RESEARCH ARTICLES. Differentiation of world politics
This article investigates the existing international hierarchy employing expert survey as its primary method. 'Authority hierarchy' and 'power status hierarchy,' the two existing research traditions of hierarchy studies, are briefly introduced. We demonstrate a gap between basic research on power status, emphasizing its social nature, and applied case studies, primarily relying on purely material indicators of a country's capabilities, such as the GDP and CINC. In times of rapid hierarchical shifts, there is a need for a more nuanced and holistic approach. The article suggests placing hierarchy studies onto the ontological foundation of Niklas Luhmann's Differentiation Theory to overcome these problems. We trace the international society's segmentary differentiation, stratificatory differentiation (status hierarchy), and functional differentiation (specialization). The paper argues that the functional roles of states and their positions in the international hierarchy are interconnected. The hierarchy of states' roles, resulting from functional differentiation, is understood in terms of authority hierarchy. In order to lay the ground for further research, three valuable insights of states in the international hierarchy. Firstly, we categorize 26 countries as belonging to one of the power status categories (small power, middle power, great power, superpower) as of autumn 2021 based on the survey results. We calculate indices operationalizing power, roles, public goods provision, and revisionism for the states in the survey. Secondly, the paper presents experts' evaluations of the importance of various valued attributes (such as the size of the economy, military might, international prestige, autonomy, etc.) for different power status categories. Thirdly, we suggest a novel approach linking a country's position in the international hierarchy to its functional roles. We use correlation analysis to test the hypothesis and compare the roles index to other popular power status indicators.
Exit of Britain from the European Union resuscitated academic discussions on the topic of the certainty value for the unfolding of disintegrative trends in the united Europe. Nevertheless, no general perception has emerged yet of how Brexit is likely to influence the organizational prospects and viability of the European integration grouping. In most cases the conceptualizations do not escape the presentation of dichotomy between integration and disintegration as two ultimo states in international relations. In fact, these are two processes, more complexly co-related. Each of them can include a wide array of structural arrangements, some differentiation dynamism, different levels of centralization in separate domains, as well as certain (variable) numbers of participants in distinct arrangements. In this article the meaning of Brexit as a condition of further European (dis)integration is treated, as based on Alexander Bogdanov’s theory of organization. This theory serves to reconsider the established renderings of such key notions, as integration, disintegration and differentiation.
The new sight is gained of immune after-effects of prior Europeanization for the political system of the UK. Cases of the Economic and Monetary Union and the Northern Ireland Protocol receive separate treatment. The latter one presents a path-breaking design for differentiated integration with subnational region participation. Yet to realize the potential of the Protocol in full, political will is needed from both London and Brussels.
On the most basic level, once this large country left the EU, one could hardly imagine any of its remaining 27 members to head off further progressive development of European integration. At the same time, it has to be acknowledged that, in order to make headway in terms of integration, the EU system, rather than unification and centralization, is in need of intensified differentiation. Meanwhile, the supranational institutions, and the European Commission most notably, remain oriented towards uniform integration as their priority. This can result in lower efficacy of the EU integration policy.
In recent years, sport reflects the most painful trends in social development, economics, culture, and international politics.
Major international sporting events of the summer 2021 reveal, according to authors, the crisis of Olympism and degradation of the ideological and philosophical basis of professional sport, which is an important element of international relations undergoing a noticeable transformation under the influence of the coronavirus pandemic and the exacerbation of racist traumas of the past.
The study is based on social constructivism, it uses elements of critical discourse analysis and comparative analysis. European Football Championship and Olympic Games in Tokyo 2021, FIFA 2022 qualifiers show some politically motivated refereeing, as well as bursts of racism on the part of individual participants. The principle of “political correctness” widespread in the West makes it difficult to discuss and deal with historical and colonial traumas, as well as with the crisis in the values of “fair play” in professional sports, caused by its commercialization and politicization.
The article concludes that the observed facts stem, among other things, from the revival of the Black Lives Matter movement in the spring of 2020, which spread beyond the borders of the United States, the formation and expansion of the “cancel culture”, as well as the growing influence of social networks and media on world public opinion. The coronavirus pandemic, announced in the spring of 2020, has exacerbated old national problems, and brought to the fore new phenomena in world sports.
The article compares Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro diplomacy with the traditional one and explains in what terms and why his foreign policy is different from a classical approach.
