A European Country Outside Europe: EU Enlargement and the Problematic of Exclusion

Abstract

Since the late 1990s there has been an upsurge in the Russian discourse on the conflict-generating effects of EU policies that hamper the prospects for the productive development of the ‘strategic partnership’¹⁶ While previously the EU figured in the Russian political and analytical discourse in the unproblematically benign modality, in contrast to NATO, whose eastward enlargement preoccupied Russian critical discussion for the entire decade, the end of the 1990s witnessed a profound rethinking of Russia’s relations with the EU as not necessarily cooperative and carrying a strong conflict potential. It is possible to date this reorientation to the 1999 military operation in Kosovo, the European support for which arguably functioned as a ‘wake-up call’ for Russian politicians and analysts, who until then had kept the EU insulated from criticism and maintained, in various forms, Gorbachev’s aspirations for the ‘Common European Home’ as the ultimate telos of Russian foreign policy (see Ulykaev, 1999; Holmogorov, 2004). In a more substantive way, the awareness of the conflictual potential of EU-Russian relations was enhanced by the process of EU enlargement. Ironically, while the NATO enlargement, strongly criticised in Russia, could only pose a threat to Russia in barely conceivable scenarios, the EU enlargement, whose implications for Russia are manifold and concrete, was until the end of the 1990s viewed as a beneficial process, in line with Russia’s own visions of its ‘integration into Europe’.