Framing the Eastern Partnership in the European Union's and Russia's Institutional Discourse

This paper traces the evolution of the European Union’s (EU) and Russian Federation’s discourse on the Eastern Partnership (EaP) along four frames – economic, (geo)political, normative, and security. We discover the dynamic of the EaP discourse in Brussels and Moscow, developing from an economic and political initiative to an adversarial security understanding, underpinned by logics of geopolitical and normative competition. With this study, we illuminate the misalignment of the EU and Russia’s interpretations of neighbourhood policy and show how it underpinned mutual mistrust and the clash over the future of the region.