Discursive Politics of Energy in EU–Russia Relations

Abstract

Vladimir Putin’s regime has struggled to restore Russia’s great power status. The discourses that have emerged around Russian energy wealth play a particularly significant role in this struggle and shape Russia’s identity in international relations. These multiple and contradictory understandings of energy resources are encapsulated in the two dominant discourses: the energy superpower and the raw-material appendage discourses. This paper examines these discourses and then demonstrates how they shape Russia’s energy diplomacy toward the European Union (EU).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to my supervisor, Dr. Ian Urquhart, for his valuable comments and support during various stages in the preparation of this paper. I also want to thank Dr. Rob Aitken, Justin Leifso, and Prachi Mishra, who read drafts of the manuscript and gave many helpful suggestions for its improvement.

Notes

1. I use upper case to identify International Relations (IR) as an academic field and lower case to identify international relations as the subject matter of this field.

2. The logic of appropriateness is a structure of meaning that justifies actions that are accepted by an agent (March and Olsen 1989, 2006). Agents are evaluating courses of action according to the logic of appropriateness that corresponds best with their identities. This means that an action always implies “evoking an identity or role and matching the obligations of that identity or role to a specific situation” (March and Olsen 1989, 951).

3. The Ministry of Energy of the Russian Federation was established as the lead agency for energy development in 2008, while the Ministry of Industry and Energy was turned into the Ministry of Industry. The website of the Ministry of Industry and Energy was assessed through the digital archive Wayback Machine.

4. My references to texts imply written and spoken-language materials as well as visual representations such works of art and documentary films included in Model 2A.

5. See Bouzarovski and Bassin (2011) and Rutland (2015) for a general discussion of the role of energy resources in debates over Russian national identity.

6. The term “superpower” by itself acquired negative connotations in Russian politics after the collapse of the Soviet Union and is mainly used to describe the United States. Putin emphasizes that the idea of superpower belongs to the Cold War era and the post-Soviet Russia does not seek to restore the bipolar international order (e.g., Putin 2006c). Putin (2013c) defines superpower as a state that infringes the interests of other countries and certifies that Russia does not “claim to be any sort of superpower.” Elsewhere, Putin (2016) argues that the United States currently is the only superpower and Russia is not interested in challenging its status.

7. As Thane Gustafson (2012, 101) puts it, in the energy sector “the market reforms went irretrievably wrong.” Market liberalization of the oil industry was a child of the 1990s, a period that is commonly referred to in Russia as “the reckless and evil 1990s” (likhie devianostye) or “the time of confusion” (smutnoe vremia). On privatization of Russia’s oil industry in the 1990s see Freeland (2000), Dixon (2008), Gustafson (2012), and Sakwa (2014).

8. The imperial prerogative is a concept developed by Partha Chatterjee (2005, 2012). It is understood as a self-claimed right of an empire to declare the colonial exception within its spheres of influence, such as proclaiming other political entities as in need of intervention because they are unable to manage their own affairs.

9. The survey was conducted by the firm Russian Public Opinion and Market Research (ROMIR) as a part of the NEORUS (Nation-building and nationalism in today’s Russia) project of the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages at the University of Oslo.

10. Initially, the term “cargo cult” chiefly, but not solely, referred to diverse Melanesian religious practices characterized by the belief that material wealth could be obtained through ritual worship. Later, the term was used metaphorically to describe attempts to achieve successful outcomes by replicating a set of conditions associated with those outcomes, although those conditions are either not related to the causes of the outcomes or not sufficient enough to reproduce them by themselves (e.g., “cargo cult science” or “cargo cult programming”). According to Shulman (2010), in Russia’s case “all forms of social organization and public administration are almost entirely borrowed and implanted with more or less violence, in the course of repetitive … waves of westernization,” yet “many of these forms have a purely decorative character of window dressing” because there is a belief that this state of affairs is the same in the West but “they are just better than we are at pretending.”

11. In 2006 and 2009, the disputes between Naftogaz of Ukraine and Gazprom over natural gas supplies, prices, and debts have led to a series of transnational political conflicts. In 2014, the tension intensified after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and support for the protesters in eastern Ukraine following the Euromaidan Revolution. For a detailed analysis of the Russia–Ukraine conflict see Stulberg (2015) and Wolczuk (2016).