Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Political stability – History'

The signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between the Republic of Sudan represented by the National Congress Party (NCP) and the SPLM (Sudan People’s Liberation Movement) which represented the people of the Southern part of Sudan in January 2005 ushered in a rare era of peace and hope for the rebuilding and construction of the war ravaged South Sudan. Coupled with the attainment of Independence for South Sudan through an internationally supervised referendum in January 2011, the objectives of years of struggle by the people of the formerly semi-autonomous region were completed. From 2005 until after the independence of South Sudan however, a period that initially was marked by huge euphoria and broad based anticipation of development boom, the support from both local and international actors for the struggle and the plight of the people of South Sudan is waning and at worst has now turned into despair and hopelessness. After attaining independence in 2011, the highest party organ, the Political Bureau decided to remove candidates who were popularly voted by their constituents and replaced them with their cronies, leading to mass exodus of cadres from the party. On top of that, the wide believe that the elections were rigged for SPLM candidates at the expense of the Independent candidates led to another wave of exodus and open rebellion by many veteran cadres of the movement. Today, these rebellions coupled with some complex problematic societal issues are major concern and a source of political instability and violence in some parts of the country. Secondly, the hasty process of the Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) campaign, which in some cases were forcefully done left some communities exposed and venerable to attacks by rival communities. This continue to exacerbate and ignite tribal hatred, tension and stereotypes between communities especially in the traditionally volatile parts of the country that are known for cattle rustling and tribal rivalry as a form of cultural practice. Unresolved post secession issues within the SPLM had resulted to political instability and violence thus having negative economic consequences for South Sudan and all the gains the country had made in the past few years vanished after December 15 2013 political upheaval. This thesis will examine the effects of these mentioned complex political instability and economic dilemma South Sudan is being confronted with in the face of the fact that it is still in the process of nation building having attained its Independence only in July 2011.

The official language policies and their basic concepts, the principle of personality in Canada and the principle of territoriality in Switzerland, are critically analyzed. The two democratic federations are compared as two multination states since 'nation' is defined in cultural terms. Language survival is justified in liberal theory through minority rights. The principle of territoriality that assures the dominance of the linguistic majority over a territory within the federation is in accordance with liberal democracy if fundamental rights are protected. The principle of territoriality contributes thus to political stability within a multination federation. There is no movement in Switzerland that is fed by a language-based grievance despite the existence of three linguistic minorities: Switzerland accommodates successfully linguistic diversity. In Canada, the perception that the survival of the French language might not be sustained fuels a secessionist movement threatening the unity of the federation.

After Berlin Conference in 1884 to 1885, Somalia was partitioned into five parts by Britain, Italy, and French. In 1960 two parts gained independence and formed the Somali Republic, and since then successive Somali governments sought to incorporate the other three parts of Somali territories under Ethiopia, Kenya and French Somaliland known as Djibouti into Greater Somalia.The aim of this study has been to explore and analyze the causes, and the impact of the Somalia’ irredentism on political stability in Somalia. In more specifically, the main objective has been to critically examine how Somali irridentism policy has been pursued, what challenges faced and how it has affected the political stability of the post-colonial Somali state from 1960 to 1990.The analysis presented in this study has shown that the causes of Somali irredentism are combined factors that helped rise Somali irredentism. The analysis has argued that Somalia’s quest for irredentism policy had a huge impact on Somalia’s political stability, including, but not limited to, creating enemies and alienating allies from neighbouring countries to western and eastern blocs, as well as interstate conflict with Ethiopia which ended with Somalia defeat. Finally, Somalia’s defeat, which resulted from irredentism’s venture, caused disunity among the national army, refugee crisis, financial burden and the rise of armed opposition movements that finally ousted the military regime led by Siad Barre. This was followed by state collapse and protracted civil war.

This dissertation examines the historical progression of the Rush-Bagot Agreement through the fundamental change versus transitory modernization debate that has emerged in North America as a result of the reorganization of continental security and defence since 2001. The Agreement, which was signed by Britain and the United States in 1817 and subsequently embraced by Canada upon its independence, has acted as a stable measure of the security and defence relationship on the continent throughout its entire history. It has persisted through nearly two centuries of industrialization, expansionism, war, and modernization, and remains relevant in governing security and defence relations on the Great Lakes. By tracing the development of this Agreement and relations on the Lakes through previous periods of continental and international discord, this paper suggests that the changes to continental security and defence since 2001 represent little more than the refurbishing of relations to address a new threat, and thus are consistent with past defence modernizations during periods of continental vulnerability.

