He and the rest of the early comparativists expected to uncover together oneworld philosophy! I suppose every major new endeavor starts with a touch of naïveté. If you realized right from the beginning the difficulties ahead, you might not ever tackle a new task. Unfortunately, with the United States entering WWII after the Pearl Harbor attacks in 1941, the second conference only took place in 1949. Countries East and West needed rebuilding and healing. Except for a gap between 1969 and 1989, the East-West Philosophers’ Conference has been reconvening every four to five years, attracting more

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Sadly, Professor Eliot Deutsch passed away on June 27, 2020. For more information about this philosopher please see: [Accessed on 28/07/2020, at 06:15]

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“Clarity is what I seek first”: An interview with Prof. Albertini 11 participants each time. The next one will be on May 21–28, 2021. We expect about 300 philosophers from around the world.

(PP): Prof. Albertini, in the public lecture on comparative philosophy you offered at Sofia University last December,5 you mentioned that you attended one of these East-West Philosophers’ Conferences personally, didn’t you? (TA): Yes, I have, and not just one. I have also been a member of the Committee organizing them since 1995. For the next one, I will serve as one of the co-directors. Let your readers know, the topic is “Walls: Thinking Through Insularity”6.

(PP): Surely, walls can be fascinating from the conceptual perspective, given the recent US push to erect a wall along the Mexican border, Afghanistan’s urge to build a wall to separate it from Pakistan, or the very fact that Nicosia in Cyprus remains the last capital in Europe to be divided by a wall. Anyway, Prof. Albertini, to get back to the topic of comparative philosophy, I recall you suggesting a new approach in your Sofia public lecture. (TA): The first time I went public with a new approach to comparative philosophy, I was responding to an invitation by the American University in Dubai. That was in 2017. A young team of philosophers there was intrigued by comparative philosophy and wished to explore it as a new research area to be pursued on their campus. They were looking for someone who was already in the field. Since I was going to be a keynote speaker, I began to finally work on the paper I had been designing in my head for many years. In a nutshell, I started by pointing out that comparativists and interculturalists were not really talking to each other. They were hardly even quoting each other’s work, which is rather odd. In my mind, they are natural allies. The latter are great at addressing cultural sensitivity. Still, I didn’t see them pursue the actual dialogue of ideas among the world’s great philosophical traditions by, for instance, exploring how friendship, governance, or, generally speaking, human relationships are conceptualized similarly or, rather, differently in

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“The Comparativist, the Fusionist, and the Bricoleur: Toward What Comparative Philosophy Should We Be Moving?” (Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski,” Sofia, December 5, 2018). Available at: [Accessed on 03.07.2020, at 14:00]. The 12th East/West Philosophers’ Conference was originally scheduled for May 22–29, 2020. It had to be postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic: http://hawaii.edu/ phil/category/department-news-all/page/2/. For updates please see http://hawaii.edu/ phil/> [Accessed on 31.07.2020, at 08:00].

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China than in the Western world.7 Conversely, comparativists are doing creative work but don’t seem interested in explicitly laying out the ethical basis upon which they engage in cross-cultural encounters. Mind you, I’m not saying they are not ethical, only that they are not usually up-front with whatever engagement rules guided them in their inquiries.8 A particularly thought-provoking debate in comparative philosophy is the one involving “fusion” and whether it has superseded the earlier comparative approach. This is a position introduced by Mark Siderits, a well-established scholar of Buddhist thought. Many more Buddhism experts are discussing this—on opposite sides of the aisle. Generally speaking, the analytical philosophers among these experts are more comfortable pursuing fusion philosophy, which they correlate with a problem-solving approach. Other scholars in the field warn against decontextualizing fused ideas and even speak of “a yet new form of neocolonial extraction of resources.”9 I am no specialist in Buddhist philosophy and yet I have similar concerns when it comes to the use of philosophic ideas and materials “extracted” from Islamic philosophy with no consideration for how they functioned in the culture of origin. My position is “You may extract for as long as you don’t abstract from the original cultural context.”

(PP): Before you continue with what I know will be your specific contribution to comparative philosophy, can you tell us what the place of Islamic philosophy is in the field? (TA): One would expect that Islamic philosophy plays a prominent role in comparative philosophy, considering that it was the first non-Western tradition of thought known to Europeans since the Middle Ages. And, yet, it is instead on the margins of this field of inquiry. I found out that the first EastWest Philosophers’ gathering did invite a representative of Islamic philosophy. So, it wasn’t entirely ignored, but it wasn’t placed on par with Western and the great Asian traditions of thought either. The problem is that Islamic philosophy was and continues to be perceived mostly through its reception in medieval Europe. While Islamic philosophy is an intriguing hybrid thanks to its borrowings from and the additions it made to Greek and Roman

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This is the kind of research pursued by comparativists like Henry Rosemont (d. 2017), Roger Ames, François Jullien, and Chung-ying Cheng. For a refreshing exception, see Arindam Chakrabarti and Ralph Weber (eds.), Comparative Philosophy Without Borders (London, Oxford et alia: Bloomsbury, 2016). Michael Nylan and Martin Verhoeven, “Fusion, Comparative, ‘Constructive Engagement Comparative,’ Or What? Third Thoughts on Levine’s Critique of Siderits,” Journal of World Philosophies, 2016, pp. 119–127, at p. 120.

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“Clarity is what I seek first”: An interview with Prof. Albertini 13 thought, it needs to be recognized as a tradition in its own right. You can’t reduce it to what it did to boost European philosophy and sciences from the Middle Ages. It is like trying to understand Buddhism solely through how this teaching was later received in Japan or Korea. As Buddhism is vaster than its multiple receptions, Islamic philosophy too is more than its continuation in the West. What damages its standing most is its placement on the timeline as belonging to the medieval period, which is an absurd measure since periodizations do not transfer from one civilization to another, certainly not synchronically. Not to forget that since the Middle Ages have passed, Islamic philosophy too would have to be a thing of the past. Besides, Muslim philosophers have influenced European thought also in the Renaissance and again in the Enlightenment period. I, therefore, suggested in the piece I sub-edited for the Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy that Islamic philosophy be reintroduced.10 I don’t see how else it can be treated with the respect every major tradition of thought deserves. Also, it is time scholars stop using the term “Arab philosophy” as a synonym for “Islamic philosophy.” Arabic has indeed been the lingua franca in Islamic thought for a very long time, but it is a misnomer if used to label the entire field of Islamic philosophy. You see, I began writing more and more in English since I moved to the United States, but that does not make me a contributor to English philosophy, does it? Besides, there is an Arab philosophy now with authors who are Muslims, Christians, or with no religious affiliation for that matter. They reflect on Arab reason, worldview(s), values, education, history, language, society, reforms, etc. It is hard to rectify longstanding prejudices just by writing scholarly pieces. I’m therefore actively promoting contemporary Arab philosophy at our next EWPC conference by organizing a panel to which I have invited Abdessamad Belhaj (Catholic University of Louvain), Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab (Doha Institute for Graduate Studies), and Ashraf Mansour (University of Alexandria).

(PP): Let us return to your specific contribution to comparative philosophy. (TA): So far, it is not a contribution, since I haven’t published my ideas yet. Hopefully, it will find the attention of colleagues in the field once my paper comes out. Basically, I propose “bricolage” as an approach to comparative

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T. Albertini, “Reintroducing Islamic Philosophy: The Persisting Problem of Smaller Orientalisms.” In Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy, edited by Jay L. Garfield and William Edelglass, 387–396. Oxford: Oxford U. P, 2010.

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philosophy that is driven by wonder and playfulness. The way I conceptualize it, it will also help avert cultural dominance by any of the great philosophical traditions since the “bricoleur” (or the tinkerer) has intercultural sensitivity and is thus not interested in establishing or supporting existing hierarchies. To some extent, I take over the features that Claude Lévi-Strauss assigned to the bricoleur and his antithetical “ingénieur” (engineer) in La Pensée sauvage (1962). The latter is said to operate with concepts, while the former works with signs. In other words, engineers create their materials from scratch, and tinkerers assign meaning to them. However, my tinkerer is not defined by being contrasted with the engineer. I concede that bricoleurs do like to work with inherited materials; that’s how they learn from their predecessors, in their own and other civilizations. They take these materials apart in order to understand their inner workings, and they reassemble them the best they can. That’s how they test how well and how much of the original concepts they are able to reconstruct. But there is also the possibility of assembling materials in a different way, for a variety of reasons that would take too long to address in an interview. All I’ll say is that what distinguishes bricoleurs from fusionists (who tend to work freely with older materials) is that the former are frank about their repurposing. Moreover, when the task requires it, they also create new materials and are then engineers. You find that here too, I apply some lessons of the Renaissance’s “art of opposites.” Opposite modi operandi do not have to exclude each other. A more significant addition I make to Lévi-Strauss’s theory is to introduce the notion of an open process. What I mean is that bricoleurs are willing to allow concepts and ideas to take them to unsuspected places, which is a way to convey that they do not try to control the process of inquiry. On the contrary, they take the risk of being carried away and transformed by it. Still, it would be a misunderstanding to think of the tinkerer as being solely driven by the materials like a ship tossed by ocean waters. To work off Plato’s famous ship-steering metaphor (Rep. 488a–489d), the best navigator is not the one trying to control the elements but the one who knows how to use their power to get the ship safely to a port. What I’m trying to clarify is that bricolage requires skills and that it is goal-driven. An open process does not necessarily lead to an open-ended inquiry. The process may originate with a question, a suspicion, or mere curiosity about a habit of the mind, then follow an anticipated trajectory, and still remain open towards “new uses” or “discoveries” on the way. I am also interested in accidental discoveries that become possible because a playful, trial-and-error approach allows one to deviate from a pre-traced path. One often hears of accidental discoveries in sciences. —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

“Clarity is what I seek first”: An interview with Prof. Albertini 15 Who says these are not happening in philosophy as well? So, that is what I like to introduce to comparative philosophy and actually to philosophy more generally: a playful way of thinking and pondering. Why become a philosopher otherwise?

(PP): Thank you very much for this incredible explanation. I have just one more question if I may. What is next for Professor Albertini? (TA): My time as a Fulbright Scholar at Sofia University is coming to an end soon. For the rest of my sabbatical, I will finally be able to accept some of the open invitations I have been receiving over the years. From Bulgaria, one can get quickly to any other European destination and anywhere in the Arab world. My first trip will take me to Moscow, where I will lecture at the Academy of Sciences and the People’s Friendship University, after which my journey will continue to Egypt. At Cairo University, I’ll have the distinct honor of meeting Hasan Hanafi, the most illustrious living Arab philosopher, and his former student Yomna Elkholy, who has made a name for herself in the philosophy of science. Another highlight will be a lecturing engagement at the University of Tunis and possibly also at St. Joseph University in Beirut. As you probably know, I lived in Tunisia as a child. The country is dear to me, and I never dreamed I would return to it a philosopher one day.11 The purpose of my public lectures and workshops on Islamic or contemporary Arab philosophy is to propose comparative philosophy as a new scholarly platform for philosophers from the Arab world and, generally speaking, specialists of Islamic philosophy who may feel separated from mainstream thought. In August, I will return to Hawai’i to embrace new duties as Department Chair. There is always a new challenge.

(PP): Prof. Albertini, I would like to say on behalf of In Statu Nascendi’s readers that we feel fortunate you agreed to this interview. Thank you for your time and best wishes in all your future endeavors. (TA): Thank you. This was a pleasure.

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In 2015, Professor Albertini returned to Tunisia for the first time after an absence of 33 years. She has recorded her impressions and reflections in her blog, available at: [Accessed on 03.07.2020, at 14:00].

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A few months after our interview, Professor Albertini received the Distinguished Scholar Award from Cairo University on April 3, 2019 (For more information please see: [Accessed on 03.07.2020, at 14:00]).

Further Reading Books and Edited Works (Ed.) Politics, Nature, and Society: The Actuality of North African Philosopher Ibn Khaldūn. Special issue of Philosophy East and West 69, 3 (2019). (Co-edited with Michel Ferrari.) Charles de Bovelles’ Liber de Sapiente, or Book of the Wise. Special issue of Intellectual History Review 21, 3 (2011). (Sub-edited). “Islamic Philosophy.” In Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy, edited by Jay L. Garfield and William Edelglass. Oxford: Oxford U. P, 2010, 387–458. Marsilio Ficino: Die Vermittlung von Denken und Welt in einer Metaphysik der Einfachheit [M.F. The Mediation of mind and world in a metaphysics of simplicity]. Munich: Fink, 1997. Online edition 2014: http://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/index.html?c=kurzauswahl&adr=digi 20.digitale-sammlungen.de (Ed.) Verum et Factum. Beiträge zur Geistesgeschichte und Philosophie der Renaissance. Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Stephan Otto [Verum et Factum. Contributions to the history of ideas and the philosophy of the Renaissance. Jubilee volume for the 60th birthday anniversary of Stephan Otto]. Bern/Frankfurt a.M./Paris/New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Articles and chapters in books “Ibn Khaldūn, A Philosopher for Times of Crisis,” in Politics, Nature, and Society: The Actuality of North African Philosopher Ibn Khaldūn. Special issue of Philosophy East and West 69, 3 (2019): 651–656. “Meanings, Words, and Names: Rābi’a’s Mystical Dance of the Letters.” In Ineffability: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion, edited by Timothy D. Knepper and Leah E. Kalmanson, 219–243. Springer International Publishing: 2017.

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“Clarity is what I seek first”: An interview with Prof. Albertini 17 “Ibn Hazm’s and al-Ghazzālī’s Most Divergent Responses to Christianity: A Question of Epistemology and Hermeneutics.” In: Nicholas of Cusa and Islam. Polemic and Dialogue in the Late Middle Ages, edited by Ian Christopher Levy, Rita George-Tvrtković and Donald F. Duclow, 218– 234. Leiden: Brill (2014). “Mystical Landscapes—Places of the Mind. Emptiness and Plenitude in Islamic Philosophy.” In Labirinti della mente. Visioni del mondo. Il lascito intellettuale di Elémire Zolla nel XXI secolo, edited by Grazia Marchianò, 175–190. Pienza: Società Bibliografica Toscana (2012). “Charles de Bovelles’ Enigmatic Liber de Sapiente: A Heroic Notion of Wisdom,” in Charles de Bovelles’ Liber de Sapiente, or Book of the Wise, edited by Michel Ferrari and Tamara Albertini, Special issue of Intellectual History Review 21,3 (2011): 297–306. “Ibn Rushd or Averroës? Of Double Names and Double Truths. A Different Approach to Islamic Philosophy.” In After Appropriation: Explorations in Intercultural Philosophy and Religion, edited by Morny Joy, 221–238. Calgary: Calgary U. P. (2011). “Reintroducing Islamic Philosophy: The Persisting Problem of Smaller Orientalisms.” In Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy, edited by Jay L. Garfield and William Edelglass, 387–396. Oxford: Oxford U. P, 2010. “Dreams, Visions, & Nightmares: From the Prophet Muhammad to the Fundamentalist Mindset.” In Dreams and Visions, edited by Nancy van Deusen, 167–182. Leiden: Brill (2010). “Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499): The Aesthetic of the One in the Soul.” In Philosophers of the Renaissance, edited by Paul Richard Blum, 82–91. CUA Press, 2010. “Crisis and Certainty of Knowledge in al-Ghazzali (1058–1111) and Descartes (1596–1650).” Philosophy East and West 55, 1 (2005): 1–14. [Revised version of a paper delivered at The World Congress of Mulla Sadra, Teheran, May 22–27, 1999).] “Nicholas of Cusa’s Mathematics and Astronomy.” In Introducing Nicholas of Cusa: A Guide to a Renaissance Man, edited by Christopher M. Bellito, Thomas M. Izbicki, and Gerald Christianson, 373–406. Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist, 2004. “The Seductiveness of Certainty. Fundamentalists’ Destruction of Islam’s Intellectual Legacy.” Philosophy East&West 53,4 (2003): 455–470. “Intellect and Will in Marsilio Ficino: Two Correlatives of a Renaissance Concept of the Mind.” In Marsilio Ficino: his Theology, his Philosophy, his Legacy, edited by Michael J. B. Allen and Valery Rees, 203–225. Leiden: Brill, 2002.

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“L’anima artista in Marsilio Ficino: Una filosofia della bellezza del pensiero.” In La Pluralità estetica. Lasciti e irradiazioni oltre il novecento, edited by G. Marchianò, 27–39. Turin: Trauben, 2001. “Actio und Passio in der Renaissance. Das Weibliche und das Männliche bei Agrippa, Postel und Bovelles” [Action and Passion in the Renaissance. The womanly and the manly in Agrippa, Postel, and Bovelles]. Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 47 (2000): 126–149. “Der Mikrokosmos-Topos als Denkfigur der Analogie in der Renaissance aufgezeigt an der Philosophie Charles de Bovelles’” [The microcosm topos as an analogical figure of thought in the Renaissance]. In Das Analogiedenken—Vorstöße in ein neues Gebiet der Rationalitätstheorie, edited by K. Gloy, 184–212. Bonn: Bouvier, 2000. “Der Mensch als metamorphische Weltmitte. Reflexionen zu einer Denkfigur der Renaissance” [Humankind as a metamorphic center of the world. Reflections upon a Renaissance figure of thought]. In Sapientiam amemus. Humanismus und Aristotelismus in der Renaissance (Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Eckhard Kessler), edited by P.–R. Blum, Ch. Lohr und C. Blackwell, 89–108. Munich: Fink, 1998. “Ein Naturbegriff der Renaissance. Charles de Bovelles: Natur und Vernunft als Außen- und Innenraum der Erkenntnis.” In Natur- und Technikbegriffe, edited by K. Gloy, 41–59. Bonn: Bouvier, 1996.

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Galina Raykova Hegel’s Recollection and Ricoeur’s Imagination We would like to briefly elaborate on Hegel’s recollection as demonstrated in The Phenomenology of Spirit. By inferring from Paul Ricoeur’s viewpoint on imagination and metaphor and Verene’s extensive work on Hegel’s recollection, we will try to demonstrate that Hegel and Ricoeur, and also Verene, come together in the notion of metaphor as the meeting point of Recollection and imagination. A brief analysis will show that the trajectory of development of Hegel’s Spirit, passing through the stages of recollection and remembrance (Erinnering and Er-innerung), bears certain similarities with the development of concept trough the work of imagination and metaphor. Our point of departure will be the notion of Hegel’s Recollection in Verene’s identically titled book (Verene 1985). Then we will consider the meaning of recollection, Erinnerung and Er-innerung as they appear in the last paragraph of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Finally, we will draw from Ricoeur’s contribution to the theory of imagination and metaphor as presented in his article “Imagination in Discourse and in Action” (Ricoeur 1993, p. 118– 136). Hegel’s Phenomenology is like a dormant volcano. There is lava of intuitive power raging behind the tenacious crust of reason. Following the procession of images the mind becomes inspired by the Elysian drink of senses. Therefore, a taste of imagination and art may be convenient for this text. Erinnerung is usually translated as “recollection”. Considering the insufficient capacity of the English language to fully express all nuances of its semantics, one should take into account that the English language has split the mental process, which the German language perceives as one. Erinnerung denotes two processes at once, internalizing and recalling. Hegel’s personal fight is to tame his wild imagination and to make it succomb to the Concept. To cite Verene, “Hegel’s own contrast is between Vorstellung and Begriff” (Verene 1985, xii). This is not meant as a conflict; it is simultaneously a Master/Slave and a Lovers’ relationship between two sides of one dual entity, which are as necessary as destructive to each other. Verene, in fact, could be blamed for over-exaggerating the role of image on

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the account of the concept and he is aware of that. In fact, in the Phenomenology the image is as important as the Concept. But how does imagination relate to Recollection? In the last poetic paragraph of his Phenomenology Hegel frequently and exclusively uses the term Erinnerung, three times and in two different ways, as one word and with separation. Kojève says with regard to this subject, “Er-innerung … is the internalization of the objective real, affected in and by the Concept, which reveals this real but is in me—is also Erinnerung—that is remembrance.” (Kojève 1980, p. 142). Verene, however, chooses to translate both variations as recollection and considers Erinnerung the “master key to Phenomenology” (Verene 1985, p. 3). He uses it further to re-read the whole work anew as philosophical work and as work of literature at the same time. My impression is that by recollection Verene means namely this kind of Er-innerung which Hegel has written separately. Er-innerung, according to him, is juxtaposed to “alienation (Entäußerung), as the condition of nature” (Verene 1985, p. 3). By this Verene implies the alienation which happens to the Spirit when it is conceptualizing nature and only then. However, alienation follows on every stage of knowledge. Alienation of nature as given is followed by alienation of this alienation as History in Time and so on. With regard to the connection between imagination and recollection Verene refers to the Preface of the Phenomenology where Hegel presents the “spekulatives Wissen” (Hegel 2017). Verene concludes that “recollection proceeds through metaphors, ingenuities and images (Bilder)” (Verene 1985, p. 3). Furthermore, Verene elaborates on several major metaphors serving as keys to develop different sides of Hegel’s theory: the Inverted World (die Verkehrte Welt), the Beautiful Soul (die Schöne Sehle), the Unhappy Consciousness (das Unglückliche Bewusstsein) and the famous Master/Slave (Herrschaft/Knechtschaft) relationship among others. Along the many historical references pointed out by Verene with regard to Hegel’s core metaphors, there is one that seems to have been overlooked. Namely, the work of Grimmelshausen from 1672 “The Verkehrte Welt” about the adventures of Simplici should be considered one of the most prominent predecessors of the Inverted World metaphor. Each of these metaphors stands for a particular stage or aspect of knowledge. Metaphor as a figure of thought and speech occupies an honorable position in Hegel’s endeavors with knowledge in Phenomenology of Spirit. —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

Hegel’s Recollection and Ricoeur’s Imagination 21 According to Verene “The Bild, the image, is the form through which Erinnerung works” (Verene 1985, p. 4). Trying to justify image and imagination as strongly related to Recollection, Verene interprets also the meaning of Vorstellung. It is often translated and understood as imagination, as something put before the concept; hence the “presentational image” is the “friendship of thought” (Verene 1985, p. 12). With Verene’s taking the approach of literary analysis, Hegel’s Phenomenology has much to gain as it is once again reconsidered as a work in its own right instead of just a predecessor of his Logic. Verene demonstrates a strong intuition in understanding of Hegel’s metaphoric toolbox as well as the concepts encoded in them. To cite his own words, “Philosophy and literature seen in this way are two sides of a coin. Neither can be fully separated from the other” (Verene 2016, p. 8). “Hegel’s Recollection” is a beautiful demonstration of such unity. It also succeeds in mimicking Hegel’s dialectics by its own content. However, is imagination the same as recollection as it appears in Hegel? In order to deduce Hegel’s own notion of Er(-)innerung, we will need to start from his notion (or motion) of Time. The becoming of Spirit has two sides, two directions or, to put it better, two parallel paths. One is the Spirit’s becoming Itself (“des Geistes zum Geist”) which forms (or is formed by) the series of contingent events (“freie zufällige Geschehens”) (Hegel 2017). This is the process of Entäußerung (alienation) of the finite Nature. To know limits, to be finite, is to know sacrifice. It is a bearing of the Cross towards Calvary (Schädelstätte, which literally means a place full of skulls). Nature represents sacrifice and constant alienation (“Entäußerung”). Spirit is contingency (“zufällige Geschehens”) as Space and Time in Nature as conceptualized (“begriffen”) by Man. History is the conscious and mediated becoming of the Spirit, which is alienated in Time (“Wissende und vermittelnde Werden” of “in der Zeit entäßerte Geist”) (Hegel 2017, p. 465). History becomes double negation (Entäußerung) from Nature. Man first aims to know Nature and then to know himself. History is therefore an inseparable part of this double nature of Spirit. There is no Spirit outside of the human History. There is no Spirit without Man and Man knows himself through History. Philosophy is the self-knowledge of Man, who aims to become Wisdom. Moreover, Man can only understand History if it is temporal. Historical Time moves slowly (träge Bewegung) (Hegel 2017, p. 465) like the food in the digestive system. Hegel uses the word “verdauen” (Hegel 2017,

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465) metaphorically, to illustrate this need for slow motion but also the element of assimilation. In order for the History to be conceptualized Man needs Time to assimilate the “food” of his own “Gallery of Pictures” (Hegel 2001) loaded with the richness of Spirit (“mit vollstandige Reichtum des Geistes ausgestattet”) (Hegel 2017, p. 465). The movement of Time draws a perfect circle comparable to the mythic symbol of the snake biting its tail (illustrated at the end of this text). It resembles the path of the Spirit itself. Starting from the emptiness of the Desire for something non-existent (existent in the future, a dream), Time moves towards the Present by the means of the Past. The Past here is the Memory or according to Hegel, Erinnerung (recollection). The goal of this second circle of negation (Entäußerung) is for the Spirit to become Self-conscious, to know itself as Self (“der Sich als Geist wissende Geist”) (Hegel 2017, p. 465). In contrast, the first circle of negation was only for the Spirit to become Spirit or “des Werden des Geistes into Geist” (Hegel 2017, p. 465). The Spirit has “grown up”, one may say, and now is moving toward self-consciousness, toward “personality formation”. Kojève speaks of “formative education” (Bildung) (Kojève 1980, p. 163) of the Spirit. It continues on its spiral-like journey until this process is completed and “education is accomplished”. At this point exactly appears philosophy, hence Hegel’s famous metaphor about the owl of Minerva beginning its flight only at dusk. Hegel has another variation of the idea of Memory, Er-innerung. How does it differ from Erinnerung? It may be of interest here to consider the semantic of the prefix “er-”, when attached to verbs. Quickly consulting the DWDS (Digital Dictionary of the German Language) one may find the following result which is quite close to the intuitive feel of the prefix as something pointing toward ancestral connection. There are three aspects of its meaning:  The act of completing something.  The act of transiting from one stage to another.  Etymologically it comes from the Old German prefix “ur-” which means “aus” (from), denotes provenance, inheritance. For example, the word “Urerbe” contains both prefixes and denotes the first heir, the one with the greatest right of inheritance. By emphasizing “Er-” Hegel draws the attention in all three directions. Er-innerung implies 1. The final stage of Spirit’s withdrawal into itself; 2. The transition into a new stage; 3. The reference to the inheritance from previous stages, preservation and continuity. —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

Hegel’s Recollection and Ricoeur’s Imagination 23 Hence Er-innerung is this threefold act while Erinnerung is meant in the rather static sense of remembrance. It is an element of the mechanism of Historical Time and is translated as recollection (in relation to remembrance). Recollection is the way by which Spirit, by retaining the Past, steps to a new level, a higher (höhere) form of existence. The realm-of-Spirits (Geisteswelt) is “formed-educated” by the tasks that any education involves, namely repeated memorizing and recollecting. There is also succession (Erbe). No need to mention the immense workeffort (“Arbeit”) behind History’s achievements. What is the goal of this Education? According to Hegel, the “goal is the revelation of depth” and the “expansion-extension” (Ausdehung) of Spirit (Hegel 2001, p. 466). The goal of this imaginary “Cross” of vertical and horizontal Expansion is for the Spirit to attain self-knowledge, “seine Substanz vollkommen zu wissen” (Hegel 2001, p. 465). The knowledge, once internalized (digested), belongs to Spirit, becomes “Sein”. This process of expansion/digestion is constantly evolving to a higher level with each repetition. But it also moves in circles, forming an endless spiral of spirals as Spirit also follows the circadian rhythm of day and night. Once it has reached the Absolute Concept. Absolute Begriff), the Spirit is engulfed in the night of its own self (in-sich-gehen). At this point, the Spirit gives its embodiment over to Recollection (Erinnerung). Hence, Erinnerung is the sleeping memory or the Spirit’s dream. When it awakens, thanks to Er-innerung the reborn Spirit, which seems to have forgotten all that it has learned before, commences its new day at a higher level. The Er-innerung is the awakening Memory of the Spirit, while the Spirit follows its circular journey through the days and nights of its SelfKnowledge. On one hand, the Spirit uses History as contingency (“in der Form der Zufalligkeit erscheinende Daseins”) (Hegel 2017, p. 465) toward its goal to attain Absolute Knowledge of itself as Spirit, and on the other hand, it uses the sciences “of which knowledge appears” (erscheinende Wissen) (Hegel 2017, p. 465). These two lines of Self-Knowledge of the Spirit, together in their effort to coincide create the conceptualized History (die begriffene Geschichte) (Hegel 2017, p. 465). The latter is saved in the Memory (Erinnerung) to be recalled on the next stage. While the precious essence of knowledge is given over to Remembrance, the empty shells of the Spirits (Geister) are piling on a mass grave of skulls on this Calvary (Golgotha, Schädelstätte), to secure the “throne” of the Absolute Spirit and also to keep it company in its infinite solitary journey. —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

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In order to further connect the dots between Recollection and Imagination, next we are going to explore Paul Ricoeur’s notion of imagination, as presented in the above mentioned article. Assuming that imagination was conceived theoretically in the context of metaphor, he considers it naturally belonging to the realm of discourse. Ricoeur starts his investigation with the image. The word is quite worn out by common use, as well as by inconsistent misuse in psychology, philosophy of creativity, semantics, etc. However, this multi-disciplinary tradition can be summarized, according to Ricoeur into four main aspects of meaning:  “The arbitrary evocation of things” (Ricoeur 1994), absent or presently elsewhere;  Representations (portrait, diagrams, etc.) which physically exist only to replace other things;  Non-existent things, fiction (like dreams, inventions, drama and novels);  The domain of illusion, which is meant as something existent only in the eyes of its believer, but not for the outside observer or even for the same believer in a later moment (disillusionment). The theories of imagination, as accounted for by Ricoeur, usually tend to put their foundation criteria on two axes, one of the object (its presence or absence) and another of the subject (believer or critical). On the first axis are situated portrait, dreams, fiction, etc., i.e. phenomena of the otherness. On the axis of the critical awareness of the subject theories mostly evolve around the degree of critic/belief. At the extreme end is total absence of critical awareness, a sincere belief leading to errors and deceptions. At the other end consciousness is fully aware of the falsity of the image, but uses it on purpose for the sake of “critique of reality” (Ricoeur 1994, p. 120). The common ground as well as “the knot of contradiction” (Ricoeur 1994, p. 120) between all these variations of the image is the “state of confusion” (Ricoeur 1994, p. 120). With regard to imagination in discourse Ricoeur draws from the theory of metaphor. He approaches imagination not from the viewpoint of perception, but as a “semantic innovation” (Ricoeur 1994, p. 121). Ricoeur finds this to be a real “shift in attack”, as it suggests that image not necessarily precedes language, that “our images are spoken before they are seen” (Ricoeur 1994, p. 121). This revelation has considerable consequences. Firstly, it means that the image is an “internal” mental process, —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

Hegel’s Recollection and Ricoeur’s Imagination 25 not accessible by any means. It also advocates “giving up a second point we also mistakenly assume, namely, that this mental entity (image) is the stuff out of which we construct our abstract ideas, our concepts, the basic ingredient in some sort of mental alchemy” (Ricoeur 1994, p. 121). I am quoting this in its entirety because it complements Verene’s rather automatic assumption with regard to Hegel’s Erinnerung, that it must presuppose images and hence imagination. According to Ricoeur, metaphor is an example of the way image is delivered through language instead from perception. His concept of metaphor involves much more than just “deviation of denomination” (Ricoeur 1994, p. 121). Metaphor is a “predicative non-pertinence” (Ricoeur 1994, p. 121), which is aimed at “producing a sort of shock between different semantic fields” (Ricoeur 1994, p. 121). At the level of sentence this results in a provocative effect. With regard to the individual word, it extends its meaning. These conclusions of Ricoeur are very important for our investigation, as they point out the process of altering of meaning, which is part of the process of Concept-formation. It must be emphasized that all metaphors work at both levels, of the sentence and of the word. According to Ricoeur, this is the most interesting point for the philosophy of imagination, namely “the restructuring of semantic fields” (Ricoeur 1994, 122). When, through the figure of style, “a new meaning emerges”, imagination commences; imagination’s point is to offer “mediation”, “apperception” or “sudden view” (Ricoeur 1994, p. 122). “Imagination is first and foremost restructuring semantic fields” (Ricoeur 1994, p. 122). How does the metaphor do this? Ricoeur refers to Aristotle’s recommendations for a good metaphor, that it must “perceive the similar” (Ricoeur 1994, p. 122). The similarity has to be placed in unusual combination between two objects, which are situated in distant semantic fields. The distance has to represent logical incompatibility, but combined with certain similarity. At any occasion, the metaphor stretches the synthesizing power of the mind, the further, the better, as long as the similarity connecting the two semantic realms stays intact (unbroken). Why do consciousness and speech produce metaphors and how do they relate to the process which Hegel named Recollection (Er-innerung)? What are metaphors for? Certainly, there is a purely aesthetic and playful element. However, there is more behind the art of producing far-stretched movements of the mind between “farflung semantic fields” (Ricoeur 1994, p. 122). Metaphor creates the tension in the sense certainty (Gewissheit) that pushes the mind to try to establish a new secure point of reference, bouncing —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

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between the object (Ansich) and the I. To cite Clero, “it synthesizes the negation with the negated; it solves contradictions, which is the chief aim of dialectics”. (Clero 2010, p. 46). “The Hegelian Erfahrung is a double movement of Consciousness against the Object, and from Consciousness towards itself, as consciousness of its knowledge” (Kennouche 2013, p. 97). Verene also stresses that Erinnerung is always present in the second moment of the Ansich. This is the moment of “doubt”, the turning point when Entäußerung is negated and becomes Errinerung one more time but on a higher level. Diagram 1 illustrates this peculiar oscillating spiral and the relationship between metaphor and concept. Experience is moving in a circular motion and while the concept is getting more and more real (moving away from the illusion of the senses), the circle becomes tighter and the meaning more abstract. The formation of the Concept is a contraction towards a center of unambiguity. However, the metaphor is the guardian of reality. It tends to question the centrifugal forces of the Concept and to push it in a centripetal direction towards its periphery.

Diagram 1. The notion of concept formation. [Source: Stoyan Raykov’s original work]. Diagram 1 depicts the element of “grasping” that the concept contains. Begriff is no more than an attempt, never finalized, to “grasp” the knowledge of”. The root of “begreifen” is “greifen” (to grab) as there is a resemblance between “grasp” and “grab”. Begreifen means to grab and hold something and so the Begriff “grabs and holds” the given. —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

Hegel’s Recollection and Ricoeur’s Imagination 27 “Through the name the object as individual being is born out of the I. This is the first creative power that spirit exerts; Adam gave all things a name, this is the sovereign prerogative and first taking possession of the whole of nature or the creation of this out of spirit … By the power of the name the world is transformed into a world for spirit” (Verene 1985, p. 8). However, like an imaginary immortal man would presumably lose identity, in a similar manner, a frozen concept would be a dead concept, empty of meaning. Metaphor as an instrument of imagination comes to aid. As shown in Diagram 2, metaphors expand the content of the concept. Thanks to imagination the concept is granted its eternal life of perpetual transformation. Once “conceived”, born and given a name, the concept sets on a journey, just like the Spirit, towards a constantly repeated death and resurrection. Discernment needs finitude; however, here once again death is the best friend of knowledge. Metaphors deliver the concept’s continuity by repeatedly attacking its rigidity.

Diagram 2. A metaphor expanding the content of the concept [Source: Stoyan Raykov’s original work]. The contracting and expanding movements (interchanging between the left and right diagram) generate a pattern of constant pulsation, a rhythm of breathing which inspires life in language and knowledge. It is a “subjective see-saw of a reasoning that goes back and forth” (Kojève 1980, p. 199)”, that cuts the given world of perception into digestible pieces. Sagen is Sägen (To say is to cut), one says, as language and reason represent a saw-like movement (a “hin-und-herübergehende Bewegung”) (Hegel 2017) between the known

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and the given, a dynamo, which takes knowledge to a higher level (Aufhebung). By finding similarity in dissimilar fields, metaphor expands the meaning of each of the words involved and of the whole semantic field. It adds connotations and nuances that suddenly (by shock) force consciousness to realize the deficiency of its concepts, which are shaken and become fluid and flexible once more. Every time a word takes part in a metaphor, it changes the concept more or less dramatically, evolves it towards the Absolute Knowing (“Absolute Begriff”). Moreover, the metaphoric play of language reflects the playful nature of mind, the way it constantly sabotages itself in a humorous manner. In this way language not only mimics the internal movements of mind, but it takes a stand on its own as a censorship of consciousness. All other non-discursive forms of imagination as dream, fiction, drama, novels and even the illusions exercise similar functions. All these have been objects of extensive studies, but the common ground for our purpose is their ability to stretch the concept and (or) the mind and sustain their plasticity. Imagination in all its forms is a mental “asana”, the sacred yoga of everlasting rejuvenation and self-overcoming of consciousness. Poetry is “the teacher of humanity” as Hegel observed (Verene 1985, p. 25). “Poetry gains a higher dignity, it becomes at the end again what it was at the beginning, the teacher of humanity; because there is no philosophy” (Verene 1985, p. 25). Nowadays scientific reason, grown to maturity, fully relies on “objectivity”, resenting the “foolish” play of imagination. However, would there be any hypothesis without the unexpected jumps of imagination? “Imagination can bring life into matter which becomes essentialized” (Kennouche 2013, p. 93). Indeed, Hegel’s Spirit is neither “real” (as in religion), nor “abstract” (as in philosophy); it is alive. Like a living Being, its Nights are full with the dreamed images (Gallery of Pictures) of its memory (Erinnerung) and in its Days are busy with Work of Recollection and conceptualizing (Er-innerung and Begreifen). Hegel imagined “a new mythology … mythology of Reason” (Verene 1985, 26). Hegel’s own Creation Myth transpires in “The Phenomenology of Spirit”: The Master of the Worlds (Weltenmeister) creates the Realm of Spirits (Geisterreich) while climbing the infinite spiral staircase of ever-evolving cycles of new-sameness, “conceiving” by its own seeds and giving birth to Itself through the “womb of Knowledge”, desperately hoping in its infinite

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Hegel’s Recollection and Ricoeur’s Imagination 29 loneliness to “conceive” the Absolute Knowledge (Absolute Wissen) of Itself. And so does man on its path of self-realization and self-exploration by forever pushing the boundaries of imagination toward the infinite horizon of knowledge. Ricoeur’s Concept and Hegel’s Spirit develop in a similar manner. Imagination is based on recollection and recollection is revealed through imagination. Concepts develop through phases of relative stability and change, stagnation and revolution and this happens through lack or presence of imagination. So does the World Spirit breathing through the ages in a rhythm of oblivion and recollection.

Picture 1. The mythic symbol of the snake biting its tail, resembling the path of the Spirit itself [Source: Stoyan Raykov’s original work].

References Cléro, Jean-Pierre. 2010. “What is a Fiction?” Sofia Philosophical Review, vol IV no 1: 34–64. Hegel, Georg. 2018. The Phenomenology of Mind. Cmbridge: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, Georg. 2017. Phanomenologie des Geistes. Urheberrechtsfreie Ausgabe: Kindle-Edition. Kennouche, Arab. 2013. “The Processes of Imagination within the Hegelian Sphere of “Consciousness” in the Phenomenology of Spirit: Dissolution—Projection—Parthenogenesis”, Sofia Philosophical Review Vol VII no 1: 93–128. Kojeve, Alexandre. 1980. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Cornell University Press.

