Framing the Eastern Partnership in the European Union’s and Russia’s institutional discourse

ABSTRACT

This paper traces the evolution of the European Union’s (EU) and Russian Federation’s discourse on the Eastern Partnership (EaP) along four frames – economic, (geo)political, normative, and security. We discover the dynamic of the EaP discourse in Brussels and Moscow, developing from an economic and political initiative to an adversarial security understanding, underpinned by logics of geopolitical and normative competition. With this study, we illuminate the misalignment of the EU and Russia’s interpretations of neighbourhood policy and show how it underpinned mutual mistrust and the clash over the future of the region.

KEYWORDS:

• Russia
• European Neighbourhood Policy
• Eastern Partnership
• European Union
• geopolitics
• discourse

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. ‘Constructing Europe’s Borders’ was a collaborative project hosted by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) in 2017-2020, led by Frank Schimmelfennig and Marie-Eve Bélanger. It was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant 172558). One of the authors took part in the project and co-authored the Codebook (doi: 10.3929/ethz-b-000414771) and Frame definition and aggregation protocol (doi: 10.3929/ethz-b-000415761).

2. Importantly, normative does not mean positive or benign: framing foreign policy in terms of values and principles does not automatically make it better or ‘softer’ (Jørgensen 2006, 57).

3. Seven semi-structured expert interviews conducted in March-May 2016 with participants and analysts of Russia’s foreign policy towards the neighbourhood (referred to in the text with capital letters A to G) helped us contextualise and interpret these sources.

4. The 10^th EaP anniversary in 2019 was marked with an expert conference rather than a summit. An EaP summit was held in Brussels in December 2021, but its conclusions were not available to the authors at the time of writing.

5. This is particularly the case in the most recent EP debate on the EaP, which took place in the aftermath of the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war and in the midst of the protracted Belarusian civil society protests. Against such a backdrop, the EU is often portrayed as ‘powerless’ (Vautmans in EP 2020, 5).

6. As interviewee A maintained, ‘quite frankly, when we were approached by the Polish about the Eastern Partnership initiative, we were not too worried about our neighbourhood, seeing that the ENP itself did not amount to much’ (Interview A 2016). Furthermore, the EaP was seen as not unanimously supported by all member states (Interview E 2016).

7. Notably, once this framing became shared, it ceded to the background: not a single time has the EaP been mentioned in the Duma since 2015.