The Black Sea region is a dynamic and complex area in which many national and international actors have key interests, including Russia and the US. The European Union stretches to the sea’s western coast where it meets former Soviet territory as well as EU candidate Turkey. Regional tensions include those over NATO enlargement, a US anti-ballistic missile system, access to the Black Sea, democratization, spheres of interest and the conflict zones of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh and Transnistria. In addition, the region’s close proximity to the Caspian basin offers the prospect of alternative energy resources and routes to western states. The Politics of the Black Sea Region: EU Neighbourhood, Conflict Zone or Future Security Community? explores and examines the many diverse political, security and economic interests that affect the region and the possible outcomes for it. By reviewing the wider history and examining the political systems and policies of the Black Sea nations and organizations as well as analyzing current tensions and future trends, it provides an invaluable, comprehensive and unique political guide to this fascinating area.

Designed to further the debate on the future of EU policies for the Black Sea region, this book is an essential resource for students and researchers in search for a coherent picture of the inter-relationship of EU initiatives and policies in the region.

Today, we know what the Black Sea is not from a strategic perspective, but we do not know what it is. This strategic indecision is the explanation for all the conflicts, frozen or not, explicit or tacit, and all the political and geopolitical tensions that are now taking place in this space and that are becoming endemic. The story of the Black Sea continues… This text is the first encyclopaedia explicitly dedicated to the geopolitics of the Black Sea, written for Western audiences, an academic research which appeals to the wider academic community, PhD students, professors, and researchers, and to any reader interested in geopolitics, history, international relations, economy, sociology, history, and geography.

Based on a major international research project undertaken by The Institute for East West Studies, this book provides the first comprehensive analysis of an important, but little explored, feature of post-Cold War Europe: the emergence of subregional cooperation in areas such as the Barents, the Baltic Sea, Central Europe and the Black Sea. It analyses the role of subregional cooperation in the new Europe, provides detailed case studies of the new subregional groups and examines their relations with NATO and the European Union.

The idea for this book is derived from the scantiness of academic references on the European Union’s policies towards the Black Sea, relative to this region’s officially stated significance for the EU. Even though the EU plays a vital role in Black Sea political agendas, the EU’s cooperation with the region is not extensively covered by academic discussions and literature. This is mostly due to the fact that the EU’s focus on foreign affairs is mainly associated with the Balkans, as part the current and potential expansion, and the Middle East, as a direct consequence of the upheaval of the Arab Spring. The Black Sea region is crucially important for the EU because of the opportunities and challenges that the region presents, both politically and socio-economically. Contributions to this book mostly focus on specific issues of EU–Black Sea cooperation, from conflict to the environment to democracy, and how these particular relationships are perceived within the region as well as through the lenses of stakeholders such as Russia, Turkey, and the USA. Overall, the collection focuses on projecting a more efficient role and a holistic strategy for the EU in its approach towards the Black Sea region, testifying to the need for a strong EU presence. For this reason, the Black Sea area remains ‘the neighbourhood too close to, yet still far from, the European Union’. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies.

A bold new look at war and diplomacy in Europe that traces the idea of a unified continent in attempts since the eighteenth century to engineer lasting peace. Political peace in Europe has historically been elusive and ephemeral. Stella Ghervas shows that since the eighteenth century, European thinkers and leaders in pursuit of lasting peace fostered the idea of European unification. Bridging intellectual and political history, Ghervas draws on the work of philosophers from Abbé de Saint-Pierre, who wrote an early eighteenth-century plan for perpetual peace, to Rousseau and Kant, as well as statesmen such as Tsar Alexander I, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, Robert Schuman, and Mikhail Gorbachev. She locates five major conflicts since 1700 that spurred such visionaries to promote systems of peace in Europe: the War of the Spanish Succession, the Napoleonic Wars, World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Each moment generated a “spirit” of peace among monarchs, diplomats, democratic leaders, and ordinary citizens. The engineers of peace progressively constructed mechanisms and institutions designed to prevent future wars. Arguing for continuities from the ideals of the Enlightenment, through the nineteenth-century Concert of Nations, to the institutions of the European Union and beyond, Conquering Peace illustrates how peace as a value shaped the idea of a unified Europe long before the EU came into being. Today the EU is widely criticized as an obstacle to sovereignty and for its democratic deficit. Seen in the long-range perspective of the history of peacemaking, however, this European society of states emerges as something else entirely: a step in the quest for a less violent world.

The application of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) in the Mediterranean and Black Sea faces several challenges also because of large ecological, economic, political and institutional differences across the basin. The challenge of CFP application is exacerbated by the legal/administrative situation, with large areas outside national/EU jurisdictions, by the different development of fisheries that result in fleet capacities highly different on opposite shores of some sub-basins, as well as by uneven monitoring and data availability across the basins that result in situations that hamper sustainable management. This book collates analyses related to the application of the principles included in the CFP in Mediterranean and Black Sea, including assessments of current status, scenario analyses, visions of best solutions, evaluation of critical hot spots and effects of regionalization of fisheries management. The eBook tackles from local to transboundary issues and solutions and provides a broad vision of problems together with important practical solutions for CFP application in the Mediterranean and Black Sea.