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Raykov, Stoyan. 2019. Diagram 1. Drawing exemplifying the notion of concept formation. Original Work, London 2019. Raykov, Stoyan. 2019. Diagram 2. Drawing exemplifying a metaphor expanding the content of the concept Original Work, London 2019. Raykov, Stoyan. 2019. Picture 1. The mythic symbol of the snake biting its tail, resembling the path of the Spirit itself. Original Work, London 2019. Ricoeur, Paul. 1994. Rethinking Imagination. Routlege: 118–136. Verene, Philip. 2016. “Borges and Vico.” Sofia Philosophical Review Vol. IX no. 2: 5–29. Verene, Philip. 1985. Hegel’s Recollection: A Study of Images in the Phenomenology of Spirit. New York: State University of New York Press. DWDS Das Wortauskunftssystem zur deutschen Sprache in Geschichte und Gegenwart. https://www.dwds.de/.

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Joseph Thomas Milburn

Identity and Globalised Culture: A Network Approach Abstract: Contemporary identity-formation takes place in a society of increasingly globalised culture. The prevalence of shared frameworks of meaning establishes a cultural landscape of confrontation and, importantly, intelligible communication. This article approaches the globalised cultural dialogue from a network perspective in which distinct identities function as integral components or nodes. Identity-formation, and the cultural network itself, are engaged in a continual process of renegotiation and re-formation. Further, identity is understood as the self-reflexive and reasonable endorsement of local commitments situated within the medium of a globally interconnected culture. The article consolidates Bauman’s (2011) call for a global public space and a suitable planetary stage of dialogue concerning global responsibility and commitment. In light of the ongoing pandemic, human interdependence is clear. An individual identity or node processes cultural information in order to negotiate shared, basic responsibilities which, through networked initiatives of reconfiguration, benefit the performance of the network or unit. The performance criterion of the cultural network is that of living responsibly with difference subject to successful/unsuccessful global co-ordination. The co-ordinated action and solutions of the future respect the values, diversity of cultures, and equal dignity of individual members of the cultural network who can reasonably endorse and justify their identities and commitments. Keywords: Identity-formation, globalised culture, network, dialogue, Zygmunt Bauman

Introduction This article builds primarily upon Zygmunt Bauman’s Migration and Identities in the Globalized World (2011) by employing a network approach to identityformation in our present-day society of globalised culture. I will argue that distinct identities function as integral components of a communicative cultural network which operates on a global, interconnected scale. The globalised cultural network is envisioned as the realisation of Bauman’s proposal for the establishment of a platform for planetary dialogue regarding basic responsibilities. The schema is supplemented by a number of connections, 31

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including the following: a self-reflexive communitarian conception of identity; the necessary recognition of difference; operative global values and the equal human dignity of individuals; in-group identification, altruism, and the co-ordinated action of a common, mutually dependent future.

Baumanian concept of contemporary society Bauman posits that niche research agendas are representative of human practices and perspectives. He provides the novel example of the social life of wasps in Panama. Researchers found that working wasps frequently changed nests in their lifetime “as full and ‘rightful’ members of the adoptive ‘community’ (Bauman 2011, p. 426).” This was at odds with previously held behavioural assumptions which framed research questions along the lines of maintaining boundaries and separating insiders/outsiders. The investigation of inter-nest migration reflects a new attitude towards belonging in a globalised culture. Such a “reversal of perspective”, Bauman asserts, is a projection upon the wasps of the researchers’ own life-practices arising from their experience of living in the multicultural city of London: “they have duly ‘discovered’ the fluidity of membership and perpetual mixing of populations to be the norm also among social insects.” (Ibid., p. 427) According to this thinker, contemporary society is one of multiple belongings owing to the “permeable borderlines” and “intense human traffic” of liquid modernity (Ibid., p. 428). The new commonality of human experience, which Bauman considers as the opportunity of “living permanently with variety and difference”, problematises assumptions of lifelong belonging and fixed identity (Ibid.). The research shows that the wasps traversed frontiers from the hive of birth to a hive of choice. The topical relevance of the research agenda is established by actual social conditions. That is, our increasingly connected world in which cultural globalization has diffused a framework of common symbols, meaning and value to the extent that human cohabitation has begun to resemble the wasps of Panama: insiders/outsiders share geographical or virtual space. Subsequently, individuals are forced (and are able to) to communicate intelligibly with individuals from different cultures and with various identities. There is no insect centre nor authoritative global centre which regulates migration or cultural interface. I propose that our society of globalised culture, powered by communication technologies, is best approached or envisioned as a network:

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Information Society and a New Form of Embodiment 33 A network is a set of interconnected nodes. A node is the point where the curve intersects itself. A network has no centre, just nodes … Nodes increase their importance for the network by absorbing more relevant information, and processing it more efficiently. The relative importance of a node does not stem from its specific features but from its ability to contribute to the network’s goal. However, all nodes of a network are necessary for the network’s performance. When nodes become redundant or useless, networks tend to reconfigure themselves … Nodes only exist and function as components of networks. The network is the unit, not the node (Castells 2004, p. 3).

The society of wasps, too, is a self-reconfigurable, complex communication network with an adaptive unity of purpose. What exactly constitutes the purpose of the cultural network will be considered as well as what type of information is processed and which criteria the performance is subject to. Identities within a society of globalised culture are in accord with the network environment: they are without psychological centre and “in the process of continuous renegotiation” (Bauman 2011, p. 431). Identity formation transforms into the lifelong project of re-formation. Bauman introduces the orphaned self, anxiously balanced between the fundamental human values of freedom and security. This could be illustrated as the isolated or even quarantined self in our time of pandemic. Bauman maintains that “in many, perhaps most, places on the planet, the resentment of insecurity prevails over the fear of a lack of freedom” (Ibid., p. 432). People, evidently, will sacrifice their personal freedom to reduce security threats. However, the task of holding society together “is being left increasingly to the enterprise of the ‘networking’ and ‘networked’ selves and to their connecting/disconnecting initiatives and enterprises” (Ibid.) Teachers making use of communication technology to instruct students remotely, psychoanalysts treating analysands through digital applications, and the utilisation of virtual conference platforms by academics are some of the many prevalent examples of network activity. The instability of life-conditions as well as the unprecedented cultural interface results in identities which are internally inconsistent or contradictory. Identity formation is reconfigurable, perpetually “in statu nascendi” (Ibid., p. 433). Bauman proposes a move from tropes of roots/uprooting to the dropping/drawing-up of anchors. To extend the image: there exists many ports of call and various vessels, yet they are connected by the sea. The transition in perspective is from a centralised sun or centre to a medium or network, just as the sea is formed from multiple sources and connects multiple places. I would agree with Bauman that freedom and security are basic human values, but they are not the only ones. Further, the unfixed nature of identity,

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as symptomatic of socio-cultural situations, can be taken positively: contemporary identity-formation presents the opportunity for constant conversation with other forming/re-forming identities within (and made possible by) the fluid medium of the cultural network. The communitarian conception of identity is that “our cultural, social, or religious commitments are our source of normativity” (Kaul 2011, p. 506). This is particularly relevant given that identity-formation takes place against a background of globalised culture and of various, potentially conflicting commitments. Kaul adds to this the notion of self-knowledge. A self-reflexive position towards commitments does not mean that one is released or distanced from one’s commitments. Even if commitments are understood as purely relative, “they remain ours, fully constitutive of our self” (Ibid. p. 507). This conception of identity, which I believe is most suited to the network approach, asserts that self-knowledge of the commitments which form our identities moves us to action only to the extent that we “will them to be the reason of our actions, we have to accept and endorse our inner commitments (Ibid.).” Endorsement justifies internal pluralism. That is, one is not moved to action unthinkingly by dominant local commitments or cultures. An individual recognises his/her own position within a globally interconnected culture. He/she endorses a particular commitment only to the extent that it is critically accepted as an integral feature of his/her identity. In this respect, Bauman proposes “a new, global public space … and a suitable planetary stage” of dialogue concerning global responsibility and commitment (Bauman 2011, p. 435). His conclusion aptly captures the interconnection which has been made so painfully obvious in light of the recent global virus: [Global responsibility is an] Acknowledgement of the fact that all of us who share the planet depend on each other for our present and our future, that nothing we do or fail doing is indifferent to the fate of anybody else, and that none of us can any longer seek and find private shelter from storms that originate in any part of the globe (Ibid.)

I would argue that it is the network society of globalised culture which will act as the setting for the renegotiation “and reform of the web of global interdependencies and interactions” (Ibid.). One must be aware that one’s self-endorsed commitments and identity may be in conflict or inconsistent with the self-endorsed commitments and identities of other individuals within the globalised cultural network. An individual, or node, processes cultural information in order to negotiate shared, basic responsibilities which will in turn, and through constant reconfiguration, benefit the performance of the global network or unit. —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

Information Society and a New Form of Embodiment 35 Importantly, each individual identity is an integral component of the network. As such, the result is not the creation of a uniform or homogenous global identity. An individual must adequately and reasonably justify their distinct commitments within the dialogue. Therefore, the network is composed of difference. The performance criterion of the globalised cultural network is that of living responsibly with difference, subject to successful/unsuccessful co-ordination on a global scale. This is facilitated by ongoing and fair renegotiation which is dependent on the recognition of the distinct values of individuals within communities which constitute the network, as well as the co-establishment of human values which all are committed to and responsible for. Similarly, Blum, in his critique of Taylor and Fraser, affirms that the recognition of distinct identity is the “driving force behind contemporary multiculturalism” (Blum 1998, p. 76). Further, recognition accounts for the individual as a distinct cultural entity as well as culturally defined groups and the cultures themselves. This tripartite structure could be envisioned as a local cultural network. Recognition of individuals/nodes necessitates the recognition of the local network environment in which the individuals/nodes are interlinked. Recognition requires ascribing value to the communitarian identity as the specific endorsement or specific configuration of a distinct culture. This could also be restated as cultural respect, or an awareness of identity-formation/re-formation as taking place within a local cultural network which contains objective value for the globalised cultural network. Rather than evaluating the comparative value of culture, Taylor’s Gadamerian expression of a “fusion of horizons” may be more apt (Ibid. 83), in which a new value framework emerges from an appreciation of the value of other cultures. The expansion of perspective, as the enhanced processing of cultural information through increased exposure and communication, is essential for the efficient operation of the globalised cultural network. In his essay on Parekh, Preiss considers his central philosophy of the “equal human dignity of all individuals” (Preiss 2011, p. 142). Parekh echoes the communitarian approach when he states that membership in a cultural community “structures and shapes the individual’s personality and gives it content or identity” (Parekh 2000, p. 156). In addition, there is a clear connection to our network approach of reconfiguration when he states, “every culture is a system of regulation. It approves or disapproves of certain forms of behaviour and ways of life” (Ibid.). Preiss considers Parekh’s notion of operative public values, or the shared moral structure of society, as the starting point for cultural practice and dialogue. This can be likened to Bauman’s global space, a place for fair and open-minded intercultural dialogue based —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

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on a common humanity. Common humanity is constituted by our inter-dependence and renegotiated basic values which provide the basis for a diverse and just world. The globalised cultural network presupposes a commitment to reason. Cultural commitments, practices, and identities must be endorsed or rationally justified. Parekh, influenced by Kant’s moral and Habermas’s consensual approach, advances a value-dialogue in which reasons for action must be “accessible and acceptable to members of very different cultures” (Ibid., p. 128). Individuals, as self-determinate and self-reflexive identities, are responsible for their actions as well as their reasons for acting. If we postulate that there are operative global values, then they are to be established in a networked dialogue which treats all members with equal respect and dignity. Group identification can be defined as “an individual’s awareness of belonging to a certain group and having a psychological attachment to that group based on a perception of shared beliefs, feelings, interests, and ideas with other members” (McClain et al. 2009, p. 474). Within the globalised cultural network, then, perhaps it is possible to establish a global belonging. A global in-group identification may result in a network approach to improving the status of the planet and realising the shared interests of interdependent individuals/nodes. Rather than a global identity, there exists a plethora of identities joined by the medium of the cultural network, by their global belonging to the planet, and by their commitment to jointly established values of responsibility. There are multiple identities, multiple cultures, but a single space in which we cohabit, discuss, and process our individual information for the benefit of the unit/world. Chandra (2006) maintains, against previous research perspectives, that ethnic membership is defined by attributes associated with descent. Identity depends on whether individuals are eligible for membership. However, it could be argued that all of humanity has a common descent and common origin. Chandra states that one falsely defined or assumed aspect of the term culture is a common history: “a shared connection to events that marked the lives of the generations before ours” (Chandra 2006, p. 112). It would perhaps be more correct to define culture, or globalised culture, as a common future. It is possible that this may lead to in-group altruism. Individuals are typically more emotionally connected and more caring for siblings than nonsiblings, for members of their perceived group than non-members. The wasp researchers of Bauman’s article ultimately concluded that the fluid membership of the social wasps, and the reason for the lack of hostility arising from inter-nest migration, was due to the insects being close relatives—that is, not

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Information Society and a New Form of Embodiment 37 real strangers. Given the increasingly interactive and intertwined fate of humanity, it would seem the case that we are also, despite (or because of) various commitments and identities, close relatives. What seems apparent is the need for globally inclusive membership and participation in the cultural network. All identities are to be given a voice in the dialogue so that the co-ordinated action and solutions of the future respect the values, diversity of cultures, and equal dignity of members who can reasonably endorse and justify their identities and commitments.

Further discussion Approaching identity within a globalised cultural network has revealed the following: identity is protean. Both identity and the network itself are engaged in the lifelong process of renegotiation. Identity is without centre, tending towards contradiction and inconsistency. It is recentred by commitment and reasonable endorsement. Its formation/re-formation is situated in a complex relational and communicative network subject to the local/global environment. Identity is a self-reflexive, distinct node. It is an essential component of the globalised cultural network which presents the opportunity for living with difference through the processing of individual cultural information; leading to an enlargement of cultural perspective, an increased respect for cultural diversity, the establishment of global responsibilities, and subsequent co-ordination on a planetary scale. Identity is eminently valuable and valuedriven. Contemporary life conditions make possible the globalised cultural dialogue in which identities are reconfigured with the networked, connective potential for novel self-constitution and new dialogic solutions to the global issues of an increasingly interdependent future. Multicultural society can be envisioned as a network. Nodes process cultural data from diverse local communities in order to establish a dialogue concerning global values. Fixed belonging becomes multiple belonging and global belonging. Zygmunt Bauman’s planetary dialogue is (progressively) realised by the communicative process of configuring basic responsibilities and commitments through networked interaction. The ongoing pandemic has made global interconnection clear. Orphaned or isolated selves exist, increasingly, within a medium of shared meaning as well as shared physical or virtual space. Through reasonable endorsement, individual identities act as networked selves exploring connective initiatives and enterprises. Liquid modernity is characterised by renegotiation. Importantly, I would argue, the renegotiation is dependent on in-group identification. Certain common interests are to be clarified before co-ordinated action can be implemented. —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

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A limitation of this paper is the lack of concrete examples. For instance, questions arise as to what form exactly the globalised cultural dialogue or the co-ordinated action of the future will take. This uncertainty is to be expected to an extent as dialogue too is protean. As society continues to transform, so does networked interaction. The globalised cultural network is without a unified purpose and planetary participation in a fair value-dialogue may seem an unlikely eventuality. The network, then, is still being coded. On a local level (or local network environment) the dialogue, enacted through cultural practices, is trialled, simulated, experimented, and engineered/re-engineered. The global cultural network can be imagined as a software in its initial stages with local updates and patches yet to be installed. Once the network is, as it were, up and running, purpose to the dialogue can be established. Global belonging may result in planetary identification or shared planetary interests. This, I would argue, is the most evident basis for discourse: a common future understood as mutual responsibility for future events and future action. Further research on this topic is required. The importance of localities, or intermediary platforms, is explored in the literature concerning the notion of glocalization. Bauman (2014) himself connects glocalization to Castells’s space of flows and space of places. An examination of local cultural networks, as laboratories of prospective forms of human cohabitation, may reveal how software updates are engineered as well as the concrete life-practices of networked selves. It is also important to note that apart from the globalised cultural network, there are of course economic and political factors which may have a considerable effect on practical implementation of cultural co-ordination. These areas are to be explored in greater depth, as well as related cybernetic, democratic, and ecological issues. This article, however, hopes to portray the intrinsic value of culture and of identity-formation within cultural interface. I would argue that economic and political networks are to be subordinate to culture, at least at the outset. Therefore, economisation or politicisation is to be avoided when establishing operative global values, commitments, and responsibilities. The globalised cultural network, ideally, is to be distanced from concepts of cultural production based on socio-economic/political competitiveness. Instead of fair, global inter-cultural communication we may be left with the domination of the discourse by certain “creative/cultural” agendas, groups or nations (Schlesinger 2016). Finally, although the global space seeks to be inclusive, conflict may arise if individuals are unable or unwilling to reasonably justify their particular endorsements. Nevertheless, to renounce the possibility of global dialogue and co-ordina-

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Information Society and a New Form of Embodiment 39 tion when confronted with an increasingly shared environment and increasingly shared planetary problems is, arguably, negligent. Rather, contemporary life conditions prompt the necessity for integrative solutions and adaptable initiatives which can overcome (and update) network latency or poor nodal performance.

Bibliography Bauman, Zygmunt. 2011. “Migration and identities in the globalized world.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 37, no. 4 (May): 425–435. https://doi. org/10.1177/0191453710396809. —, 2014. “Glocalization and hybridity.” Glocalism: Journal of Culture, Politics and Innovation 1. http://www.glocalismjournal.net/issues/hybridity/articles/glocalization_and_hybridity.kl. Accessed May 10, 2020 Blum, Lawrence. 1998. “Recognition, Value, and Equality: A Critique of Charles Taylor’s and Nancy Fraser’s Accounts of Multiculturalism.” In Theorizing Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current Debate, edited by Cynthia Willett, 73–99. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Castells, Manuel, ed. 2004. The Network Society: A Cross-cultural Perspective. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Chandra, Kanchan. 2006. “What is ethnic identity and does it matter?” Annual Review of Political Science 9, no. 1 (June): 397–424. https://doi. org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.9.062404.170715. Kaul, Volker. 2011. “Multiculturalism and the challenge of pluralism.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 37, no. 4 (May): 505–516. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0191453711400997. McClain, Paula D., Jessica D. Johnson Carew, Eugene Walton, Jr., and Candis S. Watts. 2009. “Group Membership, Group Identity, and Group Consciousness: Measures of Racial Identity in American Politics?” Annual Review of Political Science 12, no. 1 (June): 471–485. https://doi.org/ 10.1146/annurev.polisci.10.072805.102452. Parekh, Bhikhu. 2000 [2006]. Rethinking multiculturalism. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Preiss, Joshua B. 2011. “Multiculturalism and Equal Human Dignity: An Essay on Bhikhu Parekh.” Res Publica 17 (March): 141–156. https://doi. org/10.1007/s11158-011-9148-0. Schlesinger, Philip. 2016. “The creative economy: invention of a global orthodoxy.” Les Enjeux de l’information et de la communication 17, no. 2: 187–205. https://doi.org/10.3917/enic.021.0187.

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Koumparoudis Evangelos

Information Society and a New Form of Embodiment Abstract: This essay aims to present the various changes in our embodying experience shaped by the new information, virtual, and robotic technologies, as well as their political and moral effect. The essay is also expanded to encapsulate the new conceptions in our approach upon bodily transformation, medicine, and sexuality, strongly interconnected with the above facts. Our analysis is structured in five different categories of embodiment or bodies: bodily governance, transforming bodies, virtual bodies, medical bodies and sexual bodies. The political impact is mainly given though the description of the forms of bodily governance, like personal and biometric data collection used for massive surveillance and as a measure for defining the “ideal’’ standards of our social life. The possibilities provided by classical and 3D printed organ transplantation and the use of prosthetic and cosmetic surgeries, lead us to rethink our bodies as transforming or as being in a process of becoming. Our immersion in virtual environments and the use of avatars raise questions upon embodying and disembodying experiences and the formation of our identities in the virtual world. The dominant biomedical model seems to be challenged by more human-based approaches giving emphasis to the subjective narratives of the patient, consequently contributing to a more ethical and non-normative treatment of people with special needs and elder people. Furthermore, the use of robotics in the care of people with mobility or mental problems brings dilemmas in the human-machine interaction and the roles of caregivers, care receivers and robots. Finally after structuralism and poststructuralism, the natural-binary systems have been thoroughly criticized; this fact gave birth to feminist theories which consider gender to have been socially constructed, and the body and therefore the gendered body to be a disembodied prosthesis of information or as a fusion between machine and organism. Keywords: Information Society, Embodiment, Surveillance, Transforming Bodies, Virtual Reality, Human-Based Medicine, Sexuality

Introduction At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the body and subsequently embodiment had attracted the interest of the academic community. The body was not approached merely as a physical entity but in relation with the social, 41

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cultural, political, and economic terrain. The positivist assumption of classical sociology, which acclaims that the body belongs primarily to biology, had collapsed. We could enumerate several instances in which the interweaving of the body with fields that surpass its biological limits can give us a clearer view of the so-called “turn to the body” or “new materialism”. The technological progress in biology, medicine, genomics, cognitive science, and neuroscience provided valuable knowledge upon the way our bodies function or interact with others and the environment. Furthermore, the rise of civil movements around sexual liberation and the recognition of sexual and racial minorities placed the body as the keystone of contemporary struggles and debates over embodied oppression of different kinds, e.g. patriarchy, rape, domestic violence, racially excluded bodies, etc. Current trends and programs of personal enhancement or human transformation, like specialized diets or cosmetic surgery concern embodiment as a consumer lifestyle. Finally, contemporary transnational capitalism seeks more and more for flexible working bodies with the appropriate biometric and social characteristics so as to achieve the maximum functionality. In respect to the above crucial issues, a new interdisciplinary academic field has been established, that of “body studies”. Today there are plenty of undergraduate and postgraduate programs as well as journals devoted to the field. In this essay we will focus upon the new media technologies, informatization, and digitality, and how they affect embodiment. In the paper of (Dufva and Dufva 2019), Hubert Dreyfus proclaims the risk-free aspect of digitality. Physical presence can be accompanied by a certain vulnerability of the self, which in a digital world is reduced or eliminated because there is no commitment or action (Dreyfus 2008). Sherry Turkle speaks for a break of physical interconnectedness and the loneliness of our body-experiential world in the digital environment (Turkle 2011). Anna Munster suggests that in digital embodiment we do not have an immediate connection with the body as itself but that the relation lies more between the body and the digital interface. (Munster 2006). We will refer to at least five categories of bodies or embodiment in the information society. The first category is that of bodily governance. Issues like data collection from the internet will be exposed which are connected not only with the websites that the users visit but with the clicks or the average time spent on the websites and complete tracking records. Responding to the increasing violation of privacy, alternative plug-ins and applications that have been created and raise questions about the explicated digital world like AdNauseam, or redefine the relationship between the digital and the physical, —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

Information Society and a New Form of Embodiment 43 like I’m getting arrested, will contribute to our understanding of technologies and counter technologies which combat each other in the fight over personal data collection. Furthermore, after 9/11, or more recently after the emergence of ISIS and the Islamic State, bodily governance has expanded to the extreme control of public spaces with monitoring systems and specialized systems of surveillance (fingerprint collection, voice recognition, DNA sample collection, etc.) The second category is that of transforming body. The transforming body may refer to organ transplantation which reveals the vital issue of the biological limits of our bodies, prosthetics which in many cases reshape our experiential perception of space and the environment, and plastic surgery. Plastic surgery is mainly linked with the pursuit of dominant perception of beauty and aesthetic values which are formed nowadays mostly through advertising and social media and go together with the consumerist lifestyle. Plastic surgery has also been used in order to avoid racial oppression. Immigrants coming from eastern countries perform surgeries of the eyelid so their facial characteristics are compatible with the western, so in this case, we have a fusion of bodily governance and a transforming body. The third category is that of virtual bodies. Virtual bodies concern either our placement in virtual environments with the use of special gloves, glasses, or catsuits and our interaction in them, or platforms in which our embodied virtual experience is achieved through avatars. In the first case, dilemmas around our split of physical and virtual body occur, giving the essence of a disembodied experience, whilst in the latter, the debate revolves around socialization and how it is formed in these platforms, or how we select to project our virtual avatar in relation with our true selves and consequently how our identity is perceived. Identity and its perception are also connected with a more applied or practical issue of the various options which the platforms select to visualize our avatars, e.g. masculine, feminine, animal form, or first person, third person, mirrored self-angle, etc. The fourth category is that of the medical bodies. Modern medical approaches seem to question the dominant biomedical model which is based on strict evidence-based data and objective criteria. There is much concern about the subjective feeling of the patient, how his life changes in relation with his problem, and the impact on his relatives and workplace. We can grasp a more human-based view which accounts for social and psychological factors involved in the therapeutic process. Furthermore, physicians do not only prescribe drugs and implement protocols, but also give information and

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advice about a healthy lifestyle, appropriate consumption habits, and recommended patterns of organizing social and work space. Progress has also been made in the way modern medicine treats people with special needs as well as elders. They are no longer the “disabled” or “aged” bodies, but active agents who participate in social activities and are worthy of welfare and ethical practices. New technologies around mobility and mental problems play a vital role as well as the establishment of the field of gerontology. To sum up, the body is conceived more like a holistic project rather than simply a diseased body that needed to be cured. The last category is that of sexual bodies. In this section we will discuss the new theories in feminism and gender studies which deal with the performativity of gender as well as the new forms of sexual experience between human and non-human entities like machines and robots and intercourses in cyber-environments either with physical presence or through avatars.

Bodily Governance According to Shilling (2016), classical sociology and political philosophy provide us a remarkable theory of bodily governance. Max Weber, in his diligent analysis of Protestant ethics, presented how religious beliefs shape the bodily identities and behavior of individuals. He links the long working hours as the dogma of rational capitalism with the immersion of the workers into sinful pleasure and a pursuit of worldly signs of election and entering heavenly life. Nobert Elias described how etiquette books from the Renaissance onwards provided detailed codes of body management and prohibitions which regulated courtesy life and were used as the measure of differentiation of the relative worth of people. Jeremy Bentham proposed the panopticon model of an institutional building and a system of control. In this model, the prisoners are placed in the center without the ability to tell whether they are being inspected or not while a guard observes them from the periphery. Michel Foucault, in his theory of discipline and punishment, refers to the panopticon model as a method that promoted prisoners’ self-control so they could become productive members of society. Foucault analyzed the changes that took place in the European penal system during modernity and thereby gave us a compelling view of how structures function through forms of biopower which imprint themselves on and within bodies. Foucault defines these practices of the modern state as: “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations” (Foucault 1998, p. 140). —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

Information Society and a New Form of Embodiment 45 Data collection trough tracking records of searching machines, social media, credit cards, and insurance companies today form a post-panopticon model. The new model is dispersed and diffused almost everywhere, leaving aside the strict locality of the panopticon. Furthermore, new social media allow the many (the many users) to inspect the few (the economic elites, or VIPs); in Zygmunt Bauman’s conception this can be called a synopticon model (Bauman & Lyon 2010). But if we consider the fact that data in most cases is under the authority of powerful intergrated economic interests, we could admit that the model becomes a reversed synopticon.12 Bauman’s assumptions is the liquefaction of Modernity in which the world of solid, heavy structures is changing into an infinite set of flows, together with his synopticon, lead David Lyon to speak for liquid surveillance. According to Lyon, “Surveillance not only creeps and seeps, it also flows. It is on the move, globally and locally. The means of tracing and tracking the mobilities of the twenty-first century are going global in the sense that connections are increasingly sought between one system and another. The quest for harmonization of, for example, machinereadable travel documents so that systems are interoperable between as well as within countries actually harmonizes the technologic of IT with the political economy of globalization” (Lyon 2009). As a response to extreme electronic surveillance, projects like the AdNauseam plugin have been elaborated. AdNauseam functions similarly to an ad-blocker, but with some remarkable differences. It obfuscates user data by clicking all the links on the visited page provided by the ad platform and then creates a large number of data that are useless to the tracking services. The project aims not to go against advertising itself but challenges us to become aware of electronic surveillance and privacy in the digital realm. Another interesting case is that of the application I’m Getting Arrested. It has emerged through the Occupy Wall Street movement and has also been used in other civil mobilizations. It works simply when someone is arrested; it sends a pre-formatted text to multiple receivers, e.g. friends, lawyers, and journalists. Through this project, we can understand how a technological advantage can promote objectives in the physical world and challenge existing power structures (Dufva and Dufva 2019).

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For more upon reversed synopticon model please see: Alexander Gungov, “Real Semblance Flourishing in Post-Consumerist Society”, Sofia Philosophical Review, Vol. VII, No. 2, 2013

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The last cases of bodily governance that we would like to present are these of biological and neurological citizenship and collection of biometric data. According to Shilling (2016) citing the writers below, the first notion implicates that in order that someone be a citizen who is acceptable ethically, he/she should provide “received facts” which come from science and medicine. Hereditary problems, risks associated with following a certain lifestyle, e.g. alcohol consumption, are all accounted for in building the profile of the citizen who can stand as the ethical paradigm in society. According to the anthropologist Kaushik S Rajan, individuals become “patients in waiting” (Rajan 2006). The patient in waiting promotes the economic value of physical and mental health as expressed in the individual, in health care services, and as regards national productivity. Under the name of a terrorist menace and possible social turbulences, after 9/11 and ISIS, as well as after the refugee crisis that resulted, we had the creation of alien bodies which had to be meticulously registered and monitored. Fingerprints, voice and iris recognition, DNA sample collection in airports and refugee camps, CCTV monitoring systems in public spaces, and undercover police operations can reveal how our bodies become passwords (Davis 1997). From another perspective, Giorgio Agamben describes the collection of biometric data as being similar to the tattooing of Jews during the Holocaust. Biometrics turn the human persona into a bare body. Agamben distinguishes the use of the two ancient Greek terms which indicate life, “zoe”, which is life common to animals and humans and “bios”, which describes human life with its meanings and purposes. The contemporary state shapes a new biopolitical relationship between citizens and reduces their life to the purely biological, defined above by the term zoe, with a parallel reduction of their human characteristics (bios). Biometrics contribute to this remarkable shift. (Agamben 1998).

Transforming bodies Our bodies, from a physical aspect, are under continuous transformation. The chemical composition of our tissues changes over time; our cells regenerate. If we also consider the social impact of our bodily changes, the growth of our muscles depends on our dietary habits, our kind of work, etc. Lynda Birke calls us to rethink our biological bodies under the spectrum of transformation or, better, the possibility of transformation, in distinction to the stability of the genes that certain theories propose. We do not “unfold” by expressing a predetermined genetic sequence as coded in the DNA from the —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

Information Society and a New Form of Embodiment 47 moment the semen fuses with the ovum; this is no case a micro version of our future selves. There are other ways for someone to approach a human being in a process of becoming, like the growth of the embryo which actively takes place (Birke 2004). The embryo actively reshapes its environment, though it can be seen as a self-organized entity rather than a passive victim of its genetic inheritance (Goodwin 1994).13 Organ transplants and donation raise critical questions around the alteration of our subjective experience concerning our bodily image, our conceptualization of life, and our natural limits. The very fundamental essence of medicine is also under reconsideration: does medicine exist to care, heal, and relieve us from pain, or does it deal with the improvement of the human race? The ethical dilemmas that occur emphasize consent, the definition of death, and the rules that regulate organ distribution and if it has become merely a business affair (Quintin 2012). In another part of his analysis, Shilling (2016) claims that David Harvey suggests that we live in a period of primitive accumulation which can be envisaged both regarding the human slavery that still exists and also the growth of “transplant trafficking”, the “global billion-dollar criminal industry which transports fresh organs from living and dead to the affluent and medically insured mobile transplant patients” (Harvey 2004). In the information society, new forms of organ transplantations have been developed such as 3D printed biomaterials. They are biomaterials technically reproduced layer by layer to create tissue-like structures that imitate real tissues, with the use of fresh (in most cases stem) cells collected from the patient and growth factors, known as bioink. The biomaterials can consist of parts of body tissues up to fully printed organs (Sirota 2016). 3D printed biomaterials and organs promise to solve some of the major problems that conventional organ transplantations have like histocompatibility; the following immunosuppressive medication which is prescribed to the patients in order that the transplant not be rejected, which is accompanied by various side effects; the long queues most patients face when candidates for a transplant; and finally problems which concern donation, distribution, and even organ trafficking. Beyond the promises 3D printed biomaterials bring, there are also ethical issues related to experimental testing on humans, the risks of significant harm associated with testing, possible irreversibility, loss of treatment opportunity, the lack of a specific framework for the regulation and testing,

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For a more complete analysis please see: Lynda, Birke. 2004. “Soma Kai Viologia”, In Viokoinonikoties Ta Oria Tou Somatos Diepistimonikes Prosegisis, 149–159. Athens: Nisos.

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and finally, the high cost of the biomaterials produced and if they can be accessed only by those who can afford it (Gilbert et al. 2017). Prostheses and prosthetics used by amputees and in some cases paralytics are another form of body transformation. As Murray (1999), citing the authors below, argues, these persons lose their conceptual links to the world which are connected to their very existence (Murphy 1987). They also face problems concerning the “authorship” of their actions; since they may lose the ability to control their movements or their body in general, this can affect their “ownership or identification of the self with the body” (Hare 1999). Phantom phenomena can also appear in patients who make use of prosthetics; their experiences can be regarded as either painful and giving the essence of someone to be locked in the same position, or more rewarding providing the capability of movement sometimes under the patient’s conscious control. Merleau-Ponty contributed to our understanding of phantom phenomena. He considers that these phenomena are a result of the “being-in-the-world”; patients in a way remain open to a customary world and retain their practicality enjoyed before mutilation. We could speak of a separation between two bodies, the customary and the body “at this moment” (Merleau-Ponty 1962). Plastic surgery, beyond the obvious changes in our appearance, brings changes in tactility and proprioception. In breast augmentation, for example, rude touch and light pressure sensation are affected, whilst following eyelid surgeries, we have a greater scope for our vision (sight); thus, in general, we can speak about subjective changes which are deeply connected to embodiment and do not solely concern the transformation of the body under the spectrum of aestheticization of everyday life and the pursuit of a dominant lifestyle.

Virtual Bodies According to Murray (1999), virtual technologies and the way we immerse ourselves in virtual environments have progressed through time. At the start, we had the use of virtual glasses in which vision was the main link between our physical and virtual bodies. Then specially designed gloves that covered parts of the body, mainly torsos, gave the opportunity of a more embodied experience, since beyond vision, the sensations of grasping and touching were incorporated into our virtual experiencing. Today we have even more advanced methods, like catsuits which cover the whole body and have full motion detection and enable the animation of the virtual body viewable via a head-mounted visual display (Ellis 1995). We can speak consequently about —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

Information Society and a New Form of Embodiment 49 the participation of almost all the main parts of the body which can provide sensation. Frank Biocca may speak for a virtual experience becoming all embodying, even re-embodying, but he also raises the critical question of how VR peripherals block sensory impressions from physical reality. (Biocca & Levy 1995). Apart from the blocking of our physical experiencing, neo-Cartesian readings of virtual (dis-) embodiment and mind-body duality have been proposed, since VR has predominantly visual characteristics and can be considered as an optical technology. Users immersed in virtual environments may characterize their experience as leaving their bodies behind, or “disappear”, giving “way to the disembodied traveler, the astral projectionist, the ‘interface data cowboy’” (Bogard 1996). The other form of virtual embodiment which we would like to discuss is that of avatars, a visual-virtual representation of our bodies in digital platforms which permit both interaction with the digital environment and the users. Our primary concern regarding these forms of embodiment is how the users choose to socialize, what the options of communication, signs, and language that a platform can provide are, imitating customary and everyday forms of intersubjective interaction. In Dreamscape, for example, one of the most well-known digital platforms, the users can denote their presence with a greeting, which is performed by a wave or jump. The communication or “speaking” between the users is achieved through real-time dialogue via text bubbles that appear overhead; the expressiveness of the avatar is also used to display emotions, usually through facial expressions or movements. Phenomena of crossing boundaries and invasion of personal space can also appear. In these cases placement of the avatars face to face, with the attributing facial expressions and dialogue can signify anger or dispute. On the contrary, when avatars touch each other it may express intimacy or friendship. There are also more formal codes which the avatar can signify, like common dress codes or names between couples or partners, groups, etc. Users also participate in social occasions like a public funeral of a possibly dead (a user abandoning the platform) user. This is usually performed by the users gathering in a circle around the avatar of the perished user and with facial expressions of sorrow; they may even drop flowers, etc. There were also cases in which online religious services were provided in the Dreamscape platform. A fair-sized Christian community held worship events in which people would raise their avatar arms, dance, and create many other forms quite similar to some offline behaviors (Taylor 2002). Our existing isochronally in both the real and the virtual worlds, something called the “bifurcated self”, challenges us to rethink the question as to —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

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whether the two bodies (real, virtual) inhabit both spaces equally if our consciousness (even more, the part of the consciousness coming from the embodying experiencing) also participates equally?It is we ourselves during VR immersion, or do we have a more performing role like in theater or films? Are the two states of embodiment diacritical or complementary? There are various types of visualization in virtual environments. A first-person perspective or no avatar is no representation at all; the environment appears as seen through our eyes. This type mainly permits the user to stay in touch with his inner conception of the self. The mirrored self type provides a view similar to video camera capturing. The mirrored self is a dualistic form; we have a separation between the physical and virtual body spatially but not temporally. Graphical personification is different from the mirrored self; in this case, we have a graphical representation of the body which appears to occupy the same space as our physical presence would do. This representation is correspondent to our own body since the 3D creator can select if this is a representation of a humanoid or an animal far from our typical human representation, or of a single gender. Third-person view, is more common in video games than VR; in this type our embodying experience is placed outside our perceptual self. We are more like observers in a phenomenal dichotomy in which we cannot define if we ourselves or others control us (Ford Morie 2007).

