ABSTRACT

The development of EU-Russian relations since the early 1990s, while conventionally international in the sense of being a treaty-based partnership, has also been marked by a phenomenon of relative novelty: the active formation of transboundary regional linkages. The 1999 EU Common Strategy on Russia advocates ‘strengthening cross-border and regional cooperation’. The ‘traditionalist’ prejudice in Russian studies, that tends to view post-communist Russia as the ‘remainder’ of the Russian empire, obscures the evident fact that the Russian Federation is a new state, that never existed in its borders, and was born in December 1991 as a result of thoroughly contingent political events that led to the dissolution of the USSR. The Russian political constellation of the 1990s, the patchwork of overlapping authorities and loyalties coexisting in the decentred, subjectless, segmentary and heteronomous political space, bears an uncanny resemblance to contemporary European discourses of neo-medievalism and ‘postmodernity’.