ABSTRACT
Introduction The dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and the emergence of the Russian Federation as a sovereign entity in its stead resulted in a radically different political setting in Europe. This called for new policies on the part of both the European Community/Union and Russia.1 For the Community, the most urgent challenge was to define a new agenda of substantial political rapprochement and economic integration that would ensure a modicum of orderly transition to a post-Soviet era (Höhmann et al. 1993; Lippert 1993). For Russia, the main task was to secure a firm place in the new emerging architecture in postCold War Europe (Arbatov 1997: 136, 139; Zouev 1992: 259). With its provisions on limited trade-related cooperation, the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) that had been signed with the already frail Soviet Union in December 1989 was clearly inadequate for the tasks at hand. This was acknowledged by the Community as early as the end of 1990 when the European Council instructed the Commission to look for possibilities for a broader agreement with the USSR that would include ‘political dialogue and all aspects of a close economic as well as cultural co-operation’ (Timmermann 1996: 200). The fall of the Soviet Union had taken the Community and its member states largely by surprise (Kramer 1993: 213). In January 1992 the Community was faced with the acute challenge of having fifteen new countries altogether in the former Soviet Union (FSU). As such, the Russian Federation was only one, albeit perhaps the most important, of the New Independent States (NIS) emerging from the ruins of the Soviet Union. Yet, and despite the shock of being ‘catapulted into leadership’ (Pelkmans and Murphy 1991) in the East, it was the European Community that was by far the best equipped to rise to the occasion. This was largely due to the different internal dynamics between the EC and Russia: the Community was moving towards deeper integration and political union, processes that became manifest in the adoption of the Treaty of Maastricht in February 1992. This included a vision of a common foreign and security policy (CFSP), opening up at least a possibility that the new ‘European Union’ would emerge as a more purposive, strategic and coherent international actor. Perhaps more importantly, the period of European Political Cooperation
and the European Community’s key role in responding to the tumultuous changes in Central and Eastern Europe at the turn of the 1990s had already equipped the Community with a set of experiences and principles on which its policy vis-à-vis the NIS could be built (Smith 1999: 42). It already had, after all, a fairly dense network of existing practices and principles for dealing with Eastern Europe. Between 1988 and 1990 the European Community had negotiated a host of TCAs with the Soviet Union and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) countries (the process has been discussed in, for example, Smith 1999: 52-63; Lippert 1990: 126-129; Preston 1997: 197-198; and de la Serre 1991). In essence, the EC knew where it was coming from and had at least an inkling about where it wanted to go with its relations with the emerging Eastern Europe. To be sure, in the first instance the interest was mainly a negative one: to prevent the further disintegration of the former Soviet space and the significant rise in the EC’s responsibilities in the region that would obviously ensue (Lippert 1993: 130). Therefore, the policy line chosen was based on the need to solidify a new and stable order in the post-Cold War Europe. Karen E. Smith has summed up the EC’s line of reasoning by arguing that its approach was to be based on economic aid that was ‘intended to facilitate economic reforms; reforms would help reintegrate each country into the world economy; and this would help create a new European regional security order’ (1999: 49).2 In addition to this, one more piece of the puzzle was also certain: full accession into the EC was not on the cards, especially for the countries of the former Soviet Union (FSU), with the notable exception of the three Baltic States. Regardless of the membership perspective, the EC’s policy line towards the East was based on the uniform assumption that the eventual interaction and integration was to be based on common norms and values. This understanding followed logically from the developments at the end of the Cold War (the events have been discussed in detail in Haukkala 2008c). The spirit of the age was that of triumphalism of western liberal values, a mood that was well captured by Francis Fukuyama in his ‘End of History’ thesis. For Fukuyama, the third wave of democratization from the 1970s onwards showed that the ideal of liberal democracy could not be improved: all the ideological competitors were now utterly discredited, and ‘liberal democracy remains the only coherent aspiration that spans different regions and cultures around the globe’ (1992: xiii). The collapse of the Soviet Union was part and parcel of this process, which would result in the further homogenization of the world. This is not the place to discuss the content of the End of History thesis in detail, or its possible flaws. What is nevertheless important is that Fukuyama did manage to capture in his book the Zeitgeist that informed the expectations towards the ‘new democracies’ and the eventual EU policies towards Eastern Europe, Russia included. Therefore, the destination ahead was certain – liberal democracy and market economy – and the road to be taken was that of transition (and not more open-ended transformation) to western liberal norms and values (McDaniel 1996: 3; Ikenberry 2001: 215-216; Schuette 2004: 14-15; van Ham 1993: 2).3