Medical Bodies Modern medicine seems to make a variable turn; the former purely material, diseased body needed to be cured is now a body in which the subjective narratives of the patient and social infiltration may reflect better its essence. In the last 30 years, there has been a call for a more human-based approach, considering the patient not as someone deviating from evidence-based golden standards, but as a personality which interacts actively during his healing process. A patient does not only follow the prescriptions of the physician and improve the parameters that define the severity of his condition, but also cultivates a subjective narrative upon his experience and tries to establish new methods of interaction with his natural and social environment. New medical models that question the biomedical model have been proposed by various theorists, such as the biopsychosocial, the infomedical and the model of personal narrative. The first model, introduced by George L. Engel, focuses upon the deficiencies of the biomedical model and proposes methods of correction like the consideration of an active disease or manifestation of an illness as a phenomenon with a complex interaction of factors, not as starting —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

Information Society and a New Form of Embodiment 51 from only a primary cause (recognition of multiple causation), considering the psychological, social, and cultural factors which may be involved in the experiencing of the symptoms of a disease in general (recognition of various levels of activity), and finally how a disease varies individually (Engel 1977). The infomedical model suggested by Laurence Foss explores how sociocultural carriers of information called “memes”, can interact with a disease and especially with anorexia nervosa. In this case, an image or belief around the ideal weight of the body functions like a “mimetic vector” and “programs” the metabolism in a complementary way with the genetic programming (Foss, 2002). The narrative model seeks to describe the process of getting ill or recovering and may uncover alternative or new therapeutic options by accounting for the personal experience of a patient. It addresses existential and social qualities like emotions (pain, sorrow, despair, hope) which often accompany illness and emphasizes how the life of a patient or his relatives can change, e.g. abandoning a lifestyle or activities which he enjoyed in the past and the care that should be provided by the relatives if the disease is connected with disability (Greenhalgh et al. 1999). Disability is often linked with social stigmatization. Stigmatization has its basis in symbolic interactionism, the study of how norms and values are reproduced in our everyday interactions, shaping the proper field of behaviors and skills which are supposed to be followed by the members of a community, so that flexibility and wishful functioning can be achieved. The reduplication of these norms imprinted in the bodies of people with special needs lead to a feeling of a separated actual identity in distinction to a virtual identity which is compatible with community standards. The above phenomenon is described as “sticky environments”, whilst the process of negotiation of the discomfort of others by disabled people, placing themselves in a struggle of improvement, individual accomplishments, and self-care, so as the gap between “normal” and “stigmatized” be reduced, is given with the term “hidden labor”. Medical intervention should not be seen only as an attempt to alleviate the pain of disabled people. We must reconsider if it follows the dominant norms of always attaining a body close to the “normal” and thus contribute even more to the social stigmatization. Welfare practices, such as institutions helping disabled people, or offices encouraging work, are not another excuse or a way of legitimating the humanistic façade of the society. The new turn in medical reasoning as described above may help by prioritizing the patient and its subjective experience and reverse this conception of the “diseased body” remaining unfinished in its attempt to reach the “normal body” (McLaughlin 2017). —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

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Aging is conceived predominantly as the individual loss and decline over time, something that is inevitable, personally experienced and in a way universal. Chronological age is used in demographics to describe the percentage of a population which belongs to this irreversible state. Beyond statistics, “aged bodies” are also socially constructed. The discourse encompasses issues like the replacement of the “older working bodies” with new and more capable ones, the management of the health problems associated with physical decline, both by elders’ families and the state, and finally, the changes in our approach to aging if we consider the new technologies, welfare, and health care programs addressing older people (Crampton 2017). Elders are encouraged to follow a balanced lifestyle, to remain healthy, active, and productive and thus contribute to the society’s well-being as long as they can. This is a project for “active” or “successful” aging, aiming for not only the self-sufficiency of elders but for the disposition of less funding and effort for welfare policies (Buch 2015). The use of robots for elders with mobility problems or dementia raises questions about the different roles of the caregiver, the care receiver, and robots in care praxis. Can the human-machine interaction supplement the embodying experience created by the nurse who touches or lifts the patient and the oral communication and thus interaction and socialization which may also include games or songs for maintaining the verbal capacity of elders?Is the interaction between the nurse and the patient an interplay between two living bodies and thus more profound, whilst the robots can provide only more relational autonomy to the patient (actions which are linked to the affordances of the agent’s environment) (Jaana Parviainen and Jari Pirhonen 2017)?

Sexual Bodies Structuralist and post-structuralist feminist theory moved beyond the conceptions of classical feminist theory which mainly deals with the prioritization of masculinity over femininity and the subsequent oppression of women. Sexual bodies are approached through language and the forms that can reveal possible patriarchal narratives, literature, and mythology by analyzing maternal or feminine archetypes, and lately if we consider the works of Judith Butler, the body has been already shaped in discourses; therefore the “biological sex” does not serve as the concrete basis in which gender identity can be grounded. The sexual body may have a material (biological) reality as itself, but our understanding is always mediated through pre-structured discourses. The notion of gender performativity refers to a stylized repertoire of actions which —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

Information Society and a New Form of Embodiment 53 accompany the various performances of gender. Butler proposes that by adopting different gender performances from the dominant we do not exactly question the process of gender identity construction, since the agents cannot change completely the pre-structured discourses (we operate as gendered subjects, in a gendered system), but the gender trouble starts when we have a failure of the repetition of such actions. A deformity or a parodic repetition can cause a phantasmic effect on the attributing identity which is concretely constructed. An intersexed or hermaphroditic body, for example, may follow this kind of “deformity” and does not fit into the accepted gendered/sexed binary of the natural body, thus challenging the whole natural binary system (Conrad 2009). This breaking of the natural binary system can be expanded to more disembodying conceptions of corporeal physicality. Katherine Hayles points out that Western thought strives towards an erasure of embodiment and a conception of consciousness as disembodied information. The psychical body in a “posthuman” is just a substrate in which thought and information are attached; thus, the biological embodiment can only be seen as something happening accidentally in history and not as an inevitability of life. The “posthuman”, according to Hayles, concerns the possibilities which information technologies provide. Humans may develop symbiotic relationships with machines or may be replaced, but there is a limit in the articulation of humans and intelligent machines, as far as they remain remarkably different in their embodiments. She follows a dialectical scheme of pattern/randomness which is applied in complex systems. In this method the meaning is not pre-fabricated; the origin does not act to ground signification. Complex systems evolve toward an open future which is characterized by contingency and unpredictability (N. Katherine Hayles 1999). Donna Haraway in her book Cyborg Manifesto presents at least three breakpoints in our transition from the binary relations of man/woman, mind/body, and nature/culture to more polysemous fusions, uncertain boundaries, and the marginal space in which the Cyborg (as the fusion of organism and machine) arises. The first concerns the breaking of the boundary between the human and the animal. Language, the use of tools, and social behavior cannot define in a persuasive way the limit between the human and the animal; the Cyborg enters the mythical narrative exactly at this point when the above limit is surpassed. The second is the fact that the distinction between the human and the machine in the late 20th century becomes blurred. Machines become more and more animated, leaving aside the classical mind/body, natural/artificial dualisms that defined the distinctions between —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

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humans and machines. The last has to do with the immateriality of the modern microelectronic devices which are almost everywhere; they are clean and lightweight because they function with signals and electromagnetic waves. The Cyborg is seen by Haraway as a figuration of both imagination and reality, structuring any possibility of historical transformation. It is an entity which belongs to a post-gender world, it has no linkage with bisexuality, preoedipal symbiosis, or unalienated labor, and it has no origin. It is partial, ironic, intimate, and perverted, promoting opposition and utopia, and it is also without innocence (Donna Jeanne Haraway 2018). The theoretical assumptions briefly analyzed above help us to better understand issues like the new forms of sexual interaction in cyber environments, as well as the phenomenon of sexual intercourses between humans and robots or better nonhuman entities. Cyber environments as presented in the section of Virtual Bodies provide various ways either to project or reshape our virtual selves. These selves, or in some cases avatars, are maybe close to Hayes and her analysis on human and intelligent machine argumentation; furthermore the flexible virtual environments can be considered as following a dialectical scheme relative to a complex system, that of unpredictability and contingency, since we can transform into a man, a woman, an animal, a human with an animal head, etc. The variability of our sexual representations as well the newly emergent field of erotic relationships between humans and non-human entities can direct our attention to what Haraway defines as the fusion between an organism and a machine or more specifically the postgender world of the Cyborg. Beyond the existential and ontological questions which may arise, new (cyber)feminist approaches denounce the dominant patriarchal orientation of sex robots, since in most cases they are addressed to the masculine population and both their appearance and voice programming follow aesthetic standards and “the proper” behavior patterns during the interaction cultivated by men.

Conclusion In this essay, we tried to present how the technological changes and the new digital environments of information society affect our embodiment in discrete fields. Our analysis was structured by describing five different categories of bodies and thus revealing the particularity of each case, without claiming that there is no overlapping between them. In the first section of Bodily Governance, we started from classical sociology and political philosophy to expose the gradual changes in the methods of controlling our bodies. Religious —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

Information Society and a New Form of Embodiment 55 and ethical codes regulating the behaviors and evaluating bodily actions were transformed into methods of surveillance, collection of personal and biometric data, tracking internet and medical records, which stand over and beyond our bodies, shaping a field of an almost deity-like omnipresent impersonal authority. The transition from panopticon models to the current postpanopticon gives the essence of this important shift. In the following section of Transforming Bodies, we approached the body as being in a process of becoming; classical and 3D printed organ transplantations, prosthetics, and plastic surgeries challenge the limits of our bodies and provide the possibility of reshaping and mutilation. There are ethical and ontological dilemmas occurring from transplantations, whilst in prosthetics, we focus more on how our embodied actions and our being in the world are affected; finally, plastic surgeries do not bring changes in appearance but also alter our embodying experience of the world. As for the Virtual Bodies, we referred to the technologies used for immersion in virtual spaces and their impact on embodying and disembodying experiences. Furthermore, we proceeded to analyse the ways avatars socialize, communicate, and interact, and thus how our identity is formed in virtual environments. Finally, the various options which digital platforms provide to project ourselves either permit us to stay in a connection with our inner selves or create the essence of a bodily split between our physical and virtual body. Our assumptions on Medical Bodies revolved around the human-based models of medical reasoning and their attempt to criticize the dominant biomedical model which conceives the patient as a “diseased” body and not as an active agent. The phenomenon of stigmatization of people with special needs has also been posed and seen under the spectrum of the bias created by normative values and beliefs, which also affects medical praxis and the public welfare system. We also made considerations upon the social construction of aging and the questions arising from the interaction of elders with robots and machines used in their care. In the last section of Sexual Bodies, our main emphasis was to illuminate the breaking of the “natural” binary systems of thought mainly after structuralism and post-structuralism. This lead to the evolution of critical notions such as the gender performativity, post-humanist approaches that speak for the domination of information, and the possibilities that can be provided, or even for a fusion of a machine and organism named Cyborg; through them our cybersexual or sexual experiences with nonhuman entities can be better explained.

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Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Frank, Biocca, and Levy Mark. 1995. Communication Applications of Virtual Reality. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Lynda, Birke. 2004. “Soma Kai Viologia”. In Viokoinonikoties Ta Oria Tou Somatos Diepistimonikes Prosegisis, 149–159. Athens: Nisos. Bauman, Zygmunt, and David Lyon. 2016. Liquid surveillance: a conversation. Cambridge: Polity. Bogard, William. 1996. The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies. New York: Cambridge University Press. Buch, Elana D. 2015. “Anthropology of Aging and Care.” Annual Review of Anthropology 44 (1): 277–93. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro -102214-014254. Conrad, Kathryn. 2009. ‘’Surveillance, Gender and the Virtual Body in the Information Age’’. Surveillance &Society 6(4): 380–387. Crampton, A.L. 2017. “Global Aging As Life Course Experience: Results From Ethnographic Research In Ghana And The U.S.” Innovation in Aging 1 (suppl_1): 478–478. ttps://doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igx004.1701. Davis, Ann. 1997. “The Body As Password”. Wired, 1997. Available at: [Accessed on 29/ 08/2020, at. 14:45]. Dreyfus, Hubert. 2008. On The Internet. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Dufva, Tomi, and Dufva Mikko. 2019. “Grasping The Future Of The Digital Society”. Futures 107: 17–22. Engel, L. George. 1977. “The Need for a New Medical Model: A Challenge for Biomedicine’’. Science. Vol. 196, No. 4286, p. 129–136. Foucault, Michel. 1998. The History Of Sexuality. Vol. 1. London: Penguin Books Ltd. Foss, Laurence. 2002. The End Of Modern Medicine Biomedical Science Under A Microscope. New York: State University of New York Press, Albany. Gilbert, Frederic, Cathal D. O’Connell, Tajanka Mladenovska, and Susan Dodds. 2017. “Print Me An Organ? Ethical And Regulatory Issues Emerging From 3D Bioprinting In Medicine”. Science And Engineering Ethics 24 (1): 73–91. doi: 10.1007/s11948-017-9874-6. Goodwin, Brian Carey. 2001. How The Leopard Changed Its Spots. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. Greenhalgh Trisha, Hurwitz Brian. Why study narrative? BMJ 1999; 318: 48. —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

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Reinventing Politics: An Epistemic Conversion of Information Technologies Abstract: In this paper I will provide a pragmatic interpretation of Shannon’s information theory in order to see how many theorists have failed to consider such an interpretation and its consequences and potentialities in their accounts of information society. I will finally report several political approaches which aim to define an alternative emancipatory politics.

Introduction An investigation of a cultural object involves an interplay between different theoretical gestures. Relevant approaches can be drawn from philosophy to media studies, from design to sociology. Thus, while philosophy can be useful to account for the underlying assumptions of given theories, media critique provides a critical archaeology of the techniques used in the past and current technologies and their usage in other non-technological fields, e.g. management, governance, and control. And while design helps scaling, prioritising, and finding the correct size of a phenomenon and of its theoretical explanation, certain issues are visualisable, manageable, and tangible by means of sociology, which renders them available in other shapes and nuances for other subjects. All these disciplines aim to produce novel narratives, but none of them should be understood as constitutive of real, empirical worlds. Taken individually, they all are partial and fragmentary. Yet, they can still be useful. These theories, or models, indeed, have a local scope whether they instantiate a specific and regional case or they are elaborated within certain cultural and geographical constraints. However, when they are applied to other socio-cultural contexts, questioning how these disciplines apprehend, grasp and compress a real cultural phenomenon becomes necessary and foundational to an investigation about what they can produce. In other words, understanding their epistemic account and development is necessary to reflect upon new forms of political action. This method of investigation is parallel to the object criticised by several theorists listed below. Exploring the cultural dimensions of information in the last thirty years means adopting as the object of this investigation the term of network society (Castells, 1996) and that of compu-

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tational stack (Bratton, 2016). Thus, it means focusing on the role of networked digital media. Obviously, such inquiry involves questioning the process of financialization, which is the integral capture of economy by finance, and the claims related to the automatization of physical and digital infrastructures due to the rise of artificial intelligence’s techniques. Nevertheless, exchange of information has been understood as a primitive concept not only in Claude Shannon’s information theory (1948), but also, after the Second World War, in other scientific fields, e.g. chemistry, biology, and physics.

Probability Shapes Information: Shannon’s Theory The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) reports numerous meanings for the term information (OED, 2018). Information is “the imparting of knowledge in general”, or the “knowledge communicated concerning some particular fact, subject, or event”. Thus, information’s meaning is doubled. It can either be the content shared, which is “obtained by the processing of data”, or the process of sharing itself. In its mathematical sense, information is outlined as “one which represents the degree of choice exercised in the selection or formation of one particular symbol, message, etc., out of a number of possible ones, and which is defined logarithmically in terms of the statistical probabilities of occurrence of the symbol or the elements of the message”. OED specifies that this definition is retrievable in Claude Shannon’s information theory (1948). Shannon formalised information theory right after the Second World War, while working in Bell Labs. Italian mathematician Giuseppe Longo provides a precise account of Shannon’s theory and defines ‘information’ according to the theory of calculation of probability. In his article (1996), Longo describes the shift occurred after WWII. “Energy and matter used to be considered foundations of reality” (Longo 1996, p. 28), but WWII accelerated technological innovation, epistemological debates, and methodological concerns related to information. Longo notices that reflecting about information meant considering both the process of exchanging information itself and how it is structured. Following Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic relational model of his semiotic theory (Atkin, 2013), it can be argued that information, if understood as a sign, indicates a semantic dimension, the signified, i.e. the sense a sign makes, a syntactic dimension; the signifier, i.e. the form of a sign, and an indexical dimension; the referent, i.e. the object intended to be represented. Yet, Shannon’s theory adds another dimension to information, namely a quantitative dimension, according to Longo. By reducing uncertainty and

 

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noise through probability theory, information is generated (Longo 1996, p. 32). Information’s convoluted probabilistic structure also has a pragmatic layer that allows one to assume that the quantity of information shared is null if the content of information is certain, but the quantity is infinite if the information is impossible. Therefore, “information is strictly linked to probability” (Longo 1996, p. 35) and the pragmatic layer means that one can act in the world by receiving differentiated information that now has a numerical value. This pragmatic layer substitutes the indexical dimension, because information theory is not interested in representing mind-independent entities, but rather it eases this issue by letting the pragmatic layer perform on the syntactic one (Longo 1996, p. 34), as one looks for differences within information in order to act in the world. Longo continues by explaining that the functional dependency between information and probability is mathematically represented by the logarithm, and what Shannon meant by introducing the concept of entropy. As mentioned earlier, information is generated from a human or technical source by reducing noise, and then distributed through a channel. The source is strongly characterised by its entropy (Longo 1996, p. 54), i.e. the average rate at which information is generated by the source itself. Codifying the source and the channel in order to transmit and receive information without a dramatic loss of data become the two crucial problems in information theory. Entropy is thus linked to these two problems. Following these two problems, developments and important applications of Shannon’s theory have made digital technologies possible. Longo concludes: “within Shannon’s information theory, it seems that communication, metacommunication, and meta-metacommunication are levelled to the problem of data transmission” (Longo 1996, p. 61). Many theorists have criticised the elimination of uncertainty, ambiguity, and noise that information theory provides, and then they have conceptualised this critique as a paradigm to describe the informational overload that global society has experienced in the last forty years. This paradigm should therefore be problematised in order to account for new interpretations and analyses.

Making Sense of the Network Society: the Digital Turn Information society is a broad paradigm used in different fields—from sociology to philosophy, from economy to political theory—to account for planetary shift that occurred during the 70s. Globally, the decline of industrial society has brought more focus to the economic value of knowledge and, therefore,

 

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information. Alongside the importance given to knowledge and beyond the distinctions that emerged between knowledge, information, and raw data, the rise of information technology is one of the key aspects of this shift. In fact, Scottish sociologist David Lyon argues that “the computer plays a pivotal role in this revolution” (Lyon 1988, p. 3). In his book, Lyon uses David Bell’s idea of information society in order to examine this paradigm. His aim is to show all different nuances that this paradigm entails in order to find an alternative understanding of current society. The main feature he defines as problematic is the shifting method of theoretical research, which focuses “on social adaptation to IT, rather than how IT may be designed to suit people” (Lyon 1988, p. 8). Lyon concedes that “some of the most significant changes in late twentieth-century society are those inherent in, related to, or consequent upon IT” (Lyon, 1988: 8), yet his theoretical aim is to find new problems to investigate that previous theorists failed to account for. Therefore, it is interesting to inquire certain aspects of innovations that happened in IT. In an interview made in 1990 with Antonio Negri, Gilles Deleuze argued that “to each kind of society corresponds a particular kind of machine” (Deleuze 1995, p. 170). Thus, analog machines would correspond to disciplinary societies, and digital machines correspond to control societies. In the last thirty years a new kind of machinery has emerged simultaneously morphing a new form of society, and one of the first thinkers who described the shift society was going through in the 1990s was Deleuze himself. In his article Postscript on the Societies of Control (1992) he noticed that a new form of power was emerging alongside the ubiquitous and rising presence of telecommunication technologies in ordinary life. This was no longer projected onto the production of individuals—what Foucault called ‘process of subjectivation’. On the contrary, this new power consisted in modulating individuals, or rather dividuals. According to Deleuze, the deconstruction of individuals into numeric footprints caused society to be fragmented and atomised. Digital machines are able to map anyone’s location and operate a universal modulation of flows of communication. Therefore, “individuals have become dividuals and masses, samples, data, markets, or banks” (Deleuze, 1992: 5). This uncanny form of organisation, management, and process allowed the shift from disciplinary societies to control societies, whose economical and informational flows are tearing national borders down. Alongside this theoretical terrain, sociologists from the early 1990s proposed the term network society, instead of information society, to account for the complex pattern of organisation that interacting informational technolo-

 

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gies were providing. Even though the term was coined by Dutch media theorist Jan van Dijk in 1991, Spanish sociologist Castells elaborated this concept in greater details as a way to further investigate the effects of convoluted management of information in society. While the latter provides an extensive understanding of media networks, which seem to pervade any kind of social and cultural organisation (Castells, 1996, 1997, 1998), the former emphasises the role of media in organising and connecting all different structures of society, but does not reduce every form of assemblage, coupling, and cluster to the influence of information and communications technology (van Dijk 2006). Van Dijk follows Deleuze, as the French philosophers believe that “the machines are just one component of collective arrangements” (Deleuze 1995). It can be argued instead that contemporary social networks and internet platforms, such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc., have proven Castells correct. Far from suggesting a monolithic view of network society, in his trilogy Castells is precise in describing how cultural and political influences on society are managed and planned by networked information and digital technologies. Within this multifaceted environment, the network society becomes a space of flows, the expression used by Castells to account for the material organization of cultural and social practices which occur and operate within flows (Castells 1996, p. 147). Here, digital data is received and transferred horizontally through hotspots and it allows local performances and behaviours to be transmitted globally. Within this framework, a Global Positioning System (GPS) is not merely a technology which provides information regarding one’s location in the world. Rather, it becomes a new epistemic perspective of viewing and being in the world. The difference between van Dijk and Castells becomes the following: while the former thinks of media networks as tools, the latter thinks of them as a space of communication, as a new form of environment. Going back to the way data is exchanged and distributed, Australian theorist Wark polemised the horizontal circulation of information by introducing the concept of vectors (Wark, 2004). Vectors are pervasive lines of communication which where emerging in the global media environment are called virtual geography (1994). In his most famous book, A Hacker Manifesto (2004), he argues that the vectoralist class owns and controls vectors over which information flows. Within these vectoralist networks information becomes commodified. This means that the new business that emerged in the late 1990s is based on symmetries of information. Between the hacker class, who produces qualitative information and therefore knowledge and then new ideas out of raw, unstructured data, and the vectoralist class there is a vertical exchange

 

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of information, with the latter imposing on the former class the concept of scarcity on an abstracted field—information—that is antithetical to shortage. The enormous and complex amount of data that has come out in the early 2000s shows that the accumulation of information has become the new source of cognitive capital. Some of the biggest challenges of big data include the search for new methods of data visualization, data analysis, data sharing, and data management that can handle the complexity of these vast data sets and give a better understanding of them by generating knowledge and new patterns of interpretation. Enormous datacentres have emerged in parallel with big data. According to Pasquinelli, these data-hubs started mapping and wiretapping all the information exchanged through the virtual networks in the late 1990s, fulfilling the idea of extraction of information out of the hack of Wark (Pasquinelli 2018, p. 253). Therefore, Pasquinelli presents the current global society as a metadata society. The information about information, i.e. metadata, is precisely the analysis of data and it wholly accomplishes the aim of datacentres, which is not the raw accumulation of big data, but their interpretation and prediction of patterns through the use of different techniques, e.g. through the use of machine learning. Thus, Pasquinelli argues that “metadata represent the shift to a different and higher dimensional scale in relation to information” (Pasquinelli 2018, p. 254). Highlighting the dark sides of the computational turn in society has been the task of different theorists since the beginning of the third millennium.

Making Sense of the Stack: the Computational Turn It can be suggested that the 21st century has materialised the integral conjecture among this evolution of the paradigm of network society, its peculiar technopolitical form and Artificial Intelligence (AI), meant as a development of computational technologies. Instead of turning to the observation of some forms of AI whose applications are globally influential in terms of policy making, it might be useful to continue giving a general overview of some theoretical attempts made to account for a new emerging political system. Canadian philosopher Nick Srnicek criticises the conduct of a small number of monopolistic platforms, e.g. Facebook, Amazon, Uber, and Airbnb, that steers the global economy (Srnicek, 2016). Srnicek describes a platform as a digital infrastructure that intends to intermediate the communication between several groups, from advertisers and content providers to targets, whose data—a cluster of affects, desires, and behaviours—get grasped, ana-

 

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lysed, mapped, and forecast by the algorithms implemented in these platforms. What he calls platform capitalism (2016) has three main characteristics: the reliance on the network effects, namely the more users produce contents on a platform, the more valuable this platform becomes for a community; the pervasive encouragement to use a platform; and the refined capacity to extract worth from networks relying upon pre-existing infrastructure and marginal costs. The three aspects allow these platforms to grow rapidly, exponentially to the extent that they are globally shaping and controlling finance. In other words, a platform is a business based on value-creating interactions between producers and consumers, that, by providing an open and participative infrastructure, sets normative conditions to control global interactions. In relation to the platform economy, the concept of algorithmic governance has been developed lately by several thinkers (Stiegler 2010, Rouvroy & Berns 2013, Danaher, et al., 2017). The privatised model and the normative conditions set by digital, monopolistic platforms are spreading to governments. From the critique of data profiling that occurs on the platforms to the denunciation of behavioural automatization—a consequence of the behavioural targeting and profiling promoted by marketing companies (Rouvroy & Berns, 2013)—algorithmic governance refers to a new political power that relies upon the computational rules of information sciences and mathematics. The computation and the calculability of the infinite dividuals, which is perpetuated by apparatuses and networks, e.g. AI, Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud platforms, has lead, according to Benjamin Bratton, to a composition of “an accidental megastructure that is both a computational infrastructure and a new governing architecture” (Bratton 2016). In his search for new models, diagrams, and plans, Bratton describes how the computational race for the control of informational flows among financial entities and national governments is shrinking the modern Westphalian model, where national states were invested with the legitimacy of law and conflicts. His investigation regarding this complex normative structure is a design problem, where a national government is considered a machine among other computing machines. Consequentially, today’s political governance consists in “the calculation of all the world’s information and of the world itself as information” (Bratton 2016, p. 8). The rise of cheap information-sensing devices has broadened the IoT, the network of physical devices, vehicles, home appliances and other items embedded with electronics, software, and sensors, which enables them to in-

 

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ter-operate and exchange data through the pre-existing Internet infrastructure. Part of the vast amount of data that increases daily is due to the IoT. The need for interpreting, recognizing and discovering patterns in large data sets emerged in the late 1990s. As mentioned above, this process, called data mining, involves different methods and approaches, such as advanced statistics, machine learning and database systems: in other words, intelligent fields that regard the study of pattern recognition. The algorithms implemented in machine learning are a data-mining tool used for classification, clustering, and prediction. Another example is offered by deep-learning algorithms, a method that learns how to learn. The main peculiarity of these subfields of AI is that they might be called meta-digital to the extent that they are neither concerned with the correlation of truths and facts nor with the process of verification (Pasquinelli 2017). In contrast, as Pasquinelli puts it in his article, they focus on the quantification of affects, which precisely corresponds to the re-statement of already-known patterns, rather than discovering new facts and new theoretical fields. The role of artificial intelligence has widely expanded. A culture of algorithms is developing very rapidly, due to the enormous use of AI in daily life. In one of her articles, Luciana Parisi argues that “since instruments are already doing politics, one question to ask is how to reorient the brutality of instrumentality away from the senseless stirring of beliefs and desires, and towards a dynamic of reasoning that affords the re-articulation—rather than the elimination—of aims” (Parisi 2017). Architectures of control seems to be the epistemic grid with which culture and society get constantly modulated. Within this computational environment, one should not only spurn the acritical mainstream view of AI, but also highlight the failures and explore the limits and the potentialities of algorithms in order to strategically navigate within this computational stack (Bratton 2016). Following Pasquinelli once more, a philosophical theory that aims to describe this new technopolitical form should not rely on a paranoid paradigm (control society, Deleuze, 1992) of harmful speculation that totalises and destroys all possible ways of emancipation (Pasquinelli 2018). It might be suggested that thinkers—from philosophers to computer scientists—explore and examine the alien condition that key characteristics of computational machines, such as indeterminacy and noise, are providing. This is why technological singularity, that is, the ideas of having technological and cognitive homogenisation preserved by monopolistic platforms, should be avoided. On the contrary, “to reopen the question of technology is to refuse this homogeneous technological future that is pre-

 

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sented to us as the only option” (Hui 2017). Yuk Hui refuses unilateral globalisation, the model of privatised governance of platforms and the technological singularity in order to allow communities to develop tools of emancipation within and with technology.

Commons & Cooperativism: Two Post-Capitalist Ruptures As shown, these theories offer a different nuance of a bigger issue typical of current network society (Castells 1996), which is “the new architecture for sovereignty” (Bratton 2016), the computational stack. Italian theorist Tiziana Terranova retrieves the latter model and paints it in red (2014). Most of the analyses Terranova makes in her article are already covered in the previous models mentioned above: ubiquity of informational technologies in daily life; algorithmic modulation of almost every kind of relation; and capture of cognitive capacities by new capitalist apparatus. Thus, what makes Red Stack Attack interesting is Terranova’s claim “for a new nomos for the post-capitalist common” (Terranova 2014), which follows Bratton’s analysis of the new nomos of Earth. The common refers to a general counterapproach to capitalism through self-organisation practises developed since Italian Operaismo. Terranova joins Parisi in insisting that cognitive and sapient potentialities enhanced by networked technologies are never fully released within a capitalist framework. This is why she sees a beneficial alliance between technology and human subjects only in a post-capitalist society. Within the global infrastructure of automatization, Terranova describes this process by adding three transversal layers to the original stack of Bratton. The first layer, virtual money, reflects upon the possibility of converting financial wealth into the money of common. Terranova owes this expression to Italian economist Andrea Fumagalli. He defines the money of common (2015) as an alternative currency to capitalism. This must not be mistaken for cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin. Rather, Fumagalli stresses that this common’s currency should not be vector of accumulation, or speculation, but it should be an economic platform that helps to create novel practises of self-organisation by reducing the burden of economic constraints. Therefore, Terranova extends this strategic tool to find other forms of commonfare, e.g. crowdfunding models, that could empower social cooperation. The second layer of the red stack, social networks, sees a linkage between subjectivation and algorithmic automatization. Far from proposing an acritical dismissal of social network platforms, Terranova proposes to “hijack social network technologies away from a mode of consumption” in order to experiment social networks “as a

 

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distributed platform for learning about the world, fostering and nurturing new competences and skills, fostering planetary connections, and developing new ideas and value” (Terranova 2014). These claims gain greater weight in the third layer, bio-hypermedia. Terranova notices a “topological continuity” between bodies and devices, e.g. laptops, smartphones, apps, and cloud systems. In short, ubiquitous computation enabled a new ecosystem between humans and the IoT system. Thus, this leads Terranova to seek a “strategy for the construction of a machinic infrastructure of the common”, an effort not pursued by many critics of informational overload. Alongside repurposing technologies through the question of the common, creating digital platforms within certain parameters of democracy, fairness, and solidarity is a similar prerogative for new political actions. Platform cooperativism (2016) is the paradigm used by German scholar and activist Trebor Scholz to “challenge Corporate Sharing Economy”, an economic model introduced by corporations like Uber and Airbnb. In short, following the advent of big data sets and of networked digital media, the sharing economy has been understood as the sharing of unused private physical assets—tangible, material items, e.g. cars and houses—which subsequently become services. Naturally, the sharing economy is part of the broader platform economy (Srnicek 2016). Despite relevant controversies related to unfair competition and racial and gender biased information used by these companies, the major polemic Scholz and others elaborated regards their private, undemocratic infrastructure. In fact, “the current owners of online platforms are willing to offer us seemingly everything except ownership” (Scholz, 2016: 1). After lingering on the critique of cognitive and affective labour these platforms involve, Scholz proposes the creation of fair, democratic, supportive platforms, whose ownership is collective. This might be seen as a first concrete step towards engineering technology for communities’ benefits. Recognizing the pitfalls of these companies means reconstructing the history behind this new economic paradigm. Scholz notices that they adopted illegality as a method and how their development has been helped by the failure of workers’ unions, a process which was activated by British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and American president Ronald Reagan. These two politicians inaugurated a new political epoch in the 80s, better known by the motto “There Is No Alternative” (TINA) to neoliberalism, which has seen the rise of financialization in the economy and privatisation in political institutions. Therefore, TINA has been taken as a challenge to overcome capitalist economy and institutions. Interesting political solutions proposed in

 

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the last decade—see Srnicek & Williams, 2013, Laboria Cuboniks, 2015, Mason, 2015, and ANON, 2017—represent a more pragmatic shift compared to The Invisible Committee’s Manifesto (2007) due to the importance they ascribe to the role of contemporary technology in overcoming capitalism. In particular, Srnicek and Williams’ manifesto and the xenofeminist manifesto are part of a contemporary political theory, accelerationism, that views alienation as a positive force. Thus, it is the idea that by deepening its own contradictions, capitalism will eventually collapse. Accelerationism finds its theoretical roots in Marx (1848), Nietzsche (1901), and Deleuze and Guattari (1972). The first to provide a theorisation of the fall of the contemporary geopolitical order through vast developments in automatization and in AI was British philosopher Nick Land. According to Land, this geopolitical rupture would begin in non-western countries (Land 2011). Nevertheless, many left-accelerationists do not passively aim to assist in capitalism’s self-implosion. A concrete implementation of these new theories can thus be documented and experimented in Scholz’s paradigm of cooperativism within Terranova’s claim of common. Cooperatives in the digital world are globally emerging and their importance is witnessed especially by marginalised groups (Scholz 2016, p. 13). Ethics become functional and substantial in imagining a digital, immaterial, and democratic society. Additionally, Scholz does not only put emphasis on the solidarity and the collaboration present in these coops, but also on their technological and scientific innovation. The future of work is to be decentralised and networked by protocols. In fact, networking is the way all relations, from affective to work connections, are kept and organised. In network society, every relation must be functional in order to occur. Nevertheless, far from being nostalgic for a supposed authenticity of past forms of organisation and far from merely polemicizing information overload, Scholz and others accept the challenge brought by these new technologies and explore democratic and collective ways to defy monopolistic platforms within their common terrain. The next theoretical stage has to account for an epistemic framework, whence new social practises can be generated.

General Intellect: Seizing the Algorithms Italian post-workerism is a political theory that, from the ashes of Operaismo, has defined current society as a cognitive capitalistic society which gravitates around a post-Fordist knowledge economy. While the latter feature is an extension of the paradigm of information society and emphasises the role of

 

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knowledge and knowledge machines in generating economic value, the former focuses more on the shift that occurred in labour, which operates on high cognitive orders. Alongside the demand for a Universal Basic Income (UBI), the question of the commons and cooperativism are two important claims in terms of antagonism towards capitalism. Most importantly, Italian Marxist theorists have identified the General Intellect as the agent which can counteract cognitive capitalism (Vercellone, 2007). In his essay (2007), Carlo Vercellone explains how real and formal subsumption coexist in contemporary capitalism. Both are Marxian expressions and while formal subsumption indicates capitalism’s grasp of social and cultural practises for its own economic interests, real subsumption refers to capitalism’s conversion of cultural and material work, in other words, capitalism’s capacities to wholly capture every form of labour. These capacities are augmented by dynamic technologies that allow capitalism to more efficiently repurpose mental and corporal activities. According to Vercellone, the novel simultaneity between real and formal subsumption was forecast by Marx’s Grundrisse (1858), which announced “the advent of an economy based upon the diffusion and the driving role of knowledge” (Vercellone 2007, p. 28). Following Marx’s analysis of division of labour, Vercellone continues his investigation of contemporary knowledge-based capitalism not only with the terms of real and formal subsumption, but also with that of General Intellect, understood as the major antagonist to cognitive capitalism. In his Grundrisse, Marx introduces the figure of the General Intellect by recognising this novel division of labour, i.e. the radical switch of Capital’s subsumption. Thus, Marx argues that social intellect, social knowledge, and technological skills are not necessarily subjugated by capitalism but, rather he believes that General Intellect becomes a decisive force of production, which can generate both knowledge and social practices. The General Intellect is therefore a generative framework and not a mere repertoire of existing knowledge and abilities. It has emerged that cooperation and collaboration are key principles for information economies. The question of common and digital cooperativism, as aforementioned, is a first political framework where the General Intellect can imagine new political horizons. What next? It is now necessary to reclaim Shannon’s information theory with a new political standpoint. It has been viewed within a technical framework in which transmitting information provides an elimination of ambiguity, uncertainty, and noise. Critics of the information overload have failed to account for this reduction of communication to data transmission, data management, or data mining as a necessary premise

 

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to theoretical and practical developments in different disciplines. An example is offered by the Kantian understanding of an artwork. British philosopher Peter Wolfendale describes the cognitive role of contemporary art following Kant. The value of an artwork is not its presupposed ambiguity that it maintains among different levels of communication. Rather, it is “the cognitive process that instigates, […] its purpose to stimulate thinking” (Wolfendale 2016, p. 89). An artwork, or a poem, are never conveyed through a single, defined meaning. The informational overload becomes an aesthetic challenge for cognition and thinking. Learning how to engage with complexity is necessary to innovation and inspiration. Machines that manage data do not only eliminate uncertainty, ambiguity, and noise in order to transmit information. Rather, by producing random forms of uncertainty, ambiguity, and noise, they are enhancing cognitive capacities and expanding human epistemic horizons. Thus, if that is valid for art and literature, it must be also effective for imagining new political perspectives. According to Srnicek, new modes of thought, cognitive maps, and epistemic standpoints can have a dramatic impact on underlying economic, political, and social conditions (Srnicek 2014). The same statement is conveyed by the second layer of Terranova’s red stack. In his essay, British philosopher Inigo Wilkins compares current characteristics of digital platforms—that is, attention to users’ behaviours, the prediction of desires, and increasing entrainment—to the newest paradigm coined in cognitive science, redacting processing (Metzinger & Wiese 2017). Thus, both digital platforms and cognition seem to be structured along a computational predictive system. Cognition works towards an optimisation of its predictive models by sending errors to higher levels and digital platforms’ main aim is to predict users’ desires and behaviours and recommend them new products to buy, to listen, and to watch. “The problem is the ownership and control of those tools—the algorithms—and the way in which those predicted futures are manipulated and engineered by the opaque interests of power” (Wilkins 2018, p. 12). It can be argued that using algorithms to optimise its own user experience and explore new theoretical fields is not an issue per se. Rather, it becomes an urgent issue when corporations exploit them for their own economic interests. Therefore, encompassing platform cooperativism’s strategy consists in this: collectivisation should not only be directed to platforms, but also to the whole research project related to AI. This strategic development finds further justification in the Marxian General Intellect, as shown above. By extending Wilkins’ motto, “users of the world, seize the matrices of recommendation!”, it is now possible to introduce a new Marxist slogan: sapient agents of the world, seize the algorithms! .

 

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Conclusion This essay started by briefly presenting Shannon’s theory and, following Longo’s analysis, information theory was historically and technically contextualised. A jump of roughly 40 years was made in order to account for digital turn, and the computational turn along their respective philosophical, sociological, and cultural interpretations. By stressing that algorithms are the main technique to compress, manage, and exchange information nowadays, the article continued questioning the political and epistemic implications of the ubiquitous application of current technologies. Finally, post-capitalist claims have been made. Thanks to an alternative understanding of the information theory, it was argued that most of the potentialities of cognitive and informational technologies cannot be unleashed under capitalist forms of organisation.

Bibliography 2018. “information, n.”. [Online] Available at: [Accessed February 2019]. Atkin, A., 2013. Peirce’s Theory of Signs. [Online]. Available at: [Accessed 2019 February]. Bratton, B. H., 2016. The Stack—On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Castells, M., 1996. The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. I. Cambridge, Massachusetts; Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Castells, M., 1997. The Power of Identity, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. II. Cambridge, Massachusetts; Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Castells, M., 1998. End of Millennium, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. III. Cambridge, Massachusetts; Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Collective Anon, 2017. Altwoke Manifesto. [Online] Available at: [Accessed February 2019]. Committee, T. I., 2009. The Coming Insurrection. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Cuboniks, Laboria, 2015. Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation. [Online] Available at: [Accessed February 2019].

