Relations between Russia and the European Union have worsened in recent years and this has provided the Russian community of foreign policy experts with plenty to discuss. Much attention in the discussion is paid to specific factors, the negative impact of which is restricted to bilateral relations between Moscow and Brussels. More often than not experts debate the accession of former Socialist countries to the EU or interdependence in the energy sector and the apprehensions that both sides derive from it. Far less attention is given to EU identity and its radical transformation after the end of the Cold War. Meanwhile, it was precisely this change that brought up an overhaul of the security practices determining relations between the EU and its neighboring states. Also, the change predestined to a large extent the current crisis in relations with Russia and resulted in a re-interpreting of 20th century history and a redefining of Europe’s place in the past and present.

“NEVER AGAIN!”

The self-identification of any political community – whether a nation-state or a supranational association like the EU – has time and space dimensions as a rule. Any political ‘WE’ needs a common history and a set of notions about the outside world. The process necessarily has a third – ethical – dimension, as unification of people around political objectives is always underpinned by the idea of common wellbeing and a correlation of the collective past, present and future with a certain system of values, which lays the foundation for political unity.

In the first decades of its development as a political association, the European Community was unique in that the considerations of space played a subsidiary role in its self-identification. Naturally, it had a formal institution of membership and, consequently, a certain territory. More than that, the very phrase the ‘European Community’ is indicative of claims for a slice of a common historical and cultural heritage. But the Community could in no way make claims for forming the core of European civilization, i.e. for being the only or the main herald of the European idea. It represented just one of the numerous elements of the political space – the one belonging entirely to the Western part of divided Europe.

The time aspect was the key issue in the discourse on the European Union’s identity. The Community saw its mission in the overcoming of the past; its rise and enlargement proceeded under the slogan “Never Again!” – referring first and foremost to the two World Wars and the Holocaust. Economic arguments in favor of the Common Market never sounded totally convincing, especially for countries like Britain or Sweden which were more oriented at the global economy than the economy of Continental Europe. The economic success of integration was important as an instrument for reaching the political objective – preventing dictators from coming to power who would kill their own citizens and threaten the rest of the world with death and devastation.

Such an orientation of European identity encompassed an important ethical element – it was built on self-critical reflections of Europe’s past, including the historic significance of the European idea. The very fact that the European civilization had produced two world wars, concentration camps and totalitarian dictatorships called for a critical reassessment and necessitated a permanent revisiting of the lessons of the past.

Theoretically, European history can be interpreted in two ways, and the ethical consequences of these interpretations differ greatly. First, Europe’s past can be interpreted from the point of an archaic understanding of corruption that presupposes that wars and dictatorships – however catastrophic – are not at all inevitable deviations from a predestined path; they are distortions of the genuine essence of the European idea. In this case reconciliation through integration is a rectification of accidental errors and a reversion to Europe’s genuine essence.

Second, there is a more radical revision of history in the spirit of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and its ethics rest on absolute notions. From this angle, the disasters of the first half of the 20th century are seen as something that underlay the project of European modernity and are a consequence of prevalence – albeit provisional – of Evil over Good in the European consciousness. Ardent supporters of this theory include Zygmunt Bauman, who gleans the root causes of the Holocaust out of the monologic rationalism of the Enlightenment. If Nazism is a no less organic offspring of the European thought than, say, humanistic science, then the welfare gained after the defeat of Nazism appears to be dangerously fragile. In this case, the “Never Again!” slogan suggests the need for everyday vigilance and incessant work to prevent a return to an ever-looming totalitarianism and not just a one-time recognition of the dangers of totalitarian ideologies, which will smoothly advance Europe toward a bright democratic future.

Both of these interpretations could be found in the discourse on the European Community’s identity during the Cold War, and scarcely any of them prevailed over the other. Yet most importantly, in building Europe’s identity through opposition to its own past, there was no need to draw up the image of an external enemy (which, in Karl Schmidt’s philosophy, is the starting point for setting up a political community). In other words, European integration did not have to erect an impenetrable frontier between the Community’s internal sphere and the outside world. It did not need radical differences of space, since the line of antagonism that set into motion the entire mechanism of building a united Europe was drawn between the present and the past of a political entity which was brought into existence this way. Europe re-created itself, as it did not want to repeat its own fatal errors.

