From Obsolete Normative to Realpolitik in the EU and Russia Foreign Policy Relations

Growing global and regional challenges in terms of security and prosperity call for cooperation and "new type of great power" relations. Yet, both the EU and Russia took a U-turn in terms of rejuvenation of the Cold War politics announcing an astonishing overt deviation to a binary ideology fueled zero-sum game. The EU failed to transpose Russia radical twist in foreign policy into a new design of the ENP and directly recalibrating the instruments managed to address the Eastern neighbourhood. The liberal functionalist approach would have been compatible assuming Russia had maintained its Western course; here, an exclusive design of the policy based on the normative matrix might have worked, although still at risk as it was excluding other regional power dynamics, the influences of the proximity of geography and the path-dependency that seems to reveal Cold War legacies. The Russia-Georgia war of 2008 and the annexation of Crimea were just a few of the outstanding signals that Russia's assertiveness announced a reset of the power relations in the region. Hence, we reckon that it was a wrongly inspired policy choice for the EU to conclude prematurely enough that "Russia lacks the means of maintaining great-power status"(2), and consequently not predict state-like behaviour scenarios in response to a particular foreign policy pursued by the EU. In order to demonstrate the inappropriateness of the EU foreign policy design, we apply the concept of power and the regional security complex. Despite the fact that one of the pillars of the European Neighbourhood Policy is security for all, the EU has relied exclusively on policy stewardship built on a normative paradigm while miscalculating national security concerns of the Russian Federation.