 

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Danaher, J. et al., 2017. Algorithmic governance: Developing a research agenda through the power of collective intelligence. Big Data & Society. Deleuze, G., 1992. Postscript on the Societies of Control. October, Volume 59, pp. 3–7. Deleuze, G., 1995. Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press. Fumagalli, A. & Braga, E., 2015. La moneta del comune. Roma: DeriveApprodi. Hui, Y., 2017. Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics. eflux, Issue 86. Land, N., 2011. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007. Falmouth: Urbanomic. Longo, G. O., 1996. Introduzione alla teoria dell’informazione. In: S. Cerrato, ed. Teoria dell’Informazione. Naples, Italy: CUEN, p. 27–61. Lyon, D., 1988. The Information Society: Issues and Illusions. Malden, MA: Polity Press, Blackwell Publishers. Mason, P., 2015. PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. London: Allen Lane. Metzinger, T. & Wiese, W., 2017. Vanilla PP for Philosophers: A Primer on Predictive Processing. In: Philosophy and Predictive Processing. Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. Parisi, L., 2017. Reprogramming Decisionism. eflux, Issue 85. Pasquinelli, M., 2017. Machines that Morph Logic: Neural Networks and the Distorted Automation of Intelligence as Statistical Inference. Glass Bead, Issue 1. Pasquinelli, M., 2018. Metadata Society. In: R. Braidotti & M. Hlavajova, eds. Posthuman Glossary. London, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, pp. 253–256. Rouvroy, A. & Berns, T., 2013. Gouvernementalité algorithmique et perspectives d’émancipation. Le disparate comme condition d’individuation par la relation ?. Réseaux, 1 (No 177), p. 163–196. (177), p. 163–196. Scholz, T., 2016. Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy. New York, NY: Rosa Luxemburg Siftung. Shannon, C. E., 1948. A Mathematical Theory Of Communication. The Bell System Technical Journal, 27(3), pp. 379–423. Srnicek, N., 2014. Accelerationism: Epistemic, Economic, Political. In: J. Trafford & R. Mackay, eds. Speculative Aesthetics. Falmouth: Urbanomic, pp. 48–53. Srnicek, N., 2016. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

 

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Srnicek, N. & Williams, A., 2013. Accelerate Manifesto: For an Accelerationist Politics. [Online] Available at: [Accessed February 2019]. Stiegler, B., 2010. For a New Critique of Political Economy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Terranova, T., 2014. Red Stack Attack! Algorithms, Capital and The Automation of The Common. Euronomade. van Dijk, J., 2006. The Network Society. II ed. London: Sage Publications. Vercellone, C., 2007. From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism. Historical Materialism, Issue 15, p. 13–36. Wark, M., 1994. Virtual Geography: Living With Global Media Events. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Wark, M., 2004. A Hacker Manifesto. Harvard, CA: Harvard University Press. Wilkins, I., 2018. Platform Beyond Prediction. [Online] Available at: [Accessed February 2019]. Wolfendale, P., 2016. Machinic Inspiration. In: M. Salemy, ed. For Machine Use Only: Contempletations on Algorithmic Epistemology. Gwangju: &&& Journal, p. 89–90.

 

 

PART II: POLITICS AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY

 

 

Iga Kleszczyńska

An analysis of the economic and political determinants of today’s Venezuelan crisis Abstract: The purpose of this article is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the external and internal mechanisms of the Venezuelan crisis, which is reflected not only in the economic recession, but also in the presidential crisis. Considering the indicated issues, the article highlights the main hypothesis: a) Venezuela’s economic crisis was caused by internal factors including dependence on oil exports and the lack of economic diversification; and auxiliary hypothesis b) Deepening the Venezuelan recession is caused by sanctions imposed by the U.S. and changes in global energy markets. Hence, the following research questions serve to identify the featured hypotheses: a) How do the lack of diversification and the economy’s dependence on the export of natural resources influence Venezuelan economic crises and Dutch disease?; b) How have the U.S. sanctions and changes in energy markets deepened the Venezuela crisis?; c) What are the main present economic and political effects of the Venezuelan recession? The article consists of three major parts: an introduction, a main part and a summary. The introduction provides the purpose of the article, hypotheses, research questions, the background of the current socio-economic situation of Venezuela and the analysis of a theoretical perspective. The main part of the article is devoted to the analysis of internal and external determinants of the Venezuelan economic and political crisis. The research includes the problem of the economy’s dependence on oil exports, the political populism of Chavez and Maduro, and the nationalization of enterprises as the most important internal factors. However, the analysis of external factors focuses on the description of the United States sanctions, lack of foreign investment and the problem of climate change. Given the internal and external determinants, the article attempts to indicate the importance of these factors for the current political crisis and the state of diarchy. The summary is the end of the article. Described issues are presented using mixed methodology. The main theoretical perspective of the article is the theory of Dutch disease and the petro-state approach, which indicates the relationship between the economic crisis and the state’s dependence on export products. The article applies the systemic method (indicating the importance of Venezuelan crisis in the international system and the impact of external factors on the internal political and economic situation), historical (indicating the economic governance model in the perspective of previous governments), comparative (identification of the differences and similarities in the directions of Chavez 77

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Iga Kleszczyńska and Maduro’s public policies), content analysis (reports and articles of international organizations and think tanks), descriptive statistics method (analysis of the Venezuelan economy’s statistical data: inflation, public debt, economic growth and oil prices).

Keywords: Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro, Juan Guaidó, Venezuelan economy, Economic Turmoil, Presidential Crisis, Latin America

Introduction The Venezuelan crisis is certainly an unprecedented phenomenon. It is difficult to compare its scale in the economic or political dimension with any other country nowadays. The social, economic, political and humanitarian scope of the problems affecting Venezuela terrifies the international community, organizations and governments. However, the troubles that Venezuela is currently facing are multidimensional and require comprehensive analysis. On the one hand, current problems are the result of internal action strategies, both past and present, including ineffective country management. Unquestionably, it is these factors that may be identified as the symptome of pathology of the Venezuelan system’s functioning. Nonetheless, the recession that has deeply affected the indicated South American state is the result of systemic variables and international activities. A whole catalog of internal and external factors led Venezuela to the brink of state collapse and subsequently pushed the country into an unimaginable economic and humanitarian catastrophe that ultimately caused a split of power and presidential crisis. The purpose of this article is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the external and internal mechanisms of the Venezuelan crisis, which was reflected not only in the recession, but also in the presidential crisis. Although the most significant effects of the recession are observed on a daily basis, it is advisable to look at the country’s previous socio-economic conditions. Notwithstanding, the economic recession that affected the Venezuelan economy did not appear suddenly. Rather it is the result of a long-term process of inadequate management of the state and its system by previous administrations and directors of public policies. The article consists of an introduction, a main part and a summary. The introduction provides an analysis of hypotheses, research questions and variables. It also identifies the background of the current socio-economic situation of Venezuela and the problem of Dutch disease as a theoretical perspective. The main part of the article is divided

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into three parts. The first focuses on analyzing internal factors for the deepening of the economic crisis: basing the economy on oil exports, political populism and the nationalization of enterprises. The second part attempts to present the external factors aggravating the recession: international sanctions, lack of foreign investment, and qualitative and quantitative changes in global energy markets. The third part is devoted to the analysis of the presidential crisis and international response. Considering these elements, the article indicates the following hypotheses: H1: Venezuela’s economic crisis was caused by internal factors including dependence on oil exports and a lack of economic diversification H2: Deepening the Venezuelan recession is reinforced by sanctions imposed by the U.S. and changes in global energy markets. The indicated hypotheses apply to both internal economic processes and the model of managing the economy of the state. They also deal with inseparable correlations between the condition of the economy and its impact on political processes and the system of Venezuelan government. Hence, the identified hypotheses refer to the following research questions: 1)

How do the lack of diversification and the economy’s dependence on the export of natural resources influence Venezuelan economic crises and Dutch disease?

2)

How have the U.S. sanctions and changes in energy markets deepened the Venezuela crisis?

3)

What are the main present economic and political effects of the Venezuelan recession?

The state of research regarding the economic crisis of Venezuela is extensive and multidimensional. The recession as well as the presidential crisis are closely monitored and commented on by European, Asian and North and South American researchers. This article is mainly based on the United States’ various reports and analyses. The development of indicated issues was supported by the expert opinions of international economic institutions: the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, International Atomic Agency and the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Moreover, the article is prepared on the basis of articles and

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analyses shared by the most important American think tanks: Brookings Institution, Council on Foreign Relations and The Peterson Institute for International Economics. The Congressional Research Service reports published by The Federation of American Scientists and official data available on the U.S. Department of State website remain an extremely valuable source of information for this topic.

Background of the socio-economic situation in Venezuela The present economic and social crisis in Venezuela is an unusual phenomenon throughout the country’s long history. Despite having faced numerous recessions, the current collapse is unprecedented, the current collapse is unprecedented14. The crisis that has been deepening since 2013 has affected all citizens, regardless of their origin or social class. The situation is a stalemate since many Venezuelans have problems supplying their families with basic products like food, medicine or even drinking water. The media report that the country is experiencing long-term power blackouts which prevent the activity of the state, including hospitals, factories, administration etc. The current recession is affecting all spheres and state structures: social, financial and political. Venezuela is facing a budget deficit15, deteriorating living conditions and epidemics like tuberculosis and malaria—diseases that nowadays are usually treatable. Furthermore, the economic recession is accompanied by violence and corruption causing a deep paralysis of the state and its socio-political and economic system16. Recently, this South American country has been on the edge of a humanitarian disaster for several months. In addition, its economy has shrunk by over 60 percent since 201317. According to data presented by the International Monetary Fund, the economic recession that struck Venezuela has been the largest crisis in the world’s economic history

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16

17

Venezuela: Recent Economic Development (Washington D.C.: International Monetary Fund, 1998), p. 7–8. “Inflation rate, average consumer prices in Venezuela”, International Monetary Fund. Available at: [Accessed on 01.11.2019, at 02:47]. Shannon K. O’Neil, “Instability in Venezuela”, Council on Foreign Relations, November 15, 2019. Available at: [Accessed on 04.07.2020, at 03:05]. David Biller and Patricia Laya, “Venezuela Unemployment Nears That of War-Reuined Bosnia, IMF Says”, Bloomberg, 9 April, 2019. Available at: [Accessed on 04.07.2020, at 03:10.

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for the last half a century. What is most remarkable, it concerns a state where there is no war and the country is not affected by armed conflict or a natural disaster. Moreover, it should be remembered that a few years ago Venezuela was one of the strongest Latin American countries where the democratic system was relatively stable.

Venezuela's gross domestic product (nominal value in billions of dollars) [Source: IMF] 400 300 200 100 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018

0

Table 1. Venezuela’s gross domestic product (nominal value in billions of dollars) [Table inspired by data obtained from IMF and World Bank’s websites18]. The IMF compares the Venezuelan economic crisis to the recession after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its negative effects on Russia and Albania. The status of the Venezuelan economy can also be compared to Germany in 1923 or Zimbabwe in late 2000s. Reportedly, the crisis that began in 2013 is even far more severe than the Great Depression that hit the United States in 1929. According to the IMF19, the state economic structure has decreased by 35 percent since 2014 but unfortunately stagnation is still deepening20. Because of the ongoing process, the negative results of the economic downturn

                                                             18

19 20

For an exact source please refer to the link below. Available at: [Accessed at 19.07.2020 at 10:00]. World Economic Outlook of 2019, (Washington D.C.: International Monetary Fund, 2019), p. 15–16. Friedman, Uri. “How Populism Helped Wreck Venezuela”, The Atlantic, June 4, 2017. Available at: [Accessed on 04.07.2020, at 02:47].

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are contributing unparalleled political and social instability. Meanwhile, the effects of the crisis are gradually spreading throughout the entire Latin American region21.

30

Venezuela's Real GDP growth (Annual percent change) [Source: IMF]

20 10 0 -10 -20 -30 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020

-40

Table 2. Venezuela’s Real GDP growth (Annual percent change) [Table inspired by data obtained from IMF website22]. There are many reasons for the economic catastrophe of Venezuela. Surely, the main economic factors include the dependence of Venezuela’s revenues on oil exports and the lack of income diversification23. Hence, the perturbations in global energy prices markets in 2014 caused a galloping economic recession. However, the reasons for the present condition of affairs should also be sought from the political perspective. Due to the current presidential crisis, Venezuela is struggling with a state of diarchy between opposition leader Juan Guaido and President Nicolas Maduro that has strongly divided international opinion. Despite the fact that Guaido is still supported by many Latin American and European countries and the United States24, Maduro can

                                                             21 22

23 24

Venezuela’s Economic Crisis: Issues for Congress, (Washington D.C.: Congressional Research Service, 2018), p. 1–2. For an exact source please refer to the link below. Available at: [Accessed at 19.07.2020 at 10:00]. “U.S. relation with Venezuela”, The U.S. Department of State. Available at: [Accessed on 01.11.2019]. The Economist. “The not-so-strong bolivar”, February 11, 2013. Available at: [Accessed on 05.11.2019].

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still rely on aid from the Russian Federation or the People’s Republic of China25. Nevertheless, the specific division of international influence does not improve the economic situation of Venezuela and its citizens. The discrepancy of the international opinion concerning the Venezuelan case is causing a growing wave of sanctions from the United States, which intensifies the recession. The Maduro regime possesses the growing support of Russia, which uses the crisis to implement its own economic and political strategies toward Venezuela’s resources26. For China, Venezuela is still, above all, the most important investment area in the Latin America region. Thus, Beijing is mainly concerned about the possibility of U.S. influence in Venezuela’s oil sector27. Venezuela’s economy does not function in theory or in practice. Its oil production dropped sharply, foreign assets were taken over by creditors and citizens suffer from a shortage of food and medicines. Taking everything into account, domestic production has fallen at least by half considering all sectors of the economy. Along with the recession, in Caracas there is also a crisis of governance and, above all, democracy. Maduro’s government decided to weaken the rudimentary institutions of the state and already collapsed the judicial system28. Subsequently, to stay in power, the government has been using several forms of terror including paramilitary militias called colectivos. Hence, organized crime is a well-functioning institution and the drug industry is still a huge problem for Venezuela, especially since political elites, police and the army are corrupt and have deep ties with criminals. Surely, it is Maduro’s personal relations with the army that allow him to maintain his position in the country29. Because of the crime level, Venezuela topped the list of

                                                             25

26 27

28 29

Alexandra O’Brien, “Venezuela and Russia: Geopolitical Allies in the 21st Century”, The Yale Review of International Studies, March, 2019 Available at: [Accessed on 01.11.2019]. Vladimir Rouvinski, Russian-Venezuelan Relations at a Crossroads, (Washington D.C.: Wilson Center, Latin American Program, 2018), 5–7. Rendon, Moises. “When Investment Hurts: Chinese Influence in Venezuela”, Center for Strategic & International Studied, April 3, 2018. Available at: [Accessed on 04.07.2020, at 02:57]. Jose Ignacio Hernandez, Venezuela’s Presidential Crisis and the Transition to Democracy, (Washington D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies1, 2019), p. 1–3. Venezuela: Political Crisis and U.S. Policy, (Washington D.C.: Congressional Research Service, 2019), p. 2–3.

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the most violent countries in the world. In 2018, the World Bank’s data showed 81.4 murders per 100,000 people30. In 2017, hunger intensified to the extent that three-quarters of citizens lost an average of eight kilograms of body weight. In addition, more than a half of Venezuelans do not have sufficient income to meet basic life needs. The report published by the United Nations in 2019 shows that 91% of Venezuelans live in poverty and 61% live in extreme poverty with less than $1.9 a day31. Stores and warehouses are still empty and since there is a shortage of medicines hospitals do not accept patients because of the impossibility of treatment and hospitalization. However, Maduro systematically refuses to accept foreign assistance and claims that the crisis was created in the media by Washington and international organizations cooperating with the U.S. In Maduro’s opinion, this is a method to justify American intervention to take control of Venezuela’s energy resources. That is why the decision to conduct U.S. military intervention in the region seems to resemble the paradigm of Thomas Schelling’s game theory. However, the Trump administration still calculates possibilities and losses in the event of U.S. armed intervention32.

Theories of economic crises and “Dutch disease” as a theoretical framework According to the theories of international economics, a recession is a demonstration of a decline in general economic activity, especially domestic production and employment33. It is often considered to be the first phase of the business cycle. With production significantly falling, the recession deepens and eventually turns into a so called depression. The recession is most often associated with a lower level of labor productivity, decrease of economic

                                                             30

31

32

33

“Intentional homicides (per 100,000 people)—Venezuela, RB”, World Bank, accesses November 1, 2019. Available at: [Accessed on 01.11.2019]. Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights On the Situation of Human Rights in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, (New York, The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2019), p. 3. Herrera, Felipe. “Game theory in the Venezuelan Crisis: The Challenge for Credible Bargaining”, Georgetown Security Studies Review, March 12, 2019. Available at: [Accessed on 04.07.2020, at 02:50]. Paul Krugman, Currencies and Crises, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 68.

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growth, falling real wages and income (society’s income), growth rate slowdown, investment outlays dropping, stunting of price and unemployment increase34. It should be noted that unemployment is usually caused by the collapse of many enterprises, which results in mass layoffs and a reduction of jobs35. In addition, the most important symptoms of economic crises include: inflation or hyperinflation and decline in production, wages, employment, income, consumption, investment, and GDP. On the other hand, there is an increase in unemployment and budget, fiscal and trade deficits36. The economic crisis of Venezuela adequately conforms to the theories of “Dutch Disease” and petro-states approach. The indicated term was first used in 1977 in The Economist’s article and means economic recession caused by the discovery and intensive exploitation of natural resource deposits37. By the possibilities of increasing exports, which have their source in supply, contrary to appearances, the economy does not develop in a long-term perspective. However, it can be noticed that other economic sectors regress. As a reminder, Venezuela first struggled with Dutch disease in 1929 when the development of the oil industry dominated the country’s economy for the first time. According to the theory, the workforce is concentrated in the oil industry with a simultaneous lack of employees in agriculture or production. Countries with such a model of economic management are known as petro-states. For illustration, when the oil industry weakens, unemployment increases, indicating a risky dependence of the state on the export of natural resources. Sometimes, countries like Venezuela give up local oil production and instead decide to derive most of their tax revenues from foreign oil companies. This trap makes petro-states highly vulnerable to fluctuations in global energy prices and exposed to the risk of sudden capital outflow38. The Dutch disease infects not only the state economy but also the political institutions. In export-based countries, the financial system is poorly

                                                             34 35 36 37

38

Adam Budnikowski, Międzynarodowe Stosunki Gospodarcze, (Warszawa: Polskie Towarzystwo Ekonomiczne, 2001), p. 411. Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), p. 27. Stijn Claessens and Auhan Kose, Financial Crises: Explanations, Types, and Implications, (Washington D.C.: IMF Working Papers, 2013), p. 28. Research points to a new explanation of “Dutch disease”, The Economist, August 10, 2017, Available at: [Accessed on 04.07.2020, at: 03:10]. Joanna Gocłowska-Bolek, Proces uzależniania gospodarki Wenezueli od przemysłu naftowego, Ameryka Łacińska. (Uniwersytet Warszawski, 2018), p. 111.

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organized, which makes the relations between the government and citizens fragile. Interestingly, Professor Terry Karl from Stanford University notes that dependence on oil appears in countries shortly after the establishment of the democratic system, state and judicial institutions, independent civil service and the private sector. It is worth to underline that country leaders rely on export resources to maintain political power and suppress opposition. According to economists Venezuela is the archetype of the petro-state. Over a hundred years after the discovery of oil deposits, this raw material still plays a leading role in the Venezuelan economy. Hence, the recent fall in oil prices from over $100 per barrel in 2014 to $3039 at the beginning of 201640 has caused significant economic and political turbulence for the Venezuelan economy. It is believed that exiting the ongoing recession may even take decades41.

Internal determinants of the Venezuelan economic crisis The Venezuela’s economy has been mostly based on the oil industry and petrochemical exports since the 1940s. In the first decade of the present century, Venezuela was the tenth producer and eighth net exporter of oil in the world. According to data from 2018, revenues from oil exports currently account for around 50% of GDP and almost 96%42 of Venezuela’s total export revenues. Moreover, Venezuela has the largest confirmed oil deposits in the world, with 302.80943 billion barrels, or 47 billion tons (representing 17.6% of global reserves). The country has the second largest natural gas reserve in the Western Hemisphere, with 5.7 trillion m3 (3.1% of global resources)44. It

                                                             39

40 41

42 43

44

“Average annual OPEC crude oil price from 1960 to 2019 (in U.S. dollars per barrel)”, Statista.com, accessed November 1, 2019, Available at: https://www.statista.com/statist ics/262858/change-in-opec-crude-oil-prices-since-960/ [Accessed on 04.07.2020, at 02:51]. “Oil Market Report”, International Energy Agency. Available at: [Accessed on 01.11.2019]. Labrador, Rocio Cara. “Venezuela: The Rise and Fall of a Petrostate”, Council on Foreign Relations, January 24, 2019. Available at: [Accessed on 04.07.2020, at 02:45]. Country Analysis Executive Summary: Venezuela, (Washington. D.C.: the U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2019), p. 1–3. “Venezuela Facts and Figures”, Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. Available at: [Accessed on 01.11.2019]. “Crude oil—proved reserves”, The World Factbook CIA. Available at: https://www. cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/docs/notesanddefs.html#264/ [Accessed on 01.11.2019].

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is no wonder then why Venezuela is such an important member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)45. To understand the current state of affairs, it is absolutely necessary to look at the important events in the economic history of this South American country. Venezuela’s present tragedy began in 1929 when Royal Dutch Shell discovered huge oil deposits in the Maracaibo basin. In a short time, this disclosure caused oil production to explode from several million to 137 million barrels, which made Venezuela take second place in production in the United States. Doubtless, the indicated period is the first sign of a worsening of the Dutch disease. Further problems arose in the 1930s, when the Venezuelan government tried to recover oil extraction fees from foreign corporations—Royal Dutch Shell, Gulf and Standard Oil46. However, it was not until 1943 that the government introduced the relevant Gas Hydrocarbons Law, which assumed the necessity to transfer half of the profits from oil production to the state treasury. Subsequently, OPEC played a huge role in the dependence of the Venezuelan economy on oil exports and economic crises. In 1960, Venezuela joined the OPEC and founded the first state-owned oil company, raising the income tax on oil companies to 65%. Luckily, the following years maintained a good run on the energy market and favorable prices. Especially, a boom occurred in 1973 after Arab retaliation against Israel for the Yom Kippur war. As a result, OPEC decided to impose a five-month embargo on states that supported Israel in its attempts to keep its independence47. The forced sanctions quickly made Venezuela the richest country in Latin America by 1975, $10 billion had flown into the state’s treasury. The huge income from oil exports was the first attempt by the government to conduct an incompetent management of the country’s economy. According to data, over $100 billion was misappropriated between 1972 and 199748. One of the most important events in Venezuela took place in 1976 when President Carlos Andres Perez nationalized the oil industry and created the state-owned company Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA). The company’s duties included running research and development programs, production, refining

                                                             45 46 47

48

Gocłowska-Bolek, “Proces”, p. 111–113. Cara Labrador, “Venezuela”. “Reinventing the system 1972–1981”, International Monetary Fund. Available at: https://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/center/mm/eng/mm_rs_02.htm/ [Accessed on 01.11.2019]. Gustavo Coronel, “The Corruption of Democracy in Venezuela”, Cato Institute, March 4, 2008, Available at: [Accessed on 09.11.2019].

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and, of course, oil exports to foreign markets. Most astonishingly, the concern was also involved in running, maintaining and settling social transfers and funds, by which Chavez used to buy his popularity for many years49. Further problems began in the 1980s prompted by the sharp fall in oil prices on world energy markets50. The reduction in prices caused deep inflation, which created a sudden contraction of the Venezuelan economy and simultaneous foreign debt. In 1989, the International Monetary Fund was forced to launch a savings package as part of direct assistance to Venezuela, which sparked numerous protests and riots across Caracas and other cities. Social dissatisfaction spread the so-called Bolivarian revolution led by Hugo Chavez, who ultimately became the newly elected president in 1999. During his initial rule, Venezuela experienced the largest decrease in oil exports to foreign markets. Luckily for him, the prosperity of global oil prices returned at the beginning of the 21st century51. Briefly, the Chavez administration experienced price increases of oil from $10 per barrel in 1999 to $133 in 200852. In practice, this meant an increase in oil revenues to $900 million, where half that amount was achieved between 2007 and 2012. Unfortunately, the period of prosperity did not last long. The economy of Venezuela plunged as a result of Chavez’s decision to take a loan for oil exports, which caused a huge budget deficit. Hence, between 2000–2012 Venezuela’s public debt double from 28% to 58% of GDP53.

                                                             49

50

51 52 53

Colin Wiseman and Daniel Beland, The Politics of Institutional Change in Venezuela: Oil Policy During The Presidency of Hugo Chavez, (Oxfordshire: Taylor and Francis, Canadian Journal of Latin American And Caribbean Studies, 2010), p. 143–144. Keith Johnson, “How Venezuela Struck it Poor”, The Foreign Affairs, July 16, 2018, Available at: [Accessed on 08.11.2019]. Michael McCarthy, “Venezuela’s Manmade Disaster”, Current History: A journal of Contemporary World Affairs 787, Vol. 116, (February, 2017): p. 61–67. “Europe Brent Spot Price FOB”, U.S. Energy Information Administration, accessed November 1, 2019, https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/rbrteD.htm. Venezuela’s Economic Crisis, CRS, p. 4–6.

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The U.S. Free on Board shots of Venezuela Crude Oil [Source: U.S. EIA] 120 100 80 60 40 20 2019

2018

2016 2017

2015

2013 2014

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2004 2005

2003

2002

2001

2000

0

Table 3. The U.S. Free on Board Costs of Venezuela Crude Oil [Table inspired by data obtained from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s website54]. After the death of Chavez in 2013, Nicolas Maduro took over the rulership in Venezuela and inherited the unbalanced and pathological economic policy of his predecessor. It can be said that the 2014 elections became the starting point for the current economic tragedy of Venezuela. Obviously, during this period, global markets have experienced another fall in oil prices. What is more, the main problem of the economy at the time was the lack of foreign exchange reserves or property funds that could mitigate the risk of price fluctuations. The sudden reduction in oil export revenues led to a decrease in government income, which started the economic recession and political crisis. The public finances have been heavily burdened by the rampant crash; thus the living conditions of Venezuela’s citizens are now a humanitarian catastrophe55. Maduro did not decide to create an effective fiscal policy that

                                                             54

55

For an exact source of this information please refer to the link below. Available at: [Accessed at 19.07.2020 at 10:00]. Monice De Bolle, “Maduro’s Economic Plan for Venezuela: Back to the 1980s?”, Peterson Institute for International Economics”, August 23, 2018. Available at: [Accessed on 01.11.2019].

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would be able to stop the effects of the crisis by raising taxes or cutting public spending. Instead, the president started to reduce the budget deficit by printing money, which resulted in hyperinflation. Subsequently, the main effects of Maduro’s economic policy include falling production, circular economy and a contraction of GDP, deepening public debt, aforementioned hyperinflation, strengthening autocracy and a humanitarian crisis. There are also problems with the hermeticity of the Venezuelan government and the lack of official economic data due to the fact that the central bank has practically ceased to operate56. According to the latest data of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) from 2017, inflation had reached 180.1%57. Based on IMF data, it is estimated that the inflation rate for November 2019 is 200,000%58. According to the report of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the plan to stop hyperinflation requires extensive and long-term international action conducted by the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank. Certainly, extensive programs would have to cover: an exchange rate peg, a debt restructuring program, relocation of fiscal expenditure and restructuring of income sources. In particular, the government should begin the arduous process of independence from exports. Authorities should also consider spending policies carefully and in particular limit social transfers and other programs to promote consumption59.

                                                             56 57 58 59

De Bolle, “Maduro”. Economic Survey of Latin America and the Caribbean, (Santiago de Chile: the Economic Commission of Latin America and the Caribbean, 2017), p. 17–21. “Republica Bolivariana de Venezuela”, International Monetary Fund. Available at: [Accessed on 01.11.2019]. Dany Bahar, Ted Piccone and Harold Trinkunas, Venezuela: A Path out of Misery, (New York, Foreign Policy at. Brookings Institution, 2018,) p. 10–11.

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Inflation rate, average consumer prices (Annual percent change) [Source: IMF] 80000 60000 40000 20000 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020

0

Inflation rate , average consumer prices (Annual percent change) [Source: IMF]

Table 4. Inflation rate, average consumer prices (Annual percent change) [Table inspired by data obtained from the IMF’s website60].

Social programs and political populism However, the economic crisis that is deeply affecting Venezuela nowadays is not just a result of energy policy. The lack of economic diversification goes hand in hand with the problem of political populism, social programs, corruption and state interference in the economy. Extensive social assistance and spending programs defined as “Bolivarian missions” were initiated during Chavez’s presidency and continued by Maduro. They cover over thirty social programs focusing on justice and social assistance, education, the struggle against poverty, and military recruitment. The transfers deepened public spending packages, which certainly contributed to the economic collapse of Venezuela. In the years 2000–2013, Chavez expanded social programs from 28% to 40% of GDP, which is a much larger social investment than those to other large Latin American economies61. Anyway, populist social transfers gained the favor of citizens who loyally supported his presidency. It should be noted that social assistance helped reduce poverty from 37% to 25% in

                                                             60

61

For an exact source of this information please refer to the link below. Available at:

[Accessed at 19.07.2020 at 10:00]. Richard Lapper, Living with Hugo, U.S. Policy Toward Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, (New York: Council on Foreign Relations New York, The Center for Preventive Action, 2006), p. 10–12.

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201262. However, the negative effects of social programs are visible in the current recession. Neither Chavez nor Maduro did not supported investment expenditure that would probably have increased productivity and independence from oil exports. The extensive nationalization of enterprises discouraged foreign investors. The imposition of price control has affected market distortions and limited the capacity of the private sector. Apparently, populists like Chavez and Maduro believe in the power of elections and referendums. Social programs are effective tools of high voter turnout and public participation in politics. They allow increasing the autocracy and reduce possibilities of the institution of liberal democracy; they allow dictatorship to rule by portraying their opponents as egoistic public enemies. The charisma of leaders makes citizens believe in a better future for the state and their families. However, such perspectives are based on the lack of civil liberties, freedom of the media, press and the judicial system. It is possible that it was the attachment to populism that spread the protests all over the Venezuelan streets63. What affects the economy of Venezuela just as deeply as poor economic policy, is the corruption of governments and the protection of high-ranking officials64. Many analysts speculate as to why Maduro manages to maintain the loyalty of the military in Venezuela and thus the presidency. Reportedly, many military leaders have grown rich by corruption, drug trafficking and other sorts of organized crimes65. In the event of an exchange of power, the military fear that they may be prosecuted for violating human rights, which would expose them to prison or extradition, which is why they still support Maduro. Moreover, such widespread corruption limits the possibilities for sanctions imposed by the United States because corruption provides extensive opportunities for money laundering and other ways to gain influence and wealth66.

                                                             62

63

64 65 66

Julia Buxton, Social Policy in Venezuela, Bucking Neoliberalism or Unsustainable Clientelism, (New York: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 2014), p. 20. Friedman, Uri. “How Populism Helped Wreck Venezuela”, The Atlantic, June 4, 2017. Available at: [Accessed on 04.07.2020, at 02:47]. Richard Lapper, “Living”, p. 16. Advisory on Widespread Public Corruption in Venezuela, (Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of the Treasury, Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, 2017), p. 2–3. Douglas Farah and Caitlyn Yates, Maduro’s Last Stand: Venezuela’s Survival Through the Bolivarian Joint Criminal Enterprise, (New York: IBI Consultants and the National Defense University, 2019), p. 14.

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External determinants of the Venezuelan economic crisis As noted in the introduction to the article, the political and economic crisis of Venezuela is not only the result of internal action. Systemic determinants have also contributed to the extended recession. Thus, is worth underlining that fluctuations in oil prices can also be described as a systemic factor. However, due to the already described Dutch disease and dependence on oil exports, this factor was treated as part of the internal perspective. Hence, it should be remembered that some of the factors that will be analyzed in this section are not a direct cause of the Venezuelan crisis. They surely deepened the economic disaster that has already existed for many years. One of the main factors aggravating the recession in Venezuela is the sanctions imposed by the United States. As a result of the spreading economic, political and humanitarian crisis, the Trump administration has decided to extend existing sanctions and other enforcement tools to Maduro’s policy. Ultimately, The United States government managed to impose sanctions primarily on PDVSA, the central bank and the entire Venezuelan government. To clarify their position, the Trump administration listed a number of reasons for the American president’s decision, including: violation of human rights, usurpation of power, crisis of democracy, corruption, degradation of infrastructure and the environment and confiscation of mining and industrial practices. Moreover, the United States burdened the government in Caracas which reated a regional migration crisis due to the mass emigration of Venezuelan citizens to neighboring countries. According to the Congressional Research Service report, the U.S. has imposed four types of sanctions: a) Targeted Sanctions on Venezuelan Officials, b) Sanctions Restricting Venezuela’s Access to U.S. Financial Markets, c) Sanctions on Sectors of the Venezuela Economy, d) Sanctions on Maduro’s Government and Persons Transacting with or Assisting the Government67. The first category of sanctions was imposed in 2015 during the presidency of Barack Obama under the Venezuela Defense of Human Rights and Civil Society Act of 2014. Sanctions included the blocking of President Maduro’s assets and visa restrictions. The preventive measures also targeted members of the government who were responsible for acts of violence and human rights violations during the 2014 protests. Briefly, the sanctions af-

                                                             67

Venezuela Background and U.S. Relations, (Washington D.C.: Congressional Research Service, 2019), p. 34.

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fected everyone who issued an arrest warrant for persons who acted in accordance with the right to freedom of expression and assembly. Trump extended these sanctions to the wife of President Maduro, Ceclia Flores and their son, executive Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, first Vice President of PSUV Diosdado Cabello, eight members of the Supreme Court, the leaders of the Venezuelan Army, National Police and Guard, four state governors, the director of the central bank and the Minister of Foreign Affairs68. Similarly, the U.S. Treasury Department also imposed sanctions on 22 people with links to Venezuela’s government and 27 companies that were involved in drug trafficking. Later, a second category of sanctions was launched in 2017 and concerned the termination of U.S. sources of government funding in Caracas. In August 2017, the American president issued a special regulation that prevents access to American financial markets, including PDVSA, in particular to the United States’ equity and debt markets. Further expansion of sanctions in 2018 prohibited U.S. investors from buying or making transactions in Venezuela’s digital currency, petro. In 2019, Trump imposed additional restrictions on bond trading and PDVSA opportunities on secondary markets. Finally, the fourth category of sanctions that were imposed in 2018 concerned the oil, gold, finance and security sectors of Venezuela. They prohibit transactions with entities that practice or are involved in corruption and other fraudulent exchange practices69. In particular, this problem applies to companies that allow Maduro to transfer money abroad and consequently, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on companies and ships that have been allowing Venezuela to export oil to Cuba, and the Cuban government for its ongoing support of Maduro70. This category of sanctions is related to the placement of property and interests of Maduro’s government, which are under the control of American persons71.

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69

70

71

“Treasury Sanctions Venezuelan Minister of Foreign Affairs”, U.S. Department of the Treasury, accessed November 1, 2019, https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/ sm670. “Michael R. Pompeo—United States Takes Action on Vast Corruption Network in Venezuela”, U.S. Department of State. Available at: [Accessed on 01.11.2019]. “Treasury Targets Cuban Support for the Illegitimate Venezuelan Regime”, The U.S. Department of State, accessed November 1, 2019, https://home.treasury.gov/news/ press-releases/sm722. Dany Bahar, “Chavismo Is the Worst of All Sanctions: The Evidence Behind the Humanitarian Catastrophe in Venezuela,” Brookings Institution, May 22, 2019. Available at: [Accessed on 01.11.2019, at. 23:30]. Dan Bahar, “Venezuela: A path out of misery”, Brookings Institutions, October 2018, Available at: [Accessed on 01.11.2019]. Monica de Bolle, “Trump and Venezuela: Who Takes Responsibility for a Disaster?”, The Peterson Institute for International Economics, May 23, 2019. Available at: [Accessed on 08.11.2019].

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However, interim president Juan Guaido declared that in the event of a change of power, Venezuela would choose to honor all foreign contracts concluded with partners including China and Russia. Unfortunately, there are many other systemic problems for the future. Especially, qualitative and quantitative changes on the energy market are another challenge for both Venezuela and foreign investors. It should be remembered that when the Venezuelan oil company PDVSA experienced its greatest period of prosperity, the global energy industry was based on fossil fuels. Since then, the world and the climate have experienced irreversible changes. More and more countries are gradually moving away from fossil fuels by investing in other forms of obtaining energy, renewable sources in particular. It is possible that the demand for crude oil will fall along with prices of this raw material. That is why Venezuela is no longer as attractive to foreign investors as it was many years ago. Every plan and attempt to heal the Venezuelan economy should therefore identify the appropriate calculation. This requires a revision of the entire economic model and extensive diversification in the future. Economic diversity is an important safeguard in the event of turbulence and crises. Relying on one source of income is inextricably linked to the risk of recession as Venezuela has experienced repeatedly74.

The presidential crisis as a result of the collapsing of the state’s economy Maduro’s second term in office began on January 10, 2019, despite the fact that most Western Hemisphere countries, the G7 Group, the United States and the European Union did not recognize his authority. According to international opinion, Venezuela’s democratic power lies in the hands of the chairman of the National Assembly, which on January 5 supported the government of Juan Guaido (Popular Will Party). On January 23, Guaido declared himself interim president, and his decision was directly supported by the United States and 55 other countries. The National Assembly, led by the interim president, adopted a resolution that treats Nicolas Maduro’s mandate as illegal. Subsequently, Juan Guaido proposed a strategy for the political transition period of Venezuela, amnesty for officials and a humanitarian aid

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Lowenthal, Abraham F. and Smilde, David. “Venezuela: Is There a Way Out of this Tragic Impasse?”, Woodrow Wilson Center, July 9, 2019. Available at: [Accessed on 04.07.2020, at 2:45].

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plan. However, despite many efforts, Guaido still cannot rely on the support of the army and police. The food supplies that were to be delivered to Venezuela in February across the Colombian border were blocked by the National Guard and armed civilian groups called colectivos75. As a result of riots around food convoys, hundreds of people were injured and seven were killed. In the face of growing protests, in February 2019 Guaido called for civil and military rebellion against the illegally incumbent president Maduro but troops supporting the dictatorship suppressed the uprisings. During the protests many independent journalists were attacked, and a lot of social media accounts were removed76. For a long time, Guaido and his supporters have been hoping that the ongoing protests and response from the international community would force Maduro to surrender. Unfortunately, both the economic and political crisis continue to deepen, which causes mass migration of Venezuelan citizens to neighboring countries. The relationship between the army and the National Guard remains the biggest challenge for the interim president. That is why the U.S. government tried to influence this situation by announcing the liquidation of sanctions against officials who would cease support for Maduro77. However, after further sanctions by the United States government, Guaido withdrew from protests in early August. Hence, Maduro’s dictatorship still remains, and the economic and social crisis continues to expand. There are still strong ties between the army and the PSUV leader, although Maduro has no control over the National Assembly and the state’s economic resources78.

The international response to the Venezuelan crises The ongoing crisis in Venezuela has caused numerous engagements from the international community: the United Nations, the Organization of American States, the Lima Group, the European Union, the International Contact Group and the Dialogue Effort led by Norway79. Although the list of organ-

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Report on Repression in Venezuela, (Caracas: Foro Penal, 2019), 4–5. “Picking up the Pieces After Venezuela’s Quashed Uprising”, International Crisis Group, May 1, 2019, https://www.crisisgroup.org/latin-america-caribbean/andes/venezuela/pi cking-pieces-after-venezuelas-quashed-uprising. Farah, “Maduro’s”, 17. Venezuela: Political Crisis, CRS, 1–2. Clare Ribando Seelke, Venezuela: International Efforts to Resolve the Political Crisis, (Washington D.C.: Congressional Research Service, 2019), 1–2.

