The Ukraine Crisis as an Unintended Consequence of the EU’s Public Diplomacy

Under the Eastern Partnership the EU promoted a narrative that adoption of EU norms and values, and closer relations with the EU would lead to positive change in eastern neighborhood countries, including Ukraine. Through various public diplomacy initiatives the EU communicated this narrative to the Ukrainian public and civil society. Form a Constructivist perspective, public diplomacy can be understood as the practice of influencing a foreign audience through discourse (Nye 2004, Cull 2010) and the “communication of narratives that embody key norms about a society” (Cross 2013). This paper portrays how the EU’s public diplomacy has unintentionally contributed to the Maidan revolution, in which the Ukrainian public has responded to the EU’s narrative by taking it more literally than originally intended. As a consequence, despite the EU’s emphasis on separating the promotion of democracy and human rights in the eastern neighborhood from geopolitical matters, the EU took part in a process that led to regime change in Ukraine and an armed conflict involving Russia. Referring to hermeneutic theory on the transformation of meaning in the process of communication, this paper examines how the EU’s narrative was used during the Maidan protests. It analyzes the messages communicated in EU public diplomacy towards Ukraine, in media and social media releases, bulletins, and in connection with cultural and educational events organized by the EU Delegation to target the Ukrainian public before 2013. The paper analyzes the discourse of Maidan activists to understand how the narrative conveyed by the EU was reinterpreted and transformed. It opens a more general debate about an actor’s limits of controlling the impact of its public diplomacy on a receptor who interprets the communicated narratives through his or her own prim of values, beliefs and interests.