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Geopolitics
ISSN: 1465-0045 (Print) 1557-3028 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fgeo20
The Geopoliticisation of the EU’s Eastern
Partnership
David Cadier
To cite this article: David Cadier (2018): The Geopoliticisation of the EU’s Eastern Partnership,
Geopolitics, DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2018.1477754
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2018.1477754
Published online: 25 Sep 2018.
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The Geopoliticisation of the EU’s Eastern Partnership
David Cadier
CERI, Sciences Po, Paris, France, and LSE IDEAS, London School of Economics, London, United Kingdom
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.
Since the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis in 2014, the notion 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’. Moscow’s zero-sum approach and hard power projection
in its ‘near abroad’ have certainly been apparent; they are well documented
and abundantly commented upon. Several analysts have also recently denoted,
however, a growing—albeit non-comparable—tendency on the part of the EU to
adopt a geopolitical posture towards its Eastern neighbourhood (Kazharski and
Makarychev 2015; Nitoiu 2016; Youngs 2017). In a recent study investigating
both the EU’s reaction to the Ukraine crisis and the impact of the crisis on EU
foreign policy, Richard Youngs (Youngs 2017, 6–7) finds that EU support for
certain political values and reforms is increasingly “pursued as a geopolitical
comparative advantage over Russia” and “superimposed with a layer of geostrategic
diplomacy”. In documenting the same pattern, other scholars have
notably pointed to Brussels’ relaxing, in an apparent bid to compete with
Moscow’s influence, of its conditionality towards Ukraine to incentivise Viktor
CONTACT David Cadier david.cadier@sciencespo.fr CERI, Sciences Po, 56 Rue Jacob, Paris 75006, France.
GEOPOLITICS
https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2018.1477754
© 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
Yanukovych to sign the Association Agreement (AA) (Kazharski and
Makarychev 2015, 334–35) and of its benchmarks of engagement with Belarus
by lifting its sanctions in February 2016 in spite of a lack of progress on the
human rights front (Charap and Colton 2017, 119–21; 175). What is more, the
EaP itself is now, in fact, routinely represented as a containment policy in the
Western press: the AA with Ukraine is described as a “bulwark against Russian
aggression” (Robinson 2016) while the visa-free regimes with Ukraine and
Georgia are presented as ways “to help [countries of the post-soviet space] as
they try to move away from Moscow’s orbit” (Baczynska 2016).
This evolution in the self-understandings and media narratives around the
EaP begs question as neither in its original purpose, actual content or effects on
the ground does the reality of the policy correspond to such representation. Two
established experts on EU external relations concur in stressing that the
European Neighborhood Policy (ENP), of which the EaP is the Eastern branch,
was “stripped of any geo-political considerations” in its design and that it “has
not been a geopolitical power projection project in the crude sense of the term”
(Haukkala 2016, 6; Howorth 2017, 6; see also: Youngs 2017, 50–64). The ENP
hardly amounts, indeed, to a policy consciously seeking—or able—to project
hard power and was not created based on a logic of competition for territories.
Quite simply, if the EU really did want to ‘take over’ countries of the post-Soviet
space, it would offer them membership. Yet the ENP and EaP have precisely
been engineered above all as alternatives to enlargement (Dannreuther 2006). In
addition, paradoxically, what analysts generally reproach to the EU in the
context of the Ukraine crisis is, actually, to have failed to appreciate the geopolitical
dynamics at play in the Eastern neighbourhood and the potential repercussions
of the EaP in this context (Auer 2015, 760; Howorth 2017, 8; Haukkala
2016, 7; MacFarlane and Menon 2014; House of Lords 2015). They point, in
other words, to the EU’s lack of geopolitical thinking in this context. How to
account, then, for the aforementioned evolution in the representation of the
EaP? How to explain, in particular, the discrepancy between, on the one hand,
the geopolitical framing of the EaP in public discourses and, on the other hand,
the non-geopolitical content of the policy and absence of geopolitical contingency
planning in its implementation? What are the implications and consequences
of this ‘geopoliticisation’ of the EaP?
The traditional explanation advanced in both academic and policy
debates is that EU policies in the Eastern neighbourhood have become
geopolitical because Russia has perceived, denounced and responded to
them as such (see for instance: European Commission 2014). While
certainly accurate in its characterisation of Moscow’s reception of—and
reaction to—the EaP (Gretskiy, Treshchenkov and Golubev 2014), this
explanation is insufficient to fully account for why the policy has been
framed as geopolitical by European actors themselves. First, there is a
difference between acknowledging that your interlocutor sees your mutual
2 D. CADIER
interaction as a gunfight and starting seeing your own hand as a gun.
There is a difference between recognising that Russia’s reactions to the
EaP (and to the EU–Ukraine AA in particular) has turned EU–Russia
interactions in the Eastern Neighbourhood as a geopolitical contest and
representing the EaP as a geopolitical instrument in this contest. Second,
one would need to explain why this pattern of exogenous speech act (or
externally transposed meaning) happened in that instance and not others:
why would European actors adopt Moscow’s characterisation of their own
policies in the case of the EaP but not, let’s say, of the war in Kosovo, the
situation of Russian speakers in the Baltic states or the Maidan revolt?
Such transposition is particularly difficult to explain in the case of the EaP
when one agrees that Russia’s protestations against this policy were often
“disingenuous” and hardly “withstanding serious scrutiny” (Haukkala
2016, 660). Third and most crucially, the traditional explanation overlooks
the fact that, as this article shows, enunciations of the geopolitical
storyline on the EaP can be traced in European discourses before the
outbreak of the Ukraine crisis (late 2013) and, even, before the launch
of the EaP (May 2009).
With a view to advance a more complete and more accurate explanation,
this article purports to unpack the geopolitical storyline and analyse its
elevation as a prevalent narrative in European public discourse when referring
to the EaP—what is conceptualised here as the geopoliticisation of the
EaP. Directly drawing on that of securitisation (Waever 1995), this notion is
set forth to designate the discursive construction of an issue or policy as a
geopolitical matter. Relying on discourse analysis theories from the
International Relations literature, but also engaging with critical geopolitics
to some extent, this article aims to denaturalise the geopolitical narrative
around the EaP by contextualising the discursive practices that have underpinned
it and by shedding light on the conditions that have favoured its
emergence and prevalence. I argue that the geopoliticisation of the EaP was
not simply exogenous, but also carried forward from within the European
policy community by discourse entrepreneurs who, based on their own
political subjectivities and policy agenda, came to frame the EaP as an
endeavour aimed at ‘winning over’ countries of the Eastern neighbourhood
and at ‘rolling back’ Russia’s influence. The concept of discourse coalition
(Hajer 1993; Howarth et al. 2000; Howarth and Torfing 2005) is called upon
to designate, and integrate in the analysis, both these entrepreneurs and the
main storylines they promoted.
It is important to stress that the geopolitical storyline on the EaP was never
taken up as such in EU official communications. This, however, should be
read more as a manifestation of the EU’s traditional ambiguity than as a
mark of the narrative’s total irrelevance in Brussels. As emphasised by Merje
Kuus (2015), who shows that EU foreign policy is characterised by a
GEOPOLITICS 3
“variegated practical use of [geopolitical] concepts”, the neutrality of the
official narrative often serves the function of patching up variations in the
dispositions and agendas of European policy professionals. I argue in fact
that, because it was enounced by actors with significant social capital within
the European political community (notably foreign ministers from EU member
states) and as EU foreign policy discourse cannot be summed up to that
of its institutions, it contributed to shape the structure of signification in
which EU policies towards the Eastern Neighbourhood were articulated and
implemented. This article thus sheds light, through the case of the EaP, on
the broader pattern of geopoliticisation of EU–Russia relations that has
started to receive attention in relation to other issue areas, such as energy
(Casier 2016). It also provides some elements of understanding on Europe’s
internal debates over the on-going “discursive competition between the
various actors within the post-Soviet geopolitical field over the reworking
of longstanding Cold War categories” (Toal 2017, 41).
