Closing the Rhetoric-Practice Gap : An Analysis of Continuity and Development in EU-Russia Relations Through Historical Institutionalism

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines the EU's relations with Russia and their eventual suspension. The EU today, just like Russia, is an important geopolitical actor in the international arena. Their partnership was formalised in 1997 with long-term prospects. However, it gradually worsened over time. The study adopts historical institutionalism as its theoretical framework and utilises analytic process-tracing as its method. Historical institutionalism offers the analytical tools for the study, allowing concepts such as path dependence, critical junctures, and institutional change to guide the examination of EU-Russia relations from a historical institutionalist perspective. The study shows that the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement put the EU on a path dependence, which constrained the EU's penalising actions towards Russia when it violated international law. However, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 not only acted as an unprecedented institutional shock but also, being in the EU's immediate vicinity, prompted it to fully suspend the partnership, guided by rational thought.