Johann Wolfschwenger

Neither can the rivalry between Russia and the EU be explained without considering the geopolitical choices of the countries ‘in-between’, such as Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia or Armenia, nor can domestic politics in one of the countries ‘in-between’ be explained without considering the external actor’s policies and their impact on domestic politics. Thus, in order to understand Moldova’s domestic politics as well as the effects of EU policies towards Moldova (i.e. the Eastern Partnership, EaP) the regional and the domestic dimension need to be treated as strongly intertwined. In order to do so the dissertation utilizes a constructivist and poststructuralist region-building approach (RBA). The EU’s and Russia’s policies constitute two controversial, at times even conflicting, region-building projects. Following the theoretical strand of RBA, the thesis criticises the traditional conceptualization of Europeanization mechanisms based on the logic of appropriateness and the logic of consequence and develops an analytical framework on the basis of Foucauldian understanding of discursive power and insights from practice theory in order to explain how such discursive power travels between the regional discourse to the domestic discourse. The theoretical part argues that a that the poststructuralist perspective and the specific understanding of power that comes with it is a useful analytical lens to transcend the longstanding mismatch between empirical observations and conceptual assumptions about external impact in the EaP – such as the dyad of values versus interests and the complexity stemming from the relational triangle EU-Russia-neighbourhood countries. Europeanization is not understood in the traditional way as a process of norm and value – possibly identity – transfer through socialization and conditionality but as a process of impacting political practices (rites, speech acts and more generally discourses) in the target country and ‘transnationalizing’ domestic power struggles embedded in those discourses and practices.