Abstract
Arguably, a serious reason for writing the present book was that “the challenge was up there”, understood in Sir Edmund Hillary’s manner regarding why he decided to climb Mount Everest. Less melodramatically, one reason was that no such book existed in either Greek or English. And yet another challenge arose after realizing that all journal articles or book chapters on Moscow-Cyprus relations were premised on the concepts and the assumptions of “power politics” or “political realism”.1 In other words, they were taking for granted that Moscow’s Cyprus policies aimed to serve, exclusively or merely, the superpower’s own -state-centric and self-regarding — interests since, according to this hegemonic theory of international relations (IR), this is exactly what all states do or try to do.
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Notes
The only exceptions, I submit, have been the following three articles: Costas Melakopides and Marina Salvaridi, “Russia’s Policies towards Cyprus: A Case of ‘Pragmatic Idealism’?”, Obosrevatel/Observer, No. 8 (259), August 2011, pp. 34–45 (in Russian); Costas Melakopides (with Marina Salvaridi), “The ‘Pragmatic Idealism’ of Russia’s Post-Cold War Policy towards Cyprus”, The Cyprus Review, Vol. 24, No. 1, Spring 2012, pp. 71–97; and Costas Melakopides, “Pragmatic Idealism Revisited: Russia’s Post-1991 Cyprus Policy and Implications for Washington”, Mediterranean Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 4, Fall 2012, pp. 107–34.
Costas Melakopides, Pragmatic Idealism: Canadian Foreign Policy, 1945–1995 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998).
George Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern (New York: Norton, 1982), p. 342, emphasis added.
London’s idea regarding the unlawful return of Turkey to Cypriot affairs has been established, inter alia, by William Mallinson in his Cyprus: A Modern History (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2005).
Georgi L. Muradov, Interview with Kibris, 3 July 1998, reprinted in his Russia-Cyprus: Our Common Way (Nicosia: M.S. Satellite Publication Ltd, 2000), p. 171.
Claire Palley, An International Relations Debacle: The UN Secretary-General’s Mission of Good Offices in Cyprus 1999–2004 (Oxford and Portland, OR: Hart Publishing, 2005), pp. 102–3. Dr Palley was the first woman law professor at a United Kingdom University, when she was appointed at Queen’s University Belfast in 1970. In 1998, she was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.
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Melakopides, C. (2016). The “Pragmatic Idealist” Logic of the Book. In: Russia-Cyprus Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137347152_1
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