Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and the subsequent conflict in eastern Ukraine represent both the greatest security challenge to western Europe since the end of the Cold War and a profound challenge to international norms . Focusing on the short-term response to the annexation of Crimea and subsequent conflict, this volume explores the interactions between the US, the EU and Russia. These three powers represent the vertices of the triangle in ‘triangular diplomacy,’ with Ukraine as the ‘object’ in the middle.
This volume is distinctive in two particular ways. First, it is explicitly comparative, considering how the US and the EU responded to the same crisis, although the stakes were different for each and the nature of the problem was not necessarily understood in the same ways (see Chap. 5). It thus contrasts a conventional, if exceptional, great power—the US—with a very non-traditional foreign policy actor—the EU, which is typically depicted as distinctive in terms of capabilities, organization and motivations. This volume, therefore, sheds light on what kind of international actor the EU is and helps to inform foreign policy analysis more broadly. The Ukraine crisis is a particularly appropriate case as it presents an especially critical test for the EU’s foreign policy as it concerns aggression by its neighboring great power—Russia.
The second distinctive feature of this volume is its ‘360-degree’ perspective.1 Rather than focusing on the perspective of a single party in a bilateral relationship or even the contending perspectives of a bilateral pair, this volume engages with both how the US and the EU each regard the other in its dealings with Russia, and also how Russia and Ukraine perceive the motivations and effectiveness of the western powers. This 360-degree perspective is enhanced by considering the interactions of the parties in cross-cutting, thematic issues of particular relevance to the crisis and response.
Investigating the crisis in Ukraine through the lens of ‘triangular diplomacy’ helps to elucidate the complexity of crisis response when the three core actors have very different relationships with the affected party, as well as varying perceptions of the nature of the crisis. As a heuristic device the concept of triangular diplomacy probes the parameters and consequences of foreign policy behavior and reactions in ways that would be missed by analyses of only bilateral and multilateral engagements. To be clear, this volume does not seek to provide a definitive account of an unfolding, high-stakes story. Rather, it takes a snapshot—roughly the two-and-a-half years after the annexation of Crimea—to shed light on foreign policy choices of great powers at a time of crisis.
This introduction aims to set the stage analytically for the other contributions. It begins by making the case for studying the EU’s foreign policy from a comparative perspective. It then sets out the triangular diplomacy framework. The chapter concludes by introducing the other contributions to the volume.
Comparing the EU as a Foreign Policy Actor
One of our analytical ambitions for this volume is to shed light on the EU as a foreign policy actor by comparing its policy choices and policy effectiveness in response to the Ukraine crisis with those of the US. The existing literature on the EU as a foreign policy actor, in the words of Niemann and Bretherton (2013: 263), has tended to be ‘EU-introverted (or even Eurocentric).’ The literature tends to emphasize that the EU is a sui generis foreign policy actor. This depiction entails an implicit comparison of the EU with traditional foreign policy actors, most commonly the US. This literature focuses on what kind of foreign policy actor the EU is—a civilian power (Duchêne 1973), normative power (Manners 2002) or market power (Damro 2012), among others (for a review see Peterson 2012). These depictions emphasize the distinctiveness of the EU’s power resources and/or its identity.
There is another, even more voluminous, strand of the literature that describes specific EU foreign policies. This literature tends to be particularly ‘EU-introverted’ (Niemann and Bretherton 2013: 263), lacking even implicit comparison to the policies of other actors. There are, however, a few exceptions that explicitly compare EU policies to those of other actors, but these primarily concern external policies in which the EU is most ‘state-like’, such as climate change (see, e.g., Kelemen and Vogel 2010), regulatory cooperation (Drezner 2007) and promoting norms through preferential trade agreements (Postnikov 2014). There are two notable exceptions with respect to traditional foreign policy.2 Möcklie and Mauer (2011) compare American and European foreign policies toward the Middle East . Although empirically rich, this work is largely descriptive, and the EU qua the EU is only a peripheral actor. The other exception is Brown (2014), who contrasts the different perceptions of China’s rise in the EU and the US in order to explain differences in their policies toward China . To an extent, our argument is a nice complement to Brown’s; similar perceptions of threat lead to similar responses. Comparison, thus, helps to illuminate the EU’s foreign policy choices and begins to contextualize how distinctive a foreign policy actor the EU is.
Comparison is particularly useful in assessing foreign policy effectiveness (Niemann and Bretherton 2013: 268). The literature on EU foreign policy effectiveness, whether reflexively or not, echoes Laatikainen and Smith’s (2006: 16–19) distinction between internal and external effectiveness. One strand of the literature, reflecting the limited centralization of foreign policy authority in the EU, focuses on the EU’s ability to agree and sustain common positions, what Laatikainen and Smith called internal effectiveness and which is frequently referred to as ‘coherence’ (Niemann and Bretherton 2013: 267). As Hiski Haukkala argues in Chap. 4, the EU’s coherence in response to Russia’s aggression was unexpectedly high.
Given EU coherence/internal effectiveness, the next question is whether the EU is also externally effective. Much of the EU foreign policy literature concerned with external effectiveness uses goal attainment as the metric of effectiveness (Jørgensen et al. 2011: 603; see Dee 2013: 28–31). Goal attainment, however, may be an unrealistic objective. Foreign policies frequently fail, at least for some considerable time, to achieve their objectives because the goal is ambitious, the problem is intractable or other actors are uncooperative (Jørgensen et al. 2011: 604). Influencing the behavior of another great power when the policy in question is seen as affecting a core interest of the state, as is the case with Russia and the crisis in Ukraine (see Chap. 6), is a particularly tall order. Reference to goal attainment in such cases, therefore, may yield an unfairly harsh assessment of effectiveness. Comparison with another foreign policy actor, therefore, helps to contextualize how demanding the policy objective is, thus permitting a more nuanced assessment of effectiveness (see also Niemann and Bretherton 2013 (eds)).
The Challenges of Comparison
Although the case for comparing the responses of the EU and the US to the crisis in Ukraine is strong, there are some analytical challenges to the comparison. Two sets of differences particularly stand out (see Table 1.1). First, the EU and US vary considerably in their power resources relative to Russia. As Mearsheimer (2014) and Walt (2014) contend, Russia is not a peer competitor to the US. It is a regional power. In particular, this reflects the relative military capabilities of the two countries. Although the US has military superiority, its forces are relatively remote after the draw-down of its forces in Europe after the end of the Cold War, although the Pentagon redeployed heavily armed troops to eastern Europe beginning in January 2017. European forces, by contrast, are relatively close to Russia. Taken together, the EU’s member states have considerable armed forces, but the EU does not have a centralized army and th...