Category: Articles of Volume 3, Issue 4

Ozan Serdaroğlu

Abstract

Our question about the distinctiveness of Mediterranean entrepreneurial collective action stems from the inadequacy of its certain capacities and limits to its independent development. The following paper aims in identifying the reasons of this inadequacy, and explaining how this action, embodied in BusinessMed, is articulated to the European governance in order to become more apt and effective.

Keywords: Mediterranean, Entrepreneurial Collective action, UNICE, Euro-Mediterranean partnership, UMCE

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Faruk Yalvaç

Abstract

This article analyses the implications of commodity form theory in explaining international law. It argues that international law reflects the underlying social relationships of inequality in the world system and plays an essential role in the reproduction of capitalist relations of production. International law is seen as having an ideological function in concealing social contradictions and actual content of social relations. This argument is demonstrated through a critique of the commodity form theory developed by Pashukanis whose views on international law are different from the instrumentalist understanding of law prevalent in Marxist literature. According to Pashukanis, to understand the class basis and class specificity of law requires a critical analysis of the legal form itself. Law is a historical form, is the product of a particular type of society and expresses certain social relationships. What are therefore necessary are a materialist explanation of the legal form and the explanation of the material conditions which brought legal categories into being. This is as true for law in general as it is for international law.

Key Words: International law, Pashukanis, Commodity Form Theory,
Marxism, Ideology.

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John Milios and Tasos Kyprianidis

Abstract

The long-standing strategy of the Greek state in the 20th century for annexation of Cyprus failed because it conflicted with the strategy of the Greek-Cypriot political power structure under Makarios, which after 1957 aimed at establishing a quasi-bicommunal Cypriot state, which in essence was to become a second Greek state where Turkish-Cypriots would be integrated as a ‘minority’.

Keywords: Enosis, Cyprus conflict, Turkey, Greece, Zurich and London Agreements

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Anita Bakshi

Abstract

This paper will explore the nature of memory in divided Nicosia and its expression in urban space. The focus will be on the old city, contained within its 16th century Venetian Walls and divided by the United Nations Buffer Zone, as a symbolic location in the Cypriot imagination, and as a prime example of the manner in which the Cyprus conflict is remembered and forgotten. The aim is to illustrate how the conflict and associated memories affect attitudes about place by looking specifically at Nicosia’s walled city as a site of memory and oblivion. This paper will investigate the way in which the old city is used, on both sides of the divide, as a symbol to represent both the conflict as well as unity. It will seek to question the manner in which its location in the imagination, as it is remembered from the outside, is affected by changes that occur inside of this place; a space dense with personal manifestations of memory and with the lived experience of division. The paper will conclude by setting up the distinction between the manner in which the old city is remembered from the outside, and they lived reality of division as experienced within the walls.

Keywords: Nicosia, Cyprus conflict, forgetting and memory, migration.

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Christian Lekon

Abstract

Reviewing the different empires that ruled over the island of Cyprus, this contribution takes issue with Anthony Giddens’ contention that imperial systems were largely self-contained in political and economic terms. In fact, almost all the empires discussed here interacted with other sizeable political units; and Cyprus’s trade links were normally not confined to any of the empires that happened to control it. However, Giddiness’ concept of an imperial system can be maintained if it is, in the vein of Niklas Luhmann, reconceptualized as being operationally closed but, at the same time, open to the environment. This perspective also allows us to distinguish modern imperial systems from pre-modern ones: while the latter were coupled with two structurally different types of society identified by Giddens (tribal and class-divided), in the case of the former it is three types (tribal, class-divided and capitalist). Thus, being more complex than their predecessors, modern empires are also more fragile.

Keywords: Cyprus, Empire, Systems theory, Giddens, Luhmann.

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