Before he came to power, such principles as peaceful coexistence with neighbors, aspiration for national grandeur, peaceful conflict settlement and independent decision making were inherent in Brazilian diplomacy. Today the country’s foreign policy is unpredictable, inconsistent, and far from traditional peacefulness. Before changes in the US administration in 2021, Bolsonaro, as well as many of his predecessors, bet on the USA to solve national problems. Unilateral concessions to Washington predictably gave no results and lowered Brazilian independence in decision making. The USA was not interested in strengthening its rival in Latin America, no matter how friendly the relations between the two countries were. Bolsonaro’s policy is influenced by different lobby groups with opposing interests in government agencies. An important role is played by the military and followers of the theoretician Olavo de Carvalho. Paying attention to each of these groups, Bolsonaro implements an inconsistent foreign policy and runs a risk of not putting important political projects into practice and of finding himself in an international isolation.
The changes in foreign policy take place amidst political and economic crisis in Brazil. Coronavirus pandemic aggravated the conflict of the branches of power. To strengthen his positions, the president appeals to the population, looks for support in the Parliament and pushes through an administrative bill aimed at making the president more autonomous in managing the executive branch structures.
The appearance of the “right-wing” president and powerful influence of the conservative military stem from the economic and political crisis in Brazil, and Bolsonaro’s “special” governance style fits a worldwide trend of populism and active politics coverage in social networks.
The Non-Aligned movement is one of the most active and large groups within the negotiation process for the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The NAM promoted radical disarmament agenda during the conferences on the NPT for the last decade. However, it proves to be inefficient. The article aims at uncovering the NAM priorities, as well as defining its role in agenda setting during NPT negotiation process. The authors show transition from simple declarations to specific plans and projects of the NAM in the nonproliferation sphere. Critical document analysis of the NAM states and informal interviews on the margins of the 2018-2019 non-proliferation committees provided the necessary information for the research. Internal challenges within the NAM were analyzed. The authors conclude that although the NAM has a lot of members with pro-active positions, their actions were unsuccessful due to internal conflicts and polar stances on the issue. This, in turn leads to clash of interests within the NAM and to a very broad agenda. The NAM is still weak to form a united front in order to contend nuclear powers’ position.
RESEARCH ARTICLES. Turkey in world politics
The new offensive approach of Turkey's foreign policy is the sign of President Erdogan's ambitions to redistribute power in the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean and a way to legitimize his own regime. On the one hand, this can be seen as the ambitions of «neo-Ottomanism», on the other hand, there is a new attempt to solve five foreign policy problems: the «Kurdish issue», the «Aegean dispute», the return of territories mentioned in the “National Oath” (Misak-i Milli), breakthrough from disillusionment with integration with the EU and overcoming inequality in allied relations with the United States to satisfy antiAmerican nationalism.
The article examines Turkey's foreign policy since Erdogan gained full control of power and intervened in the civil war in Syria in 2014-2015. The aim is to determine the reason for Turkey's offensive strategy from the perspectives of Neorealism theory of International Relations and Bargaining model of war. The main findings are as follows. Erdogan's policy of power redistribution has focused on relations with the United States, the EU, and Russia as well as regional powers and has employed dominance in bargaining power as the main tool. A show of Turkey's force makes counterparts more compliant and serves as a tool to convince that the cost of deterring Turkey will be greater than the cost of concession.
The main feature of Erdogan's policy is the use of contradictions between partners. According to Neorealism, if a state becomes too powerful, the balancing coalition occurs. But Turkey's offensive policy does not face a balancing coalition (or an international system, especially on the NATO and the EU directions), because there are many contradictions between potential opponents, which Erdogan masterfully uses. At some point, Turkey balances each of them by the threat to move closer to its opponent thus creating a balancing lever in “balancing triangle”. In this way Erdogan uses a series of “balancing triangles” to put pressure on Russia, the US, and the EU simultaneously.
In the era of new challenges and threats, the most dangerous of which has occurred terrorism, the Republic of Turkey becomes one of the key centers of power in the Middle East and pursues the goal to create a regional security architecture around itself as well as to counter various terrorist organizations. The aim of the research is to scrutinize the peculiarities of Ankara's anti-terrorism policy both – inside and outside the country – and its political and legal approaches to understanding the phenomenon of terrorism and methods of its combating.
The study of Russia and Turkey's aspects of interaction is of particular importance. This issue seems to be especially relevant in the scope of strengthening of Russian-Turkish cooperation in recent years including the field of combating terrorism, ensuring global and regional security, and maintaining international stability. As a result of quantitative content analysis of President R.T. Erdogan's public speeches and the use of general scientific research methods, the authors conclude that the fight against terrorist threat, especially the so-called "Kurdish terrorism", is a matter of great importance for the country's leadership. At the same time Turkey's anti-terrorist activity has certain specifics and is characterized by Ankara's desire to lead anti-terrorist missions in different parts of the world and using a predominantly militaristic approach to solving the problem. This approach primarily consists in conducting cross-border anti-terrorist military operations on the neighboring states' territories. However, the military campaigns that have become an integral part of Turkey's anti-terrorism policy in many respects do not contribute to the demolishing of terrorist elements. Instead of that such operations on the contrary become an extra destabilizing factor in the Middle East. Besides that, due to the peculiarities of Turkey's interpretation of the concept of "terrorism" and its policy's implementation, Ankara's foreign anti-terrorism actions in most cases are limited to the realization of its own interests but not to achieving the goals set within the framework of the ongoing campaigns.
