The EU-Russia Strategic Partnership: The Limits of Post-Sovereignty in International Relations

What lies behind the increasing acrimony between the European Union and Russia as they negotiate over a successor to Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) and as they clash over such issues as the Russo-Georgian conflict of 2008 or the Russo-Ukrainian gas crisis of 2009? Within the literature, many have pointed to an essential incompatibility of wider value systems regarding the normative foundation of the EU-Russia relationship--i.e. the understandings concerning norms and rules that pertain to the scope, the nature of objects of contention, the relationship with sovereignty, and the logic of interaction within the international institution of the PCA and possible successors. Haukkala (a Special Adviser at the Unit for Policy Planning and Research at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland) subjects this hypothesis to theoretical and empirical scrutiny, drawing on "a sort of theoretical middle ground between structuralism and methodological individualism, rationalism and constructivism" and examining case studies concerning the role of commonality in EU-Russia interactions, specifically the negotiations and content of the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement, indigenous framing of the relationship in policy papers and strategy documents, the beginning of the Second Chechen War, the negotiations of the Common European Economic Space concept, and orientations towards the Nordic states. Annotation c2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Hiski Haukkala is Senior Lecturer at the School of Management at the University of Tampere, Finland.