These papers examine the history behind Turkey's application for EU membership. The contributors tackle the thorny issues of Cyprus, Turkey's attitude towards a common defence policy and Turkish parliamentarians' views on the nation's relations with the European Union.

The CE Conference series is organized annually by the International Society for Productivity Enhancement (ISPE) and constitutes an important forum for international scientific exchange on concurrent and collaborative enterprise engineering. These international conferences attract a significant number of researchers, industrialists and students, as well as government representatives, who are interested in the recent advances in concurrent engineering research and applications. Concurrent Engineering Approaches for Sustainable Product Development in a Multi-Disciplinary Environment: Proceedings of the 19th ISPE International Conference on Concurrent Engineering contains papers accepted, peer reviewed and presented at the annual conference held at the University of Applied Sciences in Trier, Germany, from 3rd-7th of September 2012. This covers a wide range of cutting-edge topics including: Systems Engineering and Innovation Design for Sustainability Knowledge Engineering and Management Managing product variety Product Life-Cycle Management and Service Engineering Value Engineering

The Putin and Bush presidencies, the 9/11 attack, and the war in Iraq have changed the dynamics of Russian-European-US relations and strained the Western alliance. Featuring contributions by leading experts in the field, this work is the first systematic effort to reassess the status of Russia's modernization efforts in this context. Part I examines political, economic, legal, and cultural developments in Russia for evidence of convergence with Western norms. In Part II, the contributors systematically analyze Russia's relations with the European Union, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the United States in light of new security concerns and changing economic and power relationships.

In an incisive and lively discussion International Relations of the EU examines both the economic and security dimensions of European Union external relations. The book adopts an innovative approach that combines International Relations with International Political Economy. Set against a backdrop of EU enlargement and disarray over military intervention in Iraq, International Relations of the EU is a timely contribution to our understanding of the Eu's role as an international actor. The text is suitable for advanced undergraduate courses in Politics and International Relations.

Even as enterprise resource planning (ERP) continues to play a strategic role in an education sector, educational institutions and universities are facing many challenges in creating strong ERP applications and methods to achieve the expectations of academia. Enterprise Resource Planning Models for the Education Sector: Applications and Methodologies is a comprehensive collection of research which highlights the increasing demand for insight into the challenges faced by educational institutions on the design and development of enterprise resource planning applications. This book is composed of content from management and engineering students, professionals and researchers in the education fields.

The availability of effective global communication facilities in the last decade has changed the business goals of many manufacturing enterprises. They need to remain competitive by developing products and processes which are specific to individual requirements, completely packaged and manufactured globally. Networks of enterprises are formed to operate across time and space with world-wide distributed functions such as manufacturing, sales, customer support, engineering, quality assurance, supply chain management and so on. Research and technology development need to address architectures, methodologies, models and tools supporting intra- and inter-enterprise operation and management. Throughout the life cycle of products and enterprises there is the requirement to transform information sourced from globally distributed offices and partners into knowledge for decision and action. Building on the success of previous DrrSM conferences (Tokyo 1993, Eindhoven 1996, Fort Worth 1998), the fourth International Conference on Design of Information Infrastructure Systems for Manufacturing (DrrSM 2000) aims to: • Establish and manage the dynamics of virtual enterprises, define the information system requirements and develop solutions; • Develop and deploy information management in multi-cultural systems with universal applicability of the proposed architecture and solutions; • Develop enterprise integration architectures, methodologies and information infrastructure support for reconfigurable enterprises; • Explore information transformation into knowledge for decision and action by machine and skilful people; These objectives reflect changes of the business processes due to advancements of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the last couple of years.