Russia's Strategic Partnership with Europe

Even after launching ESDP --European Spatial Development Perspective-- in 1999, the EU lacked strategic vision in assessing the potential of Russia as a major military power (Forsberg 2004); despite emphasis by the first Putin administration on Russia's aligning itself with the Euro-Atlantic community (Lynch 2003;10-12; Averre 2005), there were few signs of political will to construct a genuine strategic framework for the relationship. Despite an extensive array of institutional arrangements, the deficit of common understandings based on shared interests and the complexity of both sides' decision-making processes in the EU's case, various loci of decision-making, also involving new member states from central Europe and the Baltics which have complicated historical relations with Russia, and in the Russian case the influence on the executive of numerous bureaucratic agencies and interest groupsnarrowed the possibilities to build trust.

Russia's Sovereign Globalization Rise, Fall and Future | Chatham House - Jan 2016 |

Russia's relationship with the global economy has developed quite differently: it has been an arc. In 2000 the Putin presidency began by committing Russia to deeper engagement with the global economy and its governance, a goal actively supported by the West. By 2007, the mid-point of this period, every strand of Russia's relationship with the international economic system had thickened and strengthened significantly: Russia had just chaired the G8 for the first time and was soon to call for `modernizing alliances' with the West. But today Russia's president speaks of minimizing dependence on the West while, for the first time since the end of the Cold War, the West now seeks to restrict, rather than promote, Russia's integration into the global economy. On no other issue have the outcomes departed so comprehensively from the original intentions of Russia and the West alike.

What explains this remarkable reversal? The answer lies in the working out of a central tension between two fundamental but opposing impulses in the Putin project: to re-establish a strong, centralized and controlling state and to build a prosperous country through integration into the global economy. The first has entailed strong centralized state control over citizens and institutions (in Russian parlance, the vertikal of power), while the second has entailed autonomous, horizontal flows of goods and money across borders, linking Russia to actors and jurisdictions beyond its formal reach.