Post-Cold War Borders

Reframing Political Space in Eastern Europe

Jussi Laine,Ilkka Liikanen,James W. Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429957109
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

In the aftermath of the Ukraine crises, borders within the wider post-Cold War and post-Soviet context have become a key issue for international relations and public political debate. These borders are frequently viewed in terms of military preparedness and confrontation, but behind armed territorial conflicts there has been a broader shift in the regional balance of power and sovereignty. This book explores border conflicts in the EU's eastern neighbourhood via a detailed focus on state power and sovereignty, set in the context of post-Cold war politics and international relations.

By identifying changing definitions of sovereignty and political space the authors highlight competing strategies of legitimising and challenging borders that have emerged as a result of geopolitical transformations of the last three decades. This book uses comparative studies to examine country specific variation in border negotiation and conflict, and pays close attention to shifts in political debates that have taken place between the end of State Socialism, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the outbreak of the Ukraine crises. From this angle, Post-Cold War Borders sheds new light on change and variation in the political rhetoric of the EU, the Russian Federation, Ukraine and neighbouring EU member countries. Ultimately, the book aims to provide a new interpretation of changes in international order and how they relate to shifting concepts of sovereignty and territoriality in post-Cold war Europe.

Shedding new light on negotiation and conflict over post-Soviet borders, this book will be of interest to students, researchers and policy makers in the fields of Russian and East European studies, international relations, geography, border studies and politics.

Part I

Reframing political space in the EU’s eastern neighbourhood

1 Post-Cold War borders and the constitution of the international role of the European Union and the Russian Federation

Ilkka Liikanen and Jeremy Smith

Introduction

In the wake of the Ukraine crisis earlier developments have often been analysed in terms of the interplay between EU and Russian Federation policies. In immediate policy reactions the crisis was often seen as a failure of ‘soft’ EU neighbourhood policies and an ultimate indication of the determinedly ‘hard’ geopolitics to which the Russian Federation is committed. In more academic analyses of post-Cold War international relations there is a similar tendency to consider the EU and the Russian Federation (RF) as counterparts in their efforts to establish themselves as international actors. This juxtaposition often boils down to essentialist readings of their roles in international relations, including their approaches to changing post-Cold War borders. The EU is deemed to be a new kind of international actor, representing novel conceptions of sovereignty, borders, and territoriality, whereas Russia is considered an archetype of a traditional international actor, building its policies on securitised notions of territorial integrity, spheres of interest, and buffer zones (Diez 2005; Roberts 2013).

This discussion can be seen as a degenerated reflection of the post-Cold War search for alternative perspectives to the militarily guaranteed territorial integrity as the dominant form of security thinking. After the end of the Cold War new constructivist approaches aspired to promote alternative conceptions of sovereignty and security that no longer focused on the threat one state posed to another’s territory. In this process European integration and the consolidation of the EU as an international actor were considered major steps beyond militarised notions of security associated with the nation-state. In political rhetoric this was reflected in notions of the EU as a new kind of international actor, a peace project, and a force for good in the world.

Underlying this argument we can identify a broader trend in the study of international relations that has scrutinised the end of the Cold War as a grand epochal turn, marking the demise of the old Westphalian international order (Linklater 1998). Similarly, in the study of post-Cold War borders we can identify a strong tendency to analyse their changing significance as an epochal shift towards a new age of globalisation and integration characterised by ‘post-Westphalian’, ‘post-modern’, or ‘post-national’ borders – and ultimately a perspective of a new ‘borderless world’ (Medvedev 1999).

While this approach has captured the fundamental change of borders since the end of Cold War, it has tended to greatly over-elaborate the notion of epochal shift and hence to lose track of the fundamental continuities connecting Cold War and post-Cold War policies. The related essentialising reading of the EU’s role has obscured the contradictions and competing rationales that have characterised its policies in its eastern neighbourhood. Likewise, the development of Russian foreign policies can hardly be understood as a mere continuation of earlier imperial legacy and a counterpoint to the ideal of a new kind of international actorness represented by the EU.

