... a couple of decades.
However, imagine for a second that a miracle happens, and the Ukrainian problem is off the table. Would it open a way for a common understanding of the European future and for a consorted EU–Russia effort at building a shared Greater Europe? Most likely, it would not. The Ukrainian conflict, as important as it is, should not overshadow more fundamental divisions between the East and the West; these divisions are not likely to disappear any time soon.
Andrey Kortunov:
Europe and Russia: Four Scenarios for the New Cycle
Diverging visions of the European future
Even during the honeymoon of the Russian-EU cooperation in early 2000s Moscow ...
... Force Position Paper Released
A group of prominent Members and Supporters of the Pan-European
Task Force on Cooperation in Greater Europe
,
including former foreign and defence ministers and senior officials from Russia, the United Kingdom, Turkey,... ... Finland
has joined forces to appeal to the leadership of the countries in the Euro-Atlantic area to
halt the downward spiral in West-Russia relations and manage its risks better through developing a more stable and sustainable security relationship
.
Noting ...
... 2014. They didn’t even appear in 2000, when Vladimir Putin came to power. They existed long before. But for the longest time, all of us – East and West – tried to smooth them out, tune them down, or even ignore them completely.
The West has always seen the construction of Greater Europe as the expansion of existing western institutions towards the East. That’s why negotiations on Russia–EU cooperation had little to do with finding reasonable compromises. Rather, they were little more than Europe attempting ...
... building of a special monitoring mission, for example, has been extremely challenging.
I think in the longer term the concept of a Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok will either be rehabilitated as part of an improvement in relations between Russia and the West because in my analysis Russia needs the rest of Europe for economic interactivity, capital investment, specific technology investments in Russia. Europe needs a positive relationship with Russia both for economic reasons, energy supply but also for ...
... and distinguishing features in the concept of Europeanism. Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote: “The more nationalist we are, the greater Europeans (‘universal humans’) we will become.” Russia’s Slavophiles, those wonderful disciples ... ... they saw the Russian sociocultural phenomenon as a very bright and distinctive part of the pan-European trend.
MANY RUSSIAN Westernizers, however, interpreted Russia’s Europeanism in a far more mechanical and one-dimensional fashion. Very important ...