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Punching Above the Weight: the Baltic States' Energy Security Policy
Pinchuk, Anastasiia ; Pożarlik, Grzegorz (vedoucí práce) ; David, Maxine (oponent)
The topic of the thesis and the research problem are highly relevant for the EU as a whole. Energy security remains one of the main challenges of the EU, and it was identified as "one of Europe's main external vulnerabilities" in the Union's Global Strategy of 2016. As it was mentioned above, 6 the issue has strong regional characteristics within the EU, that is to say, heavy dependence on Russian fossil fuels is more sensitive for some EU member states than others: more precisely, those that are in a relative proximity to the Russian borders, namely, Central and Eastern European states, Finland, and the Baltic States, as they have few or virtually no alternatives to the Russian gas due to their lesser energy integration with the rest of the EU. Their position is aggravated by the fact that the Kremlin "systematically uses its dominant position in the energy field vis-a-vis its ex-Soviet allies in order to exploit their high vulnerability and serve wider foreign policy goals" . In light of 7 this, it is particularly interesting to examine how the Baltic states, usually identified in the literature as typical small states, have enhanced their energy security by looking into their steps on various levels to raise awareness in the EU and shape the Union's policy-making. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)
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Civil Society Organisations as Agents of Europeanisation in Armenia
Gevorgyan, Gayane ; RODÓN, TONI (vedoucí práce) ; Pożarlik, Grzegorz (oponent)
The accelerated expansion of democracy in the 1990s, turn the Western countries into the main democracy promoters worldwide. Existing literature identifies several dimensions or policies of democracy promotion in the post-Cold War period, as well as two distinctive agents for it: the state and the civil society. It is widely argued that the EU became involved in the promotion of democratization and Europeanization in its Neighbourhood by providing democratic assistance to the governments of the target countries and then gradually turned towards the civil society sector. It is believed that the ''bottom-up'' approach of Europeanization and democratization might have opened new avenues for EU's engagement with wider society in these countries and have subtly accelerated the process of democratization there. On the example of Armenia, the study at hand aims to verify this claim and assess the effectiveness of EU-promoted policies in the country from a new perspective, particularly by considering, first, whether EU-funded local NGOs might have contributed to the democratic transformation happened in Armenia in 2018, and, secondly, by looking into the way people change their attitudes towards the EU after interaction with these NGOs. After having conducted a survey with participants of an EU-funded project in...
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