Vesalius College

Ukraine has long been considered as a bone of contention between the European Union and Russia which could eventually lead to a geographic split of the country. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and unrest in the East of Ukraine are often quoted as example of a conflict between pro-European Ukrainians and pro-Moscow Russophones. This interpretation, however, fails to explain the fact that the Maidan activists included both pro-European activists, anti-European conservative forces and a major Russian-speaking population of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv. Neither can it explain why the Russophone population in the South and some Eastern regions of Ukraine strongly supported European trajectory of Ukraine. To address the deadlock in understanding the mixed dynamics with the situation in Ukraine this article traces the evolution of the relationships between the EU-Ukraine-Russia across four major dimensions: internal political practices, economic, international politics and ideological dimension. It attributes more agency to Ukraine and argues that Kyiv trajectory is defined by different choices the Ukrainian political class, business elites and broader society made in different dimensions.

In 2003, after the Georgian President Eduard Shevarnadze tried to legitimize electoral fraud in order to prolong his power, a united opposition movement headed by the young lawyer Mikheil Saakashvili initiated public protests against the corrupt regime and removed the old political elite from power. Saakashvili supporters, representatives of the civil society and opposition parties, flooded central squares of the Georgian capital bringing hundreds of roses. Those flowers were just the first signs of serious changes that were to come in the post-Soviet space. One year later, in November 2004, thousands of Ukrainian citizens, wearing headscarves and bandages of orange color and freezing for several weeks in the tents at the central Independence square of Kiev, actually asserted the right to choose their president. Both explosions of public protests brought to power new democratic leaderships that assumed office soon after that. Thousands of people present at the inauguration of both Presidents could not check their tears. Later on, in late March 2005 the leaders of the organized public protests in the capital of the formerly Soviet Republic of Kyrgyzstan seized power ousting from the office President Akayev with little resistance from his side. The analysis of the repercussions of these internal developments for the regional system of international relations should be started from the definition of the major factors and processes, which shaped the post-soviet space architecture in the past decade. The first among these is the process of state and nation-building in the Newly Independent States. New political elites in the former Soviet states had a certain vision of their state-projects which, as a rule, harbored Euro-Atlantic aspirations and, in fact, removed relations with Russia as well cooperation in the post-Soviet space from the list of priorities in their foreign policy agendas. Second, these aspirations, along with the changes in Europe and its periphery, resulted in the involvement of outside players in the post-soviet region - US, NATO, EU and the Western European states, and, some regional actors, i.e. Turkey, China, Poland, etc. The third actor in the post-Soviet space remains Russia, which was considerably irritated by the emergence by the aforementioned (f)actors in its Near Abroad, since Moscow had its own quite different vision for the development of this space. However, despite those three (f)actors worked in diametrically opposite directions and their relations were rather frequently complicated, this interaction did not produce serious tensions in the formerly Soviet space, which could shake the regional system of international relations. As a result, 14 years after the collapse of the USSR, the regional international system still could not find its stable equilibrium. It rather found itself in the situation of unstable equilibrium which could not last for ever.

"The book pursues a mixed methodological approach. The authors combine constructivist and post-structuralist theories in sociology. The former element implies the use of discourse analysis whereas the latter invokes the use of opinion polls and focus groups presented in Chapter 7. This is an important part of the book. While it is acknowledged that foreign policy is not a primary concern in the US, the authors demonstrate that the situation is different in Europe—a continent which accommodates 50 states—and even more so in Eastern Europe where a number of allegedly internal issues have heavily shaped inter-state relations, including post-Soviet integration, the status of the Russian language and Russia's Black Sea fleet. This argument becomes even more valid given the Russian–Ukrainian war and annexation of Crimea. The quantitative analysis shows no generalisable correlation between respondents' attitude to EU membership and their demographic profile. Economic performance, though, seems to be an important explanatory variable in people's attitudes to the EU across these states (p. 208). This is an important finding since it challenges conventions about the role that ethnic identity or social background play in the differences between Westernisers and Slavophiles."

