The European Union in the Russian State Duma Debates, 1994–2004

Abstract

Although the European Union (EU) was occasionally presented in a positive light in the lower house of the Russian parliament (the State Duma) in 1994–2004, there were also numerous criticisms of the EU and the “European community” in a broader sense. The discussions were accompanied by vocally articulated anxieties by those factions that were oppositional to the President and the Government but had a strong foothold in the parliament, such as the conservative Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), the rightwing populist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), and the rightwing Rodina (“Motherland”) Party and its predecessors. These anxieties pertained to Chechnya, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, and the Baltic states as the spaces of contestation between Russia and the EU. The projects of (re)building the Russian (Soviet) imperial formation on the basis of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) or the Union State (of Russia and Belarus) were presented as alternatives to Western European integration based on the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The anti-EU rhetoric in the Duma, which came hand in hand with the denunciation of NATO, provided a discursive foundation for the eventual shift of the President’s and the Government’spolicy. The members of United Russia, the Government’s party without a clear ideology that won a constitutional majority in 2003, adopted elements of conservative and rightwing rhetoric of the formal opposition in 2004. This happened in the context of the EU enlargement when the issues of the accessibility of the Kaliningrad Region and the rights of the Russian speakers in Latvia and Estonia were discussed in the parliament. Later the same year, the start of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine became a further impetus for the Duma’s anti-EU discourse, a discourse that would soon become mainstream in Russian politics.