This chapter seeks to sketch an alternative perspective to the stereotypical research designs that analyse the constitution of the international roles of the EU and RF as a bipolar process. In our methodology, we will apply the concept of actorness to emphasise the development of the international roles of the EU and RF as a process. The aim is to move beyond a board-game setting for the analysis of the interplay between international actors, and to grasp better the vital interdependency between external and internal policies: how the ability to influence other actors is linked to the internal preconditions for conveying coherent policies (Bretherton and Vogler 2013). To avoid essentialising readings of EU and RF policies we will focus on major conceptual shifts in political statements related to borders and cross-border interaction. Both the EU and the RF based their elaboration of the basic modes of their international actorness to a large extent on experiences of border policies – the EU as part of its introduction of cross-border cooperation programmes and Russia in response to conflicts in the post-Soviet space. In our analysis we pay special attention to shifting conceptions of sovereignty, security, and territoriality in discussions of borders in the post-Soviet space and – in the EU’s case – its eastern neighbourhood. Our aim is to understand the motives and competing rationales of EU and RF policies in the context of a shifting balance of power in international relations and as part of diverging strategies concerning the global order.

First, our chapter will briefly survey the EU’s and RF’s distinct starting points in building their post-Cold War international roles. In most of the text, we will identify major turning points in EU and RF policies and pay special attention to the interplay between external and internal factors affecting their perceptions of borders, territoriality, and sovereignty. Finally, shifts in policies concerning post-Soviet borders will be analysed in the broader context of changes in post-Cold War international order.

The end of the Cold War and the constitution of EU and RF actorness

The break-up of the Soviet Union and the RF as an international actor

Russian foreign policymaking is generally seen as following historically conditioned fixed patterns not only determined by temporary interests, but demonstrating a significant degree of continuity across the various political formations of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation (Legvold 2007). According to traditional narratives the borders of the Russian Empire expanded continuously between the sixteenth and late nineteenth centuries, but at each moment of expansion the external border was established as fixed, militarily manned, and diplomatically agreed. Within this external border the Empire was an undifferentiated, vast land mass with no significant internal distinction between the imperial core and its peripheries. It was a continuous and uninterrupted land empire (Hosking 1997). The Soviet Union, by contrast, was divided internally according to the ‘ethno-territorial principle’, with borders demarcating territories constructed according to the demographic distribution of national groups. Assessments of the nature of these internal borders range from those dismissing them as pure fictions (Nahaylo and Swoboda 1990) to those viewing the Soviet state’s fundamental organisation as derived from an obsessive preoccupation with national distinctions (Slezkine 1994). Both readings suggest that in this narrative the Putin administration’s centralising policies represent a return to the natural tendencies of a single, undifferentiated state ruled from an almost unchallenged centre.

Such characterisations, however, mask a high level of uncertainty and ambiguity in the Russian understanding of both its internal and external borders, as well as oversimplifying the monolithic, undifferentiated nature of spatial organisation. The Russian Empire included distinct political formations within its overall borders – most notably the Grand Duchy of Finland in the northwest, Poland as a separate kingdom for a period, and the southern client emirates of Bukhara and Khiva. The empire was not always a continuous territory, including as it did North American territory for over a century (1733–1867), and incorporating Georgia and other lands of the South Caucasus decades before the North Caucasus mountains were pacified. While each of these cases can be considered exceptional when there are so many exceptions one begins to wonder where the rule lies.

As for the Soviet Union, the notion that it was structured according to an ethno-territorial principle is too simple. First, why were some units, such as the Mingrelians and Permiaks, not considered distinct nationalities, while less obvious candidates, such as the Roma and Nenets, were? The answer would appear to be that each case was decided after a negotiation in which the various actors’ relative strengths and relations with neighbouring states were decisive (Blauvelt 2014; Jääts 2012; O’Keeffe 2013). Furthermore, the internal borders of the USSR changed frequently. The move by Georgia to establish customs borders in 1922 was exceptional and contributed to a major crisis, but at other times checkpoints came and went, and the extent to which mobility across borders was allowed also changed. The competences of the republics and other territorial units of the USSR within their own borders was the most common source of change, in law and even more in practice.

The structures of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) placed some constraints on the republics’ sovereign power, but they still formed platforms for power struggles within the CPSU and, in the last phase of the Soviet system, for mobilisation against central authority. Ethno-territorial borders and the borders used to organise trade and industry sometimes coincided economically, and sometimes did not. Finally, borders’ locations themselves changed frequently. Major border changes in Belarus in 1924 and Central Asia in 1926 were followed by numerous adjustments in the following decade. The westward shift of the borders of the Soviet Union following the Red Army’s victory in 1945 and the downgrading of the status of the Republic of Karelia in the 1950s were further cases of significant change. Later still, there were numerous minor changes from Ukraine to the Fergana valley reflecting land use or some form of economic reorganisation.

