Public Imagining of Friends and Foes in Post-Soviet States: Similarities, Stability and Dynamics of Change

Analysis of public opinion in foreign policy is often related to research on foreign policy formation or on the effects of soft power projections over foreign populations and foreign policies. While there are separate analyses on attitudes of post-Soviet communities towards the United States or Europe, lack of data has long prevented detailed research on public attitudes in this region. This paper using structural balance theory, image theory and insights from liberal and neorealist approaches to international relations attempts an analysis of public attitudes in terms of enmity or friendship in ten post-Soviet countries towards foreign states based on data from Eurasian Manometer Surveys 2012-2016. While showing existence of multiple imbalances in attitudes of state dyads towards third states, this paper finds striking degrees of correlation between public attitudes of some post-Soviet states towards foreign states and even more so between some states without high degrees of mutual friendship. Moreover, while some post-Soviet populations display significant similarity in defining friends irrespectively of their sub-regions or common borders, images of unfriendly states are more likely to be non-correlated, not effected by immediate political change and depend only on regional relations and shared borders. Furthermore, all populations demonstrate internal fragmentation of attitudes towards other CIS and non-CIS countries. Finally, this paper shows while public attitudes in post-Soviet states demonstrate a high degree of stability, such that major political events such as Russo-Ukrainian crisis of 2013 have inflicted change in public attitudes, however, dimension of such change is different across the analyzed countries. While this research provides an important generalization of trends of public opinion in post-Soviet countries towards each other and some external states, it also points to the need for further research on differences in positive and negative image formation and changes of such images.