Friday, March 14, 2014
Sales Conference (Omni Shoreham)
The paper attempts to historically trace, contextualise and map the geopolitical structures of the Black Sea across one of the most metamorphic periods of socio-political transformation, primarily examining the processes through which geographic space acquires geopolitical significance. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the EU’s advancement towards the Caspian rim, new territorial polities caused great spatial restructurings and differentiation around the Black Sea area and influenced how various littoral actors perceive their role in the region. At a pragmatic level, the institutionalised forms of cooperation around the Black Sea do not overlap its complex geography or the differential interpretations of its geopolitical configuration. For instance, there was a great fluctuation in the EU’s territorial policies and geopolitical appraisal of the Black Sea: from the differentiated bilateral relations with littoral states conveying narrow cooperation agendas and limited to security concerns, to multilateral policies propounding complex forms of cooperation and a more solid basis for a Black Sea foreign-policy dimension. With the advancement of European enlargement, new forms of territoriality emerge, and regions thus become the spatial units defining territorial differentiation. Even if there are persistent efforts to transform this geographical area into a coherent political region, the multifarious attempts towards insitutionalisation remain quite ineffective. Therefore, employing the geopolitical theory of Margaret and Harald Sprout, with elements of cognitive behaviourism, we shall examine how certain recent historical evolutions affected the perception and representation of geographical space, and explore the relational patterns between certain coalitions of actors at a European level.
