The judgment of the Court of Justice in the Achmea case evoked significant repercussions regarding the application and operation of the bilateral investment treaties (BITs) concluded between EU Member States. As a result of this decision, EU Member States have decided to terminate almost 190 intra-EU BITs. Nevertheless, full implementation of the Achmea judgment remains a complex issue, entangled in political and legal controversies concerning intra-EU BITs which have been present for more than a decade. On a more general level, the implementation process is simultaneously entwined in two other significant debates: the specifics of the rights of investors, and the relationship between EU law and international law.
This article analyses the capacity of the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance to counteract the democratic governance shortfall. It argues that the tangible impact of the treaty on the states’ practice has been limited by various endogenous and exogenous factors. The former are identified as directly linked to content of the document and refer to the accuracy of the drafting. The latter are rooted outside the text and beyond the character of the Charter and include issues relating to the states’ reluctance to ratify the document, certain constitutional constraints undermining implementation on the national level, and the weak international guarantees of enforcement.
The paper presents the comments of English, French, German, and Russian-language press, published in countries ranging from the USA to Soviet Russia, on the events in future Polish Second Republic between November 1918 till February 1919. The press certainly is not the ideal source to reconstruct the origins of reborn Poland. However, the press coverage reveals the stereotypes, misconceptions, impressions, and convictions of the authors, the expression of editors’ political line, sometimes even the governments of relevant countries. Alternatively, the press coverage reveals the lack of knowledge on the part of the above. “Old” Europe was wary of a new country, that was to emerge on the map of the continent. Simultaneously, some were seeing Poland as an important chain in the anti-Bolshevik cordon sanitaire. Most importantly, however, the contemporary press coverage reveals the lack of awareness of the basic political mechanisms and identity problems present in the lands of the emerging Polish Republic.
The aim of this study is to analyse the geopolitical position of independent Poland after World War I and the state of her relations with neighbour states, and the policy of building alliances with France and Romania. In view of border conflicts with Lithuania and Czechoslovakia as well as the constant German and Soviet threat, the reborn Polish state was forced to seek for allies in the West. The alliances with France and Romania could not however reduce the danger for Poland emerging from Soviet-German cooperation basing on the treaty of Rapallo from 1922. Also the treaty of Locarno from 1925 in which Polish borders were left without guarantee was seen as a failure of Polish diplomacy. The inconvenient geopolitical position of Poland, and the aggressive policy of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union resulted in the Hitler-Stalin Pact from 23rd of August 1939 and the partition of Poland.
Post-Versailles Europe saw the emergence of new, quasi-state territorial corporations (enjoying a great deal of autonomy, but not sovereignty). These included the Free State of Fiume/Rijeka (1919- 1924), Free City of Danzig/Gdańsk (1920-1939), Free State of Memel/ Klaipeda (which emerged between 1920 and 1923, before being incorporated into Lithuania with partial autonomy still remaining), as well as, slightly later, the autonomous Åland Islands (1922), and the Republic of Hatay (1938-1939). In theory, those international law constructs were supposed to resolve tensions (including those erupting on the grounds of nationality) between neighbours vying for control over strategic territories (and cities). However, they proved to primarily spark new conflicts of varying length. The article constitutes an attempt at comparing the geneses and development of the first three of the abovementioned “free cities”, as well as identifying their role in the newly-formed League of Nations. In addition, the article attempts to determine the degree to which the principle of national self-determination played a role in the establishment of these entities, as well as the methods used to ensure that the national minorities which found themselves within the borders of these “free cities” were protected.
During the Russian-Polish negotiations at the end of 1671 – the beginning of 1672, several Russian memorandums were handed over to Polish-Lithuanian diplomats. All these original documents are preserved in the Library of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kórnik, Poland, and are studied as some of the most important forms of diplomatic communications between the Muscovite State and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The memorandums clearly reveal the Muscovite diplomatic tactic against the Polish-Lithuanian side. They focus on the main problems of Russian- Polish relationships such as the transfer of Kiev from Russia to Poland (which had to be fulfilled in 1669 but which has never been executed), the policy towards the right-bank Ukraine hetman Piotr Doroshenko, who pledged his allegiance to the Ottoman sultan, the attack of the left-bank Ukrainian Cossacks (who were under the Thar’s rule) on the Lithuanian borderlands, and the implementing of the previous Russian-Polish anti-Ottoman treaty of 1667. It can be supposed also that the diplomatic form of the memorandum itself was borrowed by the Russian Foreign Office from the Polish-Lithuanian diplomatic tradition.
This article is devoted to a diplomatic (formal) analysis of 13 documents, including 12 originals issued by Russian tsars between 1576 and 1707, which are kept at the Kórnik Library. Among them, there are two original letters by Tsar Michael of Russia dating to 1634 and 1645 and four documents by Tsar Alexis of Russia from 1645 and 1668–1669. The collection also includes Peter the Great’s mandate of 1707 given to Russian negotiators for talks with representatives of the Sandomierz confederation, two extremely interesting documents (in the form of scrolls) of border-related negotiations dating to 1634 and 1645, as well as a notebook of 40 pages containing the Russian party’s proposals presented to Polish envoys during negotiations in Moscow at the turn of 1671 and 1672. The article is enriched with an analysis of the content of four well-preserved tsar’s seals applied to the documents in question.