Russia: Re-Emerging Great Power. Studies in Central and Eastern Europe by Roger E. Kanet The CIS, the EU and Russia: The Challenges of Integration. Studies in Central and Eastern Europe by Katlijn Malfliet , Lien Verpoest , Evgeny Vinokurov Russia and Europe in the Twenty-First Century: An Uneasy Partnership by Jackie Gower , Graham Timmins (review)

REVIEWS 581 gender reforms in accession countries? Is the European Union able to deal with ethnic nationalism and ifnot, why not? These issues seem to be the underlying idea in a volume like this, but unfortunately never really surface and require self-active reading. What remains is a number of good chapters thatwill attract readers from differentdisciplines. Department of European Studies Carlos W. C. Reijnen Universityof Amsterdam Kanet, Roger E. (ed.). Russia: Re-EmergingGreatPower. Studies inCentral and Eastern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2007. xii + 229 pp. Notes. Index. ?53.00. Malfliet, Katlijn, Verpoest, Lien and Vinokurov, Evgeny (eds). The CIS, the EU andRussia: The Challenges ofIntegration. Studies inCentral and Eastern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2007. xvii + 250 pp. Notes. Tables. Figures. Index. ?56.00. Gower, Jackie, and Timmins, Graham (eds). Russia andEurope in the Twenty First Century: An Uneasy Partnership. Anthem Press, London, New York and Delhi, 2007. xxiv + 305 pp. Notes. Index. ?50.00. The success ofNicolas Sarkozy, in his capacity as President of the European Union, inbringing about a cessation of hostilities in thewar between Georgia and Russia inAugust 2008 demonstrated the importance of the EU's diplo matic softpower for both Tbilisi and Moscow. Although it might have been argued that themediation worked only because amajor power such as France held theEU presidency, the importance of theEU toRussia was highlighted by the next crisis involvingRussia, fourmonths later. Bulgaria and other East European countries frozewithout gas for twoweeks as a consequence of the decision ofRussian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin at the beginning of 2009 to suspend gas supplies toUkraine. The Czech government holding the EU presidency was forced to act to protect citizens of EU countries which are dependent on theRussian gas exportmonopolist Gazprom. The Czechs were less successful than the French inmediating a solution, which was finally achieved bilaterally, after EU pressure, between Putin and the Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Both these events show that the EU sometimes has the capacity and the necessity to intervene in disputes between Russia and other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Economic issues play a role in these disputes, but a common factor is the increased wealth and power of Russia and the desire of the Russian authorities to resistwhat they see as Western encroachment on their sphere of special interests, the CIS. The media coverage of theAugust 2008 war showed a high level of bias. While thiswas unfortunately to be expected inRussia, given the state control of media there, itwas less explicable inmost of the Western countries, where in the course of the war itself much of the press and television followed the knee-jerk anti-Russian reaction ofpolicy-makers inmost of the Western states. Several months passed before policy-makers and media came to a more 582 SEER, 88, 3, JULY 20I0 balanced assessment. In contrast, by January 2009, most Western govern ments took an attitude of implicidy blaming both Russia and Ukraine, and sought pragmatically to restore the flow of gas. These crises have illustrated theurgent need to improve our understanding of the processes leading to conflicts involving former Soviet republics and the role played byWestern states and institutions in post-Soviet space, and to communicate thisunderstanding to policy-makers, themedia and the general public. The three books under review all contribute tomeeting thisneed, and all should be bought by librarieswhich supportRussian or European Studies. The first two books are published for the International Council on Central and East European Studies (ICCEES) as part of the series of volumes based on theVTI World Congress of ICCEES, held in Berlin inJuly 2005, around the theme 'Europe ? Our Common Home?'. Roger E. Kanet is the series editor, as well as the editor of the first volume here, and he deserves the gratitude of the international profession for overseeing the preparation of around eleven volumes from the congress. The third volume is a collection which grew out of a workshop at theUniversity of Stirling inJune 2004, but is rather more up-to-date than the first two volumes: whereas some of the papers in the ICCEES volumes have not been revised since theBerlin confer ence, the chapters in the book edited...

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.