This article evaluates the significance of Russian soft power in Estonia, particularly in connection to the minority issue, and compares this soft power to the countervailing pull of the European Union on the other side. It concludes that although Russia does indeed have a number of soft power resources, their potential for being translated into actual power and influence is too often exaggerated, not least because Europe provides a much more attractive focus point for the disgruntled than Moscow. Moreover, Estonia has it fully within its power to bolster its own attractiveness in the eyes of the minority populations. Thus, although relations with Russia should be handled with care, it is not Russia’s soft power that should be feared.
If the measure of Barack Obama's success in mending USÁEuropean relations is whether the tone has improved, his presidency has been a great success. If the measure of success, however, is halting the drifting apart of policy preferences, the picture looks a lot less rosy. This article argues that the 'drift' in relations did not start and end with the Bush administration. Rather it reflects deep-seated preferences and very different world views on both sides. Given this, the best any one leader on either side can hope for is to manage relations with as little friction and acrimony as possible. The Obama administration realises that, and by this more limited measure, it has succeeded brilliantly.
Abstract.Within neoliberal approaches to the study of International Relations there is a consensus that nongovernmental actors and their potential impact need to be studied more. This article examines how Estonian civil society organisations are acting as agents in the general Europeanisation processes. The framework within which they operate, the European Neighbourhood Policy and the EU-Russia Strategic Partnership, are both in theory open to participation by the third sector. The EU's foreign policy, being built up to such a large degree around notions of soft power, should also lend itself easily to the kinds of bottom-up approaches to spreading its influence, which civil society can help effecting. The empirical work shows, however, that due to both institutional and procedural obstacles, this sort of cooperation is not happening to a great extent, or is at least significantly hampered. On key issues and in terms of priorities the agendas of civil society organisations and traditional state actors also tend to diverge, with the former eager to pursue more normative charged policies, and the latter taking a more traditional approach. The state of civil society in the former Soviet Union also makes this style of policy more difficult. Thus the central argument of this article is that while civil society organisations do offer interesting avenues to explore, the EU has been far too unappreciative of the needs of civil society organisations, and has therefore not been able to fully utilise the resources they could potentially provide.
When the EU launched the Eastern Partnership (EaP) in 2009, it did so with much rhetoric about projecting its soft power into Eastern Europe. Yet today, the EU's soft power project seems to have stalled, with developments in the region being less than favourable. This article argues that the EaP essentially replicated the main weaknesses of the European Neighbourhood Policy, by offering too little incentive and support to the partners, rendering both conditionality and soft power ineffective as tools for milieu shaping. In promoting the EaP as a policy of soft power, the EU has once again forgotten that soft power can never be separated from the 'harder' policies that would meet the expectations of those wishing to align with it. This failure of policy continues to largely negate the EU's actually considerable reservoir of potential soft power in Eastern Europe.
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