We compare Russian nuclear energy diplomacy towards Finland and Hungary, where the Russian state corporation Rosatom intends to build nuclear power plants by the 2020s. Russian nuclear energy diplomacy features Rosatom working with other state institutions, its own subsidiaries and an extensive network of companies and R&D actors to support Russian nuclear power projects abroad. Using the structuration approach, we find three interests driving such diplomacy: energy business and associated profits; modernization of the Russian economy, including the diversification of its export structure; while foreign policy interests are also involved, considering the constraints emerging in EU-Russia energy diplomacy in the oil and gas sectors, including the sanctions since 2014. Some domestic actors in Finland and Hungary make the linkage between nuclear energy and foreign policy as explicit as do some western commentators. Seeking to pursue these interests, Russian actors must accommodate their considerable assets to the structural constraints they encounter in the target countries. We identify four structural dimensions The Russian actors are well endowed as regards the resources, technology, and infrastructure dimension; and the dimension of finance, business models, and markets. However, on the institutional dimension they face a less controllable environment. Regarding the ecological dimension, they must conform to local safety requirements. In both cases, Russian actors were able to strengthen perceptions of joint interests with actors in the target country facilitating the nuclear power plant projects, thereby paving the way for the use of soft power.
This article examines constitutions as a special effort of constructing long-lasting national memories. These images of the past become, with the assistance of the constitutions, canonised in the heart of the entire legal system that should be obeyed by each and every citizen. The conceptions of history represented by the Constitution are effectively spread by the government machinery and maintained unchanged for a relatively long time due to the solid character of constitutions. This study focuses on the characteristics of Eastern European constitutions and more specifically on the Hungarian Constitution's history-images and their relation to identity. The Hungarian Constitution is the most recent European case that has been brought into the limelight of the international media because of its questionable jurisdiction process that ran against the contemporary democratic values of legal thinking in the Western hemisphere. The present study draws on legal sources and debates of legal experts in the making and assessment of this legal document. In addition, the analysis also relies on public discourse related to the reception of the troubled legislation and its modification process.
This article focuses on the challenge of illiberalism to democracy, even though the nature of this contestation is ambiguous. The illiberal critique of liberal democracy is contextualised using conceptual history and two major 'political credit ratings', namely the Democracy Index and the Freedom in the World Report. Empirically we concentrate on Hungarian politics, which we consider to be an example of soft authoritarianism, drawing on two key speeches by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán: his launch of the idea of the 'illiberal state' in 2014 and his emphasis on 'Christian democracy' after the 2018 election campaign. DESPITE OPTIMISTIC PREDICTIONS AT THE END OF THE COLD WAR, the progress of democracy has demonstrably slowed. This growing disbelief in democracy has touched even the established Western democracies in the last decade (Plattner 2010, pp. 81, 83). Simultaneously, there has been a rather worrying trend, even in parts of Europe, of a 'rollback' of liberal democracy, that is, a discontent with the actual results of democratisation in relation to economic welfare. 1 More alarming is the point made by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in early 2018 that democracies still die, not at the hands of tanks and generals, but of elected governments themselves. Hungary and Poland are mentioned alongside Venezuela,
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