In this study, the manipulations of history and language in the dystopias of &ldquo
Nineteen Eighty-Four&rdquo
by George Orwell, &ldquo
We&rdquo
by Yevgeni Zamyatin and &ldquo
Brave New World&rdquo
by Aldous Huxley are examined. The principal aim of this investigation is to demonstrate that in these imaginary societies absolute stability is achieved through the manipulations of these two domains. The thesis argues that if the domains of history and language are not taken under control, they are to provide the subjects with the standard of comparisons which would enable them to realize that they are in fact dominated. However, once these domains are manipulated, they are transformed into the means of the dystopian rulers for mentally impoverishing people in a way that they would not be capable of conceiving the flaws within the system and therefore, would not attempt to challenge the order or require a change. In this sense, it is proposed that the subjects of these closed societies, who are formed as a result of the reshaping of history and language, would lack the mental capabilities to identify their subjection and behave automatically in the manner that is imposed on them by the political order. Moreover, in this study, the relationship of the genre dystopia with political theory is explored
it is indicated that dystopias are not only literary works, but rather they are also texts of social criticism containing certain warnings about the future course of events. Relying on this argument, it is claimed that such an invasion of the minds by the control over history and language in our three dystopias is the exaggerated version of the ideological relationships of the individuals to these two realms in the contemporary societies. Thus, having in mind that in the dystopias examined here the manipulations of history and language are the preconditions of the use of other realms (such as religion, sexuality and science), it is concluded that these texts enable modern individuals to see that in order to maintain a critical distance with the established political and social order, the multiplicity of linguistic resources and knowledge of history are very crucial.

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Bachelors
Arts and Sciences
Political Science

Lebanon has historically been at the center of Middle Eastern conflict. Religious diversity and weak institutions have resulted in the country’s continual exploitation by powerful foreign states. At first, a historical overview of Lebanon demonstrates how certain events over the past 200 years have shaped the country. Based on recurring political and economic misfortunes, sectarian tensions within Lebanon have flared since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. This thesis argues that in order to stabilize the country and prevent the meddling of foreign powers, a focus must be placed on establishing a national identity, strengthening the country’s political institutions, and creating an accountable economic system.

