Centre of Governance and Culture (GCE-HSG) is part of a consortium of 10 research institutes. EU-STRAT is led by Freie Universität Berlin and Leiden University.
Two questions drive research in EU-STRAT:
Why has the EU fallen short of creating peace, prosperity and stability in its Eastern neighbourhood?
How can the EU strengthen its transformative power to support political and economic change in the Eastern neighbourhood?
EU-STRAT addresses these two questions with in-depth research on:
· the propensity of domestic actors in the varying social orders in the Eastern neighbourhood to engage in political and economic change
· the effectiveness of the Association Agreements as an instrument of change
· the impact of bilateral, regional and global interdependencies to shape the preferences of stability or change of domestic actors
· other external actors’ strategies of promoting political and economic stability or change in the region
GCE-HSG contributes with:
· research on how interdependencies (to Russia, EU and Turkey) affect regime stability
· a database that pools data on linkages in trade, migration, energy and security among Eastern neighbours and to key regional players
· conceptualisation of Turkey as an actor in the Eastern neighbourhood
· study on Turkey’s influence on the social orders in the Eastern neighbourhood through state, business and cultural actors
· the creation and fostering of regional academic networks
The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 693382 for the period April 2016-April 2019.
RESEARCH TEAM
Dirk Lehmkuhl
Ole Frahm
Katharina Hoffmann
Tetyana Dobrot
PUBLICATIONS
EU-STRAT Working Paper No. 13
Turkey and the Eastern Partnership: Turkey's Foreign Policy Towards ist Post-Soviet Black Sea Neighbourhood
Ole Frahm, Katharina Hoffmann, Dirk Lehmkuhl
This paper discusses the main strands of Turkey’s post-Cold War foreign policy in its post-Soviet Black Sea neighbourhood of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine with a focus on the period of Justice and Development Party rule (2002-2018). Based on the analysis of Turkey’s rhetorical stance towards the region’s countries and its actual interaction across five sectors – trade, energy, security, education/culture and migration – our findings demonstrate that the foreign policy rhetoric with its strong emphasis on historical ties, economic and energy cooperation and support for regional countries’ territorial integrity is not matched by Turkey’s observable engagement. An important factor for the mismatch between rhetoric and engagement is that relations with the region are seen at least partly through the prism of Turkey’s more salient relations with Russia.
EU-STRAT Policy Comment
Armenia's "Velvet Revolution": Whither Change?
Laure Delcour & Katharina Hoffmann
“In spring 2018, the installation of former President Serzh Sargsyan as prime minister – a scenario which would have enabled the incumbent elite to maintain their grip over Armenia – unexpectedly failed to materialise. The 2015 constitutional referendum that transferred key powers to the prime minister as of spring 2018 paved the way for this swap scenario. Instead, on April 23rd, the newly appointed Prime Minister (and former President) Serzh Sargsyan resigned amidst a wave of protests that swept the country. This outcome to the demonstrations took many observers by surprise.
Admittedly, over the past decade, Armenia has been home to frequent protests against the ruling elite. In 2008, the flawed presidential elections that brought Serzh Sargsyan to power were followed by a brutal crackdown on protesters, killing at least ten people. None of the prior protests led to changes as substantial as the ones Armenia has experienced since spring 2018, though. In light of the authorities’ record of excessive use of force, there was little reason to believe that the 2018 protests would not end up with a brutal crackdown, thereby perpetuating the rule of the incumbent elite through a constitutional change. The scenario made possible by the constitutional amendments was also likely to materialise given its success in other post-Soviet countries, primarily Russia (Armenia’s strategic partner). Yet contrary to all expectations, the founder of the Civil Contract party and leader of the demonstrations, Nikol Pashinyan, was elected prime minister in early May 2018, raising considerable expectations among the Armenian population. ”
EVENTS
On 7 July, the Center for Governance and Culture in Europe at the University of St Gallen together with the Leibniz Institute for East and South East European Studies Regensburg organized a one-day workshop on the future of secessionist conflicts in the wider Black Sea region. The event was held in Bucharest at the New Europe College and brought together mostly young researchers from Germany, Switzerland, Georgia, Romania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Czechia, Russia, Azerbaijan and Moldova. In three sessions, participants sought to establish the state of the art in the field of research on secessionist conflicts and – inspired by the University of St Gallen’s research as part of EU-STRAT’s work package 3 – to deliberate on the interdependencies of different secessionist conflicts.
Panel I explored the issue of commonalities and differences between protracted conflicts by focusing on the cases of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Crimea and Republika Srpska. For one, it touched upon the philosophical question of under which circumstances secession can be justified and whether in the wake of Putin’s justification for annexing Crimea secession may become regularized rather than remain reserved only to extremely oppressed peoples. The argument was made that the Russian foreign policy elite’s approaches to separatist statelets changed not in 2014 but in 2008 following the war in Georgia and Kosovo’s declaration of independence. Moreover, it was emphasized how important not only the ethnic imaginary but also an idealized memory of the Socialist social order was for secessionism and how detrimental intrusive policies by the EU could be – for instance in Bosnia-Herzegovina – for the growth of a culture of democratic accountability.
