Conclusions

This work set out to examine why the European Union and Russia have faced severe problems in developing institutionalized cooperation during the post-Cold War period. It has sought to test a hypothesis drawn from the extant literature that the problems have mainly stemmed from pre-existing differences in value systems between the parties. The existence of a widening ‘values gap’ between Russia and the EU has been one of the received wisdoms in the contemporary debate, yet it has hardly been subjected to serious theoretical and empirical scrutiny at all. In order to test this proposition empirically, a substantive amount of theoretical work was required. In Chapters 2 and 3 a series of successive theoretical moves were made. First, the possible differences in values were conceptualized as stemming from differences in the worldviews held by the EU and Russia respectively. Second, the task of linking them in a given institutionalized setting was assigned to the commonality variable, an under-theorized concept drawn from the work of one of the leading (neoliberal) institutionalists, Robert O. Keohane (1989). This move also established a link with an established body of IR theorizing, thus realizing one of the main aims of the present work: bringing theoretical insights into the extant, predominantly atheoretical literature on EURussia relations. But in order to be able to probe the commonality variable in the case of the EU-Russia relationship, the strict notions of actor rationality in the institutionalist research programme had to be relaxed. This was done by adopting a concept of contextual rationality, which allowed for a subjective element in the conditions for utility maximizing, creating an opening towards thinly constructivist accounts of international relations. This move opened a door for the second main theoretical aim of the work, namely, reflecting upon the possibilities and limits of theoretical complementarity and bridge-building between rational and constructivist strands of IR theorizing. The main finding in this respect was that such a process is indeed feasible, but it is severely constrained by the need to remain within ontological and epistemological commitments of the initial conceptual starting point, meaning that the process of theoretical convergence is always strongly path-dependent on the initial (meta-)theoretical choices constraining the process subsequently. The work was not content with identifying possible differences in commonality through the use of the frame method alone, but sought to propose a way

through which their salience can be assessed in light of actual institutionalized practices. In this respect, the work suggested conceptualizing the EU and Russia as situated actors in the crosshairs of the ideational and material structure of international society. This move offered a means by which we could also take into account the wider constitution of international society in both its ideational and its material aspects, helping the work to envisage the EU-Russia relationship as only a particular instance of secondary institutionalization, which is at once constrained by the primary institutions, yet acts as a factor that shapes them. This final theoretical move enabled the work to nest the institutionalist and thinly constructivist accounts of secondary institutionalization into a wider English School framework. Taken together, the admittedly rather multifaceted theoretical model proposed in this work amounts to retroductive multi-causal modelling that is well in line with the key tenets of (critical) scientific realism, as explained in Chapter 2. In this respect, there is a certain ‘double structuration’ in the work at hand: on the one hand, the main actors, the EU and Russia, are at the same time both structured by and a part of the processes structuring the wider constitution of international society. On the other hand, their relationship and the actual institutionalized practices taking shape in it play a similar role in their own right. In the following, the main conclusions of the work are discussed under three headings: the main findings, their assessment, and the lines for further research.