0728 Final the Impact of Perceptions of Democratic Decline-Explaining
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The Impact of Perceptions of Democratic Decline: Explaining French and German Foreign Policy toward Russia BY John E. Livingstone Submitted to the graduate degree program in Political Science and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Chairperson Mariya Y. Omelicheva Nazli Avdan Robert J. Rohrschneider Clayton Webb Nathaniel Wood Date Defended: July 29, 2016 The Dissertation Committee for John E. Livingstone certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Impact of Perceptions of Democratic Decline: Explaining French and German Foreign Policy toward Russia Chairperson Mariya Y. Omelicheva Date approved: 29 July, 2016 !ii Abstract In the last ten years, Russia’s growing assertiveness in international affairs has morphed into aggression as exemplified in Moscow’s military interventions first in Georgia in 2008 and subsequently in Ukraine in 2014. European countries responded to these events in markedly different ways. Whereas they decided not to implement sanctions against Russia in 2008, they reversed the non-confrontational course and sanctioned many of Russia’s top officials and a variety of businesses in 2014. This dissertation uses discourse analysis to investigate the motivations behind these contrary responses through the examination of French and German foreign policy rhetoric. I argue that explanations based on the realist expectations of balancing behavior, neoliberal institutionalist and liberal accounts highlighting the role of international institutions, and economic and other domestic interests, or constructivist explanations focusing on identity and international norms cannot fully explain French and German responses to Russia’s interventions. Rather, the reversal of their positions on sanctioning Russia can be traced to changes in the perceptions of the French and German policy makers regarding the state of democracy in Russia. Consistent with the logic of democratic peace research, I find that French and German policy makers refrained from taking confrontational action against Russia in 2008 when they perceived it as an emerging democracy but were willing to confront Russia in 2014 when they perceived it to be regressing into authoritarianism. Theoretically, this dissertation demonstrates the importance of perceptions of the target regime, specifically with respect to the democratic peace theory, and suggests that these interpretations apply also to the trajectory of domestic politics in the target state. It expands the scope of democratic peace theory to include transitioning states and argues that democratic foreign policy is not limited to the dyads of !iii mature democracies but can also be applied to situations when the target state is perceived to be moving on a path toward western-style liberal democracy. !iv Table of Contents Abstract ...........................................................................................................................................iii Motivating Question and Plan for the Dissertation ..........................................................................1 Action and Reaction: Russian Interventions and European Responses ...........................................5 The Russo-Georgian war .....................................................................................................5 Multiple crises in Ukraine ....................................................................................................7 Theoretical Foundations .................................................................................................................11 What is foreign policy? ......................................................................................................11 “Mainstream” theoretical explanations of states’ foreign policy .......................................13 The Art of the Possible - Competing Explanations of Foreign Policy Behavior ...........................26 Hypotheses .....................................................................................................................................34 Methodology ..................................................................................................................................35 Analysis of French Foreign Policy Discourse ...............................................................................44 French data sources ............................................................................................................45 What did they talk about? Issues in French-Russian discourse .........................................47 In their own words: French foreign policy motivations .....................................................54 Preeminent discourses — tracing the most salient French rhetoric over time ...................75 Discussion — assessing the France findings .....................................................................80 Analysis of German Foreign Policy Discourse ..............................................................................88 German data sources ..........................................................................................................88 What did they talk about? Issues in German-Russian discourse .......................................92 In their own words - German foreign policy motivations ..................................................97 !v Preeminent discourses — tracing the most salient German rhetoric over time ...............115 Discussion — assessing the Germany findings ...............................................................122 Conclusions ..................................................................................................................................130 Reviewing the puzzle .......................................................................................................130 Methodology review ........................................................................................................131 Conclusions compared .....................................................................................................132 Broader implications ........................................................................................................136 Future considerations .......................................................................................................140 !vi Motivating Question and Plan for the Dissertation On 8 August 2008, Russia launched a large-scale land, air, and sea invasion of Georgia shortly after the Georgian Army attacked ethnic Russian separatists in the city of Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, a breakaway province of Georgia. Russian and South Ossetian forces defeated the Georgian military in a matter of days in what the Russian government dubbed as a “peace enforcement operation”. Responding to the Russo-Georgian hostilities, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who held at that time the rotating presidency of the European Union, negotiated a cease-fire between Moscow and Tbilisi. On 26 August 2008, then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree recognizing the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another breakaway region of Georgia. With Russian support, the two territories remain outside Georgian jurisdiction as de facto independent countries. While European countries universally expressed disapproval of Russia’s actions, they took little concrete action, specifically rejecting the implementation of sanctions. The only response was to suspend negotiations between the EU and Russia on a renewal of their Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA). Bilateral relations between Russia and the majority of European states continued unabated however. Subsequently, in the wake of Ukrainian regime change in February 2014 that replaced a pro-Russian president with a pro-western one, the Crimean parliament sought greater independence from the central government. After failing to obtain their desired autonomy, the Crimeans voted to become independent from Ukraine proper. In March 2014 Russian troops occupied Crimea in support of secessionist elements, resulting in the eventual annexation of the peninsula that had been part of Ukraine since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Soon after, ethnic Russians in the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk also sought independence from the !1 central government and began seizing control of these territories. While Russia did not overtly assist these new self-proclaimed republics, they supported the rebels through the provision of equipment and personnel. Furthermore, Russia kept up to 40,000 soldiers adjacent to the Ukraine border for several months in a clear signal to the Ukrainian government not to take aggressive action against the separatists. As a result of the annexation of Crimea and the continuing support for instability in Ukraine, France and Germany responded to Russian intervention by supporting European sanctions on certain individuals in Russian and Ukraine and sectors of the Russian economy. Both instances are cases of Russian military intervention in domestic political conflicts in sovereign states, which resulted in their territorial disintegration. In both cases, Russia acquired formal or informal but de facto control over the breakaway regions. However, key European nations—France and Germany particularly—responded to Russia’s actions differently, despite the markedly similar international and domestic contexts for foreign policy making