Facing the Kremlin. The Common Foreign and Security Policy and Initiatives of EU Member States Vis-a-Vis Russia: an Assessment of their Effectiveness

From the Libyan civil war to the crisis in Venezuela, the European Union has exhibited a worrying fatigue to address effectively today’s most pressing international issues. More than other challenges, growing tensions with Russia have divided the European Union, calling the efficacy of EU foreign policy into question. While debates concerning the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) has generated prolific literature, the discussion still lacks a genuine analysis of the effectiveness of the European Union ‘actorness’ in International Relations1. Given this vacuum, the present research aims to assess the extent to which the European Union foreign policy is effective in the negotiations with Russia. Especially, this study investigates how the relation between the CFSP and National Foreign Policy (NFP) affects possible outcomes. The study is based on a methodological framework suitable to evaluate the EU effectiveness in international negotiations, which has been applied to the specific case study of the EU bargaining with Russia during the Georgian war in 2008. Evidence suggests that the EU can display a significant level of effectiveness when intergovernmental approaches are supported by the CFSP’s institutional dynamics such as socialization, coordination and leadership legitimization. Therefore, my study supports the idea of the CFSP as “influence-multiplier” (Wong, 2011 :158) for National Foreign Policies. Such assumption leads to the implication that, if Member States want to achieve a greater impact on international issues, they should increasingly operate inside the CFSP framework. But are Member States willing to share their sovereignty on foreign policy?