In this article, we discuss the correlation between structural change in the world economy and Russian strategy. The transition to market economy in former socialist countries was the process joining the neo-liberalistic world economy. The liberalization of cross-border capital flow accelerated the expansion of capital markets and outsourcing. It stimulated the economic growth in China and other East Asian countries. Russia also enjoyed its benefits increasing oil price. It has caused a power shift from Europe and United States to Asia.

But the failure of “circulation of growth”—the financial capitalism driven by USA and EU, the export-led quantitative growth in China, and the growth in Russia depended on natural resources—was revealed after the global economic crisis in 2009.

According to the Constellation theory, the Ukraine crisis reflects an unstable hegemonic core of the world economy. In the EU financial institutions were relieved, but the burden is imposed on citizens by the reduced budget. It caused social deficits and anti-EU movements. At the same time, because of developing division of labor between East Asian countries, the East Asia economy is stepping into the way of self-sustained growth.

The competition for hegemony of the world economy is intensified by mega-regions. A Eurasian Union alone could not be a very serious challenge to the hegemonic core. However, Russia’s Pivot to the East will strengthen its economic relations with East Asian countries, and might contribute to development of “counterpoints” with the capitalism model different from the neo-liberal one.

The world energy market is undergoing a structural change through liberalization, development of renewables, and change of demands from Europe to Asia. Russia, depending on resources, must adapt to changes in the energy market and modernize its economic structure. The eastwards shift of Russia may be a wise choice. Its strategy is an adaptation to the structural change in the world economy, even if it costs enormous money to develop Far East regions in Russia. Closer relations between Russia and Asian countries will secure the energy supply in Asia and support their development. The power shift from the West to the East will be accelerated. From the long-term viewpoints, Russian joining the division of labor in Asia could be a chance of modernizing Russian industry.

At the same time, for Russia, being afraid of excessive dependence on China, the cooperation with Japan is more important than ever.

This paper examined trends in subjective well-being and political situations in Russia, paying special attention to the period of economic stagnation since the introduction of economic sanction after Crimean incidence.

It may be unclear whether or not the approval rate of current political bodies in Russia is stable in the long run. Deterioration in macroeconomic situations, however, did not play a critical role in the worsening of political circumstances. Additionally, the decline in economic activity related to sluggish oil prices and economic sanctions seemed to have bottomed out, therefore it is unlikely that the economic or political situations would deteriorate sharply in the short term. In this sense, the years of 2014–2016 may have shown the stability of the political system in Russia.

This article revisits the beginning of Putin’s third term, which was characterized by the rise of opposition. Here the opposition means “non-systemic opposition,” who placed itself decisive opposition to the regime. One of the most prominent opposition activist was Alexei Navalny. Following the 2011 Duma election, the opposition gained power with the activation of post-election protest movements “For Fair Elections.” Since the protest movements soon declined, many researchers focused more on the regime’s coercive measures towards the opposition. However, it is no less important to ask why the opposition gained power and remained active for a while. This article explores the reason behind the rise of opposition, and reveals how the regime reacted to the opposition’s activities. In answering these questions, this article focuses on the regime’s effort to defend its legitimacy from the opposition’s attacks.

The article first explores why the opposition gained power. The answer can be found in the opposition’s active commitment to the politicization of regime legitimacy. Such topics include electoral integrity, distribution of power, corruption and others. The early example of the opposition’s commitment to the legitimacy issue was their initiatives in anti-corruption campaigns. Corruption issue became a trigger for the opposition’s further attack on the regime legitimacy. In addition, it should not be ignored that the opposition’s attack on the regime legitimacy well suited to a populist discourse. The opposition emphasized how the regime contradicts the interests of ordinary people, for example, by committing electoral fraud, contradicting the “rule of law,” or committing illegal enrichment. The regime had difficulty in refuting the opposition’s criticism.

Second, the article traces how the regime reacted to the opposition’s attacks. At first, the regime tried to discredit the opposition by mobilizing anti-western rhetoric and strengthening the patriotic mobilization. But the regime’s attempts had limited impact in discrediting the opposition. Then the regime tried to narrow the room for opposition activities by forestalling the opposition’s agenda. The regime actively participated in the anti-corruption campaigns, such as banning the high-ranking officials from possessing bank account abroad, and limiting the maximum amount of money for purchase of cars by officials. The regime’s active commitment to anti-corruption initiative narrowed the room for opposition activities.

