Norm Collision and the Geopolitics of Regional Institutions: The EU, the Eurasian Economic Union, and the Struggle for Legitimacy in the Post-Soviet Eurasia

What happens when a region is exposed to both liberal and non-liberal normative influences, and more importantly, when these normative projects are competing with each other for primacy? This has been the case of the post-Soviet space, where tensions have emerged from the collision between liberal and statist visions of regional normative orders promoted by Brussels and Moscow, respectively. Since the early 2000s, Brussels has promoted the liberal regional order through various regional initiatives in the post-Soviet space. At the same time, Moscow has also strategically advanced the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) as an alternative institutional project to support, legitimize, and consolidate the statist regional order in the shared neighborhood. As European integration initiatives have edged ever closer to the domain of the Eurasian integration project advanced by Moscow, the post-Soviet common neighborhood has emerged as a field of intense normative competition between the two unions, each espousing rival norms about how to order regional politics. However, contemporary International Relations (IR) scholarship remains short of effective analytical frameworks to address this important phenomenon. In the mainstream theoretical approaches of rational institutionalism and social constructivism, the advancement of norms and institutional initiatives are supposed to stabilize regions. By the logic of cooperation, the more institutional initiatives a region is equipped with, the more stable it becomes. The case of the post-Soviet neighborhood offers a strikingly puzzling outlook in this regard: with deeper and wider involvement of European and Eurasian institutional initiatives, the region has become ever more conflict-prone, with the Ukrainian crisis being just a tip of iceberg. In this regard, this paper demonstrates that the emergence of competing normative orders has produced a sense of hostility between the EU and Russia, while regional states have learned to play both sides to maximize their freedom of action. Challenging the mainstream theoretical perspectives, the paper concludes that the development of multiple institutional initiatives may actually induce more conflicts when there is no coordination among and between the normative projects advocating opposing norms and political visions. This paper makes these interrelated arguments in four parts. Following a short introduction, the second section explores different theoretical perspectives on norm collision and proposes a methodological framework of norms matrix. Building on the systematic approach to comparative norm studies, the norms matrix offers an empirical framework to analyze competing norms in a holistic and consistent way. With this tool, the third section investigates the dynamics of interaction and counteraction between competing conceptions of regional orders advanced by the EU and EAEU by comparative research design. More specifically, it uses the norm matrix method to compare and contrast the interactive social dynamics of norm collision in four case-periods (1999-2003, 2004-200, 2009-2013, and 2014-2017). While my research design does not allow for the testing of probabilistic causal claims, an overall trend is quite clear that normative competition is characterized by multiple layers of norm collisions involving complex processes of mutual adaptation and accommodation. The final section concludes and articulates avenues for future research.