Greece and Serbia start their national movements under similar circumstances, share their goals and follow the same examples, but a different social landscape and diverse historic paths combined with non-comparable cultural, linguistic and religious realities end up shaping those movements differently.
The traditionally German-speaking Alpine region of Südtirol (South Tyrol) became a part of Italy after the First World War – today, South Tyrol is an exemplary autonomous region where the rights of German-speakers are widely protected. How did South Tyrol become the autonomous region it is today? In order to explain, we need to understand the region’s history and Austria’s role as the “protector” of the German-speakers of South Tyrol.
The EU’s principle of subsidiarity is rooted in Catholic social thought. It offers guidance on how to allocate powers among a plurality of communities. While the Catholic understanding centers around individual dignity and the vocation of each human collective to offer itself as a gift to social life, the EU’s approach resembles federalist visions based on instrumental-rational calculations of efficiency.
Post-Soviet Koreans – a Russianized ethnic minority also called Koryo-saram – are building an ethnically exclusive village close to Moscow.
Regionalism is not always the desire for greater independence. At the supranational level inside the European Union, it is about finding partners that share common interests or face similar challenges. While a multi-speed European is now finally in the pipe, some regional groups of interest have become topics for heated discussions.
The European citizenship, created in 1993, has been conceived as a way to legitimise the European project and to bring it closer to its peoples. However, by doing so, it has neglected non-Europeans residing in the continent.
The alleged dichotomy between the ‘religious’ and the ‘political’ constitutes a secularist lens which is being increasingly contested as artificial. A leading journal of International Relations traces this division back to the long 19th century – but the intellectual pedigree of secularism dates much deeper back to Antiquity.
Russia’s power over Central Asia perfectly illustrates the notion of a ‘sphere of influence’: A hegemon exerts power over a geopolitically close region. Yet, at the same time, Central Asian states do regularly resist unilateral power impositions by Russia. How can this be explained? A recent paper in the journal Geopolitics posits a ‘negotiated hegemony’ to better understand the political dynamics between an ‘influencer’ and its ‘influenced’.
Not only three actors were involved in the crisis over the status of Jerusalem – not only the U.S., Israel, and Palestine – but instead, fifty-seven Muslim states quickly claimed their legitimate stakes after Trump's decision to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Erdogan’s Turkey was at the forefront in discursively constructing the umma (the Islamic community) as the crisis' major reference point.
As the New Year begins, it is time to look back at what we achieved in 2017. For Nouvelle Europe, 2017 was a year of successful conferences, numerous articles and four, widely read dossiers on diverse topics.