The analysis on the “era of opposition” reveals the importance of discourse-level struggle over the regime legitimacy. Despite its significant disadvantage against the incumbent elites, the opposition could attack the regime by mobilizing the legitimacy issue. In order to avoid the opposition’s attacks, the regime could adopt limited measures: after a series of attempts, the regime took over the opposition’s agenda and itself began to commit to the legitimacy issue. The experience of Putin’s third term provides us with a useful perspective in predicting the future of Russian politics: once the opposition succeeds in mobilizing the legitimacy issue, it will not be easy for the regime to tackle the opposition’s attacks.

On February 19, 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed that it would be worth considering “unified Russian history textbooks” that show “respect to all pages of our past.” This announcement has been interpreted as patriotic propaganda or an attempt at re-writing the past to justify authoritarianism in the present. To be sure, we cannot overlook the clear intensification of patriotism under the Putin regime. Also, we cannot deny that Russian citizens’ protests against election fraud during 2011–12 led to Putin’s countermeasures, such as the creation of quasi-social historical organizations, advocacy for unified textbooks, and so on. These measures are clear examples of Putin’s historical politics, by which he means to use history arbitrarily for political purposes.

However, it is quite misleading to say that Putin has successfully ordered the history textbooks rewritten to strengthen his own rule. In fact, we see three types of undercurrent concerning the policy on unified history textbooks. First, a group of young politicians with patriotic views advocated the unification of textbooks in response to neighboring countries’ historical politics. Cultural Minister Vladimir Medinsky is a typical example of this group. Second, academic historians such as Aleksandr Chubaryan, director of the Institute of World History, sought to build a basic consensus on historical outlook among historians and people within Russia. Third, there were some liberal groups who opposed any kind of forced textbook unification by the government.

Putin monitored these undercurrents, adapting his historical politics as necessary, and avoided dire conflicts between the government and any of these groups. In the end, the “historical-cultural standard” was created, which every textbook must follow. The standard, however, is very general and loose. Therefore, two history textbooks with somewhat different viewpoints were authorized by the education ministry.

One characteristic of Putin’s method of governance is the adoption of halfway solutions to disputed issues. They often fail to solve conflicts between groups, and sometimes even preserve them. In this sense, conflicts over historical politics, including those regarding history textbooks, will continue in the future.

The Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH) was constructed as a Nazi-puppet state, which spanned across a large part of what is now Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, after the occupation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in April 1941. Because of its close relationship to the Nazi Party, Ustasha—a notorious Croatian political organization—attained power over NDH. Core members of the group emulated the fascist movements during WWI and WWII in Europe and forged ahead with a similar totalitarian policy in NDH, revising previous systems of governance.

The highest aim of these reforms was the achievement of national unity, implanting the ‘Ustasha spirit’ throughout the nation. Considering the nationalistic character of the Ustasha movement, it seems reasonable to suppose that ideological discourses on nationalization were consistent inside the regime. However, previous studies have argued that the relationship between Ustasha and Tias Mortigjija—the chief editor of the major weekly newspaper Spremnost from May 1943 to the end of 1944—became tense due to disagreements regarding the editorial policy. Considering the variable nature of Croatian nationalism at that time, which was caused by increasing communist resistance and tangled relations with the Axis powers, the specific course of action of nationalization under the NDH regime must be investigated.

This article analyses how Spremnost carried on propaganda work about Croatian nationalism during the period when Mortigjija was the chief director. Regarding the ideology of the Ustasha movement, it must be noticed that the leadership coped with the mobilization of the youth from the outset of NDH, training them as ‘elites’ who would conduct state affairs in the future. Ustasha thus implemented various educational policy measures to establish elitism in the mind of the younger generation (founding the Ustasha Youth, ‘purifying’ the school and the university and so on). As a result of this fascistic attempt, Zagreb University students were encouraged to develop their own political consciousness and became radicalized to adopt a resolution in April 1944 that asserted their loyalty to the Ustasha movement. Despite the discordance with the regime, Mortigjija seemed to sympathize with the appearance of the ‘elite’. The propaganda of Spremnost thus began to feature content associated with the Zagreb University students’ resolution and the student journal Plug, which was published in 1944.

Initially, Ustasha defined the image of the Croatian state as one that belonged to the ‘West’, including it in the cultural circle of Europe, and one that had a vital role as a bulwark against the ‘East’. However, through the political rhetoric of Spremnost and Plug, this image was transformed, arguing that the Croatian state was a guardian of the Balkan States and emphasizing the cultural legacy of the ‘West’. On the other hand, the image of Croats was modified to reflect changing religious policies. The leadership reinterpreted Orthodoxy as a traditional faith in Croatia and instituted the Croatian Orthodox Church in June 1942 to assimilate Serbs to NDH.