SURROUNDED BY ITS OWN PAST

Many researchers – i.e. Thomas Diets and Pertti Joeniemi – have pointed out that there has been a radical transformation in the discourse of European identity after the end of the Cold War. The new identity relies on an idea – often implicit and sometimes clearly articulate – that the Europeans have succeeded in overcoming their past, that it is impossible to repeat it, and that the main task is to ensure security by shaping an adequate policy for rebuffing external threats. Take, for instance, the European Security Strategy endorsed by the Council of Europe in December 2003. It is based exclusively on outside threats while the possibility of a conflict between states inside the EU – formerly the centerpiece of attention – has simply vanished. This form of structuring political reality, according to Thomas Christiansen, makes the EU a finalite politique; i.e. an already accomplished project and a materialized utopia.

Thus the time and space dimensions of identity change places: the political community is now being construed in precise conformity to Karl Schmidt’s theory, i.e. through opposition to an external enemy, while the reassessment of history is receding backstage. If previously the past stayed inside the EU’s political space, setting the benchmarks for evaluating current events and forecasting the future, today it is forced outside the boundaries of the “community of European democracies.” Europe, a continent that regained itself through critical assessment of its own history, now sees its past beyond its borders. This viewpoint suggests that unlike the Europeans, who have gotten through to “the end of history,” the EU’s neighbors are still far away from implementing the democratic ideal. If earlier the ethical dimension of the European project was pegged to the time factor, now it is pegged to the factor of space. The EU’s critical reflections about its own moral essence have evolved into a feeling of superiority over its neighbors.

One of the consequences of this transformation is that the emergence of a European superstate may turn out to be a far less distant prospect than many think. A transition from self-critical reflections to moralizing means that the EU has lost the uniqueness it had in comparison with the standardized political subjects of the New Time, i.e. with sovereign nation-states. This creates prerequisites for forming the idea of common wellbeing, which in essence forms the basis of modern states. It is precisely the conviction that “our” political order – albeit far from always being perfect – is still better than “their” customs and habits that provides the grounds for unification and for forming the very same demos, the absence of which is always pointed out by the critics of European integration. But the key role in it is not played by the feeling of community among members of a political organism. It is played by the presence of a clear and unproblematic borderline separating the inner world where the political ideal has been generally accomplished and the outside world that is still a long way from this ideal.

While previously Europe regarded itself as an entity needing protection from its internal forces, now it perceives the unpredictable external world as a menace to the EU’s well-regulated and comfortable internal space. If this understanding of security continues to grease the construction of a border between Europe and non-Europe – and the situation of a “global war on terror” leaves us no chance to think otherwise – the pan-European political identity will continue drifting closer and closer toward the standard nation-state model.

EXPANSION WITHOUT ENLARGEMENT

One more crucial issue pertaining to the transformation of the EU’s identity concerns the time frame of this process. Why did it fall precisely in a period after the end of the Cold War and, in all appearance, become a fait accompli by the time that the countries of Central and Eastern Europe joined the EU? No doubt, “the syndrome of victory in the Cold War,” which Russian diplomats and politicians regularly make references to, did have a role in it. The fact that after the collapse of the Soviet Union practically all of its former allies streamed to the EU and NATO put an end to the debates on comparative advantages of the capitalist and socialist integration. One cannot help admitting, however, that these debates were never taken seriously on the western side of the Iron Curtain. They were mostly conducted by Soviet social scientists, who did not always discuss them sincerely.

Unlike the U.S. that could make claims in earnest to being the victor in defeating “the evil empire,” the European Community never stood at the forefront of the fight with Communism. On the contrary, the Soviet Union’s supplies of oil and gas to Western Europe (contrary to Washington’s objections) gave an additional lease of life to the Soviet system and laid the groundwork for today’s energy sector interdependence between Moscow and Brussels. It is well known that from the very start the U.S. built its relations with the outside world from the position of a “city upon a hill” predestined to bring happiness to the world. As for the Europeans, their mission was introvert, and the collapse of the Soviet system could hardly set the scene for a total revision of the EU’s part in history.

