A European or a Slavic Choice? Foreign Policy and Public Attitudes in Post-Soviet Europe

Abstract

In the discussion that follows we focus upon this wider public dimension of the process of eastward enlargement, and upon the distribution of opinion within our four countries on the place they occupy within a changing international order. Do ordinary citizens in these countries, for instance, think of themselves as 'Europeans'? Or as members of a distinctive civilisation, sharing some but not all of the values of their Western counterparts? More generally, what support is there for a 'European choice', involving a closer relationship with the European Union and its member countries, compared with a 'Slavic choice', in which greater priority is given to relations with other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States? This is a distinction that resonates throughout the former Soviet republics, particularly those that lie 'in between' Russia and the European Union. And in turn it helps to shape their domestic and international politics in a continent that has left behind the divisions of the Cold War but not yet determined its own institutional forms.