The European Union, Russia and the Post-Soviet Space: Shared Neighbourhood, Battleground or Transit Zone on the New Silk Road?

IN THE NOW DISTANT MONTHS OF LATE 2013, WHEN WE WROTE and submitted a proposal for a Jean Monnet project that became the basis for this special collection of essays, it still seemed possible to confidently assert, as did European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso in March 2013, that ‘there is a hard and sustained effort to build wide-ranging partnership for the sake of greater prosperity, predictability and security for the European Union and Russia’ (Barroso 2014, p. 272). Rumblings about Russian policy on issues such as gender and political rights were irritants in a complex relationship, as was Russia’s use of energy in its disputes with neighbours, but they were not enough to think that great geopolitical and geostrategic games would once again be on the table. Even Russia’s conflict with Georgia in 2008 did not convince EU leaders that venturing beyond the eastern borders could lead to major tensions and conflict with Russia. Less than half a decade later, the post-Soviet space, from the Baltic Sea all the way to the Chinese border, is once again a subject of central concern in European capitals and Moscow