Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have established themselves as ardent supporters of the EU's Eastern Partnership, and have also combined this with robust national policies. The crisis in Ukraine, with the annexation of Crimea and Russian military aggression precipitating confrontation in EU-Russia relations, presented the Baltic countries with the most formidable political challenge since restoring independence. Combining Europeanization literature with Larsen's (2005) approach to the foreign policy of small states, the article focuses on the relationship between national foreign policies of EU member states and the European Union as a foreign policy platform. The analysis synthesizes the results of a content analysis of official press releases with interviews with the Baltic states’ diplomats. The empirical results show that in responding to the Ukraine crisis, the Baltic states have regularly pursued their policy aims through the EU, contesting the conventional notion that Europeanization rarely extends to foreign and security affairs. More specifically, the Baltic states’ handling of the Ukraine crisis suggests that Europeanization can affect even dossiers with heavy bearing on member states’ security and national sovereignty where – according to the extant consensus in the literature – it should be least likely.
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.
As the new government incorporating the populist EKRE party took office in Estonia in spring 2019, concerns emerged about Estonia’s long-standing policy outlook of strong Euro-Atlantic integration. Other coalition members had to balance EKRE’s policy positions, which manifested in contradictory statements and vague decisions. Analysing the Estonian government’s rhetoric about the EU, this paper reveals how the government in its first year in office framed the European Union (EU). The Green Deal, or the EU’s target of achieving climate neutrality by 2050, emerged as one of the cross-cutting topics in the discourse, but the pragmatic rhetoric employed by ministers and the conflict between values and actions raises questions about the motivations of the government, and therefore results in what is termed as ‘reluctant’ Europeanisation.
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