A Globalization Project in Practice? The EU's Cultural and Educational Activities in Azerbaijan in the Framework of the Eastern Partnership Programme (original) (raw)
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With the European Union making the rapid steps forward, there has been a permanent demand for precise knowledge of history of unified Europe. One still wonders how did the Romans manage to build Pax Romana, which was a bit more a commonwealth than an Empire. With Western and Eastern Europe now motivated firmly to build a common European house, these ideas seem to be quite interesting. As to Georgia, being a member of the Council of Europe, moving rapidly toward NATO, she had the same aspirations toward the Graeco-Roman World. This article deals with what can be labeled as making of Europe
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There are several regional and external actors that are currently engaged in intense competition over the future of Central Asia’s culture (education, media, tourism), social life (people-to-people contacts, civil society) and identity (including politics of memory), to win over the “hearts and minds” of the Central Asian people. However, this issue has been underestimated in previous research of the region. The European Union (hereafter the EU) and its member states are underperforming in this area in comparison to several key external powers, especially Russia. Despite the EU’s claims that Central Asian countries are important partners to them, the EU has not provided sufficient financial commitments and ways of supporting these claims. The paper concludes that the new EU strategy for Central Asia, due to be approved in 2019, should provide a more efficient response to the cultural policies and identity narratives of the key external powers and Central Asian countries. Aside from ...
Comparativ, 2021
link to complete issue: https://www.comparativ.net/v2/issue/view/165 The transformation of East-Central Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union is often identified with serious changes in property relations and corresponding restructuring of societies, an increase in intra-societal inequality and an adaptation to the institutional structure of the West. The field of culture appears as a derived sector in which, on the one hand, the penetration of Western practices and norms is also stated, but on the other hand, the processing of subjective perceptions and the emotional reworking of the perceived injuries is localized. This also seems compatible with ideas in which culture, and especially its nationalized and nationalizing form, serves as the remaining bracket for socio-economically drifting apart societies. Such framings of culture seem to help explaining the conspicuous nationalism in East-Central Europe. With its focus on cultural policy in East-Central Europe, this issue takes a different perspective, asking how the transformation of the cultural scene took place, how the understanding of culture and cultural policy changed, who initiated these changes and gained interpretive sovereignty over them, and how this kind of transformation in turn had an effect on the West, offering it a new kind of engagement with experiences of globalization, which were more or less accepted and used. In doing so, the authors must confront an evident contradiction in the research litera- ture, in which some assume a diffusion of Western patterns, while others claim that, in contrast to the economy, the transformation in the cultural sphere followed entirely nati- onal traditions (with the interesting exception of the GDR, which was incorporated into the Federal Republic and had therefore no autonomous tradition to be followed). These astonishingly contradictory interpretations indicate that empirical evidence cannot be that far off, but rather that examples have so far been sought to illustrate preconceived interpretations. This is not surprising when one considers the enormous political charge that accompanies the interpretation of transformation, for each of these interpretations legitimizes a different policy in the present, for which the narrative shaping of the past forms the basis. The same is true for the thematic field of cultural policy: an approach that not only con- nects the phenomena under investigation with a spatial format, very often the nation- state, but also takes into account the multi-scalar and interwoven situation under the global condition, is the main way out of this trap. Transformation cannot be understood solely as a transnational process or even as a global convergence, nor is it sufficient to move to the micro-level of the local and regional or to observe solely the regulation by national legislation and institutions. Cultural policy (like many other social dimensions, for that matter) is much more complexly spatialized and each of these dimensions fol- lows a different geography and different traditions and temporalities. As Thomas Höpel shows with the help of Polish and East German examples, this has completely opposite consequences for larger metropolises and for the countryside and smaller cities, the latter being much more dependent on subsidies from higher-level entities such as the state or the European Union or from landscapes of culture organized to sustain cultural infra- structures. The course of the transformation is understood incompletely when taking its begin- ning as a zero hour in which everything starts anew as if on a tabula rasa and nothing remains as it was. On the contrary, many practices and institutional settings continued, were adapted to new social contexts or even became places of resistance against certain dimensions of the transformation - such as the Berlin Volksbühne, which Antje Dietze presents in her article. The studies on Poland and Hungary provided by Przemysław Czapliński and Kristóf Nagy/Márton Szarvas again reveal a caesura at the nation-state level, which, after the state’s withdrawal from regulating the cultural sector since the mid-2010s, led to a new kind of interference in culture and even the intention to control it with instruments of censorship and positive discrimination against national conservative tendencies. Ho- wever, these efforts are by no means easy to impose, but come up against the cultural pre- ferences of the public and the orientation of a significant part of cultural actors towards international trends, which are reinforced by their integration into patterns of European cultural policy and, above all, by the presence of new media. Thus, the example of cultural policy in Eastern Europe since 1989 proves to be a lesson in new approaches to transnational history that is not satisfied with stating cross-border interconnections (or observing nationalization as their opposite), but instead focuses attention on the diversity of new spatializations that can offer a key to understanding global processes.
Ilgar Gurbanov, "Azerbaijan: Europeanisation Versus Real-Politics", in the book of "Dilemmas of Europeanisation: Political Choices and Economic Transformations in the Eastern Partnership Countries" (Latvian Institute of International Affairs, Riga), 2016, pp.95-123, http://liia.lv/en/publications/dilemmas-of-europeanisation-political-choices-and-economic-transformations-in-the-eastern-partnership-countries-534
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2006
The role of the East-West discourse and the East-West civilizational slope is to set the terms and rules of global and local positioning and to formulate cognitive perspectives and maps in which different actors can locate themselves, each other and their own societies in the late-modern capitalist world system or modern/colonial systems. In other words, the East-West slope is a dominant discourse for the articulation of identities and political programs and the creation of institutions in the struggle for control and/or social or political recognition. It appears in almost all areas of social and political life: individual careers, family life, institutional frameworks, scholarly works and major global political programs, and it creates a web of discursive arrangements “normalizing” our lives in the latest phase of world capitalism. Eastern Europe has proved to be an especially fruitful field for analyzing the mechanisms of the East-West slope not only because this region and the actors in it have been (re)imagined into an intermediate position, but also because this region has been decomposed as a separate and competing block and (re)folded onto a hierarchical slope during the fall of state socialism and the (re)establishment of liberal capitalism. In this way the East-West slope has played a vital role in the recent history of Eastern Europe, with several functions in the dramatic changes affecting the lives of more then 300 million people.