Современная Европа

The article draws on International Relations theorizing of different logics of social action to provide yet another conceptual interpretation of the dynamics of EU-Russia relations before the deepest crisis started in 2022. The research concentrates on the logics of habit, arguing and affective action. Logics precluding changes in EU-Russia relations are illustrated by foreign policy moves and perceptions of both sides pre-2022 crisis. According to the logic of arguing, Russia refuted the EU’s claim to have the better argument, while the EU did not accept Russia’s self-attributed status of a country belonging to the Western lifeworld with shared political culture and did not take Russian arguments as genuine. Consequently, in the logic of affective action, Russian authorities got frustrated and angry because of the EU’s denial of an important Russian affectual need for belonging. The habits of mutual distrust and the incompatibility of mutual perceptions lead to the routinization of the conflict that is very difficult if not impossible to overcome.

The failed Catalan sovereignty process, launched in 2012 and then crushed by the intervention of the Spanish central government in 2017, relied to a certain extent on a discursive framework based on the evocation of previous secessionist experiences in Europe. Among these, the case of Slovenia (successfully completed in 1992) stood out. A close examination of these cases outlines the limitations of these analogies, notably through their differences in terms of political and social articulation and, in particular, the diverging success of external engagement. Beyond political and social articulation and the degree of economic development (heterogeneous aspects in many successful statehood processes), the comparison of these cases demonstrates that a sound internationalization strategy is essential for statehood attainment. The success of such a strategy does not solely depend on the secessionist actors’ ability to reach out to the relevant international players, but also on the latter’s readiness to provide necessary support. While the Slovenes managed to promptly engage with the rapid geopolitical changes in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, the Catalan bid for secession found receptiveness only among marginal actors within major powers, all together unwilling to push for border changes of a state located in a sensitive area of the Euro-Atlantic security complex.