In short, both the Russian and Soviet Empires experimented extensively with a variety of forms of spatial organisation, few of which ever sat comfortably with either a Westphalian model or characterisations of totally borderless (Imperial Russia) or ethnically bordered (Soviet Union) formations. Thus, in neither case was there anything close to an ideal type that could be expected to provide insights into the archetype the RF might be expected to follow. Indeed, the clearest legacy of the Soviet Union was a set of contrasting border concepts: internal borders that were generally soft, barely marked, and whose significance in spheres such as economy, language, and education varied significantly over time; and hard external borders, even with allied communist states, which even senior officials needed special permission to cross. Beyond these was the insurmountable border between communism and capitalism, reified in the Berlin Wall and various fences, and heavily patrolled and guarded. After the demise of the Soviet Union it was this securitised concept of external borders that came to dominate the thinking of the new states, even in the case of those borders that had formerly been open.

The slow and gradual elaboration of the key concepts of EU external relations

In contrast to the weight of historical legacies attached to the RF’s international actorness the EU has habitually been assumed to be a completely new political animal and its international role’s constitution interpreted as a highly avant-garde project. In both cases, however, the end of the Cold War can broadly be considered the starting point for building their role in international relations. In the Russian case the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the resulting constitution of new state structures gave direction to both the internal and external policies of the RF. Initially, both the internal position and the external policies of Yeltsin’s government were tied to a clear, but intensely disputed, Euro-Atlanticist dimension. Russian policy priorities – economic and social reform – required closer relations and integration with the west and western-dominated international organisations. The setting was, however, far from a parallel development of two comparable actors.

Strictly speaking, the European Community of the day did not even have a mandate in external relations, and in principle, external relations and reacting to the consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union belonged to the jurisdiction of each member state. This was evidenced in practice by the differing approaches and timetables adopted by each member in recognising the new states emerging from the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. In hindsight, it is obvious that the end of the Cold War created the preconditions for deepening European integration and the EU’s development as a recognised international actor. However, this did not happen immediately. Rather, the first programmes of interregional cooperation introduced at the time provided just the basic model for later cross-border cooperation policies with third countries, which eventually became the constitutive basis for formulating EU external relations policies.

In contrast to simplified retrospective notions of EU cross-border cooperation policies as prime examples of policies deliberately calibrated to a new post-Westphalian order, the first Interreg programme (1989) was planned as an instrument of internal cohesion policies, not external relations, and its aim was definitively not to promote an epoch-making turn of the international order. At best, it represented a vague initial move towards building EU actorness. Its key concept, interregional cooperation, makes this quite clear. It referred in the first place to border regions’ bilateral cooperation across state borders and thus to new ways of conceptualising borders, but this represented a very limited challenge to classical notions of national sovereignty. With the Interreg programme apolitical concepts of regional development were applied to promote social cohesion between EC internal border areas. Within this modest setting we can identify a certain measure of regional bilateral pooling of sovereignty. However, even when applied to external borders these new conceptions of sovereignty and territoriality were not planned for serving the constitution of new modes of foreign policies (Liikanen 2016).

The 1992 Maastricht Treaty broadened the EU’s external relations mandate, with foreign and security policy becoming a new pillar of its activities. With the Interreg II programme (1994–1999) more coordinated tasks of external relations were introduced as part of EU policies. Instead of interregional cooperation, cross-border cooperation became the new key concept of the Interreg II programme. Compared with earlier conceptions of inter-regional cooperation this new territorial framing clearly emphasised more the role of states in the process. During this period planning of cross-border cooperation policies began to concern explicitly third states. With the Interreg II document EU policies were reframed as part of a broader European process of cross-border regionalisation: ‘Commission action … should play a special role in encouraging participation by regional and local operators … and … regional and local operators in the relevant border areas of neighbouring third countries should also be included in this process’ (European Parliament 1994: 119).

To govern practical projects of cross-border cooperation, special border-spanning Interreg areas were established that can in a limited sense be seen as constituting new spaces of Commission-coordinated shared action, not merely as frames for bilateral interregional cooperation. Concretely, this promoted notions of pooled or even shared sovereignty at EU level and thus exemplified new thinking concerning state borders’ significance. However, it can hardly be characterised as a revolutionary move towards challenging sovereignty in international relations.

A further step in this direction was taken with the Interreg III programme (2000–2006). Related programme documents introduced a template for more coordinated European pol...