beyondukraine.euandrussiainsearchofanewrelation

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14 Beyond Ukraine. EU and Russia in Search of a New Relation for Russia and has historically inhabited the heart of its identity quest and its debates about the specificity of a Russian way. By contrast, no complexity prevails in the relationship with the U.S. Here each actor has a clear understanding of each other’s position and role in what is regarded as a world competition. The EU’s attitudes towards its huge neighbour have evolved into what some have called “Russia fatigue”. Whatever official statements have said, the EU and its member states separately have always seen Russia, although to different degrees, primarily as a problem. During Yeltsin’s tenure, the constant alarm focused on Russia’s domestic instability. With Putin’s consolidation of internal power and economic growth, the concern shifted to his increasingly assertive foreign policy. It is therefore the urgency in addressing the problem that has largely dictated the EU’s behaviour towards Russia and has engraved on it a unique stamp in which preventive concern appears inseparable from intents of constructive proposals. For Russia, the importance of the economic dimension of its relations with the EU has never managed to displace the Russia/United States axis from its central place in Moscow’s foreign policy. In the Russian worldview, a great power is measured largely by the stature of its partners/competitors. With this approach, Russia can hardly see the EU, however much it is its largest trade partner, as a mighty actor, which really represents in world politics the exponential sum of its members. Thus neither European soft power nor indeed its internal divisions convey to the Kremlin this idea the way the United States does. Therefore the dialogue between the EU and Russia is strongly conditioned by the divergence of the dominant narratives. This clash of perceptions and understandings lies at the heart of the knot. Clashing perceptions: the dynamics of estrangement The EU and Russia disagree in their explanations of how we got here and tend to misinterpret the goals of the other. The question is
The EU and Russia after Crimea: Is Ukraine the Knot? 15 not only whether the EU understands Russia or not, but also whether Russia truly comprehends the EU. For years, Moscow has been insisting repeatedly on being treated as a normal partner/neighbour while constantly reiterating that Russia is a special actor. This self-perception clearly conflicts with the very rationale of the European project and explains why Russia couldn’t even envisage being just one among others in a European Neighbourhood Policy. The dominant perception among the European elites – somehow still under Gorbachev’s idea of a Common European Home − is that the EU has pursued a genuine commitment to progressive integration with Russia through the promotion of a peaceful space of shared prosperity with trade at its core. In Moscow, by contrast, an increasing disappointment has governed the official interpretation of the relationship and terms like ‘humiliation’, ‘deception’ and ‘betrayal’ come forth recurrently. The landmarks of this perceived disloyalty are the NATO operation in Kosovo/Serbia, the expansions of the Alliance to include Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic in 1999 and the Baltic States in 2004, and finally the ‘color revolutions’ in the former Soviet space. The sum of it is what the influential Russian political scientist Sergey Karaganov calls a “Versailles with velvet gloves” 1 . While in the EU’s eyes the Eastern Partnership is an instrument that does not include the prospect of joining the European Union, for Moscow it represents a first step towards rapid integration into the EU that will, it presumes, be accompanied by membership in NATO. Brussels, along with most member states, has great problems understanding the existential fear the EU’s soft power in the post-Soviet space provokes in the Kremlin. From the Kremlin’s perspective, the ‘color revolutions’ are no more than a Western instrument for carrying out “post-modern coups d’état” in such a way that the role of local actors and the domestic roots of 1 S. Karaganov, “Europe and Russia: Preventing a New Cold War”, Russia in Global Affairs, 7 June 2014, http://eng.globalaffairs.ru/number/Europe-and-Russia- Preventing-a-New-Cold-War-16701.
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