ABSTRACT
This chapter overviews the development of EU–Russia cooperation in Justice and Home Affairs (JHA). Beginning with the agreement to create the Four Common Spaces in 2003, including the Common Space of Freedom, Security and Justice, the chapter traces how the incorporation of the visa-free regime prospects into the Road Map for the Common Space had a lasting impact on all further collaborative attempts. As an instance of policy conditionality, visa waiver prospects restructured relations between the EU and Russia from being equitable to strictly hierarchical. Moreover, over time, the EU was able to use this instrument in relation to the areas of cooperation directly linked to visa arrangements and also to the issues of security and justice which had initially been left to the network governance toolkit in the Road Map. This creeping approach reached its climax in late 2013, when the Commission more openly applied policy conditionality and coupled it with the value-loaded rhetoric of classical political conditionality, effectively bringing the cooperation to the verge of a stalemate. Paradoxically, the major breakthroughs in EU–Russia cooperation in JHA are due precisely to this policy conditionality, whereas the network governance mode has borne almost no fruit to this day.
