Editorial

Abstract

American power and influence have been expanding in every zone formerly under the control of the Soviet Union. This has not been a royal road, smooth and free of risk. For instance, as Suzzette R. Grillot (with Dessie Apostolova) argue, Bulgaria, which is about to enter NATO, had ‘throughout the 1990s provided 15 million dollars worth of light artillery guns to Iraq, using Polish intermediaries and forging end-user certificates’. This kind of ‘back-stage’ deal is as much interesting as it is important. Former Soviet satellites do not tend to surrender overnight their national interests to American wishes. Grillot and Apostolova have produced a very scholarly article. The other themes explored in the issue are as much relevant. Paul Dragos Aligica looks at the ways in which the integration of the Balkan region into global markets can be achieved. Aligica makes clear that the peculiar ‘dualism’ of the region has to be taken seriously into account by policy-makers in order to achieve a fully-fledged integration of the Balkans into world and European markets without major tensions and aftershocks. Keith Brown and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos make out a different case: they criticize some Balkan narratives by which the role of external forces in the region has been analysed and understood. The Republic of Cyprus, together with Malta and other East-Central European countries, will be joining the European Union next spring. But a solution to the island’s de facto division since 1974 is still pending, as the leader of the Turkish-Cypriot community, Rauf Rauf Denktash, turned down the Anan Plan, a scheme that was providing for the re-unification of the island along federal lines. We know enough on EU-Cyprus relations and some of its complicated aspects, but we know very little on how the Parliament of the Republic contributed to the road of Cyprus’s accession to the EU. We are delighted to publish a shorter version of Stavridis’s original work on the ‘international relations of the Cypriot Parliament’, which appeared as ‘The international role of the Cypriot Parliament and Cyprus’s accession to the EU’, in Vassilis K. Fouskas and Heinz A. Richter (eds), Cyprus and Europe: The Long Way Back (Bibliopolis, Mannheim, 2003). Christophe Solioz’s interview with Ambassador Wolfgang Petritsch is most interesting as, among other things, it touches upon the sensitive issue of ownership in a state such as that of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Petrisch is optimistic and he believes that the key to a peaceful future for Bosnia lies in a democratic framework which ‘strengthens state institutions, promotes economic reform and allows all refugees to go back to their homes’. Ilaria Favretto has worked on the reviews section, also editing two interesting review articles by Dia Anagnostou and Paco Romero. Anagnostou reviews two scholarly publications on minorities in Greece and the Balkans and historian Romero two important books on Spain.