The argument is developed in four successive steps. The first section
presents the analytical framework employed and its two central concepts of
discourse coalition and geopoliticisation. In a second step, the rationale,
content and effects of the EaP are briefly analysed, with a view to emphasise
their essentially non-geopolitical nature (provided that one adopts a minimalist
definition of geopolitics, as this article does). The third section constitutes
the bulk of the empirical contribution of the article. It unpacks the
geopoliticisation of the EaP in European policy discourses by focusing on two
specific contexts: national discussions in EU member states before the launch
of the EaP in May 2009 and pan-European debates before the outbreak of the
Ukraine crisis in late 2013. For the first context or arena, I focus on the cases
of Poland and the Czech Republic, two countries that have played an
important role in pushing for the EaP initiative and in promoting it at the
EU level. Although the activism of the former is the one that has been the
most decisive in that regard, I actually focus on the latter above all as the
facts that the Czech Republic is less geopolitically exposed than Poland and
that its Eastern policies underwent salient changes in the period studied both
render geopoliticising moves more visible there. The years around the launch
of the EaP constituted a period important and rich in terms of discursive
articulation as Czech and Polish policy-makers had to ‘sell’ the EaP both to
their domestic constituencies and to other member states.1
In studying their
articulatory practices, I rely on the qualitative content analysis of public
speeches and of private, semi-directed interviews with diplomats and policy-
makers.2
The goal here—and in discourse analysis more generally—is not to
pretend to reveal what policy-makers ‘really believe’ but to trace which codes
and organisational metaphors are used when speaking about the EaP and
identify which chains of connotations and storylines are shared and reproduced
throughout. The second context studied is that of European and
4 D. CADIER
transatlantic policy debates on the EU’s AA with Ukraine and on EU-Russia
relations in the common neighbourhood more generally. There, I focus more
precisely on two metaphors redundant in policy-makers’ declarations and
think tanks productions from before the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis. The
conclusion discusses the consequences and implications of this geopoliticisation
of the EaP for EU external relations.
Discourse Coalition and Geopoliticisation: An Analytical Framework
Discourse theory understands discourse as being constitutive of social
reality rather than a mere reflection of it.3
As emphasised by Lene
Hansen, “policy discourses are inherently social because policymakers
address political opposition as well as the wider public sphere in the
attempt to institutionalize their understanding of the identities and policy
options at stake” (Hansen 2006, 1). Discourse provides the context in which
these policy articulations are set (Diez 2014, 320). The notion of articulation
refers here both to the act of formulating a policy and of endowing it
with meaning, for instance by relating to certain markers of political culture
or national identity (Weldes 1999, 98–103; Laclau and Mouffe 2001). By
ascribing meaning, discourse makes the world intelligible and creates interpretative
dispositions for actors, but it also “operationalizes certain regime
of truths while excluding other possible mode of identities and actions”
(Milliken 1999, 229). In that sense, discourse contributes to set the limit of
legitimate, meaningful and practicable policy: it enables certain choices
while disabling others (Diez 2014).
Meaning is neither immanent nor fixed, but constantly established, negotiated
and contested through political struggle (Diez 2014; Hansen 2006;
Larsen 1997). This leads discourse theories and poststructuralism in particular
to underline the contingency and precariousness of politics and, as
such, to seek to denaturalise and problematise the present. In this context,
the discourse analyst’s task is to “plot the course of these struggles to fix
meaning at all levels of the social” (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002, 24) and, in
particular, to study the “rhetorical strategies inherent in discourses [that]
contribute to the way social facts are perceived” (Carta and Morin 2014, 296;
See also: Howarth et al. 2000, 3; Foucault 2014). This article relies on
discourse theory in as much as it seeks to unpack the struggles around the
‘fixing of the meaning’ of the EaP and to unveil, in particular, the ‘rhetorical
strategies’ of discourse entrepreneurs in that context.
In studying the production, reproduction and contestation of meaning,
discourse analysis stresses its relational dynamic. As emphasised by Jutta
Weldes,
GEOPOLITICS 5
Meaning is created and temporarily fixed by establishing chains of connotations
among different linguistic elements. In this way, different terms and ideas come to
connote or to summon one another, to be welded into associative chains that make
up an identifiable whole. […] The chains of association established between such
linguistic elements […] are socially constructed and historically contingent rather
than logically or structurally necessary. (Weldes 1999, 98)
Such chains of connotations can be identified in European policy debates
on Russia and the post-Soviet space. For instance, characterising a policy
through ‘linguistic elements’ belonging to the ‘associative chain’ (or structure
of meaning) of the Cold War discourse amount to ‘connote’ Russia as
an adversary and the common neighborhood as theatre for the rivalry
between two blocs. 4
Similarly, speaking of the Baltic states as “frontline
states”—as the discourse entrepreneurs studied below have tended to do
since the 2000s—amount to indirectly frame Russia as an enemy and EURussia
relations as a conflict, since if there is a front then there must be a
conflict and an enemy. Thus, discourse theories invite to pay attention not
just to term uttered but also to the non-uttered terms and ideas associated
to it (Neumann 1996; Walker 1993).
This conception of meaning production, which is embraced by many IR
discourse analysts but also by several scholars of critical geopolitics, thus
invites placing the analytical focus on actors, their discursive practices and
their rhetorical strategies. To designate social actors and their positions, the
Essex School set forth the concept of discourse coalition, which refers to “the
ensemble of a set of storylines, the actors that utters these storylines, and the
practices that conform to these storylines, all organized around a discourse”
(Hajer 1993, 47; For an overview of the Essex School’s approach, see:
Howarth et al. 2000). Linguistic elements such as representations, storylines
or organising metaphors (in Essex School’s parlance: ‘nodal points’) glue
political subjectivities and it is around them that discourses are articulated.5
The discourse coalition framework reveals itself particularly useful to map
the various political subjectivities in the EU context: James Rogers (2009), for
instance, linked the advent of the notion of Europe as a ‘global power’—
which came to replace that of ‘civilian power’ in the definition of EU Grand
Strategy—to the action of a discourse coalition of “euro-strategists”.
Similarly, Kuus (2015, 47; see also: Kuus 2014) places the emphasis on the
agency of policy professionals, which lies in the “gradual collective crafting of
phrases, agenda and lines of reasoning”, and posits that the “terminology that
circulates in EU settings reflects in part the power among them”. The EU
constitutes, indeed, an “open and heterogeneous discursive environment”
which can be studied either by analysing “the main features of the EU
discursive field” or the “contiguous discursive practices” of actors (Carta
and Morin 2014, 303, 307). This article focuses on the latter, though not so
much at the level of EU institutions but at that of the “wider semantic field
6 D. CADIER
[that] includes the member states’ polities” (Carta and Morin 2014, 307).
More specifically, it places the spotlight on member states’ representatives,
politicians, media and think tanks. Both IR discourse analysts (Hansen 2006;
7; Diez 2014, 330) and scholars of critical geopolitics (Ó Tuathail and Agnew
1992, 194; Toal 2017, 39–41) tend to favour a large analytical angle when it
comes to studying actors’ discursive practices.
