Suchergebnisse

This study seeks to make a contribution to a limited research on the systemic level of the national coordination of European affairs, which involves both domestic institutions and a permanent representation at the EU and national embassies in the EU member states and other countries. We explore the issue through a case study which concentrates on 1) several middle-sized EU member states and 2) coordination in the field of foreign and security policy. The study argues that the coordination at the systemic level has a rather a centralized character. The elements of decentralization, which can be also identified at the systemic level, are primarily related to information-gathering as well as representation at negotiations. Permanent representations are considerably more involved in coordination than national embassies, however. Adapted from the source document.

The ambition of the paper is to analyze the major characteristics of the Chinese energy policy towards the most important producers of natural gas in Chinas neighborhood. The analytical perspectives of a strategic approach to energy security and state-centric realism are used to work with case studies of Sino-Russian and Sino-Turkmen relations from the energy security perspective. The paper concludes that Chinas energy policy towards the given producers in Russia and Turkmenistan comes significantly close to the selected analytical perspectives and that natural gas has become an important part of the strategic considerations of the Chinese political leadership. This conclusion, however, applies more to Turkmenistan and less to Russia, as in the case of the Sino-Russian relations, both parties fail to achieve a mutual complementarity, and economic thinking prevails over Beijing's strategic interests. Adapted from the source document.

A major representative of Kurdish nationalism in Turkey, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) renewed its violent activities while ending a ceasefire that lasted for almost five years in 2004. The nature of its armed struggle is in many aspects different from that of the period of 1984-1999. The issue of the Kurdish question in Turkey has been once again becoming increasingly dynamic in the last years, and the violent manifestations connected with this issue have been increasing as well. The presented case study deals with the offensive tactics of the PKK during its armed struggle in Turkey in the period from 2004 to 2011. The activities of the PKK are framed in the concept of insurgency. The analysis is focused on a description and interpretation of the nature of the PKKs offensive operations. On the basis of the analysis of the operational level of the PKKs activities, the pursued insurgent tactics are identified. The PKK pursues and combines four kinds of typical insurgency tactics - provocation, intimidation, protraction, and exhaustion, with the first two being the most important. In the background of the PKKs campaign, we can observe that the PKK plans and times its operations very carefully. At the same time the PKK focuses on getting and maintaining popular support for itself. Adapted from the source document.

The aim of this article is to contribute to the discussion of the political economy of trade policy. We also focus on the issue of foreign agricultural trade policy in the contemporary Czech Republic. We assume that in the Czech discourse the position of economic nationalism and mercantilism is clearly dominant. We would like to demonstrate this through a content analysis of several major Czech journals. We also believe that the arguments of those who request further regulation of agricultural trade are not much different from those articulated in the discussion between the free trade stance and the mercantilist stance. Even though the prevailing arguments of classical economists are still not entirely accepted in the Czech Republic (certainly not in its economic policy), the strong mercantilist position in favor of the primary sector in the country, which has a strong comparative advantage in industrial production, is nevertheless an interesting object of research interest. Adapted from the source document.

This article deals with the European integration policy of the Holy See from the 1950s until the resignation of Benedict XVI at the beginning of 2013. The goal of the study is to describe the integration policies of individual popes in the context of political science theories. In the first half of the study we will briefly introduce the major typologies of political science for the study of integration policies of political parties. From the list of the existing approaches, we choose the typology of Petr Kaniok as the most appropriate for this study. In the second half of the study, individual popes are classified according to the framework of Kaniok's typology. The goal of the study is not only to investigate the major moves in the integration policy of the Holy See, but also to utilize a theoretical approach traditionally used for the study of political parties on the issue of the Holy See. Adapted from the source document.