The thesis offers a new database of military expense in Spain from middle of the century nineteen up to the current importance, as well as three analyses of the determining ones and the economic and political consequences of the military expense in the long term. In I make concrete, the first chapter presents new estimations of the public resources destined for the military area in Spain from 1850 until 2009, as well as the economic, administrative and functional disaggregation of the above mentioned expense. The new database has been elaborated following the methodological criterion of the OTAN, which is one of the criteria most used on the part of the international institutions dedicated to the compilation of information of military expense worldwide. The above mentioned criterion allows to obtain a new database throughout the time and comparably with other countries of the European and international environment. The second chapter of the thesis analyzes the influence of the political rate in the evolution of the military expense in Spain from beginning of the Spanish Restoration up to the current importance. In contrast with the previous quantitative analyses, which generally emphasize the negative influence of the democratic rate in the evolution of the military expense, the chapter suggests that the democratic institutions can be associated with major levels of military expense in certain historical contexts. In I make concrete, the analysis of points of break of the series of military expense, as well as the analyses econometrics subsequent and the review of the military Spanish historiography, it shows that the first democratic governments established after the Pro-Franco dictatorship increased significantly the military expense in relation with the previous decades. This increase, which was due to the efforts of the above mentioned governments to re-orientate the army towards international missions and to facilitate his adjustment to the new democratic institutions, gave place to the only positive point of break of the historical series of military total expense that does not guard relation with the beginning or the end of a warlike conflict. In turn, the analysis suggests that the new orientation of the military democratic policies carried a financial effort in favor of an intensive army in the capital that could take part in new missions international. The third chapter analyzes more thoroughly the determining politicians of the military expense and his potential I affect terms of institutional stability. Since it is known well, the armies have intervened suddenly in politics coups d'état. Diverse authors suggest that the autocratic or partially democratic governments have used eventually the military expense as strategy to satisfy to the armed forces and to avoid this way his insubordination. Nonetheless, and in spite of the solidity of the argument, the quantitative recent analyses based on wide international databases have not found a significant and conclusive relation between the evolution of the military expense and the frequency and the success of the coups d'état. In this third chapter I suggest that the military total expense - measured commonly used on the part of the above mentioned quantitative literature - cannot be a good indicator of the financial effort realized on the part of the governments to obtain the loyalty of the army. Though the military total expense does not reflect any relation with the frequency and the success of the coups d'état, it is possible that the changes in the composition of the expense yes that guard a significant relation with the above mentioned phenomenon. The chapter tries to open this ' black box ' of the military expense studying the impact of the evolution of the wage remuneration of the officials in Spain from middle of the century nineteen until ends of the Spanish Restoration. On line with the pointed hypothesis, the analysis suggests that the increases in the remuneration of the officials during the second half of the century nineteen and beginning of the century twenty - together with other political and military strategies - they are related to a minor frequency of coups d'état, whereas the military total expense does not seem to show any relation in the matter. Finally, the fourth chapter examines the impact of the war and the military expense in the evolution of the fiscal systems of a sample of thirteen European and North American countries in the long term. The war and the military competition have been defined often as forces relevant motorboats of the expansion of the fiscal capacity of the conditions during the contemporary epoch. Nonetheless, the empirical evidence has not been conclusive, and still one lacks a historical narrative that explains how the changes in the nature of the war they have concerned the evolution of the fiscal contemporary systems. The fourth chapter has as aim refill this emptiness by means of the analysis of the impact of the war in the evolution of the fiscal contemporary capacity in the light of so called ' Revolutions of the Military Matters ' that took place in west from middle of the century nineteen up to the current importance. The results suggest that the relation between the war and the fiscal expansion has followed a curve of Or invested, according to which the changes in the tactics and the military technology pressed the public resources to the rise until the destructive capacity of the armies exceeded the nuclear threshold. Additional, the results suggest that the political systems have been relevant to complete this historical narrative, though they have been in occasions forgotten in this type of analysis.
La tesis ofrece una nueva base de datos de gasto militar en España desde mediados del siglo diecinueve hasta la actualidad, así como tres análisis de los condicionantes y las consecuencias económicas y políticas del gasto militar en el largo plazo. En concreto, el primer capítulo presenta nuevas estimaciones de los recursos públicos destinados al ámbito militar en España desde 1850 hasta 2009, así como la desagregación económica, administrativa y funcional de dicho gasto. La nueva base de datos ha sido elaborada siguiendo el criterio metodológico de la OTAN, que es uno de los criterios más utilizados por parte de las instituciones internacionales dedicadas a la compilación de datos de gasto militar a nivel mundial. Dicho criterio permite obtener una nueva base de datos homologable a lo largo del tiempo y comparable con otros países del entorno europeo e internacional. El segundo capítulo de la tesis analiza la influencia de los regímenes políticos en la evolución del gasto militar en España desde principios de la Restauración Española hasta la actualidad. En contraste con los análisis cuantitativos anteriores, que generalmente destacan la influencia negativa de los regímenes democráticos en la evolución del gasto militar, el capítulo sugiere que las instituciones democráticas pueden estar asociadas a mayores niveles de gasto militar en determinados contextos históricos. En concreto, el análisis de puntos de ruptura de las series de gasto militar, así como los análisis econométricos subsiguientes y la revisión de la historiografía militar española, muestra que los primeros gobiernos democráticos establecidos después de la dictadura Franquista aumentaron significativamente el gasto militar en relación con las décadas anteriores. Ese aumento, que fue debido a los esfuerzos de dichos gobiernos para reorientar el ejército hacia misiones internacionales y para facilitar su adaptación a las nuevas instituciones democráticas, dio lugar al único punto de ruptura positivo de la serie histórica de gasto militar total que no guarda relación con el inicio o el final de un conflicto bélico. A su vez, el análisis sugiere que la nueva orientación de las políticas militares democráticas conllevó un esfuerzo financiero en pro de un ejército intensivo en capital que pudiera participar en nuevas misiones internacionales. El tercer capítulo analiza más a fondo los condicionantes políticos del gasto militar y su potencial impacto en términos de estabilidad institucional. Como es bien sabido, los ejércitos han intervenido recurrentemente en política mediante golpes de estado. Diversos autores sugieren que los gobiernos autocráticos o parcialmente democráticos han usado eventualmente el gasto militar como estrategia para contentar a las fuerzas armadas y evitar así su insubordinación. Aún así, y a pesar de la solidez del argumento, los análisis cuantitativos recientes basados en amplias bases de datos internacionales no han encontrado una relación significativa y concluyente entre la evolución del gasto militar y la frecuencia y el éxito de los golpes de estado. En ese tercer capítulo sugiero que el gasto militar total – medida comúnmente utilizada por parte de dicha literatura cuantitativa – puede no ser un buen indicador del esfuerzo financiero realizado por parte de los gobiernos para conseguir la lealtad del ejército. Aunque el gasto militar total no refleje ninguna relación con la frecuencia y el éxito de los golpes de estado, puede que los cambios en la composición del gasto sí que guarden una relación significativa con dicho fenómeno. El capítulo pretende abrir esa ‘caja negra’ del gasto militar estudiando el impacto de la evolución de la remuneración salarial de los oficiales en España desde mediados del siglo diecinueve hasta finales de la Restauración Española. En línea con la hipótesis apuntada, el análisis sugiere que los aumentos en la remuneración de los oficiales durante la segunda mitad del siglo diecinueve y principios del siglo veinte – junto con otras estrategias políticas y militares – están relacionados con una menor frecuencia de golpes de estado, mientras que el gasto militar total no parece mostrar ninguna relación al respecto. Finalmente, el cuarto capítulo examina el impacto de la guerra y el gasto militar en la evolución de los sistemas fiscales de una muestra de trece países europeos y norteamericanos en el largo plazo. La guerra y la competición militar han sido a menudo definidas como fuerzas motoras relevantes de la expansión de la capacidad fiscal de los estados durante la época contemporánea. Aún así, la evidencia empírica no ha sido concluyente, y aún se carece de una narrativa histórica que explique cómo los cambios en la naturaleza de la guerra han afectado a la evolución de los sistemas fiscales contemporáneos. El cuarto capítulo tiene como objetivo rellenar ese vacío mediante el análisis del impacto de la guerra en la evolución de la capacidad fiscal contemporánea a la luz de las llamadas ‘Revoluciones de los Asuntos Militares’ que tuvieron lugar en occidente desde mediados del siglo diecinueve hasta la actualidad. Los resultados sugieren que la relación entre la guerra y la expansión fiscal ha seguido una curva de U invertida, según la cual los cambios en las tácticas y la tecnología militar presionaron los recursos públicos al alza hasta que la capacidad destructiva de los ejércitos sobrepasó el umbral nuclear. Adicionalmente, los resultados sugieren que los sistemas políticos han sido relevantes para completar esa narrativa histórica, aunque hayan sido en ocasiones olvidados en ese tipo de análisis.

The Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party was established in Syria during the mid-twentieth century, originally championing Arab unity and freedom from foreign influence. The party eventually managed to rise to power in Syria and Iraq, thereby concluding the widespread political instability that had previously plagued both countries. In each of these contexts, autocratic leaders emerged at the forefront of the ruling regimes and manipulated the party to bolster their rule for over three decades. This paper examines the Ba’ath party’s history and ideology to understand the party’s source of strength. It also discusses the party’s role in achieving power as well as the different functions it undertook in Syria and Iraq once autocratic rule was established. Finally, it studies the fall of both regimes and the status of the Ba’ath party today.

A few days before Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011, he reminded the Egyptian people that ’istiqrār (‘stability’) was his legacy both domestically and internationally. Their choice was between ‘stability’ and ‘chaos’, he threatened. This thesis argues that stability is a mode of governmentality whose power cannot be fully appreciated at the level of political discourse only. Rather, stability as a practice of government is entangled with peoples’ values, aspirations, and the intimate politics of everyday life. In Egypt between the Free Officers coup of 1952 and the January 25th revolution of 2011, ‘stability’ embodied access to both tenured employment and the means to reproduce the conditions of ‘a good life’ in the context of the family. Adequate understanding of stability and its ubiquity as an ideal must take into account the complex ways in which state projects and imaginative appropriation of those projects intersect. The thesis draws on fieldwork in an industrial neighbourhood of Cairo central to political movements of Egypt to analyse the everyday politics surrounding access to tenured employment in the context of the casualisation of labour and deregulation of capital since the inception of neo-liberal reforms in Egypt in 1991. By analysing the politics of labour at a site of strategic interest to the Egyptian regime from Abdul-Nasser to Mubarak, the thesis highlights how adequate understanding of political economy, practices of governing and neoliberalism must include both the shop floor and the home.

