Abstract
The introductory chapter provides an overview of the book’s central theme: understanding foreign policy behavior in the context of an international actor’s struggle for recognition as part of an identity community. It discusses how this approach is relevant for understanding the relationship between Central and Eastern European countries and Western international institutions, especially the EU and NATO. The chapter introduces the key theoretical concepts: ontological security, stigmatization, and strategic culture, and briefly explains how they are connected. This chapter then emphasizes what is new about the approach presented in this book. It links strategic culture to the pursuit of ontological security. It briefly discusses the relevance of Poland as a case study and ends with an outline of the book’s chapters.
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Notes
- 1.
The first round of interviews was conducted in Kyiv, Ukraine, in the summer of 2014 with Polish diplomats, officials of the European External Action Service (EEAS), and EU member state diplomats. It also included Ukrainian politicians, journalists, and academics who had been present during the Maidan protests of 2013–2014. A number of interviews were gathered on shorter trips to Warsaw and Brussels between the spring of 2015 and the spring of 2016. These include, among others, interviews with Polish politicians and diplomats, Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), and officials of the EEAS and the European Commission. The final round of interviews was conducted in Tbilisi, Georgia, in the summer of 2015 with Polish diplomats, Georgian politicians (many of whom were members of the Georgian government in August 2008), and EU and NATO officials. The interviews primarily play a role in analyzing discourse and practice during the crisis diplomacy in the cases of Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2013/14) where I talked to observers who were present at the time. In the case of Georgia, the interviewed actors justified their actions retrospectively whereas in the case of Ukraine, they were relating their position as the events were unfolding. While any selection of interviews is incomplete and potentially selective, this triangulation of sources of discourse covers these gaps.
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Krasnodębska, M. (2021). Introduction. In: Politics of Stigmatization. Palgrave Studies in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51521-8_1
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