David Cadier

Conclusion: Foreign Policy as the Continuation of Domestic Politics by Other Means

Analysts and policymakers alike were largely caught by surprise, if not by the Ukraine crisis itself, then at least by its form and magnitude. The crisis was influenced by various causal factors (both internal and external to Ukraine) and went through different phases (political, economic, military), but by many accounts it was Moscow’s decision to annex Crimea that appears in retrospect to have been the most crucial development. The active use of political, economic and even military levers by Moscow to secure its interests in its immediate post-Soviet neighbourhood does not constitute a new feature in Russia’s post-communist foreign policy. However, the absorption of territory into the Russian Federation does. In that sense, it could be argued that, in analysing Russia’s foreign policy course, the organization of the referendum in Crimea is even more significant than the military manoeuvres deployed to secure the naval base in Sevastopol. It has certainly constituted a thread line for the present volume and a backdrop against which the authors test their hypotheses.

The Geopoliticisation of the EU’s Eastern Partnership

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.