Conference reports East or West: Geopolitical Alternatives in Central and Eastern Europe

On May 16 2024, a workshop was organised at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES), Södertörn University, that included presentations on geopolitical orientations in the Baltic states, Central and Eastern Europe, and the Caucasus.

Published on balticworlds.com on June 2, 2024

Geography shapes international politics; and the study of the way geographical factors are relevant for international relations is known as geopolitics. The term incudes, among other things, great power relations, global institutions, interstate relations and border disputes. Also, territorially defined identitities and migration issues are part of geopolitical analyses. Geopolitical orientations (sometimes geopolitical identities or cultures) may be analyzed at different levels, using different methods and different data sources. On May 16 2024, a workshop was organised at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES), Södertörn University, that included presentations on geopolitical orientations in the Baltic states, Central and Eastern Europe, and the Caucasus.

The CBEES funded workshop was organized by Joakim Ekman (Södertörn University) and started with two online presentations: the first one on Belarus (by Victoria Leukavets, Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies, SCEEUS); and the second one on Ukraine (by Olena Podolian, postdoctoral researcher at CBEES). Leukavets focused on the geopolitical orientations of the Belarusian political elites after the 2020 presidential elections and the post-electoral protests. The democratic forces in Belarus advocate a European future, while the Lukashenka regime stands for a different narrative, where Russia remains the main friend and ally of Belarus. The same geopolitical division was covered by Podolian, who also discussed the theoretical debate on “security” in relation to the situation in Ukraine (2014 to 2022).

Turning to Central Europe, Péter Balogh (Eötvös Lóránd University and HUN-REN CERS Institute for Regional Studies) focused on Hungarian geopolitical orientations in the light of Russia’s war against Ukraine. His presentation included a discussion about Transcarpathia (westernmost Ukraine), where a small but politically significant ethnic Hungarian community lives. While Hungary was previously more unequivocally pro-western, over the past decade its government has found an ally in Russia, in its ardent criticism of the West in general and the EU in particular. Rather than making a U-turn in 2022, the Hungarian government has used Ukraine’s partial discrimination of its ethnic Hungarian minority as an excuse for its limited support to Ukraine. Just like Hungary, Poland too has been described as something on an outsider in the EU community of democracies. For almost a decade, up until the October 2023 elections, Poland experimented with illiberalism; and altough the elections seemeinly ended this period, not everything has changed. In the presentation by Ben Stanley (SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities), the situation in Poland was used to discuss a Central European variety of democracy different from the liberal democracy model promoted by the the EU but also different from the kind of illiberalism promoted by the Orbán regime.

Sofie Bedford (Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies, IRES) did a presenation on clashing geopolitical orientations, using Swedish-Georgian relations as a case. Western democracy assistance typically includes gender equality and sexual rights. In Georgia, these topics have both generated strong societal polarization and become the subject of “geopoliticization”. EU actors as well as national liberal progressive groups are equating gender equality and sexual rights with “Europeanness”, based on the idea of a value-based divide between the West/Europe and the East/Russia on these issues. At the same time, conservative or extreme right forces who oppose such equality and rights have been strengthened by a Russian civilizational counter-discourse focused on sexuality and gender, to which Georgia have become particularly exposed in recent years. An East/West divide was also included in the presentation by Maarika Kujanen (Tampere University of Applied Sciences) and Thomas Sedelius (Dalarna University). Here, the dividing line was the one between public support for liberal democracy and preferences for some authoritarian alternative. More specifically, the presentation focused on public opinion in seven semi-presidential political systems: Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, and Slovakia.

When analyzing geopolitical orientations among citizens by utilizing public opinion surveys, different strategies have been suggested.¹ For example, it remains far from certain that asking people about their attitudes towards certain (and perhaps specific and topical) foreign policy issues would necessarily reflect the underlying geopolitical culture of a given country. One should rather ask respondents about their perceptions about their own country´s friends and enemies in the world or what countries function as model for their own state. Geopolitical orientations could also be measured by asking people to locate their country on a spectrum between two competing poles of power, like Russia and the West.² Following this recommendation, Kjetil Duvold and Ali Abdelzadeh (Dalarna University) ended the workshop with a presentation of a fortcomong study of attitudies towards the EU and Russia in the Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Russia’s war against Ukraine – that began in February 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and escalated in 2022 with the full-scale invasion – sent shockwaves through the Baltic countries, who for years have been vocal proponents of the aggressive nature of Russia under Putin. Moreover, the external threat has accented existing tensions relating to citizenship and language rights within the Baltic states, most notably in Estonia and Latvia. In their presentation, Duvold and Abdelzadeh also covered geopolitical belonging and security perceptions among Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians.

 References:

1. John O´Loughlin and Gerard Toal, “The Geopolitical Orientations of Ordinary Belarusians: Survey Evidence from Early 2020”, Post-Soviet Affairs vol. 38, no. 1-2 (2022): 43-61.
2. John O´Loughlin and Paul F. Talbot, “Where in the World is Russia? Geopolitical Perceptions and Preferences of Ordinary Russians”, Eurasian Geography and Economics vol. 46, no. 1 (2005): 23-50.

 

 

Joakim Ekman