Elena Belokurova (ed.). European Politics and Society: Studies by Young Russian Scholars. Saint Petersburg: Intersocis, Vol. 1: 2009. 224 p., Vol. 2: 2010. 232 p. ISBN 975-5-9434-8055-3.
Elena Belokurova. Address for correspondence: Center for German and European Studies, Universitetskaia naberezhnaia 7/9, 199034 Saint Petersburg, Russia. info@zdes.spb.ru.
The first volume of this anthology was published in 2009; the second one is under preparation and will appear in 2010. Both volumes contain papers by doctoral students based in Russia and working in the field of European Studies. The contributions grew out of a series of summer schools for postgraduate students entitled European Union Studies: Methodological Opportunities and Limits held in 2007, 2008, and 2009. The schools were organized by the Center for German and European Studies at Saint Petersburg State University in cooperation with the Russian Branch of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and the Center for European Studies at the European University at Saint Petersburg.
In Russia, the most established institutions in the field of European Studies are Moscow-based think tanks, institutes of the Academy of Sciences, and a number of universities in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. By contrast, the authors of this collection, who were selected through on an open call for applications, are based in provincial Russian cities. Coming from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, they all work on subjects related to Europe; they are at the beginning of their academic careers. Therefore their work testifies to an increased interest in European Studies in Russia.
In this short overview I will try to place the two volumes in the broader framework of European Studies. The field of European Studies initially developed around theories of European integration, and to some extent within legal studies and the study of international relations. Since the 1990s, the field began to be dominated by the comparative study of politics and policies, dealing with internal EU politics and with the Europeanization of the EU member states’ national policies. Only very recently have other disciplines, such as sociology, history, cultural studies, and economics, become more involved in European Studies. In Russia, where the field is quite new, these tendencies and limitations are perhaps more evident than elsewhere. European Studies here are clearly dominated by international relations and mainly focus on relations between the EU and Russia. Economics and legal studies are also to some extent concerned with European issues, but they are less research-oriented and mostly content with simply tracking legal and economic developments. Because of their Russocentrism, Russian sociology and even political science long neglected other European countries and the EU as recearch object.
As the present volumes show, however, new tendencies are apparent in European Studies in Russia. The fact that young doctoral candidates at provincial universities choose to specialize in this field shows that it is no longer entirely dominated by scholars from Moscow and Saint Petersburg, some of whom hold foreign degrees. The increased interest in this field is due to both scholarly and political developments in Russia.
The two volumes show which disciplines are contributing to the emerging field. In the first volume, only four articles dealt with European societies, while seven papers were devoted to politics. In the second volume, half of the articles focus on social issues.
The articles in the political science sections mainly focus on European integration and the contemporary political system of the European Union. They deal with both internal EU politics and foreign policy. For example, the collection includes studies of the role of consultative bodies in the policy-making process, EU security strategy, and peace-keeping capacities. Another set of papers examines influences of EU policies on both member states (for example, on the Swedish political system, the Austrian economy, or elections in Poland) and non-member states, in particular Russia. Examples of topics include the EU’s attempts to transmit European values to non-member states; the Bologna Process; the European Court of Human Rights; and the EU’s experience of giving voting rights to foreign citizens. Of course, the classical topic of EU-Russian relations and the significance of Europe for Russia also feature prominently. Overall, the political science articles are very Russia-oriented. However, more and more they are inspired by theories of comparative politics and by methods typical of European Studies, going beyond the international relations-focused approaches that remain dominant in European Studies in Russia.
As for the sociological part, it is mostly devoted to supranational European identity-building and the role of public sphere. These issues are analyzed from very different perspectives in contributions by sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, and journalists.
Purely sociological topics are represented by research on the ethnic component in intercultural communication and interpersonal trust. These articles try to find some connection to Russia through the attempt to find relevant European theoretical approaches to analyze Russian society, or to make comparative use of empirical data from the EU and Russia. Studies of the social dimension of EU-Russian relations are represented by an article on the main factors of marriage migration from Russia to the EU. Other contributions hail from history (on the construction of the British empire); cultural studies (representations of the Second World War and European history in U.S. cinema); and linguistics (on similarities and differences in the use of adjectives in Russian and German political discourse).
The variety of topics and approaches covered shows that interdisciplinary interest in European Studies is growing in Russia. Each discipline brings its own perspectives, approaches, theories, and methodologies to a field that has traditionally been dominated by the international relations perspective. The fact that most of the contributions are written by young scholars gives hope that the field will remain vibrant in the long term and may even enrich European Studies beyond Russia.