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izations and likely actions is promising, unfortunately the mediations undertaken have not been effective so far. Governments of individual countries and institutions, when considering steps towards Venezuela, are guided by hard pragmatism rather than by a comprehensive commitment to the crisis. Nevertheless, it seems that Venezuela cannot get out of the recession without comprehensive outside aid. Without the restoration of state institutions, no economic reform can occur. Attempts to resolve the crisis on the part of the UN take place primarily in the Security Council; however, differences in positions still prevent the development of joint decisions. While most European countries support Guaido, the governments of Russia and China remain defiant80. Despite the lack of consensus, the UN continues to provide humanitarian aid to Venezuela. The High Commissioner for Refugees and International Organization for Migration supports over 4.3 million Venezuelan refugees who have decided to leave Venezuela due to a humanitarian crisis. A similar situation takes place on the forum of the Organization of American States. However, diplomatic efforts for peace in Venezuela began in early August 2017 when 12 Latin American countries signed the so-called agreement with Lima. The Lima Group, which treats the government of Nicolas Maduro as illegal, is calling on members of the international community to do similar activities, including military support, in particular from the United States. Although most countries see the validity and necessity to support Venezuela, it is difficult to establish a common decision on future actions81. For instance, CARICOM member states are opposed to interfering in Venezuela’s internal affairs due to close economic links and previous Venezuelan subsidized oil exports. In January 2019, 19 members of the OAS adopted a resolution acknowledging the illegality of Maduro’s authority and recognizing the government of interim president Juan Guaido. But the remaining Latin American states condemned the actions of the OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro for unjust activism and interference in the internal affairs of Venezuela. The European Union, like the United States, has decided to impose sectoral sanctions on Maduro along with other officials and an embargo on the

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Emily Talkin, “Why Is Russia Clashing with the United States over Venezuela?” Washington Post, May 1, 2019. Available at: [Accessed on 21/ 07/2020, at. 23:00]. “Venezuela: Events of 2019”, Human Rights Watch, accessed November 1, 2019, Available at: [Accessed on 21/07/2020, at. 23:15].

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supply of arms from Venezuela. However, the European Parliament does not support armed intervention by any organization or state. It is worth noting that such countries as Brazil or Colombia do not support any hypothetical military intervention which only points out a serious discrepancy. Instead, the European Union favors diplomatic activities within the International Contact Group, which was created in February 2019. From May 2019, ICG has supported the efforts of the Norway Dialogue, which aims to develop a consensus between Guaido and Maduro followed by the possibility to hold free elections in Venezuela. However, due to another wave of sanctions from the United States, Maduro refused to participate in the talks in August 2019. Despite a broad package of sanctions, the United States government is trying to work out an appropriate legislative agreement with Congress that deals with direct financial assistance for Venezuela82. In a recent budget request, the Trump Administration asked Congress to donate $9 million to support democratic processes and $500 million as a crisis package. Trump also noted that if Maduro resigns from office, the aid package will be increased, also by the International Monetary Fund83.

Summary Venezuela’s present economic crisis is deeply rooted in its own distant socioeconomic history. The crisis that is currently affecting this South American state affects every public sphere: economic, political, but above all, social. The current recession is a kind of hybrid of internal and systemic actions that have been plunging Venezuela into crisis for many years. The main internal economic factors include, first of all, incompetent management of huge oil deposits, which led Venezuela to the brink of bankruptcy. Doubtless, the Dutch disease has been accompanying this country since the 1930s. In practice, uncontrollable fluctuations in oil prices on world markets cause widespread turbulence for the Venezuelan economy. Although, the indicated country has experienced many recessions, the government is still making the same mistakes and is not prepared to offer multidimensional reforms for their citizens. However, the causes of the crisis

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“U.S. Government Support for the Democratic Aspirations of the Venezuelan People”, U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, accessed November 1, 2019, https://www.state.gov/u-s-government-support-for-the-democratic-aspiration s-of-the-venezuelan-people. Ribando Seelke, “Venezuela”, 1–2.

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100 Iga Kleszczyńska are also politically motivated. Populism bought for petrodollars gave the opportunity to maintain Chavez’s power as well as Maduro’s consequently. Social transfers intensify stagnation and deepen the existing humanitarian crisis, but still allow leaders to win elections. This direction of public policies and power relations with citizens ultimately led to the problems of widespread corruption, dictatorial rule, and disappearances of the institution of a democratic state of law, fundamental civil rights and freedom of the media and the press. Mass protests are pouring into the street, which is consuming more and more victims. Through inefficient rule, Venezuela became internally and externally hermetic. The government is not able to improve the living conditions of its citizens, and in addition consistently refuses help from the outside. However, Venezuela’s economic crisis has extensive ideological connections. Given the division of the international opinion one may point out that perspective of Cold War rivalry between the West and the East still endures in the Latin America region. Maduro’s governments are being favored by Russia and China, which are effectively helping to keep him in power. Above all, they are afraid of losing extremely important energy resources because of American interference. The division among international powers also intensifies the economic recession. Due to the prevailing economic and presidential crisis, the United States is consistently deciding to maintain sanctions against the Venezuelan government. However, the question remains to what extent the measures taken by the Trump administration seem to be effective in the long term. Many experts say that the sanctions imposed on Venezuela lead to an even greater humanitarian disaster. The external balance of power further intensifies the internal state of diarchy. However, the potential assumption of power by the interim president Guaido seems increasingly unreal. The level of organized crime, Maduro’s relationship with the military and corruption still allow him to maintain power. Hence, the scenario for Venezuela’s economic and social situation in the coming years is not very optimistic. Any improvement in the situation will certainly require not only a change of government and internal actions, but above all, extensive assistance from abroad. The damage that has been done to Venezuela’s economy will be remembered for decades to come.

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102 Iga Kleszczyńska Coronel, Gustavo. “The Corruption of Democracy in Venezuela”, Cato Institute, March 4, 2008. Available at: https://www.cato.org/publicatio ns/commentary/corruption-democracy-venezuela/ [Accessed on 04. 07.2020, at 02:45]. Economic Survey of Latin America and the Caribbean. Santiago de Chile: the Economic Commission of Latin America and the Caribbean, 2017. Farah. Douglas and Yates Caitlyn. Maduro’s Last Stand: Venezuela’s Survival Through the Bolivarian Joint Criminal Enterprise. New York: IBI Consultants and the National Defense University, 2019. Friedman, Uri. “How Populism Helped Wreck Venezuela”, The Atlantic, June 4, 2017. Available at: [Accessed on 04.07.2020, at 02:47]. Gocłowska-Bolek, Joanna. Proces uzależniania gospodarki Wenezueli od przemysłu naftowego, Ameryka Łacińska. Warszawa: Uniwersytet Warszawski, 2018. Hernandez, Jose Ignacio. Venezuela’s Presidential Crisis and the Transition to Democracy. Washington D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies1, 2019. Herrera, Felipe. “Game theory in the Venezuelan Crisis: The Challenge for Credible Bargaining”, Georgetown Security Studies Review, March 12, 2019. Available at: [Accessed on 04.07.2020, at 02:50]. International Crisis Group. “Picking up the Pieces After Venezuela’s Quashed Uprising”, May 1, 2019. Available at: [Accessed on 04.07.2020, at 02:50]. International Energy Agency. “Oil Market Report”, accessed November 1, 2019. Available at: [Accessed on 01.11.2019]. —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

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104 Iga Kleszczyńska Statista.com. “Average annual OPEC crude oil price from 1960 to 2019 (in U.S. dollars per barrel)”, Statista.com, accessed November 1, 2019. Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/262858/change-in-op ec-crude-oil-prices-since-1960/ [Accessed on 01.11.2019]. The Economist. “Research points to a new explanation of “Dutch disease”, August 10, 2017. Available at: https://www.economist.com/financeand-economics/2017/08/10/research-points-to-a-new-explanation-of -dutch-disease/ [Accessed on 01.11.2019]. The Economist. “The not-so-strong bolivar”, February 11, 2013. Available at: https://www.economist.com/blogs/americasview/2013/02/venez uela%E2%80%99s-currency [Accessed on 05.11.2019]. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. “Venezuela Facts and Figures”. Available at: https://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/abo ut_us/171.htm/ [Accessed on 01.11.2019]. The U.S. Department of State. “Michael R. Pompeo - United States Takes Action on Vast Corruption Network in Venezuela”. Available at: https://www.state.gov/united-states-takes-action-on-vast-corruptionnetwork-in-venezuela/ [Accessed on 01.11.2019]. The U.S. Department of State. “Treasury Targets Cuban Support for the Illegitimate Venezuelan Regime”. Available at: https://home.treasury. gov/news/press- releases/sm722/ [Accessed on 01.11.2019]. The U.S. Department of State. “U.S. relation with Venezuela”. Available at: https://2009-017.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/35766.htm/ [Accessed on 01. 11.2019]. The U.S. Department of the Treasury. “Treasury Sanctions Venezuelan Minister of Foreign Affairs”. Available at: https://home.treasury.gov/news /press-releases/sm670/ [Accessed on 01.11.2019]. The U.S. Energy Information Administration. “Europe Brent Spot Price FOB”. 2019. Available at: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/rbrte D.htm/ [Accessed on 01.11.2019]. The World Factbook CIA. “Crude oil – proved reserves”. Available at: https: //www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/docs/notesa nddefs.html#264/ [Accessed on 01.11.2019]. Venezuela Background and U.S. Relations. Washington D.C.: Congressional Research Service, 2019). Venezuela’s Economic Crisis: Issues for Congress. Washington D.C.: Congressional Research Service, 2018. Venezuela: Political Crisis and U.S. Policy. Washington D.C.: Congressional Research Service, 2019.

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Venezuela: Recent Economic Development. Washington D.C.: International Monetary Fund, 1998. Wiseman , Colin and Beland, Daniel The Politics of Institutional Change in Venezuela: Oil Policy During The Presidency of Hugo Chavez. Oxfordshire: Tylor and Francis, Canadian Journal of Latin American And Caribbean Studies, 2010. World Bank. “Intentional homicides (per 100,000 people)—Venezuela, RB”, Available at: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5? locations=VE/ [Accessed on 01.11.2019]. World Economic Outlook of 2019. Washington D.C.: International Monetary Fund, 2019.

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Bálint L. Tóth

HSR Projects in V4 Countries: EU-driven spillovers of Central East European transport development initiatives Abstract: EU investment initiatives strengthened trade and economic connections within the V4 region. Such projects spilled into the demand for constructing denser, safer, and more reliable rail services. However, as opposed to core EU states, spillovers in Visegrád countries are primarily driven by ad hoc governmental efforts, whereas the automaticity of non-governmental spillover directions is less observable in this case. The research suggests that practical integration in V4 countries generally involves high-level decision making. Spillovers of government and EU decisions are key factors in understanding the nature of interstate regional cooperative endeavors. Examining spillovers helps keep track of the expansion of collaboration circles. Comprehensive spillover researches could be essential in comprehending the directions and dynamics of country alignments within the EU and analyzing the V4’s evolution. This paper shall contribute to the better understanding of the spillover phenomena in Central Eastern Europe, while seeking answers on how and to what extent international policies, polities, and lobbies shape the Visegrád Cooperation’s functioning through spillovers. This paper intends to advance thinking on the catalysts of V4 policy making by offering an overview on the nature and directions of spillovers triggering Visegrád high-speed railway projects. Railway constructions imply further integration at political and policy levels. Keywords: Visegrád Cooperation, Visegrád Four, Railway Construction Projects, Central Europe, Spillovers

Introduction In a previous work (Tóth, 2018a) the Author asserts that the Visegrád Group (the Czech Republic, Hungary, the Republic of Poland, and the Slovak Republic)84 is a seemingly permanent country alignment within the European Union. The evolution of the V4 is not a linear process: the actual and ad hoc sectoral synergies are the engines of the interstate cooperation’s dy-

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Henceforth to be referred to as “V4”, “the Visegrád Four”, “the Visegrád cooperation”.

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108 Bálint L. Tóth namics and intensity. In spite of their common historical heritage and features, one can observe divergent emphases and orientations in the Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Slovak government strategies. The stability of this group is guaranteed by the fact that the cooperation is primarily carried out on matters that serve the interests of all. This paper’s main allegation, however, is that, as opposed to core EU states, spillovers between two policy areas in the Visegrád countries are primarily driven by higher governmental intentions, while the automaticity of other spillover directions is less observable in this case. Therefore, the convergence of integration areas within V4 countries naturally involves politics-level decision making. As a main contribution to academic debates over V4 policy coordination, this paper proposes that local nonpolitical elites and pressure groups in Visegrád countries do not have enough bargaining power for interest articulation; therefore, certain conditions have to be met so that a policy area could spill over into other fields of integration. On one hand, it is essential, for example, that the common gains outweigh the individual losses. On the other hand, the lack of institutional elements in V4 cooperation has to be balanced by the legal-institutional framework of the EU or other international organizations. While the Author has previously collected reasons why the Visegrád Group could be seen as a tool that supports the implementation of EU strategies to enhance the connectivity and interoperability of the Central East European transport grid (Tóth, 2018b), this study proposes to describe the Visegrád Four as a network of practical “cooperations” where specific joint projects imply further integration through spillovers in the area of politics. As has been proposed by the Author’s previous article (Tóth, 2019), examining spillovers could be an efficient tool to keep track of the process of the widening and expanding of V4 collaboration circles, as well as to extrapolate the underlying logic. Yet spillovers can also explain why the V4 formula remained viable even after achieving the four states’ Euro-Atlantic integration. Such process tracing might help find answers as to why do Central Eastern European (“CEE”) governments still refer to the V4 formula as a means for interests articulation within international organizations. EU institutions have launched investment initiatives in regional transport connections. Such projects spilled into the demand for constructing denser rail connections and launching more reliable train services. With the aim of filling the gap in academic literature as far as spillover analyses with V4 focus is considered, this paper shall contribute to the better understanding of spillover phenomena in CEE, while seeking to find answers on how and to what extent EU policies shape the Visegrád cooperation’s practical functioning through different functional spillovers. With the intention of contributing to the scarce academic literature on the motivations of

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joint V4 transport projects, the focus of the research is on high-speed railway (“HSR”) development projects for a couple of reasons. First, at the time of writing, EU policies prioritize cross-border railway developments over other modes of transport. Second, railway is a historically important pillar of the CEE region’s transport system. The rail networks of these four countries have a lot of common attributes: density and electrification levels in most V4 states are above EU averages, while with regard to travel habits, it can be stated that the proportion of daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly rail users in the Visegrád area exceeds the European average. Last but not least, CEE railway integration can be examined on a wide time horizon as the beginning of such process dates back in time. The number of comprehensive analyses regarding the motives behind V4 decision making procedures is found to be relatively modest. Therefore, this study also strives to offer a synthesis of neofunctionalist and liberal intergovernmentalist theoretical findings.

Research Methodology and Topicality Interstate cooperation in the field of transport may include case studies to observe the intertwining of integration circles among Visegrád countries as common infrastructure development projects have a clear regional and time focus. Spillovers in the field of transport materialize in a relatively short time, in a concentrated manner and with a clear regional perspective. Such attributes let the observer monitor the decision making process leading to the realization of the related policies right from the beginning. In the case of transport development, the implementation of government projects is relatively easy to track (through the inauguration of modernized or newly constructed infrastructures, or the expression of the opinion of civil society and professional bodies). These are well-documented processes both at EU and Member State levels. Additionally, such data is publicly accessible. Transport integration addresses many disciplines and policy areas. Besides its axiomatic political basis, transport cooperation has clearly defined economic considerations as well. Mobility policy assumes in many respects strategic and defense functions too. It is enough to take a look at the upcoming Multiannual Financial Framework (“MFF”) of the EU where the Connecting Europe Facility (“CEF”)85 is expected to have a distinct bucket for

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CEF is a financial tool for the promotion of transport integration within the Community with a view to boost European added values in the sector.

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110 Bálint L. Tóth the development of defense capabilities of member states (European Commission, 2019c). Transport cooperation also has clear social and labor market focuses. Traffic network development processes can be interpreted on a wide time scale, while their topicality and relevance most probably always remain constant. The above-noted arguments thus support the analysis of transport integration from a spillover point of view to figure out the relationship, interactions, and dynamics between national development policies and the wider conceptual and legal-institutional context of the European Union’s relevant policies. It is important to stress that at the time of finalizing the paper, research conducted on accessible academic literature and scientific databases and libraries did not yield any results for spillover analyses with a V4 focus. Additionally, no comprehensive studies, papers or analyses could be identified in relation to the various motives behind V4 transport development cooperation. In order to identify the system of references between the different authors on the topic of spillovers the so-called snowball method was followed during the research of the literature.86 In order to have a global conceptual framework, this paper brings together the findings of Ernst B. Haas, Frank Schimmelfennig, Simon Hix, Sonia Mazey, Arne Niemann, and Carolyn Rhodes for the neofunctionalist perspective, while the arguments of Walter Mattli, Andrew Maitland Moravcsik, Daniel Wincot, and again Niemann were summarized for the liberal intergovernmentalist approach (see chapter 3.). The proposed research is intended to offer a quantitative synthesis of HSR-related transport development initiatives and of already materialized projects in Visegrád countries explaining the relationship between different variables and the case study subject. The principal data source for quantitative analyses of HSR development investments resulting from spillovers from

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In order to narrow down the high number of hits in research engines and to identify the relevant articles contextual, so-called ‘intext’ searches have been run. The number of advanced research tool hits could be decreased below 30 results. As for the authors and thinkers, the major keywords for the literature research were Haas, Schimmelfennig, Hix, Mazey, Niemann, and Rhodes, for the neofunctionalist perspective and Mattli, Moravcsik, Wincot, and again Niemann for the liberal intergovernmentalist approach. As far as the technical terms are concerned, the following keywords have been searched in accessible academic online databases: spillover (and variants: spill-over, spilling over, spill(s)(ed) over into) integration, interstate, multi, trans, and supranational, overlapping membership, cooperation area, dependency level, coalition building, joint coordination, multidimensional integration, practical cooperation, transport cooperation/coordination, mobility policy(ies), regional transport, path-dependency(ies), infrastructure investment(s), further integration, transport integration.

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other policy areas are the transport statistics databases available online on the Eurostat’s website. Railway construction projects imply further integration at political and policy levels; therefore, the evolution of the V4 political leaders’ intentions and endeavors to develop the regional transport system is examined through discourse analysis of their speeches, conference minutes and media articles of the major newspapers of the four Visegrád states and other European online media sources. The policy level of such projects is addressed based on both discourse analysis (implementation documents, memorandums, inauguration ceremonies, etc.) and comparative historical statistical data analysis (Eurostat, national statistic agencies, databases of transport operators, financial balance sheets of transport operators, development and investment strategy documents of operators, etc.)—see chapters 4 and 5. The focus of the research is on joint V4 railway HSR development projects, because the framework of EU transport policies, initiatives and financing tools (that are fundamental for the feasibility of infrastructure investments in CEE) are currently determined by the idea of sustainable mobility. There is a consensus within EU institutions and member states that railways are a key for the creation of an economically and socially sustainable as well as environmentally friendly trans-European transport network (“TEN-T”). The upcoming Multiannual Financial Framework (“MFF”) of the EU is expected to prioritize cross-border railway developments over other modes of transport, which extends the relevance of the research focus for at least a decade. For the 2014–2020 multiannual EU budget, the CEF funds offered 41.6 billion euros of blended financing for the realization of transport development projects. Additionally, the Commission has allocated 11.3 billion euros from the Cohesion Fund to improve transport infrastructures in 15 less developed EU countries (European Commission, 2018b, p. 18). Therefore, the European Union’s budget and its priority areas may be seen as independent variables, while the Visegrád countries’ HSR infrastructure projects (triggered by EU investment priorities) could be taken as the dependent ones. If one takes a look at the levels of decision making in the field of international transport development policies, it can be observed that compared to other modes of transport, international railway integration can be examined in one of the most far-reaching historical perspectives. In terms of regulation, organization, and international standards, rail traffic is at the forefront in the field of transport: one of the oldest global international organizations is the International Union of Railways (UIC) that was founded back in 1922 and of which Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic (Czechoslovakia) have been members ever since. The membership of V4 states (through their authorized —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

112 Bálint L. Tóth ministries, national authorities or operators) in numerous international railway organizations can also be seen as an independent variable whereas the common rail transport endeavors of these four countries might be interpreted as outcomes dependent on such overlapping memberships. From a practical point of view, it should be emphasized that over the past decade, joint railway development initiatives have constantly been on the agenda of V4 presidency programs. Nowadays, high-speed railway investments are high on the agenda. This field of cooperation is a good example of how non-converging economic interests within the V4 can be offset by shared values and political will. In terms of freight transport, the four states are competing with each other on the Eurasian corridors. As far as railway infrastructure is considered, these countries have clear short-term economic benefits if they concentrate their efforts and resources on the development of east-west transport corridors. At the same time, however, the V4s have decided that the development of north-south high-speed rail transport linkages is also particularly important to them. Cooperation in this respect is indispensable between governments, ministries, administrative authorities, infrastructure managers, lobby organizations, research centers, etc. The V4 railway collaboration is an excellent example of the viability of the V4 formula: policy coordination is only effectuated where strategic interests meet (Tóth, 2018c). Not only their geographical position but also the historical heritage of dense transport networks compels CEE countries to keep railway issues on the agenda of intergovernmental meetings. The rail network’s density (and its electrification level) in the V4 region is relatively high compared to EU average figures. With regard to travel habits, it can be stated that the proportion of daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly rail users in the area is again above the European average. Such typical CEE characteristics could be seen as independent variables, while the different development policy emphases and integration areas would be the dependent ones. The railway-focused case-study selection may further be supported by the fact that railway companies are emerging and the market is expanding throughout Europe as a general phenomenon.

Conceptual Framework By citing current examples for V4 HSR projects supporting either the neofunctionalist or the liberal intergovernmentalist theoretical frameworks, this study provides an approach to identify and analyze spillover phenomena —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

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in contemporary (2009–2019) CEE intergovernmental policy-making addressing political, regional, sociological and transportation studies literature. The process of widening and expanding co-operation circles can be revealed by monitoring the dynamics of spillovers: the entwined and interdependent integration areas. EU institutions have launched investment initiatives in regional transport connections strengthening the internal trade within the V4 region and its economic connections to other Member States. Such projects spilled into the demand for constructing denser rail connections and launching more reliable train services. It is essential to highlight that the research focuses on cooperative intergovernmental policies introduced collectively by two or more V4 states. Spillover is an abstract term that has become an influential concept in international relations studies creating theoretical and methodological approaches in order to understand how foreign presence (originally not concomitant interests, decisions) interferes in intergovernmental political actions and the extent to which such spheres are connected. The spillover phenomenon principally fits in the toolbar of reasoning of the international relations theoretical schools of neofunctionalism and liberal intergovernmentalism. The former was the first to use the notion of spillover to describe dynamics of the European integration, while the latter formulated the first critiques of this theoretical framework. Haas (1961: 9) explains that “policies made pursuant to an initial task and grant of power can be made real only if the task itself is expanded, as reflected in the compromises among the states interested in the task.” Leon Lindberg says that actions related to specific goals create unique circumstances in which the initial goals can be reached exclusively by taking further steps in other, seemingly unrelated fields of actions, which, in turn, create conditions for more and more coordination (Rosamond, 2005, p. 11). The debate over spillover phenomena between international relations theoreticians emerged primarily in relation to the theoretical approaches of regional integration. The two main competing theories of EU integration are neofunctionalism and liberal intergovernmentalism. Intergovernmentalism claims that national governments control the level and dynamics of European integration. Liberal intergovernmentalism rejects the concept of the spillover proposed by neofunctionalists questioning the weight of political influence of exogenous pressures and supranational organizations vis-á-vis national governments. Andrew M. Moravcsik (The Choice for Europe, 1998) emphasized that national governments are key elements in the process of integration. Liberal intergovernmentalists consider supranational institutions (and exogenous —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

114 Bálint L. Tóth pressures in general) to be of limited importance in the integration process, in contrast to neofunctionalists (Mattli, 1999, p. 10−11). Liberal intergovernmentalists prioritize the cumulative logic of integration where one policy area certainly triggers spillovers into other areas, and states find it worthwhile to expand the integration process in other fields as well (Schimmelfennig, 2018, p. 2). The tightening of relationships in one given policy area may occur as the result of an “endogenous growth” of the jointly coordinated decision making of states as part of a wider and multidimensional integration process (Moravcsik, 2005: 4). Shifts in trade links, national security concerns, and directions of diplomacy may also push governments toward stronger integration on the basis of the convergence of state interests (Moravcsik, 2005, p. 360). Liberal intergovernmentalism maintains that the deep and overlapping cooperation of governments of different countries is driven by the states, especially those which are relatively less dependent on others (Wincot, 1995, p. 598). Bigger economies therefore have stronger bargaining power, Moravcsik claims. For example, Spain and France continuously push for stronger cooperation in research and development related to high-speed railway operation, while the East European states normally would prefer to deal with the upgrading of their obsolete conventional lines (Railway Gazette, 2019) (RailwayPro, 2019). Within the V4 region, Poland’s economic interests seem to prevail as far as the creation of international freight corridors is considered (Via Carpathia, Amber corridor/RFC-11, Małaszewicze dry port, etc.). According to neofunctionalism, political spillover is the way decision making activities are redirected from national levels to a new, inter- or supranational center by the creation of transnational organizations or alliances (Fesel, 2015: 10). As Frank Schimmelfennig (2018, p. 19) puts it, “political spillover increases domestic demand for integration.” In November 2018, the EU Parliament voted for a larger transport budget as the CEF funds were considered essential for the large HSR projects. In the multiannual financial period of 2014–2020, CEF has made available 41.6 billion euros of public and private financing. The Commission has allocated 11.3 billion euros from the Cohesion Fund to improve transport infrastructures in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Croatia, Hungary, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia (European Commission, 2018b: 18). Consequently, the European Union’s budget and its priority areas may (independent variables) gave an impetus to the Visegrád countries’ joint HSR infrastructure projects (dependent ones) triggered by EU investment priorities. —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

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The claims of both intergovernmentalism and neofunctionalism meet in Arne Niemann’s view that “functional integration of one task inevitably leads to problems which can be only be solved by integrating yet more” (Niemann, 2006, p. 17). Multi-level governance is a newer theory for understanding European integration. It argues that policy coordination within the EU is way too complicated to be explained by static integration theories. Sometimes intergovernmental cooperation evolves from “trial and error situations”, as a mere result of many unsuccessful experiments of collective policy making (Kühnhardt, 2008, p. 143).

HSR Projects in the Visegrád Countries and the Levels of Decision Making In May 1990, the Republic of Hungary, the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic and the Republic of Poland elaborated an economic and political framework for an intergovernmental foreign policy partnership following the dismantling of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the Warsaw Pact. Then, in February 1991, the three governments agreed to follow a joint approach towards western international institutions, and to develop a system of mutual political interactions in order to evidence their readiness to integrate in such organizations. Visegrád States became front-line applicants for accession to the European Community, while similar institutional and structural reforms took place simultaneously throughout the region. During the pre-accession period, the principal challenge for all Visegrád States was trying to turn their relations, despite their traditionally different foreign policies, into a common strength. After joining the European Union in May 2004, Visegrád countries felt compelled to find common grounds in specific EU-related issues, and the four states needed to find allies to be able to enforce their interests within the Community. The accession of Western Balkans (WB) and Post-Soviet east European countries to the EU would be an advantage for the Visegrád Four group as their interests in many cases coincide with those of their (south) eastern neighbors. Joint actions would certainly multiply the decision making power of smaller EU member states (Tóth, 2017a, p. 8–10). In addition, in order to strengthen their macroeconomic competitiveness, Visegrád Countries aim at implementing harmonized modernization policies with the best possible utilization of EU cohesion funds. Food safety and quality issues, migration and Schengen policies, EU–Caucasus bilateral relations, and cultural, educational, and research & development projects are again potential —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

116 Bálint L. Tóth fields of intergovernmental cooperation within the V4 region (Tóth, 2018a, p. 331–333). The historical east-west axis in Central European geopolitics can be broadened by developing tighter ties to the non-EU countries of the Western Balkans. In 2009, the Visegrád Group declared its readiness to promote the European integration of WB and Eastern Partnership countries by also facilitating the construction of reliable road, rail, and energy networks. V4 Governments agreed that the future EU Member States would be linked to the Community by fast and reliable transport routes; therefore, they suggested programs for the intensification of the four countries’ efforts to support the development of international rail freight corridors and road infrastructure within the TEN-T network (Tóth, 2018b, p. 169). Spillovers deriving from EU tools and policies are key factors in understanding the nature and directions of intergovernmental HSR cooperation. This research identifies the motives of governments and interest groups to invest political capital in the construction of strong regional interstate cooperation by identifying common regional factors, distinctive objectives and driving forces. For the V4 region, the liberal intergovernmentalist theoretical framework seems to fit better because as opposed to core EU states, in the Visegrád countries, spillovers between two policy areas are primarily driven by governmental efforts, while the automaticity of other spillover directions (e.g. market, civil society, financial spheres, etc.) is less observable. Consequently, the convergence of integration areas within the V4 countries naturally involves politics-level decision making that could be a sharp difference between the Visegrád Area and Western Europe. The stability of the group of countries is guaranteed by the fact that the co-operation is only carried out on matters that serve the interests of all four states. These four governments do not force policy- and decision-making to be coordinated or integrated in areas where their interests do not necessarily converge. The intention of the incumbent Visegrád Governments to upgrade and add new connections to the existing east-west and north-south transportation routes have spilled over into the more interconnected railroad network within the Visegrád Area, leading to the design of HSR lines in CEE. This paper proposes that local non-political (financial, non-governmental, labor, religious, etc.) elites and domestic pressure groups in Visegrád countries do not have enough bargaining power for interest articulation; certain conditions have to be met so that a policy area might spill over into other field(s) of integration: —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

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it is essential that the centripetal forces outweigh the centrifugal ones  the lack of institutional elements in the V4 cooperation (except for the International Visegrád Fund) has to be balanced by the legalinstitutional framework of the EU or interstate professional working groups Therefore, as opposed to core EU states, in the case of Visegrád countries, spillovers between two policy areas are primarily driven by higher governmental intents. In this sense, the liberal intergovernmentalist approach would better explain the spillover processes in the Visegrád area, because of its claims that regional integration results from a direct decision of national governments. However, liberal intergovernmentalism rejects the idea that supranational organizations are on an equal level of political influence to national governments, whereas my proposition is that in the Visegrád zone, spillovers would not take place without the EU’s legal-institutional framework. Neofunctionalists claim that spillovers could easily be traced at the low levels of international politics (Risse, 2005, p. 301). Functional spillover is used to explain the way in which integration in one policy area, for example coal and steel, creates pressure for integration in further areas, such as currency exchange rates. The most common decision making level of spillovers is low politics, and the steps towards integration are not always planned or approved by governments but they smoothly and autonomously lead to tightening cooperation. The decision making happens at multiple levels:  Sub-state (regions)  State (government)  Supra-state (regional/functional international organizations or agreements)  Global international organizations The prime ministers of Hungary and Poland agreed in February 2016 to improve the quality of rail services and reduce train travel times between their countries (MTI, 2016). A direct Budapest-Warsaw railway connection leading through the Slovak Tatra Mountains and bypassing Czech territories would significantly reduce distance and travel times between the two capital cities. However, at present, such a rail link is not available; therefore, a future HSR passenger service is expected to operate on the Budapest-Bratislava-Brno-Warsaw route (Ekonomika, 2018). The problem of the relatively scarce and underdeveloped north-south rail connections in the region is reflected by the 9–10 hour —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

118 Bálint L. Tóth average journey time on the 625 km Budapest-Krakow route. By comparison, trains run the approximately 611 km long east-west Budapest-Prague route in only 6 hours. Negotiations with Croatia and Bosnia were ongoing in 2016–2017 to relaunch a regular rail passenger service between Budapest and Sarajevo, while preparations had begun for the development of a possible HSR link between Budapest and Cluj-Napoca, Romania to be extended towards Bucharest. The 2017–2018 Hungarian V4 presidency strived for reinforcing north-south transport links and improving the competitiveness of rail passenger and freight transport (Cabinet Office of the Prime Minister/MT, 2017). At the time of finalizing this paper, there are 46,403 km of HSR lines in operation in the world. This type of transport mode is mainly used in European (9,096 km in total) and Asian (36,372 km in total) countries (UIC, 2019b). Apart from its obvious technical aspects, high-speed rail encompasses infrastructure, rolling stock, energy, operations, traffic management and certain cross-sectoral synergies in the fields of finance, investments, economy, social planning, and so on. On one hand, the high-speed rail system has become a symbol of modern transport services and R&D. On the other hand, such train services contribute to regional integration amid social and economic development. Another highly significant attribute of this transport mode is its contribution to the creation of a sustainable international mobility network. Besides being sufficiently defined and mutually respected, international unification initiatives have to be economically important for all states considered, in order to have enough potential for spilling over from one decision making area into others. Therefore, high-speed rail construction projects are high on the agenda as far as environmental, social, economic and transport policies are considered. HSR infrastructures are made of newly constructed lines designed for 250 km/h speed (or above), or upgraded existing tracks that are able to serve trains circulating at 200–220 km/h. Further key elements of the HSR system are the specially-designed rolling stock, hightechnology telecommunications and traffic management networks, as well as signaling systems (UIC, 2019).87 In the Visegrád region, only Poland operates high-speed trains. As of March 2019, the Polish railway network had a

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In Europe, Spain has the most extended HSR network encompassing 2,852 km of railway lines. The Iberian country is followed by France (2,734 km) and Germany (1,571 km). Among Asian states, China leads the way with a 31,043 km long HSR system in operation. China is followed by Japan (3,041 km) and South Korea (893 km) in the ranking. Apart from the above-noted continents, there is a 735 km long HSR network currently in use in the US, and Morocco operates a high-speed railway line of 200 km (UIC, 2019b).

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224 km long HSR line that partially connects Katowice and Krakow with the capital city. The Polish Government plans to extend the country’s HSR network to 598 km in future. At the time of writing, the Czech Republic is the only other V4 state with intentions to build high-speed railway infrastructures with a planned extension of 810 km (UIC, 2019b). As stated above, the stability of this group of countries is guaranteed by the cooperation on matters that serve the interests of all, and the V4s have decided that the development of north-south transport linkages is particularly important to all of them. It can be stated that centripetal forces outweigh the centrifugal ones in this case. However, as proposed above, the lack of institutional elements in the V4 cooperation has to be balanced by the legal-institutional framework of the EU or interstate professional working groups established by V4 countries. Cooperation is accordingly indispensable between governments, ministries, administrative authorities, infrastructure managers, lobby organizations, research centers, etc. V4 yearly presidency programs address general information exchanges on planned HSR construction projects in the region (visegradgroup.eu, 2013). The V4 railway collaboration is an excellent example of the viability of the V4 formula: policy coordination is only effectuated where strategic interests meet. From 2012 on, V4 presidency programs have included general discussions on the construction of future high-speed passenger rail lines in the region (MSZ, 2012). In addition, the 2014–2015 Slovak Presidency strived to coordinate the working of a High Level Working Group (“HLWG”) on transport connections between Visegrád Countries with the aim of implementing the previous V4 agreements facilitating cross-border rail traffic (MZV, 2014). This is the way specific joint projects imply further integration at different levels of international cooperation through spillovers. Given the need for a fast north-south train service, during their February 2016 bilateral negotiations, the prime ministers of Hungary and Poland agreed to improve rail connections between their countries (MTI/Miniszterelnök.hu, 2016). In addition, the fastest road link between the Hungarian capital and the second largest Polish city is less than 400km long and can be covered in six hours (MyDrive Route Planner, 2018). At a June 2018 V4 summit in Budapest, the prime ministers of the four countries agreed that the upgrading of their conventional railway lines must follow the guidelines of the European Union; however, the creation of HSRs in CEE is mostly driven by government decisions “[r]ecognizing the importance of improving the connectivity and accessibility of the major cities and regions of Central

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120 Bálint L. Tóth Europe in order to promote economic development, territorial cohesion and sectoral cooperation in areas such as employment, culture and tourism” (Visegrádgroup.eu, 2018b). With regards to the construction of a new double-track high-speed railway link from Budapest to Warsaw, via Bratislava, Brno and Ostrava, the Visegrád countries have developed a common approach for speeds of up to 300 km/h. The estimated travel time from Hungary to Poland would be shortened to 3– 4 hours, from the current 12–17 hours. Trains would only stop in the abovenoted cities. Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó declared the establishment of a Budapest-Bratislava-Brno-Warsaw HSR link as a “typical” V4 project where the political interests of all four members of the group coincide and both the realization and the financing is to be jointly negotiated by the V4 countries (Kormany.hu, 2018). As of 2019, technical and profitability studies are being run related to such a new high speed passenger train service going up to 250–300 km/h. Such speed would shorten the Budapest-Bratislava route (~200 km) to 1 hour and the Budapest-Warsaw service (~900 km) to 4 hours (Budapest Business Journal, 2018). The four states’ aim is to create an alternative to air travel attracting at least 500,000 passengers a year (China.org.cn, 2019). The question of possible funding sources is still open at the time of finalizing this paper; however, the Visegrád countries agreed that EU subsidies for infrastructure development would play an essential role in the project (Polandin.com, 2019). Nevertheless, quadripartite ministerial talks on the matter were attended by representatives of the European Investment Bank (“EIB”) as well (Daily News Hungary, 2018). In March 2019, the EIB’s European Investment Advisory Hub (EIAH) started working on the development of the Visegrád Advisory and Investment Platform, in order to attract investors in V4 countries for the above-noted HSR project (EIF, 2019). The November 2018 enlargement of the EU transport budget and the 41.6 billion euros of CEF funding offered in the 2014–2020 financial period show us the way Cohesion Funds and other EU financing mechanisms trigger joint member state actions as independent variables to improve cross-border transport infrastructures (dependent variables). Such a phenomenon is an example of how EU policies shape the Visegrád cooperation’s practical functioning. Due to the lack of solid civil society organizations and sectoral interest groups, the initiative to build up a Central East European HSR line arose from national governments. In January 2019, the Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Szijjártó highlighted four priority areas for the development of the V4 region’s transport network. One of these was the

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development of reliable north-south connections. The second important objective was to increase the number of border crossing points between these four countries. Another significant goal was the construction of HSR lines, while the exploitation of Eurasian trade linkages, in terms of freight services, was named as the fourth important aim of the Visegrád governments. The EU rail freight market has been entirely open to competition since 2007. Since 2010, the market share of competitors has increased most notably in the Czech Republic and Hungary within the V4 region, while as for the rail passenger services, in most Visegrád countries incumbent rail companies control over 80% of the market, with the sole exception of Poland where its share stands at around 50%, although new open-access services have been introduced in the Czech Republic as well (European Commission 2018, p. 6). Visegrád States may have many features in common; however, they also have slightly different strategic objectives. Since 1989, V4 Countries have become competitors in certain economic sectors, such as the east-west freight transport market. The Visegrád Countries’ rail networks are important parts of the European rail market due to their favorable geographical positions. The increasing cargo volumes gave a momentum to the strengthening of these countries’ railway connections towards Eastern Asian countries in order to reach more favorable international trade balances. The presence of Chinese companies, and the “Belt and Road Initiative” (“BRI”) have resulted in the establishment of rail land-bridges via Visegrád Countries towards Western European destinations, significantly shortening the normally 30–40 day long sea routes and avoiding bottlenecks in Northwestern European logistical hubs. Such “Silk Roads” provide economic and geopolitical benefits for the states they cross. Małaszewicze in Poland, Ĉierna nad Tisou in Slovakia and Záhony in Hungary are now concurrent gauge-changing facilities located between the different rail track systems of the former Soviet territories and the standard European railroad network. While the Polish rail network becomes more and more important on the EU-Belarus-Russia-Kazakhstan-China route, as a result of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, rail traffic passing through instable East Ukrainian territories towards gauge-changing facilities in Slovakia or Hungary are less prioritized by the shipment operators. Consequently, while the market of the east-west freight corridor has given rise to growing competition among V4 states, the creation of a reliable, fast and safe transportation route on the north-south axis in CEE would strengthen cohesion in the Visegrád region (Tóth 2018, p. 169–171).

