Xenophon Paper 2 pdf - ICBSS

CONCLUSIONS: BALANCING NATIONAL
INTERESTS
Panagiota Manoli
Regional cooperation as a concept and policy option has been popular in the current
international relations debates following its rebirth at the policy level worldwide.
No region in the world is identical. The particular features of each region shape different
forms of regionalism. The case of the Black Sea as a region is relatively new in terms
of policy-making and research. As the wider Black Sea region slowly takes shape
transformed into an international actor and attracts more attention by the international
community, it becomes important to identify the agenda of the regional actors that drive
multilateral cooperation.
Not only for the international community but also for the majority of the Black Sea states
devising a regional Black Sea policy has been a new undertaking with the exception in
some respect of Turkey and Russia, the two powers that have alternatively dominated
the area throughout the centuries. During the Cold War period, all littoral states (with
the exception of Turkey) had been part of the communist bloc, while Greece and Turkey
belonged to the western group. The Black Sea was thus not in unity. In the post Cold
War period, the newly emerged states tried to place themselves in the evolving new
European architecture and re-discovered their Black Sea identity.
Casting light on national preferences is important since in the case of the Black Sea regional
cooperation has been an indigenous process being driven exclusively by the local state
players. Evidence however shows that despite much rhetoric for multilateralism regional
states have not supported it on the ground. The reasons behind that, should not be
simply attributed to the ‘unwillingness’ of the states to cooperate but to a larger extent
to the lack of resources and experience along with the fact that the geopolitical and
economic environment in which Black Sea regionalism has been embedded was not
conducive.
Expectations of the member states in joining the BSEC have not remained the same
throughout time, though fifteen years in the life of an organisation is not a long period.
For all newly independent countries adhesion to the BSEC in June 1992 was one of the
first acts as independent international actors, a means of securing much needed
international recognition of their statehood. With the exception of Turkey that conceived
the BSEC as a tool of foreign economic policy, neither Russia, nor Greece seemed to
have a grand strategy for the BSEC at that time.
X E N O P H O N P A P E R no 2 157