The making of the Visegrad initiative: Crises and survivals, dilemmas and prospects

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Fakültesi, Uluslararası İlişkiler Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2004

Öğrenci: SİNAN KUZUM

Danışman: MUSTAFA TÜRKEŞ

Özet:

This thesis aims to scrutinize the Visegrad Quadruple Initiative as a device of the Central European countries in the process of involving into the re-negotiations in Europe and in world politics. The thesis argues that the Visegrad group was built in order to respond the demands of changing Europe and Euro-Atlantic structures, and thus to overcome the double process of transition and integration. However that was not the only reason to launch the Visegrad regional cooperation. The group produced an affirmative discourse that its members are distinguished from the other countries in transition, so that they are constantly one step forward to ءreturn to Europe̕. In the aftermath of the eastern enlargements of NATO and the EU alike, the original mission of the group, integration with the West, was achieved. That created a profound discussion about the survival of the group. As it is argued in this thesis, the group, as a prosperous and substantial regional cooperation, should rather continue to work in order to have more words to say in the re-negotiations processes. Another argument of the thesis is that the Visegrad group, taking Benelux group as a model in its continuity, is beneficial to produce a common foreign policy tendency among its members as long as the interests of its members are overlapping, otherwise the group is just being a political platform in which its members can share their views in such areas as regional regulations.