Following this ‘political tolerance’, an article of Spremnost advocated that Croats must possess three types of faith: Catholic, Islam and Orthodoxy. Moreover, it was highlighted and reiterated that the integrated nationalism of Croats was a Balkan-oriented one. In conclusion, the ideological discourse on nationalization in NDH was obviously altered to include religious pluralism during WWII in response to the international environment and to internal conflicts. ‘Balkan’ thus became a symbol of the nation.

Are there any experts who successfully predicted how the Ukrainian crisis would unfold after the Euromaidan revolution? On the one hand, the “Russian spring” project obviously failed: Vladimir Putin’s call for consolidating “Novorussia” did not catch the hearts of people beyond the limited part of Donbass. For example, after the launch of anti-terrorist operations in spring 2014, even such a Russified eastern city as Dnipropetrovsk turned blue-and-yellow, full with volunteer citizens supporting the government forces, thereby exhibiting the rise of Ukrainian patriotism. However, that was not the end of the story. During the national parliament elections in October, 2014 in the same Dnipropetrovsk Oblast the Opposition Bloc consisting of former Party-of-Regions members that did not endorse the Euromaidan surpassed the president’s party, Petro Poroshenko Bloc. Other eastern regions such as Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia mirrored Dnipropetrovsk in their electoral behavior. These snapshot observations speak for themselves: the social and political dynamics in Ukraine is much more complicated than is routinely described with the popular “east-west divide” discourse.

Quantitative research on the mass attitudes in Ukraine often opts for versatile “regions” to explain the social and political cleavages. Most of them, however, treat regions as proxy for historical and cultural attributes common to localities, ignoring the heterogeneous distribution of personal historical memories in a given geographical space. This study tests the explanatory power of individual acceptance of national history in shaping the attitudes toward the Euromaidan, utilizing ordered logit model on nationwide survey data collected from December 2014 to January 2015.

The author ran principal component analysis on the responses to the seven major historical events in Ukraine, and identified anti-Ukraine historical component, which denies the Ukrainian Insurgent Army as well as the collapse of the USSR and the country’s independence. In the ordered logit estimation with these principal component scores, the effect of the regional factor was mediated by historical memory in all eastern regions including Donbass, Sloboda, Lower Dniepr and Black Sea. However, explanatory power of the regional variable persists in Podolia and Left bank. This finding suggests the further need for studying interaction terms between historical memory and regions.

Furthermore, two-stage least square estimation with instrumental variable was conducted to verify the effect of historical memory on the attitudes to the Euromaidan, which rejected the above hypothesis at a five-percent significance level. This implies that causal arrows run reciprocally between these two variables.

The analysis also discovered the carriers of ambivalent “hybrid” memory, who miss the Soviet Union but welcome the independence simultaneously. These findings provide valuable insights into the amorphous nature of the eastern regions that embrace multilayered historical memories, and highlight key challenges for post-Maidan national (re)integration.

The Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) was established in 2015 and so far consists of five nations (Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan). One cannot deny that the EAEU has several defects such as too much dominance of Russia among the member states, an imbalanced network of intra-EAEU trade, relatively low importance of intra-EAEU trade for the member states, tendency to postpone market integration of crucial sectors like oil & gas and differences of import tariffs as a result of Kazakhstan’s accession to the WTO.

We should, however, evaluate true merits of the EAEU for Russia in the context of its actual political and economic developments, not of the classic economic integration theory. It is noteworthy that the concept of the EAEU was proposed by Vladimir Putin on the eve of 2012 Presidential elections of Russia. Meanwhile Putin, who put ‘modernization’ of Russia on the top of the agenda, pursued innovation and new industrialization of Russian economy. Putin argued that so as to achieve these goals Russia should improve investment climate and enhance investment merits and that the creation of the EAEU was one of the efforts in that direction.

Russian automotive industry is an important touchstone in this regard. Manufacturers of passenger cars in Russia used to concentrate on Russian domestic market, paying almost no attention to foreign markets because of high production costs within Russia. The creation of the Customs Union, a predecessor of the EAEU, however, lead to a unification of import tariff on passenger cars among Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, resulting in a rapid expansion of Russia’s new cars exports to the two partner countries, which used to be occupied by used cars. Thus, the EAEU plays a positive role in developing Russian automotive industry, a pivotal sector for new industrialization of Russian economy.

It is true that the markets of Belarus and Kazakhstan are not sizable enough for Russian manufactures to secure profitability. Still the EAEU could be instrumental in converting some industrial sectors of Russia more export-oriented and in this sense could contribute to modernization of Russia to a certain extent.