This article studies how the discursive practice of a specific group led to a
‘geopoliticisation’ of the EaP. That notion directly draws on that of securitisation,
developed by the Copenhagen School and based, to a large extent,
on the theoretical foundations presented above. Understanding security as a
speech act, Ole Waever defines a securitising move as one by which an issue
is discursively framed as a security problem and, thereby, removed from the
sphere of normal politics (Waever 1995, 67). Its success is mediated by
factors that are internal (“following the grammar of security”) as well as
external (“features of the alleged threat” and “social capital of the enunciator”)
(Buzan, Wæver and De Wilde 1998, 33). The notion of geopoliticisation
is thus used here to designate the discursive construction of an issue or policy
as a geopolitical matter. It can refer both to the discursive practices framing a
policy in geopolitical terms and to the resulting outcome in terms of crystallisation
of meaning. As for securitisation, the success of a geopoliticising
move is seen as being mediated by the speech’s internal adherence to the
‘grammar’ and ‘dialects’ of geopolitics and by the position of authority of the
geopoliticising actor. Its concrete operationalisation requires, however, to
specify what is meant by geopolitics.
Tracing the ‘Geopolitical’ in the EaP’s Rationale, Content and Impact
The notion of geopolitics has been used and abused—but rarely specified—in
reference to EU-Russia relations in the post-Soviet space. It has come to
mean anything, and everything, related to power politics, realpolitik, influence,
hard power, imperialism or conflict. Though not confined to this
context or issue-area (see: Deudney 1997, 93; Sloan and Gray 1999, 1), this
indeterminacy is particularly problematic in that case. First, while its use in
the context of the Ukraine crisis itself, to refer to the annexation of Crimea or
the conflict in the Donbas, appears rather straightforward, its applicability to
the ENP and the EaP is less evident and should be qualified. Second, the term
geopolitics has been heavily connoted in these debates and often invoked to
criticise Russia’s—but also the EU’s (See for instance: Boedeltje and van
Houtum 2011)—policies in the neighborhood. Just as the term ‘normative’
lost some of its conceptual value in the analysis of EU foreign policy after
becoming somehow associated with “doing good” (Sjursen 2013), the term
‘geopolitics’ has been increasingly associated with ‘doing bad’.
GEOPOLITICS 7
Geopolitics can refer to a body of theories, to the academic discipline of
political geography or to a set of state practices (including discursive ones) in
international affairs. The latter aspect, of concern here, is also the most
difficult to operationalise: the term is abundantly used outside of the scholarly
community and, even there, its contours can be broad. The most
encompassing conceptualisation includes the practice by which states and
their representatives spatialise international politics, order the space at their
border and define relations with their neighbours. This definition is favoured
in particular by the critical geopolitics scholarship, whose ontological and
epistemological positions are, as briefly evoked, close to the ones adopted by
the present article, except that the latter’s theoretical framework borrows
from the international relations literature rather than from political geography.
For instance, if one refers to Gearóid Ó Tuathail and Agnew (1992)
seminal article and to the key notions it introduced, geopoliticisation can be
understood as a form of ‘practical geopolitical reasoning’ and discourse
coalitions as being composed of ‘intellectual of statecrafts’.6
The present
article is not just concerned with geopolitics as mode of reasoning or writing
however, but also with geopolitics as a policy character attributed to the EaP.
Thus, when unpacking the latter, a minimalist definition of geopolitics is
favoured, one that allows to better grasp possible differences between the
content of EaP policies and their framing, and thereby emphasise possible
geopoliticising patterns more clearly.
In this understanding, a geopolitical endeavour is one that displays the
following features: projecting or seeking to deter hard power; reflecting
objectives or concerns related to territoriality; and consisting in actions
taken against, or at least decided in consideration of, other powers.7
A first
criteria pertains to the type of power deployed and draws in particular on
Luttwak’s classic differentiation between geopolitics as a competition for
territories and geoeconomics as a competition for markets (Luttwak 1990).
Extrapolating on this, Wigell and Vihma conceptualise geopolitics and geoeconomics
as two different geostrategies that mobilise different means (military
vs economic), proceed according to different logics (confrontation vs
selective accommodation), and provoke different reactions (counterbalancing
or bandwagoning vs under-balancing) (Wigell and Vihma 2016;
Vihma 2018; For a critique, see: Sparke 2018). A second criteria relates to the
territorialised setting of the competition or power projection endeavour. A
policy that seeks or amounts to control or integrate an external territory can,
by essence, be regarded as geopolitical. In that sense, the EU enlargement is a
geopolitical process under this criteria.8
A third criteria concerns external
actors: a policy can be considered geopolitical when it is decided or designed
not just in relation to the territory where it is deployed, but also to external
powers that may be present or influential on this territory or bordering it.
8 D. CADIER
Neither in their rationale, content or effects, the EaP and the ENP display
evident geopolitical features as defined above. Launched in 2004, the ENP aims
to foster the “economic integration and political association” of states of the
neighbourhood (East and South) with the EU (European Commission 2004; see
also: Whitman and Wolff 2010; Schumacher, Marchetti and Demmelhuber 2017).
Security considerations were in part driving this new policy: the underlying
rationale was to attempt to stabilise the periphery rather than risk seeing it
destabilise the EU (Rupnik 2007). However, the kind of threats against which the
EU wanted to guard itself by investing in the ENP was above all non-military and
de-territorialised (Christou 2010). As these threats were often striving on governance
failures, encouraging and supporting state reforms in the neighborhood was
seen as a way to enhance the EU’s security and, in this endeavour, Brussels sought
to reproduce the transformative power it successfully yielded in the enlargement
process—yet without offering membership. Membership was not explicitly
excluded, as ambiguity allowed to maximise incentives for neighbours and accommodate
those EU member states rooting for further Eastern enlargement, but in
reality it was largely excluded by the time the EaP was launched in 2009.9
The EaP’s
does partly proceed from a geo-strategic rationale, namely stabilising the periphery
(Browning and Joenniemi 2008), but it can be regarded as geopolitical only in the
maximalist understanding of the term, not in the minimalist definition adopted
here.
To foster domestic reforms, the EaP offers a set of incentives that can be
summed up by the so-called ‘three Ms’: Markets (sectorial access to the EU internal
market), Money (financial aid and loans), and Mobility (visa facilitation). Thus, it
is best described, in our view, as a structural power endeavor10
—the concept of
‘soft’, ‘normative’ or ‘civilian’ power are also sometimes used in the literature, yet
never that of ‘hard power’. The will to shape domestic markets towards the
approximation of EU norms and standards partly reflects a desire to make them
more amenable for EU businesses; thus the EaP does entail an offensive component
in that sense, but a geo-economic one. It is above all internal drivers and
dynamics have been key in bringing about the EaP: path-dependency on the part of
EU institutions (Kelley 2006) and the will to increase their agenda-setting capacity
in Brussels for the member states who promoted it (notably Poland, see below).11
As such, at least in the form in which it was designed by EU Commission and
adopted by all EU member states, in its content the EaP is not geared against other
powers—if anything, analysts tends precisely to reproach this policy with neglecting
the role of other regional powers, such as Russia or Turkey (Auer 2015;
Beauguitte, Richard and Guérin-Pace 2015).
