Complex Regionalisation in the Wider Black Sea Area
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COMPLEX REGIONALISATION IN THE WIDER BLACK SEA AREA Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Leicester by Mukhtar HAJIZADA (MA, Istanbul University; BA, The Academy of Public Administration in Baku) Department of Politics and International Relations University of Leicester October 2012 Abstract Mukhtar Hajizada Complex Regionalisation in the Wider Black Sea Area This thesis provides a case study analysis of regionalisation in the wider Black Sea area as a contribution to the study of regionalism. Taking 1992 as the starting point, interviews, official documents and personal observation are used to analyse the integrative processes by focusing on the areas of regional security, institutionalisation, intraregional trade and the role of the EU. Confrontation and cooperation are inter-related, and security imperatives and the lack of a sense of (security) community affect the efficiency level of the regional institutions and prevent increased regional cooperation. Nevertheless, the EU has enhanced a sense of community in the wider Black Sea area (WBSA) although mainly in the western part of it. Previous studies on regionalism have mostly dealt with regionalisms among allies or countries that seem to genuinely interact as partner countries, rather than examining the regionalist project of a group of states including adversaries with political-military problems between themselves. This thesis is thus original in focusing on a strange phenomenon that cooperation is going on at the same time as tension and conflict between states. A further sign of complexity is that many of the instances of cooperation such as economic are going on outside the remit of the regional organisations which have been established – such as the Black Sea Economic Cooperation. As this regional arrangement resembles an example of regional integration but cannot easily be analysed by the customary approaches of regionalism, the idea of ‘complex regionalism’ is proposed to denote the complex interplay among the participating actors in the WBSA. The summary contribution is to show that it is still possible to have regionalisation of states where some of them simultaneously engage in conflicts with each other, although this is likely to stunt the process and the extent of regional integration. ii Acknowledgments I owe my deepest gratitude to the important persons who agreed to be the source for this thesis as well as those who agreed to informal meetings and shared their opinion with me. I would like to start by thanking my interviewees, a number of senior officials from the European institutions, senior diplomats from the relevant countries, staff of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation Organisation (BSEC) and BSEC-related international institutions, as well as influential figures and experts from the BSEC countries, for agreeing to play a role in my research. Numerous senior officials and representatives from the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of various BSEC member states as well as the regional offices of European Union, including the European Commission (EC), the EC Delegation in Baku, EU Special Representatives, EuropeAid Co-operation Office, and the ENPI Info Centre, gave generously of their time for interviews. I also wish to extend my thanks to those who objected to their name being mentioned elsewhere but kindly agreed to have informal communications, brief conversations, exchanges of opinions; they helped me to clarify some difficult issues in the course of our question and answer sessions. My sincerest gratitude and appreciation goes to the staff responsible for the documentation centres or libraries at the regional organisations, who turned my task of accessing and using esoteric documents into a simple one. The research training sessions delivered by the Student Development Centre and the College of Social Sciences of the University of Leicester played a fundamental role in my understanding of research and what it means to be an efficient researcher. Indeed, the specialised training for researchers in the field of European Studies (November 2008) organised by the UACES Student Forum and the European Commission Representation in the UK and the UK Office of the European Parliament, also improved my skills in terms of research planning and managing, and conducting fieldwork on the EU. I am grateful for the financial assistance provided by the Central European University in Budapest for the 2009 Summer School ‘New Regionalisms, Emergent Powers and the Future of Security and Governance’, thanks to which I was enlightened with the theories on new regionalism; this was an essential part of my thesis development. On this postgraduate course, I met Timothy M. Shaw, Professor Emeritus at University of London, whom I am indebted to for helping me to structure my thesis at that very stage of my work. I am also thankful to Roger A. Coate, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of South Carolina as well as fellow PhD students for their general