Russia’s Discourse on Europe: Idiosyncratic or Part of a European Trend?

The European integration, enlargement and identity have attracted intense internal and external contestation. An especially powerful intra-regional contestation of the EU as the personified ‘Europe’ and the ‘force for good’ comes from the Russian Federation. Since the late 1990s, Russian elites have been challenging the EU’s normative hegemony in Europe and claiming agency in defining what the European past and the future are. Scholarly accounts connect this contestation with the contrast between the EU’s self-image and its outside perceptions. According to DeBardeleben, since 2014, the EU views Russia as a revisionist actor, and Russia views Europe as a declining deceptive power. Mutual assertions of power lock both actors in a confrontation, limiting the range of foreign policy and regional integration choices that they can consider. This study relies on a new corpus of parliamentary debates on regional identity and integration in the lower chamber of the Russian parliament (Duma) between 2004 and 2018 and aims at reconstructing Russian parliamentarians’ discourse on Europe: How do they define ‘Europe’? What place in it do they imagine for Russia? How is this Europe related to the EU? In which terms is it defined: political, social, cultural, religious, moral? Methodologically, this study combines political claim analysis with qualitative content analysis to trace discourse on Europe and European civilization across political party factions and time. It finds that throughout the period of study Russian parliamentary elites remain ambiguous about Russia’s place in Europe and formulate Russian identitary choices as open and conditional on the acceptance of Russian agency in Europe by the EU. At the same time, the civilizational framing of the relationship between Russia and the EU is being used more prominently over time, accompanying the conservative, traditionalist trend in Russian domestic politics. As a result, the predominant discourse on Europe in the Duma approaches in many ways the conservative Euro-sceptic rhetoric in the EU itself, with its focus on national sovereignty, traditional (often, Christian) values, and the rejection of multiculturalism. This similarity makes it possible to consider Russian discourse as an instance of wider nationalist and Euro-skeptical trends in Europe.