Research Papers

The paper addresses the issue of the role of post-Soviet regional integration initiatives and the EU in the regime transition in the European post-Soviet states. While the impact of the EU has been acknowledged in the literature, the role of the post-Soviet regionalism has mostly been neglected; the launch of the Common Economic Space in 2012, however, calls for more detailed analysis of this topic and, more importantly, the interaction between two possible channels of external influence. Theoretically, the paper is placed within the broad discussion of external factors of regime transition, where an obvious gap exists in theoretical approach to classification of external factors in comparative perspective. This paper aims to fill the gap in these studies by explicitly comparing the democratic vs. autocratic external influences by focusing on channels and mechanisms involved on both sides and their interplay. Empirically, it intends to understand how the objectives and the toolbox of the supranational organizations as external actors in regime transition is affected by the nature of the political regimes of their members and how the organizations strategically respond to the actions of each other (if at all). It also attempts to distinguish between the actual effect of regional organizations and their perceived effect used by the domestic actors while affecting the regime transition. The paper’s analysis concentrates on the period of 2000-2011. The analysis offered in this paper is of inter-disciplinary nature as combines political science, economics, and international relations and thus inspires to contribute to these fields.