The Geopoliticisation of the EU’s Eastern Partnership

ABSTRACT

Since the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis in 2014, the idea that the EU and Russia are engaged in a geopolitical contest over their common neighbourhood and that the Eastern Partnership (EaP) is Brussels’ instrument in this context appears ‘common sense’. Yet, the reality of the EaP as a policy programme hardly corresponds to such representation, whether in its original purpose, actual content or effects on the ground. To unpack this discrepancy, this article presents a genealogy of what is conceptualised here as the geopoliticisation of the EaP, a notion set forth to designate the discursive construction of an issue as a geopolitical problem. While Russia’s actions in Ukraine certainly contributed to deepen and reinforce this dynamic, the article shows that the geopoliticisation of the EaP was neither merely exogenous nor simply reactive. It was also carried forward from within the European policy community by a discourse coalition which, based on its own political subjectivities and policy agenda, came to frame the EaP as an endeavour aimed at ‘winning over’ countries of the Eastern neighbourhood and ‘rolling back’ Russia’s influence.

Notes

¹ As emphasised by Kuus (2015, 47, 36), “geopolitical argumentation [is a] politicised form of analysis crafted for specific reasons in specific places”. Hence, claims about the world are to be “studied in terms of where they are produced and where they circulate”, which calls for “empirically detailed case studies”.

² Most of the interviews cited have been conducted in Prague and Warsaw during two main periods: early 2009 and Spring 2013. More profoundly, the article draws on a more extensive, year-long empirical fieldwork conducted in Prague by the author in the year 2008–2009.

³ What is presented here is only a very brief account of a rich, dense and diverse literature. It places the emphasis in particular on what is often designated as the post-structuralist branch of discourse analysis. For a detailed overview of discourse analysis theories and methods, see for instance Carta and Morin (2014), Dunn and Neumann (2016), Jørgensen and Phillips (2002), and Milliken (1999).

⁴ The Cold War can, indeed, be understood as a configuration defined by a “particular discursive structure [where] the East–West relationship is constructed as one of hostility and clash of political, economic and social orders” (Risse 2011, 599).

⁵ As defined by Frank Fisher (2003, 87), storylines “function to condense large amounts of factual information inter- mixed with the normative assumptions and value orientations that assign meaning to them”.

⁶ Ó Tuathail and Agnew (1992, 194) distinguish practical geopolitical reasoning (that of practitioners, statespersons, politicians) from formal geopolitical reasoning (that of strategic thinkers and public intellectuals). While the latter tend to have “highly formalized rules of statement”, the former relies on “narratives and binary distinctions found in societal mythologies”.

⁷ This minimalist definition is close to Deudney’s (1997) ‘realist’ definition (“power competition between major states in peripheral areas”) and to what Ó Tuathail and Agnew (1992, 191) designate as the ‘classic’ definition (“actions taken against other powers, such as invasions, battles and the deployment of military force”).

⁸ Kazharski and Makarychev (2015, 334) note for instance that, by integrating Romania and Bulgaria in 2007, the EU became a geopolitical actor in the Black Sea.

⁹ As noted by Hiski Haukkala (2016), rather than an aspirational power projection endeavor, the ENP amounts to an “essentially defensive policy meant to stave off demands, expectations and obligations both from new members and prospective neighbours”.

¹⁰ In Susan Strange’s (1994, 24–25) classic definition, structural power refers to the “power to shape and determine the structures of the political economy within which other states, their political institutions and their economic enterprises” have to operate. (Strange 1994, 24–25)

¹¹ To be sure, the coming into being of the EaP was not totally disjointed from geopolitical events, as it is in the official resolution adopted in reaction to the Russo-Georgian conflict of August 2008 that the European Council asked the Commission to accelerate the set up of this policy (European Council 2008). Yet, this should be less read as a retaliatory move or strategic response to the conflict than as the outcome of intra-European bargaining: the member states advocating the imposition of sanctions against Russia after the conflict accepted to lift their demand in exchange for the acceleration of the EaP initiative.

¹² Comparing to Germany’s rational in supporting the 2004 EU enlargement, a Polish diplomat, who is said to have been one of the co-author of the 2006 internal MFA document that latter constituted the basis of the Polish-Swedish proposal, emphasised that it was in “Poland’s interest to have civilized states at its borders”. Interview at the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Warsaw, May 2013.

¹³ Interview with a Polish diplomat, London, April 2013.

¹⁴ The label Atlantists is used here as it is the one favoured by Czech analysts (see for instance Drulák 2013) as well as by practitioners claiming their belonging to this group (interviews conducted by the author).

¹⁵ On this group and its members, their discourse and their influence, see: (Cadier 2012).

¹⁶ As noted by Drulák (2013, 96–97), the Atlantists’ geopolitical rhetoric was indeed mainly observable in private conversations and off-record discussions with policy makers, but rarely present in public discourse. It featured, in other words, at the level of practical rather than formal geopolitical reasoning.

¹⁷ Interview at the Security Department, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, June 2009.

¹⁸ Interview with a former Foreign Minister of the Czech Republic, Prague, February 2011; Interview at the Minister’s Office, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, May 2013.

¹⁹ Interview with a diplomat, Embassy of the Czech Republic to the United States, May 2010.

²⁰ Interview at the South-Eastern Europe Department, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, July 2009.

²¹ Thus, by projecting Czech Republic’s own image onto post-Soviet countries, advocates of the EaP invoked a historical responsibility and moral imperative for Prague to support their transition as well as European integration. (Tulmets 2014)

²² For detailed and comparative case studies on other Central and Eastern European EU member states, see Kuus (2007), Raik (2016), and Tulmets (2014). Kirsti Raik (2016, 247) explains for instance that “the Baltic support to European-oriented reforms in the Eastern neighbourhood merged value-oriented and geopolitical motivations” and that this “geopolitical motive to support Eastern neighbors represents continuity in the old existential security problem”.

²³ “A US Strategy for Europe’s East: Testimony by Damon M. Wilson”, Hearing on A Pivotal Moment for the Eastern Partnership: Outlook for Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Belarus, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (Subcommittee on European Affairs), 14th November 2013. Available at: https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Wilson_Testimony.pdf

²⁴ Testimony by Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, Hearing on A Pivotal Moment for the Eastern Partnership: Outlook for Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Belarus, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (Subcommittee on European Affairs), 14th November 2013. Available at: https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Nuland_Testimony_REVISED.pdf ; Eliot Engel, “United States Must Stand Firm Against Russian Bullying in Europe”, Oped on the Eastern Partnership, available at: https://democrats-foreignaffairs.house.gov/news/press-releases/engel-op-ed-eastern-partnership

²⁵ To pressure the government in Kyiv, Moscow notably instigated a custom blockade at the Russo-Ukrainian border in August (The Economist 2013a)

²⁶ The invocation of Cold War imagery obviously served the purpose of attracting the attention of Western audiences in spite of their lack of acquaintance with the region and of the technical complexity of the EU’s Association Agreements.

²⁷ Merje Kuus (2015) cites, for instance, two European policy professionals—one from a (formerly) ‘new’ and one from an ‘old’ member state—who concur in noting that the member states from Central and Eastern Europe have “strongly influenced” the EU’s position and discourse on Russia, notably towards greater “geopolitical argumentation”.

Additional information

Funding

This work was made possible financially by the funding received in the framework of the The Transatlantic Post-Doc Fellowship for International Relations and Security (TAPIR).