Introduction: Reconstituting Political Order in Europe, West and East

Abstract

This article offers a reappraisal of some of the distinctive features and implications of the supranational civil legal order which now encompasses over 500 million Europeans, or about two-thirds of Europe's inhabitants, depending on how Europe is delimited. This order offers unprecedented degrees of security, stability, certainty and calculability and maximum scope and incentives for the peaceful and profitable coexistence of a great multiplicity of peoples with widely differing cultures, values and belief-systems, while minimizing the scope for mutual impairment, friction and violent conflict. The European Union's unprecedented and unique supranational legal order is the bedrock of this rule-governed order. Even though it is not in itself democratic, it nevertheless enhances the resilience and efficacy of liberal democracy at the state and sub-state levels and provides strong support for relatively liberal forms of capitalism and civil society. This continually evolving order is unique and without precedent, and yet it does not involve the acting out or unfolding of a preordained plan, teleology or script. It is having a transformative impact on East Central European, Baltic and Balkan post-Communist states and their positions within the wider European order. This is still dominated by the strongest West European states, but the position of smaller and poorer states is nevertheless much stronger and more secure than in any previous European order. This Introduction also contextualizes the wide-ranging contributions to this special issue. The contributors are united by shared perceptions of the fluidity, indeterminacy, ambiguities and open-endedness of the emerging civil order in Europe and its impact on the reconfiguration of East–West relationships within Europe. The resultant metamorphoses in the European states system, democracy, governance and East–West relations are also central concerns.

Key Words:

• Civil order
• rules of conduct
• vertical versus horizontal power relations
• European Union
• Russia
• Commonwealth of Independent States

Acknowledgement

This special issue grew out of a one-day workshop which was hosted and funded by the Department of Politics and International Relations at Swansea University on 1 May 2008, under the auspices of the department's ‘Macro-Political Change and Comparative Territorial Governance’ research cluster. The editors wish to express their thanks to the department for funding this workshop and to the colleagues who made stimulating contributions to the workshop discussions as well as to the contributors to this special issue, who responded very willingly and efficiently to our requests and suggestions.