The article studies Turkey’s twiplomacy how Turkish diplomats use Twitter in performing their diplomatic outreach and public diplomacy. The literature review shows that there is a lack of a comprehensive large N study of Turkey’s twiplomacy. The article fills in this gap by collecting and analyzing data set of Twitter posts by 76 diplomats from 2010 to 2020. It helps understand how and to what extent Turkish diplomats maintain their presence on Twitter. We achieve this goal using two groups of methods. Firstly, we derive descriptive statistics for several user metrics including raw numbers of tweets per user and per date as well as retweet, reply, and like counts per user. Secondly, we analyze content of tweets through calculation of their sentiment scores.
The main findings indicate that the Twitter presence of Turkish diplomats is relatively limited and reliant on a few prominent figures. Though Turkish diplomats are selected from well-educated individuals who can make the greatest use of available opportunities provided by social media, relatively few of them are active on Twitter. Another significant conclusion is that Turkey’s twiplomacy is inconsistent and driven by individuals rather than a part of a wider strategy or framework. Online activities of different state institutions are not synchronized for efficient use of social media and so-called twiplomacy. Finally, according to the results of the content analysis, Turkish diplomats usually employ positive language in their tweets, as seen by the most frequently used terms, related emotions, and sentiment scores. It confirms the idea that Turkish diplomats tend to promote messages demonstrating Turkey's endorsement of international cooperation.
RESEARCH ARTICLES. Economic dimension of global and national processes
Inter-regional gaps in the investment sphere and sanction pressure on the national economy have actualized the issue of improving the efficiency of managing investment attractiveness at the mesoscale using modern high-precision methods of economic and mathematical modeling. A number of well-known thematic ratings are used to assess the investment attractiveness of the Russian regions, whose critical analysis made it possible to identify their main shortcomings. Therefore, in the course of the study, the authors make an attempt to build an adequate rating of the investment attractiveness of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation using artificial intelligence. The results of the retrospective assessment are deepened by clustering the Russian regions based on the achieved level of investment attractiveness by the method of Kohonen self-organizing cards. To implement the prognostic function, a Bayesian ensemble of dynamic neural network models was formed. As a result of the empirical study three hypotheses have been confirmed: on significant inter-regional gaps in the sphere of investment attractiveness; on a negative change in the cluster structure (in the field of investment attractiveness) of the Russian regions in 2013-2018 due to sanctions pressure on the national economy; and on the persistence of significant inter-regional gaps (in the investment sphere) in the medium term (on the example of the leading regions). The results can be used to update the provisions of the economic policy of a number of constituent entities of the Russian Federation. Moreover, the authors’ approach might be applied for analyzing other countries in the context of the UN Sustainable Development Goals at the meso-level.
The article analyzes the legal regulation of the economy at the structural level. Economists usually ignore the impact of law on macroeconomic processes. The main attention is paid to the study of the legal regulation of economic relations at the level of macroeconomics, as well as its primary links enterprises, organizations, etc. In particular, the legal regulation of several sublevels of the economy is singled out and considered: reproductive, sectoral (intersectoral), regional (interregional). It is concluded that the system of economic management is constantly undergoing changes under the influence of various factors of an objective and subjective nature, an important place among which is occupied by legal means and methods. The ideas put forward by R. Coase need to be reconsidered, considering new economic realities. Recommendations are made aimed at strengthening the role of the contract in economic management, improving legislation, and eliminating excessive administration of the activities of economic entities.
BOOK REVIEWS
Book review: Migranyan A. 2022. Does Russia have a future? Moscow: Aspect Press. 678 p.
Book review: Fenenko A.V. 2022. Istoriya mezhdunarodnykh otnoshenij v dovetsfal’skuyu epokhu [History of International Relations in the Pre-Westphalian Epoch]. Moscow: Izdatelstvo “Aspekt Press”. 752 p. (in Russian)
Book review: Paul Rowinski. 2021. Post-Truth, Post-Press, Post-Europe. Euroscepticism and the Crisis of Political Communication. Palgrave Macmillan Cham. 2021. 252 p. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-030-55571-9.
ISSN 2541-9099 (Online)