Similarly, the impact of the EaP has been largely undirected and unspecific,
which makes it difficult to use it instrumentally. Concrete empirical studies
find that the EU did manage to foster some degree of compliance and
convergence in the Eastern neighbourhood, but that this change is above all
policy-specific and largely uncorrelated with membership prospects or the level
GEOPOLITICS 9
of interdependence with the EU (Langbein and Börzel 2015). More than
geopolitical association with either the EU or Russia, domestic actors’ preferences,
calculations and decisions remain the key mediating factor accounting
for sectorial reforms and policy change (Ademmer, Delcour and Wolczuk
2016). Furthermore, the sources of EU transformative power are multiple
and not all Brussels-controlled (e.g. donor organisations, multinational corporations,
national governments) and Russia, while having most often prevented
the kind of domestic policy change advocated by the EU in the Eastern
neighbourhood, has actually also facilitated it in some specific instances by
pushing, out of considerations for its own agenda and benefits, local actors to
adopt EU norms and standards (See: Ademmer 2016; Tolstrup 2014). All this
speaks against the prevailing images of EU–Russia relations in the Eastern
neighbourhood as a ‘geopolitical clash between two blocks’ or of the EaP as
‘geopolitical instrument’ in this battle (Cadier 2014).
The Geopoliticisation of the EaP in National and Pan-European
Contexts
Yet, both have become increasingly represented as such in European policy
debates. The section below represents a first, and necessarily incomplete,
attempt at undertaking a genealogy of this geopoliticising discourse. In order
to be as representative as possible, it focuses on two different contexts
(understood here both as setting and time period): national discussions in
two EU member states around the launch of the EaP in May 2009 and panEuropean
debates before the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis in late 2013.
Geopolitical Argumentations on the EaP in EU Member States: The Cases of
Poland and the Czech Republic
I first look at domestic discourses in Poland and the Czech Republic, notably
in the years before and around the launch of the EaP. Although the involvement
and influence of the former has been most substantial in shaping the
EaP, the empirical focus is actually placed on the latter, for three reasons.
First, albeit not comparable to that of Warsaw, Prague’s contribution has
nonetheless been meaningful, and yet received little attention. The Czech
Republic has, for instance, produced a non-paper on the Eastern dimension
of the ENP in 2007 and it was in Prague, during its holding of the rotating
Presidency of the EU Council, that the EaP was launched in May 2009
(Tulmets 2014, 205–8). Second, a clear variation in Czech Republic’s policies
towards the Eastern Neighbourhood can be identified: while the region was
largely absent from its foreign policy radar until the mid-2000s, a new focus
and activism is notable from that period onwards (Weiss 2011; Tulmets 2014;
167). This marked policy change allows to reflect on the factors that
10 D. CADIER
prompted it as well as on the discursive practices of the actors who promoted
this new preference. Third, contrary to Poland, the Czech Republic does not
share any borders with the post-Soviet space (at least since Czech Republic’s
separation from Slovakia in 1993) and its historical relationship with Russia
has been less recurrently and profoundly conflictual than in the case of
Poland. In principle, the geostrategic imperatives being less pressing, one
could hence expect Czech diplomats’ default discourse on the EaP to be less
geopolitically tainted than that of their Polish counterparts, and thus for
geopoliticising moves to be more visible.
Poland
Poland has undeniably been the main shaper behind the EaP initiative: its
first proposal to develop EU policies towards the post-Soviet space dates back
from 2003 (that is, even before its own accession to the EU or the creation of
the ENP) and what came to be known as the ‘Polish-Swedish proposal’ of
2008 eventually constituted the backbone of the EaP (‘Polish-Swedish
Proposal on the Eastern Partnership’ 2008). As such, Poland’s selfunderstanding
of this initiative, and its successful efforts in promoting it at
the EU level, have been abundantly studied (see for instance: Copsey and
Pomorska 2014; Kaminska 2014; Natorski 2007). Hence, they will only be
briefly reflected upon here.
Geopolitical thinking has been central to Poland’s investment in EU
Eastern policies and common to both its political and foreign policy elites.
The Eastern neighbourhood is, indeed, regarded in Warsaw as zone of vital
importance for national security: a Ukraine free from Moscow’s influence has
long been considered a cardinal and necessary protection against the potential
revival of Russia’s imperialism (Natorski 2007, 80; Kuzniar 1993). The
investment in the Eastern dimension of the ENP also proceeded, more
generally, from a desire to have stable, peaceful and reformed states at its
immediate border.12
Combined, these two objectives have translated into
Poland’s support for the European integration of its two Eastern neighbours,
Belarus and especially Ukraine, “sometimes more determinedly than the
neighbors themselves”(Szczepanik 2011, 63). In this context, a Polish diplomat,
who was heading the EU department at the Polish MFA at the time of
the launch of the EaP, described the initiative’s goal as being to “prepare
these countries for [approximating] the acquis communautaire” and thus
“help them to get ready” for accession.13
Beyond policy objectives, the EaP
was also articulated at times with markers of Poland’s national identity: in a
speech to the Polish Parliament in 2008, the then Foreign Minister Radosław
Sikorski presented it as a way to “fulfill the legacy” of the Jagiellonian era
(cited in: Szczepanik 2011, 55; see also: Sikorski 2013), during which the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth administrated parts of contemporary
Ukraine and Belarus.
GEOPOLITICS 11
In summary, the Polish discourse on the EaP was at least partially articulated
around geopolitical metaphors: the initiative was occasionally framed
by policy-makers and diplomats as a buffer against a feared resurgence of
Russia’s neo-imperialism, as a way to domesticate the space at Poland’s
borders and a mean to prepare countries of Eastern neighborhood for EU
membership. Casting the light on these geopolitical storylines does not
amount to claim that Poland’s investment in the EaP was strictly and only
engineered against Russia: it was also certainly conceived for the Eastern
neighbourhood countries at its borders and for Poland itself. Warsaw was,
indeed, pursuing to a great extent intra-European objectives, namely carving
out for itself a niche of specialisation in EU structures and increasing thereby
its agenda-setting capacity in Brussels. Nevertheless, the geopolitical framing
by Polish officials of the proposed EaP initiative contributed to shape its
meaning—to the extent that the proposal had to be adjusted so as to be ‘sold’
at the EU level and accepted by all member states. Nathaniel Copsey and
Pomorska (2014, 439–40) show indeed how, in an endeavour to de-politicise
the initiative and infuse it with a dose constructive ambiguity, Poland
deliberately toned down the rhetoric at the EU level and set, for the EaP,
modest bureaucratic and administrative goals.
The Czech Republic
Czech Republic’s involvement and influence in shaping the EaP has been less
substantial than Poland’s. Nevertheless, it represents an even more instructive
case for the approach specifically developed in this article.
As in Poland, intra-EU objectives explain, to a significant extent, Prague’s
investment in the EaP in the mid-2000s: it was regarded by Czech diplomacy
as a pathway towards future Eastwards enlargement (one of its priorities at
the time, see: Government of the Czech Republic 2006), as a way to cultivate
a “market niche” at the EU level and as an ideal flagship policy for its Council
Presidency (Kratochvíl and Horký 2010, 77). This change was, however, also
more specifically impulsed from within the Czech foreign policy elite by a
distinct group, based on the agendas and worldviews of its members. This
group reunited two main sociological profiles: the former dissidents, who
were advocating a stronger Czech involvement in the Eastern neighbourhood
based on their democratisation agenda (Cadier and Mikulova 2015, 84–87),
and the ‘Atlantists’ (or ‘hawks’),14
who saw it as a way to contain Russia’s
regional influence. The latter group was especially dominant in Czech foreign
policy structures in the second half of the 2000s as testified by its holding of
key positions in the MFA and by a number of atlantist decisions taken in that
period, but also by the fact the atlantist discourse had acquired quasihegemonic
status.15
This group can be characterised as a discourse coalition
in the sense that its member’s political subjectivity are articulated around a
set of distinctive storylines, metaphors, and narratives - the concept is thus
12 D. CADIER
used below to refer both to the group and to these discursive positions.
