Romania’s strategic initiatives in the Black Sea area: from subregionalism to peripheral regionalism

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe article brings under scrutiny Romania’s strategic initiatives in the Black Sea area. Theoretically, our article rests on neoclassical realism which highlights the importance of subsystemic factors for states that seek to make strategic adjustments in a strained security environment. In our view, strategic expertise, or lack thereof, is another subsystemic factor, along with strategic culture and the political calculus of different leaders, that accounts for the emergence of misperceptions of a given security milieu. In the case of Romania, lack of strategic expertise has led to misjudgements of the security environment in the Black Sea area which have caused tactical errors, such as the systematic promotion of a high politics security agenda. Thus, the failure of Romania’s strategic initiatives in the Black Sea region are not only the systemic factors but also the subsystemic lack of strategic expertise, which reveals a deficit of state capacity. By annihilating the low level of agency that small states can actualize in a tense security environment, the lack of strategic expertise spawns peripheral regionalism, which is a failed subregionalism that occurs under specific security circumstances.