Cooperation and Conflict Between Europe and Russia: Local International Brokers in a Relational Approach

While the post-Cold War decade is depicted as a honeymoon, tensions between Europe and Russia appeared in 1999. Russia joined the coalition against terrorism and agreed to the formation of NATO-Russia Council after 11 September 2001, but the Kosovo war (1999), the expansion of NATO to former Soviet satellites in 1999-2004, the US missile defense plan (2007-09), the Georgian conflict of 2008, energy crisis of 2009, the civil war in Ukraine and the annexation of the Crimea have soured relations. Although relations between Europe and Russia look bad in general, they have nevertheless resisted cooling on several issues, such as facilitating the granting of visas, management of Kaliningrad or the environment in the Baltic sea. However, International Relations’ explanations exclude the possibility that cooperation and conflict operate simultaneously. Instead of explaining why the conflict has replaced cooperation, this paper aims at understanding how cooperation and conflict coexist in Russian-European relations. Instead of focusing on States and international organizations, this research targets the practitioners responsible for “boundary issues” that emerged with and since the end of the Cold War: the mobility of people and goods, the energy and natural resources, security, and protection of minorities. Rather than looking at the puzzle from the outside in, we analyze it from the inside out. To understand the coexistence of cooperation and conflict, in an effort to link the macro- with meso-level analysis, we look at local “international brokers” (Dezalay and Garth 2002), that is elites who, bridging international and domestic fields, simultaneously use their access to domestic entry points to support their international strategies and mobilize these international networks to bolster their domestic position. Our main argument is that there is not a European-Russian relationship, but the Russian-European relations that vary according to the interests and representations of these local actors and their interactions with the European and Russian fields. Over a period covering from 1991 to 2016, this paper compares three playgrounds at the border of Russian-European relations, i.e. Estonia, Moldova and Kaliningrad, selected according to their similarities at the starting point and the varying degree of conflict and cooperation.