The second panel concentrated on interdependencies between protracted conflicts in the post-Soviet space and delved into the particularities of relations between Russia and Transnistria as well as the economic cost of conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. There are some forms of institutionalized exchange between the ‘post-Soviet four’ but the lack of further cooperation is not only due to the preference for other relations (e.g. to Russia) but to different ambitions among local elites and some level of competition over international recognition. Whereas in general the level of the client states’ leeway towards the patron is proportional to the severity of the security threat, for the post-Soviet space the global financial crisis marked a turning point as fiscal dependence on Russian aid reduced agency substantially. The militarization and brinkmanship of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict meanwhile not only imposes high economic costs on states and communities but also negatively effects education, services, corruption and democracy.
In the third panel on the role of international actors, presentations dealt with the international community’s stabilization dilemma and with the contentious part played by international organizations in shaping dialogue and confidence-building measures in Ukraine and Moldova. As unilaterally seceding entities can subsist even without international recognition, the international community faces the insoluble dilemma that efforts to stabilize the situation on the ground, for example through development work, run counter to efforts to stabilize the international state system. In the case of Ukraine, efforts by the EU and OSCE to foster track 2 and track 3 forms of dialogue in a process of orchestration were hampered by very different understandings among Ukrainian stakeholders of what actually constituted dialogue. Similarly, different agendas among donors and the Moldovan government have created downsides for civilian confidence-building measures regarding relations between Transnistria and the right-bank.
The panels were followed by a collective brainstorming session to develop new avenues for the future of this research field and to sow the seeds for collaborative research projects. One strand of argument arose over the need to provincialize the post-Soviet space and to engage more directly with research on secessionist conflicts in other world regions such as Africa as well as with more theoretical approaches from the field of conflict studies and international relations theory. Overall, the workshop benefitted from a very open and collegial atmosphere and there was a general sense that it would lead to further get-togethers in the near future.
You can find the full workshop programme here:
http://www.nec.ro/data/pdfs/public-events/2018/july/2018-07-07_Workshop.pdf
On 8 June 2018, a EU-STRAT workshop organised by the University of St. Gallen and a Turkish partner, the Bogazici University, took place in Istanbul.
About 15 participants from Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Belarus, Turkey as well as Norway and Switzerland came together to share their view on diverging lines in research on the Eastern part of the Black Sea region, which includes Turkey alongside the above mentioned post-Soviet states. The endeavour was part of EU-STRAT´s engagement with the question of how scientific cooperation may bring European and local actors closer.
This EU-STRAT workshop reflected on persisting diverging lines in research approaches, concepts and in the assessment of results. The workshop participants discussed critically how international funding schemes influence the research topics, privilege experienced partners, are sometimes vulnerable to political tensions between partners, but are nevertheless important resources to increase knowledge and mutual understanding of developments in the countries of interest.
As part of the Horizon2020 project EU-STRAT –The EU and Eastern Partnership Countries: An Inside Out Analysis and Strategic Assessment – Katharina Hoffmann and Ole Frahm from the University of St Gallen conducted a workshop in Tbilisi on 20-21 November 2017 with mostly young researchers and practitioners from five Eastern Partnership region countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine). In addition to the main objective of jointly developing a common framework for event data collection on Eastern Partnership countries’ bilateral relations with Turkey, another key aim was to transfer knowledge on best practices of social science methods.
In organizing and running the workshop which took place at Fabrika, a converted former sewing factory, the team from St Gallen cooperated closely with the Caucasus Research Resource Center in Tbilisi with whom the university had already collaborated as part of the FP7 project ISSICEU (www.issiceu.eu). The meeting in Georgia therefore also served to strengthen and enlarge an existing network of researchers from the region. Befitting the occasion, the conversation at the closing dinner was held in a mixture of German, English, Russian and Turkish.
A follow-up event is planned for 2018 to ensure that all participants can make ample use of the data both during the project and beyond.
DATABASE
The EU-STRAT database (http://142.93.104.67/main) is a website that allows researchers to explore interactive visualizations and extract data on international trade flows. It combines information from existing sources, and provides uniquely mapped data on international security training.
The primary focus of the database is Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine; as partnership counties it covers bilateral flows with China, USA, Turkey, Russian Federation and EU-28 (individual countries, or as aggregated group). Data for four sectors: Trade, Energy, Security and Migration covers period from 1991 to 2017, and provided on annual basis.
The data will in 2019 be available for scholarly studies. For accessing the data please contact: Katharina Hoffmann
Regions Covered: Primarily EaP countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova; and their partners: Turkey, Russia, China and other. Availability of data for other countries is possible but not guaranteed.
Sections:
· Trade including energy trade
· Migration
· Security
Trade. Bilateral: contains total trade values with the world, per partner countries and per sector split into two-digit HS code. Individual: contains meta data about countries, set of indices, such as trade openness, and others.
Migration. Bilateral: migrant remittance flow, emigrant and immigrants, migration flow 2000-2015. Individual: migrant stock and remittances.
Security. Bilateral: arms exports and imports. Individual: military expenditure/spending, armed forces personnel, global militarization index and supplementary information.
Methodology: APIs and web-scrapping
Data Providers: UN-Comtrade, World Bank, UN DESA, UNPD, Statistics services of EaP countries, SIPRI, Original Data Collection by EU-STRAT members
Data Format: CSV
The database has been developed and is maintained by the EU-STRAT participant University of St. Gallen (https://gce.unisg.ch/).
(screenshot of database attached)