It is often argued that the crucial democratic body of the European Union (EU) is the European parliament. Over time, the European parliament's role has increased from being a consultative body to one which has an institutionalised co‐decision authority in EU lawmaking. After the Lisbon treaty and the abolition of the Western European Union (WEU), the European parliament also has an increasingly important role as an intergovernmental European assembly. This article examines the British discussion about the country's commitment to parliamentary scrutiny, representation and supervision, in which the need for a genuine debate over representation within the EU is highlighted. British prime ministers have, in most cases, defined both the government's and parliament's stance on European integration either through their personal role, or through wide‐ranging discussions in their cabinets. However, in the 2000s, the Houses’ parliamentary committees have also influenced the shaping of the British position through their scrutiny of European policies. They were effective in the scrutiny of the Common Foreign and Defence Policy (CFDP), arguing that the government should keep parliament informed of discussions concerning the CFDP, and that the quality of the democratic process depended largely on the relationship between the British national parliament and the government. The parliamentary committees and the government both agreed that parliamentary scrutiny should not be left to the European parliament alone; the participation of national parliamentarians with specialist knowledge of the EU level was also seen as especially important.
Writing and researching Southern Europe as a symbiotic area has always presented a challenging task. Historians and political scientists such as Stanley Payne, Edward Malefakis, Giulio Sapelli, and Roberto Aliboni have studied the concept of Southern Europe and its difficult paths to modernity. They have been joined by sociologists and anthropologists who have debated the existence of a Southern European paradigm in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the arduous transformation of the region's welfare systems, economic development, education and family structures. These scholarly attempts to understand the specificities of Southern Europe date back to the concerns of Western European Cold War strategists in the 1970s, many of whom were worried about the status quo of the region in the aftermath of the fall of the dictatorships. But this geographical and geopolitical definition of the area did not necessarily follow existing cultural, political and economic patterns. Once the Eurozone crisis hit in the 2000s these questions came back with renewed force but with even less conceptual clarity, as journalists and pundits frequently gestured towards vague notions of what they considered to be ‘Southern Europe’.
This article contributes to the history of the Soviet Union and global naval history by comparing two examples of naval ports across the European and African continents: Tivat in Yugoslavia and Antsiranana in Madagascar. Comparison of the utilization and construction of these ports reveals how the Soviet network of naval ports did not display a singular rationale, but rather featured a global spider’s-web-like quality. The most marked quality of the Soviet Union's approach to naval construction was the use of nuclear carriers as a flexible tool of geographic and political aims. The goals of Soviet naval strategy were not static but mutated over the decades from the 1960s to the 1980s. In short, the policy was flexible, heavily armed and global. At each port, the Soviet Union and its navy developed a somewhat different relationship to the country and the two examples are in many ways unique; outliers but not peripheral. Their different constructions show the Soviet Union's approach to the Mediterranean as one seaway and the Indian Ocean as another, demonstrating flexibility in each theatre. Yugoslavia, its leadership and populace remained outside of the Soviet bloc for the entirety of the Soviet Union’s existence. Moscow’s attempt to include Yugoslavia in its naval network via Tivat represents a centuries-old geopolitical orientation towards the Balkan peninsula, but not successful socialist politics per se if we understand its goal to be domination over the socialist world. Madagascar on the other hand has a geographically vital position close to Africa and overlooks naval traffic both to the Red Sea as well as to the Gulf while standing at a safe distance to both continents. Moscow’s naval politics can give us an alternative view of the history of different socialisms practised in world politics in Europe and in Africa via maritime networks.
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