ABSTRACT
Since the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis in 2014, the idea that the EU and Russia are engaged in a geopolitical contest over their common neighbourhood and that the Eastern Partnership (EaP) is Brussels’ instrument in this context appears ‘common sense’. Yet, the reality of the EaP as a policy programme hardly corresponds to such representation, whether in its original purpose, actual content or effects on the ground. To unpack this discrepancy, this article presents a genealogy of what is conceptualised here as the geopoliticisation of the EaP, a notion set forth to designate the discursive construction of an issue as a geopolitical problem. While Russia’s actions in Ukraine certainly contributed to deepen and reinforce this dynamic, the article shows that the geopoliticisation of the EaP was neither merely exogenous nor simply reactive. It was also carried forward from within the European policy community by a discourse coalition which, based on its own political subjectivities and policy agenda, came to frame the EaP as an endeavour aimed at ‘winning over’ countries of the Eastern neighbourhood and ‘rolling back’ Russia’s influence.
Since the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis in 2014, the notion that the EU and Russia are engaged in a geopolitical contest over their common neighbourhood and that the Eastern Partnership (EaP) is Brussels’ instrument in this context appears ‘common sense’. Moscow’s zero-sum approach and hard power projection in its ‘near abroad’ have certainly been apparent; they are well documented and abundantly commented upon. Several analysts have also recently denoted, however, a growing—albeit non-comparable—tendency on the part of the EU to adopt a geopolitical posture towards its Eastern neighbourhood (Kazharski and Makarychev 2015; Nitoiu 2016; Youngs 2017). In a recent study investigating both the EU’s reaction to the Ukraine crisis and the impact of the crisis on EU foreign policy, Richard Youngs (Youngs 2017, 6–7) finds that EU support for certain political values and reforms is increasingly “pursued as a geopolitical comparative advantage over Russia” and “superimposed with a layer of geostrategic diplomacy”. In documenting the same pattern, other scholars have notably pointed to Brussels’ relaxing, in an apparent bid to compete with Moscow’s influence, of its conditionality towards Ukraine to incentivise Viktor Yanukovych to sign the Association Agreement (AA) (Kazharski and Makarychev 2015, 334–35) and of its benchmarks of engagement with Belarus by lifting its sanctions in February 2016 in spite of a lack of progress on the human rights front (Charap and Colton 2017, 119–21; 175). What is more, the EaP itself is now, in fact, routinely represented as a containment policy in the Western press: the AA with Ukraine is described as a “bulwark against Russian aggression” (Robinson 2016) while the visa-free regimes with Ukraine and Georgia are presented as ways “to help [countries of the post-soviet space] as they try to move away from Moscow’s orbit” (Baczynska 2016).