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122 Bálint L. Tóth All things considered, the overall deduction is that development policies pull states together amid mutual trust. Such a process leads to some sort of unification among governments (Parent 2009, p. 520). The degree of functional specificities affects the intensity of integration. Multi-level governance argues that policy coordination within the EU is more than a mere result of static integration processes (Kühnhardt 2008, p. 143). Sometimes intergovernmental cooperation evolves from a number of successful and less successful experiments of collective policy making. At the time of finalizing this paper, HSR developments are still in the design phase. Accordingly, the outcome of such endeavors is unknown at present. Having said that, media articles, government press releases, and official memoranda of understanding between sectoral stakeholders provide us numerous examples for current HSR initiatives in CEE. Hungary plans to develop a Budapest-centered modern and increased speed railway network in Central Europe. As part of such endeavors, the upgrade of the Belgrade-Budapest rail line is expected to be completed by 2023. There are plans to build a HSR line between Budapest and Cluj (Romania) as well (Daily News Hungary, 2018). Railways are in the core of the Hungarian foreign trade strategy. From 2017 to 2020, the government intends to spend 4.8 billion euros on rail development projects, increasing the country’s electrified rail network to 3,300 km. The number of available workers can be boosted by improving logistics capacities in the region. (Cabinet Office of the Prime Minister/MT, 2017). The Czech Republic plans to construct a 810 km HSR network.88 Czechia made considerable progress in the implementation of a high-speed line that in time would connect Prague with neighboring capital cities (CER Monitor, 2019a:7). The most important lines would follow historical routes like Via Caroli and the Amber Road from Poland through Moravia to Vienna. The Czech government’s first intention is to connect the Czech Republic with European cities and second, to connect major cities and regions within the country itself.89 Prague is to be linked with Munich, Berlin (Germany),

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The Velim test center (Zkušební centrum Velim) is the Czech Republic’s main accredited testing facility for new types of rolling stock designed for high-speed operation. The facility has a standard gauge railway track oval of 13.2 km designed for continuous running (Railway Gazette, 2018). The creation of the Prague section of the future high-speed rail network will involve tunnel constructions and the underground extension of the Main Station. This project could be the most expensive transport construction in the city’s history. In the city of

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Warsaw (Poland), and Brno (capital city of Moravia region, within the Czech Republic), with the latter to be extended to Bratislava (Slovakia) and Vienna (Austria). Having said that, the exact date when the Czech HSR construction work will be launched is not yet fixed as national law needs to be amended in order for the project to go ahead. In November 2018, the EU Parliament considered large crossborder HSR projects to be of high priority; therefore, it was estimated that the Dresden-Prague high-speed link would need an EU contribution of 4.5 billion euros (van Leijen 2018). All things considered, the first HSR line from Prague to Dresden could be operational by 2035 at the earliest (Willoughby, 2019), although the original target was to have three high-speed rail lines in the country by 2025 (McEnchroe 2019), while the Czech Railway Infrastructure Manager SŽDC has marked 2050 for the completion of the project. Besides significantly shortening travel times between Prague and Dresden, the new HSR route is also expected to boost the economy of the Czech city of Ústí nad Labem by increasing traffic (Němec 2019). The European innovative railway research initiative Shift2rail Joint Undertaking90 and the Ministry of Transport of the Czech Republic decided to cooperate in order to coordinate their activities in real time in view of future deployment of the freshly developed solutions and technological innovations (CER Monitor, 2019b, p. 7). HSR projects play an important role in restructuring the Polish railway system with the aim of imbedding it in the main European transport network. A December 2008 Polish government resolution launched the plan for the construction of a HSR system in the country. At the time of writing, the high-speed railway network in Poland consists of new and modernized lines connecting Warsaw to Katowice and Krakow that would reach high-speed railway parameters with a possible extension towards Czechia and Slovakia.

                                                            

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Brno, however, the location of the future main station opened for HSR traffic is still undecided (Willoughby, 2019). Shift2Rail promotes the competitiveness of the European rail industry. Its research and development programs are carried out under the Horizon 2020 initiative in order to develop the necessary technology to complete the Single European Railway Area (Shift2Rail, 2019).

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The Spilling Over of the EU Policies into V4 HSR Projects The EU’s economic, social, and territorial cohesion strategies have also been used in the V4 region as financial tools and coordinating mechanisms of initiatives aimed at harmonizing technical and safety regulations of the railway network. The deployment of the second level of the European Train Control System (ETCS) and various refurbishment, as well as construction projects on key railway corridors have been at the center of the Visegrád Countries’ infrastructure development strategies. Ensuring interoperability between railway lines is essential for the competitiveness of this transport mode. In 2017, EU’s Cohesion Fund contributed 39.2 million euros through the Integrated Transport Operational Programme to the reconstruction of Hungary’s Budapest-Békéscsaba dual-track railway line, which is part of the Trans-European Transport Network (“TEN-T”) corridors. The projects included the installation of the European Train Control System (“ETCS”) along the entire railway line from the Hungarian capital to the Romanian border crossing point, Lőkösháza-Kürtös. Such development ensures interoperability with Western European rail networks enabling trains coming from Romania to cross Hungary’s borders with Austria or Slovakia without stopping. Journey times were shortened on the aforementioned line by raising track speeds from 100–120 km/h to 160 km/h (European Commission, 2017). The Second Railway Package (2004) proposed regulations on the safety of the EU’s railways, elaborating in detail the due safety certification procedures. The package contained a new directive on the allocation of railway infrastructure capacity and the levying of charges for the use of railway infrastructure, while adding modifications to the rules on the licensing of railway companies. The new regulation amended rules on the interoperability of the trans-European high-speed and conventional rail systems. The Third Railway Package was passed in 2007 and it gave open access rights for the provision of international rail passenger services from 2010 onwards.91 In 2012, the

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The following legal acts constitute the Third Railway Package: 2007/58/EC, 2007/59/EC, EC Regulation 1370/2007, EC Regulation 1371/2007, and EC Regulation 1372/2007 (European Commission, 2018).

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new version of the First Railway Package, the so-called Single European Railway Directive laid down rules regulating the use of railway infrastructure for domestic and international rail services.92 The Fourth Railway Package (2016) completed the single market for rail services, in other words, the Single European Railway Area. By significantly reducing costs and administrative burdens for railway enterprises, the legal package’s technical pillar was intended to support the competitiveness of the railway sector vis-à-vis other transport modes. The Fourth Railway Package’s market pillar meant the final legal step towards market opening, originally initiated in 2004 by the First Railway Package. Once the Member States harmonize their national legislation with the new European railway acquis, firms established in one Member State will be allowed to operate all types of passenger services in any other country within the EU. In addition, in order to prevent discrimination, the new set of railway regulations introduced the principle of mandatory tendering for public service contracts.93 The 2014 Danube Transnational Cooperation Program included projects aimed at improving transport infrastructure quality and safety in the region in order to construct a fully multimodal and interoperable network. In this context, railway lines have started to be upgraded and equipped with the European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS) with EU support. ERTMS is an automatic train protection and safety standard creating an interoperable system with compliance with speed restrictions and signaling status. The Association of the European Rail Industry (UNIFE) elaborated ERTMS in close cooperation with the EU, as well as railway and GSM-R (Global System for Mobile Communications for Railways) industry stakeholders to replace the different national train control and command systems of the EU Member States (ERTMS, 2019). From 2007 to 2013, the EU’s Cohesion Fund contributed 74 million euros to the procurement of the GSM-R system and related services in Hungary. Such installation helps Hungary’s railway infrastructure operator establish interoperable connections with neighboring countries (European Commission, 2015).

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Official Journal of the European Union: Directive 2012/34/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 21 November 2012 establishing a single European Railway Area. Paragraph no. 5. The following legal acts constitute the Fourth Railway Package EC Regulation 2016/796, EU Directive 2016/797, EU Directive 2016/798, EU Regulation 2016/2338, Directive 2016/2370/EU, and EU Regulation 2016/2337 (European Commission, 2018).

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126 Bálint L. Tóth It is essential to mention the Commission’s Cohesion Policy projects modernizing the Polish rail network. Over 487 million euros were secured for the improvement of the railway communication system replacing obsolete technologies throughout Poland. By introducing the latest ERTMS technologies, the Polish railway system would make a significant step towards deeper integration in the European network: no more switching of locomotives or onboard equipment would be needed at the border crossings. The project is expected to be operational as of July 2023. Additionally, more than 117 million euros of EU funds are allocated to upgrade and electrify 46 km of railway lines in the Silesia region. The construction should be finished by May 2022. (European Commission, 2019a). Furthermore, EU funds worth around 838 million euros are provided to upgrade a 214.5 km section of railway line between the Polish cities of Śląskie and Łódzkie. The route is part of the TEN-T system. It is estimated that the investment will contribute to the reduction of travel times for cargo transport by 37 minutes and by almost 30 minutes for passenger trains (European Commission 2019c). A multimodal TEN-T system strengthens the internal market within the Community, increases competition, generates higher employment rates, reduces congestion, cuts emissions of greenhouse gases and boosts transport safety and speed. Visegrád Countries have become integral parts of a quite a few of the priority transport axes, and the creation or enhancement of such routes has been given a special priority in their cooperation (Lackenbauer 2004, p. 152). The elaboration of TEN-T policies and the related decisions are all normally made by EU bodies primarily based on community interests. V4 governments strive for connecting future EU Member States to the community via fast and reliable transport routes; therefore they support the development of international rail freight corridors and the TEN-T network (Visegrádgroup.eu 2010; 2018, p. 11). In the 2014–2020 financial period, the Cohesion Fund invested almost 285.5 million euros in the modernization of the railway line between the Slovakian cities of Žilina and Púchov (the section is part of the TEN-T system). By the time the upgrading is completed at the end of 2021, trains will be able to circulate on the aforementioned route at a speed of 160 km/h (European Commission 2019b). As of 2016, the completion of the TEN-T Conventional Rail Core Network in Slovakia stood at 20%, which ranked the country 18th out of the 26 EU Member States with railway traffic. In the same year,

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this figure was reported to be 63% for Czechia (13th position in the EU ranking), 8% for Hungary (21st position in the EU ranking), and 23% for Poland (17th position in the EU ranking) (European Commission 2016).94

Conclusions Neofunctionalism and liberal intergovernmentalism explain each other’s weaknesses. Both frameworks say that functional integration in one field leads to further integration and prioritizes supranational or national elites and interest groups over the population; however, both approaches need to be reshaped and updated in some ways to better fit the political landscape of the Visegrád region. Nevertheless, the liberal intergovernmentalist theoretical framework seems to better explain the V4 policy coordination in this field, because in this region, spillovers between two policy areas are principally driven by higher governmental intentions and sometimes intergovernmental cooperation evolves as a result of many former experiences of collective policy coordination. Non-political elites in Visegrád countries do not have enough bargaining power; therefore, in order to reach further integration between different policy areas through spillovers, it is essential that 1) the common gains of member states outweigh the individual losses, and 2) that the lack of institutional elements is balanced by the legal-institutional framework of an international organization or a mutually respected negotiating platform. This paper concludes that integration within the V4 countries in terms of HSR construction projects materializes as a result of politics-level decision making. The stability of such country alignment is guaranteed by cooperation carried out on matters that serve the interests of all members, and HSR projects have become stable and recurring elements of V4 transport cooperation since 2012. The intention of incumbent Visegrád governments to upgrade and add new connections to the existing rail transportation routes have spilled over into an increasingly interconnected railroad network within the area, while the growing market competition with other transportation modes has resulted in the need for reliable and safe high-speed corridors. Visegrád states compete with each other on the Eurasian freight corridors; however, the V4s have decided that the development of HSR linkages is particularly important to all of them, which shows how non-converging economic interests can be

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Length of the TEN-T Conventional Rail Core Network completed at the end of the respective year, compared to the total, including planned sections and sections to be upgraded (European Commission, 2016).

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128 Bálint L. Tóth offset by shared values and political will. Consequently, HSR collaboration exemplifies the viability of the V4 formula: policy coordination is effectuated at governmental level, if strategic interests meet and in case there is enough motivation (EU tools, financial mechanisms, strategies, marked demand, etc.) with the potential to spill over into tighter cooperation involving other policy areas. Spillovers thus explain the viability of the V4 intergovernmental negotiating formula. EU institutions have launched investment initiatives in regional transport connections strengthening the internal trade within the V4 region and its economic connections to other Member States. Such projects are constantly spilling into the demand for constructing denser rail connections and launching more reliable train services, thus shaping the Visegrád cooperation’s practical functioning. HSR integration in the V4 region is thus an ongoing process driven by spillovers deriving from gradual decisions and actual, concrete economic interests of sub-state, state and supra-state actors. HSR has become a symbol of modern mobility services. Prime ministers of the four countries agreed that in order to promote economic development, cohesion and cooperation in other policy areas it is essential to improve the connectivity of the major CEE cities. A future HSR grid connecting V4 countries would contribute to regional integration (amid social and economic development) and to the creation of a sustainable international mobility network. Therefore, high-speed rail projects are high on the agenda as far as environmental, social, economic and transport policies are considered. This paper proposes a complement to the Author’s previous studies (published in the fields of Visegrád Four spillovers, V4 railway cooperation, and Central East European policy coordination) with additional theoretical findings as well as current examples for V4 practical cooperation and decision making in high-speed railway developments. As this study provides only a general insight into railway development policies in Visegrád states, in future the Author plans to narrow down the research focus on the identification, classification and evaluation of the political motivations of each HSR project present in the Czech Republic, Hungary, the Republic of Poland and the Slovak Republic. Further papers could investigate the possible impacts of HSR lines in the Visegrád area on the employment, cultural and business relations, travel habits, tourism, and environmental protection.

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130 Bálint L. Tóth European Commission (2015): New railway communications system brings multiple benefits. Source: ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/en/projects/m ajor/hungary/new-railway-communications-system-brings-multiple-be nefits (Accessed: 10-10-2019). European Commission (2016): EU Transport Scoreboard—Investments and infrastructure. Source: ec.europa.eu/transport/facts-fundings/scorebo ard/countries/poland/investments-infrastructure_en (Accessed: 1010-2019). European Commission (2018): Railway packages. Source: ec.europa.eu/ transport/modes/rail/packages_en (Accessed: 10-10-2019) Transport in the European Union—current trends and issues. DirectorateGeneral Mobility and Transport. European Commission (2019): Cohesion Policy: EU invests €880 million to improve Poland’s railway system. Source: ec.europa.eu/commission/ presscorner/detail/en/ip_19_5969 (Accessed: 10-10-2019). Faster rail travel in northern Slovakia thanks to Cohesion Policy. Source: ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/en/newsroom/news/2019/06/25-06-2 019-faster-rail-travel-in-northern-slovakia-thanks-to-cohesion-policy (Accessed: 10-10-2019). Poland: €676 million worth of EU investments in better rails and roads. Source: ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/en/newsroom/news/2019/09/ 13-09-2019-poland-eur676-million-worth-of-eu-investments-in-betterrails-and-roads (Accessed: 10-10-2019). ERTMS (2018): About—In Brief. Source: ertms.net/?page_id=40. Hungarytoday.hu (2018): V4 to Build Budapest-Bratislava-Brno-Warsaw Express Railway. Source: hungarytoday.hu/v4-build-express-railway (Accessed: 10-10-2019). Interreg (2014): Cooperation Programme V-A Slovakia-Hungary 2014–2020. Kormany.hu (2018): The establishment of the Budapest-Warsaw high-speed railway link is the joint political will of the V4. Source: kormany. hu/en/ministry-of-foreign-affairs-and-trade/news/the-establishmentof-the-budapest-warsaw-high-speed-railway-link-is-the-joint-politicalwill-of-the-v4 (Accessed: 10-10-2019). Jorg Lackenbauer (2004): Catching-up, Regional Disparities and Cohesion Policy: The Case of Hungary. Managing Global Transitions, 2(2) 123–162. McEnchroe, Tom (2019): Could the Czech Republic soon Profit From A “State-Wide Metro System? Radio Prague International. Source: radio. cz/en/section/curraffrs/could-the-czech-republic-soon-profit-from-astate-wide-metro-system (Accessed: 10-10-2019).

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MTI (2016): The alliance between Poland and Hungary is a historic one. Source: miniszterelnok.hu/the-alliance-between-poland-and-hungaryis-a-historic-one (Accessed: 10-10-2019). Moravcsik, A., (1998): The choice for Europe: Social Purpose and state power from Messina to Maastricht, (London, UCL Press, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Němec, Lucas (2019): Prague to Dresden in less than an hour: new highspeed Czech rail network on the way. Expats.cz. Source: news.exp ats.cz/czech-tourism/prague-to-dresden-in-less-than-an-hour-new-hig h-speed-czech-rail-network-on-the-way (Accessed: 10-10-2019). Polandin.com (2019): Visegrád Group plans to build high-speed rail network. Source: polandin.com/42734417/visegrad-group-plans-to-build-highspeed-rail-network (Accessed: 10-10-2019). Railway Gazette (2018): Velim team focuses on delivery. Source: railwaygaz ette.com/news/single-view/view/velim-team-focuses-on-delivery.html (Accessed: 10-10-2019). Shift2Rail (2019): About. Source: shift2rail.org/about-shift2rail (Accessed: 10-10-2019). Tóth, Bálint László (2018): V4: A Political Tool for Advancing State Interest. Polgári Szemle, 14(1–3), 330–341. Visegrád: A Tool that Supports the Implementation of EU Strategies to Enhance the Connectivity and Interoperability of the Central East European Railway Network. Foreign Policy Review, Vol. 11. 158–181. The V4 railway cooperation—Is there a homogeneous Visegrád Railway Area? Köz-Gazdaság, 13(3). 158–177. Tóth, Bálint László (2019): The Visegrád Group and the Railway Development Interest Articulation in Central East Europe. Eastern Journal of European Studies, 10(2) preprint. TVP.pl (2019): Visegrád Group plans to build high-speed rail network. Source: tvp.pl/polandincom/news/politics-economy/visegrad-groupplans-to-build-highspeed-rail-network/42734417 (Accessed: 10-10-2019). UIC (2019): High-speed. Source: uic.org/passenger/highspeed/#What-isHigh-speed-rail (Accessed: 10-10-2019). High Speed Lines in the World (Summary). UIC Passenger Department. van Leijen, Majorie (2018): EU Parliament votes for larger transport budget. RailFright.com. Source: railfreight.com/policy/2018/11/26/eu-parlia ment-votes-for-larger-transport-budget/?gdpr=accept (Accessed: 1010-2019).

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132 Bálint L. Tóth Visegrádgroup.eu (2010): The Slovak Presidency in the Visegrád Group (2010–2011). Source: visegradgroup.eu/documents/presidency-progra ms/2010-2011-slovak-110412 (Accessed: 12-07-2019). Visegrádgroup.eu (2013): Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland: Programme of the Polish Presidency of the Visegrád Group (July 2012–June 2013). Source: visegradgroup.eu/documents/presidency-pr ograms/programme-of-the-polish (Accessed: 12-07-2019). Visegrádgroup.eu (2018): Annual Implementation Report of the Program of the Presidency of the Slovak Republic in the Visegrád Group (1 July 2010–30 June 2011). Annual Reports of the Visegrád Group’s Presidencies. Visegrádpost.com (2017): China Sold High-Speed Trains to Czechia. Source: visegradpost.com/en/2017/01/09/china-sold-high-speed-trains-to-cz echia (Accessed: 10-10-2019). Willoughby, Ian (2019): High-Speed Rail Network Plan Spells Enormous Investment For Prague. Radio.cz. Source: radio.cz/en/section/business/ high-speed-rail-network-plan-spells-enormous-investment-for-prague (Accessed: 10-10-2019).

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Attila Mezei

Balance of Power Theory and the 21st Century: Iron Law of International Relations or an Outdated Idea? Abstract: The balance of power has been one of the most influential theory for studying international relations for centuries. The main question hidden behind the theory: why has there not been a single state that has conquered the globe? The anarchical structure of the international system and the various attempts for world domination throughout the centuries seem to suggest that the balance of power is the iron law of international relations that has not been broken. The end of the Cold War and the changing nature of the 21st century mean that international relations scholars have to re-evaluate their assessment of world politics since neorealism could not predict the end of the Cold War and failed in many aspects to answer for the imbalanced power of the United States as a result. In the last three decades numerous attempts have been carried out to save the balance of power theory and update it for the 21st century. My paper tries to show these attempts, their successes and failures. The questions: Is balance of power theory still a great tool to understand the world we are living in, or it is time to bury the concept in this century? I intend to show how the neoclassical realist school can bring new life to the concept and describe contemporary international relations in a balance of power framework. The neoclassical realist school incorporates unit level factors to the analysis of international relations. In my opinion, this relatively new realist school is able to capture the balancing strategies of international actors more accurately in the contemporary world than other theories. Keywords: balance of power, world order, neorealism, neoclassical realism, international relations

Introduction Numerous attempts can be traced back more than five hundred years that have tried to describe, predict and understand international relations in the context of the balance of power (Little 2009, p. 3). However, it seems empirical evidence and numerous international relations schools of thought both verified some aspects of the theory and falsified it at the same time. The second half of the 20th century gave scholars a lot of incentive to view interna-

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134 Attila Mezei tional relations in terms of the balance of power. The Cold War and the presence of the two superpowers, the USA and the USSR, helped visualize the balance in the bipolar world. Kenneth N. Waltz’s famous Theory of International Politics book and the neorealist school of thought fit right into the surface level narrative of the Cold War. The structural view of world politics meant that analysing unit level decisions is unnecessary to understand the balance of power since the structure will sway towards equilibrium in the end of the day (Waltz 2010). The end of the Cold War and the changing nature of the 21st century mean that international relations scholars have to re-evaluate their assessment of world politics since neorealism could not predict the end of the Cold War and failed in many aspects to answer for the imbalanced power of the United States as a result. In the last three decades numerous attempts have been carried out to save the balance of power theory and update it for the 21st century. My paper tries to add to the balance of power literature and emphasizes that balance of power theory is still a great tool to understand the world we are living in. In order to reach my goal, I attempt to define what “balance of power” and balancing strategies really mean. After the theoretical background I use the example of the Ukrainian crisis to show how the neoclassical realist school of thought can be applied in order to analyse the balancing strategies of the different stakeholders and to test the theory.

The Balance of Power Although political science has tried to understand the mechanisms and processes of the balance of power for more than half a millennium the constantly changing international environment demands more answers in order to understand foreign affairs. The roots of the balance of power theory can be traced back to antiquity. The Greek city-states and their alliances show clear evidence that this concept had relevance in international relations for quite some time. The constantly fluctuating relative power of empires and various states, each trying to maintain or improve their positions and keep or disturb the status quo leads to the phenomenon called the balance of power. The term is used with different meanings:  A policy aimed at a certain state of affairs  An actual state of affairs  An approximately equal distribution of power  Any distribution of power (Morgenthau 2006, p. 179). —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

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The balance of power is commonly used as a metaphor and different definitions were given to it throughout the centuries. Sheehan made a survey in 1996 where he tried to examine the concept in the last three hundred years (Sheehan 2005). The first definition which he found from 1741 was mainly aimed at the European state of affairs: “An equal distribution of power among the Princes of Europe as makes it impractical for the one to disturb the repose of the other” (Anonymous 1741). The above mentioned definition and the main idea behind the balance of power are that it is an even distribution of power. Examples for this characterization can be drawn throughout the last few centuries from different authors and sources:  “Action by a state to keep its neighbours from becoming too strong … because the aggrandisement of one nation beyond a certain limit changes the general system of all the other neighbours … attention to maintenance of a kind of equality and equilibrium between neighbouring states” (Fenelon 1835).  “The balance of power, however it be defined, that is, whatever the powers were between which it was necessary to maintain such equilibrium, that the weaker should not be crushed by the union of the stronger, is the principle which gives unity to the political plot of modern European history” (Stubbs 1886).  “An arrangement of affairs so that no state shall be in a position to have absolute mastery and dominate the others” (Vattel 1916).  “History shows that the danger threatening the independence of this or that nation has generally arisen, at least in part, out of the momentary predominance of a neighbouring state at once militarily powerful, economically efficient, and ambitious to extend its frontiers or spread its influence, the danger being directly proportional to the degree of its power and efficiency, and to the spontaneity and ‘inevitableness’ of its ambitions. The only check on the abuse of political predominance derived from such a position has always consisted in the opposition of an equally formidable rival, or of a combination of several countries forming leagues of defence. The equilibrium established by such a grouping of forces is technically known as the balance of power” (Crowe 1928).  “The balance of power operates in a general way to keep the average calibre of states low in terms of every criterion for the measurement of political power … a state which threatens to increase its calibre —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

136 Attila Mezei above the prevailing average becomes subject, almost automatically to pressure from all the other states that are members of the same political constellation” (Toynbee 1934).  “The balance of power assumes that through shifting alliances and countervailing pressures no one power or combination of powers will be allowed to grow so strong as to threaten the security of the rest” (Palmer; Perkins, 1954).  “When any state or bloc becomes, or threatens to become, inordinately powerful, other states should recognise this as a threat to their security and respond by taking equivalent measures, individually and jointly, to enhance their power” (Claude 1962).  “The balance’s underlying principle … was that all the nth disengaged powers would tend to intervene on the side that seemed in danger of losing any ongoing war, to ensure that such a loser was not eliminated from the system and absorbed into an emerging colossus” (Quester 1977).  “The balance of power refers to an actual state of affairs in which power is distributed among several nations with approximate equality” (Morgenthau 1978). Different meanings can be interpreted by analysing the definitions quoted above: An even distribution of power.  The principle that power ought to be evenly distributed.  The existing distribution of power. Hence, any possible distribution of power.  The principle of equal aggrandizement of the great powers at the expense of the weak.  The principle that our side ought to have a margin of strength in order to avert the danger of power becoming unevenly distributed.  To hold the balance of power means to have a special role in maintaining an even distribution of power.  To hold the balance of power means a special advantage in the existing distribution of power.  Predominance  An inherent tendency of international politics to produce an even distribution of power (Little 2009, p. 27).

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I believe that the last one comes the closest to describing what is the balance of power as a concept really is. I would further specify this concept by describing the balance of power: An inherent tendency of international politics to produce a certain distribution of power that is acceptable to the major players of the world. The definition mainly focuses on describing the international system that seems to produce a certain constellation of forces. This way of interpreting the balance of power as a concept can be used to describe the world in the 21st century. However, the balance of power theory aims to give an answer to the question of how states change this constellation with specific types of balancing behaviour. The three main types of balancing are:  Hard balancing  Soft balancing  Asymmetric balancing This type of categorization is used by T.V. Paul and is summarized in Table 1:

 

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138 Attila Mezei

Hard Balancing Soft Balancing

Nature of Rivalry

Key Strategies

Intense, open, often zero sum. Relative gains matter most Submerged, non-zero sum. Relative gains of limited concern for now.

Open arms build-up, formal alliances, or USA vs. USSR95, USA vs. Russian Federation96, both India vs. Pakistan97 USA vs. China98, Limited arms build-up. Informal, tacit, or ad hoc security understandings among af- France vs. Germany fected states, within or outside of internawithin the EU99 tional institutions. Preventive strategy Non-state actors and their state sponAl Qaeda, ISIS vs. sors pursue asymmetric strategies; state USA100, Hamas, Hezbollah vs. Israel101, actors follow mixture of traditional and Boko Haram vs. Nigenon-traditional strategies to counter rian Government102, threat

Asymmetric By state or non-state actors (e.g., terrorists). RiBalancing valry intense, although latter are elusive actors.

Examples

Table 1. Balancing Behavior [The theoretical part of this classification was inspired by the work previously published by Paul et al., 2007, p. 13, practical examples were provided by the author of this paper103].

                                                             95 96 97

98

99 100

101 102

103

In this respect please refer to Robert A. Pape, Soft Balancing against the United States, International Security Vol. 30, No. 1 (Summer, 2005), p. 7–45. Available at: [Accessed on 23/07/2020, at. 12:40]. In this respect please refer to Angela Stent, “Why are US-Russia relations so challenging?”. April 27, 2020. Available at: [Accessed on 22/07/2020, at. 11:40]. In this respect please refer to Muhammad Zubair Iqbal, Musarat Amin, Vacillation between Soft and Hard Balancing: China-Pakistan versus Indo-US Strategies. Available at: [Accessed on 24/07/2020, at. 00:40]. In this respect please refer to Zhen Han, T V Paul, China’s Rise and Balance of Power Politics. The Chinese Journal of International Politics, Volume 13, Issue 1, Spring 2020, Pages 1–26. Available at: [Accessed on 21/ 07/2020, at. 10:40]. & Yuan-Kang Wang, “China’s Grand Strategy and U.S. Primacy: Is China Balancing American Power?” Saturday, July 1, 2006. Available at: [Accessed on 20/07/2020, at. 11:40]. In this respect please refer to Franz Oswald (2006) Soft Balancing Between Friends: Transforming Transatlantic Relations, Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, 14:2, 145–160, DOI: 10.1080/09651560600841502. In this respect please refer to Pietrzak, P. (2009). American “Soft Power” after George W. Bush’s Presidency. In A. Mania & Ł Wordliczek (Eds.), The United States and the World: From Imitation to Challenge (pp. 187–194). Jagiellonian University Press. Available at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/the-united-states-and-the-world/ame rican-soft-power-after-george-w-bushs-presidency/92C28B90B6768A74A8FF8123E5A 81E5F/> [Accessed on 24/07/2020, at. 00:45]. In this respect please refer to Ehud Eilam, “Israel vs. Hezbollah: The Third Lebanon War”. Available at: [Accessed on 24/07/2020, at. 00:40]. In this respect please refer to Saskia Brechenmacher’s Carnegie Report on “Stabilizing Northeast Nigeria After Boko Haram”. MAY 03, 2019. Available at: [Accessed on 24/07/2020, at. 00:40]. Disclaimer: A selected data figures in the above table have been amended, whilst others have been updated in order to exemplify the dynamic changes in the global environment ever since 2007.

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Hard balancing is the most traditional type of balancing carried out mostly by states engaged in intense interstate rivalry. It is the easiest to identify and it is one of the strongest signal a state gives to other stakeholders in the international system about its attitude towards the threat. It includes building and improving military capabilities and creating and maintaining formal alliances and counter alliances to match or overpower the capabilities of the key opponent or opponents. Using the military power of the country the opponent can be balanced with a strong commitment to stand up against it. Soft balancing behaviour is less threatening and less direct. It resembles more to using the state’s smart power described by Joseph S. Nye, Jr. (Nye 2011). It is mostly used by states when they try to balance potentially threatening states (instead of a more imminent threat). The limited arms build-up, ad hoc cooperative exercises and limited security understandings are a combination of the states military and economic power to devise smart power strategies in order to mitigate the threat in the medium to long term. Asymmetric balancing has been more relevant in the post-Cold War world. In this case, nation states try to balance and contain threats from non-state actors such as terrorist groups. In addition to nation state vs. non-state actor scenario, a weaker state can utilize subnational actors to weaken a stronger hostile state actor. The asymmetrical methods employed by the subnational actors can increase the costs of maintaining the influence of the hostile state in the region (Paul et al., 2007, p. 13; Nye 2011). The United States used this method by supplying insurgents in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Hundreds of millions of dollars and anti-aircraft missiles provided by the USA to the mujahidin helped drive the USSR out from the country (Rubin 2002). The three main types of balancing (hard, soft and asymmetrical) are not always mutually exclusive strategies. The perception of the threat and the dynamics of international political life constantly influences the states’ responses. For example, hard balancing with formal alliances, arms build-up and economic sanctions can be used at the same time with asymmetrical balancing by providing aid to subnational actors that are also hostile to the threatening state. The most effective use of asymmetrical balancing are usually when the balanced state is engaged in armed violence against the subnational group. For example, Soviet and Chinese aid to Vietnam against the USA, and the United States’ aid to the mujahidin against the USSR (Llewellyn, Southey, & Thompson 2019; Rubin 2002). The most clear cut case is an open conflict between two (or more) states. The arms build-up and strengthening of formal alliances are visible actions. They are easily determined by —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

140 Attila Mezei international experts to be hard balancing behaviour. In the case of hard and limited hard balancing the perception of the threat is clear. It is less important to show to other stakeholders in the international system that a state feels threatened. The threatened state’s balancing strategy has to match its adversary’s potential military capabilities if it believes that the clash is imminent. Well-known examples for hard balancing behaviour can be brought from the 19th and 20th century where open conflict and the threat of war between great powers was more prevalent than nowadays. The Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente were formal alliances aimed at each other, just as the NATO and the Warsaw Pact, but another good example is the Quadruple Alliance which included Austria, Prussia, Russia and Great Britain against France in the beginning of the 19th century. If the threat is coming in the medium term, limited hard balancing may be enough to prepare for the challenge and not to alarm unnecessarily the opponent. Compared to hard balancing, soft balancing is most effective if it is used against a long term threat. Limited hard balancing is a diluted version of hard balancing including coordinated military activity and limited arms build-up, while soft balancing restrain the threat by institutional alignments or informal ententes. All of the mentioned balancing behaviour tries to deter an aggressive powerful opponent by increasing the cost-benefit calculations of the threatening state (Paul 2018, p. 22–23). The application of these strategies can be carried out simultaneously or alone as well as Table 2. below demonstrates with examples ranging from the early nineteenth century up until the contemporary era.

 

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Balance of Power Theory Period

Main States

Instruments Hard

Limited Hard

Balancing Austria, Prussia, Russia, France, UK

–

Balancing Limited arms build-up

Allied vs. Axis powers

Alliances/arms build-up

Security guarantees short of formal alliances

U.S. vs. USSR Blocs

Alliances/arms build-up

Security guarantees short of formal alliances

(1949–1991)

NAM vs. Superpowers

–

Immediate

Russia & China vs. U.S.

–

Other second ranking states

–

Concert Era (1815–1853) Post-World War I. (1919–1939)

Cold War Era

Post-Cold War Era (1991–2010)

Asymmetrical arms build-ups

Limited arms build-up

Asymmetrical arms build-ups –

(2010–)

Soft Balancing

Asymmetrical Balancing

Concert System

–

League of Nations/economic sanctions

Comintern

United Nations

Financial and military aid to insurgents and rebels

United Nations/NonAligned Movement

–

UN Security Council

Financial and military aid to insurgents and rebels

ASEAN/UN Security Council

–

Sanctions/limited alignments

Financial and military aid to insurgents and rebels

U.S. vs. Russia

NATO/arms build-up

U.S. vs. China

–

Arms buildup/alliances

Limited alignments

–

Europe vs. Russia

–

NATO/limited arms build-up

Sanctions

Financial and military aid to insurgents and rebels

India vs. China

–

ASEAN

–

Limited Arms build-up Asymmetrical arms build-ups

Limited alignments ARF/Law of the Sea Tribunal

Rising Power Era

141

– –

Table 2. Historical hard balancing, limited hard balancing, soft balancing and asymmetric balancing [This classification was inspired by Paul et al., 2007, p. 13104]. Some scholars such as Mark R. Brawley use different interpretations of the balancing strategies. Instead of using hard or soft balancing to describe the great power’s behaviour we can differentiate the balancing methods as external or internal balancing, bandwagoning, buckpassing or appeasement (Brawley 2004).

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Disclaimer: A selected data figures in the above table have been amended, whilst others have been updated in order to exemplify the dynamic changes in the global environment ever since 2007.

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142 Attila Mezei Economic Components External Balancing

Internal Balancing

Bandwagoning

Strengthen oneself and one’s allies through trade; exclude enemies Strengthen oneself through economic development; exclude all others. Develop ties to dominant power; wait for future.

Military Components

Examples

Find allies; join weaker alliance

Triple Alliance, NATO

Arms race

France, Germany in the second half of the 19th century against Great Britain Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania with Nazi Germany Soviet Union (1939– 1941), England (throughout the centuries) UK & France (1935– 1939)

Join dominant power’s alliance

Buck-Passing

Free ride—increase one’s wealth, not power, in short run.

Neutrality

Appeasement

Make concessions while building oneself up for the long run

Make concessions

Table 3. Shorthand/Typology of Policy Options [Classification inspired by Table published by Brawley 2004, p. 85105]. The categorization of the strategies from Table 1. and Table 3. depends on our definition of the balance of power. Table 1. describes balancing strategies that are actively trying to deter and/or counter a threat while the categorization of Table 3. extends the balancing typology to different policy options as well. Bandwagoning, buck-passing and appeasement is not a typical balancing strategy, and they can be even characterized as the opposite of balancing behaviour. As we can see from Table 3. one important factor in balance of power is the time factor. This can answer the question why certain states in certain situation do not engage in external and/or internal balancing, therefore questioning the validity of the balance of power theory. If we accept that it is an inherent tendency of international politics to produce an equilibrium, the hard, soft and asymmetrical balancing categorization might be insufficient to fully understand international politics. Bandwagoning, buck-passing, and appeasement can be incorporated to the balance of power theory when a great power is using these strategies to deflect or delay the threat (Brawley 2004; Taliaferro, Ripsman, & Lobell, 2012). The evaluation of the state regarding the threat posed by a rising power can be altered by the calculus of transformation of wealth into power. If we

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Disclaimer: A selected data figures in the above table have been amended, whilst others have been updated in order to exemplify the dynamic changes in the global environment ever since 2004.

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disregard this factor then balancing strategies from the threatened state(s) external/internal or soft/hard (depends on our terminology) should immediately manifest as soon as a rising state appears. A lot of puzzles in connection to the balance of power theory can be solved when we introduce this factor. In order to simplify the model, Mark R. Brawley introduced a binary system of rate of transformation of wealth to power. Inspired by him, I added an intermediate variable in order to broaden the scope of wealth conversion to power. This means that the threatened state(s) might choose a different strategy in order to counter the threat if it can rapidly, moderately, or slowly transform its wealth into power. In addition to that, the strategy differs when states have to confront the threat in the short, medium or in the long run (Brawley 2004). It is easy to think of the well documented example of the Second World War. The Allied powers could transform their wealth to power in the long run and tried to delay the conflict with the Axis powers in the short run by appeasement. The Munich Agreement is a glaring example of appeasement. While the Soviet Union used buck-passing with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in order to deflect Nazi Germany’s first blow towards West. The Allied powers bought time, and when their wealth was finally converted into enough military power, they defeated the Axis in the end (Taliaferro, Ripsman, & Lobell, 2012). The neoclassical realist approach to international relations helps us understand the time factor better than the structural realist school. In terms to understand how balancing strategies are chosen the neoclassical realist approach uses unit-level factors such as strategic culture or leader perceptions. These unit-level variables help us understand the answers state gives to a threat. Rate of Transformation of Wealth to Power Rapid

Availability of Allies Yes No External balancing plus Internal balancing plus arms arms race race Moderate External balancing, continuInternal balancing, buck-pass, ously accelerated arms short term appeasement build-up Slow External balancing, invest in Internal balancing, invest at allies home or bandwagon Table 4. Conditions Shaping the Choice of Strategy: Balance Now [This classification was inspired by Brawley 2004, p. 87106].

