On December 13, 2010, the second Eastern Partnership Foreign Ministers Meeting was held in Brussels, making this a useful time to evaluate the European Union’s latest initiative towards its Eastern neighborhood.  Reviewing a report submitted by the Commission on the implementation of this program, the Foreign Ministers of the 27 EU Member States and the 6 partner countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine) discussed both what has been achieved and what they hope to achieve to enhance “political association and economic integration” throughout the reg...

Despite the complexities of the Soviet inheritance and the efforts of some to play up a conflict where none exists, the Russian Federation and the Republic of Azerbaijan have no territorial claims on each other, Aleksandr Lukashevich, an official spokesman of the Russian Foreign Ministry, said in reaction to one such effort, an article in Moscow’s Nezavisimaya gazeta on 9 February. “The border between [the Russian Federation and Azerbaijan] has been determined through the Caspian Sea and onshore,” Lukashevich said in a posting on the Russian Foreign Ministry website, with “the la...

Tsarist Russia was a multinational state in which ethno-religious conflicts were not uncommon.  They took place in different parts of the empire—in Kishinev, Gomel, Mogilev, Shusha, Ganja, Baku, Yerevan, Tiflis and Moscow, as well as in other places.  But during the Soviet period, they were little studied, because the existence of conflicts among the working class contradicted communist ideology.  An examination of 2000 “personal records” of workers at the Nobel Brothers Oil Company is now possible and provides insights into the way in which differences in workers’...