NATO – Ukraine relations for recent decades have been one of the key issues of the discussion on European security. Coup d'etat and the outbreak of civil war in 2014 have established new situation in these relations. Both sides have got boost for cooperation though new obstacles have appeared for their rapprochement. Analyzing the aid NATO and its principal members provide Ukraine one may consider what is the relations between NATO and Ukraine and what are the motives defining the proper form of aid. Despite broad political support for Ukraine NATO members are rather moderate in the field of practical aid. Arms supply is restrained. The dominating form of aid appears to be intensified joint military exercises and NATO's military presence of Ukrainian territory. Though US and other NATO members reaffirm and enhance their unformal commitments and guaranties to Ukraine they also try to avoid steps that could lead to direct confrontation with Russia. Thus NATO – Ukraine relations may illustrate "alliance dilemma".
The article analyzes the influence of the parliamentary elections in Georgia in October 2016 to Russian-Georgian relations. Ruling party "Georgian Dream" (GD) overwhelmingly won the elections and it shows that the current policy towards Moscow will not be radically revisited. At the same time we can expect GD's policy will be less flexible, than it was before. So the limits of normalization between Russia and Georgia will be more evident.
The paper is devoted to the analysis of internal and foreign political processes in Georgia in 2015. This analytical chronicle is to trace and describe the most important tendencies in such fields as the contention between political parties, the balance within the ruling coalition and the relations with Georgia's key foreign partners. Though "Georgian Dream" (GD) government met the crisis and had to change premier by the end of the year, it managed to keep the leading position in domestic politics. The main opponent of the GD, the United National Movement (UNM) could not increase its influence. The Republican party of Georgia, the member of ruling coalition that has rather weak support from the voters, was able to strengthen its position in the government by getting some key offices. The expansion of cooperation with NATO does not bring near prospects of membership. Although every single measure the sides are taking seems to be insignificant, as a complex these measures can lead to a deeper involvement of NATO and USA in the South Caucasus. The relations with European Union are inertial and strongly overestimated in Georgian internal politics. The relations with Russia are routinized; both sides acknowledge the achievements of the normalization and do not expect any breakthrough.
After the 'rose revolution' Georgia significantly improved its governance and state institutions. Scholars explain it with the professional and personal qualities of the reformist team led by Mikhael Saakashvili, with the concentration of power in the hands of the reformers, and with the international settings. However, most of those explanations hardly work in case of the reforms that were implemented after Saakashvili's team lost the power in 2012. From 2012 to 2020 Georgia have retained and even slightly improved the quality of state institutions. Also, the governments of the ruling 'Georgian Dream' party implemented three major reforms: of judiciary, of local self-government, and of public service. Why did Georgia continue reforms despite its domestic political settings changed dramatically after 2012? The paper aims to reveal structural factors which support the long-term reformist course. We point out three factors. The first is that the structure of Georgia's economy and the constellation of the elite's interests preclude the making of influential oligarchy able to significantly distort the state institutions. Unlike Ukraine, Georgia did not inherit from the USSR large export-oriented and lucrative heavy industrial sector that could have become an economic base for making sustainable financial-industrial groups with strong political influence. Unlike Moldova, Georgian home-grown "oligarchs" were locked within the small consumer market of their country and served as clients of the political leaders. The richest politicians in Georgia like Bidzina Ivanishvili, late Badri Patarkatsishvili, late Kakha Bendukidze played their own political game but the main sources of their wealth were abroad, their economic interest lay far beyond the national scale and they have (had) no strong incentives to distort the state institutions in the country. Therefore "oligarchs" in Georgia did not make obstacles for reforms. The second factor is that the opposition in 2012–2020 had no reasons to obstruct reforms implemented by "Georgian Dream" governments, because most of those reforms opened new ways (municipal reform) or gave new guaranties (judicial and public service reforms) for political participation. The third is the geopolitical one. The confrontation with Russia since 2004 provides Georgian political elite strong motivation to continue reforms in order to secure the Western patronage.
From a historical perspective, the curbing of epidemics was the collateral effect of emerging European Modern states. The current COVID-19 pandemic reminds that. It supports the broad international tendency to strengthen state sovereignty, nationalism, and economic protectionism. Meanwhile, in recent decades health care systems around the world have been evolving toward deregulation, use of market mechanisms, and decrease of state interventions, and it was one of the most salient evidence that Modern state is being deconstructed. The current crisis puts forward the prospect that Modern comes back with the following social conflicts, interstate rivalry, and growing power inequality between the international system actors.
The West is concerned over the crisis of the liberal world order attributing it to the conduct of emerging powers, such as China, India and Russia. Are its concerns legitimate? Drawing on social identity theory, the authors analyze the emerging powers' stances on international development through the lens of status dynamics. In particular, three issue areas are investigated: the debate over the UN development agenda, which has revealed differences between Western and non-Western approaches, the changes in the membership of donor and recipient groups over the last decade and the discourse of emerging countries concerning science and technology, which betrays their self-image of a "developed" or "laggard" state.The key finding of the paper is that the crisis of the liberal world order as a set of institutions created by the US-led countries after WWII manifests itself in the distorting symbolic exchange between developed and developing countries. The emerging states are unwilling to recognize the authority of the West and its leadership in setting the direction of global development. Meanwhile, they are trying to gain the status of development front-runners using their own foreign aid programs and science and technology development strategies. However, the rising states are not uniform and consistent in posing a symbolic challenge to the liberal order – while the Russia is striving for a "developed non-western country" status (thereby copying the USSR's image), India and China, though to different degrees, are positioning themselves both as developed industrial states and as developing countries which receive aid packages from richer members of the international community. What leads to the distortions in this symbolic exchange is the desire of some emerging powers to use the resources of the West and reap the benefits of the world order created by it while denying it a high status. Thus, a classic economic "free-rider problem" arises in international relations: while benefiting from the liberal order created by the West, the rising states do not recognize the status it ascribes itself ignoring the symbolic hierarchy which, as viewed by western countries, underlies this order.The authors declare the absence of conflict of interest.