The emerging global structure is wrought with tension. The contemporary international system, marshaled by the communications-and-information revolution and characterized by dense interaction capacities among transnational actors, can be conceived as a global society wherein a common normative framework guides and constrains state behavior. Its intersection with revisionist rising powers harboring intentions to mold that framework to reflect their own preferences risks an ambiguous standard of behavior, confusion, and a clash of norms that threatens to transform the cohesion that underpins accord in the global society into chaos. As the state upon whose values and principles the existing international system is based upon, it is the responsibility of the United States to ensure the stability and viability of that system and – as far as other states are expected to conform to the normative standards thereof – its ability to accommodate the development of the states within it. The United States has traditionally promoted the democratic peace as the key stabilizing mechanism in the international system. While fully institutionalized democracies may be more stable and less aggressive than other forms of government, however, emerging democracies tend to be extraordinarily violent as self-rule precipitates secessionist wars, pathological homogenization, and ethnic cleansing as “the people” are defined and those excluded are sorted out. In regions beset by the legacies of colonialism and multi-ethnic empires, wherein state boundaries were arbitrarily drawn to aggregate and divide a complex mosaic of social identity groups, the results are national cascades fueling pervasive identity-driven conflict in a struggle to reify into the primary organizing structure of modernity: the nation-state.

One of the most striking characteristics of Third World countries is political instability. Although not all Third World states are politically unstable, witness for example Saudi Arabia and Nepal, many nations of both democratic and authoritarian leanings have experienced strong political challenges in maintaining established political order and national unity. These political challenges can take the forms of mass demonstration, riots or even coups.

In much of the historiography surrounding print culture and the book trade, the worldliness of print remains a point of common emphasis. Indeed, many influential studies either assume or actively present the history of print as part of a broader ‘secularization thesis’. Recently, however, historians have challenged these narratives, recognizing the central role of religious print as a driver of growth within the book trade and discussion within the nascent ‘public sphere’. Yet the scholarship into ‘religion and the book’ remains fragmentary, focused on individual genres or persons, with no unified monograph or standard reference work yet to emerge. This dissertation addresses some of the barriers to synopsis by investigating the long-term print output of the largest social and professional group engaged in evangelizing Christianity to the public: the clergy of the Church of England. By focusing on the clergy, this dissertation evades the usual narrow focus on genre. In the past, book-historical and bibliographic studies have relied heavily on a priori classification schemes to study the market for print. While sufficient in the context of relatively well-defined genre categories, such as printed sermons, the validity of these classification schemes breaks down at the wider level, for example, under the conceptual burden of defining the highly fluid and wide-ranging category of ‘religious works’. This dissertation begins to remedy such problems by modelling the print output of a large population of authors who had the strongest stake in evangelizing Christianity to the public through print. It utilizes the latest techniques in the field of digital humanities and bibliometrics to create a representative sample of the print output of the Anglican clergy over the ‘long’ eighteenth-century (here 1660-1800). Based on statistical trends, the thesis identifies a crucial period in the history of clerical print culture, the first four decades of the Hanoverian regime. The period is explored in detail through three subsequent case studies. By combining both traditional and digital methods, therefore, the dissertation explores clerical publishing as a phenomenon subject to evolution and change at both the macro and micro level. The first chapter provides an overarching statistical study of clerical publishing between 1660 and 1800. By combining data from two bibliographical datasets, The English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC), and the prosopographical resource, The Clergy of the Church of England Database (CCED), I extract and analyse a dataset of clerical works consisting of almost 35,000 bibliographic records. The remaining chapters approach the thesis topic through primary research-based case studies using both print and manuscript sources. The case studies were selected from the period identified in the preceding statistical analysis as a crucial transitional moment in the history of clerical publishing culture, c.1714 to 1750. These case studies form chapters 2, 3, and 4, each of which explore a different aspect of a network of authors who worked under the direction of the bishop of London, Edmund Gibson (1723-1748), during the era of Whig hegemony under Sir Robert Walpole. Finally, an appendix outlines the methodology used in chapter 1 to extract the sample of clerical printed works from the ESTC. Overall, the thesis demonstrates the profound influence of the clergy on the development of English print in the hand-press period. It thus forms both a historiographic intervention against the secularization thesis still implicit in discussions of print culture and the book trade, as well as providing a cautionary critique of the revisionism which has shaped recent investigations into the Church of England.

