2012 Issue №1(11)

This article is dedicated to the problems of deployment of the US anti-missile defence system in Eastern Europe. The European system of US missile defence is just one of the components of global US missile defence. This work aims to analyze possible Russia’s responses within military and political spheres. The measures proposed are divided into three subgroups: soft, medium and hard depending on the implementation of the adopted missile defence concept by the USA. This research employs the structure-system method and the method of actualization. The authors outline both positive and negative consequences of such actions for the Russian Federation, the USA, eastern European countries and the neighbouring countries, including the Baltic Sea states. The practical significance of this study consists in the proposed and justified responses of the Russian Federation that may serve as a basis for the scenarios of development of international situation and help to forecast the level of tension in Russia-US relations.

The creation of an area of freedom, security and justice is one of the most rapidly developing aspects of European integration. It this paper, we take a look at the foreign policies involved in this process — aside from the internal development of the European Union, they concern a significant number of third countries, including Russia. In our view, the efforts to manage the flow of migrants and asylum seekers constitute a viable part of the external dimension within the AFSJ policies. Much of this article is based on the theoretical postulates introduced by the scholars of the Paris School, a school within the discipline of security studies that conceptualized the connection between migration, terrorism, asylum, crime and ethnic clashes, and its role as a major threat facing the European Union. Externalization of this complex threat (that is, externalization in relation to the European Union) is thus seen as one of the key prerequisites to advancement of migration management activities beyond the EU (i. e. externalization of migration management). In this article, we analyze the role the EU plays at the international scene and categorize the actions it took to manage the influx of migrants and asylum seekers from the 1980s until the time when supranational administrative bodies were granted mandates in the spheres of Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) of the EU Member States. We conclude that it was as early as the 1990-s that the EU launched the policy which later allowed to transfer part of its security concerns to third countries.

In this paper, we look at the interregional cooperation in adjacent areas. Specifically, we focus our attention on the cluster of regions formed by the city of St. Petersburg, the Leningrad region and the Republic of Karelia. All three areas face a number of challenges when it comes to international trade: challenges that are shared and that require strategic coordinated solutions from regional decisionmakers. One of such solutions, for example, could require pooling of competitive advantages of these areas. The analysis of strategic documents of regional development, however, shows that the issue of interregional cooperation has not been duly addressed at any level, theoretical or practical. It is important to strengthen international trade capacity and to increase cooperation in other areas of cross-border relations, since these processes are crucial for Russia’s integration into the global markets.