Many Narratives or a Single Voice? The Role of Historical Policy in EU–Russia Relations

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to analyse the process of change in Russian historical policy from a foreign policy perspective. The article hypothesizes that the historical policy can be considered as an indicator of changes in Russia’s foreign policy, allowing to infer the direction of its future development, playing both an ‘integrative’ and ‘disintegrative’ role. Using the example of the EU, the impact of Russia’s historical policy on the EU’s historical narrative is examined. While in the analysed context the new Russian historical narrative signalled a growing distrust and a more confrontational stance towards the EU (a disintegrative role), its unintended side effect was the construction of a common European historical narrative (an integrative role) pushed by the Central and Eastern European states in response to Russia’s aggressive rhetoric on historical issues, the interpretation of which few years earlier had divided the ‘old’ and ‘new’ member states.