ABSTRACT
The Eastern Partnership and Eurasian integration as region-building projects
The EU’s and Russia’s projects can be characterized as region-building, defined as the process of constructing ‘closer economic, political, security and sociocultural linkages between states and societies that are geographically proximate’
(Börzel 2012: 255). A ‘region-building approach’ (Neumann 1994) enables us to grasp dynamic interactions in a rapidly changing regional environment, particularly as, as noted by Hettne and Söderbaum (2000), there is no natural or given region. Scholarly attention has concentrated on the driving forces behind the making of regions. In his attempt to classify approaches to region-building, Neumann (1994, 1999) developed a continuum stretching from ‘inside-out’ to ‘outside-in’ explanations. Regions can first emerge in an ‘inside-out’ dynamic, as an imagined community and a political project borne by regional political actors (Neumann 1999). Regional projects can also derive from economic and institutional factors, namely transaction costs and the demand for institutional change and integration (Mattli 1999). In line with this ‘inside-out’ dynamic, whatever the factors identified, regions derive primarily from the perception of a common identity that translates into a project of cooperation or integration. From a reversed, ‘outside-in’ perspective, regions tend to be shaped by external influences. In this case, the existence of a regional identity is preceded by regionbuilders who imagine spatial and chronological identities (Adler and Barnett 1998: 62). For the purposes of this chapter, we define region-builders as external players who foster the construction of closer political, security, trade and societal linkages with post-Soviet countries located in the ‘common neighbourhood’ between Russia and the EU. The ‘outside-in’ approach also rests on the premise that regionalism – defined as the development of regional cooperation and integration – can produce spillover effects around the world. This implies that external stimuli are powerful enough to prompt the construction of regions, regardless of local specificities. Globalization, for instance, has been identified as a driving force behind the creation over the past two decades of regional organizations. Existing regions can also contribute to the building of other regions (De Lombaerde and Schulz 2009) by diffusing norms and policy templates (Börzel and Risse 2009, 2012) and/or ‘making it regional’ (Bicchi 2006), that is, designing regional strategies and aid programmes and fostering regional subgroupings (Farrell 2009), as well as pushing for interregional links (De Lombaerde and Schulz 2009). The EU’s role as a promoter of regionalism, in particular, has attracted scholarly attention. Regional integration is indeed a ‘distinct European idea’ (Börzel and Risse 2009: 5) that has emerged as a core objective of the EU’s foreign policy (Smith 2008). Scholars have shown how, from a constructivist approach, the EU diffuses norms and templates and affects outcomes in other regional organizations (Jetschke and Murray 2012), primarily through their interregional dialogue (De Lombaerde and Schulz 2009). The contrast with the neorealist view of international relations is instructive. In an international system which is characterized by the lack of a central authority which enforces rules and punishes aggressors, states adopt self-help mechanisms to ensure survival. Thus, states will seek to maximize their own relative power. In the words of Mearsheimer (2001: 35), ‘great powers recognize that the best way to ensure their security is to achieve hegemony now, thus eliminating
any possibility of a challenge by another great power’. As a result, great powers are likely to pursue expansionist policies, which will help them achieve either hegemony or, if this is beyond them, the status of a regional hegemon which dominates its ‘near abroad’. Mearsheimer (2001: 40) thus distinguishes between ‘global hegemons, which dominate the world, and regional hegemons, which dominate distinct geographical areas’, while Myers (1991: 3) defines regional hegemons as ‘states which possess sufficient power to dominate subordinate state systems’. From this perspective, and in the context of EU-Russia ‘rivalry’, regions can be deemed to be hegemon-led alliances aimed at increasing the power of the region-builder (hegemon) and/or as a response to another region-building project (or the attempted emergence of another hegemon in ‘its’ geographical region). Thus, inherent in any regional hegemonic system is the perception of challenge on the part of the existing regional hegemon in the event of any encroachment on its region by an aspiring region-building hegemon. As stressed by Mearsheimer (2001: 41), ‘regional hegemons do not want peers’. The theory predicts that the existing regional hegemons will counteract the aspiring hegemon, if necessary by using military means. However, it clearly does not need to come to that if the regional hegemon possesses other levers of control over the states in the region (which is the target of the aspiring hegemon), such as regional interdependence (for instance with regard to trade and migration), which would prevent stronger links being established between the target states and the aspiring hegemon. Hence, following the neorealist approach, region-building is a vehicle to achieving external actors’ interests in, and domination over, a region. This does not necessarily contradict constructivist approaches, though, as the diffusion of norms and ideas is also a means of gaining influence and achieving interests. Therefore, we use neorealism and constructivism as broad analytical grids that can be combined and meshed together. As has been noted (see, for example, Kratochvíl and Tulmets 2010: 29), different actors (hegemons) can employ different approaches and can indeed switch from one approach to another. Therefore, by scrutinizing Russia’s and the EU’s approaches and toolboxes for region-building we aim to gain a greater insight into the strategies employed by the competing hegemons and their underpinning rationales. Clearly, both the EU’s Eastern Partnership and the Eurasian integration process are examples of region-building (or perhaps rebuilding in the case of the latter) or ‘regionification’, that is, region-building through discursive processes (Van Langenhove 2011: 65) on the territory of the Western part of the USSR. Therefore, in the next sections we delve into the EU’s and Russia’s narratives and seek to explain the rationales underlying their approaches to region-building in the post-Soviet space.
