Popular narratives on Russia's geopolitical interests in the Balkans point to two rather divergent directions. Facts on the ground, however, do not support either.

From the Editor

The President and the Government of Ukraine are preparing to host a summit of heads of state and government, aiming to mobilize a more effective international response to Russia’s seizure of Crimea from Ukraine.

With a new US presidency, an increasingly assertive Saudi crown prince, unprecedented Arab-Israeli peace agreements, and a particularly complex Saudi-Iran dynamic, British author Christopher Davidson shares his views on the current and future state of Middle East politics in the interview offered to Geostrategic Pulse magazine.

There are plenty of lessons to be learned from the ongoing COVID-19 crisis and the heavy financial burden it is likely to put on all EU Member States, but one stands out: European defence cooperation in general, and collaborative capability development in particular, are now more indispensable and urgent than ever before.

The Dayton Peace Accords is commonly perceived as an American political project. The partition of Bosnia is interpreted as a concept that emerged for the first time during the negotiations in Dayton, and its authorship is ascribed to the American negotiator, Richard Holbrooke. However, the history of Bosnia's partition clearly demonstrates that this concept has persistently been promoted by the European Community, and then by the European Union, from the Lisbon Conference to the present day.

The year 1918 was for the Romanians a year of major political activities. At that time the Romanians lived in three different countries – the Kingdom of Romania, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire, the classical example of a divided nation. The young Romanian state, that had witnessed the union between Moldavia and Wallachia, when Alexandru Ioan Cuza was elected the ruler of the two, proved it had intellectuals capable of taking political actions in the interest of their country. Placed on the banks of the Danube River, Romania came to be as a state also due to the fact that the Europeans developed an interest in the Danube and the Black Sea, and it could guarantee free passage at the River’s mouth – as stipulated by the Treaty of Paris, in 1856, following the Crimean War (1853-1856).

Professor Dr. Zlatko Hadžidedić - the founder and director of the Center for Nationalism Studies in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina - shared from his insight on nationalism as an ideology and its implementation in the Balkans, in the interview below.

Faced with new challenge represented by the need to manage the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and the growing pressure of the Eurosceptic populist movements, the European Union was forced to provide both an immediate response, which could reflect the ability of the Member States to act according to the principle of solidarity and a medium term solution as part of the Multiannual Financial Framework for the years 2021 to 2027, a solution reflecting the vision of the 27 member states on the future of the European construct.

The present synthesis highlights a number of new features of the international relations system and reveals restrictive measures taken by both developed and developing/emerging countries in the field of foreign direct investment , before the COVID-19 pandemic and also under its influence.