The EU became convinced of its infallibility as a result of the enlargement. Prior to 1995 – that is, before the accession of Austria, Finland and Sweden – the admission of new members was effectuated on the basis of more or less equitable agreements, but during the process of eastwards expansion Brussels had the domineering position toward the candidate countries. It is not accidental that the problem of criteria for selecting “worthy candidates” from those who were yet to make improvements at home arose in the 1990s. The EU worked out these criteria at the 1993 summit in Copenhagen. The very existence of postulations working one way bestowed on the EU the role of a model to be copied from and reoriented the ethical dimension of the European identity from the temporal to the spatial plane.

Furthermore, the 1990s furnished the EU with an opportunity to monopolize the European idea and to engross the role of its main promulgator. Apart from the sentiments of the accomplished utopia (finalite politique), the Europeans also felt that Europe had reached a limit in terms of geographic enlargement (finalite geographique). From 1958-1992, the European Community represented only a part of the continent – albeit a significant one – in the geographic and cultural sense, but as the new decade began, many Europeans developed a conviction that practically the whole of the European cultural and historical space, except for the marginal cases like Norway, Russia, Croatia and Switzerland, was now within the sphere of the same political and legal modus operandi, in the formation of which Brussels played a decisive role. More than that, this outlook suggested that countries in the periphery of Europe were either striving to get into the EU (like Croatia and the rest of the Balkans; Serbia is an exception but it, too, will stop being an outsider in time) or simply did not deserve the status of complete European countries (it is becoming increasingly more obvious that the Europeans have assigned precisely this role to Russia and, very likely, to Ukraine). Europe became integrated – that is, according to the Latin origin of the word, the Old Continent regained its previous wholeness. This, too, fortifies the Europeans’ feeling of “the end of history.”

It should be noted that the postulated coincidence of cultural, historical, political and legislative borders created prerequisites for fixing the meaning of this notion. Throughout the 20th century, Europe was a discursive arena of some kind where different interpretations of European legacy clashed with one another. Any national identity – or, broadly speaking, political identity – could project itself onto Europe then, as the Europeans traced their own roots in European heritage. As a result, the integration project as such turned out to be open both for participation of different countries in it and for multiple interpretations of its primary objectives.

The arrival of the Copenhagen criteria and a hegemonic structure (which they represent) eventually put an equation mark between the European idea and a real political order – existing “right here and right now” and not as an imaginary ideology projected onto the future. The finalization of the European idea – and not the EU’s inability to absorb new members – actually caused the decision to stop EU enlargement and build relations with neighbors proceeding from the impossibility of their accession to the EU in the foreseeable future. It was not the ostensible “inedibility” of new Europeans that caused the “indigestion.” The reason lay in the order of things that took shape in the 1990s – it demanded that the new states be “swallowed” and “digested” instead of being accepted as new and equal partners.

Last but not least, as we have said above, a new understanding of security arose in Europe at the revolutionary moment when the Cold War ended. The new list of threats does not name the internal menace of totalitarianism (as the initial version of the European project did) or actors of international politics that would be equal in terms of status and power (like in the classical realism of the Cold War era). Instead, it centers on the instability caused by the collapse of the Communist system. Coupled with the September 11 syndrome, this understanding of threats has brought up a security policy based on a simplified version of democratic world theory, which considers the political systems to be different from Western democracy as threats per se. This vision of the world underlies the European ‘neighborhood policy,’ which de facto uses Copenhagen criteria to the countries surrounding the EU, whether or not they have any prospects for becoming EU members.

The politically correct parlance used in the European strategic documents barely hides the fact that the EU perceives the countries along its perimeter as a source of threats. The only way to remove those threats is to spread the Western-European model of liberal market democracy to neighboring countries. Thus, according to a remarkable definition made by German economic expert Georg Vobruba, the main content of the EU’s current policy is “expansion without enlargement.”

