Europe and Russia’s National Interests

Abstract

The article analyzes the prospects of institutional innovation in the european international process. European Union (EU) is going through several crises of political, economic, ideological and intellectual nature. It makes many scholars and researchers as well as policymakers and ordinary people to think about redefining the concept of the «Common European home» for not only European states, but also in a broader sense meaning the post-Soviet space. The authors present an assessment of weak and strong sides of the existing European integrational institutional architecture by using methods of systemic and probabilistic analysis as well as multi-level approach. It inevitably leads to the question about the relationship between the institutions as independent agents and nation states, and the role of intergovernmental cooperation in solving the current EU’s problems. This EU crisis creates opportunities as well as, challenges for Russia which has no possibility to simply fence off from Europe institutionally or ideologically. Europe was, is and will be a part of the Russian national interests – either as a threat or as a factor which contributes to its development and prosperity. Therefore, the authors wonder how the updated concept of European integration can look and, respectively, which impact all these changes can have on Russian foreign policy. Using the historic institutionalism the authors make the conclusion about the existing institutional lock-ins and path-dependent behavior of the EU that does not allow to adapt to the rapidly changing environment. To solve the existing crisis EU needs upgrade the political, economic and intellectual concept of the integration process.