EU’s External Action and Russia: How Can Institutionalisation Affect Decision Making?

The independent role of international institutions has been taken to be the core of the debate between institutionalists and realists. This study explores the EU’s relations with Russia in two cases as a testbed for this debate. Institutional independence, meaning restriction on the ambitions of powerful states on the one hand, and the impact of less powerful states on decisions on the other, are taken here to be the opposite of the power politics of realism. Two cases are studied to show how the EU safeguards the rights and interests of small members and restrains the ambitions of powerful ones to make the case for the institutionalists’ argument. The article also shows how a supranational entity like the European Commission is relatively more successful than an intergovernmental one like the Council of Europe in furthering institutionalisation, even in high-profile cases which are lynchpins of the EU’s Russia policy. This is in line with institutionalists’ argument about the significance of institutionalisation, as the European Commission, through its regulatory mechanism, sets overarching rules and links issues, brings transparency by forcing information sharing, dispels the fear of cheating and paves the ground for more comparative empirical research to evaluate the depth of institutionalisation in supranational and intergovernmental institutions.