What has been said above leads to the conclusion that the EU’s relations with the outside world are now marked – more explicitly than ever before – by an imperialistic tint. A United Europe is now far less concerned with making its internal space homogeneous (as witnessed in the restrictions imposed on migrant workers from recently absorbed countries) than with projecting its own power on the outside world. This policy merges perfectly with a consolidation of the borderline between the internal and external spheres. It is hardly possible to deny the usefulness of drawing a line of contrast between the empire and the Westphalian-type nation-state as ideal models, and yet we should stress the following. The rise of the European empire coincided with the EU’s loss of uniqueness as a political entity and the obvious transition to building its own identity and political system along the model of a sovereign territorial state of the New Time. This once again confirms the thesis that scholars have put forward many a time; namely, that empire and Westphalian-type statehood do not deny, but rather augment each other.

RUSSIA AND THE EU: AN AWKWARD NEIGHBORHOOD

Russia has no choice but to deal with a new European Union – new not only in the sense that it has engulfed a large number of countries whose historical experience is vastly different from Old Europe. Of paramount importance is the specificity of the historic situation in which the latest enlargements took place, as well as the consequent radical change in United Europe’s self-identification. The objective truth is that, irrespective of anyone’s ill will, in the most crucial aspects the EU’s new identity stands in opposition to Russia’s identity.

In the first place, this has a bearing on the security policy aimed at eliminating threats by making neighbors democratic, and Russia’s position in this sense is far from unique. Abounding research in parts of the world as different as the southern Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Equatorial Africa shows that the extremely formal approach by the U.S. and the EU to the “export of democracy,” their efforts to apply the same institutional solutions everywhere and mistrust for local political processes breed mass dissatisfaction and problems even for those activists who sincerely accept Western values. But Russia, a country with a sizable defense potential and a growing economy – regardless of the driving forces of that growth and the prospects it has – acts as the most outspoken critic of the liberal world order today. Once again, this role also pertains much more to the policy of self-identification rather than to the “objective” balance of forces. Today’s Russia sees itself as a successor to the state with a 1,000-year history and as a great European power – with the “Golden Era” of the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev serving as the benchmark for redefining the standards of a great power. That is why Western chatting about the demise of sovereignty sparks Russian protests, all the more so that – as has been justly noted by Russian leaders – the West has no plans to become dissolved as a political subject in the unified space of the global world. By speaking out from the positions of “common human values,” the West (the U.S., the EU, individual Western countries and international organizations) actually cloaks its sovereign actions using the logic of “common sense.” Indeed, if democratic values meet the interests of all and sundry, the choice of democracy loses its political pith and turns into a purely technical issue.

However, this depoliticizing is false, since in a situation where democracy is made equal to human rights all opponents to democracy immediately turn into the foes of humanity. To use the terminology of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, this “ultra-political” moment is especially typical of the global war on terror.

Russia offers its own version of universal “common sense,” in which the central role is given to state sovereignty as the most obvious self-organizational principle of the international system. It is not surprising therefore that the European policy of expansion without enlargement triggers strong protests from Moscow. Russia rejected the European ‘neighborhood policy’ right from the start, was greatly suspicious of the ‘color revolutions’ in Eastern Europe and did its best to defend its internal political space from EU and Western influences in general.

One of the reasons for the EU’s uneasy feeling about Moscow’s conduct is that Russia vehemently rejects the European logic of conditionality. Although the EU has decided against further enlargement for now, it continues to peg its neighborhood policy to the old model: it continues to set requirements that the partners should comply with in order to get financial aid, access to European commodity markets and other benefits in return.