This paper studies the significance of Rosa Luxemburg’s famous words “Freedom for people who think differently” in her manuscript “The Russian Revolution” (1918) as a background of the event of January 17, 1988 in East Berlin.

On 17 January 1988, a group tried to join the “fighting demonstration in honor of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg” in East Berlin with their own banners. The banners carried Rosa Luxemburg’s words: “Freedom is always the freedom for people who think differently” etc. quoted from her manuscript.

The MfS (East German security forces, so-called “Stasi”) arrested more than 100 people on the day. The Stasi named this operation “Troublemakers”. Hundreds, or thousands of people protested against this operation in churches every night. Western media reported the event every day. East German authorities showed some mysterious actions for the control of the event.

As for the initiator of the event there have been often misunderstandings since then. There has been a controversy also on the manuscript for a long time.

The president of the East German PEN Club H. Kamnitzer (he was also an IM (spy) of the Stasi) contributed an article to the party organ “Neues Deutschland” of January 28, 1988. He emphasized that the group had taken the quotation out of context for their banners and that Rosa Luxemburg canceled these words right before her death (January 15, 1919). This idea is a rehash.

For the first time Clara Zetkin’s book (1922) affirmed that Rosa Luxemburg canceled the contents of the manuscript. During the same period, Georg Lukács criticized Rosa Luxemburg theoretically. Since then there has been a heated controversy on the manuscript “The Russian Revolution”.

In this paper, after having explained the event briefly, I will show who was the real initiator of the event. Then I will examine the criticism of Rosa Luxemburg by Zetkin and Lukács, and I will show the influences of the event on the fate of East Germany.

My main conclusions are as follows: 1) the initiator of the event of January 17, 1988 in East Berlin was not a group of human rights activists, but the applicants for exit from the GDR, especially the working group “GDR Nationality Law”, 2) Rosa Luxemburg did not cancel her theory about and belief in the freedom, 3) Lukács studied Rosa Luxemburg’s theory about the freedom academically and understood it very well, though he attacked her, 4) Rosa Luxemburg thought that “Freedom for people who think differently” was essential not only for the socialist revolution, but also for the social development in general, and 5) the event of January 17, 1988 became the beginning of the last stage of the exit movement.

Since 1992 Poland has enjoyed positive GDP growth for 25 years, including 2009 which was a harsh year due to the global recession. It is also forecasted that its good development will further continue for several coming years. Some economic analysts attribute the important role of EU funds (grants from the EU) and foreign direct investments (FDI) for the successful GDP growth. The GDP ratio of foreign capital is 3.2% and 4.8% for EU funds and for FDI respectively, which is a relatively high ratio totaling 8% of the Polish economy. 20% of EU funds are allocated to Poland, and this makes it the top beneficiary. The inflow of FDI is also the top among Central and Eastern European Countries (11 countries).

Despite its long period of successful economic growth, it seems that an economic level (represented by GDP per capita) has not converged with the EU average and has been stagnant in recent years. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that arguments for the Middle-Income Trap in the Polish economy are gradually increasing. That is whether Poland faces the Middle-Income Trap or is already in it.

What is the background of the Middle-Income Trap? Here we look at not only the positive side of foreign capital but the negative side as well. The positive side is its function as a powerful engine to drive the Polish economy. The negative side is an unwanted effect causing an excessive dependence on foreign capital, which constrains or at the very least, deteriorates self-sustainable growth, resulting in stagnation of future growth. In order to keep competitiveness needed for continuing growth and to avoid the Middle-Income Trap, it is essential to reform the industrial structure from labor-intensive to capital/knowledge-intensive industry through successive innovation.

On February 16, 2016 Polish authorities released the Action plan for responsible development of Poland. It is a remarkable plan, because it officially acknowledged five development traps (The Middle-Income Trap, Lack of balance trap, Average product trap, Demographic trap, and Weak institutions trap), which Poland currently faces. Before the publication of this plan, Polish authorities often appealed for EU funds or FDI, and claimed the acquisition as their diplomatic or political achievement without any mention of possible traps.

On June 23, 2016, it was decided that the UK would withdraw from the EU through a referendum, known as Brexit. As the UK’s economic size is the second largest in the EU, there is concern about continued political and economic turbulence for at least a couple of years. And the withdrawal of the UK from the EU will cause a reduction in the EU budget including EU funds, which will be an external shock on Polish economic growth.

This paper focuses on the background and development of economic growth and the Middle-Income Trap in Poland.