The escalating rivalry between the EU and Russia in their shared neighborhood creates important economic, political, and legal challenges for the lands in between. Belarus and Ukraine have received proposals of integration from both the EU and Russia. However, the extents to which they accepted these offers differ and result from a multitude of factors as well as their interplay affecting the policy choices of their governments. International integration is a foreign policy question, but it has a strong domestic dimension too. Explaining various integration stances demands considering a country's foreign and internal affairs. Alla Leukavets applies here Putnam's two-level game-theoretical approach in combination with findings from comparative neighborhood Europeanization and democracy promotion studies, as well as Levitsky/Way's linkages-and-leverage-model. She develops various actor-centered and structural explanatory variables and applies them in the subsequent empirical analysis. Her research results benefit from triangulation through primary documents analysis and semi-structured interviews with elites and experts in Minsk, Moscow, Brussels, and Washington, DC. The book analyses how the simultaneity of European and Eurasian integration challenged the two countries to make a major strategic integration choice. The study sheds light on the reasons for and genesis of the Ukraine crisis, and on how external actors, such as the EU, can succeed in facilitating domestic reforms in Eastern Partnership countries.

In this well-researched and detailed book, the editors provide an extensive and critical analysis of post-Soviet regional integration. After almost two decades of unfulfilled integration promises, a new _ improved and functioning _ regime emerged in th

Russia's impact on EU policy transfer to the post-Soviet space has not been as negative as often perceived. EU policies have traveled to countries and issue areas, in which the dependence on Russia is high and Russian foreign policy is increasingly assertive. This book explores Russia's impact on the transfer of EU policies in the area of Justice, Liberty, and Security and energy policy - two policy areas in which countries in the EU's Eastern neighborhood are traditionally strongly bound to Russia. Focusing especially on Armenia and Georgia, it examines whether it is the structural condition of interdependence, the various institutional ties and similarities of neighboring countries with the EU and Russia, or their concrete foreign policy actions that have the greatest impact on domestic policy change in the region. The book also investigates how important these factors are in relation to domestic ones. It identifies conditions under which different degrees of EU policy transfer occur and the circumstances under which Russia exerts either supportive or constraining effects on this process. This book will be of key interest to students and scholars of EU and European politics, international relations and comparative politics.

Traditionally Belarus has always had a special status in Russia’s foreign policy. Russia’s approach towards a key political and military ally and a “Slavic brother” was always an indicator of how Russia would see the optimal relationships with other countries of the post-Soviet space. At this moment Belarus-Russia relations are evolving in unexpected ways. The two interconnected crises – the Belarusian mass protests of 2020 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – have had a profound impact on the Belarusian regime and society, the regional security and Russian policy towards Belarus. This book explores the ongoing development of Belarus-Russia relations and discusses the future of the relationship. This edited volume reviews the state of the relationship and underlines key emergent trends of Belarus’s and Russia’s policies towards each other to identify new mechanisms and practices as they shape into a new model. The book is comprised of in-depth empirical contributions in a range of interdisciplinary perspectives on cooperation in political, economic, security, media, and societal domains within a broader regional context.

Do Russia and the European Union have any substantial influence over the political trajectories of post-Soviet states? Shedding new light on the interplay between domestic and external drivers of regime change, Jakob Tolstrup analyzes the impact of Russia and the EU on the democratization and autocratization processes in Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine.

This book analyses recent Russian-European interaction, including Russia' s relations with the Baltic States; it discusses the development of Russia' s approach to the new security architecture in Europe resulting from the enlargement of both the EU and NATO, and assesses the prospects for greater Russian engagement in European security frameworks.

In light of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and destabilization of Ukraine, West-Russia relations have so dramatically deteriorated that talk of a new Cold War has become routine. NATO’s role in Europe is again in the spotlight, with experts and policymakers pondering whether the Alliance needs to go back to its historical roots and re-calibrate itself as an instrument of defence from and containment of Russia. At the same time, cooperation between Russia and the West has not collapsed altogether coordinate on issues such as Iran’s nuclear programme. Clearly, tensions over Ukraine are so strong that the risk of a breakdown in relations cannot be ruled out. The contributions to this volume, the result of an international conference jointly organized by the Istituto Affari Internazionali and the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings, analyze the dramatic shift in Europe’s strategic context and explore the question of whether Russia and the West can contain tensions, manage competition, and keep cooperating on issues of mutual concern.

This definitive portrait of American diplomacy reveals how the concept of the West drove twentieth-century foreign policy, how it fell from favor, and why it is worth saving. Throughout the twentieth century, many Americans saw themselves as part of Western civilization, and Western ideals of liberty and self-government guided American diplomacy. But today, other ideas fill this role: on one side, a technocratic "liberal international order," and on the other, the illiberal nationalism of "America First." In The Abandonment of the West, historian Michael Kimmage shows how the West became the dominant idea in US foreign policy in the first half of the twentieth century -- and how that consensus has unraveled. We must revive the West, he argues, to counter authoritarian challenges from Russia and China. This is an urgent portrait of modern America's complicated origins, its emergence as a superpower, and the crossroads at which it now stands.

This book maps changing definitions of statehood in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus as a result of their exclusion from an expanding Europe. The authors examine the perceptions of the place of each state in the international political system and its foreign policy choices, and draw comparisons across the region.

The future of Europe's east is open. Can the societies of this vast region become more democratic and secure and integrate into the European mainstream? Or are they destined to become failed, fractured lands of grey mired in the stagnation and turbulence historically characteristic of Europe's borderlands? How and why is Russia seeking to influence these developments, and what is the future of Russia itself? How should the West engage?