The research of Eurasian regionalism mostly focuses on the Eurasian core, for example, Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, which have been pursuing a more exclusive and closer form of integration – Customs Union/Eurasian Economic Union. Other countries of the post-Soviet space are often described as post-Soviet ‘escapists’ or ‘isolationists’ and mostly discounted in the analyses of the Eurasian regionalism. The paper looks at six post-Soviet states, who opted out from the Eurasian Economic Union, and analyse their interaction with the EEU. The paper argues that despite tensions in relations with Russia, most of these countries are reluctant to entirely disrupt their economic relations with the post-Soviet Eurasia. The paper argues that six countries of the post-Soviet Eurasian periphery effectively pursue policies of a looser form association with the Eurasian core. This finding allows to argue that Eurasian regionalism, similarly to its European model, consists of the core and outer circle. The outer circle is featured by overlapping regional arrangements and growing presence of external powers and growing number of transit and trade flows linking this Eurasian periphery with the West and Asia.

esearch on Russian foreign policy has until recently been dominated by conventional descriptive studies based on politicized and moralizing either pro-Russian or anti-Russian narratives. Some constructivist researchers have tried to produce more reflective studies grounded in modern theories of international relations. Much has been written about Russia’s uneasy relations with Europe both in Russia and the West. However, there has been a noticeable lack of intellectual effort to apply postcolonial analysis to this problem. The book by Viacheslav Morozov is an interesting attempt to bridge international relations with postcolonial theory in Russian studies.

Chapter 1 of the book makes a case for the application of postcolonial theory to gain a deeper understanding of the tensions and contradictions of Russia’s international standing. Specifically, it advances the thesis of Russia as a “subaltern empire.”1 The concept of subaltern is borrowed from postcolonial theory and refers, according to Morozov, to an oppressed nation deprived of subjectivity and ability to articulate its own narrative. By combining the two concepts, “subaltern” and “empire,” the book argues that the country is simultaneously part of both the global imperial core and the Western periphery. This mixed experience has resulted in a unique state of Russian identity, which Morozov defines as “hybrid subjectivity,” another term borrowed from postcolonial studies.

Hybrid subjectivity, according to Morozov’s interpretation of postcolonial studies, is a situation when the colonized subject is able to mimic the discourse of the colonizer, thus subverting it and making colonial domination a profoundly ambiguous phenomenon. To illustrate this condition, Morozov uses the example of the group of Hindus, who study the Gospel but refuse to accept that it was introduced to them by Europeans. Similarly to Indians, who accept the universality of Christian values, but refuse to acknowledge their origin in the European culture, Russia, [End Page 463] even when it opposes the West, nevertheless frames its own demands in the “Western” language (Pp. 23–24). Drawing on this frame of analysis, the chapter concludes that the added value of the postcolonial perspective is its ability to explain uneasiness in Russian–European relations and to demonstrate that the only subject on the horizon of Russian politics is the West itself (Pp. 6, 157–164).

Chapter 2 of the book provides a critical overview of several strands of the reflectivist international relations literature (postcolonial, constructivist, and critical revisions of the English school). In particular, the book argues that a variety of constructivist scholars, especially those who explicitly pursue the task of theorizing Russian schools of international relations, eventually end up analyzing their own identity rather than the ontology, epistemology, and methodology of the field. Furthermore, the book argues that even though separate constructivist studies identified similar patterns of the discursive landscape in Russia, China, Iran, and Japan, most of them still pursue a case-focused approach, which does not allow generalizations about the nature of identity, discourse, and othering mechanisms. Postcolonial theory, according to Morozov, allows a comparative perspective and can account for this pattern (P. 44).

Another limitation of the constructivist school, namely, its in-ability to take into account material factors, is addressed in chapter 3. In describing Russia’s economic dependency on the West, Morozov combines approaches by Alexander Etkind, Boris Kagarlitsky, and Vsevolod Sergeev. He concludes that external economic rationale (demand for fur, hemp flax, timber, grain, and currently gas imported by Russia to Europe) reveal the interrupted pattern of the country’s uneven and combined development as a semiperiphery of the capitalist core over the past several centuries (P. 89). The persistence of this extractive economy model leads to identification between the security apparatus and the state per se. The preponderance of a centralized and militarized state with its grip over the economy, as well as the persistence of resource-oriented economic development has constituted the two main distinctive features of Russia up to today (P. 94). The colonization of vast Eurasian space by Russian elites strengthened this pattern and eventually led...