Several of these storylines and metaphors are of a geopolitical texture and, as
such, stood out in the Czech political discourse. As noted by Petr Drulák
(2013, 98), who studied the discursive practices of this group with reference
to another policy area, namely missile defense, but whose insights are equally
valid for the case of the EaP, “the Atlantist foreign policy elite which came to
power in 2006 had in general been more sensitive to the Russian threat than
its predecessors and more open to geopolitical argumentation”.
The Atlantist discourse coalition played a decisive role in putting the
Eastern Neighbourhood on the agenda of Czech foreign policy and in framing
it in geopolitical terms. Its leading figure, Alexandr Vondra, who around
that time held the positions of Minister of Foreign Affairs (2006–2007) and
of Deputy Prime Minister for European Affairs (2007–2009), called on in
2006 to “reinforce the country’s diplomatic presence” in the Eastern neighbourhood,
depicting the region as a “natural geographic priority” (Vondra
2006) even though, as mentioned, it had been absent from Prague’s radar
until then. Mr Vondra and his collaborators were active in promoting this
preference inside and outside the foreign policy system (Kratochvíl and
Tulmets 2009, 81). As such, they articulated this policy around specific
symbols and self-understandings that are central to the Czech political
culture, thereby endowing the EaP with certain meanings and providing a
script to refer to it. These articulations and script were apparent in the
discursive practice of diplomats and policy-makers.16
In the content analysis
of speeches and interviews, three storylines were identified in particular.
First, the investment in the EaP was often presented as made necessary by
Russia’s return to the canons of power politics in the post-Soviet space since
the mid-2000s. In making this point, a diplomat invoked Czech Republic’s
historical “sensitivity to signals that Russia is trying to re-create its geopolitical
ambitions, if not imperial position”.17
The image of the return
evokes a continuity between the USSR and Russia as well as in the essantial
nature of their policies: the correlated securitisation and essantialisation of
Russia is, indeed, one of the landmark of the Czech atlanticisit discourse
(Cadier 2012). For instance, a former foreign minister argued in private that
Russia’s long-term policy was to “re-establish the Soviet empire” while the
Chief of Staff of another foreign minister asserted that “there is only one
Russia”.18
In this containment narrative, the theme of energy security was
also often invoked: it is, at the same time, a domain where Russia policies
have been heavily securitised in European debates (Ciută 2010, 130–31) and
an argument set forth by Czech advocates of the EaP (Vondra 2008).
Second, the EaP was sometimes framed as a rollback policy of Russia’s
influence in the post-Soviet space. In the words of a diplomat, who directly
contributed to the drafting of the aforementioned 2007 Non-paper and who
explicitly presented himself as belonging to the atlantist group, the objective
GEOPOLITICS 13
of this initiative was to “disconnect” EU policies towards the Eastern neighbourhood
from those pertaining to Russia, since colliding the two was
amounting to “pushing [EaP countries] in the arms of Russia”. In this
context, he described the EaP as an attempt to “change the situation of
these countries” and explained Moscow’s negative reaction by the fact that
this policy might lead the EU to “take EaP countries away from Russia, while
they [Russia] still think that it’s theirs”.19
More crucially, this representation
of the EaP as a tool in a regional battle for influence also somehow transpired
in some of the declarations of Karel Schwarzenberg, the Foreign Minister at
the time. In February 2009, he warned Belarus that the recognition of
(Russia-occupied) Abkhazia and South Ossetia would jeopardise its chances
to be included in the EaP initiative to be launched three months later
(Lobjakas 2009). Similarly, pointing to one of the Minister’s declaration on
(non-aligned but undemocratic) Azerbaijan (Schwarzenberg 2008), Petr
Kratochvíl and Ondřej Horký note some “highly ambiguous statements” on
the Eastern neighbourhood on the part of Czech diplomacy, which they
explain by the conflicting aim of erecting a “protective belt of countries
between the Czech Republic and Russia” and of promoting democracy in
the region (Kratochvíl and Horký 2010, 77).
Third, the investment in the EaP was represented as a pathway towards the
European integration of post-Soviet states. The need to work towards this
integration was not only articulated with the containment narrative presented
above but also, more profoundly, with Czech Republic’s own geostrategic
position and national identity. A mental map whereby the country is
depicted as being on the “edge” of Europe and constantly risking to “fall”
into an abyss was often mobilised in advocating further enlargement as well
as the EaP.20
This abyss was traditionally characterised as the ‘East’, which in
the Czech political discourse refers less to a geographical space than to
ontological categories defining the alienated past of the Czech Republic (i.e.
communist, non-democratic and satellised to Russia)21
—in other words to
the meaning the notion had acquired in the ‘Return to Europe’ narrative. In
this context, supporting the political and economic transformation as well as
geopolitical emancipation of post-Soviet countries through the EaP was
represented as a way to further ‘push back’ the East and thus consolidating
Czech Republic’s ‘Return to Europe’ (Cadier 2012).
In summary, in the discourse of the Czech Atlantist coalition, the EaP was
at least partially articulated as policy of containment of Russia’s geopolitical
ambitions in Central Europe, of rollback of its influence in the Eastern
neighbourhood, and of preparation of post-Soviet countries accession to
the EU. As for Poland, pointing to these geopolitical storylines should not
lead to oversimplify Prague’s position: the Czech Republic, too, was pursuing
intra-EU objectives and its discourse on the EaP was also articulated with
non-geopolitical markers, such as the country’s national role conception
14 D. CADIER
(democracy promotion), historical identity (successful post-communist transition)
or national identity (Western). In addition, it is important to take into
account the specific context in which this geopoliticising discourse was
uttered. On the one hand, it should be recalled that some of these EaP
debates happened in the wake of the Russo-Georgian war of August 2008,
an event that boosted politicians’ and media attention towards the Eastern
neighbourhood and often led them to apprehend the region first and foremost
through the prism of Russia’s foreign policy behaviour. On the other
hand, the promoters of the EaP were pursing an internal agenda of generating
support for a new preference—namely a greater Czech involvement in
the Eastern neighbourhood—and as such there is always a possibility that
they might have been tempted to instrumentalise the Russia question to
advocate this preference. The mere eventuality of advocacy motives does
not invalidate the argument developed here, however, since the point is not
to pretend to unveil Czech policy-makers’ thinking on the EaP—let alone to
dispute their interpretations of regional politics—but to stress that, regardless
of intent, these articulatory practices contributed to shape the structure of
meaning in which this policy was formulated and implemented.
Several intermediary conclusions can be drawn from the analysis—and
comparison—of the Czech and Polish cases. First, instances of geopolitical
framing of the EaP were unveiled in both national contexts, including in the
period preceding the official launch of the EaP (i.e. before May 2009).
Further comparative research on the situations in other EU member states
would be welcome, but this finding is already significant in itself as the two
countries played an important role in conceiving and promoting the EaP. In
considering additional cases, it would notably be useful to investigate
whether and to what extent there is a correlation between the geopolitical
framing of the EaP and national positions on Russia. It would be interesting,
for instance, to determine whether there has been a similar tendency to
geopoliticise the EaP on the part of policy-makers from Western member
states such as the UK or Sweden, who do not share Central European
countries’ geopolitical situation or Cold War history, but that have nevertheless
adopted similar (i.e. critical) positions on Russia at the EU level.
