Abstract
The editorial team at New Perspectives welcomes you to the first issue of 2024. This issue contains five outstanding articles engaging with the international politics of perception in Central and Eastern Europe. The War in Ukraine continues to shape and reshape European politics, as it faces a range of complex threats to its cohesion from disinformation and populism. Perceptions matter to this geopolitical reality facing Europe. The articles which constitute this issue examine, in various ways, precisely how perception structures international politics in the CEE region – from cultural diplomacy at Eurovision to national status amongst the Visegrád countries, anti-migrant rhetoric, and debates about regional integration or the strength of democracy.
The issue begins with Lea Welslau and Torsten Selck’s “Geopolitics in the ESC: Comparing Russia’s and Ukraine’s Use of Cultural Diplomacy in the Eurovision Song Contest”. Diplomacy at cultural events offer important insights for politics and international relations for the last two decades. Here the authors examine the Eurovision song contest to effectively explore how Russia and Ukraine have sought to use this forum to project strategic narratives onto the world stage. The authors distinguish between the culturalist and neopropagandist approaches to public communications used by Russia and Ukraine respectively in their competition for European audiences.
Next, we have Mate Szalai and Nikolett Garai’s “Status-seeking with a Negative Image – The Changing Position of Visegrád Countries in the International Community between 2004 and 2020.” This explores how Visegrád countries international status has been impacted by perceived populism. The article shows that a complicated relationship between the status and image of small states, by analysing longitudinal data sets of intergovernmental interactions.
Third we have Mucha Zbyněk’s “Dichotomous Rhetoric and Purposeful Silencing: Contradictions of Czech and Polish post-2015 Migration Policy vis-à-vis Immigration from South Asia”. This explores Czech and Polish migration policies. Rooted in “accidental ethnography”, and data from original interviews as well as discourse analysis, the article explores how antimigrant rhetoric works in European democracies. It concludes that “turning a blind eye on recruitment of international migrants represents a continuity practice of migrant labour subordination within the nation-state, originating during colonialism and the advent of capitalism in the nineteenth century”.
Fourth we have Oleksandra Kovalevska’s “Opting Out of the ‘Near Abroad’ and Moving Towards Eurointegration: A Postfunctionalist Analysis of Ukraine’s Regional Integration Dynamics in the Early 2010’s,” which examines then factors that shaped Ukraine’s ‘European turn’. Deploying and testing the value of postfunctionalist analysis, Kovalevska shows that it provides effective tools for explaining why Ukraine opted out of deeper integration into Russia’s Eurasian project, drawing attention to the role of collective identity mobilisation.
The issue concludes with another article on Ukraine, written by Vira Haponenko, Volodymyr Rykhlik, Marina Shulga, Svitlana Bulbeniuk and Olha Naumenko. In “Informal institutionalization in modern Ukraine” the authors explore the unresolved democratisation challenges facing the country. They note that informal institutions, including lobbying, corruption, populism, non-conventional forms of political participation of citizens, party agreements, clientelism, and political bargaining have remained present in the system and propose a range of technological solutions to enhance the functioning of Ukrainian democracy. This is clearly an important field for research, given the geopolitical role that Ukraine is fulfilling as a representative of liberal democracy against critics in world order.
The editorial team hopes you enjoy the issue.