ABSTRACT
Although the term is often used for lack of a better one, the “western NIS” is not a subregion in any meaningful sense. Since 1991 the three countries grouped under this label, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova, have not displayed a major desire for cooperation within a distinct subregional framework. Political elites in the three capitals do not normally conceive of themselves as having fundamental interests in common. All three are, of course, linked through strong interstate trade relationships and the cooperative political and economic arrangements of the CIS. But apart from the residual forms of economic integration inherited from the Soviet Union, there is little in Europe’s eastern borderland to set it off as a region distinct from any other group of post-Soviet republics.