Second, although enunciations of the geopolitical storyline on the EaP was
denoted in both national contexts, the comparison between the Polish and
Czech cases also revealed differences in how it emerged and was promoted,
which calls for contextualised analysis of each Central European state’s
positions on the EaP and Russia, rather than lumping them together in a
single, homogenous category.22
In Poland, geopolitical reasoning around the
EaP has been pervasive and featured at both the practical and formal levels—
to the extent that it was difficult to link geopoliticising practices to a specific
and distinct discourse coalition. In the Czech Republic by contrast, whose
territory is less exposed from a geo-strategic point of view and where
GEOPOLITICS 15
geopolitics had in fact generally not featured prominently in political thinking
(Drulák 2013, 2006), geopolitical argumentation featured mainly at the
practical level and could be attributed to a distinctive discourse coalition. In
this context, the concept of geopoliticisation revealed particularly useful to
capture and integrate in the analysis the articulatory practices of this coalition
as well as their implications in terms of meaning production.
Pan-European and Transatlantic Debates on the EaP and on the Signing of
an EU Association Agreement with Ukraine
Instances of geopoliticisation of the EaP have not been confined to the Polish and
Czech contexts—nor to the time period around the launch of the initiative—but
appeared in broader and latter contexts. This second sub-section traces enunciations
of the geopolitical story line in transatlantic and pan-European debates in
the year preceding the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis. It does not pretend to be able
provide a comprehensive, systematic and definitive analysis of such a wide and
diverse array of debates. Rather it focuses on two illustrative signposts, the ‘Europe
Whole and Free’ metaphor and the ‘Battle for Ukraine’ narrative, which are
denaturalised and contextualised. These two signposts have often been mobilised
by the members of a broader, pan-European and transatlantic discourse coalition
that encompasses, among others, the groups studied in the Czech and Polish
contexts. This coalition is mainly composed of state representatives, policymakers,
think tank analysts and journalists who coalesce around certain political
subjectivities and policy objectives, such as the normative attachment to strong
security and political links with the US, the support to democracy promotion
policies and a critical attitude towards Russia (On this group, see for instance:
Mikulova and Simecka 2013; Schaller 2005). They share a number of discursive
practices that have been articulated, maintained and reproduced on the occasion
of public speeches, participation to policy conferences, op-eds or declaration to the
press. As witnessed in the case of the Czech Republic, their discourse on the
Eastern neighbourhood tends to be marked in particular by a correlated securitisation
of Russia and geopoliticisation of the EaP.
The first signpost is the chain of association regularly established between
the EaP and the ‘Europe Whole and Free’ metaphor. Coined by the US
President George H. Bush in May 1989, this programmatic slogan was largely
meant to counter Gorbachev’s ‘Common Home’ motto and embody
Washington’s political vision for the European order (Hoagland 1989).
More specifically, the phrase “rearticulated in positive terms a longstanding
Cold War aspiration to roll back the Soviet Empire on the European continent”
(Toal 2017, 5). Later on, under the Clinton Presidency, this leitmotiv
was elevated as a parable for NATO’s enlargement, which was presented as
creating the institutional architecture to realise this vision. John O’Loughlin
(1999) points, for instance, to a 1997 report from the US State Department
16 D. CADIER
where, in advocating NATO enlargement to the US Congress, the
Department describes this enlargement as serving the “broader goal of a
peaceful, undivided and democratic Europe”.
In 2013, American members from the aforementioned discourse coalition
have been invoking the same motto in voicing their support to the EaP,
which they presented as a natural continuation and incarnation of this
historical dynamic, and Russia as a spoiler attempting to prevent its advent.
For instance, in a hearing to the US Senate, the Executive Vice President of a
Washington think tank influential on European affairs declared:
The EU’s Eastern Partnership initiative and future NATO enlargement do not
necessarily overlap, but they can be mutually reinforcing just as NATO and EU
enlargements have been in the post-Cold War period. Indeed, the Eastern
Partnership is the latest instrument of a common transatlantic grand strategy
[…] After 45 years of Cold War, we forged a bipartisan US policy to fulfill our
original national aims of 1945. We nearly achieved our goal, with NATO and EU
enlargement, the twin instruments of this strategy to secure a Europe whole, free,
and at peace. […] At the same time, the United States and the EU should
anticipate and counter possible Russian efforts to derail these nations’ move
toward Europe.23
This association between the EaP and the ‘Europe Whole and Free’ metaphor
was stable enough to be invoked in similar terms by the US Assistant
Secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs as well as by a Senior
Democrat member of the Committee on Foreign Relations.24
The invocation
of slogans and symbols in an endeavor to generate support for policies is
obviously quite common. It remains that the articulation of the EaP around a
metaphor associated with US-URSS rivalry in Europe and NATO enlargement
amount to connoting the policy geopolitically.
The second signpost relates to the framing, in the months preceding the
Ukraine crisis, of the EU-Russia geo-economic competition in the shared
neighbourhood as a geopolitical one. From Spring to Fall of 2013, tensions
were mounting between Brussels and Moscow around the signing by Ukraine
of an AA with the EU: after several years of negotiations, the Ukrainian
President seemed suddenly ready to pull the plug on the process, out of
domestic calculations and because of Russia’s pressure.25
In this context,
various commentators and notably members of the studied discourse coalition,
characterised the situation as a geopolitical ‘battle’ for Ukraine in which
the EaP was the EU’s ‘weapon’. For instance, in June of that year (i.e. before
the imposition of trade restrictions by Moscow), the Lithuanian foreign
minister, whose country was to hold the EU Council Presidency and host
the EaP Summit in November, described it in the following terms:
This is a geopolitical battle for Europe, if I may, and we should win Ukraine. We
can continue intellectual debates about human rights and things like that but we
will find ourselves on the side of losers (cited in: Peach 2013).
GEOPOLITICS 17
Similarly, in a press article from early August, a journalist and columnist
with substantial experience and visibility on matters related to Central and
Eastern Europe characterised Ukraine’s decision to sign an AA with the
EU as being about “countering Russia’s influence” and insisted that, as
such, it “mattered to Europe” (The New York Times 2013). In that article,
the Lithuanian foreign minister is also cited on its depiction of the EU
Agreement with Ukraine: it is “not just technical negotiations with just
another partner; it is a geopolitical process”. In the following months, as
Russia rhetorical and coercive pressure on Ukraine intensified and as EU–
Russia tensions grew contingently, the mainstream European press often
resorted to geopolitical metaphors borrowed from the lexicon of the Cold
War to characterise the situation26
: “bloc”; “win over Ukraine”; “geopolitics
unfolding in real time”; “Yalta”; “drawing Ukraine away from
Russia’s sphere of influence”; “going west” (Chaffin 2013; The
Economist 2013b, 2013c). Relying on comparable framing and making
similar recommendations, some think tank analysts called on the EaP to
take a “bolder strategic direction” in the “geopolitical contest with Russia”
so as to avoid seeing countries of Eastern Europe becoming “puppets of
the Kremlin” (Techau 2013). These three illustrative utterances of the
‘battle for Ukraine’ narrative are both representative of the variety in
profiles of its enunciators (policy-makers, journalists and think tankers)
and symptomatic as regard the period of their utterance (i.e. before the
outbreak of the Maidan movement and Russia’s military intervention).
