MEJORAMIENTO DE LA NAVEGABILIDAD DE LOS RÍOS DE LA CUENCA DEL PLATA

Junior Researcher in the Karelian Institute at the University of Eastern Finland

The EU-Russia Borderland: New contexts for regional cooperation

Nowadays when East-West tensions are quite palpable, this edited volume offers a much needed unconventional perspective on the EU-Russia relations – “not from the lofty heights of Kremlinology or as yet another illustration of the clash of civilizations”

(p. 61), but through the lenses of everyday practices and grassroots initiatives on the EU-Russia borderland.

While the reality brings evidence of nationalism, securitisation, assertive foreign policies and populism being on the rise, distancing from global and national centres and looking at the world processes from the periphery and particularly from the borderlands has become an even more critical approach. This alternative analytical optics enables a more nuanced and profound understanding of variable and heterogeneous nature of states, regions and borders between them.

As Jussi Laine, one of contributing authors to this book, aptly pointed out in his recent publication, borders are “complex and dynamic multiscalar entities that have different symbolic and material forms maintained by a multiplicity of bordering processes and practices” (2016, p. 466). This edited volume is a unique depository of these

“bordering processes and practices”

revealed on the particular borderland – a transitional space between Russia and Finland that is “considered by both

sides to be a laboratory for co-operation between Russia and the EU” (p. 201).

This attitude to the borderlands as empowered places of experiment is repeated in the central research question of the book which is to what extent and in which way local and regional social, economic and political actors involved in cross-border networks may “reconfigure the relationship between the EU and Russia” (p. 7).

Due to the expertise of authors involved in the book creation and the broad spectrum of issues addressed, this volume may be defined as an encyclopedia of the Russian-Finnish borderland (or to be precise of its central and southern parts). A team of contributing authors includes Russian and Finnish academics most of whom have first-hand experience of living and working in the Russian-Finnish borderland. Nine out of 16 authors are based in University of Eastern Finland, a well-known research center for Border Studies and Russian Studies. Given the authors’ diverse backgrounds, key themes touched upon in the volume encompass identity politics, region-building and ‘re-scaling’ of levels of integration and interaction. The units of analysis range from border towns (Sortavala, Svetogorsk, Kostomuksha) to (cross-)border regions (mostly Karelia), from particular actors of cooperation (civil society organisations, ethnic organisations, youth) to entire fields of interactions (such as economic ties, labour market and spatial planning).

The subtitle of the volume is somewhat intriguing as it promises to unveil “new contexts for regional co-operation”.

To name these contexts, the book discusses content and results of Russia’s political, economic, societal and cultural transformations keeping in mind multiplicity, simultaneity and overlay of these processes. Whereas from chapter to chapter authors repeat that “Russia’s overall transition has not met foreign (Western) expectations” (p. 183), privatisation, individualisation within Russian society and launch of Russia’s post-socialist modernisation project are some of the features that significantly shape the way cross-border interaction is developing.

The book is divided into three rather unequal parts. The first section comprises three chapters that focus on internal political integration (to the federal centre) – a trend happening in Russia after it had transited from total centralisation to relative decentralisation in the 1990s. Both chapters written by Elena Belokurova and Maria Nozhenko are designed as comparative studies of Russian regions located in the Northwest Federal District (NWFD) – a new level of vertical power structure. Chapter Two postulates that no political community has evolved in NWFD due to the lack of commitment to interregional integration and absence of large and stable communication networks (p.

18). Chapter Three evaluates regional political communities on the basis of their modularity and region-centeredness and concludes that political community formation is dependent on political regime, ongoing political process, presence of regional myth and history of external ties.

The second part consists of six chapters and suggests that new processes and

new actors of cross-border interaction between Russia and Finland have influenced the overall change in the borderland. This section of the book addresses Russia’s transformation from planned economy to the market, from relatively closed border with the West to a more porous one, from strict ideological control towards pluralism.

