Negotiating at cross purposes: conflicts and continuity in the EU’s trade and energy relations with Russia, pre- and post-2014

ABSTRACT

This article explores why the European Union (EU)’s promotion of Russia’s market liberalization has failed to generate the desired outcome. It takes as its starting point the Russian annexation of Crimea, and the question of whether the political rupture in 2014 constitutes a watershed in the EU-Russian trade and energy relationship. The sanctions targeting Russia for its actions in Ukraine, and the Russian counter-embargo, constrain the room for manoeuvre of businesses, but have not resulted in a decisive shift in the EU-Russian trade and energy relationship. The article finds that very limited progress had been made on key contentious issues throughout the decade preceding the breakdown of their political relations. Rather, the main shift took place with Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2012, which provided the EU with tools of compellence. The EU’s market policies have achieved very little resonance in Russia of their own accord.

KEYWORDS:

• Crimea
• EU
• market power
• Russian Federation
• trade power
• WTO

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented in 2018 at ‘EU Trade Policy in the 21st Century’ in Ottawa. The author thanks Crina Viju and Patrick Leblond, the organizers of the conference and editors of the section in which this article appears, and the three anonymous reviewers. Thanks are also due to Alasdair R. Young for raising the pertinent question of the ‘target state’s responsiveness’ back in 2010, in his role as the author’s Ph.D. supervisor at the University of Glasgow.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Anke Schmidt-Felzmann was, at the time of writing, a Senior Researcher at the Research Centre of the General Jonas Žemaitis Military Academy of Lithuania, [email protected]

ORCID

Anke Schmidt-Felzmann http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4878-9576

Notes

1. Kutlina-Dimitrova (2015) found that the sanctions, as a whole, resulted only in a 0.12% decline of extra-EU exports, taking into consideration also the redirection of exports.

Additional information

Funding

This research has benefitted from the author’s post-doctoral project ‘Med eller utan EU? Konsekvensen av nationella utrikespolitiska val för Europeiska unionens effektivitet som global aktör’ (2011–2014), funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR) Dnr 435-2011-1106, and the author’s Research Fellowship in the Special Research Programme on International Studies at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (UI, 2014-2018), financed by the Swedish Foreign Ministry.