The paper investigates the “Eastern policy” of Central and Eastern European countries in 2004 - 2009. For most of the 1990s, CEE states mobilized nearly all diplomatic resources toward the project Western integration. Its completion ushered in a “post-existentialist” era of uncertainty over new priorities - and purpose - of national foreign policies. Nonetheless, in the 5 years after accession, CEE states prosecuted surprisingly pro-active foreign policies, elevating the Eastern neighbourhood (in particular Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova) to the top of the agenda. A host of interacting motives help explain this posture, ranging from “hard security” concerns of Russia’s power projection to normative commitments to democracy promotion and solidarity with less fortunate ex-communist states. Moving beyond the interests-versus-norms debate, the paper argues that new member’s states’ Eastern policies in 2004-2009 were crucially shaped by the countries’ own experience with post-communist transition and Western integration. It draws on theories of “weak cognitivism”, FP learning and path dependency of ideas. It points to the “formative experience” of 1990s as a key but often overlooked variable that co-determined the choice of strategies and instruments of new members’ policies toward the post-Soviet states; more specifically, it argues that the policy formulation process was informed by CEE actors’ generalized causal beliefs about the logic of post-communist transitions, inferred from the 1990s and projected onto contemporary post-Soviet dynamics. These beliefs crucially affected the ends-means calculations of foreign policy-makers. The argument is empirically supported by an analysis of CEE positions on the issue of MAP status for Georgia and Ukraine and the design of EU’s neighbourhood policy as well as in the development of bilateral democracy promotion policies.