The third part comprises four chapters and is primarily concerned with the symbolic and ideological repositioning happening in Russian border regions and cities, as well as in some cross-border areas (for instance in the trans-border region of Karelia).

The final two parts of the book contain different assessments of integration attempts on the Russian-Finnish border which exemplify that cooperation in different fields proceed with different speeds. In Chapter Four drawing on analysis of market-based interactions, Heikki Eskelinen states that “geography matters when political conditions allow it” (p. 49), pointing at various asymmetries that were born due to the lack of “compatibility of territorialization processes” (p. 59). Equally critical evaluation of integration in the field of labour market and spatial planning is present in Chapters Six and Seven.

Investigating the realm of people-to-people cooperation, Alexander Izotov in Chapter 11 reached a more positive conclusion, that is that residents on both sides of the border are already involved in “processes of initiated and self-motivated integration” (p. 171). James Scott and Vladimir Kolossov in Chapter 13 also posit that cross-border lifestyles have already emerged in the Russian-Finnish trans-border region (p. 209).

The fact that this edited volume was published in 2013 may be interpreted both as an argument for and against reading it today. While many chapters were initially writen to provide a historical overview (for instance Chapters Two and Five), others became a history since the social, economic and geopolitical situatuation has dramatically changed within the last three years. Since 2014 we are witnessing the Ukrainian crisis, sanctions and counter-sanctions, a deep downturn in oil industry and Russia’s currency devaluation. However, I would recommend treating the book as a rare cut into cross-border grassroots interactions, tendencies and discourses captured just before the geopolitical change happened, something that is no longer possible. Thus, the book presents a useful foothold for comparison and understanding qualitative and quantitative fluctuations of flows, hopes and opinions that were present in the EU-Russia borderland. On the other hand, some figures (such as numbers of border crossings and flows of commodities and investments) are outdated and investigation of current statistics will break previously identified trends. Furthermore, certain events, both long-awaited (as Russia’s accesion to WTO in August 2012) and sudden (as abolishment of the Ministry of Regional Development of Russia, the federal authority in charge of coordinating cross-border cooperation, in September 2014), have transformed the institutional actuality of the borderland.

Despite interesting points raised by this book, there are aspects that have been underrepresented or overlooked. One

of them is an unbalanced structure of analysis – while the state of art on the Russian side of the border has been analysed thoroughly, the situation on the Finnish side or in the EU has not been particularly discussed in most of the chapters (except for Chapters 4, 6, 7 and 13). This can be explained by the assumption that there are separate books on each of the matters discussed on Finland and the EU respectively or by the possible positioning of the book as a contribution predominantly to the field of Russian Studies. Nevertheless, such a skewed narrative raises additional challenges for the potential reader and consequently may limit the audience of the book.

Another shortcoming of the volume is the lack of comparison – both with other external borders of the EU and with other EU-Russia borders. Moreover, interactions across the Northern part of the Russian-Finnish border, as well as cooperation within larger European frameworks – Barents and Baltic macro-regions – have not been provided with an adequate representation. Finally, the book organisation does not seem to ease the encounter with the book message. The reader may gain a more comprehensive and systematic overview of the subject if the first and the third parts of the book devoted to Russian border regions (except for the Chapter 13) are read one after the other and followed by the second part and Chapter 13 stressing cross-border interdependencies between two sides of the border.

Despite the fact that the new geopolitical and macroeconomic

actuality, as well as the new domestic agendas had substantially influenced cross-border ties and the possibility of bottom-up reconfiguration of EU-Russia relations, this book remains a highly recommended read as it is an advanced contribution to studying borderlands. It fills the deficiency in analysing Russian transformation in English academic press and will be of great interest for practitioners of cross-border cooperation, social scientists and students.

Bibliography

Laine, J., 2016. The Multiscalar Production of Borders, Geopolitics, 21(3), pp. 465-482.