Without amounting to a full fledge radiography of the pan-European
and transatlantic debates on the EaP, the focused analysis of these two
specific signposts shed light on the occurrence of geopoliticising practices
in this arena as well. It also revealed a proximity, in terms of storylines
mobilised and meaning conveyed, with what was observed in the primary
empirical case study devoted to the Czech Republic and Poland. This
could somehow be interpreted as the mark of an increased influence of
Central European member states on EU policy debates on Russia, which
has been documented elsewhere.27
More profoundly though, what this
rhetorical proximity actually reveals is that the geopoliticisation of the EaP
cannot be summed up to an uploading, at the EU level, of Central
European foreign policy elites’ practical geopolitical reasoning: this geopoliticisation
has been promoted and sustained by the discursive practices
of a broader, transatlantic discourse coalition that relied on much more
extensive resources in terms of knowledge production.
Conclusion
The practical geopolitical reasoning around the EaP has been articulated,
promoted and reproduced within the European polity by an identifiable
18 D. CADIER
discourse coalition, as early as in the year of the launch of the initiative and
the months preceding the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis. The strength of this
geopoliticising move—a notion set forth in this article to characterise the
discursive construction of an issue as a geopolitical problem—has stemmed
from its adherence to the ‘grammar’ of geopolitics (reproducing the dialect of
the Cold War in particular), from the ‘social capital’ of its enunciators (state
representatives up to the level of foreign ministers and commentators with
significant policy and media visibility), and from the ‘feature of the threat’
(geopolitical texture of Russia’s own objectives and foreign policy behaviour).
In addition to the impact of the Ukraine crisis and of Russia’s actions in that
context, this geopoliticising discourse and its effects constitute a complementary
explanation of the growing EU tendency to approach its Eastern neighbourhood
through a geopolitical prism. At the very least, this pre-existing
discourse enabled this tendency, endowing it with meaning as well as with a
script and a certain degree of legitimacy.
Through the case of the EaP, this article complements previous studies on
the broader political framing of EU-Russia relations. As noted by Tom
Casier, this framing is increasingly characterised by “one-sided negative
geopolitical reading obfuscating underlying complexity” and tends to produce,
as such, “abstract enemy-like structures” (Casier 2016, 773). From a
theoretical point of view, thanks to its emphasis on actors’ discursive practices
and to its understanding of meaning as being relational, a discourse
analysis lens, built around the notions of articulation, geopoliticisation and
discourse coalition, allowed to shed light on how these structures emerge and
are maintained and reproduced. The notion of geopoliticisation provided a
conceptual link between discursive practices and policy implications while
that of discourse coalition permitted to integrate actors in the analysis and
explanation, without falling in the pitfalls of, either, generalising indiscriminately
about a national or regional policy community (as is sometimes done
about Central Europe) or of denouncing a ‘cabal’ of individuals (as conspiracy
theories tend to do). More specifically, the concept of discourse coalition
allowed both to distinguish discourse entrepreneurs within a national context
—namely that of the Czech Republic—and to study their links or integration
with actors beyond that context. From an empirical point of view, the case of
the EaP showed a tendency on the part of European actors to geopoliticise
not just Russia’s behaviour but also, to some extent, the EU’s own policies. As
such, it permits to account, at least partially, for the notable discrepancy
between the “defensive nature” of the ENP and the “wildly ambitious rhetoric”
that accompanied its Eastern branch in particular (Haukkala 2016, 5).
The geopoliticisation of the EaP has implications for how this policy
has been implemented and for regional politics more broadly. It is
important, however, not to misrepresent these consequences or to overinflate
them to the extent of denying the impact of other factors or the
GEOPOLITICS 19
agency of other actors, as is sometimes done in the debates on the
Ukraine crisis. In emphasising that patterns of discursive geopoliticisation
of the EaP pre-date the outbreak of this conflict, this article has argued
that this discourse cannot be interpreted simply as a reaction to Russia’s
coercive actions in Ukraine. What it has not argued, though, is that this
discourse has, alone and in itself, caused the outbreak of the Ukraine
crisis. Indeed, this crisis cannot be summed up to a mere and mechanical
externality of the EU-Russia geo-economic competition in the post-Soviet
space or to its geopolitcisation in some European quarters, although this
competition and this discourse certainly played a role of incubator.
Counter-factual reasoning is useful to illustrate this point: if
Yanukovych had signed the AA but remained in power Russia would
probably not have annexed Crimea; if he had not signed the AA but the
Maidan had not happen, the EU would have probably looked the other
way. It was above all dynamics internal to Ukraine and Russia that led the
crisis to escalate and take the dramatic proportions we know. The dysfunctional
and corrupt nature of Ukraine’s state structure led internal
divisions and disagreement over the AA to escalate into a revolt and to
the fall of the government. Prompted in great deal by this fall, Russia’s
military intervention was also itself driven by strategic objectives and
domestic drivers unrelated to the EaP (Allison 2014; Cadier and Light
2015). Similarly, while it might have been partly influenced by it, it’s hard
to see why Russian policy-makers’ perceptions and interpretations of the
EaP would have been solely determined by the geopoliticising discourse
presented in this article: they have also been exposed, indeed, to EU
official communication as well as to other (i.e. non-geopolitical) discourses
on the EaP while, in addition, idiosyncrasies specific to the
Russian domestic context—such as the shift in Russia’s ideational representation
of the EU and the growing tendency to characterise the latter as
an ‘ontological other’(Makarychev and Yatsyk 2015; Neumann 2016)—
might have played a role in shaping these perceptions.
It remains that the actual and specific consequences of the geopoliticisation
of the EaP are nonetheless significant, yet often overlooked.
First, it provided ample rhetorical ammunitions to Moscow’s denunciation
of the EU’s alleged ‘expansionism’ and to its framing of the EaP as
a ‘sphere of influence’ policy: some of the geopolitical utterances transcribed
above have, in fact, been explicitly showcased by Russian officials
(see for instance: Deutsche Welle 2009; Pop 2009). Second and
most crucially, the geopoliticising discourse sent the wrong signal to
local elites in the Eastern neighbourhood, about an EU determination to
‘prevail’ over Russia in ‘winning over’ these states (which was not
confirmed when the conflict escalated militarily), but also more problematically
about Brussels’ willingness to lower or even set aside the EaP’s
20 D. CADIER
conditionality criteria and benchmarks for reform in order to do so.
During the pivotal weeks of Fall 2013, this went beyond simply conveying
an impression at the level of public discourse in fact, as proponents
of the geopolitical storyline invoked it in EU decision-making
deliberations: during a series of crucial meetings, “Poland and Lithuania
persuaded other member states—most crucially Germany—to drop the
conditions attached to the [Association] agreement [with Ukraine] as
Russia’s success in enticing Yanukovich away from the EU became
clear” (Youngs 2017, 118). In that context, the “main motivation for
Lithuania [and, arguably, for Poland] was geopolitical: it saw 2013 as a
crucial moment for preventing Ukraine’s fall into Russia’s sphere of
influence” (Raik 2016, 247). Yet, abandoning the EaP’s conditionality
criteria out of geopolitical thinking undermines EU policies in the
region and deserves their long-term objective of promoting reforms,
not least as it feed the partial reform equilibrium in these countries
and allow local elites to use the EU-Russia contest to divert attention
away from reforms (Cadier and Charap 2017). Tellingly, as early as
April 2013, a prominent Ukrainian expert, asked about how the EU
could help her country, called on Brussels to “agree a pause in the
enlargement debate”, “deliver a clear message to Ukraine” and “stop
with the unnecessary rhetoric about competition over Ukraine with
Russia” (Shumylo-Tapiola 2013; see also: Kudelia 2013). Third, one
can only wonder to what extent the essentialist script articulated by
the geopolitcising discourse coalition fed into the EU’s relative blindness
regarding both the evolution of Russia’s foreign policy and the
strategic implications of the EaP. It is rather paradoxical indeed that
while securitising Russia as a dangerous and immutable geopoliticallydriven
foe, this coalition did not anticipate or warned against Moscow’s
potential geopolitical reaction to the EaP. Whether the EU has a strategic
interest or moral imperative in confronting Russia geopolitically
over the orientations of the countries of the Eastern neighbourhood is a
political question to be settled by member states and their representatives.
