Full Description
This comparative study harks back to the revolutionary year of 1989 and asks two critical questions about the resulting reconfiguration of Europe in the aftermath of the collapse of communism: Why did Central and East European states display such divergent outcomes of their socio-political transitions? Why did three of those statesPoland, Bulgaria, and Russiadiffer so starkly in terms of the pace and extent of their integration into Europe? Rumena Filipova argues that Polands, Bulgarias, and Russias dominating conceptions of national identity have principally shaped these countries foreign policy behavior after 1989. Such an explanation of these three nations diverging degrees of Europeanization stands in contrast to institutionalist-rationalist, interest-based accounts of democratic transition and international integration in post-communist Europe. She thereby makes a case for the need to include ideational factors into the study of International Relations and demonstrates that identities are not easily malleable and may not be as fluid as often assumed. She proposes a theoretical middle-ground argument that calls for qualified post-positivism as an integrated perspective that combines positivist and post-positivist orientations in the study of IR.
Contents
Acknowledgments; Foreword by Harald Wydra; Foreword by Gergana Yankova-Dimova; Central and Eastern Europe after the 1989 Revolution: Diverging Identities in a Reunifying Era; Are the Social Sciences Indeed Sciences? Towards a Middle-Ground Methodological Perspective; Shades of Affinity: An Interactive Constructivist Theory of Self and Other in Bordering Belongingness; The Interactive Constructivist Theory of Self & Other and IR Debates: Refinement, Dialogue and Challenge; A European Trailblazer: The Thick Europeanisation of Polish Foreign Policy; Neither In, Nor Out: The Ambivalent Europeanisation of Bulgarian Foreign Policy; Europes Outlier: The Thin Europeanisation of Russian Foreign Policy; Three Limits of Europe: Poland, Bulgaria and Russia in Comparative Perspective; Epilogue: Europe Beyond the 30-year Limit; List of Abbreviations; Bibliography.
