One or Many Foreign Policies? The Significance of National Discourses on Russia in EU Member States

This paper investigates the relationship between national identity construction in selected EU member states, notably Germany, France, Britain, Poland and Hungary, and the formulation of European foreign policy toward Russia. The latter is defined both as foreign policies of single EU member states and the common EU foreign policy toward Russia. To pursue this analysis, national identities in the selected countries are deconstructed in order to identify the role of the “Russia discourse” (namely perceptions of and attitudes to Russia) therein. This allows us to discern fundamental differences among the EU member states under analysis. While in Britain and France the “Russia discourse” did not play a central role in national identity construction, in Poland and Hungary Russia constituted “the other” against which national identities were constructed after 1989. Victimhood as a result of decades of Russian occupation was a crucial element of this construction. The paper argues that policy makers’ current perceptions of Russia and their foreign policy stance toward the Kremlin are deeply influenced by the role that the “Russia discourse” played in national identity construction in their respective countries. Conventional constructivism provides the theoretical framework to explore national identity construction and its role in shaping foreign policy toward Russia. As far as methodology is concerned, discourse analysis is applied to study the “Russia discourse” in the EU member states under consideration, while the causal relationship between perceptions of Russia in the case studies and the formulation of European foreign policy toward Russia will be investigated through process tracing.