However, unlike Turkey, Russia is not seeking EU membership even in the remotest future; it does not need financial aid today; and limiting the access of Russia’s major export item – energy resources – to the European market is a hard thing to do due to the absence of alternatives there. This does not mean, of course, that Moscow does not need anything from the EU. The two sides are interdependent in the energy sector, but contrary to the dogmas of neo-liberal theories, the latter factor does not generate stimuli for cooperation. The reason is that the projected benefits of cooperation fade away in the minds of each side against the background of threats that it perceives by adopting the terms specified by the other side. Russia is ready to cooperate only if the EU recognizes its status as a sovereign European power and refrains from interfering in its home affairs. Brussels fears that cooperation with Moscow in such conditions will undermine its own sovereignty, since it will fuel authoritarian tendencies in Russia’s political development. Add to this a poor understanding of the logic of each other’s actions. Each of the sides has a sincere conviction that its notions about security are universal, and hence it suspects the other side of hypocrisy, double standards and even the purported willingness to achieve its objectives to the detriment of the partner’s interests.

Differences in the interpretation of past history make up one more stumbling block in Russian-EU relations. Naturally, this problem is greatly influenced by the position of the former Soviet Baltic republics and Poland – countries that forged their self-determination and reunification with Europe by fighting Moscow’s imperialism. Other European countries are more inclined to see nuances in their relationships with Russia, and it is their position that constitutes the pan-European consensus. Still, this consensus differs radically from Russia’s officially adopted version of its own and European history on a number of points. While Russia views the victory over Nazism as a paramount source of national pride, the pan-European version of the history of World War II sets it aside as a topic for critical reflections on the Europeans’ own past. Russia has an extremely painful reaction to attempts to draw parallels between Nazism and Stalinism, while most Europeans believe that the interpretation of 1945 as an inconspicuous, perfect moral triumph is totally unacceptable. As we have said above, this is linked to the understanding of Nazism (fascism, Francoism, etc.) as an offspring of European civilization as such. It cannot be otherwise, since the ancestors of many of today’s Europeans “fought on the wrong side” and they cannot throw these memories to the trash heap of history. Also, many Europeans are unwilling to forget Stalin’s labor camps, Soviet military domination in Central and Eastern Europe, and the events of 1956 in Hungary and of 1968 in Czechoslovakia. The Europeans talk about all these events not only in terms of the Soviet Union’s “sins,” but also as a general moral responsibility for what happened.

The assessment of the end of the Cold War and the transformations of the 1990s offer an almost mirror-like reflection of the debates on World War II. The EU views them as moments of triumph, as they form the foundation for European pride and a feeling of moral self-sufficiency. On the contrary, for Russians, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the painful reforms of the 1990s are grounds for critical self-reflections about their past and previous illusions, errors and miscalculations.

Vladimir Putin has said on many occasions that the credit for the end to the standoff of military/political blocs in Europe should go to the Soviet Union and that the decisive steps of the Soviet leadership, which got the people’s support, put an end to the Cold War and opened the doors to today’s united world. This vision suggests that the events of the late 1980s and early 1990s could in no way be a capitulation. However, Russians are equally unready to regard these events as a triumphant march of democracy and an untroubled “return to the realm of European civilization.” They have had too many hopes that have blown up and have too many grievances against those with whom they began to build a common European home two decades ago.

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The conflict between Russia and the European Union is much more profound than a mere collision of pragmatic, rationally formulated interests. The disagreement relates to the self-identification of both political subjects in time and space, which in turn has an inseparable link to ethic problems, to the understanding of good and evil, and to the perception of threats to security. Even if the political leaders on both sides prove able to realize the logic of each other’s actions and show readiness to meet each other halfway, they will have to explain to their parliaments, media, experts and voters the importance of concessions.

Our vision of ourselves and the world around us appears to be a very inert system, if one views it as a social phenomenon. And if either side perceives the conflict through the prism of security, it looks far more difficult to change the existing set of priorities. Still, there is no other way to go: we are destined to cohabit in a new Europe, which means we must learn to adjust to each other. Since attempts to build a united Europe from Vancouver to Vladivostok have so far failed, it is important that we develop a mutual recognition of the right to have our own understanding of modern threats and challenges. We must learn to coexist while accepting differences as a norm. We must first recognize the right of the other side to have its own opinion and only then make attempts to convince the opposite party that its truth is not absolute.