 

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Disclaimer: A selected data figures in the above table have been amended, whilst others have been updated in order to exemplify the dynamic changes in the global environment ever since 2004.

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144 Attila Mezei Rate of Transformation of Wealth to Power Rapid Moderate Slow

Availability of Allies Yes No ? Bandwagon, invest at home External balancing, Internal balancing, invest at moderate arms build-up home Buck-pass, invest for Appease, invest at home long term

Table 5. Conditions Shaping the Choice of Strategy: Balance Later. [This classification was inspired by Brawley 2004, p. 88107]. Clearly, Table 4. and Table 5. explain the differences how the perceived rate of transformation of wealth to power affects balancing strategies. It helps us understand how conflicts evolve as in the case of the Second World War. Structural factors alone cannot sufficiently predict which strategy the state will pursue. Leader perception is one of the most important factor when a state evaluates the imminence of the threat. In Table 5 the question mark refers to the unknown strategy that the state may pursue. If balancing is needed only in the long run and the state can rapidly transform its wealth to power and it has the sufficient allies to defeat the rising power, it can choose any strategy be it external or internal balancing.

Case Study: Ukraine Crisis In order to test whether the balance of power theory still fits into the 21st century I have chosen the Ukrainian crisis and the response of the USA as a contemporary conflict. The crisis started in 2013, when the Ukrainian President decided to turn more towards Russia instead of the European Union. A lot of Ukrainian did not support this decision and started demonstrations in Kiev. The situation escalated that prompted President Yanukovych to flee the country. Russia seized the opportunity and de facto annexed a peninsula at the Black Sea called Crimea. Russia has been trying to weaken Ukraine since then. It has been supporting the secession of the Eastern part of Ukraine and trying to make sure that the country does not join the Western block any time soon.

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Disclaimer: A selected data figures in the above table have been amended, whilst others have been updated in order to exemplify the dynamic changes in the global environment ever since 2004.

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The relative power of the Russian Federation seems to be increase thanks to its activities since 2014 that upsets the status quo or otherwise known as the balance of power. The United States as a global power has a lot of stakes everywhere in the world and its European allies are threatened by the aggressive behaviour of Russia. Some balancing behaviour has to be expected, if we use my definition where the balance of power ought to be accepted by the major players of the world. The unit level factors of the neoclassical realist school count the perception of the threat into the calculus therefore giving a more precise answer what kind of balancing strategy would be chosen by a major global power such as the United States. If we take a look at Table 4. and Table 5. we can see which balancing strategy the USA pursues. The United States is one of the leading economic and military power of the world with an extensive alliance system especially in Europe. Therefore its rate of transforming its wealth to power is rapid. It already possesses capabilities to deploy troops in the given region and it has weapons manufacturers and the financial means to further enhance its military position if it is needed. It has available allies: the NATO countries are in the proximity of the conflict. In this respect it is worth noticing that Table 5. indicates that the United States has the luxury to pursue any strategy since Ukraine is not of its ally and the Russian threat is only indirect. This also means that the theory in general would predict a slow and moderate response from the United States. Yet, the numerous diplomatic negotiations, the military aid to Ukraine and the slow increase in the military presence in Eastern Europe signal the commitment of the United States to the conflict, but it also exemplifies that the United States does not need to react to the crisis quickly since it does not affect directly and heavily its allies or its strategic interests in the short run. We also need to remember in this respect that the unit-level variable also plays a role in the handling of the situations since domestic politics also influences the balancing strategies. It is clear that the prolonged involvement of the United States in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq has a clear negative effect on the options of its leaders for the American people show a far reaching reluctance to engage in another unconventional conflict. They are afraid of walking anther open ended commitment such as the Vietnam War (1955–1975). This further indicates that the US leaders would be rather reluctant to take any substantial steps to send the troops on the ground to Ukraine to solve the crisis, should the domestic situation in this country deteriorated even further.

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146 Attila Mezei

Conclusion This paper touched upon the contemporary state of the balance of power theory, the theory that has been widely respected and used by vast majority of IR scholars to explain various political phenomenons in both regional and global realms. The working definition of balance of power that has been coined in this paper is educated by various historical examples and a clear overview of the balancing strategies that various international actors have followed throughout the centuries. The updated versions of the tables used in this paper have also proven to be a useful tool explaining various strategies and enhances our abilities to understand international politics, therefore I strongly recommend them for any scholar who is interested in illustrating their train of thoughts to their readers. It is also important to acknowledge that after applying the neoclassical realist school’s interpretation of the balancing strategies to such an example like the conflict in Ukraine, we still can inform our readers and other colleagues with rather certain predictability of the great power’s future action, for in this instance the balance of power theory clearly predicted that United States will opt to stay in line with the theory for the unit level factors clearly have contributed to the chosen balancing methods. It is also important to indicate that the neorealist (otherwise known as structural realist) school disregard the above mentioned unit level factors for it results in less accurate predictions. Having said that, it is very that further research in this area is clearly needed, for it still can be quite problematic to separate domestic factors from the foreign policy of a given country, but this approach can be seen as a good baseline to further enhance the international relations literature on concept in question.

Bibliography Anonymous. (1741). Europe’s Catechism in Little, Richard. 2009. The Balance of Power in International Relations: Metaphors, Myths and Models. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Brawley, Mark R. (2004). The Political Economy of Balance of Power Theory in Paul, T. V.; Wirtz, James J.; Fortmann, Michel. (2007). Balance of Power: Theory and Practice in the 21st Century. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

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Claude, Inis L. (1962). Power and International Relations Random House, New York in Sheehan, Michael. (2005). The Balance of Power: History and Theory. London; New York: Taylor & Francis e-Library. Available at: http://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord. aspx?p=201269. [Accessed on 20/11/2019, at 10:45]. Crowe, Sir Eyre. (1928). Memorandum on the Present State of British Relations with France and Germany in Gooch, G.P. and Temperley, H. (eds) British Documents on the Origins of the War 1898–1914 (London, HMSO) in Sheehan, Michael. (2005). The Balance of Power: History and Theory. London; New York: Taylor & Francis e-Library. Available at: http://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord .aspx?p=201269. [Accessed on 20/11/2019, at 10:45]. Fenelon, François. (1835). Oeuvres de Fénelon “Supplément” to the “Examen de conscience sur les devoirs de la royauté” (3 v., Paris), III, 360– 363 in Sheehan, Michael. (2005). The Balance of Power: History and Theory. London; New York: Taylor & Francis e-Library. Available at: http://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullreco.aspx? p=201269. [Accessed on 20/11/2019, at 10:45]. Llewellyn, Jennifer J.; Southey, Jim; Thompson, Steve. (2019). Chinese and Soviet involvement in Vietnam. Alpha History. Available at: https://alp hahistory.com/vietnamwar/chinese-and-soviet-involvement/ [Accessed on 13/07/2020, at 09:35]. Morgenthau, Hans J. (1978). Politics Among Nations, 5th edition (Knopf, New York) in Sheehan, Michael. (2005). The Balance of Power: History and Theory. London; New York: Taylor & Francis e-Library. Available at: http://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.a spx?p=201269. [Accessed on 20/11/2019, at 10:45]. Morgenthau, Hans J. (2006). Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education. Nye, Joseph S. (2011). The Future of Power. New York: PublicAffairs. Palmer, Norman D.; Perkins, Howard C. (1945). International Relations (London) in Sheehan, Michael. (2005). The Balance of Power: History and Theory. London; New York: Taylor & Francis e-Library. Available at: http://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.a spx?p=201269. [Accessed on 20/11/2019, at 10:45]. Paul, T. V.; Wirtz, James J.; Fortmann, Michel. (2007). Balance of Power: Theory and Practice in the 21st Century. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Paul, T. V. (2018). Restraining Great Powers: Soft Balancing from Empires to the Global Era. New Haven; London: Yale University Press.

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148 Attila Mezei Pietrzak, P. (2009). American “Soft Power” after George W. Bush’s Presidency. In A. Mania & Ł Wordliczek (Eds.), The United States and the World: From Imitation to Challenge (pp. 187–194). Jagiellonian University Press. Available at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/theunited-states-and-the-world/american-soft-power-after-george-w-bush s-presidency/92C28B90B6768A74A8FF8123E5A81E5F/> Accessed on 24/07/2020, at. 00:45]. Quester, George. (1977). Offence and Defence in the International System (New York) in Sheehan, Michael. (2005). The Balance of Power: History and Theory. London; New York: Taylor & Francis e-Library. Available at: http://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.a spx?p=201269. [Accessed on 20/11/2019, at 10:45]. Rubin, Michael (2002). Who Is Responsible for the Taliban? Washington D.C.; The Washington Institute for Near East Policy: Middle East Review of International Affairs, March 2002. Available at: https:// www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/who-is-responsible -for-the-taliban [Accessed on 09/07/2020, at 10:15]. Sheehan, Michael. (2005). The Balance of Power: History and Theory. London; New York: Taylor & Francis e-Library. Available at: http://public .ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=201269. [Accessed on 20/11/2019, at 10:45]. Stubbs, William. (1886). Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Medieval and Modern History Oxford at the Clarendon Press in Sheehan, Michael. (2005). The Balance of Power: History and Theory. London; New York: Taylor & Francis e-Library. Available at: http://public.ebookcentral. proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=201269. [Accessed on 20/11/2019, at 10:45]. Taliaferro, Jeffrey W.; Ripsman, Norrin, M.; Lobell, Steven E. (2012). The Challenge of Grand Strategy: The Great Powers and Broken Balance between the World Wars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Toynbee, Arnold Joseph. (1934). A Study of History, Vol. III. (Oxford) in Sheehan, Michael. (2005). The Balance of Power: History and Theory. London; New York: Taylor & Francis e-Library. Available at: [Accessed on 20/11/2019, at 10:45].

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Vattel, Emer de. (1916) The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law Applied to the Conduct and to the Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns, trans or 1758 edn Charles Fenwick (Carnegie Institution, Washington DC) in Sheehan, Michael. (2005). The Balance of Power: History and Theory. London; New York: Taylor & Francis e-Library. Available at: [Accessed on 20/11/2019, at 10:45]. Waltz, Kenneth N. (2010). Theory of International Politics. Long Grove: Waveland Press, Inc.

Disclaimer: This article has been written thanks to the support provided by “From Talent to Young Researcher Project”, that aims at activities supporting the research career model in higher education, identifier EFOP-3.6.3-VEKOP-16-201700007 co-supported by the European Union, Hungary and the European Social Fund. For more information about this project please refer to this web link: https://www.uni-corvinus.hu/main-page/research/research-and-development-projects/sz echenyi2020-2/efop-3-6-3-vekop-16-2017-00007/?lang=en#null

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PART III: IN STATU NASCENDI’S REVIEWS & RESPONSES

 

 

Krzysztof Żęgota In Response to Sergey Sukhankin, Russian Regionalism in Action: The Case of the NorthWestern Federal District (1991–2017), “Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society” 2018, Vol. 4, No. 1. forming Russian Federation. After the 1990s, however, a careful observer of the Russian Federation’s politics would no longer be able to see such propensity to entertain such ideas, for the process of the political, economic, and social consolidation within the Russian Federation has clearly put an end to such ideas, and one could clearly observe the new opening in center-periphery relations. Having said that, the current authorities of the Russian Federation have recently faced a number of growing dilemmas in respect of the demand for the reshaping of the internal relations within a number of the peripheral regions in the country. These dilemmas have been clearly identified by Sergey Sukhankin in his paper titled “Russian Regionalism in Action: The Case of the North-Western Federal District (1991–2017)” published in one of the editions of “Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society” in 2018, and I would like to make a few comments about this paper in this short commentary. Sergey Sukhankin is a very fascinating political scientist and historian who graduated from the Kaliningrad State University of Immanuel Kant, as well as some Polish as well as Spanish universities. He is an expert in the field of the international relations with the

The activity of the Russian Federation and its authority’s propensity to adopt sustainable development policies and shape the relationship between the country’s decision-making center and the peripheral areas tends to be always based on compromise in such a vastly territorially extensive country as Mother Russia. Having said that there is a visible change in the current state of affairs in this respect and the practices developed in the early 1990s, when we could clearly observe a clash between the need to delegate broad powers to local authorities, and the desire to connect the peripheral areas more closely with a central authority. Naturally, in this respect, some periodization can be observed concerning the attitude of the federal authorities of Russia to this issue: The collapse of the Soviet Union began the process of the loosening of the connections of the peripheral territories with the federal center. Political and social confusion accompanying the disintegration of the USSR have clearly contributed to the mushrooming of a number of concepts that suggested obtaining significant autonomy in some parts of the Russian Federation. During this time we could also observe much greater openness towards the idea of changing the legal status of some peripheral territories of the newly

153

154 Reviews & Responses specialization of Russian regional, foreign, and security policy. He works for The Jamestown Foundation, Washington DC (United States), and the MacEwan School of Business, Edmonton (Canada). In this article, Sergey Sukhankin touches upon a number of the dilemmas related to Russian regional relations between regions and the center with particular emphasis on the NorthWestern Federal District of Russia. As he notices, Russian regional policy has evolved over the past 30 years in a specific political context and constitutional order. When we look at the federal policy from a formal and legal point of view, it is clear that the structure of power no longer looks as openly at the concept of the autonomy of various parts that belong to the Federation as it used to in the early 1990s. From this point of view, therefore, it seems that we could even suggest that the federation is evolving into a facade federation in respect of the structure of the center-periphery relations in contemporary Russia. But I need to say, the paper is definitely well structured and the arguments are easy to follow for there are six parts in this article. In the introduction, the author presents the historical context and methodological approach to the research that scrutinizes the 26 years’ worth of available data; starting in 1991 and ending in 2017.

The following part of the article titled “The Russian Perception of Regionalism: Soviet Prejudices and New Challenges” discusses the conditions of Russian regionalism in respect of the Soviet heritage to discuss the main difficulties in implementing the modern model of managing peripheral regions from the socio-historical perspective. In this respect, the author rightly notes that as much as between 1990 and 2000 there was a strong possibility for enlarged social and economic integration of Russia’s border regions with the borderlands of neighboring states, particularly in the Baltic Sea basin, this has clearly changed in the following period, when the Western model of regionalism has been rejected, and the possibility for developing a wide cross-border cooperation with neighboring countries has decreased significantly. This change of the regional politics was clearly observable in the Warmia and Mazury Region where I reside (The province borders the Kaliningrad Oblast to the south108). The following part of the article, titled “Russia’s North-West: The General Picture (1991–2013)” focuses its attention on endogenous factors for the development of regionalism in the Russian North-Western Federal District, and argues that the structure of federal districts in Russia was shaped based on a special decree of the president of the Russian

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For more information in respect of regional cooperation between both regions please also see Pietrzak, P & Żęgota, K., (Forthcoming) Interview with Krzysztof Żęgota, Ph.D. on the Russian Federation’s Geostrategic Imperatives and Vladimir Putin’s future, in: In Statu Nascendi 2021; In Statu Nascendi: Journal of Political Philosophy and International Relations 2021/1 (Vol. 4, No. 1.) Language: EN. Available at: https://journals.indexcop ernicus.com/search/article?articleId=2559438

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Reviews & Responses Federation in May 2000. It is also emphasized that the federal districts are located in the administrative division of Russia higher than federal entities (republics, krais, oblasts, federal cities, autonomous oblasts, and autonomous okrugs). According to a number of specialists focusing their attention on Russia’s contemporary politics, constitutionalists as well as political scientists and IR scholars, the creation of federal districts was very instrumental for the intention was to strengthen the integration of federal entities with central government and subordination to federal authorities, and not to unleash more individuality of the respective regions or secure some special circumstances for the autonomous regions to choose their own path of development. Yet, the author has recognized that despite these plans we could see a very unique way in which the NorthWestern Federal District has developed, and this analysis comprises a number of dimensions related to its neighborhood with NATO and the individual EU member states. In this respect, I really enjoyed reading a number of emphases made by the author in respect of the way the significant urban centers such as Saint Petersburg, Murmansk, Pskov, and Kaliningrad have reacted to this overall change in the federal approach towards cross-border cooperation over the last two and a half decades. The region’s involvement in cross-border cooperation as well as the main barriers to regional development in the district were also presented. The next part of the article—“Russia’s North-West Post Crimea”—contains interesting observations on the de-

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velopment of the North-Western Federal District after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. This part also focuses on 1. Karelia, 2. Pskov Oblast, and 3. Saint Petersburg regions for they have enjoyed the most development in respect of cross-border cooperation. As the author emphasizes, the main factor contributing to Moscow’s worry about the way Karelia’s regional development is progressing was the concerns in respect of the growing separatism in the region. Meanwhile in respect of the Pskov Oblast this region has shown a very low potential for economic development, whilst Saint Petersburg Oblast, is pictured as a very open to the idea of regional cooperation that can really contribute to this region’s three possible scenarios for its development in the future. Subsequently, the fifth part of the article was the most fascinating for me for it debates the Kaliningrad Oblast from the perspective of the potential for the evolution of Kaliningrad in RussiaWest relations. In this respect, the author notes that in the years 1991–2005 considerable hopes were associated with the development of the Kaliningrad Oblast as a pilot area and laboratory of the EURussia relations unit 2013; but after this date the policy has changed completely into the Russian “bastion” directed against the West. Certainly the most interesting—from a scientific point of view—part of this chapter is an analysis of the potential for developing the identity of the region’s inhabitants based on German traditions and the alleged “Germanization” of the region. The article is a successful attempt to present the conditions for the development of center-periphery relations on

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156 Reviews & Responses the example of border regions of the North-Western Federal District of Russia. The author presents a historical analysis of the changes in the significance of the regions. The main limitation of this paper is the fact that it lacked a clear distinction between the real and the facade federalism in Russian political conditions, which could not be found it this article. The recent years have shown that the Russian political system has evolved in a way that excludes the autonomy of the regions, which is after all a necessary element of any federal state. One of the postulates is also the need to emphasize the caesura of May 2010, when a new level of territorial division of the country—Federal Districts—was created in Russia. This was primarily aimed at increasing Moscow’s control over federal entities of the Russian Federation. Since then, the wider independence of the region and building cross-border relations with neighboring countries is not possible in principle. This does not change the fact that the reviewed article is a valuable work on the development of border regions and makes a significant contribution to the

study of the relationship between the center and the periphery in Russian constitutional and political reality.

Further reading Sergey Sukhankin, “Russian Regionalism in Action: The Case of the NorthWestern Federal District (1991– 2017)”, Journal of Soviet and PostSoviet Politics and Society 2018, vol. 4, no. 1. Pietrzak, P. & Żęgota, K., (Forthcoming) Interview with Krzysztof Żęgota, Ph.D. on the Russian Federation’s Geostrategic Imperatives and Vladimir Putin’s future, in: In Statu Nascendi 2021; In Statu Nascendi: Journal of Political Philosophy and International Relations 2021/1 (Vol. 4, No. 1.) Language: EN. Available at: [Accessed on 21.07.2020 at: 10:30] & A video recording available at: [Accessed on 21.07.2020 at: 10:40].

 

Piotr Pietrzak A brief introduction to the Journal of Romanian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2019) I have reached to the first edition of the Journal of Romanian Studies (JRS); neither because I consider myself an expert in the field of Romanian studies, nor because I had any aspiration of becoming one. On the contrary, I am a complete novice to Romanian studies in general;

and I did so in a rather instrumental manner, purely to satisfy my life-long fascination and curiosity with the legacy of socialism in the Eastern bloc in general. This research has led me to the investigation of various backgrounds and

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Reviews & Responses socio-political developments in the region that is taken as a whole and a sum of its differences for the last 30 years, counting from the beginning of the democratic changes in Eastern Europe and the Balkans up to the present day politics in various countries in the region. As much as my research has surely allowed me to lead it through investigations of most of the countries of the former Warsaw Pact, I have never actually had a proper chance to commit enough time and energy to scrutinize either Romania or Moldavia in particular. Possibly, it has to do with the fact that both of them happened to be rather purely represented in the literature that I am acquainted with; or maybe because I have simply paid insufficient attention to rather idiosyncratic developments in both of these countries. Either way, turning to the Journal of Romanian Studies has turned out to be beneficial to me; for it has allowed me to make some necessary amends in this respect. And I am happy to say that it was done in a rather short period—for it took me approximately 11–12 hours to go through the entire first volume of this journal, during which time I have learned more about Romania than ever before. This alone accounts for a good reason why it is worth considering subscribing to this journal, but surely it will not be the only one; for the JRS editors (who happen to be associated with the Society for Romanian Studies (SRS)) have managed to distill a truly unique collection of well-written and well-referenced papers (5 in total along with 4 very interesting book reviews); that offer us many spoton observations into diverse socio-political environments in both Romania and

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Moldova; on the top of that, they touch upon several important issues of the Romanian diaspora living abroad. Yet, unlike other similar journals with a similar specialization, the JRS does not succumb to this rather dangerous tendency to be completely dedicated to a small group of experts in the field, or their respective students. On the contrary, even such a novice as me can see the entire journal as an addictive page-turner; for it comprises a very diverse and incredibly intriguing collection of multidimensional papers that have gone well beyond my expectations. Indeed, they touch upon many important contemporary issues and look at Romania as a country that has undergone a tremendous socio-economic and political transformation in recent decades and for the last 100 years. At the same time, all of the papers also take into account a very diverse set of historical experiences, their regional and global background, and the heritage and the culture of the local people, which have a real impact on the way the processes of shaping Romanian national identity progress. This subsequently means that we can expect that by taking this journal into our hands, we are destined to embark on a wonderful journey that has its origins in the years of the formation of the constitutional monarchy, through the debate on the reunification of Romania’s historical territories, through the period of strong dependence and servitude to the will of the Kremlin during its Communist years, up to the very pluralistic processes of transformation in both of these post-Communist states after 1989. Although each paper from the first edition was very interesting and deserves

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158 Reviews & Responses everyone’s attention, I have decided to select three papers for our further deliberations: Katherine Verdery’s “Notes on a century of surveillance” Journal of Romanian Studies, Maria Bucur’s “The Queen Is No Sister. Three Faces of Marie of Romania”, and the last but not least: Marius Stan and Vladimir Tismaneanu’s “Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism in Romania: The Case of Alexandru Jar Revisited. Please refer to the following papers of this section for further information.

References Journal of Romanian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2019). Katherine Verdery’s “Notes on a century of surveillance” Journal of Romanian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2019), p. 35–52. Maria Bucur “The Queen Is No Sister. Three Faces of Marie of Romania” Journal of Romanian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2019), p. 77–104. Marius Stan and Vladimir Tismaneanu’s “Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism in Romania: The Case of Alexandru Jar Revisited. Journal of Romanian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2019), p. 105–122.

 

Piotr Pietrzak In response to Katherine Verdery’s “Notes on a century of surveillance” Journal of Romanian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2019), p. 35–52. The “Notes on a century of surveillance”, by Katherine Verdery, is worth our close attention for it depicts Romania’s intelligence apparatus through the perspective of its historical tradition, by bringing to the fore its finest achievements such as successful maintenance of the country’s unity during the most difficult times and extrapolates it further in a very elaborated manner to incorporate the discussions on far less proud moments of these services’ operations when their most active operatives embarked upon their pursuits of personal goals and objectives that had little to do with the attainment of certain aspects of the country’s national interests. Dealing with

such diverse tasks and scrutinizing such a complex heritage of any secret institution is never easy, but the author found an incredible way of treating her readers to really multidimensional and deep analysis of various evolutions and transformational events that have changed the way the Romanian intelligence services have operated for the last decade and approaches both the intelligence service and the time of their operations in a very specific manner that considers the transhistorical core reality between Romania in 1918 and 2018 while also taking into account a number of particular moments in time that added a certain dynamism

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Reviews & Responses and ease to the way modern Romania has evolved (Verdery 2019, p. 35–39). Verdery begins by briefly explaining that the origin of the formation of the military intelligence trained by French and Prussian officers dates back to 1859, whilst the formation of the first non-military secret police followed some thirty years later. This specially established intelligence organization was responsible for maintaining public order, expelling persons considered dangerous, monitoring foreigners, and coordinating the police force; it was structured within the general police force under the Ministry of Internal Affairs/Securităța Generală109. Yet, we need to remember, as the author of this paper emphasizes, that this early arrangement did not stand the test of time for the peasant rebellion of 1907 and an attempt on the life of Prime Minister Ion I. C. Brătianu110 two years later made the Romanian decision-makers realize the need for the complete reorganization and further professionalization of the intelligence services to better maintain law and order in the country and protect the country from any outside interference. These conciliatory early ef-

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forts paid off and were proven particularly useful at the time of the incorporation of the new territories of Bessarabia, Bucovina, and Transylvania into Greater Romania, for as Verdery suggests, acquiring just Bessarabia had almost turned the region into a hotbed of Bolshevik extremism and made the entire country more vulnerable to the rise of revolutionary anarchy and heightened the exposure to communist infiltration. This fact alone created serious problems for governing Romania’s eastern territories and exposed the national security services to serious existential threats and semi-peaceful irredentist propaganda. These exposures, in turn, created fertile ground for the growth of secret police and strengthened the capacity and strength of both the Siguranta111 and SSI (Serviciul Special de Informație) in dealing with communist spies and agitators crossing the Soviet border into Bessarabia (Verdery 2019, p. 38–39). The author also emphasizes that in terms of external difficulties the local security services also had to focus on dealing with the consequences of the acquisition of Transylvania112, which in-

                                                             109 110 111

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Directorate of the Police and General Safety; Romanian: Direcția Poliției și Siguranței Generale Ion I. C. Brătianu (20 August 1864–24 November 1927) was a Romanian politician, leader of the National Liberal Party, Prime Minister of Romania for five terms. Siguranța was the generic name for the successive secret police services in the Kingdom of Romania. The official title of the organization changed throughout its history, with names including Directorate of the Police and General Safety (Romanian: Direcția Poliției și Siguranței Generale), the Secret Intelligence Service (Romanian: Serviciul Secret de Informații), the Special Intelligence Service (Romanian: Serviciul Special de Informații) or simply the Intelligence Service (Romanian: Serviciul de Informații). After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, the separate status of Transylvania ceased; it was incorporated into the Kingdom of Hungary (Transleithania) as part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. On 17 August 1916, Romania signed a secret treaty (the

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160 Reviews & Responses creased the risk of Hungarian irredentism, and even though this threat was not as imminent as in the East, the Romanian security services at that time had to commit considerable human and material resources to infiltrate these more grassroots-based movements in the West that aimed at separating these territories from Greater Romania and unifying them with the newly emerged first Hungarian Republic. Subsequently, the author argues that building up the country’s intelligence apparatus took a different turn when the SSI started stripping most of the Singuranta’s prerogatives under the royal dictatorship between the 1938 and 1940 (Verdery 2019, p. 38–39). Subsequently, Verdery also mentions a few organizational changes in the functionality of both SSI and Singuranta for the next four years in their direct relation to extremist groups such as the Legionary movement and the pro-Nazi National Legionary government of Ion Antonescu, who also ruled the country

like a dictator. The author mentions the increasing difficulty of these organizations with Soviet attacks on Romania through illegal entry after ceding Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union113 and increasing Hungarian irredentism during this time (Salagean 2014, p. 7–16). Possibly, the biggest downside of framing this argument in this manner and limiting it to just a few vague observations about the role of the intelligence apparatus in respect of the previously mentioned events is the fact that it overshadows what is far more important to the careful reader of history than the interdepartmental power-struggle between SSI and Singuranta, namely, their positions on the openly fascist and anti-Semitic policies of the Antonescu government, its active reinforcement of existing anti-Semitic sentiments, seizures of Jewish property, and scapegoating of Jews, and its complicity in inciting many Romanians (who were traumatized and frustrated by the loss of the large swathes

                                                            

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Treaty of Bucharest, 1916) with the Entente Powers (United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Russia), according to which the Allies agreed that Transylvania, Banat, and Partium would become part of Romania after the war if it entered the war. After World War I, Transylvania became part of Romania. For more information please see Seton-Watson, R. W. (1925), “Transylvania since 1867”, The Slavonic Review, Modern Humanities Research Association, 4 (10), p. 101–23; Cornwall, Mark (2002), Last Years of Austria-Hungary: A Multi-National Experiment in Early Twentieth-Century Europe (2nd ed.); Tihany, Leslie C. (1969), “The Austro-Hungarian Compromise, 1867–1918: A Half-Century of Diagnosis; Fifty Years of Post-Mortem”, Central European History, Cambridge University Press, Central European History Society, 2 (2), p. 114–38. According to Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact that was signed on 23rd of August 1939 Soviet Union was allowed to take back Bessarabia and northern Bukovina in June 1940. A year later Germany and Italy mediated Romanian disputes with Hungary about Transilvania, and Bulgaria regarding Dobruja resulting in the Treaty of Craiova. Large areas of Romania were ceded to Hungary and Bulgaria {For more information in this respect please visit: Marcela Salagean, Romania’s status in the new European geopolitics imposed by the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, Journal of Global Politics and Current Diplomacy, Issue Year: 2/2014. p. 7–16. Available at: [Accessed on 26/07/2020, at 11:50]}.

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Reviews & Responses of the country in the 1940s without a war) against the Jewish minority. Surely, had Katherine Verdery pulled the Antonescu thread in a more elaborated manner she would have unravelled some inconvenient data about the role of both intelligence apparatus in the Holocaust, but she could also provide examples of the bravery among the members of the Romanian intelligence services who risked their lives to prevent Jewish and Roma community’s arrests, and the extermination of the members of these communities, especially in Bessarabia and Bukovina, and attempted to stop or at least minimize the scope of the Chestura massacre of 1941 and the Bucharest pogrom of 1941, as well as other anti-Semitic pogroms that add to the long list of the Romanian government’s questionable actions against minorities during this time114. Nevertheless, what is an oversight on the side of the author is surely compensated for by the following chapters that describe the revolutionary changes that happened to the entire Romanian security apparatus after the communist takeover in 1944. In this respect the author emphasizes that even in this respect there is an undeniable element of continuity in the way the new security apparatus was formed, for she suggests that it took at least another four years before Securitate (CNSAS)—Departamentul Securității Statului was fully operational [officially on 30 August 1948

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(Verdery 2019, p. 42–46)]. The reorganization was undertaken in such a fashion to accommodate the new needs and the requirements of the new Communist dignitaries, even if it meant firing, verifying, and rehiring several officers who had served in other institutions: Singuranta, SSI, and even those who had served as legionaries. That means that the Romanian state apparatus chose to function with a certain continuity, not disposing an efficient service but utilizing the most reliable cadres the former regime had developed. This was important for two main reasons: on the one hand, the experienced offices and subofficers paradoxically chose some of the most savage measures of reprisals and state-imposed terror not because of their opportunism but simply because they had to outperform their colleagues and impress their bosses with their harsh execution of orders to prove their usefulness. On the other hand, the know-how of the old cadres was important for the new officers who didn’t need to exclusively rely on the Soviets’ instruction, for we can assume that not every new hire was also fluent in Russian, and they had to learn the craft and all of the nuances of the fieldwork from someone who already had enough experience in infiltrating and trying to dismantle political groupings considered undesirable in this particular socio-political background. In this respect, Verdery suggests that “in 1947, the effective of DGP reached 9,339, of which 5,615 (60%) were hired

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For more information in this respect please visit: Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Iasi Pogrom of June 1941, Contemporary European History, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Jul., 1993), p. 119–148. Available at: [Accessed 30 June 2020, at. 12:30]

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162 Reviews & Responses ‘din vechile cadre polițienești’—from the old police officers, only 3,724 having been hired new”; and in 1951 the newly formed Securitate also swallowed up the SSI. All of those early measures allowed Securitate to become one of the most notorious political police forces of the communist era and was able to act as a repressive arm of the new regime (Verdery 2019, p. 44–48. As much as Securitate behaved with excessive brutality between 1948and the 1960s, and possibly become one of the most effective intelligence services in the world, responsible for penetrating various institutions, identifying enemies, and fulfilling informative and counter-informative acts of sabotage, arrests, torture and the deaths of thousands of people, the author of this paper also suggests that this force was also used in later years to help to overcome the technological backwardness of the country, acquiring new technology from the West, like buying its first IBM computer by bartering it for jam. All of those unconventional methods did not stop what was inevitable in Romania and the entire Eastern Bloc, for the author emphasizes that the Romanian intelligence services were again challenged by the revolution of 1989. Yet Katherine Verdery proves to be rather skeptical whether or not the democratic takeover was completed in an expected manner in Romania, for there was a certain element of continuity that allowed the biggest opportunists from the former intelligence services to control the way certain events

started unfolding in the post-1989 environment. Her example shows that certain informers who were building her personal Securitate profile during the communist years were still collecting information about her activity in her local village even six years after the revolution took place. Furthermore, the author also suggests that, paradoxically, similar to in Russia115, the people from inner circles of former Romanian Secret Police services, not nomenclature, have accumulated economic power, became the pioneer capitalists, and eventually took over the entire economy in the country. She suggests that the connection between the oligarchs and former secret police is very tight, for those people who took over the economy are likely to continue to enable business people with state security connections to prosper in post-Communist Romania until the transformation is fully completed. Clearly, it may have cost her a decade of work in the archives but the final effect is astonishing for it shows an incredible journey fueled by a different level of intellectual curiosity that results in reaching a different level of understanding of the way the modern security services adjust to an inherently changing environment, as well as the local, regional, and global socio-political environment (Verdery 2019, p. 46–52). Verdery’s paper deserves everyone’s attention for it clearly shows that on the one hand the need of intelligence services in our modern world can no longer be underestimated and on the

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According to the statistics that was brought to fore by the author provided by Olga Kryshtnovskaya—approximately 78% of Russian elite had a KGB connection (Verdery 2019, p. 50.

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Reviews & Responses other, it proves beyond any question that maintenance of state security is never easy, and it can never depend on the effectiveness of just one institution or a group of people. Furthermore, this paper asks a number of very important questions, starting with how do we know when a state is the same as or different from 25 to 100 years ago? In order to check if it can be a single state existing across a century, even if in different forms, Verdery takes us on an intellectual expedition that shows a certain continuity across several revolutionary and evolutionary transformations of Romanian intelligence services in statu nascendi from one socio-political system into another, of a country that has changed not only borderlines and the socio-ethical structure of the society, but also shifted geostrategic alliances, changed sides in wars, and changed one oppressive regime for another. This paper also provides us with a different perspective to several regime changes and exposes us to various sociohistorical-political descriptions without much of the bias, prejudice, or maliciousness that is quite common in similar work that I have come across with a certain local account of former Security Services in the other post-Communist countries, especially in Poland under Kaczynski’s regime. It should be recommended to anyone who is interested in exploring a totally new angle of investigation of the transformations that happened both in Romania as well as the entire Central and Eastern Europe both after 1989 and during the 20th century.

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References Cornwall, Mark (2002), Last Years of Austria-Hungary: A Multi-National Experiment in Early TwentiethCentury Europe (2nd ed.); Tihany, Leslie C. (1969), The Austro-Hungarian Compromise, 1867–1918: A Half-Century of Diagnosis; Fifty Years of Post-Mortem”, Central European History, Cambridge University Press, Central European History Society, 2 (2), p. 114–38. Ioanid, Radu “The Holocaust in Romania: The Iasi Pogrom of June 1941”, Contemporary European History, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Jul., 1993), p. 119–148. Available at: [Accessed 30 June 2020, at. 12:30]. Marcela Salagean, Romania’s status in the new European geopolitics imposed by the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, Journal of Global Politics and Current Diplomacy, Issue Year: 2/2014. p. 7–16. Available at: [Accessed on 26.07.2020, at. 11:30]. Seton-Watson, R. W. (1925), “Transylvania since 1867”, The Slavonic Review, Modern Humanities Research Association, 4 (10), p. 101– 23. Katherine Verdery’s “Notes on a century of surveillance” Journal of Romanian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2019), p. 35–52.

