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

Summary/Abstract: Although the European Union (EU) was occasionally presented in a positive light in the lower house of the Russian parliament (the State Duma) during the period 1994–2004, the EU and the “European community” were often criticized. The discussions were accompanied by expressed anxieties from 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 the Chechen Republic, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, and the Baltic states as ostensible areas 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 both the President’s and the Government’s policy. The members of United Russia, the Government’s party that won a constitutional majority in 2003, adopted elements of conservative and rightwing rhetoric of the formal opposition in 2004. This occured in the context of EU enlargement when the issues of the accessibility of the Kaliningrad Region and the rights of Russian speakers in Latvia and Estonia were discussed in parliament. Later in the same year, the start of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine became further impetus for the Duma’s anti-EU discourse, a discourse that would soon become mainstream in Russian politics.

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