Better shared than dead? Russia’s dissociation from the post-cold war European security order
Authors:   , Polianskii Mikhail 
Published: October 2024

Why did Russian-Western relations experience such a dramatic downturn less than a generation after they arguably arrived at the highest point in history at the end of the Cold War? Despite extensive literature addressing this question, the academic debate is still largely dominated by the reductionist studies that assign blame for the breakdown of relations between Russia and countries of the political West exclusively to one side of the conflict, overlooking the possible joint responsibility for mismanaging the relations to the point of military conflict. Against this background, this cumulative dissertation project, consisting of five research papers, narrows down this gap by investigating the role of the European security institutions, that were created after the end of the bipolar confrontation, in the deterioration of Russian-Western conflict in the post-Cold War period. It argues that the European security institutions and Russia’s dissociation from them, referred to below as “Ruxit,” should be treated not only as pure victims of the overall Russian-Western conflict but also as one of its causes. Specifically, I demonstrate that the European multilateral institutions, albeit far from being the sole cause of the crisis, have played a key tensions-intensifying role in Russian-Western relation in the post-Cold War period in two distinctive ways. First, Russia’s interaction with European multilateral institutions and Russian-Western reconciliation at large were based on what turned out to be overly optimistic premise of Russia’s inevitable political and economic democratisation and liberalisation. However, the initial optimism surrounding Russia's leadership transition was short-lived, as cascading economic crises and the discreditation of liberal factions, who were made responsible for it, precipitated the resurgence of more hawkish elements within the Russian leadership. In what followed, Western states, openly expressing their frustration with the Russian authoritarian turn, transitioned from a stance of institutional inclusivity to a hedging strategy, ostensibly elevating Russia's symbolic status while effectively keeping it on the margins of the Western-dominated European security architecture. The perceived encroachment of Western policies, most notably by NATO expansion from 1999 onwards, served as a convenient pretext for the hawks within Russia to bolster their position in the Russian government even further, exacerbating a mutually reinforcing cycle of confrontation with the newly created institutional framework. As a result, paradoxically, instead of aiding Russia's democratic transition, the institutional security framework exacerbated its own burdens and intensified tensions between Russia and the West. The second mechanism elucidating the deterioration of Russian-Western relations attributable to European multilateral institutions pertains to their inability to adequately react to Russia's political and diplomatic efforts to adapt joint institutions in response to emerging challenges in the mid-2000s. This dissertation argues that the original institutional framework not only failed to foresee Russia’s domestic development but also demonstrated structural inadequacies to counter resulting foreign policy behaviour of the disillusioned Russian leadership. Subsequently, Moscow, after a brief phase of selectively disregarding established norms, escalated its contestation strategies by initially advocating for alternative institutional frameworks and ultimately opting for a de facto withdrawal from them. With this, I advance the counterfactual argument that had the European institutions proved to be more agile and adaptive to the dynamic of the post-Cold War development of Russian-Western relations, Moscow would most likely have longer remained within the bounds of the reformed European institutional order, or, at least, not pursued such an openly confrontational anti-Western course. Through the use of original aggregated data (43 personal interviews with Russian and Western politicians, diplomats, scholars, and experts) and synthesis of Russian foreign policy literature with the institutional crisis scholarship that have so far developed independently, this dissertation presents a comprehensive analysis of why Russia felt so estranged from the order which it formerly so actively endorsed. Overall, this study bridges the domains of academia and practice, domestic and international politics, while also establishing connections between the past, present, and future of Russian-Western relations.