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Piotr Pietrzak In response to Maria Bucur’s “The Queen Is No Sister. Three Faces of Marie of Romania” Journal of Romanian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2019), p. 77–104. “The Queen Is No Sister. Three Faces of Marie of Romania” deserves our attention for its author Maria Bucur asks tough questions about the choices made by Queen Marie of Romania during the difficult time of the First World War and directly after this military conflict. Bucur begins her argument by suggesting that the monarch in question is very often pictured as a charismatic, talented, beautiful, and ambitious historical figure that became a real source of inspiration to many young Romanian women and girls; for to her credit, Marie engaged in several charitable activities that are believed to have saved many lives during this difficult time in Romanian history. Those initiatives included encouraging volunteer nursing efforts concerning epidemics and battlefield casualties, transforming some of the royal palaces into field hospitals for the wounded, helping to arrange ambulance services and supplies to these hospitals, and many other ad hoc activities. Bucur argues that it is also admirable that as a granddaughter of Queen Victoria of England, who surely had a very close relation to the royalty on both sides of the conflict, Marie of Romania did not hesitate to use this advantageous position to write several letters on behalf of Romania’s interests. These letters were written to some global leaders such as King George V of the United Kingdom, Keiser Wilhelm of Germany, and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, who

were Marie’s cousins, as well as other influential people at that time to mobilize support for this country’s military efforts. As she suggests, more details about this can be found in the queen’s autobiography, for Marie was writing about herself throughout her adult life, virtually on a daily basis (Bucur 2019, p. 77– 80). The above-mentioned journals also indicate that Marie’s ambitions were much higher than just fulfilling the role of a supportive wife or being responsible for raising the royal offspring. On the contrary, they indicate that Marie was increasingly frustrated with the fact that she was locked in a disadvantageous position; for her role was purely representative, without any authority that could extend to having any say in more important governmental matters at the time. That meant that as the wife of such an indecisive political figure as King Ferdinand she could not step in and impose her will on anyone, for her only power or influence could yield from the realm of charm and persuasion that could only achieve so much in the very patriarchal socio-political political system of the kingdom of Romania where the gender norms of the time had it that both in the royal caste and beyond women had no business in politics or business. Her journals also suggest that Marie wanted to change this state of affairs and that she was a keen partisan in the struggle

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Reviews & Responses for women’s voting rights and warmly embraced the women’s movement for emancipation in Romania. Yet, in this respect, Bucur warns us not to mistake these declarations for an actual state of affairs, for Marie of Romania was very careful and strategic in crafting her literary persona. The words she put on paper were not an unedited flow of thoughts, even in her diaries, for clearly her journal was never penned simply for herself, but had an imagined audience of many and diverse readers, and very often these or similar declarations were meant to contribute to Marie’s self-promotion efforts and present her as an open-minded and cosmopolitan woman who wanted to improve her position and the position of the fellow women. But the sad truth is that even if we take into account the unprecedented nature of the war and the specific complexity of Romania’s predicament at a certain time, Marie’s journal tends to be rather selective about a more inconvenient truth. For these reasons it is advisable not to rely solely on the primary sources authored by the queen herself, but to invoke other historical sources and documents produced at the time that suggest that some of these statements and declarations were meant in rather an instrumental manner to encourage other women’s contributions to the war effort. Furthermore, there is also little or very little evidence to support Queen Marie’s claim that she meant to act upon her promises and declarations after the war ended. In that respect, the author claims that at least soldiers who came back from the field of battle when the war was over were awarded some land, but there was no long-lasting recognition for women who assumed

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several normally-considered male roles to support the war efforts and then were just forced back to their pre-WWI roles—they were told that now they needed to prove that they were good mothers and wives and generously volunteer before they would be awarded any political rights (Bucur 2019, p. 80– 103). In this respect, Bucur laments that especially when we take into account King Ferdinand’s indecisiveness, and even though her political influence was informal, it was clearly on the rise, for it was strengthened during the war, so if she was really not comfortable with this status quo, she could have done something remarkable and achieved great things for her fellow women; yet instead of that she chose to put her head in the sand regarding pre-established gender roles at that time, and she did not question the status quo (Bucur 2019, p. 97– 103). Naturally, Marie expressed her support for the cause of women’s rights on many occasions, but when it came to supporting Romanian women in their fight for gender equality she took no public stance on the matter. She neither spoke nor wrote in support of female suffrage in 1917, ’18, ’19, or ’23, or for any other women’s rights, even when other feminist leaders in the country were publicly articulating several reasons why women deserved and the country needed them to become full citizens with voting rights, access to all educational and professional opportunities, and the same civil rights as men. She also did not reflect on the real issues faced by her fellow women at the time: poverty, vulnerability, fears, and the ability to prevail

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166 Reviews & Responses over their context of disempowerment. The only remarkable thing that she did in respect of her feminist self (if there was any, for Bucur also suggests that Marie of Romania had no knowledge of or interest in feminist rising stars of the late 19th century and if she ever read Harriet Taylor or John Stuart Mill, they left no mark on her) was to keep it equal when it came to awarding the Queen Marie Cross116, for she awarded 41% of them (1264 out of 3109) to women (Bucur 2019, p. 87–97). This article is really impressive and extremely interlinked for it successfully proves the main assertion of Maria Bucur, that Queen Mary of Romania can be seen as a strong historical figure and one of the most influential Romanian women of her time, but not a feminist. Bucur claims that her article was not written with the intent to desecrate the icon, or to frame Queen Marie’s actions as egoistic, egocentric, or only self-serving, but to try to determine how someone who wields power in gendered terms uses or does not use that position of privilege for the benefits of others without power, and the way she presented her arguments suggest that her intentions were genuine. Unfortunately, I need to agree with the author that it is clear that Marie of Romania did little or very little to understand the grassrootsbased feminist demand for change in the way women are treated both in Romania and in Europe at that time, and for this reason the impact that she made on the

lives of her fellow women was limited (Bucur 2019, p. 95–100). In this respect, Bucur explains that some the reasons behind her choices and “her detachment from the reality she entered” may come from the queen’s royal upbringing and the fact that she was raised in castles, palaces, and sumptuous villas in Great Britain, Malta, and Germany, before marrying Ferdinand and moving to Romania. In this respect, Bucur also suggests Queen Mary of Romania could have also been under the impression that following certain patterns of behavior of her predecessor (Queen Elisabeth of Romania) such as certain irrational instincts would not be beneficial in strengthening her public image so she did her utmost to restrain the side that would have made her more outspoken about women rights. Indeed, as Bucur writes, Romanian women’s voting rights expanded only after her son Carol II assumed royal dictatorship in 1938, and Marie of Romania played no role in this change whatsoever; for these reasons, she can be seen as one of those self-absorbed foreign-born princesses who came to sit on the throne in Romania as a sign of compromise orchestrated by the monarchical regimes of the European great powers at the time; for instead of fitting in with the society that by the end of the 19th century had developed a dynamic engagement with modernization, including movements for women’s empowerment in education, civil rights, and ever more diverse engagement on

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Queen Marie Cross—(Ordinul Crucea Regina Maria) was established as an award dedicated to Civil and Military Personnel of Merit in Medical work in Wars and in Peacetime working in the same field as Queen Marie

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Reviews & Responses the part of female royals, she failed to acknowledge the needs and the aspirations of more than half of the Romanian society that expected more from her.

References Maria Bucur “The Queen Is No Sister. Three Faces of Marie of Romania” Journal of Romanian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2019), p. 77–104.

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Further reading: Mandache, Diana (May 2001). “The Marriage of Princess Marie of Edinburgh and Ferdinand, the Crown Prince of Romania”. Royalty Digest. 10 (119): 333–38 Pakula, Hannah (1984). The Last Romantic. New York: Simon and Schuster. Kingdom of Romania: Order of the Queen Marie Cross—Ordinul “Crucea Regina Maria”. Available at: [Accessed on 20/07/2020 at: 12:30].

 

Piotr Pietrzak In response to Marius Stan and Vladimir Tismaneanu’s “Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism in Romania: The Case of Alexandru Jar Revisited.” Journal of Romanian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2019), p. 105–122. Marius Stan and Vladimir Tismaneanu’s “Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism in Romania: The Case of Alexandru Jar Revisited” is a very interesting paper that adds significantly to the understanding of the dialectics of some of the first attempts at de-Stalinization in Romania after Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech of 1956, which undoubtedly shook the foundation of the Soviet Union and its respective satellite regimes in Romania and across all of Central and Eastern Europe. The speech itself unleashed several unintended consequences on the integrity of the entire Communist bloc, questioned the very direction in which the regime in Moscow

was heading, and pushed some of the most vocal headliners to reconsider their ideological choices and start promising either minor or major changes to the way law and order were maintained in their respective countries (Stan & Tismaneanu 2019, p. 105–109). Unfortunately, if we look beyond the rhetoric of this particular time between 1953 and 1956, it seems that most of the proposed changes were rather cosmetic at that time, and whoever overstepped himself in expressing too much happiness after the demise of Stalin, or whoever doubted “Stalin’s heroism”, “his greatness” or “his humanitarian intentions” could easily expose himself to

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168 Reviews & Responses a very uncertain fate: imprisonment, deportation to Siberia, or very unexpected death in very peculiar circumstances for at least the three years following the 5th of March, 1953; for the Stalinist system of terror continued to live long after Stalin’s body was put to rest in a mausoleum alongside Lenin’s, long before any liberalization, openness, or far-reaching restraint could replace it. What’s worth emphasizing is the fact that both in the Soviet Union and such places as the Polish People’s Republic, Hungarian People’s Republic or the Socialist Republic of Romania between 1953 and 1956, the political situation was not only peculiar and uncertain, but also very serious and at times very tragicomic, for we just need to recall the circumstances related to one of the rather inappropriate jokes that emerged in the direct aftermath of Stalin’s death and were very popular especially in Poland at that time; it asks sarcastically; “Na co umarł Stalin?—and response is: Na szczęście” that translates to something along the lines: “What was the real cause of Stalin’s death? Doesn’t matter, let us celebrate his demise, the monster is dead”. The problem, besides the fact that we tend to have very particular sense of humor in Poland, is the fact that not many people had realized that even tell-

ing such a sarcastic joke in such an inherently rebellious society as the Polish one could end up problematic and sometimes more deadly than funny. By the mid-1950s the secret apparatus of Ministerstwo Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego (commonly known SB) had their informants virtually everywhere, like Securitate in Romania, and one wrong move in the wrong company could have really severe consequences. It was not only ordinary people that lived in such a constant state of fear, for this fear did not concern only ordinary people; it also affected some of the highest echelons of the respective communist parties across Central and Eastern Europe. Even Khrushchev was afraid for his life, which is why Lavrentiy Beira’s trial was so brief and his execution so sudden. Yet, despite the many local Lavrentiy Beira’s who may have been executed alongside him in Belgrade, Warsaw, Budapest, and Prague, the real changes to everyday lives of the affected people, the citizens of the Eastern Bloc, had to wait much longer than they thought. The sad truth is that Khrushchev knew exactly that his plans of destalinization should be seen more as a long process than something that could just be imposed arbitrarily from the top down117. He did not intend to derail the Stalinist system of oppression in such a

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There is ongoing historical speculation on the methods Nikita Khrushchev used to deal with his political opponents and in particular on the methods of persuasion used against various hardliners who were not ready to accept his policy out of the fear of further liberalisation and destalinization. One case is that of Boleslaw Bierut, Polish Stalinist leader subject to these controversies for he allegedly died of a heart attack in Moscow on 12 March 1956, just a few weeks after he read the text of Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech”. Pojechał do Moskwy dumnie, a wrócił w trumnie. Bierut may have traveled to Moscow proudly but he came back in a casket.

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Reviews & Responses rapid manner, especially considering that his position was not strengthened back in 1956 and he must have been himself bruised and tired after emerging as a victor of what turned out to be at least three years of the very intense domestic struggle for power for “succession” between many parasitic cronies hoping to inherit the keys of the Kremlin after Stalin’s departure. These circumstances really must have taken their toll on Khrushchev, but even if he did not intend to make his speech public (it was meant to be secret and revealed only to the very small panel of the members of the local politburos for every respective Soviet satellite state), someone leaked it; so the milk was spilled, and several interest groups from within the Eastern bloc were about to use the text of this speech to launch several attacks on those who were either responsible for hiding the real truth about the real nature of Stalin’s tyrannical rule, or on those who were complicit in these crimes. Possibly, if more anti-regime groups had mushroomed in Romania and across the Eastern Bloc, and they had been more adventurous or more violent and they had started working together, the fate of the Soviet Union and the entire Warsaw Pact would have been settled not in 1991 but some 35 years earlier. However, many such top-down acts of disobedience and various grassroots actions were stopped at the outset in a number of countries across Central and Eastern Europe, and Marius Stan and Vladimir Tismaneanu’s paper clearly shows the mechanisms that were used to derail such “acts of ideological sabotage”. Still, as they argue, it would have been difficult to replicate the events that

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took place in Poland and Hungary in 1956 in Romania; for after the execution of Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu some two years earlier, there was no other genuine nationalist in the Romanian Communist Party who similar to Władysław Gomułka of Poland or Imre Nagy of Hungary could have created the conditions for the necessary changes: putting an end to heavy-handed Soviet interference in the country’s internal affairs and implementing far-reaching liberalization and destalinization (Stan & Tismaneanu 2019, p. 108–115). Yet, despite the unfavorable circumstances described above, such a brave attempt at launching far-reaching destalinization policies was made by Alexandru Jar, whose disenchantment with Stalinism is not described here as some sudden change of heart as to his entire Communist belief, but was someone who underwent a slow and rather painful evolution from an arduous, passionate, hardcore Stalinist (who believed in socialist society and devoted his whole life to communism, and on many occasions passionately argued in favor of collectivization, reaffirming the principle according to which art and literature had to follow the party dictates, which helped to nip any liberalization in the bud during high Stalinism, 1948–1953) to a rebel who had finally realized that Stalinism was a moral disaster that a true Communist had to fight against. Yet, having read the text of Nikita Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech”, in which Stalin’s crimes were revealed and his cult of personality was put into question; this biggest of communist zealots in Romania grew extremely disillusioned with the existing dogma, and became very vocal

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170 Reviews & Responses about the party’s dictatorship over literature and the arts, to the extent that Jar evolved into an apologist for liberalization, far-reaching reforms, and even destalinization in Romania (Stan & Tismaneanu 2019, p. 105–121). In this respect, Marius Stan and Vladimir Tismaneanu suggest that whether his protest sounds authentic or not, given a chance, Jar could have evolved into an intellectual icon of destalinization who could have helped to overcome the intellectual and socio-political stigma and disillusionment with the Soviet Communist crimes, for his case (similar to the case of Adam Ważyk of Poland) could be very convincing, despite his Stalinist past. As a pre-1944 Romanian communist activist, known for his role in the French Resistance, and a widower to Olga Bancic (fellow revolutionary who was captured and beheaded by the Nazis), Jar could be seen as far more authentic than the most of the other apparatchiks from the local communist party. So he could have been a reputation saver in this respect, but as it turned out both Romania and the local communist apparatus were not ready to entertain such a strategy of entrusting him with such a sensitive mission of going public with the nature and the scope of Stalinist crimes. The party decided to organize a cover-up of these crimes and their upper echelons decided to launch a sneaky provocation against Jar to discredit him as inauthentic in his sudden change of heart about Stalinism. Gheorghiu-Dej (the first Communist leader of Romania, 1944–54 and 55–65) even encouraged him to speak up and publically express his discontent during the Roma-

nian Union of Writers meeting to embark on a soul-searching discussion of Stalinist abuses. Yet, as it quickly turned out, it was a trap and Jar was not chosen to make any difference but was just sent to the lion’s den for the local dictator who was less interested in entertaining the idea of a rapid destalinization policy than in identifying and instrumentally destroying any potential threat to his authoritarian rule (Stan & Tismaneanu 2019, p. 110–115). Because he was trapped by this sneaky provocation, Jar was deemed a revisionist who dared to assault the party’s ideological monopoly; he consequently ended up banned as a member of the Union of Romanian Writers and a member of the Romanian Communist Party for the next two decades, which effectively meant the end of his writing career. Because he had been accused of holding anti-party positions, all of his contracts with state-owned publishing houses were terminated. Meanwhile, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had no regrets whatsoever, for thanks to betraying his old friend, he managed to put down the intellectual unrest triggered by Khrushchevite revisionism and put an end to the emergence of a potential liberalizing faction in Romanian Communist Party. Thanks to this instrumental move the struggle against the remnants of the Stalinist system was not truly completed in Romania for the next few decades, for it survived the second de-Stalinization campaign launched by Khrushchev in 1961, and it outlived Gheorghiou-Dej himself, who lost his battle not against the liberalizing faction in the Communist Party (that he was so

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Reviews & Responses much afraid of throughout his entire political career) but against cancer, in 1965. Yet even after Gheorghiou-Dej’s departure, “his fascination with Stalinist methods” ended up very much alive, for he was replaced by another notorious leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, who despite agreeing to some cosmetic liberalizing changes to the socio-political landscape of Romania, made the purpose of his political life to utilize some of the most effective methods of his predecessor and kept himself in power until 1989 when people of Romania took things into their own hands. Needless to say, during this entire time Romania was considered one of the most loyal and reliable of Soviet Union’s satellites, and one of the most dangerous places to live for anyone who disagreed with the leading dogma (Stan & Tismaneanu 2019, p. 117–122). Marius Stan and Vladimir Tismaneanu’s article should be strongly recommended to students of history and political science and those interested in the legacy of socialism in the Eastern bloc in general. It shines more light onto a very interesting background of one of the most important protests against the Stalinist dogma in post-war Romania and depicts it as one of the most dangerous acts of semi-political, semi-ideological brinkmanship. Its failure ultimately prevented the emergence of the liberalizing faction in the Romanian Communist Party during the peak of communism. On the one hand, the authors frame their deliberations on the story of the internal struggle of the renowned communist writer and former Stalinist zealot who having read the Khrushchev’s secret speech of 1956, became

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completely disillusioned with the Stalinism, but still felt that he had a responsibility to pick up the gauntlet and do his utmost to redeem his party from all of those “uncommunist” Stalinist crimes, as well as his cult of personality. On the other hand, this paper exposes the mechanism used by Gheorghiou-Dej (the First Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party at the time) to squash Jar’s moment of realization and his hopes and aspirations with a cynical efficiency that led him directly into the trap that would end his entire writing career and have him banned from participation in any professional or political communist organizations in Romania. In this respect, this paper suggests an arbitrary abuse of the communist ideology for personal gains by Gheorghiou-Dej. His Machiavellian attack on Jar was motivated by his hope to retain the existing status quo that had benefited him personally; it secured his ultimate grip on power until his death, even if it was achieved at the expense of the ideological integrity of the party. Meanwhile, however, it is really difficult to read Jar’s intentions, for we are left wondering whether (at the end) his rather unsuccessful protest against Stalinism in Romania should be remembered as more patriotic or more communist. Was his motivation more selfless or entirely selfish?Could it be seen as a selfless act of bravery of the last genuine nationalist in the Romanian Communist Party, who similarly to Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu was hoping to put an end to heavy-handed Soviet interference in Romania’s internal affairs, and dreamed about the implementation of far-reaching liberalization and destalinization? Or

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172 Reviews & Responses should we see Jar’s protest only through the prism of him being a communist who felt that his entire adult life was being influenced by the Soviet propaganda that presented Joseph Stalin as a role model to be followed by other international comrades, but who now felt betrayed by that and decided to separate all of those still sound, plausible, defensible parts of the communist/Marxist ideology from all of the reputational damage inflicted upon it by the extent of the Soviet crimes? The other questions that we can ask ourselves are: was he interested more in protecting the party or the proletarians that composed both Romania and the Comintern (Communist International) at the time when criticism and openness were still in short supply? Finally, were his actions completely selfish? Maybe he just wanted to use the situation, to clear his compromised reputation or clear his consciousness sullied by his ultimate complicity with Stalinism. I

am sure that we could ask the same questions about the actions of Władysław Gomułka of Poland or Imre Nagy of Hungary, but that is the topic of another story.

References Marius Stan and Vladimir Tismaneanu’s “Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism in Romania: The Case of Alexandru Jar Revisited. Journal of Romanian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2019), p. 105–122. Tismaneanu, Vladimir. 2004. Stalinism for all seasons: a political history of Romanian communism. Berkeley, Calif: Univ. of Calif. Press. P. 149 Goina C. (2015) Rehabilitation in Romania: The Case of Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu. In: McDermott K., Stibbe M. (eds) De-Stalinising Eastern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London

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Call for Papers Submit your Articles, Reports, Book Reviews, Analyses, Documents, and Polemics to the next volume of In Statu Nascendi—Journal of Political Philosophy and International Relations. Authors are welcome to submit manuscripts dealing with various interdisciplinary themes relating to the mission of the journal, which may include, but are not confined to: International Relations Theory, Political Theory & political, economic, cultural, and geopolitical dimensions of the new contemporary decision-making process, Issues related to rising powers, new types of global cooperation, the global pursuit of power, especially matters related to foreign policies of the leading political powers in the modern architecture of power, Various aspects of political radicalization; contemporary conflicts and conflict resolution strategies; cross-border development, inter-regional migration, Matters related to globalization, regionalization, localization, multiculturalism, various new demographic trends, as well as emerging global challenges related to climate change and environmental degradation, Economics: issues related to both Microeconomics and Macroeconomics; Grand Economic Debates & Varieties of Capitalism, Grand Philosophical Debates between Continental, Analytical, Western, Eastern, Islamic, Classic, Contemporary, and any other unorthodox tradition/s.

Submission Instructions Please submit an article (comprising an abstract of max. 500 words, plus a minimum of 5 keywords) including the personal information of its author(s) with full name(s), institutional affiliation(s), and contact information to [email protected] Papers will be accepted for publication only if they meet high scholarly standards of originality, significance, and rigor in advancing an understanding of area development and policy. Authors of accepted papers will be notified by e-mail after their paper has been reviewed.

 

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or visit our website at https://irinstatunascendi.wixsite.com/journal

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Biographic Notes TAMARA ALBERTINI has a Lic.phil. from the University of Basel (Switzerland) and a Dr.phil. from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich (Germany). Her research fields are Renaissance and Islamic philosophy. Her major publications are Verum and Factum (editor, 1993), Marsilio Ficino. Das Problem der Vermittlung von Denken und Welt in einer Metaphysik der Einfachheit (1997); “The Seductiveness of Certainty. Fundamentalists’ Destruction of Islam’s Intellectual Legacy,” Philosophy East and West (2003); “Islamic Philosophy” in The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy (sub-editor, 2011); and Charles de Bovelles’ Liber de Sapiente or Book of the Wise (co-editor, 2011). Professor Albertini has been awarded a number of national and international fellowships and grants, including a NEH travel grant for Iran and Central Asia. She is the co-founder and President of The International Charles de Bovelles Society and the founder as well as the director of the undergraduate certificate in Islamic studies. WEBSITE: https://hawaii.academia.edu/TamaraAlbertini Email: [email protected]

KOUMPAROUDIS EVANGELOS is a Ph.D. Candidate in Medical Philosophy at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridiski” who was awarded an Erasmus Scholarship in 2019 to Sorbonne University, Paris. Evangelos looks after a column on Bibliotheque.gr where he frequently publishes original essays and short stories (literature). Additionally, he writes dramas and black comedies for the theatre. ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1068-4376 Email: [email protected]

IGA KLESZCZYŃSKA is a Ph.D. Candidate at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She also graduated from Jagiellonian University with an MA in international relations, defending the thesis titled The geoeconomic paradigm in economic policy of Barack Obama (2018) and a BA in the field of national security defending the thesis concerns the inter-American security system (2016). Website: https://inp.uj.edu.pl/khdipm/doktoranci E-mail: [email protected]

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176 Biographic Notes

ATTILA MEZEI is a Ph.D. candidate at Corvinus University of Budapest—International Relations Multidisciplinary Doctoral School and an external lecturer at the University of Debrecen—Faculty of Economics and Business—Institute of World Economy and International Relations E-mail: [email protected]

JOSEPH THOMAS MILBURN is a PhD student of Philosophy at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridiski”. He holds a Master’s Degree in Jungian and Post-Jungian Studies from the University of Essex and a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature and Philosophy from Newcastle University. Website: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4792-2785 E-mail: [email protected]

PIOTR PIETRZAK specializes in the politics and philosophy of the Middle East & the Islamic world; he looks at his research area through the prism of some of the most exciting developments in the International Relations theory, geopolitics, conflict resolution strategies, and international law. At times Piotr also comments on the matters related to the Second World Wars, and superpower competition during and after the Cold War. But he is primarily interested in various socio-political developments in Cyprus, Chechnya, the Former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Mali, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Yemen, as well as Georgia, and Ukraine. ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0464-1991 E-mail: [email protected]

ANDREA GIUSEPPE RAGNO is pursuing a MSc in Philosophy of Science at London School of Economics. He holds a Master’s Degree in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London and a Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy from Università degli Studi di Bari “Aldo Moro”, Bari, Italy. Academia: https://goldsmiths.academia.edu/AndreaGiuseppeRagno E-mail: [email protected]

GALINA RAYKOVA is a PhD student of Philosophy at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridiski”. She holds a Master’s Degree in Psychology taught in English and an MA in Linguistics in German and Romanian Languages, also from Sofia University. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/galina-raykova-30a309145/ E-mail: [email protected] —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

Biographic Notes

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BÁLINT LÁSZLÓ TÓTH serves as an international relations expert at MÁV Hungarian State Railways Co. and is a bursar researcher, lecturer, and PhD student at the Corvinus University of Budapest (International Relations Multidisciplinary Doctoral School). Tóth specializes in Visegrád Four (V4) and Western Balkans affairs as well as global migration issues. His University teaching activities include World Economics and European Economic Governance, both for MA students, in English language. WEBSITE: https://doktori.hu/index.php?menuid=192&lang=EN& sz_ID=27436 E-mail: [email protected]

KRZYSZTOF ŻĘGOTA, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn. He is a Member of Association of Political Science in cooperation with Institute of Political Science (2003– 2005), Chief Specialist at Warmia and Mazury Regional Development Agency in Olsztyn. His areas of expertise are Geopolitics, Russian Foreign Policy, Kaliningrad Oblast, EU-Russia Relations, and the Baltic Sea Basin. WEBSITE: https://uwm-pl.academia.edu/KrzysztofŻęgota E-mail: [email protected]

MATTHEW GILL holds a Master in Philosophy from Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridiski” and a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. WEBSITE: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-gill-90027b140 E-mail: [email protected].

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What We Stand for in Nineteen Different Languages “To learn a language is to have one more window from which to look at the world” Mandarin proverb

Albanian “Në Statu Nascendi (ISN) është një ditar i rishikuar nga bashkëmoshatarët që aspirojnë të jenë në një platformë studimore të klasit botëror që përfshin hulumtime origjinale akademike kushtuar rrethit të Filozofisë Politike, Studimeve Kulturore, Teorisë së Marrëdhënieve Ndërkombëtare, Politikës së Jashtme dhe vendimit politik-proceseve të krijimit. Revista heton çështje specifike përmes një qasje socio-kulturore, filozofike dhe antropologjike për të ngritur një lloj të ri të vetëdijes qytetare në lidhje me kompleksitetin e krizës bashkëkohore, paqëndrueshmërinë dhe situata të luftës, ku “faza-e-bërjes” luan një rol jetësor”. Arabic In Statu Nascendi ‫ﺘﻌﺮﺍﺽ ﺟﺪﻳ ﺪﺓ ﻣﺠﻠ ﺔ ﻳﻮﺟ ﺪ‬

‫ﺃﻥ ﺇﻟ ﻰ ﺗﻄﻤ ﺢ ﺍﻷﻗ ﺮﺍﻥ ﻻﺳ‬ ‫ﺍﻷﻛﺎﺩﻳﻤﻴ ﺔ ﺍﻟﺒﺤ ﻮﺙ ﺗﺸ ﻤﻞ ﺍﻟﻌ ﺎﻟﻤﻲ ﺍﻟﻄ ﺮﺍﺯ ﻣﻦ ﻋﻠﻤﻴ ﺔ ﻣﻨﺼ ﺔ ﺗﻜ ﻮﻥ‬ ‫ﻔﺔ ﻟ ﺪﺍﺋﺮﺓ ﺍﻟﻤﺨﺼﺼ ﺔ ﺍﻷﺻ ﻠﻴﺔ‬ ‫ﻴﺔ ﺍﻟﻔﻠﺴ‬ ‫ ﺍﻟﺴﻴﺎﺳ‬، ‫ﺍﻟﺪﺭﺍﺳ ﺎﺕ‬ ‫ﺔ‬ ‫ ﺍﻟﺜﻘﺎﻓﻴ‬، ‫ ﺍﻟﺪﻭﻟﻴ ﺔ ﺍﻟﻌﻼﻗ ﺎﺕ ﻧﻈﺮﻳ ﺔ‬، ‫ ﺍﻟﺨﺎﺭﺟﻴ ﺔ ﺍﻟﺴﻴﺎﺳ ﺔ‬، ‫ﻭﻋﻤﻠﻴ ﺔ‬ ‫ ﺍﻟﺴﻴﺎﺳ ﻲ ﺍﻟﻘ ﺮﺍﺭ ﺻ ﻨﻊ‬. ‫ﻧﻬ ﺞ ﺧ ﻼﻝ ﻣﻦ ﻣﺤﺪﺩﺓ ﻗﻀ ﺎﻳﺎ ﻓ ﻲ ﺍﻟﻤﺠﻠ ﺔ ﻭﺗﺤﻘ ﻖ‬ ‫ﻔﻲ ﺛﻘ ﺎﻓﻲ ﺍﺟﺘﻤ ﺎﻋﻲ‬ ‫ﺜﺮﻭﺑﻮﻟﻮﺟﻲ ﻭﻓﻠﺴ‬ ‫ﻣﻦ ﺟﺪﻳ ﺪ ﻧ ﻮﻉ ﻟ ﺮﻓﻊ ﻭﺃﻧ‬ ‫ﻭﺍﻟﺤ ﺮﺏ ﺍﻻﺳ ﺘﻘﺮﺍﺭ ﻭﻋﺪﻡ ﺍﻟﻤﻌﺎﺻ ﺮﺓ ﺍﻷﺯﻣﺎﺕ ﺗﻌﻘﻴ ﺪ ﺣﻮﻝ ﺍﻟﻤ ﺪﻧﻲ ﺍﻟﻮﻋ ﻲ‬ ، ‫ﺣﻴﻮﻳﺎ ً ﺩﻭﺭﺍ ً "ﺍﻻﻧﻄ ﻼﻕ ﻣﺮﺣﻠ ﺔ" ﺗﻠﻌ ﺐ ﺣﻴ ﺚ‬  Bulgarian In Statu Nascendi (Ин Стату Насенди)—е нов академичен журнал, който се стреми да бъде научна платформа от световна класа, включваща оригинални академични изследвания, посветени на политическата философия, културните изследвания, теорията на международните отношения, външната политика и политическия процес на вземане на решения. Журналът изследва конкретни проблеми чрез социалнокултурен, философски и антропологичен подход за издигане на нов тип гражданска осведоменост относно сложността на съвременните кризи, нестабилност и военни ситуации, където “състоянието на зараждане” (in statu nascendi) играе жизненоважна роля. 179

180 What We Stand for Croatian In Statu Nascendi (ISN) je časopis s dvostruko slijepom recenzijom koji teži postati platformom visoke kvalitete u originalnom akademskom istraživanju posvećenom krugovima političke filozofije, kulturnih studija, teorije međunarodnih odnosa, vanjske politike te političkih procesa donošenja odluka. Časopis istražuje specifične probleme kroz socio-kulturalni, filozofski i antropološki pristup kako bi podigao građansku svijest o kompleksnosti trenutnih kriza, nestabilnosti, ratova u kojima “početne faze” igraju vitalnu ulogu. Belarusian In Statu Nascendi—гэта новы часопіс, які рэцэнзуюць эксперты. Мэта часопіса—стаць навуковай пляцоўкай сусветнага ўзроўню. In Statu Nascendi публікуе акадэмічныя даследаванні, прысвечаныя палітычнай філасофіі, культурным пытанням, тэорыі міжнародных адносінаў, замежнай палітыцы і палітычнаму працэсу прыняцця рашэнняў. Задача публікуемых даследаванняў—спрыяць фарміраванню новага тыпу грамадзянскай свядомасці ва ўмовах сучаснага крызісу, нестабільнасці і ваенных сітуацый. Dutch In Statu Nascendi is een nieuw wetenschappelijk getoetst tijdschrift dat ernaar streeft een academisch platform van wereldklasse te zijn en te vormen. Het omvat origineel academisch onderzoek met een focus naar politieke filosofie, culturele studies, theorie van internationale betrekkingen, buitenlands beleid en het politieke besluitvormingsproces. Het tijdschrift onderzoekt specifieke kwesties door middel van een sociaal-culturele, filosofische en antropologische benadering om een nieuw type van burgerbewustzijn op te wekken. Aangaande de complexiteit van de hedendaagse crisis, instabiliteit en oorlogssituaties, waarbij het ‘stadium van wording’ een vitale rol speelt. English In Statu Nascendi (ISN) is a peer-reviewed journal that aspires to be a world-class scholarly platform encompassing original academic research dedicated to the circle of Political Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Theory of International Relations, Foreign Policy, and the political Decision-making process. The journal investigates specific issues through a socio-cultural, philosophical, and anthropological approach to raise a new type of civic awareness about the complexity of contemporary crisis, instability, and warfare situations, where the “stage-of-becoming” plays a vital role. —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

What We Stand for 181 French In Statu Nascendi est un nouveau journal des revues par les pairs qui aspire à devenir une plate-forme scolaire globale. Il englobe des recherches académiques dédiées aux: Philosophie politique, études culturels, théories des relations internationales, politiques étrangères et les procédés des décisions politiques. Le journal étudie des questions particulières, par une approche socioculturelle, philosophique et anthropologique, afin d’accroître un nouveau type de sensibilisation civique concernant la crise contemporaine; sa complexité, instabilité et situations de guerre, dont la phase de lancement joue un rôle vital. German In Statu Nascendi ist eine neue, wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift, die Beiträge der politischen Philosophie, Kulturwissenschaften, Theorie internationaler Beziehungen, Außenpolitik und politischer Entscheidungsprozesse veröffentlicht. Die Artikel werden im Peer-Review-Verfahren geprüft und untersuchen konkrete Themen mithilfe einer soziokulturellen, philosophischen und anthropologischen Herangehensweise. Ziel ist es, zu einem neuen Bürgerbewusstsein über die Komplexität von gegenwärtigen Krisen, Instabilität und Kriegssituationen, bei denen die Phase der Entstehung eine wesentliche Rolle spielt, beizutragen. Greek Το επιστημονικό περιοδικό In Statu Nascendi δημοσιεύει μετά από κρίση πρωτότυπες μελέτες πάνω σε θέματα Πολιτικής Φιλοσοφίας, Κοινωνικών και Πολιτισμικών Σπουδών, Θεωρίες Διεθνών Σχέσεων, Εξωτερικής Πολιτικής, Πολιτικής Διπλωματίας και Ανθρωπολογίας. Το περιοδικό πραγματεύεται κυρίως εξειδικευμένα άρθρα που προσεγγίζουν πτυχές της κοινωνικοπολιτισμικής, φιλοσοφικής και ανθρωπολογικής επιστήμης και έρευνας με σκοπό την διαμόρφωση ορθής πολιτικής και κοινωνικής συνείδησης σχετικά με την πολυπλοκότητα της σύγχρονης ‘κρίσης’, την αστάθεια και τις εμπόλεμες καταστάσεις που αναδύονται στην σύγχρονη πραγματικότητα, όπου το πλαίσιο του κοινωνικο-πολιτικού γίγνεσθαι χρίζει ιδιαίτερης αναφοράς. Hungarian Az In Statu Nascendi (ISN) egy lektorált folyóirat, amely a politikafilozófia, a kulturális tanulmányok, a nemzetközi kapcsolatok elmélete, a külpolitika, valamint a döntéshozatali folyamatok témájában íródott egyedi tudományos kutatások világszínvonalú akadémiai műhelye kíván lenni. A világban zajló —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

182 What We Stand for válságjelenségekről, instabil helyzetekről és háborús eseményekről kialakítandó új típusú társadalmi véleménynyilvánítás elterjedése érdekében a folyóirat társadalmi—kulturális, filozófiai és antropológiai megközelítéssel, azok teljes összetettségében vizsgálja a konkrét történéseket, különös tekintettel a kialakulás állapotában lévő jelenségekre. Indonesian In Statu Nascendi (ISN) adalah jurnal yang diulas oleh para sejawat yang bercita-cita untuk menjadi media ilmiah kelas dunia yang mencakup penelitian akademis orisinal yang didedikasikan untuk bidang Filsafat Politik, Studi Budaya, Teori Hubungan Internasional, Kebijakan Luar Negeri, dan proses pembuatan keputusan politik. Jurnal ini mengkaji berbagai isu-isu spesifik dengan menggunakan pendekatan sosial-budaya, filosofis, dan antropologis untuk meningkatkan jenis baru kesadaran kewarganegaraan tentang kompleksitas krisis kontemporer, instabilitas, dan situasi peperangan, di mana “tahap menjadi” memainkan peran yang sangat penting. Italian In Statu Nascendi—è una nuova rivista accademica che aspira a essere una internazionale piattaforma di ricerca dedicata allo studio di tematiche legate alla Filosofia Politica, gli Affari Internazionali, gli Studi Culturali e le diverse Teorie delle Relazioni Internazionali. La rivista analizza tali specificità tematiche attraverso un approccio socio-culturale, filosofico e antropologico per costruir una nuova consapevolezza civile sulle tante complessità della società odierna, della sua instabilità e conflittualità, all’interno della quale nuovi “processi-in-divenire” interagiscono tra loro in modo rilevante Polish In Statu Nascendi jest nowym recenzowanym czasopismem akademickim, które aspiruje do światowej klasy platformy naukowej obejmującej oryginalne badania naukowe poświęcone kręgowi zagadnień zwiazanych z filozofią polityczną, kulturoznawstwem, teorią stosunków międzynarodowych, polityką zagraniczną i złożonością współczesnego procesu decyzyjnego. To czasopismo analizuje konkretne zagadnienia za pomocą podejścia społeczno kulturowego, filozoficznego i antropologicznego, w celu podniesienia poziom świadomości obywatelskiej na temat złożoności współczesnych sytuacji kryzysowych, niestabilnosci miedzynarodowej, i konfliktów w których kluczową rolę odgrywa „etap stawania się”.

—In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

What We Stand for 183 Russian In Statu Nascendi—это новый журнал, рецензируемый экспертами, цель которого—стать научной платформой мирового уровня. In Statu Nascendi публикует академические исследования, посвященные политической философии, культурным вопросам, теории международных отношений, зарубежной политике и политическому процессу принятия решений. Задача публикуемых исследований— способствовать формированию нового типа гражданской осознанности в условиях современного кризиса, нестабильности и военных ситуаций. Serbian In Statu Nascendi (ISN) je časopis s dvostruko slepom recenzijom koji teži postati platformom visokog kvaliteta u originalnom akademskom istraživanju posvećenom krugovima političke filozofije, kulturnih studija, teorije međunarodnih odnosa, spoljne politike te političkih procesa donošenja odluka. Časopis istražuje specifične probleme kroz socio-kulturalni, filozofski i antropološki pristup kako bi podigao građansku svest o kompleksnosti trenutnih kriza, nestabilnosti, ratova u kojima “početne faze” igraju vitalnu ulogu. Spanish In Statu Nascendi es una nueva revista con revisión paritaria que aspira a convertirse en una plataforma de investigación académica mundial dedicada al campo de la Filosofía Política, Estudios Culturales, teorías de las Relaciones Internacionales, Política Exterior, y procesos de toma de decisión política. Esta revista analiza asuntos de relevancia internacional a través de un enfoque socio-cultural, filosófico y antropológico. Nuestro objetivo es crear un nuevo tipo de conciencia cívica que tenga en cuenta la complejidad de las crisis coetáneas y la problemática de la inestabilidad y la guerra en las que el ‘stage-ofbecoming’ juega un rol crucial. Turkish In Statu Nascendi—Siyaset Felsefesi, Kültürel Çalışmalar, Uluslararası İlişkiler Teorisi, Dış Politika ve siyasi Karar verme sürecine adanmış özgün akademik araştırmaları kapsayan dünya çapında bir akademik platform olmayı amaçlayan yeni bir hakemli dergidir. Dergi, “kriz aşamasının” hayati bir rol oynadığı çağdaş kriz, istikrarsızlık ve savaş durumlarının karmaşıklığı hakkında yeni bir sivil farkındalık yaratmak için sosyo-kültürel, felsefi ve antropolojik bir yaklaşımla belirli konuları araştırıyor. —In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

184 What We Stand for Ukrainian In Statu Nascendi—це новий рецензований науковий журнал метою якого стати науковою платформою на світовому рівні. Опубліковані академічні вивчення присвячені політичній філософії, культурології, міжнародним відносинам та зарубіжній політиці, і також політичному процесу прийняття питань. Вивчатимуться дослідження соціальнокультурними, філософськими та антропологічними підходами та направлені на створення нового виду громадської свідомості в умовах сучасного кризисну в світі, нестабільності та військових ситуацій.

—In Statu Nascendi 3:2 (2020)—

 

Coming up next in In Statu Nascendi In Statu Nascendi is a peer-reviewed journal that aspires to be a world-class scholarly platform encompassing original academic research dedicated to the circles of Political Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Theory of International Relations, Foreign Policy, and the political Decision-making process. The journal investigates specific issues through socio-cultural, philosophical, and anthropological approaches to raise a new type of civic awareness about the complexity of contemporary crisis, instability, and warfare situations, where the “stage-of-becoming” plays a vital role. Issue 2021: 1 comprises, amongst others, the following interviews & articles: 

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Constructivism in the study of sustainable development, The Role of Donald Trump’s Idiosyncratic Factors in the Correlation with the US Decision to Withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action Deal with Iran in 2018, Interview with Krzysztof Żęgota, PhD on the Russian Federation’s Geostrategic Imperatives and Vladimir Putin’s future.

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