but invaluable comments on the structure. iii Thanks to all those who knew about my research and did not hesitate to play some role in it when I participated in various conferences dedicated to topics related to this thesis. I am also grateful to those persons who invited me to meetings, high level conferences or expert seminars; the range of opinions I was exposed to thanks to meeting academics as well as practitioners on the topics relevant to this thesis significantly enhanced my research. Whereas my participation in the International Symposium ‘The Wider Black Sea Area in Perspective’ (Greece, 1-6 July 2008), organised by the International Centre for Black Sea Studies, provided an important gateway to the experts on the region, recent attendance at another similar Symposium ‘Understanding the Common Neighbourhood - The Black Sea Region in Focus’ (Istanbul, 28 June-3 July 2011), organised by the Centre for International and European Studies at Kadir Has University, helped me to tighten up some parts of the thesis. Therefore, I am very thankful to Dr. Dimitrios Triantaphyllou who invited me to contribute to, and benefit from, these two conferences. Moreover, the PhD Summer Schools ‘EU Subregional Strategies’ (3-10 July 2011), organised by the Vienna Institute for the Danube Region and Central Europe, and ‘EU in the World 2010’ by Roskilde University, Denmark (16-28 August 2010) played an important role in helping me to understand and compare EU policies, and I am thankful to the organisers for providing me with this opportunity. Chapter 5 is a heavily based on quantitative research. The completion of this chapter would have been extremely difficult if the following experts had not generously shared their expertise with me. I am particularly thankful to Dr. Richard Connolly, School of Government and Society of the University of Birmingham, for his methodological assistance on data collection and helpful comments on the early version of this chapter. I am also grateful to Dr. Maksim Belitski, Economics Department of the University of Leicester, for sharing his much needed expertise on computer program (E-Views-6 software) with the author. Without his help, it is hard to imagine the correlation matrix analysis of this chapter would ever have materialised. I am grateful also to Prof. Stephen G. Hall, Department of Economics, University of Leicester, for his invaluable comments on this particular chapter. The initial interest in the Black Sea region is a result of my internship at the BSEC headquarters in Istanbul which took place in the beginning of 2007, and coincided with the period when the senior officials from the member states of EU and BSEC gathered in Istanbul to negotiate the prospective Black Sea Synergy. I thank the officials of the Permanent International Secretariat of BSEC (PERMIS) for being helpful in deepening my understanding of the BSEC Organisation. I am also grateful to the senior officials of the BSEC member states for their kind help with interpreting the diplomatic language they professionally used in the BSEC meetings. iv I thank Michael Emerson for inviting me to become a Visiting Research Fellow at the Brussels- based think-tank of the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in October and November 2010. This fellowship was realised thanks to the research grant offered by the Local Government and Public Service Reform Initiative (LGI) of the Open Society Institution- Budapest. Prior to this stay, I had visited almost all of the main European institutions, based in or around Brussels, thanks to a bursary from the Financial Times which funded my study-tour organised by the European Atlantic Movement (TEAM) in April 2009. The ideas contained in this thesis have been widely presented at various international academic conferences where I had a chance to receive feedback from wider audiences of the academic community. The papers stemming from this thesis have been discussed at eight conferences. For their comments, I particularly thank Prof. Graham Timmins of the University of Stirling for discussing my paper at the 41st Annual Conference of the University Association for Contemporary European Studies (7 September 2011, Cambridge); Prof. David John Allen of Loughborough University for discussing my paper at the 5th Pan-European Conference on EU Politics, organised by the European Consortium for Political Research (26 June 2010, Porto); and Emilie Blais of the University of Pittsburgh for discussing the earlier ideas of my thesis presented at the 7th Biennial Conference ‘The Maturing European Union’ (26 September 2008, Edmonton) organised by the European Community Studies Association - Canada. I am also grateful to Dr. George Christou at the University of Warwick, whose comments were helpful in improving my contribution to an edited book entitled The Black Sea Region and EU Policy: The Challenge of Divergent Agendas (K. Henderson and C. Weaver (eds) 2010). The contribution stemmed from the ideas in this thesis. It is not an easy task for anybody to write a thesis in their fourth language unless they have a very kind friend; in my case, it was Dr.