International Reintegration of the Former Soviet and East European Countries

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As a result of the change of political system, the former Soviet and East European countries have been set free from constraints of the international system of the Cold War era. What kind of new international order is emerging, and how the former Soviet and East European countries are being reintegrated into it? This is the question which the present research project asks. The project is headed by Takayuki Ito, Waseda University, and supported by an international team of twenty one scholars, inluding two Russians, two Poles, a Korean, a Chinese, a German and an American. It started in April 1992 with a generous grant of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Science and Culture and came to a close in March 1994. During the three years it conducted a lot of investigations in former Soviet and East European countries and invited foreign scholars to workshops and symposiums held in Sapporo. There are many insights gained from the project. For instance, there is no unilateral process : the in … More tegration process is progressing side by side with the disintegration process. There is much talk of reintegartion of the CIS countries, but one cannot overlook the on-going disintegration of the former Soviet Union into more or less independent international actors. Second, the international process is deeply intertwined with the domestic process. There can happen a volte-face change in the foreign policy orientation of a country, as this depends on a very volatile political situation in the country. Third, the domestic process should be understood as composed of many strata, not only political and economic, but also sociological and cultural. It seems that there is emerging a new European World Order with the core area in Western Europe and the periphery in outlying countries of the European continent. The former Soviet and East European countries are facing the choice : either joining this Order or rejecting it and creating an Order for themselves. Some of the results of the project have been published or are currently in the process of publication : Takayuki Ito & Shinichiro Tabata, eds., Between Disintegration and Reintegration. Former Socialist Countries and the World since 1989, Sapporo : Slavic Research Center, 1994, pp. 444 (in English) ; Takayuki Ito et al., eds., International Relations of the Slavic Area, Tokyo : Kobundo Publishers, forthcoming in April 1995 (in Japanese). Less