Prenant appui sur un ensemble d'entretiens auprès des protagonistes, la base de données des émissions de titres publics du Bureau National de Crédit Public et un large corpus d'articles de presse, cette recherche analyse la relation entre ressources économiques et pouvoir politique en étudiant l'impact de l'intégration semi-périphérique au système financier mondial sur la coalition sociopolitique au pouvoir en Argentine de 1989 à 2001. Cette coalition était composée des partis politiques au gouvernement, ce qui garantissait la légitimité démocratique, des technocrates des think tanks du libéralisme économique, des grandes entreprises locales et des acteurs privés du système financier mondial. Contrairement aux pays centraux qui sont au coeur du système financier mondial et les périphériques, qui en sont exclus, l'Argentine représente un cas d'intégration "semipériphérique", c'est-à-dire, avec un accès variable au crédit privé externe en fonction de la perception des principaux acteurs privés du système financier sur le risque de défaut des paiements de la dette. Cette intégration a joué un rôle important sur la formation, la consolidation et la dissolution de la coalition socio-politique au pouvoir. D'une part, le plan de Convertibilité implique une dépendance structurelle de l'afflux de devises pourassurer la stabilité économique. D'autre part, les caractéristiques de l'intégration du système financier mondial ont été modifiées par le plan Brady, qui implique une substitution de la dette publique de prêt bancaire par des titres, et le processus de mondialisation. Contrairement aux prêts bancaires, les titres sont des produits échangés sur un marché où les prêteurs prennent des décisions d'investissement de court terme en fonction de leur perception du risque de défaut de paiement de la dette. Cette perception, qui implique une surveillance permanente sur la politique économique, détermine la capacité de l'État à s'endetter et soutenir ainsi l'afflux de devises.

Defence date: 28 July 2006
Examining board: Prof. Friedrich Kratochwil, European University Institute (Supervisor) ; Prof. Jaap Dronkers, European University Institute ; Prof. Jens Bartelson, University of Copenhagen ; Prof. Richard Little, University of Bristol
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 2017
The way the sovereign state is taken for granted in political theory prevents an explanation of historical and contemporary organizations and phenomena different from this ideal type. Peter Haldén bypasses the state and the problems it causes by constructing an understanding of politics and a research model based on classical and early modern republican political theory. This enables historical analysis without anachronism and a new interpretation of the European Union. By comparing the EU with the Holy Roman Empire (1648-1763) and the antebellum United States (1776-1865), he explains that the EU's international weakness is a result of its strength as a security system that stabilizes Europe. The author argues that continued American support and embedding in NATO is necessary in order for the EU to act on the world stage and to stabilize Europe in the long run. Through these theoretical innovations, he explores alternatives to state-building in the Third World.

Defence date: 14 July 2017
Examining Board: Prof Federico Romero, European University Institute (Supervisor); Prof Pavel Kolář, European University Institute; Prof Josip Glaurdić, University of Luxembourg; Prof Tvrtko Jakovina, University of Zagreb
This thesis examines the origins and evolution of Yugoslav policy towards Western European integration from the early 1950s until the signing of the first Yugoslav–EEC Trade Agreement in 1970. It examines the emerging role of Western Europe in the Yugoslav foreign and internal politics within the larger context of the Cold War and development of European integration. Increased trade relations with the EEC and the domestic introduction of the 1965 Economic Reform proved vital in persuading Belgrade to become the first socialist country to establish diplomatic and trade relations with the Community in 1968. The thesis argues that these relations became of increasing relevance to the economic and, ultimately, political stability of Yugoslavia. Besides the basic foreign (trade) policy concepts towards the EEC, this study focuses on the perceptions of the Western European integration process among the political elite by addressing the following research questions: How did Yugoslav policymakers react to the Western European integration process? What impact did the success of the EEC have on Yugoslav foreign policy and internal differences among the political elite? In what way did the League of Communists of Yugoslavia rationalize their cooperation with the EEC? What did it mean for the internal coherence of the LCY and for Yugoslavia’s pronounced cooperation with the developing countries? The overarching question is how and why already in the 1960s the EEC became such an important external factor, crucial for the economic development and stability of Yugoslavia. By analysing the complex interaction between the external factors and internal dynamics of Yugoslavia and their impact on Belgrade´s policy towards the EEC, this study provides an explanation of the underlying long-term structural problems of the economy that determined the Yugoslav diplomatic and economic responses to the creation and evolution of the EEC until the breakup of the country.
Chapter ‘Conclusion' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as an article 'A troubled relationship : Yugoslavia and the European economic community in détente' (2014) in the journal ‘European review of history’