In any case, regardless of the ends actually agreed upon, framing
as a geopolitical mean in that competition a policy (the EaP) that is not
equipped for such use appears un-strategic. In sum, this article has thus
provided a theoretical and empirical account of a pattern of geopolitical
thinking that has the potential to somehow weaken, rather than
strengthen, the EU’s strategic posture in its Eastern neighbourhood.
Notes
1 As emphasised by Kuus (2015, 47, 36), “geopolitical argumentation [is a] politicised
form of analysis crafted for specific reasons in specific places”. Hence, claims about the
GEOPOLITICS 21
world are to be “studied in terms of where they are produced and where they circulate”,
which calls for “empirically detailed case studies”.
2 Most of the interviews cited have been conducted in Prague and Warsaw during two
main periods: early 2009 and Spring 2013. More profoundly, the article draws on a
more extensive, year-long empirical fieldwork conducted in Prague by the author in
the year 2008–2009.
3 What is presented here is only a very brief account of a rich, dense and diverse
literature. It places the emphasis in particular on what is often designated as the poststructuralist
branch of discourse analysis. For a detailed overview of discourse analysis
theories and methods, see for instance Carta and Morin (2014), Dunn and Neumann
(2016), Jørgensen and Phillips (2002), and Milliken (1999).
4 The Cold War can, indeed, be understood as a configuration defined by a “particular
discursive structure [where] the East–West relationship is constructed as one of
hostility and clash of political, economic and social orders” (Risse 2011, 599).
5 As defined by Frank Fisher (2003, 87), storylines “function to condense large amounts
of factual information inter- mixed with the normative assumptions and value orientations
that assign meaning to them”.
6 Ó Tuathail and Agnew (1992, 194) distinguish practical geopolitical reasoning (that of
practitioners, statespersons, politicians) from formal geopolitical reasoning (that of
strategic thinkers and public intellectuals). While the latter tend to have “highly
formalized rules of statement”, the former relies on “narratives and binary distinctions
found in societal mythologies”.
7 This minimalist definition is close to Deudney’s (1997) ‘realist’ definition (“power
competition between major states in peripheral areas”) and to what Ó Tuathail and
Agnew (1992, 191) designate as the ‘classic’ definition (“actions taken against other
powers, such as invasions, battles and the deployment of military force”).
8 Kazharski and Makarychev (2015, 334) note for instance that, by integrating Romania
and Bulgaria in 2007, the EU became a geopolitical actor in the Black Sea.
9 As noted by Hiski Haukkala (2016), rather than an aspirational power projection endeavor,
the ENP amounts to an “essentially defensive policy meant to stave off demands, expectations
and obligations both from new members and prospective neighbours”.
10 In Susan Strange’s (1994, 24–25) classic definition, structural power refers to the
“power to shape and determine the structures of the political economy within which
other states, their political institutions and their economic enterprises” have to operate.
(Strange 1994, 24–25)
11 To be sure, the coming into being of the EaP was not totally disjointed from geopolitical
events, as it is in the official resolution adopted in reaction to the RussoGeorgian
conflict of August 2008 that the European Council asked the Commission
to accelerate the set up of this policy (European Council 2008). Yet, this should be less
read as a retaliatory move or strategic response to the conflict than as the outcome of
intra-European bargaining: the member states advocating the imposition of sanctions
against Russia after the conflict accepted to lift their demand in exchange for the
acceleration of the EaP initiative.
12 Comparing to Germany’s rational in supporting the 2004 EU enlargement, a Polish
diplomat, who is said to have been one of the co-author of the 2006 internal MFA
document that latter constituted the basis of the Polish-Swedish proposal, emphasised
that it was in “Poland’s interest to have civilized states at its borders”. Interview at the
Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Warsaw, May 2013.
13 Interview with a Polish diplomat, London, April 2013.
22 D. CADIER
14 The label Atlantists is used here as it is the one favoured by Czech analysts (see for
instance Drulák 2013) as well as by practitioners claiming their belonging to this group
(interviews conducted by the author).
15 On this group and its members, their discourse and their influence, see: (Cadier 2012).
16 As noted by Drulák (2013, 96–97), the Atlantists’ geopolitical rhetoric was indeed
mainly observable in private conversations and off-record discussions with policy
makers, but rarely present in public discourse. It featured, in other words, at the
level of practical rather than formal geopolitical reasoning.
17 Interview at the Security Department, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech
Republic, June 2009.
18 Interview with a former Foreign Minister of the Czech Republic, Prague,
February 2011; Interview at the Minister’s Office, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the
Czech Republic, May 2013.
19 Interview with a diplomat, Embassy of the Czech Republic to the United States,
May 2010.
20 Interview at the South-Eastern Europe Department, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the
Czech Republic, July 2009.
21 Thus, by projecting Czech Republic’s own image onto post-Soviet countries, advocates
of the EaP invoked a historical responsibility and moral imperative for Prague to
support their transition as well as European integration. (Tulmets 2014)
22 For detailed and comparative case studies on other Central and Eastern European EU
member states, see Kuus (2007), Raik (2016), and Tulmets (2014). Kirsti Raik (2016,
247) explains for instance that “the Baltic support to European-oriented reforms in the
Eastern neighbourhood merged value-oriented and geopolitical motivations” and that
this “geopolitical motive to support Eastern neighbors represents continuity in the old
existential security problem”.
23 “A US Strategy for Europe’s East: Testimony by Damon M. Wilson”, Hearing on A
Pivotal Moment for the Eastern Partnership: Outlook for Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia,
Belarus, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations
(Subcommittee on European Affairs), 14th November 2013. Available at: https://
www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Wilson_Testimony.pdf
24 Testimony by Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria
Nuland, Hearing on A Pivotal Moment for the Eastern Partnership: Outlook for
Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Belarus, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, US Senate Committee
on Foreign Relations (Subcommittee on European Affairs), 14th November 2013.
Available at: https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Nuland_Testimony_
REVISED.pdf ; Eliot Engel, “United States Must Stand Firm Against Russian
Bullying in Europe”, Oped on the Eastern Partnership, available at: https://democrats-
foreignaffairs.house.gov/news/press-releases/engel-op-ed-eastern-partnership
25 To pressure the government in Kyiv, Moscow notably instigated a custom blockade at
the Russo-Ukrainian border in August (The Economist 2013a)
26 The invocation of Cold War imagery obviously served the purpose of attracting the
attention of Western audiences in spite of their lack of acquaintance with the region
and of the technical complexity of the EU’s Association Agreements.
27 Merje Kuus (2015) cites, for instance, two European policy professionals—one from a
(formerly) ‘new’ and one from an ‘old’ member state—who concur in noting that the
GEOPOLITICS 23
member states from Central and Eastern Europe have “strongly influenced” the EU’s
position and discourse on Russia, notably towards greater “geopolitical argumentation”.
Funding
This work was made possible financially by the funding received in the framework of the The
Transatlantic Post-Doc Fellowship for International Relations and Security (TAPIR).
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