Suchergebnisse

The article focuses on the two concepts that have become increasingly common in the official discourse of the EU in recent years - "strategic sovereignty" and "strategic autonomy". Top public officials, politicians and bodies of the European Union and of member states refer to each of these terms, depending on the circumstances or the established tradition of using the concept in a particular area of the EU's policy. However, there is still no clear understanding in the academic and expert community of how they relate at the semantic level - in other words, whether these terms are interchangeable with regard to their meaning, adjacent ones or they differ radically from each other. The author uses the morphological analysis of ideology by M. Freeden with the special emphasis on the process of decontestation as a theoretical and methodological framework of the study in order to compare these two concepts and discover their semantic content. The empirical evidence of the article includes speeches of EU's top public officials, politicians, as well as key documents of the EU during the period of active dissemination of concepts in the discourse of Brussels. The analysis reveals that the two concepts occupy related semantic positions, but they are not completely synonymous. It is difficult to predict the further evolution of the concepts within the EU's semantic system, but they have already taken an important place in the foreign policy discourse of Brussels that will inevitably affect all the EU counterparties, including Russia.

The ecological notion of resilience has been adopted by different Western theoretical approaches in a wide range of scientific fields from economics to political studies. Canadian ecologist С. Holling defines resilience as a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance (dynamic part) and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variable (static part). The aim of this article is to identify the role of the dynamic dimension in strengthening resilience of British society during the period between the two London terrorist attacks of 2005 and 2017. Methods: The methodology of the paper is based on the discourse analysis of the key British documents on public security and the Internet publications immediately after the tragedy. Considering the theoretical aspect, the author distinguishes 'the bouncing back' approach (emphasizing static dimension), 'complexity' (dynamic) and 'adaptive cycles' being a middle ground. Analysis: Analysis of the key British security documents has shown that the government policy on strengthening resilience failed as it was characterized by an excessive predominance of the static element over the dynamic one. However, during the crisis, the London society managed to respond through specific set of adaptation measures such as grassroots self-organization through social networks, strategies of normalization and the phenomenon of habituation. Results: Results of this paper can be summarized in the following points: D. Chandler's concept of 'complexity' has the significant potential for understanding the effectiveness of counterterrorism strategies and ensuring public security. Russia, also facing the threat of international terrorism, should take into account the negative experience of British colleagues and avoid underestimating the preventive dimension of strengthening resilience.

At the turn of the century, the rogue state concept has become an integral part of the theory of international relations. However, even contemporary approaches lack the appropriate academic tools to reach a comprehensive understanding of the international community's role in determining the normative frameworks of the proper behavior of the states as the main actors of international system, leaving the relations between global community and the rogues almost an uncharted territory on the international stage. The article considers the category of rogue states as "excluded" members of the international community through the sociological lens of "stigma" (E. Goffman) and "labelling theory" (H. Becker and E. Lemert). Engaging an empirical case of Iraqi foreign policy during and after the Gulf War 1991, the author demonstrates two thresholds of the labelling state as the rogue: public initiation of the offender and self-fulfilling prophecy. It is possible to define some specific features of the outsider's behavior on the international stage: the high level of cooperation among the representatives of the same category, "unsustainable bravado" as the set of fluid and inconsistent actions of the rogue state in foreign policy, finally, the tendency toward obtaining the "secondary gains". Contrariwise, global community tends to pay greater attention to rogue states and exercise some discrimination practices on the ground of their outcast position in the world normative structure with the category of "wise" actors, for example China, being an exception from the common mainstream and maintaining close cooperation ties with rogues.

The European Union (EU) has developed as an actor that overcomes national sovereignty in global politics. Yet, as of 2017, the EU has used the "sovereignty" category at the supranational level, both in general and in combination with "sectoral" adjectives. The objective of research is to demonstrate that the use of "sectoral sovereignty" can be examined as the EU's work with collective anxiety, which results from various challenges that can hardly be controlled. The anxiety is examined in the context of emotion culture with the focus on public images of sentiments whereas the incorporation of sovereignty in the EU's discourse comes out as a "self-identification with an aggressor" - with something that has previously been viewed as a threat to integration. In the EU's discourse "sovereignty" means a set of actions targeted at drawing a border between the internal and the external, at establishing higher autonomy. Three cases are examined with the help of discourse analysis: challenge of technological companies and monetary sovereignty; pandemic threat and health sovereignty; problems in global agricultural trade and food sovereignty. In each case elements of the EU's collective anxiety are described; sovereignty as a system of actions to address anxiety is identified; the overall support for this work in the EU is revealed. The conclusions are drawn on when and where "sectoral" sovereignty helps the EU to limit its anxiety. Yet, the successful incorporation of sovereignty in the EU's discourse does not mean a complete overcoming of anxiety; instead, dialectic relations between collective anxiety and sovereignty emerge.

The normative interaction between Russia and the EU is a significant component of foreign policy for both Moscow and Brussels. It reflects important general patterns of the symbolic interaction between the West and the rest of the world. The theory of hegemony of E.Laclau and C.Mouffe and post-Marxist discourse analysis show that the European symbolic mapping today is based on historicism and orientalism, embodied in the discursive figure of «transition». The situation has changed recently after the emergence of the «resilience» notion (as the ability of states and societies to adapt to turbulence) in the neoliberal hegemony of the EU. The interpretation of this concept by the EU directly links it with the normative component: only liberal democracies can be resilient in the long run. This approach fills the previous structure of the symbolic political map with the new content – some countries are subject to more exclusion. For instance, Russia moves from its conditional semi-peripheral position to the peripheral one that threatens the resilience of the EU and its Eastern partners. Nevertheless, this position of an outsider in the official discourse of the EU provides Russia with the unique opportunity to come out of the Western-centered historicist pattern.