Authors

Discussion

Throughout their thirty-three years of coexistence, the relations between the European Community (EC) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) underwent a phase of denial, rejection, acceptance, and ultimately, cooperation. For the same number of years, EC-USSR relations primarily consisted of trade (or the lack thereof) and only took on a political nature during the Gorbachev years. While the decision-making in Brussels was highly pragmatic, seeking to establish and then better relations with the Soviets via trade, the notion of the periphery was not absent. However, more interestingly, it became highly volatile during the final years of the Cold War. Suddenly, the socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe (excluding the USSR) seemed less peripheral. Gorbachev’s reforms brought the USSR closer to this periphery until the former socialist states signed association agreements with the EC. Yeltsin’s Russia displayed an eagerness to do so, too. It even inquired about potential EC membership while simultaneously showing imperialist ambitions in the post-Soviet space, worryingly recognised by some in the European Commission in 1992. While Jacques Delors’ vision of a Grande Europe might have appeared compatible with the Russian eagerness to join the Western fold, the EC member states preferred to leave Russia in the periphery.

This paper will briefly retrace Brussels’ perspective on the Eastern European periphery throughout the pre-Gorbachev years and then focus on the latter, examining the rapid shift in perceptions of Central and Eastern Europe, including the USSR and Russia. The end of the Cold War had ended ‘the anomaly of a divided Europe’, which had been the EC’s long-term goal throughout that event. Russia would be excluded from the European integration process, not only because of its vast territory but also due to its ambitions to establish a foothold in the former Soviet territory. Moscow sought to display itself as European to Brussels while simultaneously using the Commonwealth of Independent States as an imperially tinged integrationist tool in the post-Soviet space.